Parshah Commentary
This week, we are sharing a dvar Torah for VeZot HaBerakhah, the final parshah of the Torah, which is read this coming Wednesday morning on Simchat Torah. On Shabbat, which falls during Chol HaMoed (“intermediate days”) of Sukkot, we break the regular Torah reading cycle and instead read a selection of verses from Shemot. For reflections on that parshah, as well as on the holiday itself, see Rabbi Lexie Botzum’s reflection from last year.
Our parshah, Vayelech, finds Moses modeling a kind of time travel. In one of his last speeches to the Jewish people, he repeatedly envisions them doing evil and experiencing evil, suffering and causing suffering. Moses is prophesying, but he is also predicting the future based on his own experiences: “Well I know how defiant and stiffnecked you are: Even now, while I am still alive in your midst, you have been defiant toward God; how much more, then, when I am dead!” Contemplating the connection between what has been and what will come to pass also compels him to offer a resource for days to come: Throughout this address, Moses repeatedly urges the Jewish people to write down these words for the time ahead. Through the suffering that will be their lot, he asks them to nevertheless hold fast to the Torah, which will be “a witness” for them, tying their past experiences to future possibilities.
This approach to temporality mirrors the great medieval scholar Maimonides’s instructions for performing teshuva. He states that a key step of repentance, referred to by later thinkers as “kabbalah al ha’atid” (“acceptance for the future”), is that the penitent “resolves in their heart never to commit [the sin] again.” Indeed, they must be able to declare with confidence that they have looked back on the past so thoroughly and done such serious internal work in the present that even “the One who knows the hidden”—the all-knowing God—“will testify concerning them that they will never return to this sin again.” Just as Moses stands at the edge of the Land of Israel and looks back into the past, looks at the Israelites in front of him in the present, and then looks out and imagines a future, so too one who seeks to do teshuva must engage with their past misdeeds, where they stand at the present, and the possibilities and commitments of the future.
This high holiday season, many Jews are striving for collective as well as personal repair, asking: How did we get here? What are the structures that enabled our institutions to support a genocide, that made it so hard for organizations, leaders, and individuals to name and speak out against the truth of what is happening in Gaza? But the work is stymied by the awful continuity between past and present; the war machine grinds on. Hundreds of thousands of people have had their futures stolen, through murder or through the closing-off of possibilities even for the living. Many in our communities still support or tolerate this destruction. In this moment, looking ahead can feel hopeless or futile. How can we even conceive of a future that is different from the horror of today and yesterday?
In her 2023 book Everyday Utopia, Kristen Ghodsee insists that “we must imagine the future that we want . . . no matter how outlandish or impossible” it may appear from the present. She invites us to think of this as “learning to ‘remember’ the future using a similar set of mental acuities as those we use to remember the past.” This injunction to use the skill of memory—so well honed by Jews—as a way of orienting toward the future highlights the necessity of imaginative time travel for fundamental transformation. Moses, too, offers a vision in which the work of changing course requires a method of remembrance; for him, it’s our enduring rootedness in Jewish text. These calls share an insistence that memory of a deeply broken past can guide us toward something better, even if we can’t yet see how. Communal teshuva must likewise remain honest about the past and nonetheless committed to imagining the future.
Our distance from justice might incline us to set our sights on the ground before us, rather than the far-away horizon. But if full, deep teshuva requires a reckoning that reaches into the fullness of the past, it also asks us to picture what comes next, and what comes beyond what comes next. We must, in the words of Becca Leviss, founder of the Judeo-Futurism Project, envision the shape of our communities “not just ten weeks from now, but ten years from now, one hundred years from now.” As we stand at the start of a Jewish year where nothing feels new, we must be brave enough to dream and demand a completely different world—and then to move toward building it.
Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.
