Parashat Nitzavim/Vayelekh and Rosh HaShanah: On Return

A baby in her mother’s womb is taught the whole Torah, according to the Talmud. Then, when she is about to touch the air of the world, an angel strikes her mouth and she forgets it (Niddah 30b).

She forgets, but not entirely. They say that babies develop a taste for the foods that their mothers ate while they were in utero. If a baby has tasted Torah in utero, maybe he retains some special sense, some special feeling and yearning for Torah so that when he learns Torah later in life, the experience has a kind of déjà vu quality. It feels not so much like something new, but like a return to an old familiar place.

Return. Teshuva. This is the Hebrew word describing the process of change referred to in English as “repentance.” But as the Hebrew term implies, the process does not merely look to the past as a place of wrongdoing – a place from which to repent of one’s sins and move forward to a bright new future; the past also becomes a place to return to, an old home.

Teshuva is the process of finding inside oneself that pre-birth place of Torah. It is not the discovery of something new. It is the uncovering of something very old residing inside oneself, a divine spark, the point of contact between oneself and the oldest Being on earth.

Sometimes we have chance sightings of this eternal side of ourselves – whether through a Torah insight, a song or a walk in the woods. How do we know we have hit truth when we read/hear/see/feel it? Because it feels achingly familiar. The best ideas, the ones that feel most true to us, are the ones that somehow express something we already knew but never articulated. In that moment of insight, what we feel is not exactly a sense of novelty or discovery, but a sense of familiarity, of return, of the uncovering of some deep old forgotten truth.

And so if you’re looking to connect to Torah, you don’t have to go far, says this week’s parsha. The Torah is “not in the heavens” nor “over the sea,” but rather karov eleikha hadavar me’od, “the thing is very close to you . . . in your mouth and in your heart.” Look inside yourself. Return to home. It is like the man who goes searching all over the world for treasure only to find that it is buried in his own backyard. We are restless searchers, constantly climbing and reaching, looking for the miracle cure everywhere but inside ourselves, where it is and always has been.

It’s not easy to find that inner point to return to. As the midrash says of Hagar – who didn’t see the well in the desert until God showed it to her -- “We are all blind until God opens our eyes.” That is the function of the shofar on Rosh HaShanah. The blasts that broke down the walls of Jericho thousands of years ago are now called to break down our own exterior barriers – fear and insecurity, stress and anxiety -- to break down those barriers and uncover that point of peace and divine connection that is buried inside us, a faint in utero memory.