“Don’t let this darkness fool you. All lights turned off can be turned on.” – Noah Kahan, Call Your Mom
On Yom Kippur of 2019 I was ready to die. I was deep in the pits of mental illness. I could not imagine ever being happy.
I could not eat. I was looking forward to Yom Kippur because I would not have to face the pressure of the university dining hall, or the binge sessions at the end of each day after I had starved myself and spent an evening in the gym.
I wanted to die every day, and I had been feeling that way for months already.
I cried my way through Shacharit and Mussaf that morning and when everyone else filed out of the room to take a break before Mincha, I laid down on the floor to die.
It was very clear to me based on the liturgy that some of us would not survive into the next year and I was quite convinced that I was not deserving of another day on Earth.
I was tired of having a body. I wanted to be finished.
As I drifted off to sleep on the floor of Brandeis University’s Sherman Function Hall, I briefly considered the fact that I would be leaving a dead body in the same room as a Sefer Torah, and that was not very considerate of me. But I made peace with that. I said the Shema, and then I gave up.
And when I woke up, I was angry.
In Parashat Nitzavim, which always comes just before the High Holy Days, we are given a choice.
The Israelites are all standing before God – each and every one without exception – being presented with the opportunity to cut a deal with Him that will include not only them but their descendants in perpetuity.
“You stand this day,” reads Deuteronomy 29: 9-13, “all of you, before your God – your tribal heads, your elders, and your officials, every householder in Israel, your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper to waterdrawer – to enter into the covenant of your God, which your God is concluding with you this day, with its sanctions; in order to establish you this day as God’s people and in order to be your God, as promised you and as sworn to your fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”
God makes it very clear that those among the nation who are considering refusing His offer will be cursed along with their descendants. And He then makes it equally clear that those who heed Him and enter into the covenant will be richly rewarded.
What I notice here is that we have a choice. Obviously, the narrative is telling us there is a right choice and wrong choice, but it is a choice nonetheless. God goes on to lay out the choice in the plainest terms:
“I set before you this day life and prosperity, death and adversity.” [Deuteronomy 30:15]
And again:
“I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse.” [Deuteronomy 30:19]
Until this point God has presented an argument. He stated the facts and allowed the people of Israel to draw their own conclusions without explicitly stating a preference of His own.
In the continuation of verse 19, God tells us which option He prefers.
“Choose life.”
God wants us to keep trying to be good people and good Jews. He wants us to be close to Him in whatever ways we can be. He wants us to continue to engage with Him and with the world around us.
“Choose Life”: The biblical story of Jonah
IN THE story of Jonah, which is read on Yom Kippur, this message is doubly driven home.
The story opens with God telling Jonah to warn the people of Nineveh that they will be punished for their wickedness if they do not change their ways soon.
God is not bound by any of our moral or legal standards. He did not have to give this warning. The story of Jonah could just as easily have been a cautionary tale describing the violent destruction of the city of Nineveh.
Instead, we follow a reluctant prophet who himself is given a second chance by God after running away from his responsibilities.
He eventually completes his mission, Nineveh is saved, and Jonah is still not satisfied.
“Please, God,” he says on two separate occasions, “take my life, for I would rather die than live.”
“Are you so deeply grieved?” asks God.
“Yes,” Jonah replies. “So deeply that I want to die.”
Instead of being permitted to die, Jonah was taught a lesson: God would much rather that His people repent and move closer to Him than give up and succumb to destruction. And there will always be a second chance.
Jonah’s tale ends before he can respond to God’s lesson, but we have Parashat Nitzavim to encourage us to make the right choice.
God did not appear to me in a dream or speak to me like He did for the prophets or the Israelites. But in that moment of waking up on the floor of Sherman Function Hall, when I had entirely convinced myself that God would somehow cause me to be struck down in my sleep, the fact of my waking was significant.
I was angry because I knew I would have to make a choice; God would not make it for me.
I could no longer just keep waiting to be struck down where I stood. I would have to take action toward either life or death.
And clearly, we are meant to choose life.
TWO YEARS later, when I was working in a Chabad preschool, another verse from Parashat Nitzavim was brought to my attention as one of the Rebbe’s 12 Pesukim that Chabad children learn by heart: “No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.” (Deuteronomy 30:14)
If you want the authentic Cheder New Haven experience of this verse, sing it in Hebrew to the tune of “Frere Jacques.”
This verse comes just before God lays out the choice between life and death.
In the full passage, it says: “Surely, this instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, ‘Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?’ No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.”
It took time for me to come to terms with the fact that choosing life was within my reach.
For a long time, I would not make plans, even just days ahead, because I could not conceive of the possibility that I would still be living the following day. It seemed too massive an undertaking.
But the burden did lighten eventually. In the words of folk pop singer Noah Kahan: “Don’t let this darkness fool you. All lights turned off can be turned on.”
You just have to put in the work to turn the lights back on. To choose life.
Four years later, after graduating and making aliyah, I still struggle. I am still turning the lights back on, one by one, over and over again after they go dark.
But every time Parashat Nitzavim rolls around I remember that God desperately wants us to live.
And I have to keep living. And so, I wake up each day and turn the lights on again.
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