Making Sense of the Sedra: Nitzavim‑Vayeilech

As we watch, along with the rest of the world, the ongoings in Ukraine – in stories that are straight out of movie scripts (such as the recent ‘crash’ of Wagner boss Prigozhin’s plane) – sometimes helpless other times frustrated and always deeply saddened, I am often asked: “What has this got to do with us?”

We are living through one of the tightest financial squeezes that our generation has lived through, young people are struggling post-Covid and therefore the question often surfaces – why the obsession with problems thousands of miles away, when we have so many of our own?

In this week’s parsha, Nitzavim‑Vayeilech, the Torah sheds some light on this. The Torah calls all Jews from every walk of life – from the water carrier to the woodcutter – and says: “You are all responsible for one another.” The Kli Yakar (Rabbi Shlomo Ephraim ben Aaron Luntschitz (1550 – 1619) goes one step further and explains that our responsibility to one another goes to a whole different level. If your neighbour has not heard kiddush on Shabbat, then you can recite it all over again. Why, because a part of you has not heard kiddush. The Torah is teaching us that the level of responsibility that we have for each other is not a luxury, it is a vital part of our survival, as a nation and in the world.

The analogy I once heard, which is apt here, is about a man on a cruise ship. He starts drilling a hole in his cabin to the ocean. When he is affronted by the captain and staff on the ship, he exclaimed: “This is MY cabin – leave me alone!” The crew explained that his cabin is connected to all of us. If he is going down, then we all are.

Our leaders understand that by battling the good battles, sometimes thousands of miles away, we are actually fighting our own. Because the level of responsibility that we have for each other goes way beyond what we see and what we know.
When we heed that call of responsibility the whole world is a safer and better place.