Nitzavim: Royal Lineage

"You are standing here today, every one of you…"(Deuteronomy 15:4).
 

"Every one of you" literally, for not a single person was missing on the day of Moses's death, when he gathered all of the Jewish People to hear his last address to them before assuming his rightful place in the World to Come.
 
 

Within this passage is a prodigious praise of the Jewish People. Forty years prior, each of the Children of Israel appeared before Moses and their respective tribal president and identified themselves and their lineage, proof that they were all direct descendents of Jacob's twelve sons and proof of their tribal membership (see Numbers 1:18). After two hundred and ten years of slavery in Egypt, not a single one of them assimilated or intermarried. No one established a breakaway ideological group at the edge of the Israelite encampment. Nobody forsook the ways of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as passed down to the twelve sons. Each had a clean and direct lineage tying them to the holy patriarchs and matriarchs.
 
 

Latter exiles of our people were not so fortunate. After a mere seventy years of Communist rule, Russian Jewry suffered a near spiritual death. Most of American Jewry can be traced back to the mass immigration from Russia, Ukraine and Poland during the heinous pogroms of 1890-1910. Therefore, the mainstream American Jewish Diaspora is no more than one hundred thirty years old. But, in this "enlightened", more than seventy percent have fallen to assimilation. Despite the hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews who have come to America in the last three decades, the number of Jews in America is actually less than what in was fifty years ago, when it should have at least trebled in that interim.
 
 

The Torah here describes how the generation that is now about to inherit the Land of Israel – the sons of the generation that left Egypt and sojourned in the desert – are one unified people, each one present to hear the last words of Moses, ready and willing to implement his instructions to them. No one was missing and no one tried to find an excuse for not being there. No one displayed boredom or a lack of interest. Not a single person contested Moses, the unequivocal spiritual leader of the generation. As the Torah testifies, everyone was there – "your leaders, your tribes, your elders, your policemen, every man of Israel, your women and your children…from your wood choppers to your water carriers." From the leaders to the water carriers, from the heads of the nation to the simplest laborers, everyone was there. Just like their parents' generation, they too could each trace their lineage back to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is the praise of the generation that deserved to inherit the holy Land of Israel. No one swayed from the ways of the fathers and no one tried to establish any reformist movement or ideology.
 
 

The Torah hereby testifies to the two generations that left Egypt and entered the Land of Israel, both upright and holy, who didn't swerve from the path of the fathers. Not a single one of them assimilated. No one left the fold.
 
 

"You are standing here today" – anytime the Torah says "today", it is referring to a firm spiritual principle that is not only timeless, but renews itself every single day. We must therefore ask, what is the meaning of "you are standing here today" to a person of this generation?
 
 

The beautiful phenomenon of this generation is the "teshuva movement". The children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of assimilated Jews on both sides of the ocean are now returning en masse to the ways of the forefathers. They're leaving the spiritual emptiness of the "movements of change" that ensnared previous generations. Hashem is redeeming the returning children from the last 130 years of spiritual exile.
 
 

Yet, many of the spiritual returnees have an apparent problem. Their grandparents or great grandparents took off their kippas and stopped observing the Sabbath when they left Europe and North Africa and came to America or to Israel. Many don't know their lineage anymore. The unbroken chain had snapped along the way. So now, what do they do? No problem; if one doesn't have an unbroken tradition from his or her parents, they can simply connect to a spiritual guide who has an unbroken connection from rabbi to pupil all the way back to Moses. One's rabbi is tantamount to one's father in Judaism. So, when a person is connected to a rabbi and spiritual guide who is also connected to the teachers of previous generations, he too has a lineage, a priceless asset that he can now pass down to his children.