As we prepare for this final shabbat of 5776, I am meditating upon the words of Moshe’s exhortation to the Jewish people:

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—if you and your offspring would live—” (Devarim 30:19)

This might seem like a statement of the obvious – if we want to live, of course we must choose life. But the Torah continues and explains how it is that we are to choose life:

“by loving the LORD your God, listening to His voice, and cleaving to Him. For thereby you shall have life,” (Ibid v. 20)

It seems that there are three actions that together comprise “choosing life.”

Loving the Lord your God לְאַֽהֲבָה֙ אֶת ה׳ אֱ-לֹקיךָ

Listening to His voice לִשְׁמֹ֥עַ בְּקֹל֖וֹ

Cleaving to Him וּלְדָבְקָה־ב֑וֹ

Perhaps we are meant to understand that life (either long life in this world, or eternal life in the next) is the reward for doing those three things, loving God, listening to (i.e., obeying) His voice, and cleaving to Him (i.e., seeking intimacy with the Divine). In this understanding, Moshe is simply reminding us that if we love and obey our God we will receive the reward of life.

However, we can also understand these verses are not as explaining how to earn a reward of life, but explaining what it means to live. For Torah, life means loving God, listening to His voice and cleaving to Him; life without these three elements is, from the perspective of Torah, non-life.

While biological life is an either/or proposition—either you are alive or you’re not—spiritual life is more complicated. I can always be a little more alive, by loving God more deeply, by listening to Him more closely, by cleaving to Him more intimately. To the extent that all human beings are created in His image, I can choose life by loving them, by listening to them—by seeking to understand my fellow human being, and by cleaving to them, by opening myself up to intimacy and vulnerability with others.

We have all met people who seem to diminish as their lives go on, their horizons narrowing with each passing year, leaving them with a little less vitality, and we have all met others who remain spiritually vital through the years, even as their physical and cognitive abilities diminish and their physical lives draw to a close. Perhaps what determines which group we will fall into is the degree to which, in each moment of our lives, we choose life: by choosing to love more, to listen more, and to be more intimate with God and with our fellow human being.

In these closing moments of 5777, and at every moment of our lives, God places before us a choice between life and non-life. This Shabbat and throughout the year to come, at every opportunity that we have, let us choose life.

May you each be inscribed this year in the book of life,

Rabbi Garth Silberstein