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Being ThereShabbat Nitzavim 5765September 30, 2005Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon Do any of you remember a wonderful film from about 25 years ago called "Being There"? It starred Peter Sellers and Melvyn Douglas--who were both Jewish, by the way--and was based on a novel by controversial Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosinski. It was about a mentally challenged middle aged man trained as a gardener who finds himself, accidentally, suddenly enshrined as the economic and social guru of the president of the United States and a media icon. It's about, well being there, being in the right place at a particular time. You could say that two other films, Woody Allen's Zelig and the classic Forrest Gump were more or less modeled on Being There, more fine examples of how sometimes just showing up is all that matters. We
can see many examples of this phenomenon in our own lives: people who seem to
succeed just by being in the right place at the right time.
It's certainly not true that most of us are just taking up space in
this world, for everyone is created in the image of God... but there are times
when you do wonder a little bit about whether some folks have achieved great
heights simply by, well, showing up. But
perhaps this isn't the right approach to the question of what it means to
simply be there. Without
venturing too far into Zen Buddhism--or, as we say on the Too Jewish Radio
Show, Zen Judaism--perhaps we should explore what simply being present, truly
present, can mean in our world. For
example, God's own name, the Tetragrammaton, the holiest name for the Holy
One, is Yud Hay Vav Hay--a name made up of the past, present, and
future tense of the verb to be. As
the hymn Adon Olam puts it, hu hayah, hu hoveh, v'hu yihyeh--God is,
God was, God will be. The
essential quality of God, the holiest description of the Creator of the
universe, is existence--that is, presence. God is, and while that might not be
enough of a tangible depiction for some, it is a central element of God's
identity. Ehyeh asher ehyeh,
God tells Moses: I will be what I will be, I am what I am.
If that is God's primary nature, being there must be pretty important. This
weekend we are celebrating the final Shabbat of the year, which means that our
Torah portion is one of the great sections of the entire year, Nitzavim: you
stand her today, all of you, the oldest to the youngest, from the wealthiest
to the poorest, the most famous to the humblest, the leaders of your community
and the strangers visiting with you. You
are all part of the covenant with the Lord your God.
You, and every other generation to come who will be descended from you.
This great berit, this covenant affirms that you will be God's
people, and God will be your Lord. This
universal covenant affirms that we are part of a profound and eternal
tradition, a connection to our ancestors that will be carried forward to our
descendants. Each of us present
tonight, every one of us who will join together on Monday and Tuesday for the
new year of Rosh Hashanah, all of us are part of this remarkable compact.
It is an extraordinarily democratic and egalitarian agreement with God,
a berit that is shared with everyone regardless of gender or age:
children and women stand with men here, not always the case at the time of the
Torah--or even today. So
it's a very special covenant. But
what is the content of the mitzvah that we are now to observe? At
the climax of our Torah portion we are told ki hamitzvah hazot asher anochi
m'tzav'cha hayom, lo nifleit hi mimcha--Look, this mitzvah that I command
you today is not to awesome for you, and it's not beyond your reach.
It's not in the heavens that you should say "Who among us can go
up to the heavens and take it for us and teach it to us so that we may do
it?" It's not across the sea
that you should say "Who among us can cross over the sea and bring it
back to us so that we may do it." No,
it's very close to you, already in your mouth and in your heart to do it. As
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner says--he's present on the Too Jewish Radio Show this
Sunday, by the way--"So the Torah is not somewhere else.
It's already in us. We're
made of it... Torah is already coded into our protoplasm, our DNA.
And that's why it feels so good to live by the Torah, the way of all
being: we're just doing what we've been designed for from the very
beginning." Perhaps
the mitzvah that Nitzavim speaks about is no more than becoming aware
of the presence of Torah in our midst--or, more precisely, of the presence of
God in the here and now. In this
season we prepare for our Teshuvah, our return and repentance.
But if God is here right now, then Teshuva is a way of becoming
aware that Torah is in our mouths and hearts.
As Kushner adds, this may be the mother of all mitzvot, all
commandments--for all the other commandments are merely human refractions of
the one mitzvah, the awareness of God's presence.
And teshuvah simply means God saying "Return to Me, again
become aware of me always in your life." Our
Christian friends speak of something called the "Ministry of
presence". It's the way in
which we bring consolation to those who are terribly ill, or severely wounded
by life, at a time when words fail. We
help solely by being present. By
being there. For when we are
there for them, we are truly living out the notion of being created b'tzelem
Elohim, in the image of God. Our
presence reminds them of God's presence in their lives.
Just as we are there, God is there. We
need that reminder, too. And
so, in this season of teshuvah, we seek to be reminded of God's
presence in our lives. Ruth Brin
has a beautiful poem entitled "A sense of Your presence." Among
our many appetites May
we come to understand what being there really means, in these coming days of
Awe. And may we be blessed with
the awareness of God's permanent presence, and our own share in creating
holiness. |
