Moshe begins chapter 14 with the statement: “Banim Atem l'Hashem Elohehem – You are children of .A. your God” (Devarim 14:1) to appreciate the nature of the commandments that have been given to us and to highlight a relationship that must be permanently created: that of the Father to the children, and that of the children to the brothers. The relationship that we saw from Bereshit until now as very conflictive.
The following commandments help us internalize and demonstrate this new state, particularly that of being brothers. Moshe has imposed another obligation on us: the responsibility to care for each other. The rest of the parsha deals with different ways in which this sense of family, of community, is manifested through daily ritual and everyday life. These include (but are not limited to) the following commandments: Maaser Ani (the tithe of the poor): "And the Levite will come, who has no share or inheritance with you, and the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow who is in your populations, and they will eat and be satisfied; so that .A. May your God bless you in every work that your hands do” (Devarim 14:29). Tzedaká (charity): «When there is a needy person among you, one of your brothers in one of your cities, in the land that .A. your God gives you, you will not harden your heart, nor close your hand against your poor brother, but you will open your hand to him liberally, and in fact you will lend him what he needs” (Devarim 15:7-8). (The obligation to remit loans in the shemitah year, plus the obligation to lend funds to the needy before the beginning of that year of rest of the land: "Beware of having an evil thought in your heart, saying: The seventh year is near, that of remission, and look with evil on your needy brother so as not to give him; because he may cry out against you to .A., and it will be counted as sin to you…” (Devarim 15: 9). in the next chapter it is done with this aspect in mind: “And you will rejoice before .A your God, you, your son, your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, the Levite who dwells in your cities, and the foreigner, the orphan and the widow who are among you, in the place that your God has chosen to place his name there (Devarim 16:11, see also verse 14).
Moshe reminds us of the importance of completely uprooting all traces of idolatry and establishing a new central place of worship where all people can gather. The laws discuss the details of what tithes must be brought to this place and how even the act of eating is affected. The Torah reveals the latent fear that underlies if despite our willingness to eliminate idolatry from the land, the Jewish people will later express a desire to "adopt" pagan styles of worship. "When to. your God has destroyed before you the nations where you are going to possess them, and you inherit them, and live in his land, take care that you do not stumble as you follow them, after they are destroyed before you; Do not ask about their gods, saying: As those nations served their gods, so will I also serve them. You shall not do so to your God; because every abominable thing that .A. hates, they made their gods; for even their sons and their daughters they burned their gods in the fire” (12:29-13:1).
Ramban explains the fears as follows: Moshe was not concerned that, having invested so much energy in eradicating Canaanite cults, the Jewish people would want to express a desire to perform the same rites. Instead, the fear was much more insidious: the Jewish people would justify and associate the destruction of the Canaanites because of the object of their worship (the gods they worshiped were not worthy), yet they would not realize that what was so abhorrent to .A. It was the method of their worship. The Torah, therefore, begs us not to make this mistake (12:31). In other words, in addition to having the wrong approach to worship (worshipping nothingness as deities), the methods they used (including, as the verse explicitly says, filicide) were hateful to God. To prove this point, this warning is immediately followed by the command not to add to or diminish God's commandments. The Sforno explains that we should not bring our own methods of worship, whether the result of our own creative thinking or the adoption of the behavior of other nations, to the worship of God, since we do not know what is and is not abhorrent to others. God's eyes.
And it also serves as a reminder in our time, that it is as serious to add non-ordained precepts as to suppress the prescribed ones. It is as if we dialed a telephone number, adding or subtracting a number. If we did this we would never be able to communicate.