This week’s Parsha, Nitzavim, begins with the words, “Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem” — you, the nation of Israel, are standing here today, all of you.
Nitzavim is usually translated as “standing,” but it means more than simply being physically present. It carries a sense of standing firmly, of being present and established.
The Torah then goes on to describe the heads of the tribes, the tribes themselves, and the entire nation.
So the first question is: Why does the Torah use the word nitzavim? Why not simply say, “Atem kan” — you are here?
The question becomes even stronger when we look at what surrounds this statement. The Torah speaks about the terrible consequences that can come upon Am Yisrael if we fail to listen to Hashem and fail to do what we are supposed to do. It speaks about war, famine and other very difficult things that can happen to the Jewish people.
If our remaining in the Land and our success are dependent upon our actions, why does the Torah make such an absolute statement: “Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem” — you are standing here today, all of you?
Why doesn’t it say, “You will stand here if you keep the Torah”?
That would seem to make more sense.
The answer is that, yes, Bnei Yisrael have to work on themselves. The nation has to work on itself. There are consequences to our actions. It really is that simple.
Hashem tells us that if we do what we are supposed to do, there will be blessing. There will be food, security and success. If we don’t, things will not be wonderful.
Some of the curses described in the Torah are horrific. They remind us of some of the darkest periods in Jewish history, including the Holocaust.
But those consequences do not mean that Am Yisrael ceases to exist.
That is the importance of “Atem nitzavim.”
We are still here.
The Torah then says:
“V’haya ki yavo alecha kol hadevarim ha’eleh, habracha v’haklalah” — when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse that Hashem placed before you.
Hashem is telling us in advance what will happen. We are not supposed to be surprised.
If famine comes, or if we begin losing wars, it is a sign that something has to be fixed. It doesn’t mean we are evil. It means we have to look at ourselves and correct what needs correcting.
That is the purpose of punishment in Judaism.
In the Western world, punishment can simply mean that you did something wrong and now you are going to pay for it. You go to jail and you are punished.
In Judaism, punishment is supposed to be corrective.
The klalah does not come simply so that Hashem can hurt us. It comes so that we should wake up and say, “We understand. Something is wrong. We have to fix ourselves.”
And what happens after that?
The Torah tells us that we will wake up in the places to which Hashem has scattered us.
In other words, Am Yisrael will be spread throughout the world, and eventually we will realize: We don’t belong there. That is not our home.
Thank God, America has been very good to the Jews. Europe was also very good to the Jews during certain periods before the Holocaust.
But even when things are good, it is still not home.
If you go to Disneyland, or you spend a weekend in a beautiful hotel, you can have a wonderful time. You appreciate the hotel. You thank the staff. You enjoy yourself.
But you know it is a hotel.
It is not home.
That is the situation of the Jewish people outside the Land of Israel.
We can live comfortably. We can appreciate the countries that treat us well. We can thank them and contribute to those societies.
But ultimately, it is still a hotel.
The Land of Israel is home.
Hashem tells us that being scattered throughout the nations is not the prize. It is part of the punishment.
That doesn’t mean life outside Israel always has to be terrible. America can be a wonderful place.
But eventually the Jewish people are supposed to wake up and realize where we belong.
The Torah continues:
“V’shavta ad Hashem Elokecha v’shamata b’kolo” — you will return to Hashem your God and listen to His voice.
Eventually we realize that it is time to come back.
It is time to come back spiritually, to our traditions and our Torah.
And it is also time to come back physically, to our Land.
Then comes one of the most incredible prophecies in the Torah — a prophecy that we are watching unfold in our own generation.
“V’shav Hashem Elokecha et shevutcha v’richamecha, v’shav v’kibetzcha mikol ha’amim” — Hashem will return your captivity, have mercy upon you and gather you from all the nations where He scattered you.
“Im yihyeh nidachacha biktzei hashamayim” — even if you are scattered to the ends of the heavens.
“Misham yikabetzcha Hashem Elokecha umisham yikachecha” — from there Hashem will gather you, and from there He will take you.
“Veheviacha Hashem Elokecha el ha’aretz asher yarshu avotecha” — Hashem will bring you to the Land that your forefathers possessed.
You will come back, and it will be good for you in the Land.
Every morning in davening we say the bracha of Kibbutz Galuyot:
“Teka b’shofar gadol l’cheiruteinu” — sound the great shofar for our freedom.
“V’sa nes l’kabetz galuyoteinu” — raise a banner to gather our exiles.
“V’kabtzeinu yachad me’arba kanfot ha’aretz” — gather us together from the four corners of the earth.
And we conclude by blessing Hashem as the One who gathers the dispersed of His people Israel.
Why do we specifically speak about the dispersed?
Think about Jews who were trapped behind the Iron Curtain thirty years ago. They could not simply leave.
Think about Ethiopian Jewry. They needed the State of Israel to come and rescue them.
Those are Jews who were truly dispersed, with no easy way to return.
And yet they came home.
We are literally watching Jews return from the four corners of the earth.
That is the fulfillment of the promise in this week’s Torah portion.
This also helps us understand what it means when we call Am Yisrael the Am Hanivchar, the Chosen Nation.
People sometimes interpret that as saying, “We’re better than everyone else.”
That completely misses the point.
Being chosen is primarily about responsibility.
Think of an honors class. The students in an honors class are expected to do more. More is demanded of them.
That is what being the Chosen Nation means.
It does not simply mean that we are better than everyone else. It means that more is expected of us.
When we say the blessing in the morning thanking Hashem for not making us a Gentile, that also does not mean that we are saying we are better.
It means that we have more commandments to keep.
That is why when someone comes and says he wants to convert to Judaism, our response is essentially: Are you sure?
Why would you want to take all of this upon yourself?
There are 613 commandments, plus an enormous body of Oral Law.
You can’t eat a cheeseburger. You can’t put butter on your steak, which is probably delicious.
Why convert?
A non-Jew can be a righteous person by keeping the Seven Noahide Laws.
But this week’s Torah portion is specifically speaking to Am Yisrael.
And it says: “Atem nitzavim.”
You are still standing.
Think about what the Jewish people have survived.
In Egypt, we endured 210 years of slavery. Pharaoh threw Jewish baby boys into the Nile. Families were destroyed. Men and women were separated. It was a horrific period in our history.
And yet, at the end of it, Hashem took us out of Egypt through Moshe Rabbeinu.
Interestingly, when we tell the story in the Pesach Haggadah, Moshe Rabbeinu is barely mentioned.
Why?
Because we do not want people to make the mistake of thinking that Moshe was ultimately responsible for taking us out of Egypt.
Hashem took us out.
At the same time, of course we honor Moshe Rabbeinu. He was the human being through whom Hashem brought about the redemption.
The same thing is true today.
When the Torah says that Hashem will gather us from the four corners of the earth, some people seem to imagine that a giant hand will suddenly come down from Heaven, pick everyone up and deposit them in Israel.
That is not how Hashem normally works.
Hashem did not need Moshe Rabbeinu to take us out of Egypt. He chose to work through Moshe.
And today Hashem is working through history, through people and through the State of Israel to bring the Jewish people home.
I have friends where American Jews are marrying Ethiopian Jews.
Think about what that means.
Jews whose families came from completely different corners of the world are meeting in the Land of Israel.
That is literally Kibbutz Galuyot.
We are witnessing miracles in modern times.
Shimon Peres
I also want to say a few words about the funeral of Shimon Peres.
I have said this before, and I will say it again because I think it is extremely important:
Political disagreement should never become personal hatred.
We all have political differences. Some people are on the Right, some are on the Left and some are in the center.
We can argue. We can argue passionately. We might even scream at each other.
But at the end of the day, if I am in uniform and the person I am arguing with is in uniform, we are going to take a bullet for each other.
That is the bottom line.
I was speaking to someone and asked him whether he would give blood to someone with whom he strongly disagreed politically.
He said, “Of course.”
I said, “Then you don’t hate him.”
If you truly hated him, you wouldn’t give him your blood.
Political disagreement is not supposed to be about personal hatred.
That brings us to Shimon Peres.
May he rest in peace. Yehi zichro livracha.
Shimon Peres was unquestionably part of the founding generation of the State of Israel.
He played an enormous role in establishing Israel’s nuclear capability.
He served as prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister and president of Israel.
Nobody can take any of that away from him.
The issue is not whether Shimon Peres accomplished great things for Israel. He did.
The issue is understanding why so many of the world’s political leaders came to his funeral and what exactly they were honoring.
I do not consider Abu Mazen a VIP. I do not consider Obama a VIP. And I certainly do not consider every foreign leader who arrived in Israel someone whose approval Israel should automatically value.
But I was happy that they came.
And one of the most extraordinary moments was hearing Avinu Malkeinu sung in front of the assembled world leaders.
That tefillah, during these special days of the Jewish calendar, being sung publicly in front of leaders from around the world was something extraordinary.
But we still have to understand why they came.
Obama did not come because Shimon Peres had been president of Israel.
He did not come because Peres had been prime minister, foreign minister or defense minister.
And he certainly did not come because Shimon Peres helped build Israel’s nuclear capability.
In fact, many of those leaders would have opposed some of those very accomplishments.
They came because of the political vision Shimon Peres represented in his later years.
They came because his ideology of making agreements with Israel’s enemies was closely aligned with their own worldview.
That is why they came.
You could hear it in the speeches.
The focus was overwhelmingly on Oslo and on Peres’ vision of peace.
Beginning with the Oslo process, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Yossi Beilin and other leaders of the Israeli Left made an agreement with Yasser Arafat.
They gave him weapons.
They gave him territory.
They gave him power.
And perhaps most importantly, they gave legitimacy to a Palestinian national movement.
In my view, that represented a profound change.
Even Golda Meir, herself a leader of the Labor Party, had said that there was no distinct Palestinian people in the national sense.
But with Oslo, Israeli leaders themselves recognized and empowered that national identity and created an expectation that portions of the Land of Israel would eventually become part of a separate Palestinian entity.
And this is not an argument about whether we should want peace.
Everybody wants peace.
I certainly want peace.
I have seen the face of war. It is not a pretty sight.
But wanting peace does not mean that every agreement labeled “peace” actually produces peace.
If your definition of peace requires dismantling parts of your own country and empowering people who continue to seek your destruction, that is not peace.
Maybe it is giving away the country piece by piece, but it is not peace in the real sense of ending the conflict.
Unfortunately, Shimon Peres and others on the Israeli Left made agreements with people who had spent their lives fighting Israel.
Arafat appeared at the United Nations carrying a gun.
The PLO Charter called for the destruction of Israel.
The organizations around him were responsible for the murder of Jews, including attacks such as the murder of Leon Klinghoffer and the massacre of children at Ma’alot.
And Israel gave these people weapons in the hope that they would use those weapons to police their own population and protect Israelis rather than attack them.
I thought that was a terrible mistake.
There is also an irony here.
Many liberals around the world insist that giving people weapons is dangerous.
Yet when Peres and Rabin gave weapons to people involved in terrorism, suddenly this was described as courageous peacemaking.
People said, “He was brave. He was making peace.”
I disagree.
Giving weapons to your enemies and hoping they will use them to protect you is not bravery.
It is foolish.
That explains why many liberal world leaders came to Peres’ funeral.
But Abu Mazen came for a different reason.
Abu Mazen is not a liberal.
I believe Abu Mazen came because Shimon Peres was one of the last members of Israel’s founding generation who retained enormous prestige within Israeli society while still being prepared to support the kinds of concessions Abu Mazen wanted.
Peres was respected.
People listened to him.
And he continued to advocate a political vision that Abu Mazen believed could eventually produce the concessions he wanted from Israel.
With Peres gone, Abu Mazen lost an important Israeli voice.
Perhaps Abu Mazen also came for public relations.
People saw him at the funeral and said, “Look how courageous this is. Look how moderate he is.”
But what exactly was courageous about showing up at a funeral?
This is a man who has refused to recognize Israel as the Jewish state and who has made statements encouraging hostility toward Jews in Jerusalem.
His attendance at Peres’ funeral does not erase any of that.
There was another revealing aspect of the funeral.
The Arab parties in Israel chose not to attend.
And they were very clear about why.
Shimon Peres was being described as one of the founding fathers of the State of Israel.
To them, the establishment of Israel itself is a tragedy.
So they did not want to attend the funeral of someone being honored for helping create the State of Israel.
These are people who sit in Israel’s Knesset and enjoy political representation like everyone else, yet some of them regard the creation of the country whose parliament they sit in as a tragedy.
Why Israel tolerates that is something I do not understand.
What bothers me is seeing the Israeli press and much of the public interpret the enormous international turnout at Peres’ funeral as an outpouring of love for Israel.
It was not.
Much of it was an outpouring of support for a particular political ideology.
Some people responded that there should be a time when politics stops.
“The man died. Let people mourn.”
I agree.
There should be a time when politics stops.
I wish Shimon Peres could simply have been mourned by the nation as one of the people who helped build the State of Israel.
Unfortunately, much of the funeral itself became political.
From Obama down, speech after speech focused on a particular political vision.
People spoke about Peres’ chazon, his vision, and his legacy.
So we have to ask: What exactly was that legacy?
Certainly his role in building Israel’s defense establishment and nuclear capability.
Certainly his service as defense minister, foreign minister, prime minister and president.
Those are enormous accomplishments.
But if we are talking about his political legacy in his later years, we also have to look honestly at the results.
Shimon Peres spoke repeatedly about creating a “New Middle East.”
Well, we certainly got a new Middle East.
Before Oslo, Israel dealt largely with rocks and simpler forms of terrorism.
After Israel armed the Palestinian Authority, we had to deal with guns.
Later we had to deal with rockets.
Things that had barely been imagined as part of the conflict became part of our reality.
We reached the point where two Israeli soldiers killed in the Gaza war were being held in Gaza, and Israel did not have the ability simply to go in and bring them home.
That reality did not exist before.
If the legacy is the New Middle East, then yes, we got a New Middle East.
But it was not a better Middle East.
In the decade after Oslo, more Israelis were killed by terrorism than in the decades immediately preceding Oslo.
That has to be part of the discussion as well.
And yet, after saying all of that, I will repeat what I said at the beginning:
Shimon Peres was one of the founding fathers of the State of Israel.
May he rest in peace.
His legacy is much greater than the political mistakes I believe he made in the later years of his life.
That is what I choose to remember him for.
Political disagreement does not have to become personal hatred.
A Year of Victory and Real Peace
I want to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Shana Tova U’metuka.
We should have a happy year, a sweet year, a year of victory and a year of real peace.
Not false peace that brings danger and death.
We have seen too many times what happens when Israel reaches out for peace toward people who do not actually want peace.
Whether it was Oslo, the Gaza disengagement or Hebron, every time we surrendered something while the other side remained committed to fighting us, we paid a price.
So this year should be a year of victory and peace.
Because sometimes victory is what makes peace possible.
Egypt ultimately made peace with Israel after the wars in which the Arab world came to understand that Israel could not simply be destroyed militarily.
Jordan understood that it had no realistic path to defeating Israel and eventually made peace as well.
Only when your enemies understand that they cannot defeat you does genuine peace become possible.
The same principle can be seen in World War II.
Peace did not come because the Allies politely asked Nazi Germany to stop.
Peace came after Nazi Germany was decisively defeated.
Berlin fell. The Nazi regime was destroyed.
Only then did peace come.
That does not mean we want war.
It means that sometimes war is forced upon us, and when that happens, there has to be a distinction between the aggressor and the victim.
I say this all the time:
The fact that the Arabs lose a war does not automatically make them the victims.
The victim is the side that was attacked.
If somebody attacks you and you successfully defend yourself, the fact that you won does not make you the aggressor.
It makes you the victor.
That is a very important distinction.
May this be a year of victory, a year of real peace and a year in which the Jewish people continue returning home.
Shana Tova.