The Ten Sayings, the Family Story, and Healing for the Nations

Hazan Gavriel ben David  ·  Elul 5786 / August 2026

I have been sitting with Rabbi Menachem Leibtag’s last shiur on Ki Tavo and with Rabbi David Fohrman’s reading of the Ten Sayings through the house of Yitzchak. The two of them do not cancel each other. Leibtag shows how Devarim is built. Fohrman shows where the Sayings were already living before Sinai ever shook. Together they answer a question I have carried from church tables to a small esnoga in Amarillo: whose family story is this Book?

The Torah does not call them the Ten Commandments. It calls them Aseret HaDevarim — the Ten Sayings, the Ten Words. A commandment can hang on a courthouse wall and be ignored. A saying is speech. Speech is how the world was made. Speech is how a family is torn or put back together.

Until This Day

Leibtag closes his sixth class on a verse that should not be hard and is. “You have seen all that Hashem did before your eyes in Egypt… the great trials that your eyes saw, those great signs and wonders. But Hashem did not give you a heart to know, or eyes to see, or ears to hear, until this day” (Devarim 29:1–3).

Israel had eyes. They had ears. They stood at the sea and at the mountain. What changed hayom?

Leibtag follows Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and Sforno. Until now, the nation was not ready to take the covenant as its own. Rashi adds the story of that same day. Moshe gives the Sefer Torah to the sons of Levi. All Israel comes and says: We also stood at Sinai. Do not make it theirs alone. Moshe rejoices. Hayom hazeh nihyeita le’am — this day I understand that you want to cling to Him.

Seeing the event and knowing the event are not the same act.

What the Rambam Locates at Sinai

The Rambam in Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 8 will not let Israel’s faith rest on signs. Signs leave a suspicion: perhaps it was sorcery. The ground of belief is Ma’amad Har Sinai. Our eyes saw, and not a stranger’s. Our ears heard, and not another’s. Face-to-face, Hashem spoke with you. He did not cut this covenant with our fathers, but with us, we who are all here alive today.

Shemot 19:9 says they will hear Me speaking with you, and also in you they will believe forever. Before Sinai, the Rambam says, their trust in Moshe still had hirhur — afterthought, room for doubt. Sinai is the seeing that does not need a middleman.

So the Rambam places the decisive eyes and ears at the mountain, in the first year. Devarim 29:3 places the heart to know at the end of the fortieth year. I will not paper over that gap. Both verses are true.

What About the People Who Already Saw?

Three groups stand inside the verse.

The first are those who were under twenty at the time of the Exodus. They saw Egypt with a child’s eyes. They are still alive. Moshe can say “your eyes saw” and mean it. They saw. The Torah still says the gift of knowing did not arrive until now.

The second were born in the wilderness. They did not see the plagues. They ate manna they never asked for and wore clothes that did not wear out. For them, “you have seen” is already inherited sight. Devarim 29:14 will say the brit is also with those who are not standing here today. Their eyes are later eyes. The verse still includes them in hayom.

The third is us. We did not see the sea split. The Rambam’s rule is severe. Later generations do not believe because we saw what they saw. We believe because a nation saw, and the chain holds. If even eyewitnesses did not know until forty years had done their work, then our distance is not a lesser faith. It is the same faith — delayed knowing — stretched across more years.

The people who saw all those things before that day prove the point. Sight was not the missing organ. Readiness was.

Time Is Not the Clock. Time Is the Teacher.

Avodah Zarah 5b hears 29:3 and says a person does not stand on his teacher’s mind until forty years. Rashi sets that reading next to the Levi story. Both can be true. One is inner. It takes forty years to understand what you have been hearing. One is communal. Only today did they demand the Torah as theirs, not Levi’s.

Hayom in Devarim is not only a date. It is the day a people can stand. Forty years of manna, of cloth that did not rot, of Sichon and Og, of graves in the sand, were not waiting for a calendar page. They were wearing down the part of the soul that can see a miracle and still ask for a different menu.

Leibtag notes that verses 4 and 5 shift into first person. I led you forty years… that you might know that I am Hashem your God. Either Moshe is quoting God, or he is putting the first line of the Ten Words in quotation marks. The whole midbar was so you would take in Anochi Hashem Elokeichem. The eyes that matter are the ones that finally read the wilderness as that sentence.

The sages said there is no earlier and later in the Torah. The Name is was, is, and will be at once. “Until this day” is not an apology for slow students. It is the moment the same event becomes visible from the inside. Sinai happened. The sea happened. They happened again every day in smaller form until someone said, “I see what this has been.”

Groundhog Day

You do the same things. You wake to manna. You fold the same garment. You hear the same rebuke. You bury another name from the old generation. Then one morning the loop does not feel like a loop. It feels like a sentence that just closed.

That is not mockery of the forty years. It is what 29:3 describes. Egypt was spectacle. The midbar was repetition. Spectacle does not give a lev lada’at. Repetition, if you stay in it, can.

I live that pattern without leaving Egypt. The same parsha returns. The same berachah. The same failure. The same Shabbat. Then, without a new miracle, the old one opens. Wow. I see. The verse allows that ad hayom hazeh can mean both a generation that never saw the mountain and one that did.

The Rambam is not contradicted. Sinai remains the event no later sign can replace. Devarim 29:3 says something Sinai did not say. Even after you have seen, you may not yet have been given the heart that knows what you saw. The giving of that heart is also from Him. It arrived, the Torah says, today — for them on the plains of Moab, and for anyone who has walked around the same mountain long enough to want the book for himself, not only for Levi.

You Stand Today

Nitzavim 29:9–14 is the moment the Moab covenant stops being a speech about the people and becomes a speech with them. It answers Leibtag’s question about the seam at the end of the Tochacha. Why another brit after Sinai and after the curses?

Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem. Nitzavim is not casual standing. It is being posted for a legal act. The generation that has a heart to know is now the generation that can stand. Heads, tribes, elders, officers, every man of Israel. Then the ones who do not speak: children, wives, the stranger who chops wood and draws water. They do not recite the curses on Ebal. They are still named.

Le’ovrecha bivrit — that you may pass into the covenant. Same root as crossing the Jordan. The brit in Moab is the threshold. Ebal and Gerizim will be the land. One crossing is legal. The other is geographic. Both are hayom from the Torah’s side.

Not with you alone do I cut this covenant and this oath, but with those who are standing here with us today before Hashem our God, and with those who are not here with us today.

That is Devarim 29:13–14. All future souls. All future Israel. The people who will stand on the two mountains are already addressed. So are the people who will read this in Amarillo. You do not need a time machine. You need the Torah’s “you” to be larger than the camp in Moab.

Devarim Is Not a Second Law

Leibtag, following Rav David Tzvi Hoffmann, shows that the main speech of Sefer Devarim is built on the Ten Words. The first two dibrot are emunah: Who is speaking, and to whom you may not bow. The remaining eight are how a people lives in a land. From chapter 6 through 26, the mitzvot hang on that frame.

Greek ears heard Deuteronomion — second law. The book never says that. Mishneh Torah in 17:18 is a copy the king must write, not a replacement code. Ramban already listed what appears here for the first time in writing: divorce, slander of a bride, conspiring witnesses, the king, and more. Nearly a third of the 613, in the Rambam’s count, surface in this book. They are not Moshe’s inventions. They are words he received at Horev and at the Tent and held until a generation had a heart to know.

New laws. New mercies. The forgotten sheaf. The escaped slave you will not return. The worker paid that day. And an unbroken promise: the same Anochi, the same oath to the fathers, the same “not with you alone.”

A second law would mean the first had failed. Devarim means the first was always meant to be lived in a house, among brothers, with eyes that finally see what the wilderness had been saying for forty years. The Boss who pulled you out of the house of slaves is the same Boss still speaking on the plains of Moab.

Bitter Water, a Tree, Twelve Springs, Seventy Palms

Three days after the sea, there is no water. Then there is water they cannot drink. Ki marim hem — they are bitter. Hashem shows Moshe a tree. He casts it into the water, and it becomes sweet. Then they camp at Elim: twelve springs and seventy date palms (Shemot 15:22–27).

The Mekhilta reads the twelve springs as the twelve tribes and the seventy palms as the seventy elders. Rabbeinu Bachya and others push the image one step further. The seventy palms are the seventy nations. The twelve springs nourish the seventy trees. Israel is not an oasis for itself. The water that was bitter until a tree entered it is meant to run toward every household that came off the ark.

In Adam, the Blueprint of Creation and the Tree of Life, I have taught that the Tree of Life is the original operating system of the human family. Yechezkel sees a river from the House, trees on both banks: fruit for food, leaf for healing (Yechezkel 47:12). The pattern is already in Beshalach. Bitter water is the world after brothers stop seeing one another. The tree in the water is Torah entering the wound. Elim is what the camp looks like when the twelve remember they were sent for the seventy.

One Family from Adam through Noah

Genesis 10 is the Table of Nations. From three sons the earth is filled. Dr. Nathaniel Jeanson’s Traced argues, based on Y-chromosome lineages, that living male trunks cluster in a way consistent with Shem, Ham, and Yefet. Mainstream genetics does not grant his dates or his rooting. What the Torah requires does not wait on the lab. Me’eleh nifretzah kol ha’aretz — from these the whole earth was populated (Bereshit 9:19). Every national hatred is a family quarrel wearing flags.

Adam is the blueprint, not a tribal mascot. Vayikra 18:5 says asher ya’aseh otam ha’adam vachai bahem — the human being who does them shall live by them. Adam. Not only Yisrael. Sinai did not invent the code. Sinai published it for a kingdom of priests whose job is to keep the water sweet for the seventy palms.

Chosenness is not a racial boast. It is an assignment. When Israel fails the assignment, the Name is desecrated. When Israel lives the Sayings, the nations have a well they can drink from without turning the well into a different god.

The Tanakh does not flatter the nations, and it does not flatter us. The families of the earth will be blessed through Avraham, and they will also press against Tzion. Christianity and Islam built cathedrals of meaning on Jewish text and then told the family that wrote the text that the Author had moved. The signature the Torah keeps offering is simpler than their metaphysics. Anochi Hashem Elokecha asher hotzeiticha me’eretz Mitzrayim. The God who took you out of Egypt. Not a man. Not a later recitation. The One whose first public word to a nation was an act of extraction from slavery.

The Family Story the Church Did Not Keep

I sat in church rooms for twenty-five years. I heard the Ten Commandments treated as a monument, or as a foil for grace, or as something Jesus either intensified or replaced. What I did not hear is that the Sayings are a family document. Rabbi Fohrman’s Season 4 of A Book Like No Other is not a sermon that uses Yaakov as an illustration.

It is a claim about how the Torah is written. He tracks words in the same order from the deception-and-reunion saga — Bereshit 27 through 33, with Lavan in between — into Shemot 19 and 20. Genesis is the hidden commentary. The Ten Sayings are the public repair.

The First Tablet Is Already in the Tent

Anochi. Who is the Doer. At Sinai, God says, “I am Hashem, your God, who took you out.” I am the One who acted. In the tent, Yaakov says to the blind father: I am Esav, your firstborn.

He names himself as the doer of the hunt. The first Saying is an identification. The family story is a mis-identification. Sinai tells the nation: do not become someone else in order to be loved. Let the Parent name you.

No image. No other gods. Fohrman hears the shofar at Sinai as a cry before it becomes words, and he sets that cry next to Esav’s “tze’akah gedolah u’marah ad me’od” — the great and bitter cry when the blessing is gone. God, who needs nothing, opens Himself to being refused.

Idolatry is not only bowing to stone. It is forcing the Parent into a form you can manage with your hands and eyes, the way a son tries to manage a blind father’s love with goatskins.

Do not carry the Name in vain. This is Fohrman’s cleanest hit. The phrase Hashem Elokecha appears for the first time in the Torah when Yaakov, already in costume, answers Yitzchak: ki hikrah Hashem Elokecha lefanai — because Hashem your God made it happen for me (Bereshit 27:20). The Name is used to make a lie hold. The next time the phrase is loaded this way is the third Saying. The Torah is pointing. You remember that scene. Do not do that again.

Shabbat, Both Parents, and the Second Tablet

Rivkah says stay with Lavan yamim achadim, a few days, until your brother’s heat turns. The few days become twenty years. Yaakov works without rest in a house where wages change ten times. Fohrman reads Shabbat against that grind. Rest is not a nap. Rest breaks the hierarchy in which a human being is only labor.

Honor father and mother — not father alone. After the stolen blessing, Yitzchak and Rivkah together send Yaakov to Padan Aram. The text says he listened to his father and his mother. Esav watches. Then Esav, who has already married women who embitter Rivkah, takes a daughter of Ishmael because he has seen what honors his father.

The fifth Saying is not only Yaakov’s obedience. It is also Esav’s late attempt to hold both parents in view. Honor is what stops the family from splitting into Dad’s son and Mom’s son.

Fohrman’s sharpest structural claim is this. Every horizontal crime in Yaakov’s life is bleed-through from a vertical wound — a fracture with Yitzchak, or later with Lavan standing in as father. Murder, the neighbor’s wife, theft, false witness, coveting: they are what happens when a child cannot trust that there is blessing enough.

Esav says in his heart he will kill his brother when mourning comes. He has motive and later four hundred men. He does not do it. That restraint is the fifth Saying holding the sixth. Lavan puts Leah in the dark where Rachel was expected. The house that stole a firstborn blessing is trapped inside a firstborn marriage. Goatskins. I am Esav. Identity theft is the prototype of false witness.

Do not covet. The word is already in the closet. Bigdei Esav hachamudot — Esav’s coveted garments, the ones Rivkah puts on Yaakov. Coveting is not first about a house or an ox. It is about believing your own face is not enough, so you put on your brother’s skin to be lovable. Lo tachmod is the Torah forbidding that costume.

You Cannot See God. Then You See a Face.

The first tablet says no form. You saw no image at Horev. The saga ends: ra’iti panecha kir’ot penei Elokim vattirzeini — I have seen your face as one sees the face of God, and you accepted me (Bereshit 33:10). Yaakov has learned the only permitted image: the brother who was the rival. God remains unseen. The neighbor becomes visible as someone whose existence is not the theft of yours. That is the last Saying enacted. They weep. The zero-sum game of the one blessing in the dark tent is, for a moment, not running.

Fohrman asks the ugly question. If Genesis 27 is a catastrophe of favoritism, why does Sinai look like God picking Yaakov’s children over the Esavs of the world? His move is integration. In the tent, Yitzchak speaks to Esav and Rivkah speaks to Yaakov. At Sinai God takes up both voices.

Nominally He addresses the children of Yaakov. Really the speech is aimed at the whole human house — including the older brother who cried. Chosenness is not Dad loved me more. It is: the family that lived the wound is commanded to publish the repair.

Leibtag takes those same Ten Words and shows they are the spine of Devarim. Fohrman shows they were already the spine of the family. Together they are one claim. The Author who spoke at Sinai had already been speaking in Beersheba.

What I Carry Now

The tree goes into bitter water. The springs number twelve. The palms number seventy. The Ten Sayings repair the house of Yitzchak so the house of Noah can drink. Whether a man accepts Jeanson’s clock or only the Torah’s table, we are not separate species of human. Prophecy says the quarrel with Israel will not be the last word. The Boss who took a slave nation out of Egypt has not changed His Name.

I do not need a pastor to certify that these Words belong to Israel before they belong to the nations. I needed my mother’s kitchen, a beit din, a prison classroom, and the Book. Live the Sayings when you sit in the house and when you walk on the way.

Teach the children the family history, not a slogan. When a brother can look at another brother and see a face like the face of God, the nations are already being healed — one household at a time. That is the only scale on which a tree ever sweetens water.

As long as there is seedtime and harvest, the covenant with Noah stands. As long as there is a seventh day, the covenant of Sinai stands. I am waiting for the rest. I am not waiting to be proven wrong on my face.

B’H’

Hazan Gavriel ben David

Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo

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