The Sedra starts “You are standing together today all of you, before the L-rd your G-d, your leaders, the heads of your tribes, your judges, your elders, every Jewish man, your children, your women-folk, your proselyte in the midst of the camp, hewers of wood and drawers of water.”
Rabbi Shneur Zalman points out that this Sedra is always read before Rosh Hashana. In fact the word ‘today’ hints at Rosh Hashana, as we say in the Rosh Hashana prayers ‘today is the beginning of Your works, a memory of the first day’. For on Rosh Hashana the individual sparks of souls of the Jewish people ascend and are connected to their root, together ‘before G-d’. The Sedra lists ten levels for the entire people has ten levels which are all connected together.
The hewers of wood and drawers of water, as explained in Chassidic teaching, do not just mean people of humble occupation. Wood (etz in Hebrew) is like the word etzah, counsel: one has to hew out the false counsel of the evil desire; likewise water represents lust and desire, which has to be drawn up and poured away. The hewers of wood and drawers of water are thus people who have to try to achieve this, but have not yet done so. This means the ten levels are not only positive, but also including some which are at the moment still morally negative. But all are united together before G-d.
They are united in such a way that the highest and the lowest are joined. Each needs the other, just as in a single body the head needs the feet and is organically connected with them, so that the head can be helped medically by an injection in the leg.
What unites all these disparate aspects of the Jewish people together? The text continues: “so that you should be joined in a Covenant”. A Covenant joins people in a way which goes beyond ordinary kinds of relationship and feelings of affection and preference. A Covenant joins people in a way which transcends Reason.
In this case, the Covenant is the revelation of G-d’s Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, which were revealed through Moses, and which unite together the entire Jewish people.
This theme links with another discourse on this Sedra, by the Tzemach Tzedek. He explains there that Nitzavim, ‘standing’ is actually a word in the Niphal case, passive. It therefore really means ‘you have been enabled to stand’. It is the Divine radiance of the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, particularly revealed in the month of Elul, which enables the Jewish people to stand united before G-d.
Further, the word Nitzav has another meaning in Hebrew: leader. The effect of Rosh Hashana is that it makes the entire Jewish people into Nitzavim, leaders in their own inner world, in which the Divine Soul battles with the Animal Soul.
The Jewish people are called Jacob, a word which in Hebrew relates to the heel, because at the stage of Jacob the person’s Divine soul might descend even to their ‘heel’ to enjoy the pleasures of this world and be subject to them. But the higher form of the individual and the nation is Israel, a name they hold because ‘you struggled with angels and men and you prevailed.’ The exalted spiritual effect of Rosh Hashanah is to give each of us the opportunity to be master, Nitzav, Israel rather than Jacob, in our inner world.
The Torah text continues ‘so that you can be a people together, and He will be your G-d.’
Precisely this is the theme of Rosh Hashanah. As the Talmud puts it: G-d says ‘say before Me the verses of Kingship, so as to make me rule over you’.
Unified together as the Jewish people gives us the power to appeal to G-d in His exalted Essence, far beyond the worlds, that He should indeed be King over us. And then we ask further that He should rule over the whole world, by the fact that every created thing recognises their source in G-d.
Then we ‘remind’ G-d of the Binding of Isaac, through reciting verses in the Musaf prayer about Remembering, and also about the Shofar, and we blow the Shofar. Through this we draw the infinite Essence of the Divine to be the King over the universe, through which it was originally created and now continues to exist.
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