Nitzavim #2

Devarim 29:9-30:20

Circumcising Our Hearts

Aryeh Bernstein, 5765

Throughout the devar torah, the single letter "H" will indicate God's "personal", four-letter name. The word "God" in translations refers to the impersonal title, "Elohim".

At the center of our parashah, God warns of the bad fortune we will find if we disregard the mitzvot, but promises our eventual return to a life of mitzvot and God's favor (30:1-6):

For the most part, this passage follows the familiar script: if we are good, we will be rewarded; if we are bad, we will punished, but God will always take us back if we change our ways. However, the last verse throws a monkey-wrench into the routine. The Torah does not say that we will circumcise our own hearts, deciding to love and obey God; it says that God will circumcise our hearts. It's a strange metaphor, but the point is that God will remove whatever extraneous and corrupting stuff that prevents our hearts from thinking and feeling the way they should. That is, God will make us feel and think the right way, so that we will behave properly. In other words, God will remove our free will. This theme is prominent in other Biblical passages describing the Messianic age. For example, in Yehezq'el's prophecy for the end of days (36:26-27):

A similar prophecy is made by Yirmiyahu (31:30-34):

Lest you think this is an arcane theological discussion about Messianism far removed from our lives today, note that this theme of the removal of our free will figures prominently in the prayers we say during this High Holiday period. In fact, every day this week in our selihot prayers we have been reciting the verse from our parashah promising that God will circumcise our hearts, and we will again recite it throughout the day on Yom Kippur. We even preface the verse with a request that God fulfill this promise soon. This desire to have our free will eliminated is an immediate concern of our moment.

This is really strange. We Jews tend to be big free will people. That's the thrust of a system focused on mitzvot. As the Rambam stresses in Hilkhot Teshuvah (5:4), what could possibly be the meaning of God commanding us to do something if we have no choice whether to fulfill the commandment?! The Rambam and many others emphasize that free will is the characteristic that most distinguishes humans from other created beings. The Rambam's words live strongly with us (5:1, 3):

This is an adult religion, a culture of responsibility, and we usually celebrate it, parading it as our contribution to human civilization. Why would God promise to undermine it and why on earth would we pray for that?

Free will has a nasty underbelly: sometimes we make bad choices, i.e., we sin. Moreover, truth be told, there is really no such thing as totally free will, since choices themselves begin to enslave us into patterns as they become habitual. Ben Azzai teaches in the mishnah in Pirqei Avot 4:2, "a mitzvah drags along another mitzvah, and a transgression drags along another transgression" -"מצוה גוררת מצוה ועבירה גוררת עבירה" . If you accustom yourself to doing a certain thing - whether good, bad, or neutral, you do not have free will regarding that thing to the same extent that someone else does. This is most blatantly manifest in chemically addictive behavior, such as alcohol, nicotine, or drugs, but can apply to all sorts of other habits, as well. Think about bad habits like biting nails. The chronic nail-biter is less free to refrain from biting nails than one who does not have such a habit. If you are generally nasty to someone, you are less free speak kindly to that person than is someone who has a neutral or warm way of interacting with that person. This is true of good habits, as well: if you always say "thank you" when someone does something for you, it would take a lot of effort not to say it the next time. This loss of freedom through formation of habits is great when we form good habits, but painful and terrifying when we develop bad habits. Probably every single way in which you and I see ourselves as ugly or shameful is a result of this enslavement to bad habits. One halakhic angle on the reality of habit-forming behavior is that an action that you perform in the same way three times in a row is often considered to have the status of a neder, a vow, such that if you wanted to change that practice, you would be required to convene a beit din, a court, to disavow it publicly, the same procedure you would need to endure to release a vow.

There is a widespread practice on erev Rosh HaShanah for each Jew to convene an ad hoc beit din of three Jews before whom one annuls any vows one has taken in the past year. On Yom Kippur, of course, we do this communally in one of the strangest yet strongest customs in Judaism, Kol Nidre. These practices of hatarat nedarim, releasing vows, may be the key to understanding our prayer for God to circumcise our hearts.

As commanded, free and responsible Jews, we are adults-citizens in the fullest sense. However, every adult has an inner child who feels weak, inadequate, incompetent, in need of lots of direction. In other words, we feel as though we don't want free will. We reach out to God to circumcise our hearts, to take control of our lack of freedom, to set us on the right course, to wipe our slate clean - to return us to infancy in order that we grow into adulthood better than we have so far. I think this is what Hazal are getting at when they explain that the second, repaired, tablets of the 10 Commandments were given on Yom Kippur (Ta‘anit 30b). Yom Kippur is the day of starting over, getting a second chance, cleaning the slate after making a horrible mistake (the Golden Calf). The Days of Awe are the pinnacle of being in touch with our inner child.

Of course, this is not actually how the world functions. Now that we are not yet fully in that High Holiday moment, we can reflect and acknowledge that of course, we remain accountable to our relationships that pre-existed the Days of Awe and that will continue beyond. As Jews, as commanded, responsible adults, we don't "live for the moment", or fly away. That's not what we're about, because that always leaves someone behind. There is one time, though, to live just a little bit for the moment, to see nothing beyond right now, the moment of being reborn, of being free of the shackles of our past, of our poor choices and our stubborn, uncircumcised hearts. We release our vows, we ask God to help us break our habits, to change who we are. As the Rambam says, we do things that allow us to say "Ani aher - I am someone else, and not the same person who did those things" - "אני אחר ואיני אותו האיש שעשה אותן המעשים" (Hilkhot Teshuvah 2:4). During the Days of Awe, we fly away just a bit - enough to be able to approach our weaknesses and relationships from a different angle and a stronger position, in order to make something better of the.

In these intense days of selihot and teshuvah, we fear our errors and the hurt we can inflict through our bad choices - through sin - so we want that possibility erased. We want to be children so that tomorrow we can face our adult choices as greater adults.

Shabbat Shalom and Ketivah va-Hatimah tovah.

Be inscribed and sealed for a good, sweet, new year.