Thread by @rabbisacks

Here is a thread from my Covenant & Conversation essay on #Devarim called "The Teacher as Hero". You can read it in full here: bit.ly/31uNuNk and download the accompanying Family Edition here: bit.ly/2MPEVbM. #ShabbatShalom

In Deuteronomy, a new word enters the biblical vocabulary: the verb l-m-d, meaning to learn or teach. The verb does not appear even once in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, or Numbers. In Deuteronomy it appears seventeen times.

There was nothing like this concern for universal education elsewhere in the ancient world. Jews became the people whose heroes were teachers, whose citadels were schools, and whose passion was study and the life of the mind.

Moses’ end-of-life transformation is one of the most inspiring in all of religious history. In that one act, he liberated his career from tragedy. He became a leader not for his time only but for all time.

His body did not accompany his people as they entered the land, but his teachings did. His sons did not succeed him, but his disciples did. He may have felt that he had not changed his people in his lifetime, but in the full perspective of history, he changed them more than any…

…leader has ever changed any people, turning them into the people of the book and the nation who built not ziggurats or pyramids but schools and houses of study.

The poet Shelley famously said, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”[1] In truth, though, it is not poets but teachers who shape society, handing on the legacy of the past to those who build the future.

That insight sustained Judaism for longer than any other civilisation, and it began with Moses in the last month of his life.