Summary:
G-d promises that the Jews will be able to take over Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel) and that He will provide for them.
G-d prepares the Jews to enter the Land by reviewing incidents where they had messed up along the way and how G-d had helped them as well as punished them.
Moshe describes how he had interceded on behalf of the Jews during the incident of the Golden Calf.
The Torah makes a correlation between the performance of good or bad deeds and positive and negative consequences in this world.
My analysis:
I just remember this one Maharal I learned a number of years back that helped me to understand some of these reward and punishment portions. I happened to really like Maharal because of his heavy philosophical analysis that makes you feel smarter every time you pick up his books:
There’s so many places where people are getting rewarded with treasure or getting zapped all throughout Tanakh. If you notice, there are no explicit mentions of reward or punishment in the Next World. It seems odd to have a religion with no afterworld, and the fact is that the same people who put Tanakh together, the rabbis, say that in fact we do have a conception of a next world, including reincarnation, resurrection, and an ethereal next world of reward and punishment. So why no explicit mention of any of this?
Imagine this: you spend three weeks writing a paper on your laptop which gets stolen, you don’t have the paper so you fail the class and lose your scholarship and are forced to leave school and work in a gas station, and someone tells you as a reward for your good deeds you’ll get to do it all over again? Spiritual concepts such as the Next World can’t really be spelled out in physical terms, and to write them out would distort the concept. Only through allusions made in the prophetic literature coupled with a good teacher can someone begin to get a picture of what these things really are.
Incidentally, the fact that these things aren’t spelled out also tells you how much of your time should be spent worrying about what’s going to be. Take care of the here and now and you will be taken care of.
Tags: G-d, heaven, hell, Israel, jew, jewish, Maharal, next world, reincarnation, reward and punishment, Tanakh, Torah
