Choosing anew
NITZAVIM – CHOOSING ANEW
“Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem”: you stand here today. All of you. So Nitzavim begins — not with a journey, not with a battle, not even with a new law, but with a position. Moses looks at the people before him and seems to name them one by one so that no one can imagine themselves outside it: the heads, the tribes, the elders, the officers, the men, the children, the women, the stranger living in the midst of the camp, the one who hews the wood, the one who draws the water. All.
But scarcely has he set them standing there before the text introduces movement: they are there to cross over, לעברך בברית, to enter the covenant. Stability does not abolish movement: it prepares for it. There is an instant before a boundary is crossed when the step has not yet been taken. One stands there, present. One may yet see. Yet hear. Yet choose. Nitzavim begins exactly there.
STANDING IN ORDER TO CROSS
For forty years the people have been moving: departure, wilderness, encampments, setting out, losses, rebellions, setting out again. Now they have stopped. But to stop is not to reach the end of the road: it is to gain a position from which another movement can begin. One may move for years without truly changing position, and remain perfectly still while a decision alters the course of one’s life completely.
Nitzavim knows both. First: stand. Then: cross. Position matters because it determines where one stands to meet what comes next. Not every stability is faithfulness — one may remain stubbornly fixed in the wrong place — and not every movement is transformation. The question is more uncomfortable: where am I moving from? And then: towards where?
THOSE WHO ARE HERE AND THOSE WHO ARE NOT
Then the covenant breaks the boundary of the visible group. Moses says that the covenant is made not only with those who stand there that day, but also with “the one who is not here with us today”. The present contains those who are not yet present. Later the parashah itself will speak of the generation to come, of the children who will rise after them, and of someone arriving from a distant land who will look at what has happened and ask what took place.
One generation acts; another may inherit the consequences. That changes the weight of the present. Some decisions all but end with us; others become conditions: a house, a debt, an institution, a war, a trust, a way of educating, a way of governing, a destruction that someone else will find already accomplished. What one generation turns into structure may become another generation’s starting point.
The absent cannot yet answer. But they can inherit. Nitzavim brings them within the responsibility of those who are here. That is why today never belongs only to those who inhabit it.
WHEN THE HEART CHANGES DIRECTION
Then the text enters less comfortable ground. Among those who hear the words of the covenant there may be someone whose heart has already turned away — פנה לבבו, his heart turns. And then comes a dangerous sentence: “I shall have peace, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart.”
Information is not lacking here. This man has heard. He knows. He has heard the words. And still he constructs within himself a reality in which the consequences will not reach him: it will not happen to me, the relationship will hold, the body will endure, the institution will keep functioning, others will pay the cost, tomorrow I shall put it right.
It is not simply desire. The heart has already begun to manufacture an interpretation that allows him to continue in the same direction. And while that interpretation remains intact, information may enter through the ear without governing a single action. Perhaps this is one of Nitzavim’s strangest dangers: to know, and to live as though one did not.
THE SECRET AND THE REVEALED
Then comes a sentence that seems almost to step aside from the movement before it: “The secret things belong unto YHWH our God; but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this Torah.”
There is a boundary. Not everything can be known, not every chain of causation reconstructed, not every consequence foreseen; we do not know all the variables. Nitzavim does not demand omniscience. And that matters because human beings have an extraordinary ability to use what they do not know as an excuse before what they already know: I would need to know more, have another confirmation, be completely certain, know what will happen in ten years, understand the whole system first. Then I would act.
But there are secret things and there are revealed things. Responsibility does not wait for uncertainty to vanish. It begins when what lies before us is enough to call for an answer. The verse ends not in knowledge. It ends in a verb: do.
WHEN REALITY RETURNS INFORMATION
Then comes one of the deepest movements in the parashah. The text imagines that the events have already happened: the blessing, the curse, the scattering, the loss. Reality has answered. And then it says: והשבת אל לבבך — you shall bring it back to your heart.
It does not say that the consequence disappears. It says that it returns. What happened can enter the one who lived it again: a relationship broke, a strategy failed, a society produced something it had not expected, repeated behavior finally became a condition, a decision opened some possibilities and closed others.
Then a second possibility appears: to read. Not merely to suffer the consequence, not merely to celebrate it, but to read it, to bring it back to the heart. What happened? What did I do? What did I fail to see? What did I assume? What relation was there between my action and the reality that appeared afterwards?
Experience does not teach automatically. One may repeat it for an entire lifetime without learning from it. For experience to become knowledge, it has to return: reality, consequence, heart. Only then can something change.
TESHUVAH: WHEN THE ROAD CAN CHANGE
Nitzavim returns again and again to shuv: to return, teshuvah — a turning back. Not simply to regret. To return. The difference is considerable. One may deeply regret what happened and continue in the same direction; feel guilty without changing a single relationship; even understand why one failed and continue doing the same thing. Teshuvah demands movement.
The heart that had turned away can turn again. The one who had ceased to hear can hear again. The one who was scattered can be gathered. Even from the furthest reaches of heaven, the possibility of return begins. Distance does not automatically become destiny.
There was a parting of the ways. A direction was taken. Consequences appeared. But the path need not close there: there is a way back. The consequences do not disappear; the scattering happened; the rupture leaves marks. Return does not undo history. It takes history into itself. And precisely because it does, the next choice need not be the same.
SCATTERED AND GATHERED AGAIN
That inner movement takes outward form. The people may be driven out, scattered, carried far away, even to the very edge. Then: gathered, taken, led back again. The land reappears as a possible place to dwell.
Here Nitzavim takes up the movement with which Ki Tavo ended. Ki Tavo had shown a terrible trajectory: land → expulsion → scattering → no rest. Nitzavim does not deny it. It continues from there: scattering → return → gathering → dwelling anew.
Stability can be lost. But movement need not continue for ever towards disintegration either: another stability can emerge, not identical to the one before — it has passed through something. Movement is not good merely because it is movement. Stability is not good merely because it is stability. What matters is the structure that leads from one to the other.
YHWH WILL CIRCUMCISE YOUR HEART
In the midst of that return comes a sentence I do not wish to erase or soften: “YHWH your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you may love YHWH your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”
The text presents God as the agent. That is what it says. On a literal reading, YHWH effects an inner transformation: something that covers, hardens or obstructs the relationship is removed. Human return has already begun, and yet here the Torah introduces a divine action upon the heart.
My theological reading does not erase that formulation. It passes through it from another place. For around that sentence the text remains full of human verbs: the human being remembers, returns, listens. After the circumcision of the heart, one returns again, listens again, acts. And at the end one must still choose.
So I cannot read that Presence as a substitute for the will. The Presence does not listen for a human being, does not return in one’s place, does not make all the decisions that will follow. Perhaps the image allows something more precise to be said: not to create another heart, but to remove what no longer allows the heart already there to respond.
There are moments when a person does not need more information. What is needed is for something to stop preventing that person from hearing the information already there. The relationship with God may inhabit that transformation. But responsibility remains, because the Torah will still have to say: choose.
IT IS NOT IN HEAVEN
Then Moses makes one of Devarim’s most radical declarations. The commandment is not too far away. Not in heaven. Not beyond the sea. There is no need to ask: who will go up for us? Who will cross over for us? Who will fetch it for us, so that we may hear it and do it?
The earlier sentence has just acknowledged that there are secret things. So this cannot mean that everything is simple, obvious or immediately intelligible. No. There are things we do not know. But what is needed to enter into responsibility has not been placed somewhere impossible: “the word is very near you” — in your mouth, in your heart, to do it.
Mouth. Heart. Action. A truth that remains only in the mouth may become a formula. A truth that remains only in the heart may die there. Nitzavim presses further: לעשתו, to do it. Information must retain the power to shape conduct. Otherwise it may be repeated, revered, even defended — and still fail to govern a life.
TWO REALITIES BEFORE US
At the end Moses says: “See: I have set before you today life and good, death and evil.” The alternatives are set before us: life, death, good, evil; later, blessing, curse. And finally comes the verb that decides the scene: ובחרת בחיים — choose life.
The Torah is not neutral. It inclines the choice. It desires it. But it does not make it for us. If one must still choose, there is still a parting of the ways. And choice does not produce merely an inner state: it opens a trajectory. A way of listening generates a way of acting. A way of acting changes relationships. Relationships produce conditions. Conditions enlarge some possibilities and diminish others, until a choice becomes a reality one inhabits. That is why choice does not end when it is made. That is where it begins.
THE ROAD THAT PARTS
Nitzavim does not describe a line. It describes something more like a road opening into different ways. First there is a position. Then a parting. One path listens, holds fast and acts. The other turns away. The heart then begins to assure the person: “I shall have peace.” Onward. Reality answers. Consequences arrive. It could end there. It does not.
The consequence can return to the heart. It can become new information. Direction can change. The one who was scattered can return. The one who ceased to hear can hear again. And a new choice appears. The structure might look like this:
STANDING → PARTING → DOING → CONSEQUENCE → RETURN TO THE HEART → REORIENTATION → NEW LISTENING → NEW ACTION → NEW CHOICE → NEW REALITY
It is not a perfect circle. The one who returns does not return to the earlier instant. Something has already been lived. Its consequences are carried along. Return therefore does not erase the road. It turns it into knowledge — if one can read it.
THE CHILDREN WILL LOOK UPON THE LAND
There is another movement still. The consequence does not return only to the heart of the one who acted. It may outlive that person. The parashah imagines the later generation, the children who will rise after them, looking upon a wounded land and asking: what happened here? Why?
Inherited reality then becomes testimony. One generation produces certain conditions. Another finds them already there, looks, asks, tries to reconstruct the cause. This adds a disturbing dimension to responsibility: not all our consequences will return to us. Some will return to our children. They will receive a reality whose origin they may not have witnessed. And they will have to read it. History can thus become a late form of feedback, when those who caused something are no longer there.
TO CHOOSE IS NOT TO CONTROL EVERYTHING
The distinction between the secret and the revealed prevents another confusion. Responsibility does not mean control. If I am responsible, it does not follow that I can guarantee the outcome. I do not know all the variables; I do not know how others will respond; I cannot open every future consequence in advance. The secret remains secret.
But there is a field that does belong to me: what I have received, what I have already understood, the orientation I choose, the action I can take. And when reality answers, another responsibility appears: to read it. Not to control the world. To answer within it. The difference is immense.
NITZAVIM IN OUR TIME
We live surrounded by information. Never has it been so easy to receive it. And perhaps never has it been so easy to use the absence of perfect information as an excuse not to act: another study, another confirmation, another opinion, another certainty, as though we were ever going to possess all the variables.
Nitzavim draws a more sober boundary. There are secret things. There always will be. The question is not whether we know everything. It is whether we act responsibly with what we already know. That is true for a person, a family, a company, a society, a civilization.
We have also often lost the ability to read consequences. When something goes wrong, we immediately look for someone to blame. When it goes well, we look for who deserves the credit. Both can prevent learning. A consequence may contain something more valuable than a verdict: information. What structure produced this? What relationship broke? What hypothesis failed to hold? What signal was there that we refused to hear? What deserves to be kept? What has to change?
Nitzavim does not promise a life without wrong roads. It says something else: the road can still be read. And while it can be read, another direction remains possible.
You cannot return to the beginning of your life. It no longer exists. The question is another: where are you today? Not where you were. Not where you wish you were. Today. Nitzavim. Standing.
What reality lies before you? What do you already know, yet continue to treat as though it were still hidden? What consequence have you lived through but not yet brought back to the heart? Where do you still tell yourself, “I shall be all right even if I continue this way”? And what would change if what you have already learnt truly governed your next action?
Teshuvah does not erase the road already travelled. It makes it possible for that road not to have to be travelled again.
“Uvajarta bajayim.” Choose life. Not because you have always chosen well. Not because you have never strayed. Not because you understand everything. Choose life because today you are still standing. And while there is still a today in which you can listen, bring experience back to the heart, change direction and act again, the last consequence need not yet be the last word.
