Maureena’s Torah Reflections
Parashat Va’etchanan. Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11
“We will hear and we will do” (Deut 5.27)
What an incomparably rich parashah! It contains the Shema Yisrael (Deut 6:9; cf. Mark 1:29), the decalogue (cf. Ex 20), and the words of our Bat Kol motto, “We will hear and we do”( Deut 5.27).
“We will hear and we will do” (Deut 5.27). I began chapter 2 in “Redeeming Jesus’ Name” with a quotation from Martin Buber who tells us how to hear God speaking to us:
I experience what God desires of me for this hour—so far as I do experience it—not earlier…only one thing matters, that as the situation is presented to me, I expose myself to it as to the words manifested to me, to the very ground of my being where hearing passes into being (p. 10).
In the section on Abraham, I quoted Aviva Zornberg who wrote that what Abram felt was not just a human drive within him that pushed him to act— it was a divine-human urge “mysteriously originating within Abram himself for the sake of his own enlargement and self-realization” (p. 17).
These authors tell us that God talks to us in the events of our lives.
We will hear and we will do
Prepared by Prof. Sr. Maureena Fritz nds
Fritz, Maureena Redeeming Jesus Name, 2023 (available Wipf and Stock)
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“Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies.”
Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions: Nostra Aetate, No. 4