A Dvar Torah Of Parshat Nitzavim

A Dvar Torah of Parshat Nitzavim: Choose Life By Ellen Dannin

Parashat Nitzavim Deuteronomy 29:9 - 30:20 On June 4, 1989, tanks entered Tian-amen Square in Beijing to clear it of the democracy demonstrators who had been massed there for days. The first word I got of the massacre was during my Chinese lesson when my teacher's phone in Troy, Michigan began ringing with the news. Half a world away this event had a profound impact on my life. I was supposed to have gone to Beijing for a year, but after the massacre the Chinese government ended the program. So I did something else, and that "something else" set my life on a wholly new course. My being where I am today is a direct result of the suffering of those people in China. An enormous tragedy and unintended, unimagined consequences that grew out of them far away. And a few years ago, I got an amazing call. A woman identified herself, but the name meant nothing to me. She explained that she had been a student of mine when I was a teaching fellow in Michigan years ago. She told me that I had given her encouragement and that what I had said had changed her life and helped her reach for goals she never would have otherwise. She had tracked me down to thank me. I was humbled and embarrassed in the face of this. I had forgotten her and what I had said all these years. They just hadn't been that significant to me. A small event in one life – a defining one in another. On December 22, 1997, at 6:30 pm, a friend of mine stepped into Goldfinch Street in Mission Hills and was struck by a sixteen year old girl who had just gotten off work. She struck Terry with such force that he went into her windshield. We'll never really know how this happened – was she tired? changing radio stations? speeding to go out to a party with friends? was Terry distracted? Till that moment these two people were strangers. Now I doubt that the girl will ever be able to untangle herself from Terry, get this event out of her mind. I'm confident that from the moment of impact it has sent her life and her family's life in a direction she and they never imagined. But they weren't the only ones affected. Terry was the glue that held a wide circle of people together. Now that he is gone, that circle, that community has fallen apart, and we are all living in a less connected way than before. From December 22 to now, I've thought: what if Terry had been just a minute earlier or later – no, just twenty seconds – maybe even just 5 seconds – all this would have been different. The girl would have zoomed down Goldfinch and never realized she had just

missed a tragedy. Her life would have continued on in its normal -- maybe boring -way. And Terry would have crossed the street unscathed. His friends and family would find long-winded messages in that familiar voice on their answering machines and mutter: Man, that guy can talk. We'd eat his great food, and we'd still be connected. And we'd never know that it could have been any other way. In Nitzavim, we are told that what we are commanded to do is not too hard for us. It is not far off. It is not in heaven or over the sea. No, the thing we are to do is very near to us. It is in our mouths and in our hearts. It is something we have the ability to do. We are told that what we have to do is to make choices -- and not small ones. We have to choose between life and good, death and evil. These are the choices that are in our mouths and in our hearts. These verses tell us that we're not talking about the big things in life, but the choices it gives us seem to be the big choices – life and good, death and evil. What does it mean for how we live our lives? The thing I've been learning about Judaism is that it's a religion of the small things, the small moments, the ordinary and how they are actually the key to transcendence.. It's a religion that says we need to pay attention to these small things and do them right. And that doing the small things right connects us to big things, connects us to the heavens and across the seas. The thing Judaism has made me see is that we can't avoid being in community, so we have to learn how to live with that reality. The Shehechiyanu is a good example of the small and large entangled. We can recite it as: "Thank you for the miraculous act of preserving us to live to see this important day" or we can say it as "We are conscious that merely being alive to see this day -- to see any day -- is a miraculous thing." And if we have understood that, in so many ways, it could have been otherwise, then it certainly is a miracle. At each moment, at each second, in each conversation, in each choice, we have the ability to choose life and good, death and evil. Whatever we choose there will be consequences. These consequences will ripple out from our choices and it may take years and mean crossing great distances before we learn who and what those ripples have touched. Or we may never learn, but that doesn't mean there have been no consequences. It's not just the big stuff -- massacres, crimes, and miracles -- that matters in the world. It's the small stuff, because there are amazing and invisible connections that tie us all together. And Judaism forces us to see this. It makes us live consciously. We don't just eat bread. We bless it, and, in blessing it, we acknowledge its origin in the earth. We don't just drink wine. In blessing it we are forced to be conscious that it came from a vine and to think of the hands and events that caused it to grow there and the hands and actions that brought it to us. Living this way, we are aware that what is in our hearts and in our mouths can be lethal or healing. Life and good, death and evil.

Our tradition has a richness in this constant connection of the mundane with the exalted. Once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere. In reciting "Kol hanshema tehalel yah" we may be saying: "Every soul praises God." But breath and soul are the same words in Hebrew. So the Hebrew can just as reasonably be read to say: "The act of breathing is the act of praising." It is an amazing connection to see that the simple act of breathing, something none of us can live without, each breath we draw which keeps us alive, is fundamentally an act of praising. At every moment we have the choice to see these connections or not see them. To act as if we see and understand them or not. To just breathe and just live as an animal, eating whatever is put in our way. Or to see breathing as praising, to see that we always hold invisible hands in ours. When we live consciously and conscientiously, when we live in each second as we ought to, with intentionality, when we choose life and good and when we do so with the sense of our connectedness we are engaged in the moral repair of this shattered world. We become partners in the work of creation, not looking to the heavens for the answer but, instead, bringing heaven to earth. One small piece at a time. Baruch ata adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam shehechiyanu, vkiyamanu, vhigiyanu lazman hazeh. Ellen Dannin

Added September 26, 2008

Dr. Ellen Dannin is a Professor of Law, Penn State's Dickinson School of Law and a former member of the Ann Arbor Havurah and Dor Hadash in San Diego.