#Parshat Vayelech

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Don't Stop Moving!! - Parshat Nitzavim & Vayelech

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Mayim Bialik (Big Bang Theory) Talks about Parshat Vayelech - this week's Torah portion

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Register Now for Today's Rebbe Nachman on the Parsha Class

Register Now for Today’s Rebbe Nachman on the Parsha Class

Tuesdays at 12:30 PM ET, 11:30 AM CT, 10:30 AM MT, 9:30 AM PT NEW!!! One-time click here for Free Registration to Attend all Tuesday Radiant Torah Parsha Classes https://tinyurl.com/9pjym2dm After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. You must register once to attend any/all upcoming Radiant Torah Parsha classes on Tuesdays. This…

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Creating Bridges

On parshat  Nitzavim-Vayelech

Mediation, bridges and connections are an important part of life. When we do not have them, we often find oppression, aggression or simply loneliness. Human beings are created to relate to each other and to relate with G-d, but very often the links are hidden, concealed under blankets of ego, self interest and materialism.

The double Torah reading this week expresses the theme of bridges on several levels.

At the beginning of the first reading there is a famous statement about the variety of the Jewish people and the fact that despite this variety, all are one. The Torah lists leaders, heads of tribes, elders, men, women, children, proselytes, hewers of wood and water carriers. All are standing together, unified, says Moses. Some kind of remarkable bonding and linkage is in evidence, dissolving the barrier between the lofty national leaders and the apparently unassuming water carriers.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe points out that towards the end of the double Parshah there is another example of the same concept of bridging and connection.

The Torah describes (Deuteronomy 31:22-26) how Moses finished writing the complete Torah, the original parchment scroll of which we have an exact copy in every Synagogue today. He then gave it to the Levites to put in the Sanctuary, in the Holy of Holies, together with the Golden Ark containing the Tablets of the Law which came from Sinai.

The Rebbe points out that this act provides an important bridge.

The sapphire Tablets of the Law which Moses got from Mount Sinai express an ethereal level of holiness and of Divine teaching. The words of the Ten Commandments were engraved on the Tablets, signifying a special level of unity. The sacred sapphire and the Divine wording were one. The Tablets were kept in the Golden Ark in the Holy of Holies, an awesomely holy place which could only be entered on special occasions, such as Yom Kippur.

By contrast, the Torah Scroll is an object which, although very holy, enters the world of human beings. It is housed in the synagogue and regularly read from in public. The sacred words are not engraved, they are carefully and beautifully written on the parchment in ink. The ink letters are separate from the parchment because they carry the Torah teachings into a world of apparent separation.

This means that the Torah Scroll which Moses wrote and which was placed together with the Golden Ark in the Holy of Holies is a bridge for the exalted holiness of the Tablets from Sinai to enter this daily world. Based freely on the Lubavitcher Rebbe's Likkutei Sichot vol. 2, pp. 407-8.

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What is the significance of every single letter of the Torah?

What is the significance of every single letter of the Torah?

The UK Chief Rabbi brings the explanation of the Lubavitcher Rebbe for the Mitzva of writing just one letter of a Sefer Torah.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe gave a beautiful explanation. In Parshat Vayelech, which read this Shabbat, the Torah presents us with the last of the Mitzvot. Mitzvah number 613 states “and now, write for yourselves this song, which is the Torah, and teach it to the children of…

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Rosner’s Torah Talk: Parshat Nitzavim-Vayelech with Rabbi Tal Sessler

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One of the most poignant and enigmatic sections in the Torah appears in this week's parsha: This commandment that I am...

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Mayim Bialik (Big Bang Theory) Talks about Parshat Vayelech - this week'...

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A Little Secret About Teshuvah: Parshat Nitzavim-Vayelech

Can we even believe in the possibility of teshuvah?  Can we imagine that our hurt, our alienation, our loneliness and brokenness can be repaired? Can we or the people we love make their way back?

In the first part of our double Torah portion, the Jews are told that if they cut themselves off from God, from the source of life, their own lives will be undone. They land will be ruined and produce nothing and the Israelites will be exiled and scattered among the nations.  Even from this place of spiritual abandonment and suffering, however, teshuvah (return) is possible.

וְהָיָה֩ כִֽי־יָבֹ֨אוּ עָלֶ֜יךָ כָּל־הַדְּבָרִ֣ים הָאֵ֗לֶּה הַבְּרָכָה֙ וְהַקְּלָלָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר נָתַ֖תִּי לְפָנֶ֑יךָ וַהֲשֵׁבֹתָ֙ אֶל־לְבָבֶ֔ךָ בְּכָל־הַגּוֹיִ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֧ר הִדִּיחֲךָ֛ יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ שָֽׁמָּה׃ וְשַׁבְתָּ֞ עַד־יְהוָ֤ה אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙ וְשָׁמַעְתָּ֣ בְקֹל֔וֹ כְּכֹ֛ל אֲשֶׁר־אָנֹכִ֥י מְצַוְּךָ֖ הַיּ֑וֹם אַתָּ֣ה וּבָנֶ֔יךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ֖ וּבְכָל־נַפְשֶֽׁךָ׃ וְשָׁ֨ב יְהוָ֧ה אֱלֹהֶ֛יךָ אֶת־שְׁבוּתְךָ֖ וְרִחֲמֶ֑ךָ וְשָׁ֗ב וְקִבֶּצְךָ֙ מִכָּל־הָ֣עַמִּ֔ים אֲשֶׁ֧ר הֱפִֽיצְךָ֛ יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֶ֖יךָ שָֽׁמָּה׃ אִם־יִהְיֶ֥ה נִֽדַּחֲךָ֖ בִּקְצֵ֣ה הַשָּׁמָ֑יִם מִשָּׁ֗ם יְקַבֶּצְךָ֙ יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ וּמִשָּׁ֖ם יִקָּחֶֽךָ

When all these things befall you—the blessing and the curse that I have set before you—and you take them to heart 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 upon you this day, then the LORD your God will return [you from] your captivity and take you back in love. He will bring you together again from all the peoples where the LORD your God has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the LORD your God will gather you, from there He will fetch you.

The promise of teshuvah is absolute.    You can see in the Hebrew text that I’ve put in bold certain words.  These are all verbs and nouns that have the same verbal root as “return” or teshuvah.  In fact, between verses 1-10 in this chapter the verb appears seven times.   Even after you have been separated from your home, from your place of joy and harmony, from your place of peace and connection with others, even then you can be restored. 

The Baal Shem Tov focuses on the problem of returning from such a low state.  After the Israelites have been dispossessed, after their own transgressions have caused their lives to be torn apart - from such a low place they can be restored?

This is like a person who brings a candle into a dark place.  The darkness dissipates completely and is not longer there.  So too with one who returns in teshuvah. Though it was initially a place of darkness, when the light of Torah radiates the darkness disappears.  (From Degel Macheneh Ephraim, Parshat Nitzavim)

So too with us.  As we prepare for Selichot (Saturday night at 8:3) and Rosh HaShanah, our thoughts turn toward our own teshuvah.  Spiritually we’re not where we wanted to be.  Still making the same mistakes, still feeling dead inside at times.  The people we love are distant from us and some of those we love the most seem to be hurting and lost.  Our communities are responding to us or to our world as we think they should.   

Nonetheless, all we need is a little bit.  A little bit of goodness, a little bit of Torah, a little bit of teshuvah.  It can push the darkness back.  A little is enough to start, and from there - step by step - we bring in a little more light. 

Please join us for selichot on Saturday night at 8:30 pm. If you can please RSVP.

Shabbat Shalom  

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ZOOM: All NEW Radiant Torah of Rebbe Nachman for 5782-- Register NOW (It's Free)

ZOOM: All NEW Radiant Torah of Rebbe Nachman for 5782– Register NOW (It’s Free)

It’s a New Year & a fresh new beginning. Join us Tuesdays at 12:30 PM ET, 11:30 AM CT, 10:30 AM MT, 9:30 AM PT NEW! One-time click here for Free Registration and you’ll receive an email/link to all Tuesday Radiant Torah Parsha Classes https://tinyurl.com/9pjym2dm

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Hurry & Get Your ZOOM Link for Today's Fresh, New Breslov Parsha Class

Hurry & Get Your ZOOM Link for Today’s Fresh, New Breslov Parsha Class

It’s a New Year & a fresh new beginning. Join us Tuesdays at 12:30 PM ET, 11:30 AM CT, 10:30 AM MT, 9:30 AM PT NEW! One-time click here for Free Registration and you’ll receive an email/link to all Tuesday Radiant Torah Parsha Classes https://tinyurl.com/9pjym2dm

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WATCH VIDEO: Parshat Nitzavim The Radiant Torah with Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

WATCH VIDEO: Parshat Nitzavim The Radiant Torah with Rebbe Nachman of Breslov

BEFORE YOU WATCH: Please click here to get upcoming class schedule now through Cheshvan. Note: not all classes are sponsored/dedicated. It’s a special merit to share the teachings of Rebbe Nachman with others, your help is needed! Subscribe to get new videos! Comment below In this video, Chaya Rivka discusses Parshat Nitzavim (and a bit of Vayelech) Standing Together…Achdut-Unity Today…

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NEW REGISTRATION INFORMATION for Tuesday Rebbe Nachman of Breslov on the Parsha

NEW REGISTRATION INFORMATION for Tuesday Rebbe Nachman of Breslov on the Parsha

Tuesdays at 12:30 PM ET, 11:30 AM CT, 10:30 AM MT, 9:30 AM PT NEW!!! One-time click here for Free Registration to Attend all Tuesday Radiant Torah Parsha Classes https://tinyurl.com/9pjym2dm After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. You must register once to attend any/all upcoming Radiant Torah Parsha classes on Tuesdays. This…

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In the week of Rabbi Sacks zt"l's matzeiva (stonesetting), it is very fitting and a sheer coincidence that his Covenant & Conversation essay on this week's parsha of Nitzavim is entitled 'Defeating Death'.

In the essay, pasted in full below, Rabbi Sacks wrote the following:

"How then do you defeat death? Yes there is an afterlife. Yes there is techiyat hametim, resurrection. But Moses does not focus on these obvious ideas. He tells us something different altogether. You achieve immortality by being part of a covenant – a covenant with eternity itself, that is to say, a covenant with God. When you live your life within a covenant something extraordinary happens. Your parents and grandparents live on in you. You live on in your children and grandchildren. They are part of your life. You are part of theirs."

How true that has proven to be over the past nine months since Rabbi Sacks passed away. The outpouring of love for him, his teachings, and the Judaism he taught and personified has been so moving. 

As we approach Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when we each take stock of our own lives, we can look to his example of what it is to live a life of meaning and purpose and to embrace, and be embraced by, the Shechinah.

On behalf of The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust, we thank you for your continued support and wish you and your families a Shana tova u'metukah.

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DEFYING DEATH (NITZAVIM 5781)

Only now, reaching Nitzavim, can we begin to get a sense of the vast, world-changing project at the heart of the Divine-human encounter that took place in the lifetime of Moses and the birth of Jews/ Israel as a nation.

To understand it, recall the famous remark of Sherlock Holmes. “I draw your attention,” he said to Dr Watson, “to the curious incident of the dog at night.” “But the dog did nothing at night,” said Watson. “That,” said Holmes, “is the curious incident.”[1] Sometimes to know what a book is about you need to focus on what it does not say, not just on what it does.

What is missing from the Torah, almost inexplicably so given the background against which it is set, is a fixation with death. The ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death. Their monumental buildings were an attempt to defy death. The pyramids were giant mausoleums. More precisely, they were portals through which the soul of a deceased pharaoh could ascend to heaven and join the immortals. The most famous Egyptian text that has come down to us is The Book of the Dead. Only the afterlife is real: life is a preparation for death.

There is nothing of this in the Torah, at least not explicitly. Jews believed in Olam HaBa, the World to Come, life after death. They believed in techiyat hametim, the resurrection of the dead.[2] There are six references to it in the second paragraph of the Amidah alone. But not only are these ideas almost completely absent from Tanach. They are absent at the very points where we would expect them.

The book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) is an extended lament at human mortality. Havel havalim… hakol havel: Everything is worthless because life is a mere fleeting breath (Ecc 1:2). Why did the author of Ecclesiastes not mention the World to Come and life-after-death? Another example: the book of Job is a sustained protest against the apparent injustice of the world. Why did no one answer Job to say, “You and other innocent people who suffer will be rewarded in the afterlife”? We believe in the afterlife. Why then is it not mentioned – merely hinted at – in the Torah? That is the curious incident.

The simple answer is that obsession with death ultimately devalues life. Why fight against the evils and injustices of the world if this life is only a preparation for the world to come? Ernest Becker in his classic The Denial of Death argues that fear of our own mortality has been one of the driving forces of civilisation.[3] It is what led the ancient world to enslave the masses, turning them into giant labour forces to build monumental buildings that would stand as long as time itself. It led to the ancient cult of the hero, the man who becomes immortal by doing daring deeds on the field of battle. We fear death; we have a love-hate relationship with it. Freud called this thanatos, the death instinct, and said it was one of the two driving forces of life, the other being eros.

Judaism is a sustained protest against this world-view. That is why “No one knows where Moses is buried” (Deut. 34:6) so that his tomb should never become a place of pilgrimage and worship. That is why in place of a pyramid or a temple such as Ramses II built at Abu Simbel, all the Israelites had for almost five centuries until the days of Solomon was the Mishkan, a portable Sanctuary, more like a tent than a temple. That is why, in Judaism, death defiles and why the rite of the Red Heifer was necessary to purify people from contact with it. That is why the holier you are – if you are a Kohen, more so if you are the High Priest – the less you can be in contact or under the same roof as a dead person. God is not in death but in life.

Only against this Egyptian background can we fully sense the drama behind words that have become so familiar to us that we are no longer surprised by them, the great words in which Moses frames the choice for all time:

See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil … I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that you and your children may live. (Deut. 30:15, 19)

Life is good, death is bad. Life is a blessing, death is a curse. These are truisms for us. Why even mention them? Because they were not common ideas in the ancient world. They were revolutionary. They still are.

How then do you defeat death? Yes there is an afterlife. Yes there is techiyat hametim, resurrection. But Moses does not focus on these obvious ideas. He tells us something different altogether. You achieve immortality by being part of a covenant – a covenant with eternity itself, that is to say, a covenant with God.

When you live your life within a covenant something extraordinary happens. Your parents and grandparents live on in you. You live on in your children and grandchildren. They are part of your life. You are part of theirs. That is what Moses meant when he said, near the beginning of this week’s parsha:

It is not with you alone that I am making this covenant and oath, but with whoever stands with us here today before the Lord our God as well as those not with us here today. (Deut. 29:13-14)

In Moses’ day that last phrase meant “your children not yet born.” He did not need to include “your parents, no longer alive” because their parents had themselves made a covenant with God forty years before at Mount Sinai. But what Moses meant in a larger sense is that when we renew the covenant, when we dedicate our lives to the faith and way of life of our ancestors, they become immortal in us, as we become immortal in our children.

It is precisely because Judaism focuses on this world, not the next, that it is the most child-centred of all the great religions. They are our immortality. That is what Rachel meant when she said, “Give me children, or else I am like one dead” (Gen. 30:1). It is what Abraham meant when he said, “Lord, God, what will you give me if I remain childless?” (Gen. 15:2). We are not all destined to have children. The Rabbis said that the good we do constitutes our toldot, our posterity. But by honouring the memory of our parents and bringing up children to continue the Jewish story we achieve the one form of immortality that lies this side of the grave, in this world that God pronounced good.

Now consider the two last commands in the Torah, set out in parshat Vayelech, the ones Moses gave at the very end of his life. One is hakhel, the command that the King summon the nation to an assembly every seven years:

At the end of every seven years …  Assemble the people – men, women and children, and the stranger living in your towns – so that they can listen and learn to fear the Lord your God and follow carefully all the words of this law. (Deut. 31:12)

The meaning of this command is simple. Moses is saying: It is not enough that your parents made a covenant with God at Mount Sinai or that you yourselves renewed it with me here on the plains of Moab. The covenant must be perpetually renewed, every seven years, so that it never becomes history. It always remains memory. It never becomes old because every seven years it becomes new again.

And the last command? “Now write down this song and teach it to the Israelites and make them sing it, so that it may be a witness for me against them” (Deut. 31:19). This, according to tradition, is the command to write [at least part of] a Sefer Torah. As Maimonides puts it: “Even if your ancestors have left you a Sefer Torah, nonetheless you are commanded to write one for yourself.”[4]

What is Moses saying in this, his last charge to the people he had led for forty years, was: It is not sufficient to say, our ancestors received the Torah from Moses, or from God. You have to take it and make it new in every generation. You must make the Torah not just your parents’ or grandparents’ faith but your own. If you write it, it will write you. The eternal word of the eternal God is your share in eternity.

We now sense the full force of the drama of these last days of Moses’ life. Moses knew he was about to die, knew he would not cross the Jordan and enter the land he had spent his entire life leading the people toward. Moses, confronting his own mortality, asks us in every generation to confront ours.

Our faith – Moses is telling us – is not like that of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, or virtually every other civilisation known to history. We do not find God in a realm beyond life – in heaven, or after death, in mystic disengagement from the world or in philosophical contemplation. We find God in life. We find God in (the key words of Devarim) love and joy. To find God, he says in this week’s parsha, you don’t have to climb to heaven or cross the sea (Deut. 30:12-13). God is here. God is now. God is life.

And that life, though it will end one day, in truth does not end. For if you keep the covenant, then your ancestors will live in you, and you will live on in your children (or your disciples or the recipients of your kindness). Every seven years the covenant will become new again. Every generation will write its own Sefer Torah. The gate to eternity is not death: it is life lived in a covenant endlessly renewed, in words engraved on our hearts and the hearts of our children.

And so Moses, the greatest leader we ever had, became immortal. Not by living forever. Not by building a tomb and temple to his glory. We don’t even know where he is buried. The only physical structure he left us was portable because life itself is a journey. He didn’t even become immortal the way Aaron did, by seeing his children become his successors. He became immortal by making us his disciples. And in one of their first recorded utterances, the Rabbis said likewise: Raise up many disciples.

To be a leader, you don’t need a crown or robes of office. All you need to do is to write your chapter in the story, do deeds that heal some of the pain of this world, and act so that others become a little better for having known you. Live so that through you our ancient covenant with God is renewed in the only way that matters: in life. Moses’ last testament to us at the very end of his days, when his mind might so easily have turned to death, was: Choose life.

[1] Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of Silver Blaze.”

[2] The Mishnah in Sanhedrin 10:1 says that believing that the resurrection of the dead is stated in the Torah is a fundamental part of Jewish faith. However, according to any interpretation, the statement is implicit, not explicit.

[3] New York: Free Press, 1973.

[4] Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Tefillin, Mezuza, VeSefer Torah 7:1.

The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust 

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Shabbat Shalom. Am Yisrael Chai.

Don't Stop Moving!! - Parshat Nitzavim & Vayelech