What's more meaningful to a marriage: a candlelit anniversary dinner or a husband quietly doing the dishes on a random Tuesday night?
We'd all say the dinner. It's romantic, elevated and feels like love. But let’s be honest: nothing says "I see you and I care about you" quite like someone doing the thing they really don't want to do. Whether it’s the dishes, the diapers, or the garbage that is being done with no applause and nothing in it for them. The candlelit dinner is beautiful. The garbage is love.
This week we begin reading the fifth book of the Torah, Devarim, Deuteronomy. The first four books were spoken by G-d directly through Moshe, word for word, no filter. Devarim, Moshe says "on his own." It's still Torah, still holy, and still divine. However, now it's been absorbed into a human mind and repackaged in human words.
Why the change? Because this generation was about to leave the desert.
In the desert, everything was handed to them. Food fell from the sky, their clothing never wore out, their protection came from clouds of glory. It was a spiritual paradise and the Rebbe says, it was also a little selfish. It felt amazing, yet it didn't actually connect them to G-d's essence. It was the candlelit dinner.
The moment they crossed into the Land of Israel, everything changed. Now they had to plant, build, work, and deal with the physical world and its mess. And that, not the desert, is where the real connection lives. Making the ordinary, stubborn, and physical world into a home for G-d is the whole point. That's the garbage, and that's the love.
Devarim comes to us via Moshe filtering G-d’s words instead of repeating what G-d said, because the job now is to bring the highest things all the way down into real, everyday life. If you can only feel it in the desert, you haven't really brought it home yet.
Here's a line I heard: "If I'm spiritual in shul but not a mentch on the street, was I ever really spiritual in shul?" The proof of a spiritual life isn't the beautiful moment in the synagogue. It's the person you are in the parking lot afterward.
Take one ordinary, un-spiritual, slightly annoying task that you'd rather skip, and do it. On purpose, as an act of connection, not meditation, not the perfect prayer. The dishes, that's how you connect to G-d’s essence.
Good Shabbos,
Rabbi Kushi Schusterman