Parashat Nitzavim - First Aliyah

Everyone is standing, from the heads to the water drawer

Moses opens the assembly by describing who is present in it. He does not begin with the content of the covenant but with a list: the heads of the people, the tribes, the elders and the officers, and after them every man of Israel. The list opens with the leadership and moves down from there to the people as a whole.

Right after that the list continues to those who are not part of the leadership: the children, the women, and the stranger who is within the camp. From there it goes one step further and reaches from your woodcutter to your water drawer, that is, to the workers who supply the most basic needs of the camp. Already at the opening of the aliyah an important principle appears: the covenant is not made with one layer of the people, but with all of them in the same standing.

The third verse says where this whole list leads. The people are standing there in order to pass into the covenant of God and into his oath, that is, to enter the framework and not only to hear about it. The language is language of passing over, not of presence.

Alongside the covenant the oath is mentioned as well. The covenant is the bond, and the oath is the commitment to the consequences, and both are said together. Joining is not only receiving a promise of good, but also accepting responsibility for what will happen if the covenant is broken.

The word today appears twice in the aliyah, at the opening and at the close, and it frames the three verses: this day, these people, and the passage into the covenant.

Insights from the aliyah

A covenant made with part of the people is not a covenant

Already at the end of the first verse it says every man of Israel, and still the list continues layer after layer down to the water drawer. At the level of the idea, when you want a commitment to hold, it is not enough that the leadership agreed. Everyone who will bear the consequence has to stand there in person.

Social standing does not determine belonging

The heads of the tribes and the woodcutters appear in the same list and in the same standing. This teaches that a person’s place on the social ladder does not change the depth of their bond to the covenant.

Precisely those who are not seen have to be named

A woodcutter and a water drawer are people whose work is done in the background and is usually not mentioned. The Torah mentions them explicitly. Some groups stay outside the picture not because someone decided to leave them out, but because nobody bothered to count them.

The stranger is counted among those standing, not beside them

The stranger who is within your camp appears inside the list itself, between the women and the children and the workers. Whoever joined the camp is in the covenant like everyone else, and not as a guest attending someone else’s event.

Entering a commitment is an act, not presence

The text does not say that the people are standing in the covenant but that they are passing into it. There is a difference between being in the place where a commitment is made and taking the step that brings you inside it.

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