A Dvar Torah of Parshat Nitzavim: Choose Life By Ellen Dannin

Parashat Nitzavim
Deuteronomy 29:9 - 30:20

On June 4, 1989, tanks entered Tian-amen Square in Beijing to clear it of the democracy
demonstrators who had been massed there for days. The first word I got of the massacre
was during my Chinese lesson when my teacher's phone in Troy, Michigan began
ringing with the news. Half a world away this event had a profound impact on my life. I
was supposed to have gone to Beijing for a year, but after the massacre the Chinese
government ended the program. So I did something else, and that "something else" set
my life on a wholly new course. My being where I am today is a direct result of the
suffering of those people in China.

An enormous tragedy and unintended, unimagined consequences that grew out of them
far away.

And a few years ago, I got an amazing call. A woman identified herself, but the name
meant nothing to me. She explained that she had been a student of mine when I was a
teaching fellow in Michigan years ago. She told me that I had given her encouragement
and that what I had said had changed her life and helped her reach for goals she never
would have otherwise. She had tracked me down to thank me. I was humbled and
embarrassed in the face of this. I had forgotten her and what I had said all these years.
They just hadn't been that significant to me.

A small event in one life – a defining one in another.

On December 22, 1997, at 6:30 pm, a friend of mine stepped into Goldfinch Street in
Mission Hills and was struck by a sixteen year old girl who had just gotten off work.
She struck Terry with such force that he went into her windshield. We'll never really
know how this happened – was she tired? changing radio stations? speeding to go out to
a party with friends? was Terry distracted?

Till that moment these two people were strangers. Now I doubt that the girl will ever be
able to untangle herself from Terry, get this event out of her mind. I'm confident that
from the moment of impact it has sent her life and her family's life in a direction she and
they never imagined.

But they weren't the only ones affected. Terry was the glue that held a wide circle of
people together. Now that he is gone, that circle, that community has fallen apart, and
we are all living in a less connected way than before.

From December 22 to now, I've thought: what if Terry had been just a minute earlier or
later – no, just twenty seconds – maybe even just 5 seconds – all this would have been
different. The girl would have zoomed down Goldfinch and never realized she had just
missed a tragedy. Her life would have continued on in its normal -- maybe boring --
way.

And Terry would have crossed the street unscathed. His friends and family would find
long-winded messages in that familiar voice on their answering machines and mutter:
Man, that guy can talk. We'd eat his great food, and we'd still be connected. And we'd
never know that it could have been any other way.

In Nitzavim, we are told that what we are commanded to do is not too hard for us. It is
not far off. It is not in heaven or over the sea. No, the thing we are to do is very near to
us. It is in our mouths and in our hearts. It is something we have the ability to do. We
are told that what we have to do is to make choices -- and not small ones. We have to
choose between life and good, death and evil. These are the choices that are in our
mouths and in our hearts.

These verses tell us that we're not talking about the big things in life, but the choices it
gives us seem to be the big choices – life and good, death and evil. What does it mean
for how we live our lives?

The thing I've been learning about Judaism is that it's a religion of the small things, the
small moments, the ordinary and how they are actually the key to transcendence.. It's a
religion that says we need to pay attention to these small things and do them right. And
that doing the small things right connects us to big things, connects us to the heavens
and across the seas. The thing Judaism has made me see is that we can't avoid being in
community, so we have to learn how to live with that reality.

The Shehechiyanu is a good example of the small and large entangled. We can recite it
as: "Thank you for the miraculous act of preserving us to live to see this important day"
or we can say it as "We are conscious that merely being alive to see this day -- to see
any day -- is a miraculous thing." And if we have understood that, in so many ways, it
could have been otherwise, then it certainly is a miracle.

At each moment, at each second, in each conversation, in each choice, we have the
ability to choose life and good, death and evil. Whatever we choose there will be
consequences. These consequences will ripple out from our choices and it may take
years and mean crossing great distances before we learn who and what those ripples
have touched. Or we may never learn, but that doesn't mean there have been no
consequences.

It's not just the big stuff -- massacres, crimes, and miracles -- that matters in the world.
It's the small stuff, because there are amazing and invisible connections that tie us all
together.

And Judaism forces us to see this. It makes us live consciously. We don't just eat bread.
We bless it, and, in blessing it, we acknowledge its origin in the earth. We don't just
drink wine. In blessing it we are forced to be conscious that it came from a vine and to
think of the hands and events that caused it to grow there and the hands and actions that
brought it to us. Living this way, we are aware that what is in our hearts and in our
mouths can be lethal or healing. Life and good, death and evil.
Our tradition has a richness in this constant connection of the mundane with the exalted.
Once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere.

In reciting "Kol hanshema tehalel yah" we may be saying: "Every soul praises God."
But breath and soul are the same words in Hebrew. So the Hebrew can just as
reasonably be read to say: "The act of breathing is the act of praising." It is an amazing
connection to see that the simple act of breathing, something none of us can live without,
each breath we draw which keeps us alive, is fundamentally an act of praising.

At every moment we have the choice to see these connections or not see them. To act as
if we see and understand them or not. To just breathe and just live as an animal, eating
whatever is put in our way. Or to see breathing as praising, to see that we always hold
invisible hands in ours.

When we live consciously and conscientiously, when we live in each second as we

ought to, with intentionality, when we choose life and good and when we do so with the
sense of our connectedness we are engaged in the moral repair of this shattered world.
We become partners in the work of creation, not looking to the heavens for the answer
but, instead, bringing heaven to earth. One small piece at a time.

Baruch ata adonai eloheinu melech ha-olam shehechiyanu, vkiyamanu, vhigiyanu

lazman hazeh.

Ellen Dannin Added September 26, 2008

Dr. Ellen Dannin is a Professor of Law, Penn State's Dickinson

School of Law and a former member of the Ann Arbor Havurah
and Dor Hadash in San Diego.