Six years ago my little brother who now, by some cruel twist of fate, is taller and has way more hair than I do, stood before a congregation, received an aliyah, read Nitzavim Vayelech in a young girl’s soprano (in my family, we mature late), and was thereby ushered into the privileged world of Jewish manhood.
In the time that has since passed, he has decided – in every apparent way – to cast off the admittedly weighty, perhaps cumbersome, sometimes illogical yoke of orthodox observance. No one to blame. No scapegoat to pin this on. Our home was a modern one where Batman yarmulkes, a Talmudic scholar/Kabbalist father, Puerto Rican beaches, festive sedarim, Skinemax, Mishmar, and an impressive shul attendance record all mixed into one latently confusing cornucopia of American Jewry … but it produced two entirely devout Jewish women who possess an unquestioning devotion to all that is Baruch Hashem. Based on these findings, I have to conclude that my brother is merely an unavoidable statistical certainty – some Jews will be lost regardless of their background. Lost like the millions throughout our age old history, all for “reasons” – some so compelling that even Ben Brafman couldn’t argue against them – other Jews are just lazy or uninterested.
Lost members of the tribe. Who knows for how long? Who knows how far-gone?
This weeks parsha takes a stab at an answer.
Nitzavim begins with a “dying” Moses attempting to convey his last farewell, his final thoughts to his beloved nation. He begins with a covenant establishing the infinite bond between Hashem and his people and, in a seemingly strange verse, Moses declares that (29:13-14) “not with you alone am I making this covenant and this oath-curse. But with whoever is here with us standing today in the presence of Ad-noy, our G-d, and with those who are not here with us today.”
The covenant is even with those who were not there. Sure you could say the pasuk means the people not yet born, but perhaps it refers to those who simply got lost on the way to the meeting. The ditchers. The late sleepers. The kids who painted their faces, pierced their nipples, and ran down to New Sodom for the weekend.
Moses’ last efforts come to make clear that the covenant that Jewish men and women have with G-d exists even with the slackers, the secular philosophers, the deniers. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to drive home this concept like a Holocaust or a sickness in the family (C’V), but the message remains: You can eat as many Happy Meals on Yom Kippur as you please, but you are always in the loop. Have we not seen the cancer victim call his rabbi after forty years of agnosticism? Have we not heard of the miraculous tales of teshuvah after the proverbial point of no return had been long ago tread over? Or the mysterious donation to the yeshiva in the rasha’s will? So the answer is that no Jew is ever lost as long as they still live and breathe. Even if their fellow Jews have lost hope, G-d and his covenant are still stirring somewhere deep and immovable. But how is that possible? Why is it that Jews return even after a lifetime of indifference, animosity, and secularism? Nitzavim has us covered there as well (30:12-14) “It is not in heaven, [for you] to say, "Who will go up to heaven for us, and acquire it for us, and inform us of it, and we will fulfill it? Nor is it overseas, [for you] to say, Who will travel overseas for us, and acquire it for us, and inform us of it, and we will fulfill it? For the matter is extremely close to you; in your mouth and in your mind to fulfill it.”
Our sages believe that these verses are speaking about both Torah (living an observant “religious” existence) and teshuvah (returning spiritually to G-d during one’s lifetime). The idea is, like Maimonides explains in his Hilchot Teshuvah, that a person has the power to virtually erase his past at any time and start afresh as if it were the first day of their lives. We always have the power to start over. Nitzavim teaches us that not only do we have the power, but the instinct as well. We have ineffable, indestructible, forever straining to soar neshamas, and no matter the distance we may travel to avoid the covenant – no matter the walls – no matter the efforts to become lost and forgotten, it remains impossible to escape the tether that G-d mercifully implanted within.