As we begin a new book of Torah with D’varim, I find myself reflecting upon how many of us have walked through loss in the past year. Just last week marked my mother’s first yahrzeit, and I know that recently many of us have buried a parent, or someone deeply beloved, as well. Perhaps that is why this opening parashah feels especially poignant to me this year.
D’varim stands at the edge of a threshold. Moses is looking back over a lifetime and looking forward to a future he will never see. The Israelites stand poised to enter the Promised Land, but Moses—and the generation that began the journey with him—will not cross over with them.
Every year I come back to this text and find myself feeling sad for Moses. After all he has endured, all he has given, all he has carried, he never gets to arrive. And yet, perhaps that sadness comes from our modern assumption that the goal is always the destination. Moses seems to be teaching something more complicated. This year, while studying the parashah I got distracted by commentators and parables trying to explain why the Israelites and Moses were punished. Instead of focusing on the just nature of this “punishment,” I rather would like to focus on the journey.
The book opens, “These are the words…” Such an understated beginning for what follows: Moses’s final act of leadership. His last great accomplishment is not another miracle, not another confrontation with Pharaoh, not even entry into the land. It is interpretation. It is memory. It is testimony.
He stands before the people and tells the story again. His last great lecture. Or three.
As rabbis, we know that memory is never simply recollection. Memory is selection. Moses chooses what to emphasize, what lessons to draw, what wisdom his people will need when he is no longer there. His final gift is not a map. It is a framework.
And that, it seems to me, is an extraordinary act of g’vurah.
We often translate g’vurah as strength, but not the strength of conquest or domination. It is inner strength. Restraint. Courage. The capacity to accept what cannot be changed while continuing to give what only we can give.
Moses displays that kind of strength throughout D’varim. He accepts that Joshua will lead the people forward. He relinquishes authority. He recounts his own failures without defensiveness. He warns against concentrating too much power in a single leader and reminds the people to establish wise judges and shared systems of governance. His ego gradually yields to the future.
I think that may be one of the hardest spiritual tasks any of us ever face.
A few years ago, after my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I asked her what she still wanted to accomplish. It was actually my colleague Rabbi Dan Levin’s mentorship to me. Was there one more trip? One more item on the bucket list? One unfinished dream?
Her answer surprised me: There wasn’t anything.
She had traveled the world. She had built a family. She had lived a rich life. There was no great achievement left undone.
She simply wanted more time. She was not ready to go.
More time to watch her grandchildren grow. More time to see who they would become. More birthdays, more simchahs, more ordinary days watching the nightly news with her dogs on her lap. Not because life had been incomplete, but because it had been meaningful.
I think Moses understands that longing. Standing on the plains of Moab, he surely wants more time. He surely wants to see what comes next. He wants to witness the fulfillment of promises that have defined his entire existence.
But instead of clinging to what he cannot have, he turns his attention to what he can still give.
That inner g’vurah.
One of the questions I encountered while preparing this reflection asked whether ignorance is sometimes preferable to knowledge. Is naiveté ever a blessing?
I think many of us know moments when it is. New parents often enter pregnancy and child-rearing with a measure of naiveté that allows them to move forward despite all the things that could go wrong. At bedsides, we have accompanied families who do not yet fully understand the diagnosis or the road ahead, and sometimes that limited knowledge gives them room to breathe, to hope, to be present.
But D’varim suggests that the Promised Land ultimately belongs not to the naive but to those who have learned from the journey. The wilderness generation carried burdens, traumas, and habits that could not make the crossing. Yet the lessons of the wilderness mattered. The memories mattered.
The challenge is discerning which memories must be carried forward and which must be released.
That, too, requires g’vurah.
One of the profound privileges of our rabbinate is that we accompany people through this work. We sit with congregants as they take stock of their lives. We help them tell their stories. We witness them passing on blessings, values, and memories to the next generation. Again and again, we stand with people who discover that the final task of life is not achieving immortality but transmitting legacy.
In that sense, all of us become a little like Moses.
None of us gets to enter every promised land. None of us gets to see the final chapter of the stories we begin. If we are fortunate, we catch a glimpse of the next generation taking up the torch. We offer our sermons, our teachings, our blessings, our love, and trust that they will travel farther than we can.
As I complete this year of firsts without my mother, I find myself startled by the small ways she remains present. I catch myself yawning exactly like her. I reach for the phone before remembering. A story from my childhood surfaces, and suddenly I realize that the only people who were there were my parents—and now I am the keeper of that memory.
There is sadness in that realization.
But there is also responsibility (an ocean of memories, an imperative to pass them down).
And so Moses teaches. And blesses. And remembers.
And somehow, standing at the edge of everything he loves, he finds the strength to let go.
That may be the deepest expression of g’vurah of all.
Rabbi Stephanie Kramer serves on the CCAR Board of Trustees and is senior rabbi at The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah, in Overland Park, Kansas. She shared this d’var Torah with the CCAR Board at their July 2026 meeting.
