Rosh Hashanah 2011
As always I find myself standing before you on Rosh Hashanah somewhat astonished that another year has come and gone. Even more amazing to me, this is the 14th time I have officiated at High Holy Day services here at Beth El, and it is the 18th time officiating at a Rosh Hashanah service in my entire rabbinic career, to count student pulpits that I served. Two propitious numbers! The passage of time always hits me in a powerful way when our fall holidays come around, and part of the reason for that is because this is the time of year when we are supposed to look back, and think about the year, or even many years, that have gone by.
It is a curious thing to note that the name we use for today’s holiday, Rosh Hashanah, is not found anywhere in the Torah. Instead, the Torah calls this day either Yom Teruah, the day of shofar sounding, or Zichron Teruah, a day of remembering, marked by the sounding of the shofar . And it is the second phrase that I think captures what Rosh Hashanah is all about - it is about remembering, and it happens on two levels.
On the one hand there is an idea of collective memory. That is the memory of a community that gives the community a shared sense of meaning, connection, values, stories, and identity. There is a book that is often assigned in middle school these days called the Giver - it is about a future society where one person is designated as the "receiver of memory.' That person's job is to be the repository of all of the memories of that culture. And when that person becomes old, they become ‘the Giver,’ and they give the memories to the next ‘receiver.’ In Judaism, you might say we all play both roles - we are all 'receivers of memory', and we are all ‘givers,’ protecting the memories and traditions of our people so that we can pass them down, to children and grandchildren - then they become the 'receivers' - and then to the next generation, and the generation after that. That is collective memory, and it is at the heart of the Jewish enterprise.
But a remarkable thing happens in the process of passing down this collective memory from generation to generation - it becomes a personal touchstone for our lives and identities - and that is the second level of remembering on Rosh Hashanah - personal memory - looking back on our own lives. There is a well known story about a Jewish mother who is preparing her youngest son for his first day of kindergarten. She is walking him to the place where he will get the bus, and she is giving him the last pieces of advice that she’ll be able to give him before he goes off - so she says to him - ‘Bubeleh, behave, be a good boy. And Tatelah, don’t forget, as soon as school is over, get right on the bus and come straight home. And ketselah, remember, your mother loves you!” So the boy gets on the bus, he goes off to school, at the end of the day his mother is waiting for him at the bus stop, he gets off, she hugs him, and she says “Bubeleh, bubeleh, my bubeleh, what did you learn today?” And the boy looks at his mother and he says “I learned my name is Arnie!”
And RH is about all of that - it is about remembering where we come from, it is about reflecting on who we are today, but it is also about discovering or rediscovering who we would like to be in the future.
When I was a boy, growing up in upstate New York, one of my family’s October rituals was taking care of all the leaves that would fall from the trees. It was something I did with my father, and I remember that every year, we would spend hours and hours raking the leaves into piles, and by the time we were done raking, I was ready to quit. But my dad would always say, you can’t stop there - once you rake the leaves, you have to bag them. And yom tov is the same way - just looking back, collecting the memories, sorting them, putting them into piles, isn’t enough. You have to do something with the piles that you make. And I think we’re all pretty good at collecting the memories, sifting through them, putting them into piles. But once we go through the process, and have the piles there, I am not sure if we always know what to do with them.
The problem is that memories that we collect, what some call the baggage that we carry, too often defines for us who we are today, and limits us in terms of who we want to be in the years to come. It is so easy for us to get stuck in the patterns of our lives - our jobs are our jobs, our relationships our relationships, our habits our habits, our limitations are our limitations. What is the phrase you hear repeated over and over and over again today? - it is what it is. And what we really mean by that is: this is not perfect, it is not the way we want it to be. But it is the way it has been, and so we assume its the way it will be in the future - and we say, “OK,we’ll just live with it.”
But why do we do that? Why do we let the past define us and limit us like that? I don’t imagine that a single person in this room is entirely satisfied with their present - even if life is good, even if you have everything you need - isn’t there one relationship that you wish was different, better? Isn’t there one thing in your life you would like to change? Isn’t there one character flaw that you would like to get rid of. And most of us would probably say - one!?
The haftara text from the first day of Rosh Hashanah tells the story of Hannah, and her quest to have a child. The beginning of the haftara gives us a description of Hannah’s life, and to say the least she is stuck in a rut. She is married to Elkanah, and he is a decent enough fellow, but he has another wife who gives him children, while Hannah is barren. To make matters worse, the other wife, whose name is Peninnah, taunts Hannah because she can’t have children. And this is her life, day after day, year after year - v’chain ya’ashe shana v’shanah - so it was year after year.
Finally Hannah can’t take it anymore, and she becomes depressed. She stops eating, she weeps all the time. And her husband, Elkanah, wants to console her, just so that she’ll feel better. And he says to her “Don’t be sad - I am more devoted to you than 10 sons would be anyway.” And what he’s really saying to her is: “You know Hannah, it is what is. Its not perfect, its not the life you thought you would have, but it could be worse. Just accept it, that is the way it is always going to be.”
But we know the end of the story - Hannah refuses to let the past, all of those years of disappointment and sadness, define her. “It is what it is” is not enough for her, and that year, when the family makes its annual pilgrimage for the holidays, Hannah’s faith that the future can be different is as strong as ever, maybe stronger. She prays for a child as she has never prayed before, and she gives birth to Samuel, who will be the prophet that unites the Israelites and helps them crown a king.
What I admire most about Hannah is not the faith that she showed, not even the beautiful prayer that she offers to God. To me what defines Hannah is the spirit that she has, the belief that despite all the evidence of the past to the contrary, she can do something to make a better life for herself, and she never gives up on that possibility.
A couple of years ago a gentleman made an appointment with me and came to my office, right around yomtov time, because he wanted to share with me a story about his relationship with his father.
And he told me that when he was a young man, in his mid- twenties, that relationship was less than ideal. There were things they wished they said to one another, things they should have said to one another, that for whatever reason, like in so many relationships, they were not able to say. And there were things they said to one another that they regretted saying. And this went on and on for years and years - it was what it was. One day he had received a phone call - out of the blue - his father had died suddenly. He was beside himself - not only from the loss of his father, but from the terrible feeling that he would never have a chance to clear the air with him, to say the things that he needed to say, to tell him how much he had loved him.
Then a few days after his father died the young man found out that in his father’s wallet, he had been carrying a letter that the young man had written to him a number of months earlier. The father had received the letter, and he had carried it with him everywhere he went. And sitting in my office, the man who was now older than his father had been when he died, told me two things that he had learned from the fact that his father had been carrying that letter: the first was that his father loved him. That letter didn’t go into the trash, or into a drawer somewhere to never be seen again - it went into his wallet, something he carried with him, every single day. And the second thing he had learned was that his father knew how much his son had loved him. What we all want to know when we lose someone, what we all want to be assured of, that little letter, carried by his father, had given to him.
But imagine just for a moment - what if that letter hadn't been written? What if the young many never put pen to paper, never took the chance, never thought to himself ‘maybe I can do something about this to make it better.” He would have gone the rest of his life wondering if his relationship with his father was what he wanted it to be - and his father would have died, not knowing for sure in his heart how his son felt towards him. But you see his decision to write that letter changed a pattern, and enabled him to break free of the past, and in the end make a future he hoped to have. And he said that it was one of the great blessings of his life.
And I’ve been thinking about that story a lot - and I have been wondering - would I have written that letter? And I guess what I want you to think about today is: Would you have written it? You know we have all faced those moments: we have them in a year, we have them in the course of many years - there is a person we care about, something we thought we should do, or say, a call we should make, a chance we should take - a letter we should write - and we let it go by - it is what it is.
And yom tov is about acknowledging what it is, and what it has been - but it is also about imagining what it should be. We are given a chance in a new year - if there is a grudge that we hold, to resolve it; if there is forgiveness that we need, to seek it; if there is someone that we love, to tell them; if there is a letter that we need to write, to write it - we are given a chance, a precious chance, to set aside everything that keeps us still, to break free of the past, and to move forward into the future with faith - with God’s help this year may we do that - may we do it with friends, may we do it with family - and may we together share in a year of sweetness, blessing, and health -