R. David Kasher on Parashat VeZot HaBerakhah: A Shared Inheritance

Ta Shma

The first verse in the Torah I ever learned by heart comes from its final parashah. When my brother and I would go visit our father in New York for the summer, he would try to figure out things for us to do during the day, and one year—I must have been about ten or eleven—he sent us to this Chabad day camp for a week. We were not observant during the rest of the year at my mom’s house, so my father probably thought it would be good training for us, maybe fill in some gaps. The thing I remember most vividly from that week is that every morning, all the campers would stand outside on the grass in a big formation and chant together:

Torah! Tzivah! Lanu! Moshe! Morashah! Kehilas! Ya’akov!