By Rabbi Steve Wernick:
The hail came Wednesday night. By morning, my rear windshield was a mosaic, sixty-five thousand households were dark, and Beth Tzedec—as I write—still has no power.
And then Shabbat arrives, and Moshe says:
אַתֶּם נִצָּבִים הַיּוֹם כֻּלְּכֶם
“You are standing this day, all of you.”
Listen to the verb. Nitzavim—planted, braced, stationed. It is what you call someone who has had something come at them and has not moved. And notice where it falls: right after the tokhehah, that catalogue of curses we chanted last week in an undertone because we could barely stand to hear it aloud. The people have just been told every way they could be broken. Moshe’s next words are: “you are still standing”.
Then he takes attendance—elders and officials, children and wives, the stranger in the camp, the one who chops the wood and the one who draws the water. Kulkhem. The covenant isn’t cut with the strongest among us. It’s cut with the whole roster.
Here is our roster from this week.
Thursday morning, we called a young man to the Torah as a bar mitzvah—no amplification, generators running for Apex Kosher Catering, voices carrying on their own—and it was a lovely simchah. Thursday afternoon, fifty of us played canasta and mah jong on the Beit Alpha floor by whatever daylight fell through the atrium. Members who live nearby, and who happen to have a grand piano, opened their living room so the choir could keep rehearsing for the Yamim Nora’im. Our teens met in my backyard to prepare Shabbat morning programs for our youngest children. In the morning and the evening, we made a minyan.
None of it required a building at full brightness.
Elul is the month we take our own attendance. This year the storm did the counting for us, and the answer came back before we had time to worry about it. We were all here.
The power was out. The power of a people who hold Torah and stand together—BTogether—was more than enough.
Shabbat shalom.