Re'eh – Torah with Joseph

Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.

Shalom, my name is Joseph Shulam, and in partnership with Brad TV, we are continuing to do the weekly portion of reading from the Law of Moses, and from the prophets, and from the New Testament, and this week, the reading in all the synagogues in the world will be from Deuteronomy chapter 11, verse 26 to chapter 16, verse 17, and the portion from the prophets is Isaiah 54, verse 11 to 55, verse 5, and from the New Testament, it’s Acts chapter 13, verses 13 to verse 52.

I really personally think that this is one of the most important portions of the Word of God from Genesis to Revelation, because it does something that the rest of the scriptures rarely do. Yeshua did it in the sermon on the mountain, building on what is written here in Deuteronomy.

But let me get right into the text from Deuteronomy chapter 11, verse 26. The text starts with the Hebrew word, re’eh, and that’s the Hebrew name of the Torah portion, Re’eh, which means look, behold. The King James has it, “Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse.” Let me stop here in verse 26 of Deuteronomy 11, the first verse of our Torah reading. Very important for us to analyze this very short and very important word.

God says to the children of Israel, and through the children of Israel to all of His children in the world, look, today, now, every day, not only one day, not only today, every day. That’s the meaning of the text. “I’m giving you a choice. You could either be blessed or you could be cursed.” I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

I wake up in the morning, I am 76 years old, my head hurts, my bones hurt, my back hurts, my leg hurts. They say in Yiddish, in the German Jewish language, they say that if you’re past 70 years old, and you wake up in the morning and nothing hurts you, and you don’t have a pain, it’s a sign of only one thing: you’re dead. Well, I’m not dead. I wake up every morning with pain here, pain there, my back, my leg, my head, problems to solve every day. And every day, I need to remember that this day that I wake up, I’m getting out of bed, taking a shower, brushing my teeth, getting dressed, this day could be a blessing, or it could be a curse for me.

Now, one thing that Christians don’t realize, that we have more than one chapter in the Bible that has lists of curses, lists! Cursed is the man who raises his hand against his father or his mother. Cursed is the man who cheats on the boundary of the fields that he owns in his favor. Cursed is the son that curses his father or his mother. Cursed is the man who sleeps with his mother-in-law. Lists of curses! There are chapters that are lists of curses.

The most famous chapter is from Numbers chapter 24, and Leviticus chapter 26 starts with 11 verses of blessings, 33 verses of curses. If we go against God, if we’re stubborn, and we reject, and we embarrass, and we defile, and we worship idols, knowing that we’re doing wrong, we do it, you know, with intent, then terrible things will happen to us. And they did happen. They did happen to the Jewish nation. More than one chapter of our history is marred because of our sin with terrible things that happened to us.

But in this case, in this portion of the week, God says, “Wake up, behold, look, look, you have, this day, an option to be blessed or to be cursed.” Verse 27 of the same portion: “The blessing will come to you if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you today,” the command that you have for today, not for tomorrow or for yesterday. Whatever you have to do today according to God’s will, that’s what you’re responsible for, and if you do it, oh, wow, you will be blessed. Today, you will be blessed.

But the next verse: “If you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God but turn aside from the way which I command you today. to go after other gods which you have not known, you will be cursed.” Yeshua, Jesus, took this paradigm and broke it into a very concentrated picture. He said there are two roads. There is one road that is narrow, uphill, difficult to walk up, that leads to life. It’s a road of obedience, of faith, of love, of hope. It’s a road of doing God’s will, following Jesus.

The other road is easy, downhill. Not only is it downhill, there is grease on it to make you slide faster down the hill to hell, to deprivation, to misery. Yes, you do the will of God, oh, there’s so many verses in the psalms, in the prophets, in the Law of Moses, if you do right with what God gave you, if you use the talents that God gave you, and use them wisely, you’ll be blessed, you’ll get more. You’ll be getting God’s blessing to increase you down here on earth, and bless your family and your children. They will be like plants planted by the river with plenty of water and sun to grow and to flourish.

But if not, according to Jeremiah 17, if you go against God and you trust in other men and not in God, then you will be like a tree planted in the desert where there’s no water, and your leaves will wither, and you will have no fruit, and you will be cursed. This choice is the ultimate doctrine of prosperity, not what you hear on Christian television. The ultimate doctrine of prosperity is not how much money you give to the pastor, or to the church, or to the ministry. The ultimate doctrine of prosperity is how much are you going to walk with God and with Jesus, hand in hand, in the narrow, and difficult, and challenging road that leads to eternal life? That’s the question.

And this is how this portion starts. Like I said, there are several chapters in the Bible that have lists and lists of curses, and we need to realize this: If we, as disciples of Jesus Christ, as priests in His kingdom, have a right to bless, to really bless people: every week we bless our congregation, the children of our congregation, with the Aaronic Blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face to shine up upon you.” Every week we bless. But if we have the power to bless, given to us by God, we also have the power to curse, given to us by God. We shouldn’t curse, we shouldn’t use that power, but the people that do us evil, we don’t even have to curse them. They bring the curse on themself, the unrighteous, the ungodly, they bring the curses to themself.

In this same chapter, in this portion called Behold, Re’eh, we also have this monumental event. The children of Israel cross the Jordan river, they conquer the hill country of Ephraim, and the hill country of Judea, and God tells Joshua to set the Levites in Shechem, the old town of Shechem, where Jacob and his sons had the affair with Dinah, his daughter that was raped by Hamor, the son of the king of Shechem. That town is in the valley. On one side is Mount Gerizim, it’s mount of the blessing, on the other side is Mount Ebal, the sound of the curses. Why is it so? It’s so, geographically, dear brothers. It didn’t just happen that God chose this place, because when the clouds come from the west, from the Mediterranean Sea, and they climb the mountain, they drop all the rain on the first range, and then the mountain on the other side, looking toward the Jordan River, doesn’t get the rain, so it’s desolate.

God said to Moses, “Put the people, half of the tribes, on the Mount Gerizim, which is the mount of blessing, and the other half on Mount Ebal. And on Mount Ebal, build an altar, a huge altar.” Joshua builds the altar. Very specific architectural design was given to Joshua in order to build that altar. That altar still stands. 15 years ago, it stood more than it does now, because the Palestinians have worked hard to dismantle it, but they were stopped in time before they dismantled the whole thing. But that same altar, in the same place from the days of Joshua, with archeological evidence, you can Google it, Joshua’s altar on Mount Ebal. You’ll see pictures, maybe even videos.

So, God tells Moses there will be one mountain that will be the curses, and one mountain that will be the blessings. Mount Gerizim, on the west side of Shechem, will be the mountain of blessing. Mount Ebal, on the east side of the mountain, will be the mountain of curses. The Levites will be in the middle, and they will proclaim blessings, and the people will say, “Amen.” They will offer sacrifices on mount of blessing, Mount Gerizim, and also on Mount of Ebal, on the east side of Shechem, and it will be a big event.

It will be a big event, mount of blessing and mount of curses, and everybody will hear the blessings and say “Amen, we receive them.” Amen is an acrostic of the words: God is a faithful king. That’s the meaning of amen. Yah, God is a faithful king. Whatever He says and He promises, He keeps. Both the blessings and the curses, He keeps.

And so, this event, monumental event, takes place in Samaria, above Shechem, the Levites in the middle, children of Israel divided between six tribes here, and six tribes there, and they accept this covenant of blessings and the covenant of curses. What does it mean, they accept it? They understand that if they do what’s right, and they do what’s prescribed by God as good, like honor your father and your mother so that your days may be lengthened, like keep the Sabbath day, rest on it, enjoy time with your family and with God, with meditating about high things and not low things, you’ll be blessed. It’s good for you. I know, you know, the Jewish people still keep the Sabbath. In fact, the majority, even the secular Israeli Jews, don’t work on the Sabbath. Almost everything is closed. They’re at home with their family. They may go take a walk, they may take a drive in the spring to see the beautiful flowers in the northern Negev Desert, but they don’t go to their job.

Or if you go against God in disobedience, with design, not by mistake, on purpose, not by accident, disobeying God, you will incur the wrath of God. That’s what this portion of the Torah is centrally teaching us. Let me read to you from chapter 12. There are all kinds of commandments, not to eat blood, and not to kill, and to do what’s right, but let me read you from chapter 12 of our portion, verse 25: “You shall not eat,” it’s talking about blood, “You shall not eat it that it may go well with you and your children after you, when you do what is right in the sight of the Lord.”

You should not eat blood. Do Christians have to keep this command? Not because it’s written in the Book of Deuteronomy, but because this command is written in the New Testament, that the apostles, in Acts 15, gathered together, Paul was there, Barnabas was there, Jacob was there, James in English, and Peter was there, and the elders of the church in Jerusalem were there, discussing, “What should we do with our Gentile brothers?”

The majority of the church was Jewish, but more and more Gentiles around the Mediterranean Sea were accepting the Lord, and accepting the gospel, and giving their life to God, so there was a discussion, “Shall we circumcise them, convert them to Judaism, or not?” The decision was not to convert them to Judaism. Why? Because we have wonderful promises in the prophets, in Isaiah chapter 66 and Amos chapter 9, and we have it in Zechariah, and we have it in Jeremiah, that the Gentiles come in as Gentiles, they don’t have to become Jews. God is the God of all flesh. So, yes, the apostles decide to command our Gentile brothers to keep four commandments that are a part of the commandments that were already commanded on all humanity in Genesis chapter 9, in the first verses of Genesis chapter 9.

The rabbis started with three commands, expanded them to seven commands by interpreting the three commands, breaking it up in smaller pieces so that it’d be clearer what they have to keep. The apostles started with three commands, expanded it to four commands. Why? Because the word blood can mean two things, okay? So, they broke it up to blood as bloodshed, and to eating meat that is strangled, that is not properly slaughtered and bled from its blood of the animal, because eating blood was forbidden.

So, in the Book of Acts, they were commanding the Gentiles to abstain from idolatry or anything that smells, or looks, or is suspected of idolatry. That’s really what it means. The second thing that they were commanded is they abstain from everything that is sexually immoral. Pornography comes from the same word in Greek, which means prostitution, sexual immorality.

In short, abstain from meat strangled, in other words, the throat of the animal is not cut, and his blood doesn’t come out, his heart keeps pumping his blood. If they cut the right vein in the throat, then the blood will come out of the body and the body will be halal for the Arabs, or kosher for the Jews, and also for the Gentiles.And the fourth one is “abstain from blood” which is bloodshed, killing people, you know, murdering people. Abstain from taking other people’s life. But that command is broken up by the rabbis into smaller portions. Among them is destroying a person’s character by falsely accusing him, by gossiping behind his back, by killing him with your mouth, killing his business, killing his reputation. So that last command is, blood means killing in every way possible; physically, spiritually, emotionally, financially, or any other way.

That’s all based on this portion of the Torah, portion that is called Behold, Re’eh. Ah, there’s so much more that we could talk about it, but our time is up, and God bless you all with this.

I just want to say something about the portion from Isaiah. I’m going to go to Isaiah chapter 54 and just give you an interesting outlook. Isaiah the prophet is addressing Israel in a time of great difficulty. Babylon is at the gates. Israel is losing the battle. They’re going to go to exile. They are in exile already. So, the prophet, in the name of God says,

Because the gentiles are going to come in, that’s the context, folks, and you, brothers in Asia, in Korea, in Singapore, in Japan, in China, are a fulfillment of this prophecy that God gave to Israel.

“Don’t get despaired,” God says to Israel. You may feel desolate right now, small and weak, but there’s going to be a great army of humanity that is going to join you, and the implication is join you through the Son of God, through the Messiah, through the one that is from the seed of David and the seed of Abraham, Yeshua, our Lord. God bless you all.