Still Standing, Still Becoming - Parashat Nitzavim-Vayelech

“You are standing today, all of you, before Hashem your G’d.”

These words arrive immediately after the Torah’s tokhachah, after Moshe describes exile, devastation, hunger, displacement, suffering, and the many forms that national catastrophe can take. Then the Torah gathers Israel before Moshe and says something remarkably and simply inspiring: 

Atem nitzavim hayom. You are standing today.

We arrive at these parashot during Elul, with Rosh Hashanah approaching and the accounting of another year beginning. We examine our choices, our relationships, our responsibilities, and the ways our lives have unfolded. Alongside that accounting comes another sacred recognition: we are here.

Another year has passed, and we have arrived at this moment together. We have carried whatever this year placed upon our shoulders, and now we stand before God with the capacity to begin again.

Atem nitzavim hayom.

Those words carry another weight when we hear them as African Americans and as African American Jews.

Our history contains generations of displacement, violence, separation, resistance, rebuilding, and renewal. Our ancestors endured conditions that sought to fracture families, erase histories, restrict freedom, and diminish human dignity. Through those generations, people continued to create families, preserve memory, cultivate faith, pursue education, establish institutions, make music, tell stories, and imagine futures for people who had yet to be born.

Our Jewish history carries its own generations of exile and destruction, with communities repeatedly uprooted and rebuilt across different lands and different centuries. Eidot CHeMDaT”A Jewish life carries another layer of historical experience, shaped by the particular realities of Black life in America and by the work of creating Jewish community within that history.

Through all of it, people continued to stand.

That standing deserves recognition because every generation receives something from the generations that preceded it. We inherit names, melodies, stories, practices, memories, lessons, wounds, hopes, and responsibilities. We become the evidence that something was carried successfully across time.

Atem nitzavim.

We are standing because somebody carried something forward.

That brings us to another command in these parashot: haqhel, the great gathering that took place every seven years when the people assembled in Jerusalem to hear the Torah.

The Torah commands, “Gather the people—the men, the women, and the little ones.”

The inclusion of infants is especially striking. The youngest members of the community could not yet understand the Torah reading, yet their presence belonged within the gathering. The tradition understood their participation as part of the transmission of Torah itself.

A baby sitting among thousands of Jews does not yet comprehend the words being spoken. That child can nevertheless experience something essential: these are my people, this is my gathering, this is the world into which I have been born.

Haqhel teaches us that continuity begins long before comprehension.

Our children need more than information about who we are. They need encounters with our people, our stories, our traditions, our struggles, our accomplishments, and our responsibilities. They need to know the generations whose work made their own lives possible. They need to encounter Jewish life as something living, communal, demanding, joyful, and worthy of their participation.

That responsibility becomes especially important for communities whose histories have so often been overlooked, distorted, or left outside the dominant telling of Jewish and American history.

Our children deserve the full story.

They deserve to know the people who stood before them, the communities that survived and rebuilt, the Jewish traditions carried by Eidot CHeMDaT”A Jewry across generations and circumstances, the struggles that shaped us, the accomplishments that strengthened us, and the work that remains in our hands.

Most importantly, they deserve to know that they have a place within the story and a responsibility within its future.

That is the work of haqhel: gathering everyone into the presence of Torah and allowing each generation to encounter the inheritance that belongs to it.

Gathering includes the infant who cannot yet understand, the child who is beginning to learn, the young adult discovering what Jewish life means, the elder carrying decades of memory, and every generation between them. The entire community becomes part of the act of transmission because Torah survives through people who receive it, embody it, teach it, and carry it forward.

As we approach Rosh Hashanah, “Atem nitzavim” becomes a declaration for this particular moment in our lives. We stand before God carrying generations behind us and generations ahead of us. Our presence represents those who preserved something precious long enough for us to receive it, while our choices determine what the next generation will receive from us.

This is where standing becomes responsibility. The question of Elul therefore reaches beyond the individual soul. Alongside the familiar questions of What have I done? Who have I become? What must I repair? stands another question that belongs to the entire community:

What will remain because we were here?

Will our children know the story?

Will they recognize themselves within Jewish history?

Will they understand the struggles their ancestors endured and the achievements they created?

Will they know what it means to carry Jewish life as African Americans, with all of the particular history, responsibility, beauty, and complexity that such an inheritance contains?

Will they understand what G’d asks of them as the next generation?

Haqhel gives us an answer through the simple act of bringing everyone together. We bring the children because they belong to the story before they can fully understand it, and we teach them because belonging eventually grows into responsibility.

That is how a people continues.

That is how standing becomes continuity.

We are standing today, all of us.

We stand because generations before us carried us here, and we stand with the responsibility to carry something forward for those who will come after us. The work of this generation therefore reaches beyond preserving what we inherited. It includes making that inheritance sufficiently alive, meaningful, and accessible that our children will recognize themselves within it and choose to carry it further.

As Rosh Hashanah approaches, may we recognize the gift contained in our continued presence and the responsibility that accompanies it. May we honor the generations whose perseverance made our own lives possible, while giving our children the knowledge, memory, Torah, and sense of purpose that will allow them to become the next generation standing before G’d.

Because the Torah gives us the words we need:

Atem nitzavim hayom.

You are standing today.

And when the next generation gathers, may they be able to say the same.

Shabbat shalom.