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.
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