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Parsha by Gura

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Parasha Noach

It would be nice if our Jewish identities would just resolve itself. If we could just un-self-consciously know who and what we as Jews collectively and individually are about. Nitzavim-Vayelekh, a double parasha split into two in leap years, is read usually before Rosh Hashanah or on the Shabbat of the Yamin Noraim.

During this time, our tradition instructs us to gather ourselves together to witness the annual Judgment of the Universe. We stand as supplicants before the Judge and Creator of all. And now, we come in our text, in this parasha, to review yet another covenant between G-d and Am Israel. This review suggests why working out some of these identity issues seem so problematic for us "post-traditional" Jews, and perhaps why even as resolute moderns, traditionalism in some form beckons us.

Our text would be easier if it more clearly and succinctly stated the content of covenant G-d is establishing, before entering the land of Israel. One would have thought that, when the Torah was revealed at Mt. Sinai, the deed, as it were, was done. The covenant was established, the deal closed, the relationship between G-d and Am Israel determined. But that happened chapters and chapters previous to this particular parasha. Why, in these verses from the very end of the Torah, on the day Moses is to die, the day Moses transfers leadership to Joshua, do we read:

You are standing today, all of you, before the L-rd, your G-d: your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your officers-all the men of Israel; your small children, your women, and your sojourner who is in the midst of your camp, from the hewer of your wood to the drawer of your water, for you to pass into a covenant of the L-rd, your G-d, and into His oath that the L-rd, your G-d, cuts with you today, in order to establish you today as a people to Him, and that He be a G-d to you, as He spoke to you and as He swore to your forefather, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. Not with you alone do I forge this covenant and this oath, but with whomever is here, standing with us today before the L-rd, our G-d, and with whomever is not here with us today. (Deuteronomy 29: 9-14)

First of all, this is tough to read. It is not clear precisely who is standing there, ready to cut again the brit. Everyone it seems: leaders, followers, women, children, manual laborers, even perhaps passers-by (the sojourner, although the word "ger" has come to mean convert, and is understood in that manner by traditionalists). Nor is it very clearly exactly what this covenant is. These odd grammatical constructions not only bother us, but also many of the traditional commentators.

At Mt. Sinai, G-d gave us the mitzvot. In these verses, Don Isaac Abravanel, the 15th century Spanish exegete, reads between the lines with a rabbinic text, Midrash Tanhuma. G-d, he claims, is finally determining the nature of the three fold relationship between the Jewish people, the Land of Israel and Himself. In doing so, He indentures eternally the Jewish people on the Land (see Leibowitz, Studies in Devarim, Jerusalem: 1980). Abravanel argues that, unlike other contractual arrangements, here the parents can eternally obligate the children. His language is particularly choice, if a bit offensive to our modern, autonomous ears: "This covenant, therefore, implied that this nation should be perpetual slaves to the Almighty and never be free of His yoke. This then is the meaning of the Sages' dictum that every Jew is a priori bound by the Sinaitic revelation, for it was then that they were initiated into the service of G-d and all their issue shared that same obligation and subjection from which it could never be freed."

How strange and distant this sounds to our modern ears. Aren't we taught at virtually every turn that what truly, deeply matters is how we construct our own fate, how we need to "just do it", "be all you can", "accept no limits"? Isn't to be a slave, to be indentured, the ultimate shame? Yet Abravanel would have us take pride in the bearing of that yoke of servitude. And the traditionalist question is: can we be free of that yoke?

Today we strive to celebrate our unrestrained individuality. But don't we find often find ourselves dropped back into some almost inescapable web of familial and historical relations? And, when we figure out who we really are, do we want to rend that web?

This past year, Brandeis University Press published Barbara Kessel's "Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots". She explains how she interviewed over 160 people who at some point discovered their Jewish descent. In opening, Kessel reminds us of Madelaine Albright's belated and public discovery of her grandparent's martyrdom during the Shoah, and Albright protestations of ignorance of her parent's Jewish roots.

Not all of the 160 who contacted Kessel where willing to be public: Over a third of her correspondents requested anonymity.

But the stories she does relate are moving. Each was driven in some inexplicable way to discover some Jewish truth about oneself, from mere self-acceptance, to actively claiming a place inside of Jewish life. Each struggled with some different sense of being, and different sense of G-d.

How can we be tied to some deal made along ago in a context we can barely understand? Logically, as moderns, we would out of hand reject that those ancient rites bind us. But many, perhaps most, modern Jews, although distant and uncomfortable with our tradition, are unable to unequivocally walk away. And, when we try to walk away, sometimes we find that we can't or won't walk away. Those connections and relationships bind us, even when we try unbind ourselves.

Can an individual Jew "escape" that identity? Probably, given time, given some effort to blend away, the distinctiveness that marks us as Jew might fade. I suspect that most American Jews have close relatives who aren't Jewish, won't be Jewish, can't be Jewish-and they are nonetheless still our nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, cousins, sisters and brothers. And beneath the distant, we still sense some residual identity, some aching pintele yid. Or, maybe, even if they pull themselves away, we carry with us the memory of them as Jews, or would be Jews.

Our relationship with G-d, like so many of our other relationship, require that we balance seemingly contradictory requirements. G-d would have us enter into His covenant freely: to use our contemporary language, we all are on some level "Jews by Choice". But, and this is the uncomfortable message of this passage of the parasha, we are also, in some manner, compelled.

Perhaps our tradition would have the compulsion be mutual. If, as Abravanel has it, we are slaves of G-d, G-d cannot escape, no matter how hidden in this century of enormous suffering, some obligation to us, even if that obligation is only a passing nod of love and forgiveness. We are taught later in this parasha that, after exile and suffering, "the L-rd, your G-d, will bring you to the land which your forefathers possessed, and you shall posses it; He will do good to you, and make you more abundant than your forefathers. The L-rd, your G-d, will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, to love the L-rd, your G-d, with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you might liveThe L-rd will make you excel in all the doing of your hands, in the fruit of your womb, and in the fruit of your animals, and in the fruit of your soil, to good-measure, indeed, the L-rd will return to delighting in you for good, as He delighted in your forefathers." (Deuteronomy 30: 5-9).

The covenant is both ways, even if we forget. Those who are traditionalist will claim that even if we forget, the Holy One, Blessed be He, will certainly remember.

A classic hasidic tale relates, if we give it some little twists, some of the flavor of that promise of redemption embedded in our lines from the Torah quoted above.

On Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev rose to blow the Shofar. He ascended to the Bimah, and led the congregation in prayer before the blowing, and then waited until the congregation stood silently and expectantly. All waited without a sound for the blowing of the Shofar to commence.

Then, to their consternation, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak stopped, removed the Shofar from his lips, and put it down. He seemed to be pausing, waiting for something to happen.

The people grew restless. Had the great Rabbi forgotten what to do? Finally, he smiled, and began to offer an explanation.

"My friends," he said, "in the rear of the shul today sits a Jew who spent his early years among the gentiles. He had been kidnapped as a child, brought up by a gentile family, and placed into the king's army. When he was 40 years old, he was finally freed and allowed to return to his people.

"This man has not been inside a shul since he was a youngster, until he joined us today. He could not possibly remember the prayers that he heard so long ago. And yet, he was overcome with emotion at his return to the House of G-d. He yearned to join the expression of devotion to the Holy One, Blessed be He. And so, I saw him speaking the only remnants of Hebrew that he recalled from his youth, the letters of the Aleph Beis. But he said these with such feeling that they have risen straight to the heavens. I therefore paused before blowing the Shofar so that his letters would have time to reach Hashem Yitborach ,Who will Himself form them into the words of our prayers. Now we can begin the blowing of the Shofar." (R. Mordechai Katz, From The Teachings of Our Sages, Brooklyn: 1978).

Maybe this is one of the ways that then yet-unborn generations of Jews are tied to, and can be tied to, the undying covenant between the Holy One and the people Israel. For the kidnapped Jewish youngster of yesterday, substitute the distant but still identified Jew of today. Perhaps even the not-so identified Jew. For all our prayers, let us hope that G-d will put them in the right order.

Shabbat Shalom.

Dennis