Rabbi Yair Robinson

Parashat Nitzavim

9/19/25

Part of being a rabbi means you get some pretty strange mail. There are a lot of requests for donations, as you might imagine, and bulletins from organizations and other synagogues. Sometimes it is a multi-page manifesto from someone about why we should stop controlling the world, or how we can be saved, or something else fairly offensive. Sometimes it is in the form of truly painful missives from former and current congregants who do not know how else to articulate their needs and ask for help. And sometimes it is books. And this week, it was a book. An old, old, old book, Stories From The Rabbis, a collection of midrashim and rabbinic tales rewritten as short stories. It was, as I gathered, the textbook for class 4 in our religious school in 1925. It was returned by the widow of Benjamin Raphael, who recently passed. His parents Felix and Else Raphael, we continue to remember here. It was accompanied by a brief note: “Returning this lovely book which my 95-year-old husband had for a [all caps] LONG TIME! Apologies!” She also included the memorial card from the funeral home.

The book itself is charming, albeit out of date. It is hard to imagine it holding the attention of current fourth graders, what with its lack of memes. What is remarkable is that it is clearly not a library book—no card in the back. Which means, potentially, he has been holding onto this book for a VERY long time indeed. And yet, it has been returned to us.

We are in our season of return, and while I know the return of a borrowed book and the return of the high holidays are, on the surface, different kinds of returning, I am wondering if that is really so. The idea that we are, at this time, attempting to return in so many different ways: to this place, to be sure, to our idea of who we’re meant to be, to old relationships damaged by this or that wound, even, perhaps, to God and Torah. And that is a kind of spiritual, personal return. But the return of a book long forgotten is not so different from the return to a broken relationship—with a loved one, with ourselves—or the return of a lost sense of identity, or a return to an urgency about our values after a time of feeling moribund and depressed over the state of the world.

Our Torah text, which Susan just chanted beautifully, and which points us toward Yom Kippur, reminds us that each of us, all of us, make a promise. Just as we understand that all of us went forth from Egypt, and all of us stood together at Sinai to say “na’aseh v’nishmah”, we will do and we will hear, all of us, each of us in every generation stood together at the foot of Mount Nebo to swear an oath, to affirm and renew our covenant. It is a sacred relationship that does not demand perfection from us but does invite us to return to one another and our sacred tasks, to renew ourselves. And so, when we hear these words chanted again in less than two weeks, we are reminded that we may reaffirm that commitment, renew that relationship, return to that which we thought was lost or broken, at any time, no matter how long ago it was. Just like a book borrowed decades ago.