This week we read Parashat Re’eh. As it begins, Moshe, speaking to the people on the plains of Moab, about to enter the Promised Land, lays out a choice of cosmic significance. He says:
רְאֵה אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לִפְנֵיכֶם הַיּוֹם בְּרָכָה וּקְלָלָה
“See, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse.” (Deuteronomy 11:26)
He continues, making the terms perfectly clear: the blessing comes if you listen to the commandments of God, and the curse comes if you do not.
It all seems so straightforward, so binary. On one side, there is light, blessing, and obedience. On the other, darkness, curse, and rebellion. It’s a structure that feels intuitive; it appeals to our desire for moral clarity, for a world where the rules are clear and the consequences are direct. Do good, and you will be rewarded. Stray from the path, and you will suffer.
It is a worldview of sharp lines and distinct categories, and for a generation poised to conquer a new land, filled with new challenges and temptations, perhaps this clarity was essential. You are either with God, or you are not. You are either on the path of blessing, or on the path of curse.
But as we sit here today, in our complex, messy, and often confusing world, we must ask ourselves: is life truly that simple? Do our experiences really fit into such neat and tidy boxes?
We have all lived long enough to know that sometimes, the most difficult and painful moments of our lives, what we might have called a ‘curse’ at the time, can lead to unexpected growth, wisdom, and transformation. We have a name for this phenomenon: a ‘blessing in disguise’. It’s the recognition that the neat division between blessing and curse can be porous, that light can emerge from darkness, that a painful ending can be the necessary prelude to a beautiful new beginning.
Our own tradition, in its deepest wisdom, understands this. While Deuteronomy presents this stark choice, the prophet Isaiah offers a far more complex and challenging theology. In a powerful declaration of God’s ultimate unity and power, the prophet says in God’s name:
יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חֹשֶׁךְ, עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם וּבוֹרֵא רָע. Yotzer or u’voreh choshech, oseh shalom u’voreh ra. “I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create evil.” (Isaiah 45:7)
This is a staggering verse. It collapses the simple binary. It tells us that the source of all existence is one, and that this one source encompasses everything we perceive as good and everything we perceive as evil, the light and the darkness. Reality, Isaiah teaches, is not a simple battle between two opposing forces. It is a complex, unified whole. This verse challenges us to move beyond simplistic labels and to grapple with a more profound and unsettling truth: that life cannot be easily sorted into ‘blessing’ and ‘curse’. Everything, it seems, can be seen from multiple perspectives.
This ancient tension between the simple binary of Deuteronomy and the complex unity of Isaiah has taken on a powerful new urgency in our time. We live in the age of the algorithm, an age of social media, where the currency is not wisdom, but attention. The platforms that shape our discourse are designed for speed, not depth. They demand that every complex issue be distilled into a video of two minutes or less, every nuanced thought summarised in 280 characters.
In this digital ecosystem, complexity is a bug, not a feature. Nuance is boring. Thoughtful, analytical rigour is dismissed as elitist or out of touch. What gets rewarded? What goes viral? It is the simple, the radical, the absolute. It is the digital equivalent of “berachah u’klalah”, blessing and curse. You are either with us or against us. Right or wrong. Good or evil. The middle ground has vanished, and the loudest, most extreme voices dominate the conversation, attracting the views and the clicks upon which the whole system is built.
To make matters worse, we are caught in a relentless war of narratives. With the rise of sophisticated technologies like deepfakes, we can no longer be certain that what we are seeing is real. A video can be manipulated, a voice can be cloned, and a photograph can be manufactured to show something that never happened. The very foundations of our perception, seeing and hearing, are becoming unstable. How can we know who to trust? How can we discern what is true when our own senses can be so easily deceived?
It is precisely here, in this moment of profound epistemic crisis, that our parashah, Re’eh, returns to offer us its most subtle and urgent guidance.
The parashah's name and its very first word is Re’eh, meaning "See!" It is a command to open our eyes, to perceive, to witness what is being set before us. Yet in a world of deepfakes, this command becomes a challenge. It is no longer a simple instruction to look, but a demand to look critically, to see with discernment.
Then there is the word Sh’ma (שׁמע), to listen or to hear. Its variations appear six times in our parashah. We are told to listen to the commandments, to listen to the voice of God. But in an age of infinite information, of podcasts and pundits and screaming headlines, what does it mean to truly listen? It means filtering the noise, discerning the motive, and listening not just to the words being said, but for the truth, or the falsehood, that lies beneath them.
The acts of seeing and listening, the two primary ways we receive information about our world, are at the core of our parashah, and they are the very faculties under assault today.
But the parashah does not leave us there. It offers us a third, crucial verb, a tool for navigating this treacherous landscape. The word is Shamor (שמור), meaning to keep, to guard, or to be careful. This root word appears an astonishing seven times in Parashat Re’eh. We are commanded to be careful to perform the statutes, to guard the commandments.
Here, I believe, lies the parashah’s hidden wisdom for our time. The text opens with the stark, simple binary of blessing and curse, a framing perfectly suited for the social media age. But it then repeatedly, insistently, whispers a different instruction: Shamor. Be careful. Guard yourself.
Be careful with what you see. Do not accept images at face value. Interrogate their source. Question their intent. See with a critical, guarded eye.
Be careful with what you hear. Do not be seduced by the easy certainties of the zealot or the comforting rage of the demagogue. Listen for the nuance, for the voices that have been silenced, for the complexity that the algorithm seeks to erase.
Be careful with the simple narratives of blessing and curse. The world is rarely so clear cut. The person you have labelled as your enemy is a complex human being with their own story. The political solution that promises a simple utopia is almost certainly hiding a dark compromise. Shamor. Be careful of the seductive pull of absolute certainty.
Parashat Re’eh, then, is not a simple instruction manual with a clear choice. It is a sophisticated lesson in perception. It presents us with the binary worldview that is so appealing, and then gives us the intellectual and spiritual tools to dismantle it. The true blessing, it suggests, is not found in blindly choosing one path. The true blessing is the wisdom to be careful, the strength to embrace complexity, and the courage to inhabit the difficult, uncertain, and profoundly human space between the extremes.
In a world that demands we react in an instant, our tradition calls on us to pause and reflect. In a world that rewards radical simplicity, our Torah urges us to be careful and to appreciate nuance. And in a world where we are told to trust our eyes and ears, our parashah says: Re’eh, see, Sh’ma, listen, but above all, Shamor, be careful. For it is in that careful guarding of our minds and our hearts that we will truly find the path to blessing.
Shabbat Shalom.
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