Parashat Nitzavim and Rosh HaShanah: Suffering Together

Some weeks all roads point to the same truth.

Last night, my 6-year old niece Ruby, who was visiting our family on her own, was having trouble falling asleep because she was homesick. In the end, what worked was simply to lie next to her as she was crying, being with her in her sadness.

A friend of mine who is going through a period of illness told me this week that she tries to repeat to herself the phrase Imo Anokhi Be’Tzarah. “I am with him in distress,” a phrase referring to God’s ability to reside with the nation of Israel (or with an individual) in its period of suffering. The phrase gives her the comforting knowledge that God is with her in whatever she, too, suffers.

In this week’s parsha, Rashi makes a simllar comment. After asserting that God will disperse the people of Israel for their sins, the Torah goes on to describe how the people will repent and then God will bring them back to the land of Israel. Strangely, as Rashi points out, the word used to refer to God’s return of the people is veshav, meaning, “He will return,” not “He will bring back,” which would have been veheshiv. This strange locution, suggests Rashi (citing the classical rabbis) is designed to tell us that God Himself was in exile together with the people, with them in their distress, so that when the Torah reports their return, it also reports the return of God Himself, having suffered alongside the people.

God’s presence in our suffering is a frequent theme in Esh Kodesh, the work of the Piaseczner Rebbe from the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942 he was able to write: “This is the difference. The pain and grief that a person suffers over his own situation, alone, in isolation, can break him. He may even fall so far that he becomes immobilized by it. But the crying that a person does together with God makes him strong. He cries and takes strength.”

As we approach Rosh HaShanah this seems an important message – the message of Presence, God’s presence in our lives and our own ability to provide such presence for those around us, to know how to simply be with those who are suffering. On Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur we come together to pray about the year that has past and the year that is to come, and each person brings with him his own burdens and sorrows. We come together, reviewing our lives with angst and intensity, to learn to feel God’s presence in our struggles and to learn to be so present for one another. I remember as a child in Cong Shomrei Emunah, sitting next to my mother all day in the back of the synagogue and feeling the weight of the sorrows of all those praying in the room. The room felt heavy with sighs and weeping and they entered into me. We don’t try to solve each others’ problems on these days; we pray together, and in so doing, learn to be present for one another as God Himself is. May we all be inscribed for a year of health, contentment and compassionate Presence and presence.