Thinking Torah Blog

This Shabbat, we read Parashat Nitzavim. As I've mentioned in years past, we also read this section of Torah on Yom Kippur. We should note that reading Nitzavim is specifically a Reform practice. The traditional reading recounts the rituals of preparation that the High Priest would undergo for his responsibilities on Yom Kippur. I am glad we made this change in Reform tradition. Nitzavim speaks more directly to the lives of Jews today who worship without the sacrificial system of the Temple. For us, having the opportunity to read Nitzavim this Shabbat and then again on Yom Kippur gives us time to consider the Torah portion's central idea: that God and the Jewish people are in covenant with each other, that we need not have physically stood at Sinai, that the covenant made there extends to all Jewish people, those of generations past and those of us alive today.

In the aftermath of the Shoah, much of the Jewish world began asking: "How could something like this happen if we are in covenant with God?" This is a question that Jews have asked in the aftermath of many of the catastrophic events in our history. We still reflect on the destruction of the Temple (which included the death of countless Jews), and that was 2,000 years ago! The Holocaust, even more than 80 years later, continues to echo through Jewish theology and thinking in ways still unfolding. It would have taken another generation or two, at least, to fully grasp the theological and philosophical implications of the Shoah for us. Of course, that was before October 7th and the subsequent war.

In many ways, the reaction to October 7th was a post-Shoah response to the attack. By that I mean: because we have not fully processed the Holocaust, because, as a community, the memory of those years still resides in living people, and the philosophical implications remain unsettled, it is almost as though Israel and the Jewish people around the world responded as if we were still in the Holocaust. Of course, with one significant difference: this time, Israel had immense power. This time, we could destroy our enemy—completely.

Especially in the last few months of this war, theological questions have been raised in the other direction, posing equally challenging issues.

As I read Nitzavim this Shabbat and on Yom Kippur, I won't only be asking, "How can we continue to be in covenant with God if God let the Shoah happen?" I will also be asking, "How can God continue to be in covenant with us if we let Gaza happen?"

I don't know where the philosophers and thought leaders will take us in the years and generations to come, but I do know that this war has changed the Jewish people and the course of Jewish history in deeply significant and dramatic ways. The one answer I am certain I will not give is: "The covenant is over, as is my relationship with Israel." Just as in the wake of the Shoah we found new ways of expressing our covenantal relationship with God, so too will we find new ways once more.

That is why there are still Jews. That is why we are here.