HaRav Sternbuch: NItzovim-Vayelech

 THE LIVING DEAD

You shall choose life, so that you and your offspring will live. (30:19)

A person should not only feel that the Torah is something positive in his life, but that it is life itself, because without Torah a person is not considered to be alive at all, since his soul is dead. The Torah and mitzvos are the soul’s food and it cannot survive without them. The body may be alive but the person is only living the life of an animal, as Chazal say, “The wicked are called dead even when they are alive”. 

In a similar vein, it says in Yechezkel (18:12): “For I do not desire the death of the dead … rather, turn yourselves and live”. The wicked person is termed “dead” because he has died a spiritual death, but teshuva has the power to bring him back to life completely. The Mekubolim explain that on Rosh Hashono a person is judged for his afterlife. Why would a person be judged with regard to his afterlife when he has not yet left this world?

It means that a person’s neshomo undergoes a “diagnosis” to see whether he has a connection to spirituality, to Hashem, or whether he is already spiritually dead. If he has a majority of merits but only stumbles in sin on occasion, he is considered spiritually alive and deemed worthy of being inscribed in the Book of Life, whereas if most of his acts are sins, he is considered spiritually disconnected from Hashem and therefore “dead.” If he is a beinoni, his judgement is not proclaimed until Yom Kippur, so that he may be given a chance to repent and be inscribed in the Book of Life.

The Meiri says that someone who does not repent on Rosh Hashono does not have a portion in the G-d of the Jews. This seems difficult to understand since the time for repentance is on Yom Kippur not Rosh Hashono, whose essence is rather the “coronation” (malchuyos) of Hashem when we internalize that everything stems from Him. 

However, the Meiri is not referring to a “punishment” for not doing teshuvah, but rather to a “sign.” If a person does not display any signs whatsoever of repentance on Rosh Hashono — not even during the tekios and the tefillos — he must worry about whether he is not among those who are already spiritually dead, and he must then undergo an intense process of repentance in order to break the walls separating him from the Creator.

TORAH AFTER THE HOLOCAUST

“And Hashem said to Moshe: Behold, you are about to lie with your forefathers, and this nation will rise up and stray after the deities of the nations of the land, into which they are coming. And they will forsake Me and violate My covenant which I made with them…. And now, write for yourselves this song.” (31:16-19) 

An activist once complained to the Brisker Rov about our dire situation, in which 80% of Jewish children do not know what Shema Yisroel is, some non-religious raise pigs, there is a lot of Shabbos desecration and so on. He concluded by saying, “I’m beginning to despair because the situation seems hopeless and there’s nothing more that can be done”. 

The Brisker Rov responded by citing the above possuk. Even when the nation will serve idols, and not keep the Torah, we are still told to write for ourselves this song. The remedy for our terrible situation, said the Brisker Rov, is to learn Torah, because when we delve in it, its illumination makes us repent. 

After the Holocaust destroyed so much of Torah Jewry, Hashem left us with several places of Torah learning, and they served as the nucleus for the subsequent global explosion of Torah. Torah has the power to renew itself when it is taught and transmitted in the undiluted manner with which it has been transmitted throughout the generations. 

Rav Sternbuch recalls shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War when everyone was frightened about what the future had in store, he heard Rav Elchonon Wasserman saying during his stay in London that although Hashem promised us that the Torah would not be forgotten, it was possible that most of the Jews could be killed, and only a small handful would remain to fulfil this promise. Nevertheless, he added prophetically, that even if this will happen, G-d forbid, we have been promised that this small handful will produce a whole generation of Torah learners.