We stand one week from Rosh Hashana, before the parashot Nitzavim-Vayelech.

Chronologically it was spoken on the last day of Moshe's life, the seventh of Adar. The proof is in Vayelech: "I am one hundred and twenty years old today." The Holy One, blessed be He, completes the years of the righteous from day to day; by tradition Moshe was born on the seventh of Adar and died on the seventh of Adar. By gezera shava, the "today" of our verse is that same day — as it is for the end of Ki Tavo, for Vayelech, Haazinu and Vezot HaBeracha.

So much for chronology. But the Zohar HaKadosh teaches that wherever the word hayom appears there is a hint of Rosh Hashana. And it rests this on a verse from the book of Iyov:

When Ezra HaSofer fixed the order of the readings, he arranged it so that Nitzavim — alone or with Vayelech — always falls before Rosh Hashana. To bring us into the mood of the day, and because the parasha deals precisely with teshuva: "and you shall return to your heart," "and the Lord will bring back your captivity."

The same device appears before Shavuot: Bechukotai, with its forty-nine rebukes, always falls earlier, and Bamidbar is set in between — for it would be neither pleasant nor fitting to receive the giving of the Torah immediately after those rebukes.

Since you are attentive, here is a chidush. It is reported that among the thousands of verses in Tanach, not one has the numerical value of the words "Rosh Hashana" — except one.

Let us count: rosh, resh two hundred, aleph one, shin three hundred; hashana, heh five, shin three hundred, nun fifty, heh five. Total: 861.

What happened on that day, that Moshe had to tell them "you are standing"? Rashi asks why this parasha follows the curses, and answers: because Israel had heard one hundred curses less two, besides the forty-nine of Torat Kohanim — their faces turned pale and they said: who can stand before these?

They were crushed. What Moshe had just described they heard as the announcement of everything we know was later endured — and most of it has come to pass, which means, thank God, that we are already on the last stretch before the redemption. So Moshe tells them: lift up your heads. Nitzav means to stand upright. "You have angered the Omnipresent greatly, and He has not made an end of you — and here you are, existing before Him." Forty years of testing Him, and you are still here: even when He punishes, He never destroys.

We cannot proceed without the Zohar. The Zohar Chadash records an exchange between Eliyahu HaNavi and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai.

Rabbi Shimon does the work, goes through the whole list, and returns: I have found it.

You rise in the morning and the day is such a nightmare that you long only for evening to come. Evening comes, you hope for some rest in the darkness — and the noise and the wars begin again, and you say: let the morning come at last. There is no taste left in such a life.

It remains to understand how what I have just described — a nightmare — can be a blessing.

We all live with the sense that a great deal of time remains. A man of thirty or forty will tell you: what are you talking about, I have another eighty years. A man of eighty-five walks into the office wanting to buy land and start a project. The truth is that we know nothing of it: our lives are in the hand of the Holy One, blessed be He.

And here, in the name of the Yismach Moshe, a very strong formulation, which I quote: and this is the secret of the redemption — the personal redemption, which is teshuva. "And your life shall hang before you": at every hour you stand to die; "you shall fear day and night": perhaps now is the time; "and you shall have no assurance of your life": for at every hour the term is at hand. And if so, you will return in teshuva — and that will be the sprouting of the redemption, for everything depends on teshuva.

We are not here to frighten but to strengthen. What do we ask for on Rosh Hashana? Look at the first blessings of the Amida, which are the essence:

Not health, not money, nothing else: life. Give us life and let us grow, that we may do good things with it. And next year the appointment is set: what did you do with that life?

Another reading of our verse. Moshe is careful to say: "you are standing today, all of you, before the Lord your God: your heads, your tribes, your elders…"

And let us not be overly afraid: it is a judgment, but the One judging us is the King — who is also our Father. There is no father who, seeing his son say "I want to be good," pushes him away. It does not exist.

If Nitzavim is joined to Ki Tavo, let us go further: Ki Tavo is not only curses. How does it open? With the bikurim, the first fruits. Let us see whether that too binds us to Rosh Hashana.

The Kohen takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar. And the next verse: "and you shall answer and say before the Lord your God: an Aramean sought to destroy my father…"

And we see why the reading is so fine. The mitzva of bikurim has two springs. The first, obvious: to give thanks for the fruit. But if that were all, one could bring a basket at any time of year, and finer fruit at that.

A mishna sheds light on this. We learned in tractate Bikurim that the rich brought their first fruits in baskets of silver and gold, and the poor in woven wicker baskets.

Who first in the Torah brought first fruits? Kayin. He worked the ground, and the idea was his; Hevel only followed: "and Hevel brought, he too."

It is explained that Kayin brought the lowest there was — flaxseed, from which nothing can be had without processing. But to say Hevel's offering was accepted because it was of better quality is to make the Holy One, blessed be He, small: since when is He impressed by the quality of livestock? He declares it Himself through Shmuel, after the war with Amalek — "does the Lord delight in burnt offerings as in obeying His voice? Behold, to listen is better than sacrifice." There must, then, have been something else.

Note the order of the verse too: "and the Lord turned to Hevel — and to his offering." First Hevel, then the offering. What counts is what you feel as you give: do you come from "my strength and the might of my hand," or from hevel? Had he come in submission, even with a matchstick it would have sufficed. It is the surrender of the heart that is sought.

Now look at the Kohen's body language — see how sweet the Torah is: you have made the whole journey from your field to Jerusalem, you arrive with your basket — and he takes it and sets it aside. As if to say: what is in the basket does not interest Me. What have you to say?

So what is left? One thing only: to make a hevel. Like Hevel, who brought himself. And how do we bring a hevel to the Holy One, blessed be He?

This motif runs through the whole liturgy, and we meet it on Yom Kippur: answer the poor who stand before You today; like paupers they beg Your forgiveness. That is exactly the bikurim we bring: ourselves, reduced to the state of hevel. And recall why the poor man is called ani: because the Holy One, blessed be He, answers — oneh. But on condition that we come this way, and not saying: life is owed me, I gave tzedaka.

And here the shofar is hinted at within Nitzavim itself:

A little arithmetic, to see how the sweetening works. The word shofar divides in two: sho — shin three hundred, vav six — equals 306, exactly like devash, honey; that is also why we dip the apple in honey. And par — peh eighty, resh two hundred — equals 280, the value of the five final letters of the Hebrew alphabet together. And everything final belongs to judgment.

A common question: what should one think or say during the tekiat shofar? Those few minutes are the essence of the day — what does one do with them?

The Shelah HaKadosh explains how this is heard in the sounds themselves. The tekia is a straight, whole sound, unbroken: a hint to man's birth into this world — a blank page, a pure soul; drawn on a graph, a straight line.

Rosh Hashana comes immediately after Elul, whose initials are those of "ani ledodi vedodi li." There is a twin verse in Shir HaShirim, the same words in another order: "dodi li va'ani lo."

To grasp its depth, a verse from parashat Tazria — the parasha of sowing: "when a woman sows and bears a male." When the woman sows first, a male is born.

And see how it all closes. What is the mazal of the month of Elul? Betulah, the Virgin — in the aspect of woman. Everything we do during Elul is sowing: teshuva, prayer, tzedaka, chassadim, selichot. And on Rosh Hashana: "and she bears a zachar." For zachar equals 227 — and berachah, blessing, equals 227.