Torah from JTS Nitzavim-Vayeilekh 5770

Between The Lines
Weekly Midrash Learning with Rabbi Andy Shugerman
‏(במדבר כז יח)‏ ויאמר ה'‏ אל מ ש ה ק ח ל ך א ת י ה ו ש ע ב ן נ ו ן ק ח ל ך ג ב ר ת ן כ מ ו ת ך.‏ ק ח ל ך א י נ ו
א ל א ב ל ק י ח ה ל פ י ש א י ן ח ב ר נ ק נ ה א ל א ב ק ש י ק ש י ן מ כ א ן א מ ר ו י ק נ ה א ד ם ח ב ר ל ע צ מ ו ש י ה א
ק ו ר א ע מ ו ו ש ו נ ה ע מ ו א ו כ ל ע מ ו ו ש ו ת ה ע מ ו ו ג ו ל ה ל ו ס ת ר י ו ו כ ן ה ו א א ו מ ר ‏(ק ה ל ת ד ט)‏ ט ו ב י ם
השנים מן האחד ‏(שם קהלת ד יב)‏ והחוט המשולש לא במהרה ינתק
כ יון שמת משה היה יהושע בוכה ומצעק ומתאבל עליו במרד ו ה י ה א ו מ ר א ב י א ב י ר ב י ר ב י א ב י
ש ג ד ל נ י ר ב י ש ל מ ד נ י ת ו ר ה ו ה י ה מ ת א ב ל ע ל י ו י מ י ם ר ב י ם ע ד ש א מ ר ל ו ה ק ד ו ש ב ר ו ך ה ו א
ל י ה ו ש ע י ה ו ש ע ע ד כ מ ה א ת ה מ ת א ב ל ו ה ו ל ך ו כ י ל ך ב ל ב ד מ ת מ ש ה ו ה ל א ל א מ ת א ל א ל י
ש מ י ו ם ש מ ת א ב ל ג ד ו ל ה ו א ל פ נ י ש נ א מ ר ‏(י ש ע י ה כ ב י ב)‏ ו י ק ר א ה'‏ א ל ה י ם ב י ו ם ה ה ו א ל ב כ י
ו למספד וגו'‏ אלא מובט ח ל ו ש ב ן ה ע ו ל ם ה ב א ה ו א ש נ א מ ר ‏(ד ב ר י ם ל א ט ז)‏ ו י א מ ר ה'‏ א ל מ ש ה
הנך שכב עם אבותיך וקם
And the Lord said to Moses: Take for yourself Joshua the son of Nun . . . (Num. 27:18):
Take for yourself—a man as heroic as yourself. One can do this only by taking
possession, for one cannot acquire a friend except by great effort, as the Sages have said:
One should acquire a friend for himself, to study Torah with him, and to reveal his secrets
to him, as it is said, Two are better than one . . . (Eccles. 4:9), and . . . a threefold cord is
not quickly broken (Eccles. 4:12).
Upon the death of Moses, Joshua wept, wailed, and mourned bitterly, saying, “My father,
my father, my master, my master, my father who has raised me, my master who has
taught me Torah!” He kept mourning over him for many days, until the Blessed Holy One
said to him, “Joshua, how long will you continue mourning? Does his death affect you
alone? Does not his death truly affect Me? For from the day he died there has been great
mourning before Me, as it is said, And in that day did the Lord, the God of Hosts, call to
weeping, and to lamentation, etc. (Isa. 22:12); but he is assured of the world to come, as it
is said, And the Lord said to Moses: Behold, you are about to sleep with your ancestors
and . . . will arise . . . (Deut. 31:16).”
Almost one year has passed since my late friend and Rabbinical School classmate Rafi
Lehmann (z”l) died. The bitterness I felt that day for our collective loss remains, as his
cohort has since been ordained and we have begun our careers in the rabbinate without
him.
In preparing for Rafi’s first yahrzeit on the day after Yom Kippur, I take solace in lessons
from the midrash above. The Sages imagine Joshua learning from Moses as “our Teacher”
and with him as “a friend”; the younger leader’s cries to his “master” and “father”
demonstrate the powerful and multifaceted relationship between the two men. Joshua’s
bereavement eventually evokes an emotional response from God, whose rhetorical
questions express both intense sadness and hope. While we can hardly fathom how the
death of any individual affects God, this midrash assures us that our deceased heroes
have departed from us only in a physical sense. Those who acquired Rafi as a friend
expended great effort to match his example of love for Torah, dedication to community, and
pious joy for life.
Throughout the coming High Holy Days and beyond, let those of blessed memory inspire
all of us to recommit ourselves to continued learning and acts of righteousness in their
honor. May the merit of our efforts further establish their sacred legacy.
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Torah from JTS
Parashat Nitzavim-Vayeilekh
Deuteronomy 29:9–31:30
September 4, 2010
25 Elul 5770
Parashah Commentary
This week’s commentary was written by Rabbi Abigail Treu, rabbinic
fellow and director of Donor Relations and Planned Giving, JTS.
My kids have a hard time taking turns speaking. While their mother tries to instill
some manners, they have taken to shouting, “Pause!” in order to silence one
another, a phrase they’ve adapted from their use of the TV remote control to
temporarily stop the scene unfolding on screen.
An inviting metaphor: hitting pause on the forward motion of our lives, attending
to what needs to be said or done, and then pressing the play button to continue
the action. Of course, life doesn’t work that way. The High Holiday season
invites us to try it, though: before the new year unfolds we pause, take time off
from work to be with our fellow Jews, and stand still for a few days.
Stand still, nitzavim, before we move forward, vayeilekh: the double parashah
we read just before Rosh Hashanah invites us to recognize what we need to do.
Stuck in the narrative while Moses talks—reviewing the history of forty years
gone by and preparing for the future about to unfold—we hardly notice what the
names of the parashah, Nitzavim-Vayeilekh, suggest.
The metaphors of “pause” and “play” or of “stopping” and “starting,” however,
do not do full justice to the rabbinic model. Yes, we are to stand still, to spend
time reviewing and preparing before moving into a new year. But more than
that, we must become a little disoriented, a little shaken up, in order to really be
able to move forward in a meaningful way. If we simply hit pause, we haven’t
done what our tradition is asking us to do this month. We need to go deeper,
and for that we need to be taken out of the regular, ordered rhythm of life and
into someplace at once familiar and disquieting.
After reading straight through nearly four-fifths of the humash, we are almost at
the end. The obvious way of concluding would be to hit pause, and then press
play and read straight to the end. But that’s not what we do. For the next month,
we are going to skip around. Here at Nitzavim-Vayeilekh, we are nearing the
end of Moses’s last speech; but in a few days we will jump to the middle of
Genesis for Rosh Hashanah. Not the beginning of Genesis, mind you, as the
idea of a “new year” might suggest (in fact, for the birthday of the world it might
make the most sense to read the Creation story). No: we read from the middle

of that first book of our national story. We don’t get too ensconced, however: for
Yom Kippur, we land in Leviticus. A few days later, for Sukkot, we read from
Numbers, until Shabbat, at which point we are plunged into a mini-revelation scene
from Exodus. Finally, on Simhat Torah, we pick up where we left off, back towards
the end, finishing out Deuteronomy and then in one fell swoop beginning again “in
the beginning.” Even the haftarot are jarring: after nine weeks straight of Isaiah, we
will now be confronted with eleven different prophets in one month, eleven different
voices and visions and understandings of what God wants from us. Until we finally
land back with Joshua, with a narrative picking up where it left off, just as life will
take its next steps as we settle again, “post-haggim,” into the rhythm of the normal.
We are hitting pause and then being disoriented, through both the calendar and the
text. We are in shul on Thursdays and Fridays, celebrating with friends and family
on weeknights. In fact, this is part of why the Yamim Nora’im are so synagoguecentric:
the place where so many Jews are so uncomfortable is precisely the place
we are invited to come and take stock of our lives once a year. (For those of us
who smugly feel at home at shul, we are handed a liturgy so different from the
usual one that we, too, are stopped in our tracks.) And while we’re in shul, the very
narratives that usually lend order and structure to our lives are presented out of
order, disorienting us so that we are forced to step back and do the kind of deeper
reflection that tradition calls on us to undertake.
There is, however, one constant: the maftir readings. Over the course of the
month, we slowly read Numbers 29 from start to finish, progressing in a
chronologically sound manner through the list of festivals that we celebrate as we
read. It is the one place tying together the chaos of the calendar and the narrative.
The cycle of time, which we usually mark with the sidra, is for the month of Tishrei
marked by the maftir. The coda reading, usually the afterthought, grounds us, and
the juxtaposition of stories read out of order next to a maftir progressing on pace
alerts us to the reality that the march of time is relentless, and we’d better stop and
consider how we are living before it goes by too fast.
Sometimes we need to stand still, nitzavim, and pause the action of our lives. And
sometimes, too, we need to see things out of order, to read Genesis in the middle
of Deuteronomy, Leviticus in the middle of Genesis, Numbers in the autumn. We
need the narrative to jolt us into seeing things differently. After a year of slogging
through the parashah, we have grown complacent to the truths it has revealed;
reading it out of order makes it new again, just in time for us to go, vayeilekh, and
face the newness available to us in the year ahead.
This week, we will leave off mid-sentence. We stand, paused in the desert as the
final verse of Vayeilekh brings us to the edge of motion: “Then Moses recited the
words of this poem to the very end, in the hearing of the whole congregation of
Israel.” What poem? What did he say? We have to wait a month to hear it. By then,
the calendar will have moved us into a new year. We will have had Rosh
Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Sukkot to review the journey we have taken thus
far and to articulate our hopes and dreams for the year ahead. We stand still,
narratively on pause but also traveling great distances, for in the intervening weeks
of living with schedules and parshiyot upended, we hope to achieve an inner
stillness that will steel us for a new year of purpose and forward direction.
A Taste of Torah
A Commentary by Rabbi Matthew Berkowitz, director of Israel
Programs, JTS
Deuteronomy 30:1–3 When all these things befall you . . . and you take
them amidst the various nations to which the Lord your God has banished
you, and you return to the Lord your God, and you and your children heed
His command with all your heart and soul, just as I enjoin you this day, the
Lord your God will restore your fortunes and take you back in love. God will
return and collect you from among all the peoples that God has scattered
you.
B’khor Shor, “God will return and collect you from among all the peoples,”
God will return us from the Babylonian exile and will collect us from the
great and long exile in which we are scattered today. Our rabbis explain
from this verse that God suffers in the trials of Israel as it is written, “in all of
their sorrows, He is pained” (Isaiah 63:9). And when they return, it is as if
God returns since it is written, “God will return” (Deut 30:3) and not “God will
cause them to return.”
Parashat Nitzavim continues Deuteronomy’s central message of loyalty to
the covenant. The Israelites are commanded to observe the many laws that
God has given to them. Promises of blessing were described extensively in
last week’s parashah, as was the threat of punishment, in the form of
curses. The theology of quid pro quo hangs in the balance as the Israelites
are about to enter into the Promised Land. Still, with all the punishment that
is threatened for wayward behavior, Parashat Nitzavim delivers a powerful
message of hope and deliverance. When all of the blessings and curses
have come to pass and Israel finds itself scattered all over the world, hope
of return should not be abandoned. How can we translate and internalize
our parashah’s promise?
Commenting on Deuteronomy 30:3, the B’khor Shor explains the power of
this verse. First, given the repetition of the word return, he explains that the
first instance refers to a return from Babylonian exile, while the second
alludes to a return from what he calls the “great and long exile.” He also
explains that God and Israel are bound to one another. Quoting from a
rabbinic midrash (Tractate Megillah 29a), he teaches that God literally
suffers with Israel and, in the end, will return with Israel.
Destiny is shared. As we approach Rosh Hashanah and focus on the
theme of repentance, we can never lose sight that teshuvah is mutual. Far
from being a one-way street, the process involves both human beings and
God reaching out to each other. We have the capacity to bring God into our
midst. Carpe diem. Truly, let us seize this season of repentance!
The publication and distribution of A Taste of Torah are made possible by a generous grant
from Sam and Marilee Susi.
The publication and distribution of the JTS Commentary are made possible by a generous grant
from Rita Dee and Harold (z”l) Hassenfeld.