Miracles and Thanks – Nitzavim
אַתֶּם נִצָּבִים הַיּוֹם כֻּלְּכֶם לִפְנֵי ה' אֱ-לֹקֵיכֶם (דברים כט, ט).
According to the Tur, if there is a chag during the week, it is hinted at in the parsha on the Shabbat preceding it. In this week’s parsha, Nitzavim, the Shabbat before Rosh Hashana, it is not hard to find the hint. Moshe tells Am Yisrael – “You are all standing today היום before Hashem. According to the Zohar Hakadosh when the word היום appears in the Torah, it is referring to Rosh Hashana – היום הרת עולם. Indeed, in a few short days we will all be standing in judgment before HKB”H on יום הדין.
If chas vechalila someone has an impending fateful court case in which they stand to lose their entire fortune, or be imprisoned for the rest of their life, what do they do the night before? They spend all night awake worrying what is going to happen. They are so tense and on edge, nobody can get near them.
On the night before our judgment, where we stand to lose far more than our fortunes, what do Am Yisrael do? …….. We have something closely resembling a Pesach seder! We dress up in our finest clothes, usually newly purchased. We have a banquet with the finest food and drink. We set out a tray of special foods – pomegranate seeds, carrots, dates, beetroot, gourd, sheep/lamb’s head, etc. and on each one we recite a special verse. Are we tense? Are we apprehensive? Quite the opposite, we are celebrating! The following day we may chas vechalila be sentenced not to see out the coming year, but never mind …. “Pass a piece of beetroot – שיסתלקו שונאינו, have another glass of Emerald Riesling”.
So the cynics among you may be saying “Well we don’t know what is going to be the following day, so we might as well enjoy ourselves while we have the chance!” But obviously the “eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die” philosophy is not part of the Jewish belief. So what is going on here?
In our parsha, if Moshe Rabbeinu wanted to say that we are “standing”, why did he not simply say אתם עומדים היום? What is so special about the word נצבים? The term להתייצב does not appear often in the Torah. One notable mention is when Am Yisrael reached Yam Suf, with the Egyptians in hot pursuit. Moshe told Am Yisrael –
הִתְיַצְּבוּ וּרְאוּ אֶת יְשׁוּעַת ה' (שמות יד, יג)
“Stand and witness the salvation of Hashem!”
The word להתייצב does not simply mean to stand, but to stand and witness a miracle. If, in our parsha, Moshe tells Am Yisrael that they are נִצָּבִים הַיּוֹם before Hashem, what he is in fact telling them is that they are standing on Rosh Hashana before Hashem - to witness a miracle!
Chazal say that the fact that Hashem forgives us on Rosh Hashana is in fact a נס. By all rights He should not be forgiving us. When we sin, we do not have the faintest clue what harm we are causing.
The Mefarshim bring a story to illustrate this (with their permission, I will paraphrase it in more contemporary terms).
A thief tries to break into the house of a wealthy person. Unfortunately for the thief, the house is well secured. The door is steel reinforced, the windows are bullet proof, alarms and motion sensors are positioned on every possible angle. The thief figures that a ground approach is out of the question so he decides to rappel from the adjacent building and try get in from the roof, through the chimney. Poor thief however, when he lands on the roof, he discovers that the chimney is also wired up to the wazoo, so he decides to call it a night and try an easier house down the street.
As he is about to make his exit, he notices, out of the corner of his eye, a 2” steel bolt on the floor and remembers that his wife asked him to fix their washing machine which had been acting up lately and what was needed was exactly a 2” bolt like this one. So he unscrews it, pockets the bolt and leaves.
The next morning he is woken to the sound of sirens and a SWAT team surrounding his house. He is arrested – the security cameras caught him on video. He is brought before a judge and charged with causing damage in the sum of 10 million dollars!
“Your honor”, he says to the judge, “10 million dollars??? Have a look at the camera footage – all I did was “take” a 2” bolt from the roof. At a hardware store you can buy one like it for 10cents!”
“Just one 2” bolt !!!??” replies the judge indignantly, “The owner of the house purchased a 2 million dollar antique Venetian crystal chandelier which he had specially flown in by private jet from Italy. The chandelier weighed about one and a half tons, so he had construction workers reinforce the ceiling with 2 meters of concrete through which they drilled a hole and secured a “Jumbo” screw through the concrete to hold up this heavy chandelier. When you removed that 2” bolt on the roof, the entire chandelier came crashing down. It was so heavy it broke through the parquet floor to the level below, where it landed in the kitchen, breaking the owner’s hip bone as he was preparing a midnight snack. Here’s the bill – 1 chandelier, 1 parquet floor, 1 hip replacement surgery, damages and עגמת נפש = 10 million dollars!”
When we sin, what do we say? “Sin? What did I do that was so terrible? OK, so I forgot to say בורא נפשות that day after I had a Magnum double chocolate ice cream. How much was the Magnum? 12 Shekels? So what’s the big deal? OK, so I’ll put 12 Shekels in the pushke and we will call it quits!”
Indeed, what is so terrible?
What is terrible is that by not saying bracha acharona on that ice cream and because Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh La Zeh, we failed to bring down the שפע הא-לוקי down fully that week and instead of raining 12mm that Thursday it only rained 8mm, so only 15 cubic meters of rainwater went through the drainage pipe and not 25 cubic meters. In one of the adjacent offshoots to the pipe was a yellow scorpion nest. If there had been 25 cubic meters of rainwater, it would have flushed the nest into the sewer, but because there was less water, the nest remained intact. One of the scorpions crawled through a crack in the window of the bedroom of one of the neighbors, who had a rough day so he took some sleeping pills to help him sleep. He didn’t feel the sting and only hours later, his wife found him in a coma. He eventually regained consciousness 6 months later, but not before the trauma caused damage to his reproductive system and the family remained childless. If not for that missed bracha acharona, that man would have had a son who would have become a fireman and saved hundreds of other peoples’ lives. You have heard of the “Buttefly Effect?” There is a saying that when a butterfly flaps its wings, on the other side of the world there is an earthquake!
And that is just one missed bracha for a 12 Shekel ice cream! What about the real “doozies”, like when we embarrassed someone in public, spoke lashon harah to the neighbor, were mechalel Shabbat, and far, far worse רחמנא ליצלן!
When HKB”H tallies the reckoning for our זכויות vs. our sins, by all rights He should not simply write down 10cents for a 2” bolt, or 12 Shekels for the ice cream, but the whole “shebang” for all the repercussions as well. With accounting like that, there is no way we can possibly come out in the black!
However that is not how HKB”H does the calculation. When we sin, unlike the civil courts down here on earth, Hashem only charges us 10 cents for the bolt and 12 Shekel for the Magnum. We are not held accountable for the repercussions, although by our actions, we were the מכה בפטיש that caused them.
But more than that, we get “brownie points” for our intentions to do a mitzvah, even though we have not done it yet! Erev Rosh Hashana we make new year’s resolutions – “This year I will undertake to learn 10 minutes of Mishnayot before Maariv every evening”. HKB”H does a calculation – how many years does this person have left to live? 67 years! So 67 years X 365 days X 10 minutes = 4076 hours of learning Mishnayot! Add that to the “plus” column! We haven’t even got past Rosh Hashana yet to start fulfilling that resolution, but HKB”H already chalks it up to our credit, as if we had already done it! With accounting like that it is almost impossible to come out in the red!
HKB”H performs a MIRACLE of accounting, because if He did not, none of us would survive the coming year!
As we well know, it is forbidden to rely on a miracle (Gemara, Pesachim 64b, Kiddushin 39b) and we are obligated do all we can to achieve the same result without a miracle. However Chazal say this is only in a case where we have the power to achieve the result entirely with our own hishtadlut, but in a case where it is clear that without a miracle all is lost, we are allowed to rely on a miracle and Rosh Hashana is such a case.
This is why Rosh Hashana is a celebration! Not exactly like Pesach for a miracle that occurred in the past, but for a miracle that is about to take place. We are banking on this miracle actually coming to fruition! So we dress up in new clothes, we conduct something that closely resembles a Pesach seder. We say שהחיינו and give thanks to HKB”H for all the miracles He has given us in the past (the essence of Mitzvat Habikkurim from last week’s parsha) and the enormous miracle of life He is about to give us!
When someone gives thanks, it is like a Korban Toda!
The Mefarshim say that the word תודה means “thanks”, but it also means “admit” from the lashon of וידוי. The Mefarshim say that giving thanks is the ultimate form of וידוי, which is the precursor to doing tshuva! When a person gives thanks he is admitting and affirming the Malchut of HKB”H, which is essentially the same end result as when a person admits and confesses a sin.
This is why when a person brings a Korban Toda it contains a humungous amount of food, 40 loaves of bread and matza, an entire ox-full of steaks and spare ribs – so that the ba’al habayit will invite lots of people to help share in this banquet - for the express purpose of declaring and affirming HKB”H’s Malchut.
Therefore, the best way a person can do tshuva on Rosh Hashana, is by giving thanks. Gratitude is the ultimate form of tshuva.
I would therefore like to take this opportunity to thank HKB”H for the past year, with its many challenges, but predominantly its many brachot.
This past year Machon Lechem Hapanim became a registered amuta (NPO). We are just now wrapping up the final banking and administrative bureaucracy to begin fundraising. B”H and bli neder this coming year we will begin doing chessed work in earnest and increasing awareness of the Kodashim and the Geulah amongst Am Yisrael. I want to thank the vaad of the amuta, Lauraine, Tanya, Phyllis, Mayer, Eli, Yanki and Menachem for their faith and support in making this vision a reality.
This past year (the first of many B”H), I have been zocheh to pen a weekly shiur on Parshat Hashavua, with unique connections to the Menachot and the Mikdash. I would like to thank all of you who take the time to read and learn the weekly shiur and help pass it on, thus disseminating Torah and the special message of Machon Lechem Hapanim to others around the world.
An enormous bracha that I was zocheh to this past year בסעייתא דשמיא was the completion of my sefer Meir Panim, the first (to my knowledge) sefer kodesh totally dedicated to the subject of the Lechem Hapanim. Now begins the search for a publisher and B”H it will be published this coming year בשעה טובה.
Last but not least -
We tend to focus on the “out of the ordinary” things that happened during the year and inadvertently in doing so, we run the risk of overlooking the true brachot, that lie, not in the extraordinary, but in the little, “mundane”, day to day miracles that almost go unnoticed. Like – enjoying looking up at the cloudless, deep blue sky (the color of the כסא הכבוד) this morning on my way back from shacharit; That old familiar twitch in my hip reminding me I am no longer 32 years old and realizing that getting a little older is OK and actually better than being 32; The expectant, beatific smile from my 17-year-old special angel-in-residence, approaching me for art advice related to a project she is working on; That almost imperceptible, but day-altering light joke from my wife, kicking off the day with a smile; Somehow finding the extra few minutes to finish writing this shiur, in the midst of a numbing pre-Rosh Hashana baking schedule from hell.
All these little moments which make up our lives, that we take for granted – for these I am most grateful.
It is my fervent prayer that HKB”H bless us all with a year of life, good health, פרנסה בשפע without טרחה, like it was in the time of the Mikdash, much nachat from our families, achdut in Am Yisrael, increased consciousness of HKB”H and may He accelerate the coming of the Mashiach and the rebuilding of the Beit Hamikdash בבי"א.
