כי יקום בקרבך נביא, “When a prophet will arise among you, etc.” This refers to someone claiming to be a prophet, claiming that G’d had communicated with him either while he was awake or while he was dreaming. ונתן אליך אות, “and he will produce a sign (miracle) for you,” something in heaven proving G’d had communicated with him (compare Judges 6,17). או מופת, “or a miracle,” something occurring on terrestrial earth which defies the laws of nature. The Torah tells you that such miracles nothwithstanding you are not to listen to his instructions. (Rashi) If you will ask why G’d has empowered such a person to perform a miracle, the Torah answers that G’d will test your faith in Him by doing so. [It is assumed that the so-called prophet uses the miracle to entice you to violate a law of the Torah you are familiar with, primarily forms of idolatry. Ed.]

Nachmanides understands the word אות או מופת as follows: אות is advance notice of an otherwise unexpected future event, the sort of thing Moses did when he announced the arrival and time of the plagues to Pharaoh beforehand. The Torah had referred to his staff as the instrument with which he would make these אותות occur. (Exodus 4,17) Isaiah 7,14 also uses the word אות to describes an event he had foretold. The word is derived from אתה, “i.e. to come, to arrive, to occur,” as in Deut. 33,2 ואתה מרבבות קודש, “He arrived with myriads of holy ones” (angels). The word מופת on the other hand, describes a totally new phenomenon occurring on earth, such as when G’d said in Yoel 3,3 ונתתי מופתים בשמים ובארץ, “I will perform miracles in the sky and on earth.” The word מופת is an abbreviation of the word מופלאת, (compare Job 37,16). In Egypt G’d had performed both אותות ומופתים as we know from Deut. 4,34. אותות were the ones Moses had announced in advance, whereas מופתים took the victims by surprise and also defied the laws of nature.

It is a well known fact that one does not accept a person’s claim to be a prophet until he has legitimized himself either by an אות or by a מופת. Not only do the miracles he foretold have to occur, but they have to occur 100% as he had foretold, both regarding date, regarding extent, etc. If a single detail of what the claimant promised did not materialize it is certain that he is not a prophet. Once a person has legitimatized himself in that all the miracles he foretold occurred in accordance with his predictions, if he will foretell a disaster in the future and the disaster does not occur this does not mean that he is a fraud. The test of whether a prophet is real or an impostor is when he foretold something pleasant, something that people look forward to and all or some of it fails to materialize. It makes no difference whether his prophecy concerned an individual or a group of people; not a single detail of what he predicted is allowed to fail to come true. In Jeremiah 28,9 the prophet told Chananiah son of Azor, who claimed to be a prophet “if a prophet prophesies good fortune, then only when the word of the prophet comes true can it be known that the Lord really sent him.” When prophets predict disasters which do not occur, one does not suspect them but attributes this to other causes, primarily that the people warned of the disaster had repented. After all, the whole purpose of the prophet’s mission is to cause people to return to G’d in penitence. We have a rule that G’d never reconsiders the promise of good fortune (compare Maimonides Yesodei Hatorah 10,4). Proof that the failure of a prophet’s foretelling disaster does not disqualify him when it does not occur, is what happened a Nineveh. Jonah was not discredited by the people of Nineveh doing teshuvah. Had G’d wanted to destroy those people at that time why did He have to send the prophet to them in the first place? When Isaiah told king Chizkiyah מות תמות, “you will surely die,” it did not discredit the prophet when Chizkiyah was given 15 more years of life on earth. At the time Iaaiah warned Chizkiyah he was most certainly under divine sentence of death. G’d allowed Himself to be entreated by him; this did not make Isaiah a liar. The technical reason why such prophetic pronouncements can be canceled is that teshuvah, repentance, was created prior to the creation of the universe, i.e. it overrides anything created later. (compare Pesachim 54).

אחרי ה' אלו-היכם תלכו, “Follow Hashem your G’d!” This is an exhortation to emulate G’d’s attributes. The call by Moses here is similar to והלכת בדרכיו in Deut. 28,9. ואותו תיראו, “and Him you shall revere.” Do no relate to Him by trying to investigate His essence but by assessing His manifest actions.

ואת מצותיו תשמרו, “and His commandments you are to observe.” This is a reference to the written Torah, the 613 commandments written therein.

ובקולו תשמעו, “and to His voice you are to hearken.” This refers to the prophets and includes the oral Torah as we learned in Avot 1,1: “Moses received the Torah (orally) at Mount Sinai and handed it over to Joshua,” etc.

ואותו תעבודו, “and Him you shall serve.” This refers to prayer. ובו תדבקון, “and to Him you shall cleave.” This means that even while you are preoccupied with matters other than Torah, matters which are your legitimate concern, such as working for a living, you shall still have G’d on your mind and not totally disassociate your mind from Him even at such times.

Alternatively, the meaning could be that you should not ever entertain the thought to leave the service of the Lord. When someone is a slave, even if he is fortunate enough to have the most accommodating and sympathetic master, there are times when he wishes to be free, independent. A Jew is never to allow himself the feeling that he wants to be free of his obligations vis-a-vis the Lord. The affinity between Israelite and G’d should be one that neither party ever wishes to sever. The reason is that true freedom is this very cleaving to Hashem, the best insurance against being enslaved to the evil urge.

It is also possible to view the words ובו תדבקון not so much as a command but as a promise. It is the promise of life in the world to come if we have fulfilled the instructions in the first half of the verse to emulate the attributes of the Lord, to revere Him and to serve Him by praying to Him and to observe His commandments, both the written ones and the oral ones (compare Ibn Ezra).

כי דבר סרה על ה' אלו-היכם המוציא אתכם מארץ מצרים, “for he has spoken perversely against the Lord your G’d Who has taken you out of the land of Egypt.” In other words, the false prophet is guilty of insurrection against heaven even if he performed numerous miracles and placed the sun in the zenith of the sky (at morning or evening) and claimed that this was proof that G’d had instructed him to do so, so that on that particular day we are to serve a certain planet or constellation of stars or other celestial manifestations. Such an impostor is guilty of death by asphyxiation. The reason is that by doing what he did he challenged Moses’s stature as G’d’s foremost prophet (compare Maimonides Hilchot Yessodey Hatorah 9,5). By claiming to have received such instructions from G’d he violated the second of the Ten Commandments that “you shall not have any other deity.” All of the people of Israel had heard this commandment directly from G’d with their own ears. How could anyone come later and claim that G’d had suspended this commandment even for a day?! All of Israel were witnesses against this so-called prophet even before he spoke. This is why the Torah decrees that such a person must be executed seeing all the “so-called” miracles he performed were not real but were deceptions of his audience, sleight of hand, power of suggestion, mass hypnosis, whatever you want to call it.

What we have said so far applies only when such a “prophet” asks the people or some of them to commit an act known to be forbidden as idolatrous. If however, a prophet, who had legitimised himself and had been proven to be a legitimate prophet for an extended period of time, will call on the people to temporarily disregard one of the other commandments of the Torah we must listen to him and continue to believe him and to follow his instructions seeing he made it clear that the suspension of the particular commandment he called for was only temporary. This is the meaning of the words אליו תשמעון, “to him you shall hearken” in Deut. 18,15 where the subject of prophets occurs once more. [if the prophet merely called upon you to perform the commandments of the Torah, the Torah would not have had to tell us that we must be “listening to him;” we would be listening to G’d directly, without the need of a prophet’s call. to do so. Ed.] If we do rely on the miracles performed by such a prophet and do not treat them as deception and sleight of hand this is because he has a חזקה, an established reputation, of being a true prophet. If for some reason unknown to us such a prophet becomes a renegade, the Torah does not consider our being misled by him as our fault, but wrote in Deut. 29,28 הנסתרות לה' אלו-הינו, “hidden matters are G’d’s problem” (not our province to investigate). On the other hand הנגלות לנו ולבנינו , “matters which can be clarified by our using our means of detection, we ourselves are held responsible for.” Man must judge by what his eyes see, only G’d is able to look into a man’s heart (compare Maimonides Hilchot Yessodey Hatorah end of chapter 7). The Talmud Sanhedrin 90 also rules that when an established prophet such as Elijah at the time calls upon you to repair a private altar in order to discredit the priests of the Baal, we are to listen to such a prophet. The exception is if such a prophet were to ask you to commit an act of idolatry. The fact that Elijah offered a sacrifice outside the Temple, something prohibited in Leviticus 17,4 and 9, was prompted only by special circumstances. Anyone arguing that a commandment should be canceled permanently is a false prophet seeing the commandments of the Torah (unless otherwise stated) are permanent This is the meaning of the last half of the verse we quoted from Deut. 29,28 לנו ולבנינו עד עולם לעשות את כל דברי התורה הזאת, “for us and for our children to carry out all the words of this Torah forever.” What the sages said in respect of Elijah at Mount Carmel is applicable in all similar situations when prophets cancel Torah injunctions as an emergency measure. When Joshua (compare Bamidbar Rabbah 14,5) violated the Sabbath when the priests carrying the shofarot and the Holy Ark marched around Jericho for seven days in a row, he did so at the express command of G’d. This was an emergency. We encounter a similar occurrence with the prophet Elisha in Kings II 3,25 when the Israelites in their battle against Moav cut down fruit-bearing trees and stopped up wells. Although the Torah had expressly forbidden this in Deut. 20,19 the prophet used his authority to set aside this injunction on a temporary basis. If the prophet gives such orders and they sound as if they are meant to be permanent he has discredited himself and people must not listen to his instructions. This is the meaning of a statement in Yevamot 102: “if Elijah were to come and tell you that the rites of chalitzah are performed with a shoe known as מנעל one follows his instructions; if he were to instruct that this procedure must not be performed with a sandal instead, one does not follow his instructions.” [The original practice had been to use a shoe known as מנעל. At the time of the Talmud, sandals had been in use for this for hundreds of years already. Even this established custom a prophet must not cancel permanently. Ed.] The Talmud in Berachot 24,2 quotes a scholar saying that even if the greatest authority of his time had told him that it was permitted to recite the kriat shema in an otherwise unfit location by placing his hand over his mouth first, he would not obey this scholar in this matter. Moreover, the Talmud is also on record that even when such instructions are issued by means of a bat kol, a heavenly echo, this is without halachic significance when it involves permanent changes of Torah law. Prophecy is a higher authority than a בת קול and all the laws of the Torah have been communicated by the father of all prophets, by Moses. Rabbi Joshua used this latter statement in Baba Metzia 59 to aver that halachic decisions are arrived at by a majority of the competent scholars of their time and are not subject to divine interference (at a time when we have no prophets).

כי יסיתך אחיך בן אמך, “if your brother, the son of your mother tries to seduce you, etc.” According to the plain meaning of the text the wording means that “even if the seducer is a brother, son of the same mother, you must not protect him against justice“ (Ibn Ezra).

A Midrashic approach based on Kidushin 80: even a brother who does not share the inheritance with you seeing he is only the son of the same mother and there is therefore no natural jealousy between them must not be protected, nor must one allow oneself to be seduced by him into idolatry. This is all the more so if the brother is one with whom one shares the parental heritage, when there is reason to suspect that he is being given bad advice for ulterior motives.

אשר לא ידעת אתה ואבותיך, “whom neither you nor your fathers have known of.” Rashi comments: “consider for a moment how despicable such advice is. He tells you to abandon a deity whom you and your fathers have served successfully, and suggests you try something totally unknown.”

It is also possible that the Torah here alludes to two separate aspects of faith. One is based on tradition, the other on intelligence. If someone believes because he has a tradition from his parents, this is a good form of faith though it is not perfect as he did not examine the premise this tradition is based on. Such a person lacks wisdom and is like someone who is blind and walks in the company of more blind people. They appear to get to their goal because each one holds on to the hand of his nearest companion. As long as this column of blind people have one seeing person at their head they will travel a well paved road seeing they all follow the seeing person. This is what happens to us if we rely completely on the faith handed down by our ancestors. Seeing that Moses was “seeing,” as long as we follow the tradition of Moses we cannot go wrong, seeing we heard the instructions from Moses directly and our fathers have told us about it if we were not around at the time. However, such a faith is not perfect. The problem with such a faith is that when the believer is challenged by people presenting a different viewpoint, a person who does not possess wisdom will be shaken in his belief, become unsure of himself and his forefathers as they did not equip him with the answers to the new challenges. A physically blind person no less than a spiritually blind person is by definition unsure of himself and a potential victim of the seducer mentioned in our verse. This is why it is not enough to accept the tradition handed down by our fathers but one must study it and thereby develop the insights necessary to counter arguments presented by theologians of different religions. Only in that way will one acquire a perfect אמונה, faith. This is what the sages in Avot 2,19 had in mind when they said: “try and study Torah in depth so that you will know how to answer the heretic.” This is why the Torah refers here to two aspects of אמונה, one which lacks ידיעה by yourself, the other a faith not even handed down by your fathers.

הקרובים אליך או הרחוקים ממך, “the ones close to you, or ones which are far removed from you” The Torah draws a comparison between the religions which are practiced by people physically near you to those practiced in distant countries. Just as you know that there is no substance to any religion of the pagans near you, there is no more substance to religions practiced by people further afield. מקצה הארץ עד קצה ארץ, “from one end of the globe to the other end.” An oblique reference to sun and moon each of which travels from one end of the earth to the other.

כי הרג תהרגנו, “you are to surely kill him.” Seeing that the words of Torah all express mercy of one kind or another, it is not possible to understand the words הרג תהרגנו as an instruction to take revenge on the individual who is to be executed. If that were the purpose of the execution the Torah would actually train us in developing a cruel streak in our character; this is clearly at odds with all the Torah wishes to teach us. The consideration underlying the Torah’s insistence is the mercy and loving concern the Torah extends to all those who know the guilty party. If he were allowed to get away with it many more people would follow in his footsteps with terrible results for them. To make this whole point clear, the Torah first wrote: “you shall not be compassionate with him;” afterwards the Torah explains its concern for the people by writing that the execution of such a seducer will cause the survivors to relate to G’d with the proper degree of reverence so as to preclude the need for any executions in the future.

יצאו אנשים בני בליעל, “lawless men have emerged from your midst;” the word בליעל means “not capable of rising spiritually to the domain of G’d.” Alternatively, the word is not connected to על but to עול, “yoke,” people who refuse to wear the yoke of any restrictive legislation, rejection of the authority of heaven. Our sages understand the emphasis on the word אנשים to mean that the legislation spelled out here does not apply if the instigators were women (compare Sanhedrin 111). The words יושבי עירם, “inhabitants of their city, are also understood restrictively, i.e. only if they misled people of their own city does this city have to be destroyed.

ודרשת וחקרת, “you will have to seek out and investigate thoroughly.” Witnesses who testified in capital crimes were subjected to questioning on seven cardinal points. 1) in which Shemittah cycle did the offense take place; 2) in which year; 3) in which month; 4) on which day of the month; 5) which day of the week; 6) what time of day or night; 7) where did the crime occur? These questions are known as חקירות. In addition the witnesses have to answer questions known as בדיקות, questions which do not pertain to the substance of the testimony and which do not invalidate the testimony if the witness is unsure of some of the answers. Examples of these בדיקות are: what kind of garments did the killer and the victim wear, i.e. white or black? What was the color of the earth on which the victim was found white or red? It happened once that a witness testified that he had observed the crime being perpetrated at a certain place under a fig tree. The judges asked the witness to describe the color of the figs, whether the figs had long or short stalks (compare Maimonides Hilchot Eidut 1,6). The mystical dimension of the requirement for the 7 חקירות is that they are perceived as representing the six extremities on the globe with the Holy Sanctuary at the centre of the globe, i.e. the opposite end of each extremity. [In baseball jargon, this could be described as “covering all the bases.” Ed.] The center is the point at which the truth emerges.

הכה תכה, “you shall surely smite.“ The Torah means that if one is unable for one reason or another to execute the inhabitants of this town by judicial process one must see to it that the people are killed even by other than accepted judicial procedures. This is why the verb הכה is repeated here (compare Baba Metzia 31).

ואת כל שללה תקבוץ, ”and you are to collect all its loot (all the possessions).” Our sages in Sanhedrin 111 say that the word שללה “its loot,” excludes “the loot belonging to heaven” [a reference to donations the citizens had made to the Temple Treasury. Ed.] These are to be subject to redemption just like הקדשות of ordinary people in other towns. They are not to be burned. Included in such שלל שמים is the second tithe which normally is taken to Jerusalem to be consumed there by the owners (or its proceeds). Neither are holy writings such as Torah scrolls subject to this provision of all the possessions of the people in that city having to be burned. They need to be buried (Sanhedrin ibid.)

כליל לה' אלו-היך, “completely for the Lord your G’d.” All of it henceforth belongs to G’d; no one has the right to use any of it for deriving any benefit from it whatsoever. On the same folio in Sanhedrin 111 Rabbi Shimon is quoted as saying in the name of G’d: “if you carry out the provisions written here concerning such an עיר הנדחת, a city which has to be obliterated, I will consider it as if you had offered a burnt-offering which the Torah describes as כליל לה'.” He based this on Exodus 32,29: מלאו ידכם היום לה' כי איש בבנו ובאחיו, “dedicate yourselves to the Lord this day, for each has opposed his son and his brother.”

למען ישוב ה' מחרון אפו, “so that the Lord will turn back from His burning wrath.” In this instance, though the Torah speaks only of Hashem, the attribute of Justice is meant. The mystical dimension of the עיר הנדחת is referred to by the woman from Tekoah (Samuel II 14,14) [who pleaded that David allow Avshalom to return from exile by describing a fictional event. Ed.]. She said (amongst other things) וחשב המלך מחשבות לבלתי ידח ממנו נדח, “(G’d will not take away the life) of one who makes plans so that no one may be kept banished.” The people of the עיר הנדחת had been cast out from the celestial domains. Burning all their former belongings was part of their expiation, just as we find that the congregation of Korach was not only killed by G’d but their belongings were burned (compare author’s comments on Numbers 16, 31-32). The site where this city used to be located will be a ruin forever never to be rebuilt even at the time when the Jewish people will experience resurrection of the dead.

When the Torah continues ונתן לך רחמים “that the Lord your G’d will grant you (the survivors) mercy, etc.,” this is similar to the promise by Yaakov (prayer) to his sons that on their second journey to Egypt the ruler (Joseph) should release Shimon and allow Binyamin to return home also. (Compare author’s comments on that verse in Genesis 43,14). The words 'כי תשמע בקול ה' are to be understood as “in order that you will hearken to the voice of Hashem Who is your G’d, and observe all of His commandments; then you will do what is right in His eyes,” i.e. in the eyes of Hashem the attribute known as the tetragrammaton.