Deuteronomy 29:9–31:30
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.
Continue reading.
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