Parashat Nitzavim – Vayelekh
Maidenhead Synagogue – 5 September 2026 / 23 Elul 5786
September is usually the time of the year when we make choices. Which school to attend, which leisure activities to undertake, and how we organise our working life and balance it with our personal one. Of course, we want our choices to be good choices. As our Torah portion puts it, we want to choose life. But what does the Torah mean when it asks us to choose life?
Near the end of the book of Deuteronomy, Moses sets a choice before our people. He has gathered everyone, from the heads of the tribes to those who draw the water, and he speaks plainly: ‘I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live’ (Deuteronomy 30:19).
What I find fascinating is that these words are uttered by a man, Moses, who is near the end of his own life.
Moses is 120 years old; he can no longer come and go, and he has been told that he will not cross the Jordan (Deuteronomy 31:2). He has led our people out of Egypt, through the sea, up the mountain and across forty years of wilderness. He is now about to hand the work to someone else. He will die within sight of the land, and he will not enter it, even though that is the ultimate goal of this long journey.
So, the instruction to choose life is spoken by someone who has just been told that his own life is ending, and ending short of its goal. That changes what the words can mean. Moses is not offering the cheerful confidence of a person who believes that good choices produce good outcomes. He knows about endings. He knows that we do not choose our way out of mortality. The question the verse leaves us is this: what can a dying man mean when he tells others to choose life?
The Torah answers immediately. Choosing life means ‘loving the Eternal your God, listening to God’s voice and holding fast to God’ (Deuteronomy 30:20). Every one of those verbs describes a relationship rather than an achievement. Loving, listening, holding fast. None of them promises control over what happens to us. They describe how we stay attached to the source and the purposes of our lives while things happen to us. That is the first thing the text gives us: choosing life is a decision we make again and again. It is an ongoing attitude towards the journey we are engaged on, an attitude of love and of holding on.
And then, there is what Moses does after he speaks. He does not simply issue the command and step away. He appoints Joshua in front of the whole community and tells him to be strong and courageous (Deuteronomy 31:7). He writes down the Torah and gives it to the priests and the elders (Deuteronomy 31:9). He teaches a poem that our people will carry even when he is gone (Deuteronomy 31:19). At the end of his life, with nothing left to gain, he spends his remaining strength on building a future he will not share.
Moses shows us the meaning of his own instruction. To choose life is to build up what carries on without you, to understand that we are just a small ring in the chain of our people, but a ring that needs to be strong for future generations.
Our tradition returns to this idea often. In the Talmud, Honi the Circle Drawer came upon a man planting a carob tree and asked how long it would take to bear fruit. Seventy years, the man said. Honi asked whether he expected to live another seventy years to eat from it. The man answered that he had come into a world full of carob trees planted by those who came before him and that he was planting in turn for his children (Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 23a). The same idea becomes a rule for how we work: we are not obliged to complete the task, and we are not free to abandon it either (Mishnah Avot 2:16).
That gives us a definition we can use. We choose life whenever we act so that life continues past our own lives.
This reaches into everyday life. We choose life when we teach something we know to someone who will still be using it long after we have forgotten teaching it. We choose life when we repair a relationship we damaged, rather than waiting for the damage to become permanent. We choose life when we support our community’s work in a year when we personally get nothing back from it. We choose life when we tell a family story to a grandchild, when we care for land or buildings we will not see finished, when we vote or campaign or give for the sake of people we will never meet. Each of these is a decision to invest in a future we cannot possess.
And sometimes, we are asked to keep contributing to something after we have learned that we will not see it through. That is Moses on the other side of the Jordan, appointing his successor and handing over his authority. He strengthens him and lets him go forward.
We come to these words each year on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, when we are asked to take stock of our lives. That timing is well chosen. The new year invites us to consider what we are building and for what purpose.
Moses cannot choose whether he will die. He cannot choose whether he will cross the Jordan. He can choose what he leaves to the people who will live after him, and that is the choice he makes in front of us. His words carry the weight of that decision, which is why they still reach us. ‘Choose life’ is spoken in the face of death, and that is what gives it its force.
Before Rosh Hashanah, each of us can name one thing we will strengthen this year for the sake of someone who comes after us: something we will teach, something we will mend, something we will plant.
May we decide, deliberately and with full awareness, to choose life for the new year that begins on Friday evening.