Rabbi Anderson's Divrei Torah

Shabbat shalom! Today is not Shabbat Mevarchim Ha-Chodesh – you may have noticed that we didn’t bless the month of Tishrei before we put the Torah back just now.  And this is odd, given that a new month does in fact begin in the next week. Tishrei is the only month whose arrival we do not announce publicly during the Torah service, but there are many explanations for this custom.  The most practical answer is that Tishrei is the only month whose first day is marked by a well-known holiday. People who aren’t minyan regulars may or may not pay attention to the date of a regular Rosh Chodesh, but if you’re here this morning, either in person or on the livestream, I’m going to guess that you already know that the first day of Tishrei – aka Rosh Hashanah – is beginning on Friday night.[1] Other explanations are more whimsical: for instance, that we don’t want to announce ahead of time when Rosh Hashanah is coming so that the Satan – the heavenly advocate for our prosecution – won’t know exactly when to finish gathering evidence against us for our actions in the past year.[2]  (This requires considerable suspension of belief:  even if you believe in a Satan, can you believe in a Satan who comes to shul on Rosh Hashanah but somehow avoids being on any Jewish email lists?)  My favorite midrashic explanation is attributed to the Baal Shem Tov and turns on the first verse of this morning’s Torah portion. Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem lifnei Adonai Eloheichem “all of you are standing today before the Lord your God.” Hayom, the Baal Shem Tov explained, referred to Rosh Hashanah, because it’s Yom ha-Zikkoron.[3] Nitzavim, “standing,” meant that we have achieved enough merit for God to judge favorably. Thus, our reading of Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, as we always do, is God’s way of blessing the new month of Tishrei.[4] Since God is blessing the new month, we don’t need to; instead, we imitate God’s actions when we bless the other eleven – or, in the coming leap year, twelve – months of the coming year.

            The idea of our actions existing in a kind of reciprocal relationship with God’s actions also appears in a different explanation for Tishrei’s lack of announcement. An early rabbinic midrash[5] on Psalm 81:4, Tiku ba-chodesh shofar, b’keseh l’yom chageinu: “Blow the shofar on the new moon, at the appointed time for our festival day.”  reads keseh not as “appointed time” but as a form of Hebrew kasah (כסה), meaning “covered” or “hidden,” and the verse itself as a reference to Rosh Hashanah, the only holiday that falls on a day when the moon is completely hidden. Since God has “hidden” Rosh Hashanah, the thinking goes, we also refrain from announcing it in advance. Of course, this seems counterintuitive from any non-lunar perspective. Rosh Hashanah is one of our least hidden holidays, featuring widespread synagogue attendance, custom-made greeting cards, special symbolic foods, greetings of Shanah tovah for at least a month in either direction, and the incredibly unstealthy sound of the shofar. Apart from the moon, there is only one hidden element to Rosh Hashanah: God’s judgment. We go into the holiday thinking about our fate in the coming year, and we exit it in exactly the same fashion.  It will be another ten days before we can claim to receive any kind of assurance that God has forgiven our community.  But the theme of hiddenness also runs through today’s double Torah portion: in Parshat Nitzavim, Moses explains that ha-nistarot, or “hidden things,” usually assumed to refer to sins – “the hidden acts are for the Lord our God, but the revealed acts are for us and our children forever, to carry out all the words of this torah” (Deut. 29:28).[6] In Parshat Vayeilech, Moses predicts a time when the Israelites will so anger God that “My anger will flare up against them, and I will abandon them and hide My countenance from them… I will surely have hidden my face on that day.” (Deut. 31:17-18).  The concept of God’s hidden face – hester panim – suggests the troubling idea that God can abandon us. What does it mean for God to hide from us in the same way we try to hide our own transgressions from God? What does it mean to resolve all of this on an upcoming “hidden” holiday?

The parallelism here is no accident.  The closing parshiyot of Deuteronomy presents a God who gets angry enough to ask for a time-out in the relationship with Israel, a God who plans to sow the Promised Land with sulfur and salt.  But this is also a God who relents – who, it seems, performs a sort of divine teshuvah.  This is what I consider the most amazing moment in the Book of Deuteronomy.  In this morning’s first aliyah, we fast-forward through history from standing together in covenant before God to a future in which Israel will commit apostasy, worship idols and abandon the covenant, ending with a glimpse of unimaginably future generations marveling at the destruction of Israel just as they marveled at Sodom and Gomorrah. And then – then – impossibly, wonderfully, the story keeps going. The process of teshuvah, of returning to God, kick-starts history again.  After all these things – after the Israelites have taken their lessons to heart, after they have done teshuvah and returned to God – then God will return to them.  As the parsha explains, “if you turn back to the Lord your God and listen to God’s voice… the Lord your God will return you to your former state and have mercy upon you” (Deut. 30:2-3). It continues by explaining that, contrary to all our understandings, God’s Torah not up in the heavens; it is not beyond reach; it is not beyond the sea.  It is, in fact, the opposite of “hidden.” The teaching – the Torah – is in our own mouths and hearts. 

Going into Rosh Hashanah, where our liturgy emphasizes again and again that God is Sovereign, Judge, and Creator, the Torah offers us a shockingly direct message of human empowerment. We have the power to imitate God, to change and restart human history, to internalize the Torah, inspire God to imitate us in our teshuvah. Or perhaps, as the sixteenth-century Alshikh suggests, teshuvah is a process that requires human agency to begin, and then God will complete it, even though we may feel that we are doing all the work.[7] In any close partnership, it can be difficult to identify which partner did which element of the work, and if there is a falling-out, there’s almost always a question of who started it and who is going to end it. This week our Torah is telling us that if we feel estranged from God and from Judaism, it’s our job to start the process of return. The Torah is in our mouths, in our hearts. And, formal blessing or no formal blessing, we already know when Rosh Hashanah will start. We know that God will turn back to us in response to our turning back to God. This is the promise that we take into Tishrei: that teshuvah works, and that we are the ones who can start the process – all of us, standing (or sitting) here, today. God has re-emerged from and within hiddenness to start off the month of Tishrei, and we are challenged to emerge from within our individual hiddennesses to do the same.  L’shanah tovah tikateivu