The parsha which always precedes Rosh Hashanah, Nitzavim, begins with the words Atem Nitzavim Hayom. “You stand here today” entering into a new covenant with God. The word hayom is a mantra in this parsha and throughout Devarim and also for the High Holiday season. Hayom literally means “the day” – in other words, the ultimate day that matters is not tomorrow but today, the present. Be mindful of the present moment.
But it is not exactly right to say that in the Torah’s view hayom, the present, is all that matters. Rather, encapsulated in the present, if you live it fully, with an awareness of God, are the past and future as well.
The parsha starts by stating that the people are all standing today before God but soon makes it clear that the covenant’s audience is larger than those present only on that “today”: “I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us today before the Lord our God and with those who are not with us here today” (29:13-14). Rashi says, “those who are not with us” refers to future generations. I wonder whether it couldn’t also refer to past generations. The verse before it refers to the covenant made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. My husband’s family has a practice of beginning significant family meals by mentioning “those who are no longer with us.” The practice actually creates a moment in which “those who are no longer with us” are with us. The Torah’s hayom seems similar. It is a sacred “today” in which the past, present and future are somehow merged.
To understand this concept of time, we need to look not just at the word hayom, but also at the word before it, nitzavim, “standing.” The word implies a kind of fixed standing in one place, like a matzevah, a statue. In order to feel the thickness of the past, present and future in today’s moment, we need to do one important thing – stand still, very still, rooted to the ground. Not to lunge forward in our restless pursuit of the future, but to stand absolutely still. To live, for a moment, not horizontally, from Day 1 to Day 2, as we normally do, but vertically, at this moment as it was experienced in the past, a year ago, a century ago, a millennium ago, and at this moment as it will be experienced in the future, a year from now, a century from now, and into eternity.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are especially thick hayom days. They are days when we tend to live in this vertical time-space, when we think not so much of tomorrow but of last Rosh Hashanah, of the Rosh Hashanah before so-and-so was born (what a miracle!), of the Rosh Hashanahs my ancestors spent in the shtetl in Poland, and of the future Rosh Hashanahs we hope for ourselves and others.
There is one other element which is significant in this understanding of hayom — God. The Torah doesn’t just say we are standing still today. It says we are standing still before God. It is God who grants us this escape from the human framework of horizontal time, this peek into the divine vertical vision of eternity, of a present merged with its past and future. The Lord’s name as it is written but not pronounced (it is too sacred and secret to be pronounced) actually contains within it the word for “being” in the past, the present and the future. That is God’s essence. Unlike each of us, He was, He is, and He will be. What we are doing when we stand still for that moment of vertical eternal time is existing in the divine realm.As we say at the end of Mussaf on Rosh Hashanah, Hayom Te’amtzeinu, “Today may You strengthen us!” Hayom Tevarkhenu, “Today may You bless us!” Today may You strengthen and bless us with a full experience of hayom.
Photo by Max Andrey at Pexels
