From the time I was a child, I loved Friday nights – lighting the candles, making a special dinner, going to services, connecting with generations of Jews for whom this suspension of time embodies our covenant with God and each other. This week’s Torah portion, Nitzavim, Deuteronomy 29:9-31:30, is in my mind a powerful bookend to the Shama and V’ahavta, found earlier in Deuteronomy 6:19. Moses, 120 years old, for his final act before dying, convenes all the Israelites in an assembly where the covenant between One God and Israel will be ratified. This covenant is mutual, with no secrets or surprises or mystery. As Jews, we are reminded of our covenant with God, in the rainbow, by circumcision, by Torah, and in Shabbat. Each of us, over the past 3,000 years, has had this gift and obligation available to us. Each Shabbat I try to stop time and enter that space in which I reaffirm my spiritual link to the covenant that Moses affirmed between the Jewish people and God. I feel the sacred obligation and partnership this covenant implies to me as a Jew in relation to my place in the world. And even those weeks when we cannot “make Shabbat,” I know it is there, waiting for me next week, and the next. Keeping Shabbat is fragile, so NItzavim reminds me that Moses called on all of us standing there on that day, and on all unborn generations to bind ourselves to that covenant with God to make the world a better place.