By Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel in Chula Vista, California
When Britain asked for bids on a tunnel under the Channel, Cohen and O’Brian named a price no respectable firm would sign. A civil servant found them in a building that did not look like destiny.
“You can do this for that?”
“Sure.”
“With what?”
“Two shovels.”
“How?”
“I dig from here. He digs from there. When we meet, you have a tunnel.”
“And if you never meet?”
“Then you’ll have two tunnels.”
Moses is not telling that joke. He is standing inside it. Atem nitzavim hayom kulkhem—you are standing today, all of you: heads of tribes and the one who draws water, women and children, the stranger in the camp. The oath is cut with those on the plain and with those not yet born. The Torah’s fear is not that Israel will refuse to work. It is that Israel will work, devoutly, from opposite banks, and never meet.
Why hayom? The word is not a date-stamp. After the curses, standing is already an argument against despair. After Sinai, a second covenant on the step of the land is an argument against ease. The wilderness was a poor school for freedom. When bread falls, obedience can be hunger in religious dress. Milk and honey will ask whether the Torah survives a good year. The nations are not required to find us convenient. We are required not to spend the night proving that the Jew on the other bank is the problem.
We have never lacked shovels. We study, found, argue, annotate, split, rebuild. Brothers who could not share a field. A kingdom that became two capitals and called the split theology. Houses of study that competed for Heaven’s franchise. Disaster has often been the only engineer who made us share a ditch. That is not a credential. It is a warning.
The counter-word is one syllable. A man comes into a rabbi’s house armed with certainties. The rabbi says efshar—perhaps. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps I am. The word does not end the argument. It keeps two shafts from becoming two religions.
The Mishnah asks why the minority views of Bet Shammai and Bet Hillel were kept at all (Eduyot 1:5): so that a later generation would learn not to persist unbending in its opinion. At Sinai, the tradition says, Moses was shown forty-nine ways a matter might be closed and forty-nine ways it might be opened. Revelation was not a single locked door. It was a field of reasoned possibilities under one Name.
Hillel still stands in that field: if I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I? A self without a people is one tunnel. A people without a self is a collapse. The sages blessed an assembly with the sentence that should govern the year: Blessed is the One who knows secrets, for no two minds are alike, as no two faces are alike (Berakhot 58a). Difference is not the scandal. The refusal to meet is.
They ask whether teshuvah will be received. The Midrash answers with men no committee would print on a brochure. Cain speaks and half a decree is lifted. Ahab tears his clothes and a sentence is stayed. Manasseh fills the Temple with a four-faced idol; the angels shut the windows. Yet God bores a hole under the Throne, and through that passage Manasseh’s prayer is received, and he repents. Repentance is not a display cabinet. It is the claim that Heaven would rather make a passage than let a human being believe he is finished. The High Holidays are full of people polishing the door. The mitzvah is to walk through it.
Two clocks run the return. One is now, if the turning is whole. The other is the hour already set. We are gifted at discussing the second clock. The first is the only clock we can touch.
Vayelekh makes the cost plain. Moses is dying. Write this song and put it in their mouths, because the speaker will not remain to repeat it. A people that cannot stand together will not keep a song. A people that will not write the song will not remember why they stood.
Jews always dig. That was never the question. We put our backs into study, into institutions, into being right. The question is whether the two shovels are aimed at the same dark—the shared depth Moses names this week: one covenant, one people, a life that can still be placed in a child’s mouth. You do not see the other digger at once. You hear him only if you have gone far enough, and only if you have left room in the work for someone who is not you.
If we meet, there is a road under the water. If we never meet, we may still call the result achievement. Heaven will call it two tunnels.
Shabbat shalom.
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Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista, California.