There are moments in our lives when we are almost forced to stop, to look back, and to recount the past before we can move forward. Moments when we find ourselves in the wilderness, standing on the edge of something new, able to see a promised land that we have not yet entered.

We have reached exactly this moment in the Torah.

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Moses is looking towards the Promised Land. His children are about to begin a new life without him. He has spent forty years teaching them, challenging them, arguing with them, protecting them and loving them. Now they are ready to cross into a future that he will never see.

He is not invited to be part of it.

So he does what many parents do when they know their children are about to leave home. He looks back. He tells their story once again, reminding them who they are, where they come from, and what they have learned along the way, hoping those memories will accompany them into the chapter he will never witness.

As Nehama Leibowitz points out, Moses could have reminded them of the Golden Calf or Korach’s rebellion. Instead, he chooses one memory: the story of the spies.

Why?

Because these children are standing exactly where their parents once stood thirty-eight years earlier. Once before, fear kept a generation from entering the land. Moses is quietly saying:

Do not let fear write the ending a second time.

I find myself understanding Moses a little more this year.

I have been watching my own children grow, graduate, choose their paths, become adults and make their own decisions. These weeks have been full of celebrations, journeys and new beginnings.

And, like Moses, I have found myself looking back, recounting stories and remembering who we have been together.

Trying to give them not instructions for every step ahead, but something deeper: a sense of who they are, where they come from, and the values that have shaped them.

Unlike Moses, I hope to remain somewhere in my own wilderness, ready to help if they ever need me. Moses knows he will not have that privilege.

And perhaps that is why another image from Devarim has been lingering in my mind.

By the end of the book, Moses leaves this world alone, accompanied only by God. The man who led a people. The husband. The father. The brother. In the end, only God walks beside him.

That image became unexpectedly real for me this week.

For the first time, I conducted a funeral where no family could be present. Only four people, including me, stood beside the grave.

As I looked around, I wondered whether perhaps they were Divine Messengers, sent by God so that this soul would not make the final journey entirely alone.

I could not help thinking about my own family, scattered around the world. Like Moses, who had already buried his brother and sister before reaching the end of his own journey. Like the man whose funeral I led, whose wife had already drifted into another world through dementia, and whose child lives too far away to return.

Sometimes life leads us into the wilderness.

Yet the wilderness is not only a place of loneliness. It is also a magical place. A place where sunsets and sunrises are unforgettable, where the stars become your compass, where everything feels raw, deep and honest.

The sidrah we have just read speaks about leaving, crossing and travelling through the Aravah, the desert in Israel. Every time I hear those words, I am taken back to a place I will never forget.

I remember standing there, convinced there was nothing to see.

Then someone simply said,

“Stop. Close your eyes. Give them time.”

When I opened them again, nothing around me had changed.

I had.

There, in the Aravah, I learned that sometimes, before we can find our way, we have to stop. We have to close our eyes, refocus our attention, and give ourselves time to see differently.

Rabbi Shefa Gold reminds us that the Hebrew word midbar, wilderness, shares its root with dibbur, speech. In the wilderness, when the noise finally quiets, God’s voice can be heard.

Perhaps that is why so much of our Torah unfolds there.

The wilderness is where we remember who we are and discover who we can become.

By the time the people stand at the border of the land, they are no longer the frightened slaves who left Egypt. The wilderness has changed them. They carry within them Torah, memory, community and God.

Like every parent who finally has to let go, Moses knows there will be battles he cannot fight for them, choices he cannot make for them, roads he cannot walk beside them.

So, standing in his own wilderness, Moses says to his children:

לֹא תִירָאוּם כִּי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם הוּא הַנִּלְחָם לָכֶם

“Do not fear them, for it is the Eternal your God who will battle for you.”

Those words were spoken to a generation standing on the threshold of an unknown future.

They are spoken to every generation: to our children, to ourselves, to anyone standing before a new beginning.

So today I want to say to my children, and to all children, whatever your age, who are standing before your own promised land:

Obstacles will come. There will be moments when fear whispers that you are not ready. When that happens, remember your story. Remember who you are. Remember where you come from.

Carry with you the Torah that has shaped you, the memories that have formed you, the community that has loved you, and the God who has walked beside you through every wilderness.

And when the journey becomes too difficult, return to the wilderness. Not because you are meant to stay there, but because it reminds you who you are.

It was there that we first became a people. It was there that we received Torah. It was there that we learned to trust.

The wilderness is not only a place we once passed through. It is something we carry within us.

Moses never crossed the Jordan with his children.

But everything he had spent forty years teaching them did.

Perhaps that is the hope of every parent. That there will come a day when our children walk places we cannot go, yet they never walk there alone, because they carry within them the story, the values and the love that brought them this far.

So whenever life places us on the threshold of something new,

stop.

Close your eyes.

Give yourself time to see.

The stars are still there.

They always were.

Shabbat Shalom.

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