Nitzavim–Vayelech: Courage, Return, and the Door Noach Opened
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein is the spine of both parshiyot. For Rosh Hashanah week 5786.
Nitzavim: The stance that is already strong
The last Shabbat of the year does not open with a soft word. It opens with a stance. Atem nitzavim hayom kulchem lifnei Hashem Elokeichem: You are standing today, all of you, before Hashem your God. Chief Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein hears the verb before he hears the date. The verse uses nitzavim, which implies standing with strength.
It is not omdim, mere presence. It is planted weight. According to Rashi, this is God’s promise that we will never be destroyed. We will endure throughout history; no matter the difficulties, challenges, and calamities we face, we will still be standing strong in the end. And we are still standing strong.
Rashi’s midrash is the first comfort after the curses of Ki Tavo. Their faces paled. Moshe answers with a fact, not a softer list: you are still here. Egypt did not finish you. The calf did not finish you. The desert did not finish you. Nitzavim is a consolation that has the shape of courage.
Goldstein wrote that sentence in the year after the October 7 massacre, when Jewish communities from Johannesburg to Jerusalem had to decide whether standing was still possible. His answer was the parsha’s answer. We are still standing strong.
Vayelech: The Second Parsha is a Marching Order
In 5786, the two portions are read as one. Standing is not the last word. The next word is motion. Moshe tells Israel and then tells Yehoshua: Chazak ve-ematz. Be strong and courageous. Hashem, your God, goes with you. He will not fail you nor forsake you. That is the second parsha’s charge to every man and every woman who must walk into a battle that is not only of armies.
Goldstein’s teaching on fear belongs here. On Vayishlach, he reads the verse without anesthesia: Yaakov was very afraid, and it distressed him. The danger was real. The fear was real. Our Sages teach that courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it. Yaakov splits the camp, prepares a gift, and prays. Strategy is not unbelief. Prayer is the training ground for trust. Fear and laziness come from the body. Courage comes from the neshama.
Pirkei Avot gives the definition that has to be memorized before any later war of the spirit: Who is mighty? He who conquers his inclination. Yehudah ben Teima adds the emblems: Be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and strong as a lion to do the will of your Father in Heaven. The Shulchan Aruch opens the code of ordinary mornings with that lion. Rise like a lion to serve the Creator.
When Israel went out to battle, the kohen spoke four negations of fear. Israel do not be faint.Men of battle do not fear. Do not panic. Do not be broken before them. Hashem, your God, goes with you to fight for you. Rashi says the four phrases answer four ancient tactics of intimidation: clashing shields, screaming horses, trumpets, and shouts.
Noise is the first weapon. Inner strength is the answer. Goldstein carried Yehoshua 1:6 into the years after October 7: Be strong and courageous. You do not become safe through weakness. You find peace and safety through strength. Weakness is not compassion. Silence before a lie is not piety. Vayelech is the order to move while still standing.
Hayom-Today Spent Forty Years in the Furnace
Nitzavim does not pretend the standing was cheap. Four verses earlier, Moshe said the quiet sentence: Hashem had not given you a heart to know, eyes to see, and ears to hear until this day. Hayom is the name of a strength that had to be grown in heat.
Forty years of manna. Graves in the sand. A generation that could not enter. A new generation that watched and learned. Courage here is not a mood. It is what a person looks like when they have come through a furnace and can finally say the first line of the Ten Words from the inside.
Isaiah speaks to a later furnace with the same grammar of enough. Speak to the heart of Jerusalem. Her term of service is over. Her guilt is paid off. She has received from the hand of Hashem double for all her sins. Double. Not a mild sadness.
A ledger the prophet is willing to read aloud. The people who stand hayom in any century are a people who have already paid. The land and the city do not call them tourists. They call them children whose bill, Isaiah says, has been marked paid, and who are therefore free to come home.
Return in Any Way. Open The Heart Today
The same parsha that plants the monument also writes the return. When all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse, you shall return to your heart, and you shall return to Hashem your God. Hashem will gather you from among all the people.
He will bring you into the land. He will circumcise your heart. Then Moshe lowers the ladder to the ground. This commandment is not too wondrous and not far off. It is not in heaven. It is not across the sea. The thing is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.
Jerusalem and the land are calling. Return in any way. Buy the ticket if you can. Learn one verse if you cannot. Light the candles a grandmother hid. Say the Shema with the word “hayom” inside it. Open the heart. That last act is not a consolation prize. It is the first act the Torah names.
You shall return to your heart. Today. A man or a woman in Amarillo, Johannesburg, or a prison classroom can do that before sundown. Goldstein’s nitzavim is the public name of that inner motion. We are still standing. Therefore, we can still turn.
HaMakom: The Place Where You Are Seen
There is a special time in the design of creation that lets a person occupy a day larger than a clock. The Torah calls one coordinate haMakom, the Place Hashem will choose. Hashem Himself is called HaMakom, the Place of the world, whom the world does not contain.
On the day the soul stands before Him — Rosh Hashanah as kingship and as universal judgment — a person is seen as he is. Not the headline of his failures. The ninety-nine percent that was sent into a world of choice. The hidden things belong to Hashem. The revealed things are for us and our children to do.
Moshe already said the covenant includes those who are not standing here today. Midrash Tanchuma reads the missing bodies as future souls. The Talmud records that Moshe sat in Rabbi Akiva’s later classroom. The Torah’s own hayom is an address, not only a date. To learn, to accept the yoke, to open the heart, is to travel — not by gadget but by the design of a day that was never locked. How could this be reality? Only if the blueprint of creation includes a Place where time is thinner, and a people commanded to stand in it.
Choose Today. Good from Bad. The Choice is in our Hands
Vayelech’s courage has content. Nitzavim names it. See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, so that you and your seed may live. The choice is in our hands now. Not in heaven.
Not after a committee meets. Hayom. Goldstein heard the same chapter as a public ethic: choose life in hospitals, in the protection of the innocent, in the way a nation treats the stranger. The verse is not only private mussar. It is how a landlord-species runs a world that God has promised not to flood again.
Pirkei Avot will not let the choice stay abstract. It is not upon you to finish the work, but you are not free to desist from it. Hillel: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when? The now is hayom. The way this morning is rising like a lion.
The battle a man or a woman faces is often not a border. It is the inclination that wants the curse while blessing the self in the heart, the poisonous root of the parsha. Courage is saying no to that speech. Hope in Hashem. Be strong, and let your heart take courage.
God Closed the Ark. Noach Opened the Door to Tikkun
The courage of Vayelech predates Yehoshua. It is the courage of the first man to open a door onto a repaired world. Fohrman, reading Noach against Genesis 1, shows that the Flood is not only a punishment of persons. The earth itself was corrupt. The earth was filled with violence. God saw the earth, and behold, it was ruined.
Demolition of a house. Then recreation in the order of the days: wind over water, upper waters parted from lower, dry land, plants, birds, animals, and humans. All except the heavenly lights, which were never destroyed. God closed the door of the ark on His world. Noach opened the door to ours.
Meat is permitted. Man becomes landlord. God swears by the rainbow that He will not unmake this world again. The seventh day was already the first sign-covenant with Adam. Shabbat is an everlasting sign that the Creator finished a world and will not treat time as disposable. The new world is a world of tikkun.
Repair is the only option left on the table. That your days and the days of your children may be multiplied upon the land like the days of heaven upon the earth. Heaven on earth is not a slogan for people who wait for God to reopen the sky. It is the assignment given to those who hold the keys.
Hashem will not flood the world. We can still ruin the earth with violence. That is why standing strong is not nostalgia. It is the landlord’s duty. Bring heaven down. Choose good over bad. Open the heart. Open the door.
The Land is Calling. The Monument Is Still On Its Feet
For Zion’s sake I will not be still, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest. Comfort, comfort, My people. The double payment has been named. The gathering of chapter 30 is not a metaphor that expires in the classroom. Jews return in planes and in teshuvah and in the small bravery of a public life that refuses to hide. Goldstein’s sentence after the massacre was not complicated. We are still standing strong. Rashi promised it. Vayelech orders the next step. Chazak ve-ematz. Go in.
A Charge
Be strong and courageous. Not because fear is a sin. Yaakov was afraid. Because fear is not allowed to drive. Rise like a lion. Conquer the inclination. Do not be broken by the noise of shields. Stand as nitzavim: a monument people, witnesses that a covenant cut in Avraham’s flesh and restated on the plains of Moav still has living stones.
Forty years made hayom possible. Double payment has been recorded. The land calls. The heart can open today. God closed the ark. Noach had to open the door. The world is repaired. Like the days of heaven upon the earth. That sentence is a task. It takes strength from within. It takes the neshama Goldstein says is already light, already strong, already purposeful, if we will let it lead the body into the day.
— Hazan Gavriel ben David
Esnoga Beit HaShoavah · Amarillo · Nitzavim–Vayelech 5786