Photo credit: LBC rabbinical student Tim Motz
We are approaching the last Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah. This week, this year, we read a double parashah. Nitzavim – Va-yeilech. Nitzavim, here we stand. We are ready, all of us together to enter into God’s covenant with the whole people. Or perhaps we’re not ready? The old year has rushed past too quickly, some of us are not spiritually prepared for the time of renewal that is almost upon us. But we’re instructed to stand together anyway. In a few days’ time, most of us will gather in our synagogues, our houses of assembly, whether virtually, or in our regular buildings, or in expanded spaces borrowed for the purpose of a much larger crowd standing together than will fit in our usual space.
Parashat Nitzavim describes how all of us stood together to accept not just the covenant, but its consequences, the curses and punishments God will visit on us if we don’t keep our side of the deal. We renew this deal every year; many of our communities will read part of Nitzavim again not just this coming Shabbat, but during the High Holy Days festivals as well. Part of the connection between Nitzavim and the season is that God promises us the possibility of return, teshuvah, no matter how badly we mess things up. If we return to God, God will return our losses.
That’s not the end of the story, though, but very much the beginning. When we read Nitzavim combined with Va-yeilech, meaning ‘he went out’, we are reminded forcefully that we can’t stand still forever. We can’t always be in the sanctified time of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We have to move out from standing together in unity, and start to take action as individuals. Moses goes out and does things, even in the last days of his life. He sets things in motion that he knows he will not complete, he invites the next generation to “be strong and determined” and to take things forward after he is gone. Even as he charges them to carry on, he knows that sometimes they will fall short, they will not live up to God’s stringent demands.
Nitzavim, here we stand. Poised on the edge of renewal and celebration, ready to leave behind the past as we are leaving behind the summer. Va-yeilech, we move on. We can’t ask time to stand still for us. This year, we have already passed the autumn equinox and are crossing into the darkness of the unknown. Over 120 years ago, the non-Jewish German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of this season:
God, it is time. The summer was immense…
Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time
This year, perhaps even more than other years, we grieve and regret the loss of those we once looked up to, who could have led us confidently into the future. Some are fortunate like Moses and have died naturally after a long and fulfilling life, and yet moving on without them is still almost unbearably hard. Others have had their lives cut short by illness and violence. This year our High Holy Day season will be almost overshadowed by an anniversary that fills us with dread, both at the murders of October 7th 2023 and the immense violence that has followed in the year since. Can we find it in ourselves to be strong and determined, to carry on without the people who should be here?
In Va-yeilech, Joshua accepts from Moses an unimaginably challenging task. He must lead the Israelites through wars, and protect them from their enemies and those who will try to annihilate them. At the same time, he must show them how to act with justice and uprightness, to avoid following the harmful and terrible practices the ancient Israelites saw around them. In Deuteronomy 31, towards the end of the double parashah, we read that the purpose of gathering the whole people together was to learn to revere God and observe and carry out all the laws of the Torah. Moses was famously unable to complete his life’s task of bringing the people into the Promised Land, but Joshua never finished his task either, and we too are the inheritors of some small part of this task.
As we are buffeted by world events as a community, we might wonder: how much can we be held responsible for the behaviour of others? In recent weeks I have learned from Rabbi Mark Solomon an interpretation of a strange verse towards the beginning of Nitzavim, which seems not to quite fit in with the rest of Moses’ speech: in Deuteronomy 29:28, we read “The hidden things are for the Eternal our God, and the revealed things are for us and our children for all time”. The words ‘for us and our children’ are marked in Torah scrolls with dots. These dots point us to a midrash that explains that in the original draft of the Covenant, God asked us to take responsibility for all sins committed by our fellow Israelites, even those committed in secret and unknown to us. As this is not a reasonable provision to sign up to, our ancestors bargained with God to change the terms so that we are only responsible for sins we know about: the revealed things, but not the hidden ones.
Our prayers during the Days of Awe are almost all collective, culminating in the communal confessions of Yom Kippur: we have sinned, we are guilty. We gather as a community, we stand, Nitzavim, to face judgement together. But we go forward, Va-yeilech, in the singular, each one of us to live our own values in the year that lies ahead. May it be a sweet year for all of us.
Rachel Berkson, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.