Posted on August 8, 2025 by Rabbi Noah Diamondstein
Dear Temple Beth-El,
Sadly, I’ll miss spending Friday night with you in person as I need to be home to take care of my family, all of whom are under the weather with a virus. Marnie, kiddos, I’m sending you a refuah shleimah!
Parashat Va’etchanan contains Deuteronomy ch. 6, which famously is the location of the Shema and first paragraph of the V’ahavta in the Torah. That chapter opens with a somewhat interesting Hebrew formulation: “V’zot hamitzvah hachukim v’hamishpatim…” “This is the commandment, the laws, and the decrees…” Oddly, though I suspect intentionally, Mitzvah, commandment, is written here in the singular, whereas “the laws and decrees” are pluralized. The JPS translation is useful here: “And this is the Instruction—the laws and the rules—that THE ETERNAL your God has commanded…” (Deut. 6:1) Those dashes are doing heavy lifting here, but the translation serves to highlight that the following text is meant to grab our attention. To add my own emphasis, “And this is THE Instruction…” That critically important instruction of course is the Shema and V’ahavta, the watchwords of our faith.
The V’ahavta is to me the most central text for Reform Judaism, specifically Deuteronomy 6:8–”And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and as a symbol between your eyes.” Judaism made that commandment literal with the creation of tefillin, phylactery boxes containing these words from the Torah with leather straps that we wrap around our arms and place around our foreheads. You might be thinking: Okay, I’ve seen Jews wrap tefillin before, but they were Orthodox and they were trying to get me to wrap them as I walked to board my plane at JFK. But tefillin are not only for Orthodox Jews to use. I myself find the ritual to be meaningful and beautiful. It helps me to focus in prayer and reminds me of my most core Jewish value. If you’re curious about how to wrap them I’ll happily teach you so you can try it out for yourself!
The ritual itself, though, is not the reason for my placement of this text at the very center of my Reform Judaism. The reason we bind this central text to our bodies in this particular way is to draw a line of connection between our hands and the space between our eyes. It seems quite obviously to be a connection between thought and deed. Tefillin, and the verse from which they originated, are about integrity. As Reform Jews it is our responsibility, not merely our right, to shape our Judaism to fit our ethical principles, societal circumstances, contemporary situation and communal values. We must make our actions fit our beliefs, from little everyday decisions, to choices we make about Jewish religious matters, to applications of our ethics in our politics and relationships of all kinds.
This Shabbat, and always, may we live up to the high standards of the V’ahavta.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Noah Diamondstein
