Afterwards, stripped of our own Jewish Land and Israeli Nationhood, we became minorities in foreign lands. Up until the Destruction, the religion of the Jewish People was the Torah, a combination of Divine laws and commandments that covered our individuals lives AND the life of the JEWISH NATION, laws concerning the king, the Sanhedrin, the army of Israel, the Beit HaMikdash, the sacrifices which can only be brought in Jerusalem, and the agricultural laws unique to the Holy Land. But when we were cast out of our Land, the Torah lost its earthy component, and our physical Nationhood ceased. Instead of being the Divine Constitution of our NATION, the Torah was reduced to moral teachings and a handful of individual commandments, like the bones of a large salmon at the end of the Shabbos morning Kiddush. That’s when “Judaism” started. Stripped of our own Land and Israelite monarchy, our own JEWISH NATIONHOOD was lost. Exiled in other peoples’ countries, we were left with the few ritual precepts that we could still perform, like putting on tefillin, keeping kosher, learning Torah, and observing the Sabbath. Instead of being our NATIONAL CONSTITUTION, the Torah was truncated into being just a religion without its many fundamental NATIONAL, POLITICAL, and GEOGRAPHIC obligations and demands.
For example, a gentile can be a Buddhist or Christian anywhere he wants. The Pope lives in the Vatican, but there is no obligation for any other Christian or Catholic to live there. The same holds true for Islam, Buddhism, of Hinduism. These are religions, period, with a division between church and state. Not so with Torah. The Torah encompasses the entire life of the Jewish People, the religious and NATIONAL as well. But when we were severed from our earthy base, the Land of Israel, where Hashem wants us to established the NATIONHOOD of ISRAEL in the Holy Land, we were left with a truncated “Judaism” – the religious rituals of the exiled tribe of Judah, which could still be practiced in galut, but without the Torah’s DIVINE NATIONAL FORMAT and NATIONAL LAWS. Instead of being a NATION, a CLAL, we became scattered individuals in foreign gentile lands.
This is what the Spies failed to understand. Even though they were respected Torah scholars and the heads of the tribes, they wanted to make do with exile “Judaism” alone, content with just the personal precepts, without the hassle of conquering and settling the Land. And this same misunderstanding has continued to this day, when you can still find many people, Torah communities amongst them, who just want to observe a handful of individual precepts in the wilderness of foreign lands, without having to worry about the hassle of settling the Land of Israel and fighting for it in order to keep it under Jewish sovereignty as the Torah commands.
This is why, in this week’s parsha, Moshe had to go over the teachings of the Torah as we were about to enter the Promised Land. The Spies and their rebellious generation had all died in punishment for not wanting to make aliyah, but the pernicious influence of their tragic misunderstanding still remained. So at the very beginning of the Book of Devarim, Moshe begins to explain the Torah, as it says, “Moshe began to explain the Torah….” (Devarim, 1:6).
Rashi comments that Moshe explained the Torah in 70 languages. Apparently, he prophetically knew that the Jews would one day be scattered around the world, where they would speak French and Spanish and German and Russian and English and Yiddish, and Moshe didn’t want them to have the excuse, “We didn’t know we were supposed to live in Israel – we don’t speak Hebrew, so how can you blame us for not understanding the Torah?” So Moshe made sure to teach the Torah in 70 languages, so that every Jew would know for all times to come.