Still Standing
Years ago, at the Hebrew University, a professor of ancient history was lecturing about the great civilizations of the ancient world.
Egypt and its Pharaohs. Assyria and Babylon. Persia, Greece and Rome. Empires that conquered nations, redrew borders and, in their time, appeared too powerful ever to disappear.
Yet they did. Empires collapsed, kingdoms vanished and peoples were conquered, scattered or absorbed into others. Civilizations that once ruled much of the known world were left to ruins, archaeology and the pages of history.
Then the professor told his students that, for all he had encountered in his studies, one sight had affected him more than almost anything else. It was not something uncovered on an archaeological dig, nor an ancient inscription or long-lost artefact.
It was a Jew eating falafel on a street in Jaffa.
“How can it be,” he asked, “that three thousand years later, the same people live in the same land, speaking the same language?”
“Historically, it simply does not make sense. It sends shivers down my spine.”
Those three thousand years had come at a terrible cost. There had been the destruction of two Temples and exile, persecutions and expulsions, Crusades and pogroms, and the Holocaust. Again and again, Jewish history reached moments when there seemed every reason to believe that this time there would be no return.
And still, there he was—a Jew eating falafel on a street in Jaffa.
The professor was not a rabbi, nor a man searching history for evidence of faith. He was, by his own admission, an atheist.
A historian who had spent his life studying civilizations that had risen and fallen was staring at a people who were still standing.
Parashat Nitzavim begins with words that could almost have been written in answer to him:
אַתֶּם נִצָּבִים הַיּוֹם כֻּלְּכֶם לִפְנֵי ה׳ אֱלֹקֵיכֶם
You are standing today, all of you, before Hashem your G-d.
(Devarim 29:9)
But these words came after one of the darkest passages in the Torah. The Jewish people had just heard the Tochachah—Moshe’s terrible warning of disease, defeat, exile and a people scattered among the nations.
Rashi tells us that when the people heard the curses, they asked, “Who can possibly endure these?” Moshe reassured them: despite everything they had already done, despite having angered Hashem, they were still standing before Him.
Rashi then draws attention to the word הַיּוֹם—today. Just as the day becomes dark and then light again, so too would the Jewish people. Darkness would come, but it would never be the whole story.
Jewish history would prove how much darkness those words would have to carry.
But Moshe was not speaking only to the people standing before him:
וְאֵת אֲשֶׁר אֵינֶנּוּ פֹּה עִמָּנוּ הַיּוֹם
And with those who are not here with us today.
(Devarim 29:14)
The Midrash takes these words further. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani teaches that the souls of the generations yet to come were also there. The Kli Yakar points to the words themselves: they were not “here with us,” yet they too stood before Hashem.
Through centuries of exile, through times of light and terrible darkness, the flame of the covenant passed from one generation to the next until it reached us.
After everything history had brought, the people to whom Moshe had spoken were still here:
אַתֶּם נִצָּבִים הַיּוֹם
You are still standing today.
שבת שלום
שמואל
