Be Strong and Resolute

The Torah's Call to Authenticity

“In the moment of vision, indeed, and often just ‘for that moment,’ existence can even gain mastery over the everyday; but it can never extinguish it.” (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time)

Be strong and resolute (chizku v’imtzu), be not in fear or in dread of them; for the LORD your God Godself marches with you: God will not fail you or forsake you. (Deuteronomy 31:6)

Then Moses called Joshua and said to him in the sight of all Israel: “Be strong and resolute (chazak v’e’ematz), for it is you who shall go with this people into the land that the LORD swore to their fathers to give them, and it is you who shall apportion it to them. (Deut. 31:7)

And He charged Joshua son of Nun: “Be strong and resolute (chazak v’e’ematz): for you shall bring the Israelites into the land that I promised them on oath, and I will be with you.” (Deut. 31:23)

“Be strong and resolute (chazak v’e’ematz), for you shall apportion to this people the land that I swore to their fathers to assign to them. (Joshua 1:6)

What does it mean to be resolute? On the one hand, being resolute or resolved sounds final, definitive, like some sort of existential accomplishment. On the other hand, the re- prefix intimates that being in a state of resolution takes continuous work, is a kind of habit, activity, or even life calling.

One can be resolved about specific matters, one can have made up one’s mind about a particular decision or a particular worldview, but to live in a state of resoluteness seems to be at once more amorphous and more profound.

In this week’s parasha, Vayeilech (Deut. 31:1-31:30), which falls between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, God commands both Joshua and the people to be strong and resolute. The command repeats three times, suggesting that the short phrase, “strong and resolved” contains the key to the entire reading. Contextually, we are at a moment of transition. Moses, knowing he is about to die, confers legitimacy on his successor, Joshua, but also gives him and the people some “life wisdom”; their success depends upon being strong and resolute.

That this phrase is specifically linked to a moment of vulnerability, a potentially scary moment in the life of the people and its leadership, is evidenced by the fact that it repeats at the beginning of the Book of Joshua. “Be strong and resolute” is the existential command that binds Deuteronomy to Joshua, Moses to Joshua, wilderness to Promised Land. “Be strong and resolute” is the metaphorical bridge that gathers the banks of the Jordan; it is the command specifically offered to people in a time of uncertainty, unclarity, difficulty. While the immediate context of the phrase may be militaristic, as in, “don’t break rank,” the broader challenge it responds to is that of continuity in the face of change. “Chazak v’ametz” is the call to acknowledge the fundamental problem of time passing; it is what we can do, because of and in spite of the fact that nothing lasts.

The plain reading of the command and the existential reading of the command are somewhat in tension, roughly mapping onto a distinction that Heidegger draws between the “ontic” plane and the “ontological” one. The plain reading says, “Don’t worry: you will succeed in your earthly challenges, because God is going to help you.” The existential reading says, “Embrace your fundamental anxiety, your mortality, your vulnerability. No divine intervention, no earthly success, can take it away from you. You think life is about winning battles. No. Life is about the fact that no amount of winning or losing can penetrate to the deeper problem of what it means that you are here. Be strong and resolute, anyways.”

In other words, there’s the strength and resolution that come from feeling that everything will work out, and there’s the the strength and resolution that come from recognizing that things merely are, and that we should not predicate our strength and resolution on the basis of external outcomes. In some ways, this latter position is a kind of Stoic one. What is one resolving to be? Circularly, and at the very least, to being resolute itself. In self-help literature, it’s common to advocate for some version of “positive thinking”: “fake it ‘til you make it.” Through that lens, being strong and resolute is a tactic for achievement. But through a Zen and non- or anti- utilitarian lens, one should be strong and resolute not to receive an external reward, but because cultivating these modes of being is an end in itself. The reward for being strong and resolute is being strong and resolute.

The existential reading is somewhat subversive. The plain reading says if I do X,Y, and Z, I’ll get to the Promised Land, but the existential reading says if I do X,Y, and Z, it won’t matter if I get to the Promised Land, or else, the Promised Land will be reconfigured to be a state of mind, a comportment, rather than a plot of land. Since, for most of Jewish history, we have not lived in the land of Israel, but have lived in a state of political, geographic, and spiritual exile, the commandment to be strong and resolute cannot be dependent on the land or on military victory. It is precisely a command we need in times of darkness and uncertainty.

The modern thinkers who best grasped the existential depths of resoluteness were Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Both understood that resoluteness is a kind of mirage, something I must devote myself to, but at the same time something I am always slipping away from. The Days of Awe, culminating in Yom Kippur, offer us a time to be more resolute, to commit to being resolute. But inevitably, Yom Kippur ends and we return to everyday life. The dramatic struggle between the authentic and the inauthentic, the individuating moment and the humdrum of socialized routine, is at the core of Heidegger’s Being and Time. We want so badly, at our core, to be resolute, to face up to ourselves (and/or, to God) and yet we are constantly pulled in by distraction, by external forces, by cliche, ideology, “bad faith.” Heidegger termed the forces that strip us of our resoluteness, “the they” (das Man), a kind of decentralized, yet internalized saboteur whom we can’t but live without. Classical rabbinic thought would call it “the yetzer hara,” the evil inclination. Augustinian Christianity might call it “original sin.”

Yet for Heidegger, the evil urge is not impulse, not an appetite, not a source of vice. It’s a feature, not a bug, and what it does is not tell me to kill or steal or commit some taboo. It’s more benign and yet for that reason more insidious. It simply tells me to do what others do, to enjoy that which “they” enjoy, to talk as “they talk,” to go to this school or pursue this job or this kind of life partner because “that’s what one does.” Auto-pilot.

We need auto-pilot. Because if we were always inventing the wheel and living in a state of epiphany, we’d be very inefficient. Skillfulness means familiarity and familiarity grows through repetition, turning exciting and challenging encounters into smooth and predictable ones. At scale, we have better “Return on our investment” better “margins.” But at scale, we lose the difficult, the quirky, the personal. To be strong and resolute is to love the difficult, to delight in that which is insoluble, the mystery of (my) existence itself.

For Heidegger, there was one thing which forced me to be resolute and that was the prospect of my own death. Yet Heidegger knew we are not wired to think about death most (or any) of the time.

Yom Kippur, coming next week, is an opportunity to confront our mortality. Not just the fact that our days are numbered, but the fact that, without knowing it, our life is composed of moments, moments in which we are deciding or not deciding to be who we are. It is not coincidental that the immanent death of Moses triggers him and God to give the kind of summons that can only come from a death bed: love your life. Do not waste your time on things that don’t matter. Be strong and resolute.

We are blessed with moments of vision in our lives in which time slows or stops. The call to resoluteness is a call to create more moments of pause. We can do this through prayer and meditation, through creative production and consumption, through deep conversations and deep relationships, through acts of service and generosity, through time spent in nature, through the observance of festivals. But we cannot escape everydayness. The mundane is always waiting, the bug on my neck, the thought that says time to check my watch, the neurotic voices DJ’ing my neural network on loop.

To be strong and resolute, then, is not to oppose the everyday, but to be strong and resolute about the fact that we are imperfect, that not all of our time will feel meaningful or visionary or focused, and that, this, too, is part of it. Authenticity is a way we must make, a “desire line,” not a pre-existing path. May we be inscribed and sealed in the Book of Life, the Book in constant need of our re-reading and re-writing.

Shabbat Shalom and G’mar Chatima Tova,

Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh

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Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.

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