- All articles

All articles

- 8 Hanukah Traditions + Bonus Goodies

- Blessings and Curses?

- Our Side Of The Deal

- Bad Indians and Narrative Seeds

- Check-in time (subscriber only)

- Deuteronomy's Liberation Theology

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | DEC 11, 2025, 9:30 AM EST

8 Hanukah Traditions + Bonus Goodies

that you might not know about

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

Almost-Hanukah sameach!! The first night of Hanukah begins Sunday night! And Advent blessings to all of you celebrating!

I thought it could be fun to share eight (okayyy: ten) groovy (and lesser-known) Hanukah traditions and treats; the Jewish people are expansive and global, and there are so many faces to everything we do.

1) There's a tradition of the Sephardic Jews (the descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492) who settled in Aleppo to light an additional shamash (helper candle, the one that lights all the other ones) on Hanukah as a sign of gratitude.

(Lighting an additional shamash could be a practice of solidarity with refugees worldwide, honoring their search for shelter and peace.)

2) Here's a probably-new-to-you banger by Albert Rouimi, the Jewish Algerian musician who went by Blond Blond, a reference to his Albinism. Blond Blond was born in Algeria in 1919, spent some years back and forth between Algeria and Paris in the 30s and 40s (avoiding the Vichy years), and pioneered the Francarabe style, a mixture of French chansons and Arabic chaabi. As in other songs, he switches between languages and styles seamlessly. As I understand it, there are a lot of puns and wordplays here– maybe one of you can help?

Here's "El Bonco – Hannouka":

This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/hanukah8/ on Dec 15, 2025 at 7:20 AM EST.

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | DEC 4, 2025, 9:30 AM EST

Blessings and Curses?

making sense of loaded theology

On Monday we looked at the crux of the divine covenant– our side of the deal, which comes down to choosing life.

I didn't unpack the specific blessings and curses there, but thought that perhaps we might look at them– and their theological complexity– here, together.

Let's start with the logistics: The covenanting really begins in Deuteronomy 27, on the edge of entering the Promised Land. God-via-Moses tells everybody that when they finally get there, they'll need to get some of the people to stand on Mt. Gezirim, and recite blessings, and some on Mt. Ebal, and recite curses– as well as, per the caption in the photo above, to write the Torah. (The mountains in question are near the biblical city of Shechem and the contemporary Palestinian city of Nablus, in the West Bank.)

I'll quote the Torah at length, and then we'll look at some of the ways various smart people have made sense of this over the centuries:

And all the Levites are to speak up and say to every person of Israel,

[with] voice raised:

Cursed be the one who makes a carved-image or molten-thing and sets [it] up in secret! And all the people say: Amen! [This refrain appears after each of the cursed-bes, but I'm cutting for space– assume all the people say Amen! after each line.]

Cursed be one who insults their parent!

Cursed be one who moves the territory-marker of their neighbor!

Cursed be one leading-astray a blind-person in the way!

Cursed be one casting aside the case of a sojourner, an orphan, or a widow!

Cursed be one lying with the wife of their father...!

Cursed be one lying with any animal!

Cursed be one lying with their sister!

Cursed be one lying with their mother-in-law!

Cursed be one who strikes down their neighbor in secret!

Cursed be one taking a bribe, [thus] striking down a life [through] innocent blood!

Cursed be one who does not fulfill the words of this Torah, to observe them! And all the people say: Amen!

Now it shall be: if you hearken, to the voice of God, taking care to observe all God's commandments, then ...then there will come upon you all these blessings, and overtake you:

blessed be you, in the town,

blessed be you, in the [open] field;

blessed be the fruit of your womb, the fruit of your land, and the fruit of your animals, the offspring of your cattle and the fecundity of your sheep.

Blessed be your basket and your kneading-bowl.

Blessed be you, in your coming in,

blessed be you, in your going out.

May God make your enemies, those that rise against you, be defeated before you;

by one road they will go out against you, but by seven roads they will flee before you.

God will ordain for you the blessing in your storehouses, in all the enterprises of your hand, and God will bless you in the land.

God will open for you God's heavens, by giving the rain of your land in its set-time,

and by blessing all the doings of your hand;

God will make you the head and not the tail, you will only be up, you will not be down... (Deuteronomy 27:13-28:13, condensed slightly)

This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/blessings-and-curses/ on Dec 15, 2025 at 7:20 AM EST.

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | DEC 1, 2025, 9:30 AM EST

Our Side Of The Deal

the tl;dr of covenant, and everything since Creation: Choose Life

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

This week, after four and a half years of investigations and examinations, journeys and questions, we arrive to what is, in so many ways, the climax of the entire book: the moment towards which the entire story has been building.

The whole narrative arc from the Creation of the world through one family's tribulations, through the Exodus, Revelation, struggles in the desert and beyond– was to get us to this moment:

You are stationed today, all of you, before the presence of God: your heads, your tribes, your elders and your officials, all the householders of Israel, your young, your wives, your stranger who is within your camp, from your woodchopper to your waterhauler, for you to cross over into the covenant of God, and into God's oath-of-fealty that God is cutting with you today.... (Deuteronomy 29:9-11)

It's covenant time.

A covenant: A binding agreement between two parties, in which each is required to uphold their side of the accord.

This covenant (which, we learned last time, subverts the Assyrian vassal treaty model) is presented to everyone.

Everyone. Those with social privilege and those without. Those who are part of the cultural community and immigrants, strangers to the national polity.

And what is the apex of this covenant? The pure, molten core of it?

I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—so that you and your descendants will live. (Deuteronomy 30:19)

Choose life.

Those two words.

That's the covenant, and where we've been getting to all this time.

Choose it. It's not a given. As many sages and commentators observe, a crucial piece of this is that our free will is involved. Our agency matters.

We see a harkening back to the very beginning, to the original subversive choice: eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve used her free will to make that choice, and because of it, we can now discern between good and evil, life and death, blessing and curse.*

*This connection between this verse and the Tree of Knowledge also appears all over the sources, originating, my guess would be, in Midrash Lamentations Rabbah 3:13 and possibly elsewhere.

So what does it mean to choose life?

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You have to actively walk through the door. Again and again. Nils-Udo, Entrance, 1980, Ash, Hazel, Willow, Beech branches. (Image of a gate made of leaves in the forest in Germany.)

Let's start with the basics: The Talmud (Sanhedrin 74a) makes it clear that living is so crucial that, if forced to choose, one should violate just about any mitzvah instead of sacrificing one's own or another's life.*

*Sexual assault, murder and acts of idolatry are the exceptions to this rule. (Understand the third in the context of the Roman Empire and the broader pagan world in which it was created and the speed at which a slippery slope could devastate a whole community.) Later Jewish law, writing from a time of ongoing religious persecution, amended this to say that death was only preferable to idolotry if someone was demanding they do an act in public, in front of ten other Jews who might be thus led astray (Shulchan Arukh, Yoreh De'ah 157:1). If the order to commit idolotry happened in private, the Jew should do what must be done to preserve their own life.

But, of course, there's more to it than that. So let's see what Maimonides makes of Deuteronomy 30:19:

... True principles are called life, and corrupt principles death. Thus God shows that “life” and “good,” “death” and “evil,” are identical.... (Guide for the Perplexed, Part 1 42:4)

I might extend his read of the verse to suggest that good choices are those that lead to life flourishing, and evil ones lead to to death.

In other words, the point of the covenant? The culmination of the the last 183 chapters, everything from Creation until now?

That it's our job to help life to thrive, through our choices,

–for everyone, with and without privilege, enfranchised and not–

– and for all of our descendants.

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Choose life: Pithy words, but the work starts to become obvious when you apply that lens to, well, everything:

It means that everyone has enough to eat, every day.

It means that everybody can access all the healthcare they might need.

It means that people can go about their lives without being gunned down.

It means that people of all ages, abilities and situations are cared for, and care for, in community.

It means not abusing children, or anyone– or protecting the people who do.

It means not caging people because they made a mistake or were struggling.

It means being more concerned about people's welfare and safety than their administrative status.

It means making choices around war and peace that minimize harm for every human being involved.

It means ensuring that everyone has the other things that lend themselves to the flourishing of life, like bodily autonomy; secure housing; economic stability free of exploitation; the ability to navigate society without structural barriers; access to education.

It means stewarding the planet as a nonnegotiable part of our collective thriving.

It's not complicated, really.

When we lift our heads from the weeds and look at the entire forest, it becomes clear how and why so many of the systems in which we are now embedded contravene the two-word mandate.

And then, when we look back at the Torah, the logic behind so many of its demands becomes clear: its calls for im/migrant justice; for worker justice; for economic justice; redeem captives; to protect the Earth and so much more.

(And many other calls are clearer in the context of later Jewish law, and others still may leave us curious or confused from our contemporary vantage, but we can nonetheless engage these details as process, as faithful partners in the ever-ongoing work of receiving the Torah anew.)

In fact, the 12th c. Spanish commentator Ibn Ezra's comment on the meaning of this verse– on what "choosing life" means–

"The explanation is that 'life' is 'to love'."

In other words, as he reads it, the Torah is saying, "Choose to love."

Which brings us back to the heart of Leviticus, the centermost verse of the Torah:

"Love your neighbor as yourself, I am God." (Leviticus 19:18)

Yep.

We have free will. Every choice we make is one that can support the joyful blossoming of life, that can bring us deeper into love and connection – or farther from it, to hate, to death, to disconnection and harm.

The terms of our side of the deal are pretty simple, ultimately:

We must choose life, every day. Every policy. With every risk. Every effort.

Which doesn't mean that it's easy.

Only that it's the most important thing in the world.

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There's been a lot of desecration and devastation this last year, these last years, and knowing how to create holiness, once again, in the wake of so much ruin is essential. In the season of Hanukah, we'll look at a couple of texts that might be able to show us how to reignite and purify that which seems like it has been entirely lost, whether in our polity or in ourselves.

Come get the fuel you need.

Come and get it ❤️‍🔥

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Related:

Perhaps the most subversive act of all

Humankind’s first act of free will is a profound act of bravery.

Life is a Sacred TextRabbi Danya Ruttenberg

the point of it all

we serve God when we care for one another

Life is a Sacred TextRabbi Danya Ruttenberg

This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/our-side-of-the-deal/ on Dec 15, 2025 at 7:20 AM EST.

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | NOV 27, 2025, 9:30 AM EST

Bad Indians and Narrative Seeds

two book excerpts to transform how you encounter stories

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

I wish you all a day of great gratitude, no matter where you are.

Today feels like an apt time for something that I've wanted to share out for a while, now–

That is, it's my great honor to share excerpts from two very important books that make a great cocktail– get them both and read them in conversation with one another, and with everything else you read.

Narrative choices are everything. They certainly underlie the myths surrounding the holiday celebrated today in the U.S., as well as the larger stories around the colonialist harms preceding and following that time–

so this seemed like a perfect day to learn from two brilliant Indigenous women who have lessons that are both critically specific and applicable to everything we do here at Life is a Sacred Text ... and beyond.

If you let them, they will transform how you experience reading, stories, and the life informed by both of these things (which is to say: everything.)

Image is of two hands holding an acorn, with the words Everything is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives by Kaitlin B. Curtice (Foreword by Simran Jeet Singh) on them.

We'll start with Everything is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives

by the Potawatomi poet, author and theologian Kaitlin B. Curtice:

We may be storytellers, but we are always inheriting stories— from Segmekwe (Mother Earth), from the trees and the waters, the ants and the coneflowers, and, yes, of course, the oak trees....

The world also shifts with a story’s birth, with a story’s beginning....

Is any story completely new and unique? Our birth stories as humans are unique to a point, but we are still human. Acorns fall to the ground and go on their own journey, but they are still acorns. So, what makes a story magical? I’d say it’s the journey that a story takes—who the story encounters, how they are shaped, and where they end up.

We are told so many stories throughout our lives, stories in childhood and as adults, stories as we age into the last stages of these human-body lives.

We are told stories about creation, about life and death, about family, about friends and enemies, about what we should believe.

Sometimes these stories give us room to breathe and grow, and sometimes they suffocate us.

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And now we'll move to Bad Indians Book Club: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds

by the Anishinaabe author and activist Patty Krawec:

In a world that is increasingly polarizing along religious, racial, and ethnic lines, the solidarity that happens when we set aside the political categories meant to keep us apart and talk to each other is becoming critical to our survival.

Reading groups or book clubs have a long history of exploring new ideas: indeed, the power of this kind of collective reading is such that during the years of chattel slavery, Black people were not allowed to read at all. Reading groups proliferated in the 1970s as consciousness raising, and they continue to be sources of grassroots education across a range of racial and political categories.

There is a reason, after all, why more and more people seek to ban the books that point us towards collective liberation.

Bad Indians Book Club emerged from a series of conversations I had with friends and authors, some of which became podcasts, about books read and written. Like happens in any good book club, ideas about how we could live differently emerged from the connections between us: readers and writers from a variety of backgrounds who are no longer seeking inclusion into a house that is on fire.*

*James Baldwin wrote, “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?”

I write this as the world is awash in protest, people raising hell, as Wente puts it, all of which is being done wrong according to Good Citizens. We’re too loud, too inconvenient, too demanding, too everything. Demanding something other than genocide, violence, and extreme inequity, we’re the bad ones. I’m okay with that—with being one of many Bad Indians who challenge the stories we tell about the society in which we live, because the things we believe have consequences that are often borne by others, consequences we may not see.

My first book, Becoming Kin, challenged the myths and stories that Canada and the United States tell about their history. But history isn't the only story we tell about our encounters with the worlds around us.

This book is an invitation to join me in challenging all the stories.

I hope that you can begin challenging the stories you encounter—stories that, like the colonialism in which they are rooted, serve to displace and erase other ways of knowing.

We live in a culture that romanticizes certain kinds of outlaws, and I don’t want to do that, but we should pay attention to how subaltern people are spoken of when we refuse to take our place.

To remind us of what’s at stake, of how we are seen and spoken of when we refuse to behave, memoirist Deborah Miranda writes a “Novena to Bad Indians,” a novena being an urgent nine-day prayer petitioning for grace or favour. She offers gratitude and intention to those who are called names and painted as violent. She petitions those who refused to accept their position in social and gendered hierarchies. She asks for grace from women whose sexual agency and reproductive choices were and are seen as threatening. She honours those who refused to convert to a Christianity that arrived hand in glove with empire and those who later recanted. She writes,

illuminate the dark civilization we endure.

Teach us to love untamed, inspire us to break rules,

remind us of your brutal wisdom learned so dearly:

even dead Indians are never

good enough.

Bad Indians Book Club is a novena, of sorts: nine chapters of public prayer to Bad Indians and those like them who refused to be left in their special interest section.

Bad Indians know that you learn best when you push aside the dust and detritus you have become accustomed to and make room for new ideas and new ways of thinking about things.

Bad Indians take the life around us seriously, even when it is life we don’t understand.

Bad Indians return to themselves through histories told by those who have a different stake in those stories.

We are experts at refusal and creating hostile spaces, and we tell our own stories, even when they aren’t pretty.

Bad Indians wield stories like weapons in the war against imagination.

We pick medicine with the things that go bump in the night, and we know that we have a future despite everything that has been stolen, buried, and burned.

There is something defiant about being a Bad Indian, about leaning into these negative stereotypes. Something adolescent and feral. If I’m going to get into trouble anyway, I might as well deserve it. This book is, ultimately, a book about refusal: refusing political categories and the borders and violence that comes with them, refusing to assimilate by becoming the kind of person the state cannot assimilate. It’s written by a Bad Indian who doesn't just want to survive this current apocalypse.

I want to join with others—Bad Indians and more—to midwife new worlds into being.

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"...wield stories like weapons in the war against imagination." Unauthorized? Cass Gardiner in collaboration BirdxBird, “Skoden Warriors” (2025) over Jerome B. Thompson’s “The Belated Party on Mansfield Mountain” (1858) Starting Oct 13, 2025, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 17 Native artists staged a still-ongoing, unsanctioned digital intervention at the Metropolitan Museum, using augmented reality (AR) to layer their own work atop the wing’s 19th-century paintings. You can find ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future here. (Image of a landscape painting of a mountain peak with three figures looking out onto the distance, pixelated, with an old-school computer frame around it with the words Skoden ("let's go") Warriors on it, and pixelated animated Native Americans looking at each other with an Oregon Trail game-like square of text in the center of the painting, with the words, "Look at these guys, acting like they discovered the place.")

"...the journey that a story takes—who the story encounters, how they are shaped, and where they end up." Authorized? Jeffrey Gibson's The Animal That Therefore I Am, 2025, aka The Genesis Facade Commission from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, currently on display outside the museum's Fifth Ave. facade. Top left: they carry messages between light and dark spaces, bia̱kak / dawodv / hawk Top right: they plan and prepare for the future, fvni / sa lo li / squirrel Bottom left: they teach us to be sensitive and to trust our instincts, issi / awi / deer Bottom right: they are witty and transform themselves in order to guide us, nashoba holba / wayaha / coyote (Sculptures of bronze squirrel, coyote, deer and hawk, all standing upright / on two legs. Sculptures give the sense that the animals are wearing beadwork, leather, furs, textiles and feathers, integrating motifs from Indigenous visual traditions.)

Let's end with some words from

Everything is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives by Kaitlin B. Curtice:

We are not automatically given home. Some of us journey to find it, and home doesn’t always mean the place where we grew up, does it? Many of us are still finding home. When I’m asked where I’m from, I always stumble, because I can’t really answer that. I’ve lived in so many places I feel like a bit of a nomad, and I’ve known people from many places who welcomed me as family, as kin.

A spiritual home, a genealogical home, a physical home— these things take time and examination, just like that tiny acorn we hold.

As we enter into this journey together, as we consider the origins of a story, the very seed we tenderly hold in our hands, we acknowledge what it means to look for home, to journey toward home, to find home, to create home, to sustain home.

Along the way, we go beyond ourselves, asking what it means to be home to others.

May we begin there.

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Kaitlin Curtice is an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi nation, Kaitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity and how that shifts throughout our lives. She also speaks on these topics to diverse audiences who are interested in truth-telling and healing.

Everything Is a Story: Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives

Reclaiming the Power of Stories to Heal and Shape Our Lives

Brazos PressBrazos Press

Patty Krawec (Anishinaabe Ukrainian) is author of Becoming Kin and Bad Indians Book Club and cofounder of the Nii’kinaagana Foundation. An activist and former social worker, she belongs to Lac Seul First Nation in Treaty 3 territory and resides in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Krawec has served on the board of the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre and cohosted the Medicine for the Resistance podcast.

Bad Indians Book Club: Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds

Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds

Broadleaf BooksBroadleaf Books

And, of course, remember, #LandBack doesn't mean giving up your home tomorrow, but it does mean supporting Indigenous sovereignty in every possible way, and developing an appropriate relationship with the land on which you live, the people from whom it was stolen, and with others.

Knowing on whose land you dwell is a first step– this is a helpful tool. From there, it's pretty easy to click through to the main tribal websites, for starters. Some communities have programs like Real Rent, or other means of supporting self-empowerment. There are many national orgs, as well, though today especially I'll lift up Patty's work with The Nii’kinaagana Foundation.

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Subscribe now! 20% off!

Support independent work committed to telling inconvenient truths:

And don't forget: When you join the House of Study, you can join

The December Zoom Salon!

Sunday,December 7, 2-3:30 EST, 11-12:30 PST.

(You do not have to know anything to show up!

And you are allowed to keep your screen off the whole time if you want!

You can also choose to have your screen on and be crafting or eating or with your hair a mess and we are all very casual and friendly and welcome you exactly as you are!)

There's been a lot of desecration and devastation this last year, these last years, and knowing how to create holiness, once again, in the wake of so much ruin is essential. In the season of Hanukah, we'll look at a couple of texts that might be able to show us how to reignite and purify that which seems like it has been entirely lost, whether in our polity or in ourselves.

Come get the fuel you need.

Come and get it ❤️‍🔥

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RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | NOV 20, 2025, 9:14 PM EST

Check-in time (subscriber only)

how we doing, here?

View this paid post here: Check-in time (subscriber only).

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RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | NOV 17, 2025, 9:30 AM EST

Deuteronomy's Liberation Theology

how it can teach us to expand our vision for tomorrow

It's time for some Torah on what influences, hampers, and shapes the liberatory imagination.

After King Solomon died in 926 BCE, his son Rehoboam ruled poorly, and the united monarchy became two separate states: Judah and Israel.

In 722 BCE, Israel was conquered by the Assyrians. Many people were forcibly relocated—reportedly, ostensibly, the time when 10 "lost" tribes were dispersed—and many Israelite refugees came into Judah, bringing the ideas they'd developed in the north along with them.

At the same time, in 735 BCE, the Assyrians conquered Judah and made it a vassal state of Assyria.

Map of Israel in the north and Judah in the south ca. 9th-8th c. BCE, before everything fell apart, with a note about the direction from which the Assyrians will come.

Many scholars have pointed out the similarities between various parts of the Book of Deuteronomy and Assyrian vassal treaties—that is, the agreements that the Assyrian Empire made with its vassal states.

As a reminder, we generally assume that Deuteronomy was connected to the reign of the Judean King Josiah (who reigned c. 640–609 BCE). Recently, a copy of Esarhaddon’s Sucession Treaty (672 BCE)* was found Tell Tayinat, in nearly-Syria, leading scholars to assume that other copies may have made their way into the the region, perhaps into Judea.

*This treaty bound the inhabitants of the Assyrian empire to ensure the succession of Esarhaddon’s son, Aššurbanipal (reigned 668-627 BCE) to to the throne.

L: Esarhaddon, closeup from his victory stele over Egypt in 671 BCE. (Stone carving of the profile of an Assyrian ruler with a conical crown and tightly curled beard, holding a cup and a staff) R: An actual original copy of the actual Succession Treaty regarding the succession of Aššurbanipal, the crown prince of Assyria, imposed by his father, Esarhaddon, the king of Assyria, in 672 BCE. (Image of a carved ancient Near Eastern stone treaty engraved in columns of a light pink/brown stone).

I won't go through all the possible examples, but to give you a sense of things, I'll quote Esarhaddon’s Sucession Treaty in simple italics, and the Torah text in italics with line indent:

You shall neither change nor alter the word of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria but heed this very Assurbanipal, the great crown prince designate.

Everything that I command you, that you are to take care to observe; you are not to add to it, you are not to diminish from it! (Deuteronomy 13:1)

Whoever changes, neglects, violates, or voids the oath of this tablet and transgresses against the father, the lord, and the adê of the great gods and breaks their entire oath....may your name, your seed, and the seed of your brothers and your sons completely disappear from the face of the earth.

Beware that the heart of no man, woman, clan, or tribe among you turns away from God our God today to pursue and serve the gods of those nations... all the curses written in this scroll will fall upon him, and God will obliterate their name from memory. (Deuteronomy 29:18-20)

May all the great[t go]ds of heaven and earth who inhabit the universe and are mentioned by name in this tablet, strike you, look at you in anger, uproot you from among the living... May food and water abandon you; may want and famine, hunger and plague never be removed from you.

God will send upon you disaster, panic, and frustration in everything you attempt to do until you are destroyed and perish quickly, [because you have forsaken me]. ...God will afflict you with consumption, fever, inflammation, with fiery heat and drought, and with blight and mildew; they shall pursue you until you perish. (Deuteronomy 28:20–22)

May Sin, the brightness of heaven and earth, clothe you with leprosy and forbid your entering into the presence of the gods or king. Roam the desert like the wild-ass and the gazelle!

God will strike you with boils of Egypt and with tumors, with scabs, and with itching, from which you cannot be healed; (Deuteronomy 28:27)

May Šamaš, the light of heaven and earth, not judge you justly. May he remove  your eyesight. Walk about in darkness!

God will strike you with madness, with blindness, and with confusion of heart. You will feel about at noon like a blind-person feels about in deep-darkness... (Deuteronomy 28:28-29)

May Venus, the brightest of the stars, before your eyes make your wives lie in the lap of your enemy; may your sons not take possession of your house, but a  strange enemy divide your goods.

A woman you will betroth, but another man will lie with her, a house you will build, but you will not dwell in it...your donkey will be robbed [from you] in front of you...your sheep will be given to your enemies, with no deliverer for you. Your sons and your daughters will be given to another people, while your eyes look on and languish for them all the day, with no God-power to your hand. (Deuteronomy 28:30-32)

Deuteronomy has a lot of this kind of language: “IF you are good and do all of these things, you will be safe and protected. IF you are not...well, not so much.” When you understand them as subtweets of Assyrian treaties, things become clearer:

We are vassals, absolutely. But not of an earthly kingdom.

The only ruler we serve is God.

The authors of Deuteronomy took the terms of subjugation and subverted them to become the terms of liberation.

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The Creation of God, Harmonia Rosales, 2017. Rosales is a self-taught Afro-Cuban American painter from Chicago who not only plays with Biblical and Greek imagery in classical painting but often interweaves Yoruba (and Yoruba Diaspora) religious elements as well-- her work is worth your time. (IG) On her website, the copy about this piece notes, "Rosales presents the first human as a Black woman formed from the clay of the earth, the reddish-brown markings of her new body echoing the rusty land around her. The first woman Eve reaches for God’s life-giving touch. In another moment God will imbue her with energy, also known as the life-force, or asé... God is depicted as a strong Black woman, her protective pink covering forming a womb around the twelve nude figures. In the artist’s words, '…when you consider that all human life came out of Africa, the Garden of Eden and all, then it only makes sense to paint God as a black woman, sparking life in her own image.' By subverting Michelangelo’s well-known fresco, Rosales paints Black female empowerment into history, and simultaneously challenges hegemonic systems of belief.” (Image similar to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, but among other changes, God is an older Black woman surrounded by Black attendants, and She is reaching out to touch hands with a nude Black woman.)

They replaced their service to an earthly king with service to the divine.

Deuteronomy is profoundly subversive in this way.

This is the same message that we saw in Exodus, in a different key: We don't serve Pharaoh, we serve God. We don't serve the Assyrian king, we serve God.

Later, our Rabbinic texts will say, in a thousand ways: We don't serve the Roman emperor, we serve God.

And maybe it's the renunciation of Empire is one of the most enduring religious concepts across time and place.

How to turn chains into wings, the yoke of Assyria into the yoke of Heaven.

In other key ways, Deuteronomy aligns with a vision of Liberation Theology, which focuses on orthopraxy over orthodoxy - that is to say, what a person does is more important than what they believe. As we have seen over these many months, Deuteronomy has taught us that we must pursue justice justly, striving to go beyond the letter of the law, that we must both care for those in need today and fight for systemic solutions for tomorrow, that joy is, in itself, an action focused on the enfranchisement of those most marginalized, that we create sanctuary for those at risk of communal violence, that both personal and systemic redistribution of economic resources is an obligation. As is labor justice, and not only caring for, but loving the non-citizen.

But I also wonder about how Deuteronomy's authors' ideas were limited by the vassal treaty model. What else could freedom have looked like? If there were other possibilities for shaping this future, it's not clear that they saw them.

As such, this story invites us to ask, not only: How can we subvert the terms of our oppression to become the conditions for our own liberation?

But also: In what ways are our liberatory imagination, our own visions of what's possible and should be, limited by the terms of our oppression? We can see from here, maybe, what other ways of thinking the Deuteronomists might have reached for that they couldn't have, from where they were.

What aren't we seeing now, because we're so stuck in our own assumptions about how things are and what's possible? What else do we need in order to create an expansive liberatory imagination, to not be limited by what is known and familiar?

I think about Deuteronomy in contrast to the Exodus story. Some scholars (and there are lots of debates about dating, here) suggest that the Exodus story really became the foundation of our tradition during the Babylonian exile.

The Babylonians defeated the Assyrians/ Egyptians in 605 BCE, then laid siege to Jerusalem. The first deportations from Judea to Babylon started in 597 BCE, and the Temple was destroyed 587 BCE.

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A map of the ancient Near East, showing the Assyrian Empire (covering much of what's now Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Israel/Palestine) with its heart in Nineveh, what's now Mosul, north of the Babylonian Empire (covering much of the same ground, but based in Babylon, what's now Hillah, 62 miles south of Baghdad, also in what's now Iraq).

If, indeed, the Exodus story either originated or really took root in exile, well– one might understand how that could be the case: It's the story of oppression by a foreign power, about dreams of liberation and hopes for return to the Promised Land.

In this way, it's possible that the Exodus story helped the Judean exiles both address of the pain and suffering of now as well as to articulate an expansive vision of freedom.

That doesn't mean that they created it all from scratch; a linguistic analysis suggests that the Song of the Sea– Exodus 15– is one of the oldest bits of the Torah that we have. This was likely woven in to other parts of the narrative at some point. Imagine using the Song of the Sea to answer the pain of Babylonian captivity.

Imagine how we might use very ancient traditions today to address the suffering of now, to give us doorways and windows out. How could they to help us construct a vision for a more whole tomorrow?

What else do we need to create an expansive liberatory imagination, to not be limited by what is known and familiar? What else can help us see beyond the known and familiar ways of being?

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Tourmaline, Summer Azure (2020). Photo: Dario Lasagni. Tourmaline (IG) is an artist, activist, and filmmaker who works to elevate the visibility and agency of queer, transgender, and Black communities. From the Getty Museum description of the piece: "The work evokes themes of pleasure, ease, and liberation. For decades, U.S. laws have targeted transgender people in a multitude of ways, including criminalizing cross dressing. Here the artist wears gender non-conforming clothing, celebrating self-expression through fashion in a way that has been denied to the trans community. This photograph is from her body of work "Pleasure Garden." Pleasure gardens were open-air spaces designed for leisure and communal gathering. They were popular in 19th-century New York but most were off-limits to Black people. In response, Black-owned pleasure gardens emerged and provided a place for the Black community to meet and enjoy recreation in nature. These gardens allowed them to seek refuge from the stressful conditions of the world during a time when slavery was still legal. Today, the Black and trans communities continue to face discrimination and violence. With "Summer Azure," Tourmaline both references the history of refuge in pleasure gardens, and conjures a future of self-expression, freedom, and joy." ("Summer Azure" is a self-portrait that depicts the artist barefoot in white clothing, wearing an astronaut's helmet and appearing to walk on clouds.)

After Babylon then fell to the Persian king Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE (every empire ends eventually!) the exiled Judeans (not everyone in Judea, but a big chunk of population, especially the elite and trade classes) were permitted to return. The story of the Exodus was codified back in Judea, carried back home.

When people talk about liberation theology, they usually refer to the critically important work of folks like the Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Black American theologian James Cone, the Māori priest and scholar Dr Jenny Te Paa Daniel, the Mexican biblical scholar Elsa Támez or the Jesuit priest Jon Sobrino.

But Exodus was liberation theology from the start—not only the story of liberation, but the story for those who were in need of liberation.

It was always there. There is no neutral mainstream reading.

And Deuteronomy, too, though less well-understood as such, is a liberation text, a radical repurposing of the tools of the oppressor, a redrafting into the terms of freedom.

People try to neuter the radical power of these texts, but they have always been about overthrowing Empire, always been about freedom from oppression.

They have always offered a pathway to our own.

There is no secret other meaning.

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Deuteronomy's Liberation Theology