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Parashat Vayeilech: One of the Crowd

The author of the Toldos Yaakov Yosef, the first written work of the Hasidim, asks why "Moses went and told all this to the sons of Israel?" Since he was the leader and the teacher, he should have asked them to come to him! How could he demean himself to make a house call like that? The author answers that when Moshe went to the people he wasn’t only giving the rebuke to them but to himself as well. Why was he rebuking himself? After all, he is one of the most righteous people ever to live? The answer is that as one who is part of the generation, is responsible for any misdoing of the generation. Moses was not only part of the crowd, but was a leader, whose responsibility it was to shape and mold the behavior of the generation. That is why he went to rebuke himself. Since he was going to rebuke himself, it was o.k. for him to go toward the crowd rather than wait for them to come to him, since he was really going to see himself.

Moses is about to tell the people of Israel a poem which speaks of their ultimate fate. He tells the people to write down this song/poem. But we know that you can’t just write a piece of the Torah without writing the whole thing, so it implies that every person should write the whole Torah. The Rosh, Rabbeinu Asher of Medieval Germany and later, Spain, writes that nowadays that we learn from books and not the Torah scroll, one can fulfill this mitzvah by buying Jewish books. The Gherer Rebbe suggests that this change in the law is hinted in the verse when it says, "Now, write this song." The implication is that at that time, they need to write this song, but in the future we could write other holy books in fulfillment of this mitzvah.