Parashat Nitzavim-Vayelekh: On the Concept of "Today"

We often feel today is just preparation for tomorrow. I am writing this on the day before school starts. Today we buy supplies and go to orientations. Today is light and fleeting. We rush through it to get to the all-significant tomorrow.

Not so the Torah’s “today.” The Torah’s today is weighty and significant. In Hebrew, the word for today, hayom, means “the day.” It is THE ultimate day.

This week’s double parsha begins with the statement Atem nitzavim hayom. “Today you stand.” Today, the parsha tells us, the people all stand in God’s presence to take on His covenant and become His people.

A midrash on the word hayom elsewhere in Deuteronomy (the word is a constant mantra) tells us that “today” describes the proper attitude one should take toward God and His commandments. One should always feel as if they were newly given “today.” Borrowing from Buddhist terminology, we might say one should be present and mindful in the fulfillment of commandments, be fully alive to the power of that moment, of that hayom. This feeling of presence is also the meaning of the shehecheyanu prayer; we thank God for keeping us alive to see this day; we thank God for the present moment.

But it is not exactly right to say that in the Torah’s view hayom, the present, is all that matters. Rather, encapsulated in the present, if you live it fully, with an awareness of God, are the past and future as well.

The parsha starts by stating that the people are all standing today before God but soon makes it clear that the covenant’s audience is larger than those present only on that “today”: “I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us today before the Lord our God and with those who are not with us here today” (29:13-14). Rashi says, “those who are not with us” refers to future generations. I wonder whether it couldn’t also refer to past generations. The verse before it refers to the covenant made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. My husband’s family has a practice of beginning significant family meals by mentioning “those who are no longer with us.” The practice actually creates a moment in which “those who are no longer with us” are with us. The Torah’s hayom seems similar. It is a sacred “today” in which the past, present and future are somehow merged.

To understand this concept of time, we need to look not just at the word hayom, but also at the word before it, nitzavim, “standing.” The word implies a kind of fixed standing in one place, like a matzevah, a statue. In order to feel the thickness of the past, present and future in today’s moment, we need to do one important thing – stand still, very still, rooted to the ground. Not to lunge forward in our restless pursuit of the future, but to stand absolutely still. To live, for a moment, not horizontally, from Day 1 to Day 2, as we normally do, but vertically, at this moment as it was experienced in the past, a year ago, a century ago, a millennium ago, and at this moment as it will be experienced in the future, a year from now, a century from now, and into eternity.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are especially thick hayom days. They are days when we tend to live in this vertical time-space, when we think not so much of tomorrow but of last Rosh Hashanah, of the Rosh Hashanah before so-and-so was born (what a miracle!), of the Rosh Hashanahs my ancestors spent in the shtetl in Poland, and of the future Rosh Hashanahs we hope for ourselves and others.

There is one other element which is significant in this understanding of hayom -- God. The Torah doesn’t just say we are standing still today. It says we are standing still before God. It is God who grants us this escape from the human framework of horizontal time, this peek into the divine vertical vision of eternity, of a present merged with its past and future. The Lord’s name as it is written but not pronounced (it is too sacred and secret to be pronounced) actually contains within it the word for “being” in the past, the present and the future. That is God’s essence. Unlike each of us, He was, He is, and He will be. What we are doing when we stand still for that moment of vertical eternal time is existing in the divine realm.

The fall is a time of great changes. The weather turns. Students everywhere begin their new journeys. Such changes are exciting, but they can also be frightening and dislocating. Rashi says that Moshe told the people to be nitzavim, “standing,” because he wanted to assure them that during this time of transition from his leadership to that of Yehoshua, they would still feel secure and rooted. Our little moments of hayom, of standing still in the thickness of God’s eternal presence, can provide a similar sense of calm amidst the swirl of change and activity in the world around us.

At the end of each of the days’ prayers on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we say a little poem entitled hayom. On this day, we ask God to bless us, to hear us, and to support us. Hayom te’amtzeinu. Today you make us strong -- today, back through the ages; today, stretching forward into eternity. Hayom te’amtzeinu.