Tell me again
by Misha Holleb
אֵ֣לֶּה הַדְּבָרִ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֨ר דִּבֶּ֤ר מֹשֶׁה֙ אֶל־כׇּל־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל
These are the words which Moshe spoke to kol Yisrael (all Israel)
This opening line of the book Devarim sets the framing for the parsha and the rest of the Torah. It's not Hashem who speaks to the people; it's Moshe. Moshe is the leader, the interpreter, the intermediary, the mouthpiece for Hashem. This is not the story that Hashem tells us; it's our story as told through Moshe.
The parsha Devarim is a recounting of events already described in Bmidbar (Numbers). We hear once again how Moshe delegated the judiciary and appointed chiefs; the episode of the twelve spies; encounters with the Edomites and Amonites; the battles and conquest of Sihon and Og; and the divine allotment of land to the tribes of Reuven, Gad, and Manaseh.
Moshe speaks to the generation after Sinai, recounting the last 40 years to them and to us. We as readers have already read this, and the generation of Israelites standing before Moshe would have heard about these dramatic and miraculous events from their parents. Devarim is a repetition. More than telling them what happened, Moshe is telling them how to frame those events and how they fit into a narrative. He's telling them how they should remember their lives, and their ancestors' lives, and how to conceptualize their relationship to Hashem. He's telling us, too.
Our tradition declares that Torah is a perfect text: it has no redundancies. Therefore its repetition is necessary and holy. The rabbinic name for Devarim is Mishna Torah: the repetiton of the Torah or the second Torah, taken from Devarim 17:18. More often than not, Devarim is repetition of previous events. There's an assumption in Western philosophy that treats the copy as derivative and therefore lesser: the original speech act is pure; the repetition is a degradation. Devarim refuses that hierarchy. It insists that the re-telling for a new audience is not a diminishment of revelation but its completion. The Sinai generation received the original. This generation—born in the wilderness, never at the mountain—hears the repetition, which is to say they are the first to hear Torah as a narrative. The second generation becomes Yisroel through hearing the story. The repetition is pedagogical but more importantly it's constitutative. Repetition is not some workaround for a deficiency in memory or understanding. It is how our community was formed.
This a week of reflection, the parsha just before Tisha b'Ov. Rather than consider the next part of the story, we're called to pause and remember what's already happened. We use text, ritual, and repetition to reenact and mourn a loss that we haven't directly experienced. Devarim puts us in the right frame of mind to hear—to receive—a repeated narrative, and to repeat its refrains.
Repetition is learning. Most people understand a text better if they're given a few different framings; rare is the person who hears something once and knows it forever, and even that person will know it differently as time passes and they hear it again, integrating it with their own experiences since the last time they heard it. Needing to read or hear things more than once is normal and common: in my community are people who are hard of hearing and people with audio processing issues, traumatic brain injuries, dementia, and ADHD. For overlapping reasons, they all benefit from repetition.
I often need things repeated because my memory is bad, or I'm oversaturated with stimuli, or my chronic pain distracts me and prevents me from absorbing information. "Have I already told you this?" a friend will ask. "Maybe, but tell me again," I reply. The act of listening is one of shared intimacy and cooperative world-building.
Repetition is a tool for building (and rebuilding) comprehension. It's especially effective when the familiar story is reframed, or even recounted with slightly different phrasing. The need for repetition doesn't denote lack of capacity for understanding: each pass at the story provides us with deeper meaning.
We repeat our text every year. One of the purposes of Torah is to contextualize us as Jews, to narrativize our histories and religious traditions. This is only possible with repetition.
Jews love text more than we love almost anything else. Text is a home we can carry on our backs, a treasure that can't be stolen from our lips, a refuge in our minds when the material world denies us comfort—if, of course, we can remember it. Repetition helps us remember.
The kol Yisrael referenced at the beginning of the parsha isn't just the Israelites immediately descended from those at Sinai—it's all Jews, past, present, and future. None of us were at Sinai, but we become part of kol Yisrael through the retelling and remembering, and it becomes as though we were there. We are the things we do repeatedly. In repeating a narrative, we create ourselves.
Misha Holleb is a Jewish orthodox anarchist, writer, and khazn in Brooklyn. He's worked as a professional transsexual advocate since 2014 and has founded an exorbitant 4 non-profits. His first book—The A–Z of Gender and Sexuality, the first long-form queer glossary—came out in 2019. He writes antizionist Torah commentary and is working on a one act play and a memoir about the time he got conned into loving a dead man.
