The text is, for once, very clear, unequivocal, uncompromising in its way. Being part of the Israelite community, the Hebrew people, the Jewish people, involves being in a covenant, a symbolic contract – formal, solemn, fateful  (Deuteronomy 29: 9 – 28).

Within the sacred saga – mythos – that we inhabit, this covenant is recorded as having been established millennia ago between the people of Israel and their God. But it not only an event in the past.  

 “I make this covenant”, says the divine voice in the text, “not only with you alone, standing here now” – but with the future generations, “those who are not here with us today.” (Deuteronomy 29:13)

Those who came to the synagogue this week to hear these words as part of the annual cycle of readings are still bound up in this symbolic covenant. Whether they believe in it or not; reject its premises or not; reject the divine authority with which it speaks or not – Jews hearing these words read out, or chanted, are being reminded that they are still part of this faith tradition, still acknowledging there’s something in this whole crazy, dramatic, problematic business of Jewishness that is worthwhile. This covenant brings Jews to the synagogue each week. But even if a Jew never attends synagogue – and there are many who prefer not to, or who have no affinity for the so-called ‘religious’ dimensions of Jewishness – they too still remain inside a sacred covenant, as a Jew.

People attend synagogue for many reasons: to feel a sense of belonging, to connect to their community, or see friends; they might attend out of a sense of duty, or habit, or tradition; or for a yahrzeit, to remember a lost loved one; they  might be there for some space and time in their week, or for a chance to connect more deeply to themselves or, in prayer, to God. The reasons are probably multiple; but they usually don’t say to themselves ‘I am here because I am honouring my part of a longstanding contract, a sacred covenant, between my people and the Holy One, source of all life’.  

But whatever the relationship Jews feel or don’t feel to this covenant, this contract, this week’s text suggests that far from it being about any cosy sense of belonging, it involves being part of a frightening and threatening relationship. Because the covenant makes demands on the people, demands for ethical living – and it spells out the consequences of a failure to enact that vision or keep that vision alive. Inside this relationship there is nowhere to hide. The text acknowledges how easy it is to say: this doesn’t apply to me, it doesn’t include me, “I will be safe, despite following my own wilful heart” (29:18).

This is deeply uncomfortable, unwelcome news – that deviance from paths of righteousness will have consequences, destructive consequences not just for the individual but for the community. And for the land that the community live on.

The text portrays how later Jewish generations will look with horror at what happened to the people of Israel – and the non-Jewish world will look with astonishment at what happened. And everyone will ask ‘Why?’. The simple human question, ‘Why did it happen?’. Why did what happen, we readers of the text ask. Well, the text tells you.

First it describes the desolation of the land itself, barren and unable to support life, “a soil filled with ashes…beyond sowing and producing, not even any grass able to grow, like Sodom and Gemorrah” (29:22) – a picture that conjures up Gaza today, where the suffering is not a divine punishment, but a result of human destruction.  

And then we get the questions about this in the text. Seeing the destruction of the land all the other nations are going to say ’Why did this happen? Why does God punish so harshly?’ (29:23) – it’s a natural question, it’s the question the nations of the world ask today, not in religious terms, but in secular ones: ‘Why? Why this immense fury, this destructiveness, why are the people of God so ungodly?’

And as the text spells out, future generations will be told: this was, is, the consequence of turning away from the paths of peace and holiness; it is a consequence of serving what the text describes as “other gods” (verse 25). It led to disaster – to exile, to loss, to pain. That’s what happens, says the text: the people are already being warned about disaster while still in the desert.

The text can do this – seem to foretell the future – because it is written in exile and is seeking to find a way of understanding why disaster had happened to the people. It is projecting back into the past and letting the saga say, in effect: see, you were warned what would happen.

This text in Deuteronomy is the prototype of the strand of Biblical thinking running through the Hebrew Bible that says: if you are in this sacred covenant there are consequences for failing to adhere to its ethical standards and values. The language Deuteronomy uses is traditional – it is God that punishes the people – but you don’t have to be a believer in that archaic theology to recognise that spiritually and psychologically it is speaking a truth, a truth that we probably want to reject, a truth we don’t want to hear, particularly at the moment: there have been, are, and will be, terrible consequences for a failure to live up to the highest aspirations and demands of the covenant.

In a way I can’t believe I am saying this. I don’t want to talk about this. Because I don’t want to believe this is how things turn out. I don’t believe in the punishing God of the Hebrew Bible – in other words, I don’t believe these texts literally. But I do thing they speak things that are true, I do think they speak symbolically and psychologically and spiritually about what happens to a people that loses its orientation towards holiness.

I wish I didn’t think this – for one thing it makes me sound unbearably naïve – but if we take these texts of the Torah seriously, if we still connect ourselves to the sacred covenant, it just seems to be the case that they are, as our liturgical blessing puts it, Torat Emet, a Torah that speaks a truth, a profound truth. Beyond logic, beyond that pernicious fabrication ‘common sense’, the Torah speaks about what can happen when there is a betrayal, when a people – the Jewish people – fail to stay true to the vision of compassion and justice they have been given, and told to enact.

The imagery is graphic – “poison weed and wormwood”, bitter and deadly (verse 17) will sprout up in the community who serve “other gods”, betraying the vision: the gods of military might, and nationalism, and ethnic supremacism, the gods of self-righteousness and self-pity, there are many other gods being served as we speak, but not the God of mercy and compassion – el rachum v’chanun (Exodus 34:6).

And once we abandon that God, we end up being abandoned. And we are being abandoned – by the nations of the world, and by people of conscience, non-Jews and Jews; we end up in exile, exiled by those who turn their backs on us and our proud and tragic history, turn their backs on seeing the Jewish people as a force for good in the world. This is happening and it is a bitter exile. We may possess a strip of land in the Middle East, but spiritually we are having to endure again the pain of exile, of being cast out. This is what the Torah is talking about: if you betray the vision of the covenant you will end up without security, without the feeling of being at home in the world.

This is our new Jewish reality and we are going to have to work very hard as a people to turn this round. As we enter the New Year this week let us hope, let us pray, we can find our way back to our true path, a  homeland rooted in the vision of Sinai, the vision of the prophets, the vision of justice and peace.  

That homeland is worth fighting for, and worth protesting about when we see it being corrupted.

[based on a sermon given at FInchley Reform Synagogue, London, September 20^th, 2025]