By Larry Kaufman 
My uncle Sidney Pazol was a dropout from Hebrew Union College, who later found himself a secular rabbinate as the leader of a Great Books discussion group. He told me once about-can we call her his congregant?-Mrs. Guggenheim, who came regularly to the sessions, but who never participated in the conversation, no matter how hard he tried to engage her. 

Plato? Mrs. G had nothing to say. St. Thomas Aquinas? Mrs. G had nothing to say. Certainly, Uncle Sid thought, she would have something to say when they came to Macbeth-everybody has an opinion about Macbeth--but again, nothing. Finally, he turned to her and asked point blank what she had thought of the play. "Well," she replied, "I don't understand what makes this a great book - it's just a bunch of famous quotations strung together."

I thought of Mrs. Guggenheim as I read Nitzavim - for surely there are few parshiot that string so many famous quotations together.

"You stand this day, all of you."

"I make this covenant...with those who are not here with us today."

"The blessing and the curse."

"It is not in the heavens nor beyond the sea." 

"I set before you life and good, death and evil....Choose life."

Of course, one of the reasons these famous quotations ring so familiarly in our ears is that we hear them twice every year, in close proximity - on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah and again on Yom Kippur. And the message of Nitzavim seems so right for Yom Kippur that most Reform Jews probably do not realize that while we are reading these verses, most of the Jewish world is instead reading the laws of Yom Kippur in Leviticus 16.

One thing this parashah has in common with Leviticus 16 and that contrasts vividly with Macbeth is the absence of a story line. Our narrative opens as Moses is beginning the windup of his valedictory address, re-enlisting his audience in the Covenant, outlining some of the obligations the Covenant entails, discussing some of the outcomes of straying from those obligations, along with a concluding exhortation to shape up or ship out. The core message that commends Nitzavim to our Yom Kippur attention is that yes, you will stray, but if you sincerely repent, God will take you back into His fold.

Nitzavim is rich not only in famous quotations, but also in significant issues we might ponder. If we were only to consider the question of individual or collective responsibility and not the question of sins committed openly or in secret, dayenu. If we were only to consider sins committed openly or in secret, and not the accessibility or difficulty of obeying the Law, dayenu.

But before we get into some of these significant issues, let me raise a perhaps less important one. As someone who tends to obsess over the way Hebrew text is rendered into English, I am particularly struck by verse 30:15: re-ei, natati l'fanecha hayom et ha chay-im v'et hatov, v'et hamavet v'et harah. 

This is simple and straightforward Hebrew - see, I set before you today life and good, and death and evil - and it is rendered pretty much that way in the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation, Old JPS. In my congregation, however, we take our English from the 1996 translation, New JPS, which reads-- I set before you this day life and prosperity, death and adversity.

What price progress! Every kid in cheder knows that tov means good, and rah means bad. The JPS commentary justifies the new translation as better fitting the context. Robert Alter, in his 2004 translation and commentary, not only translates tov and rah as good and evil, but specifically takes New JPS to task for a change he characterizes as reductive (which I take to mean diminishing rather than clarifying the meaning). I am personally affronted by the chutzpah and the condescension exhibited here. I'm also reminded of overhearing my boss many years ago scolding his secretary, "You shouldn't have done what I said; you should have done what I meant." While it seems very possible that the Kaddish Boruch Hu meant prosperity and adversity, the fact remains that what He said to Moses was tov, good , not shefah, prosperity, and rah, bad or evil, not tzarah, adversity.

Maybe I react as strongly as I do to the irresponsibility of this translation because I read this sedrah as above all a sermon on responsibility. You are all here today - H E R E - to hear -H E A R -- and to be bound by the covenant. All means the totality of the community, no exceptions for age, gender, profession, or previous or current condition of servitude - not even, as we hear later on, your status as not yet born. Speaking as one who does not believe the Torah was divinely revealed to Moses at Sinai, I nonetheless accept that I was there at the time and am responsible to keep the covenant.

The theme of responsibility continues as Moses warns the people not to even think about going astray and worshipping strange gods, although he seems pretty sure they're going to. Torah gives us page after page of rules and regulations, chukim umishpatim - what we can eat, what we should wear or not wear, what we can't do on Shabbos, and so forth, to the count of 613, but clearly the biggie is disloyalty - worshipping other gods or not having sufficient faith in the one you've got. And although we are taught that it's what we do that counts, not what we think, there are passages in Nitzavim that remind us we may think we're safe, because we are concealing our misbehavior or our wayward thoughts -but we're not fooling God.

We read, "Concealed acts concern Adonai our God, but with overt acts, it is for us and our children ever to apply all the provisions of this Torah." The mainstream meaning seems to be that God knows what you're concealing and He will punish you, but it's up to the community to punish you for your wrongful public acts.

I found two other interesting spins on concealed and overt acts. The Rambam suggests that what is concealed is the reason for any given commandment, and therefore we shouldn't presume to decide for ourselves which commandments are worth keeping and which we can disregard. So much for Reform autonomy!

But others suggest that it's not our concealed acts that are being discussed here, but rather acts that have not yet taken place, and are therefore concealed from all except God. Our job is to follow the laws that have been revealed and not speculate about the future.

Regardless of the interpretation you like best, we will all hedge our bets on the Yamim Noraim when we ask for forgiveness Al chet shechatanu l'fanacha b'gilui uvesater, for the sin we have committed before You openly or secretly.

This passage, concealed acts concern Adonai our God, is not one of the string of famous quotations cited previously, but it gave rise to a quotation that is famous indeed - kol Yisrael arevim zeh la zeh - all Israel is responsible one for the other. I had always taken this to mean we have the responsibility to care for any of our brethren in distress - but the rabbis have read this to impose responsibility on us for punishing misbehavior that we know about, leaving God the responsibility only for punishing secret sins. But even with the overt acts we and our children are responsible for punishing - note that the responsibility is collective, not individual. Our responsibility to punish is not a justification for individual vigilante-ism, but rather a communal injunction to maintain law and order, or at least prevent idol worship. Or is it?

At this season of cheshbon hanefesh, I do not minimize my own transgressions of the past year, nor the things for which I need to atone - but if I limit my personal accounting to the commandments of this sedrah, I can begin to let myself off the hook. If I have followed my own willful heart, it has not been in pursuit of the gods of other nations, nor have I sought to send anyone to the other side of the sea to get the teaching for me. If Nitzavim contains anything I should worry about, it has to do with my reluctance to participate in judging or reproving or punishing anyone else.

As we discussed the question of collective responsibility for punishing the overt sinful acts of others during our congregational Torah study, I sensed a distinct discomfort, not just my own, with confronting the evildoer, yet a clear consensus that it needed to be done. Our kahal (community), it seems, does not want to limit kol Yisrael arevim zeh lazeh to caring for those in distress, but offers no clear road map for mobilizing the community to chastise or punish. But is having it in your own heart and your own mouth to observe it enough? One respected voice suggested role modeling as a solution; one proposed appealing to the miscreant to put the needs of the community ahead of self-interest. I don't think I was alone in finding both of these responses noble but naïve. 
We also talked about Moses's seeming certainty that his flock would stray, and as a result be uprooted from their land. It was suggested that Moses the realist was conjecturing that the episode of the Golden Calf did not get the hankering for idolatry out of the people's systems. But it was also proposed that Moses the visionary recognized that false gods like greed, materialism, lust and jealousy are intrinsic to human nature, and that the struggle to uproot them would go on forever. 
As Reform Jews, we are given a double shot at confronting the message and the paradox of Nitzavim. Whether we were with Moses that day or were not with him, we are reminded that this is simple stuff, not too baffling, not dependent on others to explain. And certainly the words are clear enough: Choose life. Yet we spend hours and days and years wrestling with the concealed and revealed words of Torah. Apparently this is a tale full of sound and fury, signifying Something. In this season of return, as we return twice to this parashah, we are challenged to discover, individually and collectively, what that Something is.

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