Seventy Languages and a Best Buy
I spent too much time this week figuring out that my AirPods are not adequate as a microphone.
A podcast I recorded has to be recorded again. The argument was fine, I didn’t lose my place, the host was great. The sound was just bad — thin, a little boxy, like I was talking to you through a door and with a few weird clicking artefacts. You could follow it if you were determined. But, really, nobody should have to be determined.
So: Amazon orders. Then Amazon returns. Then a trip to Best Buy. Somewhere in there I went bowling. We’re in Orange County at the moment, I head east next week, and the High Holidays will be at our own shul, which is the part I’m actually counting down to.
Not much of a week. It is, though, exactly the errand this week’s parsha hands out.
Ki Tavo opens with a farmer carrying a basket and ends with Moshe walking the people back through forty years. In between, before anybody reads out a single blessing or curse, he gives instructions for the day they cross the Jordan. Set up large stones. Coat them with plaster. Build an altar out of stones no iron has touched. And then:
וְכָתַבְתָּ֣ עַל־הָאֲבָנִ֗ים אֶֽת־כׇּל־דִּבְרֵ֛י הַתּוֹרָ֥ה הַזֹּ֖את בַּאֵ֥ר הֵיטֵֽב׃
And on those stones you shall inscribe every word of this Teaching most distinctly.
Ba’er heitev. Most distinctly. Rashi spends two words on it: b’shivim lashon. In seventy languages.
That’s really odd. The nation had been walking for forty years. It is about to cross a river into a war. One of the first things it is told to do on the far bank is solve a publishing problem. Not just write it down. Write it down so it can be read — by everyone standing there, including the people who were already living on that hill.
The rabbis spend a stretch of Sotah arguing about whether it actually worked. Rabbi Yehuda says they cut the words into the stone and plastered over the top. Rabbi Shimon asks: then how was anyone supposed to read it? Rabbi Yehuda’s answer is that the nations sent their scribes, and the scribes peeled the plaster back and copied it out. Rabbi Shimon says it didn’t happen that way at all — they plastered first and wrote on the plaster, out in the open, where anyone walking past could see.
Two sages going at each other over a coat of lime, and what they are arguing about is whether you could read it without too much effort. Surface or underneath. Handed to you, or excavated.
I know which side I was on this week, standing in a Best Buy holding two boxes.
Here’s the part I keep turning over, though. All of it — the stones, the plaster, the altar, the writing — happens on Mount Ebal.
Ebal is the curse mountain. The text is not subtle about the arrangement: six tribes on Gerizim for the blessing, six on Ebal for the curse, and the levi’im down in the middle calling it out in a loud voice so both slopes hear it. So you would expect the altar on Gerizim. The good news gets the good hill. That is how anyone would stage it.
It isn’t staged that way. The altar goes up on Ebal, the offerings are brought on Ebal, and the verse right before the writing instruction says this:
וְזָבַחְתָּ֥ שְׁלָמִ֖ים וְאָכַ֣לְתָּ שָּׁ֑ם וְשָׂ֣מַחְתָּ֔ לִפְנֵ֖י יְהֹוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶֽיךָ׃
and you shall sacrifice there offerings of well-being and eat them, rejoicing before the ETERNAL your God.
V’samachta. And you will rejoice. On the mountain that just got handed the curses.
A few weeks ago I was up at Har Bracha, which sits on Gerizim. You look north from there, across the valley and past Shechem, and Ebal is right there in front of you. The two are close. Close enough that you understand the ceremony the moment you see the ground — it’s an amphitheater, and somebody picked that spot because the sound carries. Which, as it happens, is the problem I’ve been having all week with considerably worse equipment.
I don’t think the altar sits on Ebal to make some point about looking on the bright side. I think it sits there because that is where people are going to be standing when the hard words land, and the Torah declines to leave them there. You hear the curse. Then you build. Then you eat. And then — the verse doesn’t hedge about it — you’re glad. Not eventually. There, on that hill, that day.
Elul is halfway gone. Two weeks from now it’s Tishrei and I’ll be in our own seats for the first time in a while, which is its own kind of arriving. The season asks a lot of accounting from a person, and some of what comes back is not flattering. This parsha puts the joy on Ebal anyway, on the day the curses get read out.
And the other instruction, the one I’ve been working through with a credit card and a return label, is that when you finally have something worth saying, you owe the person on the other end a version they can actually hear. Carve it. Plaster it. Buy the microphone. Seventy languages, if you can manage it.
The re-record is still ahead of me.
Shabbat shalom.
— Uriel ben Avraham
Uriel ben Avraham writes the Israel Brief and is the author of Rooted in Judea. A book and speaking tour is booking stops now — write to speaking@mitzpe.org if you’d like one near you.