The Torah reading of Nitzavim, always read the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, in many ways is wide and expansive, like the opening end of the Shofar.
The parasha (week’s Torah portion) begins:
You stand this day, all of you, before the Eternal your God – you tribal heads, you elders, and you officials, all the men of Israel, you children, you wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper to water drawer – to enter into the covenant of the Eternal your God, which the Eternal your God is concluding with you this day, with its sanctions; in order to establish you this day as God’s people and in order to be your God, as promised you and as sworn to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before the Eternal our God and with those who are not with us here this day. – (Deuteronomy 29:9-14)
These words of Moses are said on the last day of his life, echoing Yom Kippur when we confront our own mortality by not eating, as well as dressing in white, like the burial shrouds in which we will eventually be wrapped. Moses models for us to consider what would we say on the last day of our life, even as Yom Kippur heightens the awareness of the finitude of our lives, asking us to endeavor to become the best version of ourselves. As Rabbi Max Artz comments, we “lessen the distance between what we are and what we ought to be.”
The breadth of that work, Moses reminds us, concerns all of us, no matter our status in society – from the tribal heads to water drawers – and that its message is for all generations. Moses bookends the expansive nature of that message when he concludes his speech by calling upon “heaven and earth to bear witness” (Deuteronomy 30:19) to his final instructions to the Jewish people.
Throughout the parasha, the leitwort (motto) “hayom,” today, acts as an anchor. It carries many meanings, including today as in that day, the actual particular day, that moment, when Moses spoke to those assembled before him. When Moses says “and with whoever is not here with us today” he means now, at this moment, as you read these words. Finally, according to the Zohar (32:2), “today” refers to Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Judgment.
The expansive structure of the message is also felt in the eternal timeless nature of the words of Moses – the present, as always, instantaneously becomes the past, while simultaneously becoming a directive for the future: future generations, us. Theologian Richard Sugarman, in exploring the thinking of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, writes that time “is never completely ‘over and done with.’ The breezy idiom of ‘moving on’ is limited in advance by a covenantal sense of time in which the past time of others is taken up within my own.” As James Baldwin notes, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”
REMEMBERING GENERATIONS of the past, and anticipating generations of the future is, as far as we know, a uniquely human quality. In Judaism, we emphasize both – the past through saying Kaddish (the Mourner’s Prayer) and Yizkor (the Memorial Prayer), along with naming our children from relatives of previous generations, while the future we find in the words of Moses in this week’s parasha.
Related to our looking to the future, Letty Cottin Pogrebin points out, “The great Talmudist Adin Steinsaltz once said that a Jew is not someone whose grandparents are Jewish but someone who wants his or her grandchildren to be Jewish.” When we engage in these activities of the past and future we are not only being Jewish, but also more human.
There is another interesting timeless element to Rosh Hashanah itself. The three-letter root of shana is shin-nun-heh which means “to repeat.” What is that connection to the word “year”? A year is the marking of the earth having repeated another cycle around the sun. But there is something even more delicious here. Think of the v’ahavta paragraph after the Shema and the verse v’shinantam l’vanecha which means “and you will teach them to your children.” In Hebrew, the root of the word “teach” is shin-nun-nun, also containing the concept of repetition.
Why? Because pedagogically we know repeating is one of the most effective ways to learn. This is why we read the Torah throughout the year and then start all over the following year. Not only do we hear its words again, but we also bring new insights into the text from who we are a year later: the new us.
The prayer book we use on the High Holy Days is called a Mahzor, which means “cycle” and is related to the Hebrew words to “return” and to “repeat.” Our annual cycle around the sun should not be a boring repetition of what we have done previously. That is the exact point of Rosh Hashanah – it is not only about improving who we are, but also noting the ways we have changed since last year as we return to this spot in the cosmos. May this season of introspection at the beginning of the new year enable us to recognize the opportunities the past year gave us, as we enter the future of the next year. ■
The writer is rabbi emeritus of the Israel Congregation, Manchester Center, Vermont, and a faculty member of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and Bennington College.