Paradoxes of Teshuvah: Presence and Eternity. Standing Still and Walking. Nitzavim/Vayelekh 25 Elul, 5784 -- 9/28/2024

Committing to the Covenant Today, Professor Everett Fox, Torah.Com

"the experience of hearing the repeated “todays” in Nitzavim in essence transforms the text’s later audiences into Moses’s addressees. I am suggesting that it is difficult to be present at the reciting of these words without feeling somehow addressed."^[9]

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"In a small way, then, these kinds of scenes are reenacted whenever the Torah is read aloud. “Today” in Nitzavim challenges all hearers of the text to make the moment their own. The book of Deuteronomy, the great example of the Teaching (Torah) made new, thus begins the Jewish process, as old as the Bible itself, of rehearing and rethinking the tradition."

^{https://www.thetorah.com/article/committing-to-the-covenant-today}

Now. We. Here.

^9.A similar effect, in a more modern setting, might be heard in the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln’s repetition of the word “here” echoes for later audiences well beyond the confines of the battlefield.

Professor Everett Fox

The Gettysburg Address

by Abraham Lincoln

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
November 19, 1863

Bliss Copy

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

“Breathing in, I see all my ancestors in me: my mineral ancestors, plant ancestors, mammal ancestors, and human ancestors. My ancestors are always present, alive in every cell of my body, and I play a part in their immortality.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Living: mindful techniques for peaceful living from one of the world’s most revered spiritual leaders

The "God" Element

There is one other element which is significant in this understanding of hayom — God. The Torah doesn’t just say we are standing still today. It says we are standing still before God. It is God who grants us this escape from the human framework of horizontal time, this peek into the divine vertical vision of eternity, of a present merged with its past and future. The Lord’s name as it is written but not pronounced (it is too sacred and secret to be pronounced) actually contains within it the word for “being” in the past, the present and the future. That is God’s essence. Unlike each of us, He was, He is, and He [sic] will be. What we are doing when we stand still for that moment of vertical eternal time is existing in the divine realm.As we say at the end of Mussaf on Rosh Hashanah, Hayom Te’amtzeinu, “Today may You strengthen us!” Hayom Tevarkhenu, “Today may You bless us!” Today may You strengthen and bless us with a full experience of hayom.

“Hayom” — Today — Feeling Vertical Time (Parashat Nitzavim And Rosh Hashanah)

Dr. Rachel Anisfeld

https://rachelanisfeld.com/2009/09/09/short-essay-hayom-today-feeling-vertical-time-parashat-nitzavim-and-rosh-hashanah/

Standing

From a letter to his sister-in-law, p.92 of Franz Rosenzweig -- His Life and Thought by Nahum Glatzer

Each of us can only seize by the scruff whoever happens to be closest to us in the mire. This is the “neighbor” the Bible speaks of. And the miraculous thing is that, although each of us stands in the mire of our self, we can each pull out our neighbor, or at least keep him from drowning. None of us has solid ground under our feet; each of us is only held up by the neighborly hands grasping us by the scruff, with the result that we are each held up by the next one, and often, indeed most of the time…hold each other up mutually. All this mutual upholding (a physical impossibility) becomes possible only because the great hand from above supports all these holding human hands by their wrists. It is this, and not some nonexistent “solid ground under one’s feet” that enables all the human hands to hold and to help. There is no such thing as standing, there is only being held up.

Moshe understood what sustains us during these leave-takings and transitions: a sense of some continual eternal holekh presence. ה’ אלוקיך הוא ההולך עמך לא ירפך ולא יעזבך, “For the Lord your God Himself walks with you; He will not fail your or forsake you” (31:6). I may leave you, says Moshe, I may walk away, walk on to the next world, but God continues to walk with you, always. You can count on that, hold on to that steadiness in your times of grief and in your times of internal change and turmoil, in your letting go and in your being left. There is always One who walks with you. Amidst the storm and swirl of constant change, inside and out, there is One that always walks with you through the storm, holding you in steadiness.

As we say in Psalm 27 regularly this season, “for my father and my mother may forsake me, but the Lord will gather me in.”

Moshe knows that people have trouble feeling this Presence, that we are not always aware of this steady Walker, and so he himself walks, for one last time, through the camp, to deliver this message to each and every tribe personally, to be, for the last time, God’s legs and mouth on earth, a walking emissary of the ultimate Walker, reminding people of God’s Presence through his own last bit of presence on earth.

We carry the eternal Walker inside us, and as we walk through the camp, through life, we deliver this message of ultimate steadiness, again and again, in each personal encounter we are granted, even as we, too, are always slowly leaving.

Dr. Rachel Anisfeld

https://rachelanisfeld.com/2022/09/29/wow-word-of-the-week-%d7%95%d7%99%d7%9c%d7%9a-he-went-parashat-vayelech/

Resources:

Professor Everett Fox in Torah.com https://www.thetorah.com/article/committing-to-the-covenant-today

Dr. Rachel Anisfeld https://rachelanisfeld.com/2009/09/09/short-essay-hayom-today-feeling-vertical-time-parashat-nitzavim-and-rosh-hashanah/