Renewing the covenant: Nitzavim-Vayelech 5784

This week’s Torah reading provides a fitting conclusion to the year. At the end of his long life and after decades of service to the Jewish people, Moshe renews the covenant between God and the people of Israel. Addressing the new generation of Jews standing before him, Jews who were neither part of the Egypt experience nor present at the moment of revelation at Sinai, Moshe make it clear that the original covenant between God and the Jewish people remains in force. Not only that, but it will continue to be so throughout the Jewish future. This covenant cannot be repealed, altered or ignored: it is the basis for all Jewish life, the leitmotif of all Jewish history. Moshe concedes that there will be times and events and occurrences in the story of the Jewish people that will seem cruel, inexplicable and irrational. As he phrases it, there will be many “hidden, mysterious” events ahead of them.

Moshe offers no easy explanation for those events except to say that they are somehow related to the attempts of sections of the Jewish people to annul the covenant—and to the consequences of those attempts. The “hidden” part of the covenant belongs to God but its revealed part—the obligations of Torah commandments and Jewish life—belongs to the Jewish people and is relevant in every generation and locale. The Jewish people and the Jewish State will always be judged through their commitment to this eternal pact, the existence of which has caused us much pain and angst throughout the centuries. The other nations of the world harbor resentment against us because of the uniqueness of our relationship to the Creator, which this covenant exemplifies. Many Jewish thinkers have attributed anti-Semitism, both in its virulent or more benign forms, to a jealousy over the existence of God’s pact with the Jewish people.  

The covenant has remained the rock of Jewish identity throughout the ages. Just the knowledge of its existence has created a stubborn Jewish people which possesses a resolve to maintain its faith and lifestyle though a very small minority in a world of many billions. The Torah details its terms and conditions, and its study helps formulate the life that Jews are expected to live. That is why the Torah demands that we study and are aware of these terms morning and night, whether traveling or at home, in all times and places. 

There were, and unfortunately still are, those amongst us who wish to discard the covenant and its obligations and merely to blend in with the surrounding society. The Lord, so to speak, has warned us many times that He would not allow this to occur. All Jewish history teaches us regarding its strength and eternity. In the year that is now dawning, we should all resolutely renew the covenant in our hearts, minds and actions, in order to be blessed with a year of health, success and peace. 

Shabbat shalom, Rabbi Berel Wein