The Book of Deuteronomy is all about the mitzvot, or commandments. And commandments, let’s be honest, aren’t much fun. But as this week’s guest, Rabbi Diana Fersko, Chief Jewish Life Officer of the JCC of Manhattan, argues, there’s no better—or indeed, other—way to achieve true happiness, self-fulfillment, and intimacy with God. Moses’ keen understanding of human psychology, Rabbi Fersko argues, helped him deliver a book that is more a self-help guide—in the best sense of the term—than a list of antiquated, onerous laws.

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One thing that makes the book of Deuteronomy so remarkable is its ability to seamlessly blend together sweeping speeches about morality and meaning with a host of seemingly mundane laws. And that, argues our guest this week, the writer and musician Peter Himmelman, is why we still keep coming back to it, seeking a way to balance out the sublime and the humdrum in our own lives. Moses himself shows us the way forward, Himmelman argues, by instructing us not to see or touch but to listen, an admission that music and sound possess the capacity to unlock our greatest spiritual mysteries.

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Every day, we lose hundreds of Americans to what experts are calling “deaths of despair,” which include suicide, opioid addiction, alcohol abuse, and other self-destructive measures. Why would so many people, living in the most prosperous nation in human history, lose all hope in the future? Our guest this week, Rabbi David Lau, the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, joins us to deliver surprising insight on this question: Moses, he argues, saw it all coming, and left behind a clear prescription on how to reject despair and live a life of joy and gratitude instead.   

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How do you raise people to be resilient, responsible, and hopeful? The question, as our guest this week, the author and teacher Mijal Bitton explains, is an urgent one for leaders and parents alike. And in his final speech, Moses gives us all a blueprint to raise what Bitton calls “the people of eternity,” willful folks who see themselves neither as perennial victims nor as bullies but as mindful citizens who are able to learn from the past failures and believe in their future triumphs.

Dr. Mijal Bitton isScholar in Residence at the Maimonides Fund and Rosh Kehilla at the Downtown Minyan. For more Jewish thoughts on the Torah portion, follow Mijal on her Substack, Committed, or listen to her weekly podcast, Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.

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Everywhere you look these days, Western democracies seem to be in disarray, struggling with tumultuous political systems and societies that seem to be teetering on the verge of something that looks a lot like civil war. As our guest on this week’s episode, investor and scholar Michael Eisenberg, argues, Moses could see all this coming, which is why he left behind not only a radical blueprint for a smaller, more efficient government, but also instructions for how to forge citizens who care less about their rights and more about their responsibilities.

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In the summer of 1788, as the New Hampshire Convention met to decide whether or not it wanted to become the ninth state to ratify the Constitution and thereby put it into effect, Samuel Langdon, who would eventually become the president of Harvard, took the stage. Urging his fellow Americans to vote “yes” on the nation’s founding document, he urged them to find inspiration in the greatest blueprint ever written for fledgling democracies busy being born: The Book of Deuteronomy.

Rabbi Dr. Ari Lamm joins us to explore how Moses’s final speech inspired the American Founding Fathers, and how the ancient words can give us moderns, raging about our flawed political systems, both solace and hope.

The Republic of Moses is a project from the Simchat Torah Challenge, bringing Jews modern wisdom from our ancient books. To sign up for our free newsletter, visit simchattorahchallenge.org

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