Nitzavim — The Secret Things Belong to the Lord

What the Dots Above the Letters Are Hiding

There are ten places in the entire Hebrew Bible, including in this weeks torah portion, where ancient scribes placed small dots above certain letters — a marking system so rare and deliberate that the second-century Rabbi Shimon ben Eliezer, a disciple of Rabbi Meir, taught these spots deserved special attention. The dots signal that beneath the plain meaning of the words, something else is being protected — a gap between what is said and what is fully meant.

One of the most striking examples sits outside this week's portion but illustrates the principle perfectly. In Genesis 33:4, when Esau finally encounters Jacob after years of separation, the text says Esau

The word "kissed him" carries the dotted marking. Esau had sworn, after their father's death, to kill Jacob — and now approaches with 400 armed men, while Jacob has carefully divided his own camp for safety in case of disaster. The rabbis note that switching a single letter in the Hebrew word for "kiss" produces the word for "bite." The hidden suggestion is that Esau's real intention, even in that embrace, may have been to go for Jacob's throat — and only the presence of witnesses and armed men on both sides stopped him. The centuries of hostility that followed between their descendants suggest the kiss was never as sincere as it looked.

This same principle — using deliberately enigmatic marks to indicate that something more is intended than what's plainly stated — is exactly what Yeshua does with parables. When His disciples asked why He taught that way, He answered:

Some things are deliberately kept just out of easy reach.

"The Secret Things Belong to the Lord"

This is the spirit behind Deuteronomy 29:29 —

This verse is a direct warning against the pull toward Kabbalah, numerology, and Gnostic-style "secret knowledge" — a pull that has tempted both Jews and Christians for centuries. Gnosticism, from the Greek word for "secret knowledge," arose in closed circles toward the end of the first century and offered salvation through esoteric, mystical revelation rather than the plain, revealed word.

Jewish tradition itself recognized the danger here. The Shulchan Aruch, the foundational code of Jewish law, restricts serious study of Kabbalah to those who have reached the age of 40 — drawing on a much earlier teaching in Pirkei Avot 5:21 from Rabbi Yehuda ben Tama, who outlines what a person should be studying at each stage of life, with deep mystical understanding reserved for full maturity. There's wisdom embedded in that restriction: most of us have a hard enough time keeping the plain, clear, revealed instructions God has already given us, without wading into speculative waters where we can't see the bottom of the pool or which direction leads to safety.

There's a beautiful image for what staying within revealed boundaries actually looks like: a field of corn, safe and practical, where even on the Sabbath one can pick what's needed and feed both yourself and others who are hungry for God and fellowship. The temptation toward secret knowledge usually promises something more exciting than that — but the field of corn is where the actual nourishment is.

The Esau Problem, Reversed

There's a deeper irony buried in all of this. Jacob's own brother Esau was physically circumcised — he carried the outward sign of the covenant his entire life — yet he forfeited the inheritance entirely, selling his birthright for a bowl of soup. Paul makes the obvious point from this:

The outward marker, by itself, guaranteed nothing — not even for the man who first received it.

This matters enormously for how we read Paul's language elsewhere. Throughout his letters, when Paul uses the pronoun "you," he is consistently speaking to non-Jewish disciples; when he says "we," "us," or "our," he means the Jewish disciples, including himself. In Colossians, writing to Gentile believers specifically, Paul tells them they have already been

— a circumcision of the heart that the Pharisees themselves had no authority to grant, withhold, or control. It happens entirely within God's domain — exactly the kind of "secret thing" that belongs to Him alone, and that He chooses, in His mercy, to reveal in the hearts of those who turn to Him.