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by Rabbi Steven Schwartz
Of all the blessings that we recite in our tradition, I would say that the best known, and very possibly the best loved of all of the blessings is the shehechiyanu, that we recite throughout the holidays, but perhaps most powerfully at the end of the Kol Nidre prayer. First of all it is a blessing that many of us know by heart, I would say one of the three. Most people know borei p’ri hagafen, the prayer on the wine, most people know hamitzi lechem min ha’aretz, the prayer we say before eating bread, and those you can understand because they are practical - and - we say them before we eat. So it behooves us to know them by heart - because we are hungry, we don’t want to spend time flipping through the pages of a siddur - you know it by heart! Just say it and lets eat!
But the shehechiyanu is different - it doesn’t really have any practical implications - you don’t for example, say the shehechiyanu before eating, or before performing a ritual. Instead, it has a different liturgical function, which more than anything else seems to be to remind us of the passage of time. Translating the blessing is a little bit tricky, but essentially it means this - blessed are you, Lord our God - shehechiyanu - Who has kept us in life; v’kiyimanu - and sustained us; v’higiyanu - and enabled us to reach, to arrive at - la’z’man hazeh - this moment, or really literally translated, this TIME. In fact the rabbinic nickname for the blessing, that is used to refer to it in the Talmud, is simply z’man, which means time.
Now why would we need a blessing to remind us of the passage of time? After all, it is something that we all seem to be very well aware of. We mark time quite carefully. We plan our days and our weeks around particular hours, we write them onto our calendars or our computers, we check them every day. We wear watches to help us keep track of how much time has gone by, what time it is, and what time is coming up. We have clocks in the dashboards of our cars that we glance at every 30 seconds or so as we drive and clocks right next to our heads as we sleep at night. We expect people to be on time, and we are annoyed when they are not. In our community, of course, we even have what we call “Jewish time” which as far as I can tell means starting something about 15 minutes late.
But for all we do to keep track of time and to mark its passage, one thing we can never do is control it. Of all the things that people say to me in my role as rabbi, I think the single most repeated statement is this: “Rabbi, I cannot believe how quickly the time has gone by.” It could be a wedding anniversary, a yartzeit, a birth, a graduation, a significant birthday. These are the sudden moments, and they can be very powerful, when we realize how quickly the river of time is moving along.
I had one of those moments this past summer, while vacationing at Bethany Beach with my extended family, the gantza mishpaha schwartz. For the last 7 years we have spent a week or so at the Sea Colony community there - Becky and I and the kids, my parents, my sister and her family, my brother and his wife. But we actually have a relationship with Sea Colony that goes back many more years, all the way to my childhood, when my parents owned a place there, which they sold some time ago. This year, for the very first time, we actually rented that place - the very same unit that my parents owned so long ago. We had not been inside it in 18 years, maybe 20! - and we thought it would be fun, probably bring back some old memories, and also the price was right - but more than that we didn’t expect.
And so we were quite surprised, to say the least, to discover that the owners had not changed the place in almost 20 years. (maybe that is why the price was right!) All of the furniture was there, exactly as it had been when we last saw it. The same pictures hung on the walls in the same places, the coffee mugs - the same; many of the dishes, the same; even the tchochkes - little model farm houses and a stuffed animal cat - were sitting in their same spots, on top of the same entrance way sideboard. It was almost like walking through the door and stepping back in time.
But if time had not moved there, in our lives it had moved quite dramatically. When I last sat on that couch I was 25 years old - so looking in the mirror one day it was quite clear that a few years had indeed gone by. I had a beard - and not only that, it was grey! I had wrinkles in places that I didn’t remember having wrinkles the last time I looked in those mirrors. And much more significantly, since then I had become a father, and Talia, Josh, and Merav are not all that far from the age that I was back then. I had changed careers, gone through rabbinical school, and lived in LA, Jerusalem, and New York, all before settling here in Baltimore - all in that time - that brief window of time - since I had last been in that beach house. Time was indeed moving quickly in my life, and whether I liked it or not, there was nothing that I could do to roll back the clock, or even to slow it down just the tiniest bit.
You may remember Charles Dickens’ novel “Great Expectations.” One of the most memorable characters in the novel, in fact one of Dickens’ most memorable characters period, is the middle aged woman Miss Havisham. As a young woman engaged to be married she was left on the altar by a swindling fiance, and she was so devastated and humiliated by the experience that she decides not to move forward with her life. She essentially freezes time in the great mansion where she dwells - she continues to wear the wedding dress she was wearing the day of her tragedy, even wearing just a single shoe because that is what she had on when she heard the news; the uneaten wedding cake lays moldy and rotten on the great dining room table; all the furniture, the placement of every object in the house, is unchanged. Even the clocks have all been stopped.
It is a strange thing, but in actuality I think I do know a few Miss Havishams, and maybe you do too. Because there are people who for whatever reason get stuck in a moment from their past, and they don’t seem to be able to move forward. It can be a tragedy that holds them, or it can be a triumph. Some great victory they enjoyed, that they revisit time and time again while never achieving anything of significance afterwards. Or a loss that they have suffered that they have never been able to move beyond. Or a wrong that was done to them that they bitterly replay in their minds over and over again. They live their lives in some kind of holding pattern, going through the motions in the present, but all the while subconsciously living in a frozen moment from the past.
- But Judaism has always been uncomfortable with that idea. It tells us that the past should certainly be used as a source of wisdom and guidance, as a grounding point for our history and our traditions - but it is not a place where one should live out one’s life. Because the past is a place without hope or expectation, or the possibility of change - all ideas that Judaism believes in deeply.
And it may be that we all have just a little bit of Miss Havisham in us, because there are those moments when we too feel that we would like to stop the clock. There are suggestions all around us that we might just be able to do it - with the right exercise program, or diet, or attitude, or clothes, or car. But we all know, at the end of the day - or at least we should - that inevitably, inexorably, time will continue to move forward. And I think in many ways Kol Nidre is an acknowledgment of that fact.
After all, it is in a sense like my experience at the beach house. We come here this evening and it all feels the same. The solemn KN ritual, the procession of the Torahs, the melody of the prayer, the look and feel of the room - year to year it doesn’t change. But we come back here each year, and the tradition asks us to pause tonight, and to think about the changes in our lives. We may have had a wonderful year, filled with blessings; we may have had a difficult year, where we had to struggle. Most likely we had some kind of combination of blessings and challenges, of good moments that we were grateful for, and difficult moments that we had to meet. And it is the sameness of Kol Nidre, the unchanging quality of it, that creates a mirror that we can use to find a sense of perspective, to consider the changes that a year can bring, and to acknowledge that time is indeed moving along. You know at one point there were two versions of the Kol Nidre prayer, and one talked about the past, the year that had just ended. But the other version, which became the accepted version, the one the Cantor chanted tonight - talks about the future - the year that is about to begin - mi yom kippurim zeh ad yom kippurim haba - from this YK to the next one! We have a clean slate, its a new year, and we must move forward into it!
And maybe more than anything else that is why we rise together on KN eve to recite the shehechiyanu, the blessing of time. It is not a blessing that we use to thank God for past moments - quite the contrary, it is a blessing that we use to thank God for tonight, for the present moment, and for the next one, and the one after that. L’zeman haZEH we say - thank you God, for THIS moment - this sacred moment of my life.
may we have many more such moments to be thankful for in this year that is beginning - and may it be a year of health and goodness for all of us - amen
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