Nitzavim-Vayelech: Still Standing
By: Rabbi Moshe Taragin
Near the end of his life, Moshe delivered one of the Torah’s most frightening passages: the tochachah, a warning of the devastation that can follow if we betray Hashem. The Torah sounded a similar warning earlier, but Moshe returns to it now, just as we prepare to enter Eretz Yisrael without him.
The scenes are grisly: starvation, sickness, military conquest, exile, dispersion, and crushing psychological uncertainty. Jewish history has brought us through many of these horrors. Twice we were banished from Yerushalayim, and throughout the centuries we endured suffering that seemed to mirror Moshe’s nightmare.
After delivering this warning, Moshe worries that its terrifying images may leave us dispirited. This was especially dangerous for a nation exhausted by forty years in the desert and the death of an entire generation.
Aware of the fear his words created, Moshe reassures them with these words: Atem nitzavim hayom—you are still standing. Despite everything you’ve heard and endured, you’re still here.
Moshe speaks across the centuries to every generation that was forced to endure suffering and upheaval. His words offer a message of recovery, describing how a wounded people can absorb tragedy without surrendering their faith, their responsibilities, or their future.
It feels as if Moshe is speaking directly to our generation as we approach the end of a third year of a burdensome war that has taken so much from us. Rosh Hashanah invites us to look back and search for perspective. This past year cannot easily be separated from the three-year odyssey we have traveled. The years have blurred together through war, loss, sacrifice, and uncertainty. After living through what at times felt like our own small Churban, what can Moshe teach us about how to stand again?
{Moving Forward
The first message is, despite everything we have endured, we have survived. Have all the threats been eliminated? Have we achieved a lasting victory? The answers remain uncertain and probably negative. Yet after nearly three years of relentless war fought on the battlefield and absorbed on the home front, the country is still standing and still moving forward.
That recognition should not diminish our ambitions. Medinat Yisrael cannot define success as survival alone, and Jewish history cannot be reduced to an endless cycle of escaping destruction. Sometimes the great achievement is simply that after every blow we remain standing.
Survival should also reshape our confidence about the future. There is a confidence born of innocence, when danger feels distant and we assume the structures around us will hold. That confidence has been badly shaken. We now understand our vulnerability and we know how quickly what once seemed secure can unravel.
A different kind of confidence emerges after those illusions have been stripped away. It comes from having faced danger at close range, suffered painful losses, and discovered that, with Hashem’s help, we can still defend ourselves, adapt, and move forward. This confidence is less comfortable than what we once possessed, but more durable. It is rooted less in assumptions and more in what we have actually lived through.
Shared suffering also creates deep bonds. Moshe gathers a diverse nation, from its most prominent figures to the woodchoppers and water carriers at the lowest rungs of ancient society. Their social and economic differences are real, yet they have crossed the same wilderness and heard the same dark warnings about what may lie ahead. What they endured together has tied them to one another in ways that status and background cannot easily undo. They may stand on different rungs, but they’re standing on the same ground.
That message matters as Israel enters a fractious election season, when campaigns inevitably sharpen differences to mobilize voters. The extraordinary achdut after October 7 was bound to fade. As the war lengthened, old fissures resurfaced and new ones emerged.
Yet beneath those disparities lies an experience we have all shared. We have lived through the same national emergency, followed the same casualty reports, and rushed to shelters under the same sirens. We remain bound by a common fate and by the Jewish future we are building together. Election seasons encourage us to sort ourselves into camps. Moshe asks us to remember the bonds that common suffering creates.
Moshe also widens the horizon beyond the generation standing before him. He announces that this brit is directed not only at “those who are here with us today,” but also at “those who are not here with us today.” Jewish history is a mission shared across generations. One generation may be asked to make sacrifices whose full meaning becomes apparent only decades later.
David HaMelech yearned to build the Beit HaMikdash. He purchased the site, prepared materials, and laid the groundwork, yet he was not permitted to build it. That task was left to Shlomo.
That intergenerational perspective can give us patience during our own difficult chapter. We may not resolve every threat, repair every fracture, or complete every national project in our lifetime. Much of what this generation is enduring may be laying foundations for those who come after us. Living inside a brit means accepting responsibility for a story whose next chapters will be written long after we’re gone.
Moshe also teaches that survival carries responsibilities. To remain standing after catastrophe places demands on us. We must learn from the failures that contributed to disaster, honor those who lost their lives, and ensure that their sacrifice continues to shape the future.
Every Jew living in the aftermath of October 7 should in some form articulate a personal doctrine of responsibility. We are living through a consequential period of Jewish history, and that raises an unavoidable question: what does this moment ask of me?
For religious Jews, that question cannot remain only national or political. It must enter our avodat Hashem. Has this war changed the seriousness of our tefillah? Our commitment to Torah? Our identification with Klal Yisrael? Our willingness to carry responsibility for other Jews? Have three years of living so close to sacrifice, loss, and Jewish destiny altered anything in the way we serve Hashem?
The particular response will differ from person to person. It’s hard to imagine living through a period that has altered Jewish history so profoundly and emerging with precisely the same sense of obligation we carried into it. If we are still standing, Moshe implies, then we must ask what we are now standing for. Each of us must find a way to personalize this moment in history.
Finally, we should remember before Whom we stand. Moshe does not merely tell us that we are still standing. We are standing before Hashem. Even after enduring the punishments, we remain lifnei Hashem. We may not fully understand the divine logic of suffering, but we have walked through these dark years with Him.
“Gam ki elech b’gei tzalmavet lo ira ra, ki Atah imadi—Even when I walk through the valley of deathly shadows, I do not fear evil because You are with me.” The pasuk does not promise that the valley disappears. It promises safety and security within it. Even when we struggle to understand Hashem’s ways or to feel His help, He continues to watch over us.
For the past three years, we have walked with Hashem through fear, grief, and uncertainty. We have cried out to Him, davened to Him, and questioned Him. At times we have felt His presence clearly; at other times we have struggled to find it. But we never stopped turning to Him.
As we approach the days when we once again stand before Hashem in judgment, we should remember that we have already spent three years standing before Him in struggle. We come to Rosh Hashanah wounded, questioning, grateful, exhausted, and still searching. But after everything, we are still standing, before Him. n
Rabbi Moshe Taragin is a rabbi and educator at Yeshivat Har Etzion (Gush). Find his latest book, Reclaiming Redemption, Vol. II: Faith, Identity, Peoplehood, and the Storms of War, at mtaraginbooks.com.
