You’ve got Moses, begging The Lord to enter the Promised Land, and reporting back that “The Lord said to me ‘Enough! Never speak to me of this matter again!’” (Deuteronomy 3:26).
You get God promising that observing the laws will be “proof of your wisdom and discernment to other peoples...” (4:6) and there you have it, the tradition of exceptional Jewish intelligence.
You get plenty of warnings to “Never Forget” ; for example: “But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live.” (4:9)
You get your Ten Commandments (one version of them, anyway...), you get your stone tablets, you get your Lord who “spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of his words but perceived no shape -- nothing but a voice.” (4:12)
You get your advance warning of and explanation for the Diaspora:
When you have begotten children and children’s children and are long established in the land, should you act wickedly ... I call heaven and earth this day to witness against you that you shall soon perish from the land ... The Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and only a scant few of you shall be left ... There you will serve man-made gods of wood and stone, that cannot see or eat or smell. ( 4:25-28)Well, sort of. It probably wasn’t really advance warning; scholars figure Deuteronomy was written mostly after there’d already been some scattering.
Did I mention the Ten Commandments? Cue the thunderclouds.
“You shall have no other God beside me.” Except when you serve man-made gods, which look a lot like Goldman Sachs, I’ll bet. Or a dry-goods store in rural Alabama. Here we are in the Diaspora, ruled by money and surrounded by the idols of consumer culture. Even here, there’s hope, however: “But if you search for the Lord Your God, you will find him, if only you seek him with all your heart and soul..” ( 4:29).
But wait! There’s more. Also included is the Biblical source for the most famous prayer in Judaism, the Sh’ma. “Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord alone.” (6:4). Or translate that as “Listen, Israelites, Yah is God, Yah is One.” Or “Listen Jews, The Godness of God is a Moebius Strip.” Okay, the last translation is my own paraphrase.
And then you get the first paragraph of what I always called, growing up, the Veahafta, but which most Jews think of as part of the K’riat Sh’ma, and boy, if you go to shul at all you’ve got that sucker memorized, reverberating in your head like the most ancient earworm ever. “You shall love the lord your god with all your heart, with all your strength, and with all your might. Set these words, which I command you this day, upon your heart. Speak of them when you are at home, and when you are away, when you lie down, and when you rise up, Teach them faithfully to your children. Bind them as a sign upon your hand, let them be a symbol before your eyes, and upon your gates.” That was from memory, so the order of all these instructions is probably not quite right. Tefillin, Mezuzot, and “You shall love...”.
But wait! Still more! Free of charge, here’s the source text for the question asked by the wise son at every Passover seder: “What mean the decrees, laws, and rules?” “We were slaves to Pharoah in Egypt...” (6:20ish)
And as a final bonus gift, some monotheistic fundamentalism: “You shall tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred posts, and consign their images to the fire” (7:5).
So this is Judaism.
Listen. Love. Remember. Seek. Obey. Freedom from slavery, the mighty hand of God, a voice from the flames, stone tablets and commandments and the Promised Land. Exodus. Do not worship other Gods, which are not gods. Smashing idols.
Telling the same stories for thousands of years! Who can grasp the enormity of that? Not just stories, but ideas. Hints. Glimpses. Trying to make everything fit tidily together, when of course it doesn’t. Themes weave in and out, again and again. Second verse, same as the first, sings a voice in my head. Old stories on top of older stories on top of who knows what.
Listen. Love. Remember. Seek. Obey. That’s quite enough for the moment. Maybe enough for always.
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