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Looking Back to Move Forward: VaEtchanan/Nachamu Rosh Hashanah II, 5776 ~ 9.15.15 Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg, Beth Am Synagogue One of my great loves is working with candidates for conversion, and one of the expectations I set with them is that before making the choice to become Jewish, a potential ger or georet should experience the full cycle of the Jewish holidays. It’s obvious, if you pay attention, that there is a flow, an annual procession of the chagim, and that these observances also exist in a broader context. For example, every year I’m struck by the structure of this High Holyday period, which is elegant and purposeful. Let’s take a quick audio tour: Each year, our community moves through shivah asar b’tammuz and the Three Weeks marked by three special haftarot of admonition, to Tisha B’Av, our national day of Jewish mourning and the book of Eicha (Lamentations), to seven weeks of consolation. And all of this, the remembrance of sin and suffering, the constriction of sadness, the swelling of our capacity to be comforted, is meant to prepare us for the Yamim Noraim. Ten weeks – three sad, seven comforting – correspond to 10 days, the aseret Y’mai Teshuvah. And all of it culminates in the year’s holiest day: Yom Kippur. We spend a lot of time during those ten weeks preparing for these days, but rarely do we take time on the High Holydays to look back. So that’s what I’d like to do today: look back in order to move forward. On this second day of Rosh Hashanah, as we begin to turn our attention to Yom Kippur, let’s go back to just after Tisha B’Av. The first of the seven Shabbatot of consolation has a special designation; it’s called Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of comfort. The name derives from the words of the haftarah where Isaiah says, “Nachamu, nachamu, ami, comfort oh comfort My people” (Is. 40:1). There are a number of special Shabbatot marked by special haftarot throughout the year: Shabbat Zakhor, Shabbat Parah, Shabbat Shuvah and so on, but it’s rare to find special Shabbatot where the Torah and haftarah portions are consistent each year. That’s the case with Shabbat Nachamu, when we always read V’Etchanan. So what I’d like to do today is see if that particular Shabbat, observed just over seven weeks ago, has in it some guidance for us in this moment, in our process of t’shuvah. Let’s start with the beginning of the Parasha (3:23): “Vaetchanan el Hashem ba’eit ha’hi leimor,…” Here’s Moses saying to the people, “I pleaded with the Lord at that time, saying, O Lord God, You who let Your servant see the first works of Your greatness and Your mighty hand. You whose powerful deeds no god in heaven or on earth can equal.” “Evra-na v’er’eh et ha’aretz hotova asher v’eiver hayarden…. Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan….” One 13th-century scholar understands Moses’ oddly revealing statement as relating to traditional Jewish prayer. To understand this we have to play with numbers for a moment. You see, words in the Torah convey multiple layers of meaning, and as you know there are a number of hermeneutic devices our tradition employs to interpret Torah. One tool is something called Gematria (Jewish numerology where each letter has a numerical equivalent. Paneach Raza (R. Yitzhak ben Yehuda HaLevi) points out the Gematria of the word “VaEtchanan” (I pleaded) is 515 which is the same as the word “tefilah” (prayer) and also “shira” (song). In other words, our approach during songs of praise and petition to God should be done – argues Rav Yitzhak – in a particular way, with chen (from V’etchanan). 1 Remember that word chen; we’ll come back to it. Because he points out another layer, even more secret and hidden. You see, the first letter of the first word in our verse is “vav” which in gematria is 6… and the word VaEtchanan has 6 letters… and the verse itself has 6 words. And what’s 6X3? 18! Shemoneh Esrei, what the Mishnah calls simply “tefilah” – the word for prayer in general, but here refers to THE PRAYER, the core of any Jewish service: the Amidah. The rabbis often play with words – speculating about their meaning, form, even the shape of the individual letters. Here’s an example: why does Torah begin with the letter Bet and not Aleph? Because the shape is an invitation to what comes after. Hebrew reads right to left and bet opens left, not right. The answers, according to this understanding, are to be found not to the right, not before bereishit before the beginning, but in this world, in the words of Torah that follow. Lo BaShamayim Hi, the secrets of the universe are revealed not in the metaphysical realm, the ethereal cosmos, but in the world of things, of relationships, of ritual and of the body. And since the first letter of Torah is bet, it makes sense that the last letter is lamed. Because the first thing we do when we finish the Torah is to immediately begin again. but not with indifference – with curiosity and devotion! Lamed-bet is lev, heart. On Simchat Torah we engage in simchat lev, following the path set forward each year by the letter bet and joyfully inclining our hearts toward greater Jewish learning. Now let’s go back to that word chen. I mentioned the parasha on Shabbat Nachamu is V’Etchanan the basic root word of which is chen, which means grace. Grace is a difficult word for Jews, largely because of the way Christianity has understood it. I asked a Christian colleague of mine to define grace. He said it is “undeserved love.” But we Jews don’t have the same concept of original sin. For us, human worthiness isn’t the issue. Therefore chen, for us, is better translated not undeserved, but unearned love. Chen is unconditional love, a special kind of love. Which is why it’s not the Torah’s primary word for love. What’s that? Ahava. (It’s not just a line of Dead Sea bath products). Ahava is a love of devotion – a love that can be commanded, “V’ahavta et A’nai Elohecha, you shall love the Lord your God.” Chen is what God does for us because it’s in God’s nature to love. Or what we do for each other without expectation of reciprocity, just because we care. It’s what Moses is seeking (and laments that he doesn’t get) when he says “v’etchanan.” Think back to the Gematria, how v’etchanan is equivalent to tefilah. To pray is to plea and not usually for what we’ve earned. Moses knows he blew it. He’s just hoping for another chance. He’s counting on God’s enduring love to get him what he wants. And he’s confronted with the harsh reality: that God’s love doesn’t always mean getting what we want. That’s chen: it’s the love of encounter; it can be romantic or platonic, love at first sight or the kind that comes through spending time with someone, but it’s not about obligation. Torah employs the expression: matz’ah chen b’einav, “she found favor in his eyes” (or he in hers or his). In other words, we feel something powerful, but that we can’t quite explain, can’t really understand. What, then, is the relationship between chen (v’etchanan) and nachamu? Nachamu, as I mentioned, is comfort, but also regret. It’s the word Torah assigns to God just before the flood: “va’yinachem Hashem, ki asah et ha’adam va’aretz, va’yit’atzev el libo,” And the Lord regretted that He had made man on earth, and His heart was saddened.” In other words, the three letter root nun, chet, mem, as in Nachamu, means to be sorry, to pity. Whether the positive connotation “comfort” or the negative “regret,” it’s a reaction to some sort of wrongdoing. 2 But, interestingly enough, the Torah does something different with this word in relation to the flood narrative; there’s an intra-textual drash on Noah’s name. What’s Noah in Hebrew? Noach. The end of Parashat Bereishit explains Noach is given this name because, “Zeh y’nachameinu mima’aseinu…. This one will provide us comfort from our work and from the toil of our hands, out of the very soil which the Lord placed under a curse” (Gen. 5:29). In other words, scripture relates the name Noach not to its proper root nun, vav, chet, but the same root as nacham – comfort (nun, chet, mem). This isn’t just a word game. In fact there’s a school of thought which argues all Hebrew words derive initially from two, not three-letter roots. This approach is championed by venerated scholars and linguists like Shimshon Rafael Hirsch, Yehoshua Steinberg and Marcus Jastrow. Steinberg uses the example of Noach to claim it’s fairly common for a two letter root to gain a “mem,” at the end. So, strip away that final mem or vocalize Noach differently and we’re left with nach – comforting rest. Here’s the cool part: chen (chet-nun) is the inverse of nach (nun- chet). Which leaves us with the obvious question: what’s the conceptual relationship between the two? Or going back to our original question, why might the rabbis have chosen Parashat v’Etchanan to always coincide with Shabbat Nachamu? And what does this pairing indicate to us about our process of t’shuvah as we approach Yom Kippur? If you think about it, chen and nach are complimentary.

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