“See, this day I set before you blessing and curse: blessing, if you obey the commandments of your God Hashem that I enjoin upon you this day; and curse, if you do not obey the commandments of your God, Hashem” Deuteronomy 11:26-28
August 21, 2025 16:28
On Sunday, we enter the month of Ellul, our month of preparation for the Chagim to come. I find the Torah readings at this time of year often have a double meaning – on the one hand, they are Moses’s swansong: a desperate rush of advice and instruction to his people.
On the other hand, the words echo for Jews throughout the ages as we look back on the year gone and approach our annual time of repentance and renewal.
The start of this week’s parashah adds to the high drama of this time of year. We are presented with a choice between blessing and curse. Two paths lie before us, one with mitzvot and brachot (blessings), the other with “turning away” and curses. Pretty charif (spicy) words.
The commentator Sforno adds to the starkness of this description, saying that the word re’eh, “see”, is meant to encourage us to “pay good attention”. What we should be paying attention to is “not following the custom of the people who are always trying to find middle ground (beinonit)”.
Rather, God is giving us “the choice of two extremes, opposites.”
I’ve always loved middle ground – seeing the nuances and the greys, the antithesis to every thesis, the blurriness of reality. And there’s Jewish backing for this in the form of Maimonides’s “golden mean”. He says in his Mishneh Torah: “The straight path: this involves discovering the middle ground (beinonit) temperament of each and every trait that one possesses.”
The same word, beinonit, “the middle ground”, is to Maimonides a virtue, and to Sforno, moral disorientation.
Fast forward to the end of the parashah, and another phrase helps settle this matter for me: “If, however, there is a needy person among you… do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kin” (Deuteronomy 15:7).
Think back to the first time you ever saw a homeless person. I expect that like me, you were horrified and full of questions about how someone came to be – and remain – homeless. Today though, my heart “hardened”, I no longer feel the same shock.
Hardening the heart is a kind of beinonit position, a moral shrug, reasoning and justifying something that simply should not be.
While Maimonides refers to the virtue of the beinonit in our interior life, Sforno warns against it in our moral life. Some things should never be moral grey areas, or seen with nuance. “See!” our parashah warns us, really see moral issues. Do not harden your heart, and do not ever blur the difference between a blessing and a curse.
Rabbi Lorie is rabbinical scholar of Jofa UK
Image: Pedestrians walk past a homeless man near Windsor Castle (photo: Getty Images)
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