Who By Fire…(Nitzavim)
All week I’ve been waiting and hoping for some inspiration for this week’s blog, but honestly, I didn’t want the kind of inspiration that came yesterday morning.
I woke up, after a terrifying night of hour upon hour of pelting rain, high winds, a tornado over Harlem (where I live), and non-stop lightning, only to hear that 8 people had died—in their apartments!—due to floodwaters that, in one case anyway, broke through an outside wall!
What more do we need to begin heeding the dire predictions, not just from science but from the Bible as well?
What more do we need to make the Unetaneh Tokef prayer more real: Who by fire? Who by water…? On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, according to our tradition, who shall die in the coming year and by what means. So we pray and pray until the end of Yom Kippur for forgiveness, and to be written in the Book of Life (where is that book, anyway?).
This week, in Nitzavim, God is very angry again, but as I read it this time, God’s anger felt different to me than other times. For some reason, I felt a seriousness, a heaviness, that I hadn’t felt before.
Other times I’ve kind of scoffed at it: “Oh, God is angry AGAIN, in a frantic out-of-control way, a way that seems momentary and will pass as soon as Moses talks him down. Here He lays out (again) what he expects of the Israelites. Mostly it’s about worshiping only our One God and not bowing down to other gods. Then God will open our heart—circumcise it, cutting away the crustiness that covers it.
God clearly says that we have a choice: to choose the blessings or the curses that have been laid out for us, so that we may “live and not die.” We are told to “choose life.”
And the famous lines, “Surely this is not so difficult to grasp; it’s right in front of you, close by, not up in the heavens, not an extraordinary wonder or marvel difficult to make sense of—nor is it across the sea, far away, that we should need someone to go and get it for us and bring it back to explain it so that we can then do it.
Surely.
Yet, it’s not simple. If only back then, when the Bible was written down, God and Moses had known how difficult such a commandment would prove to be. If it were simple, we would have done it a long time ago—like, thousands of years ago.
As we watch as troops finally withdraw from Afghanistan, approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, review the past year and a half of pandemic along with all the other confusion and chaos around the globe, we enter a time of trying to heal, of rest for the earth during this coming Shmita year, and prayer for ourselves and all that lives.
We take a break from the action so we can be renewed to continue our work of repair and hopefully begin to remove the scabs we’ve built up around our hearts, to open them again.
May it be so.
