5770 Erev Rosh Hoshanah Sermon
by Rabbi Jan Salzman
Niggin: ivdu et ya b’simcha
Shana Tova! I am so delighted to be here with you this evening! This past year has been one full of so many changes and blessings, as well as some of the deepest heartbreak and losses that we never thought we could endure. Births; Deaths; Job changes; new bicycles and knee replacements. We strive to enter into this time of the new moon of Tishrei with the sweetness and the dignity that it requires of us. While I would like to just spend the next 15-20 minutes just singing with you, and maybe even dancing, in order to celebrate this New Year’s Eve, I know that tradition asks that we ascend into the realm of thought and reflection at this point in our journey together.
First I need to ask, what am I doing here in the first place, preaching a sermon to you?
What is this about a sermon, anyway? Now in the old days, there were two kinds of sermons: one was when the head Rav, of a geographic region, would speak to the peasants twice a year: on RH and on Passover...that’s it. not every week, not each Shabbat, but 2x year! in the intellectual elitism of Europe in the 16th and 17th century, a true Rav would NEVER want to speak to the peasants! That group of learned and I would add respectfully, very serious and holy men, to whom I trace my own family lineage, looked down on the uneducated and imperfectly observant simple yidden, who, because of their lot in life, with grinding poverty and little advanced education, could never understand the pilpul, or excruciating convolutions that Talmud study had become. It was an impersonal, very dry kind of sermon, for the two parties had no connection with each other’s lives; they lived in radically different universes. On the more positive side, it was the opportunity for those who were less educated to get a taste, for which they, the Tevye’s, did yearn, of that more esoteric and elevated learning. You know, and I’d discuss the holy books with the learned men, 7 hours every day. That would be the sweetest thing of all... oy...
The other kind of sermon, that took place throughout the year, and was wildly popular, was what we might describe as a ‘fire and brimstone’ kind of experience: some real preachin’! These were handled by a system of travelling rabbis, who were famous for their dramatic flair, who would go from town to town, to preach in the little synagogues of the villages. These men were astute with their Torah and Talmud, quick with their wit, and had a burning purpose to reprimand the people with great flare and hyperbole, so that it would became a very emotional experience. The peasants would be filled with remorse and guilt at their role in bringing on their own suffering and it wasn’t considered a ‘good’ sermon unless everyone was crying by the end. Not unlike we might do with theatre or novels or even soap operas. These travelling rabbis were also subject to the critique of the population. Someone who delivered a sermon in a lackluster manner soon lost his audience. So you get that there was a theatrical component to these events, as well as cathartic function in this kind of sermon: a place for everyone to have a good cry. For the life of the yidden was hard. And dangerous. And frightening. And we needed a time and a place for public mourning, and some emotional release, from the harshness of our situation. And, we also enjoyed the opportunity to mock and dismiss those preachers who could not deliver an impressive show!
So I thought that I would take on each of these kinds of sermonizers. First a bissel of elevated learning, from a living sage, Rabbi Arthur Green, who has worked tirelessly to re-infuse our people with joy and learning. He teaches that, as Rosh Hashannah is dedicated to the creation of creation, the New Year: He looks at the opening pasook of the Torah: Bereshit bara elohim et ha-shamiyim v’et ha aretz, and derives the following three mitzvoth:
The first mitzvah is of an obligation to cultivate awareness of Oneness. This mitzvah is based in the pasook/sentence of Deut. 4:39, which we say during the Aleinu right before the v’ne-emar:
Know this day and set it upon your heart that YHVH is Gd in heaven above and on the earth below; there is none else.
Spiritually, we are to remain aware, in all that we do and say and think and dream, that ultimately, it’s all part of a great big ECHAD/ONE. a place where there is no differentiation, no specificity, no aloneness. And how to cultivate that awareness? That mindfulness? The liturgical tradition offers an opportunity to say over 100 blessings a day, a constant little ‘ding’ that rings throughout the most mundane tasks: eating, bathroom breaks, doing our parnassa/making a living, marking time as it marches through our day, as well as for noticing the amazing: the rainbow, the clouds, a child, a bride and groom.
What does he mean by this? the mitzva of awareness, is the mindfulness of Tich Na Han , the Vietnamese Buddisht priest: everything, every moment deserves our honor, our attention; every thing in life is an opportunity to deepen our experience and our appreciation of life itself. Can we cultivate that awareness? can we see the hidden light that is embedded in all of creation? can we rouse ourselves from our somnolence and mechanical living, so that we can see, really see, really touch, really know beauty, grace, connectedness, relations, covenant? Oy, it is so hard to do! kayn y’hi ratzon.
The second mitzvah that Art explores is grounded in the text, b’tzelem elohim (genesis, 5:1) that every human being is created in the tzelem, as Gd’s shadow, not shadow, as in the dark side, but in the way that peter pan understood his shadow: his counter-weight, attached irrevocably to himself, and, remember, he was desolate that his shadow had come unattached to him, so that he could not feel whole and accompanied., The understanding, we are all tzelem elohim, demands that we treat every human being as the image of Gd, or, as the Kabbalists understood this, each human being contained A spark of the Divine. A hidden flame. Tzelem Elohim is understood to be even greater than “love your neighbor as yourself” from Lev. 19:18; Why? Love, if it happens, is very nice. But, it is not realistic to expect that we’ll love everyone. Art writes: Even where there is no love, there is still the divine image. Every person is the bearer of that image and is entitled to the esteem and reverence in which we hold the face of Gd…and all decisions that we make in the interpersonal realm needs to bear this principle in mind….making an unambiguous demand on us: Each person has the right to be known and loved for the divine image that is his or her most profound and often hidden self.” This is the foundation for that hard to define word, menschlichkeyt, or human decency, that sets the agenda for the instinctive ethics of many Jews, even those cut off from the theological moorings of mussar, our system of values.
Each of us holds a deep interest for the world; we each have something unique, something that only we can share with the world, a personal flub-bub in the universal pulse. Art concludes: Each messenger brings a unique portrait of Echad/One, one that only he or she could paint. To take seriously our faith that each person is a t’zelem elohim is to treat all people with a spiritual dignity and caring that can transform our lives.” the dignity of each of us, that asks: what is it that i can do, that no one else in the world can do, that is simply my own special love-gift for the world?
How does it change us, to look into the eyes of the cashier at the grocery store, and smile? how does it affect the world, if we take seriously the liturgy, ‘baruch she’amar v’haya olam/blessed is the one who speaks and, lo, a world is created! that every single word that comes out of our mouths creates a world? what kind of world do we create with our eyes, our gestures, our attitudes? Surely none of us lives this mitzvah to the fullest, but there can be no Judaism that does not constantly attempt to make tzelem elohim a reality.”
Finally, the third mitza which Art describes has been beautifully addressed in AJ Heschel’s little but potent book, The Sabbath. The creation of Shabbat comes from the word for rest,????? . This, my holy friends, is perhaps the greatest gift that we Jews have to give the world. To be Jewish, as Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz teaches, is to accept that our culture is different than other cultures…not better, but different. We have skills that no other culture has; they have stuff we don’t. We’re all organs in the cosmic body. and that each organ contributes something special and unique to the smooth running of that metabolism. One of our gifts to the world, and for which the world yearns to learn, is how we organize and sanctify time. It amazed the Romans that Jews gave everyone, slaves, servants, women, children, even our animals, a full day off each week. They thought that we were nuts. But we knew...that if you don’t take a day to renew your spiritual connection, to reboot your hard-drive, then the human being, and life, has no dignity, no break. in this, we are the most keenly ‘b’tzelem elohim’.
Rabbi Green writes: Shabbat is an extended meditation on the wonders of the created world and the divine presence that fills it. The weekly stopping of the clocks, and the relief from all pressures and obligations of the workaday world, form the ongoing demand to recreate and transform reality, is needed more than ever in our fast-paced world...shabbat is contemplation turned into a way of living...one that is constructed out of family, communal joy and celebration.”
So, how do we get this boat pushed off the shore? one little thing, dear friends: try this one little thing: from Friday night until Saturday night, do not check your e-mail for 24 hours! it’s a little thing, but, oh such a big bang in such a little thing! or something like this.
Ok, very nice. I’m sure your brain is happy with that little bissel of teaching. Yet not very satisfying, is it? we need to have more of our vessels shook: our puppy and lizard brains, need some attention. our feelings; our kishkeh’s. our spirits. let’s take off the kid gloves and get to preachin’!
So we switch to the second kind of rabbi: the one who implores us to, with apologies to Beatrix Potter, and her Peter Rabbit, they implored the Jews to exert themselves (tell the Peter rabbit story). What was the role of this second kind of rebbe? They were a way for the people, as a whole, to process the changes that were swirling around them. The preachers brought news of what was happening in the rest of the Jewish world; they were the carrier pigeons of world news, of pogroms that were happening, and of blood libels; but also of new clothing styles and the current music that was captivating the young folk (which btw, was the source of all those tunes that we now consider traditional and etched in stone!); and they were also on the forefront of fomenting a resistance to both the Enlightenment and the nascent Hasidic movements, both of which were beginning to appear on the horizon in Europe, and to which all the kids were ridiculously attracted to, one way or the other. This effort, of course, failed miserably.
My husband, Loredo, once gave over one of the most beautiful and deep teachings. He had just finished watching some movie, I don’t recall which one, maybe Willow? in which the baby is snatched away from the mommy’s arms, and the rest of the movie was the repair of that breach, with the happy ending of the reunification of the mommy and baby. From that point on, that archetypical moment became a touch point for us, an emotional shorthand, for those times when the floor gets ripped out from underneath us, and a situation threatens that might result in a beloved being snatched away, or the potential of being abandoned, rears its frightening head. Change. Abandonment. separation. Shifting sands. The deepest cut, the deepest fear.
What is that fear like, to lose that which holds us moored? To lose the fulcrum for our emotional and spiritual foundation? And, isn’t that need to hold onto what we know ever-present, especially when we find ourselves in changing situations? What is our response to sudden, or even gradual, change? Where is our awareness, like Rabbi Green taught us? Change gives us the chance to bring out our eagerness to travel and visit other places, and try a different kind of fruit upon our pancakes. Or, sometimes, we bring to that crack in our world the more resistant side of being a human who feels that they’ve been abandoned: anger, revenge, retaliation, spoiling it for others, gossip whose purpose is to distort and disrupt. oy, one sin of transgression after another!
Our most ancient, primitive parts of us confront this imperative to change, during the High Holidays, and is the compelling force of t’shuva. Can we counter the impulse to repeat something that we thought we’d never do again? The liturgy of this holiday creates the pit into which we dip, and then gives us the spiritual technology, the tools, through which we can transfer from what we were and did, to what we might and will be; to recommit, re-covenant, re-member, to our most elevated ways that we can imagine being, that as a tzelem elohom, we must be!
T’shuva from the Chet/the missing of our mark. It’s not just the surface meaning, of transgression, that we missed our marks; that’s kind of the 6 year old’s version of, oh i promise never to do that again! rather, more deeply, it’s that, when we mess up, the connection with the rest of creation has been threatened and severed by our behavior, and that each time we act in such a way that takes us further from our inner core, of the values by which we aspire to live, that of love and compassion and patience and thinking of the other before we think of ourselves, and so on and so forth....a little more shmutz collects, and pollutes our worlds, both figuratively and substantially. and so teshuva is about going deep into the hard drive, and changing how we even might understand and react to a situation, rather than the situation itself.
AJ Heschel tells this story about himself, when he was a child: he writes, in the third person:
A child of seven was reading in school the chapter which tells of the binding of Isaac:
Isaac was on the way to Mount Moriah with his father; then he lay on the alter, bound, waiting to be sacrificed. My heart began to beat even faster; it actually sobbed with pity for Isaac. Behold, Abraham now lifted the knife. And now my heart froze within me with fright. Suddenly, the voice of an angel was heard: “Abraham, lay not your hand upon the lad, for now I know that you fear God.” And here I broke out into tears and wept aloud. “Why are you crying?” asked the rabbi. “You know that Isaac was not killed.”
And I said to him, still weeping, “But, rabbi, supposing the angel had come a second too late?” The rabbi comforted me and calmed me by telling that an angel cannot come late.
An angel cannot be late, but man, made of flesh and blood, can.
We all come too late. To stop the pain. To stop the danger. To stop the loose tongue, the scornful look, the quick retort. To stop the angry force, or the quiet acquiescence in the face of oppression. In large and small ways, we break our world, and walk around, shattering, shattered, isolating and isolated from the company of not only our fellow travellers on this earthship, but from the deep deep meaning of Shalom: not peace, like in pax, i win you lose...that is the roman understanding of peace. Shalom means wholeness. Our wholeness. the diversity and abundance that is the tzelem elohim, the celebration of the many facets, and faces, and the inherent imperative for change and growth, that is life.
Holy friends, the real transgression is to be emotionally withdrawn from ourselves, so that we lose connection to the topsy turvy nature of being alive, and hence lose the exquisite sensitivity to the impact that we have on the rest of creation, we wreck havoc on the rest of the world. We are grumpy. We are lethargic. We are under the sway of the yetzir hara, the inclination to break stuff. We are in desperate need of a snack and a good nap.
So, during this dive into the deep dark sticky stuff, as my sister calls it, of who we were and are and could be, we strive to reconnect with our deepest selves at this time of year, so that we can recharge our spent and empty batteries and fully embrace a new commitment to try yet again.
So I implore you to exert yourself! to the scraping away of all the husks until we get to the inner nikuda, the spark of light that can never be polluted by anything that we do. It’s the little flame with which we light that first candle of chanukah, in the darkest time of the year; that spark, the shard that i spoke of when we began our journey together this evening. It is always, irrevocably connected to the entire Oneness of Creation., The most primal part of being a human being: connection; loyalty; trust; that we can turn back around, look back at the year that is passing, face those places where we didn’t live according to our highest aspirations, and then turn our faces to this next year. Hope. Resiliency. To be in touch with our yearning to be loved and safe and cared for, so that we can love, and create safety, and care for…t’shoooo’vaaaaa. Ahhhhh.
Processing change. This was the thrust of the sermons back then, and still to today. How do we process change? When do we embrace it and when should we offer resistance? to know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em. Events and new inventions constantly challenge us; assimilation, new cultures in which we find ourselves, different moral and ethical references …we Jews are experts at this, and take strength from rolling with the punches, so to speak: keeping our unique identity while integrating into the new world order.
Rosh haShannah . Shana. Reb Nachman teaches that the word, shana, contains a dual meaning: it means, not just ‘head of the year’, but also ‘The Head Change’, or perhaps we should say, ‘the changing of the head’! How poetic and full that double meaning! Beginnings understood as new chances, change experienced as opportunities, yet both ‘year’ and ‘change’ can also hold a bit of uncertainty and vertigo. A process of becoming different. Using what was, and shaping it into what needs to be. Yet, also destabilizing; shifting sands.
And i want to say that sometimes, it’s ok not to change. as Tevye says, if i change one more thing i’ll break. So it’s not always the right thing to do, to change. Sometimes, it’s just not possible. or healthy. or desirable.
ok, we’re coming in for a landing.... I want to shift our attention to a final bissel Torah, a understanding of the point at which the Israelites find themselves at the other side of the sea of reeds, not sure of what will come to be. This moment has always held a depth charge for me.
Amazingly, though not uncharacteristically, the text gives us two absolutely different, polar opposite images: one, in Ex.14:27-28, the Egyptians are hurled into the sea and perish there; in the second version, (Ex. 14:30) we are presented with a vision of dead Egyptians on the lip (s’ftai) of the sea; corpses are heaped up on the banks. …as if they had been spit out from the mouth of the sea…..how did the drowned end up on the river bank? We have no idea. We just have these two scenarios. So, we can ask, why two different versions of the same situation? Well, one answer is actually a question: is there ever really two situations that are exactly the same? What can we learn from the difference between these two?
In the first scenario, as they look back, they are filled with despair, that all that they had, for generations, was gone. Wiped out. Drowned. Nothing familiar, not a photo, not a spoon, remains of their known life. Like Katrina. Or a Tsunami. Or a home fire. Despondency sets in, and probably a little panic. Already we can hear the refrain, which will be repeated over and over again during their journey: oh, if only we had remained in Egypt! Where we always had enuf food and comfort and everything else! Why did things have to change?
And then, a few sentences later, the Torah switches the lens to the pile of corpses on the lips of the Sea. The Israelites can see, materially, what they are leaving behind. The shells of what used to be. This is a hard one to experience, because with deep, paradigmatic change, there is a mourning of what was. All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we feel that we are leaving behind us is a part of ourselves.
Well, thank Gd, not all change is so cataclysmic. Sometimes change is so gradual that you don’t know anything has shifted until you realize that you’re already on the other side! No point in time can be pinpointed. It’s just all different, now….a 12 year old is suddenly 13; our hair is becomes gray, though the change occurred hair by hair…and we can learn from the next part of the story a deep teaching by asking:
What do the Israelites have in their pockets? The jewels and metals from their time in slavery, with which they will build the mishkan the holy tabernacle in which their Gd will dwell…the people look back on their past, feel the jewels in their pockets, and turn, running to begin the dance and rejoice over their new incarnation, their new tasks, which is, of course, the text that we sing in Mi Chamocha…
But, what’s important to me, in this moment, is that the question arises: What shall they bring with them/what are the jewels that they will use to construct their new dwelling place for the new Gd? What will they leave behind, if it is even possible to leave anything behind.
Nothing is ever left behind. We do not forgive and forget. We forgive and remember. As our text teaches, we take where we were, and weave it into the next part of the journey.… all the jewels that we bring forward into a new era will get subsumed into the next developmental level. Just like T’shuva is not a circle, returning to where you were before…it’s taking what you have learned, and crawling onto the next spiral of the year.
I end with where we began: with the modality of the two Rebbes. One intellectual, for whom the Torah is the most real metaphor in the world: we are unavoidably and irrevocably Tzelem elohim. We are those who do the godding. the Verb, not the noun. making and creating worlds with our attitudes, actions, and words. And the other rebbe, that is the psychospiritual. the one of kishkes; passions; exhortations! the fear and the longing! the eagerness and the hesitancy. We hold within our lives, our hearts, both Rebbes...the one who exhorts and the one who analyses; the one who sees from a distance and the one who gets right in our face. May these two Rebbes find some kind of balance within us, so that our next year might be filled with a little less anxiety and a whole lot more joy and comfort.
Ken Y’hi Ratzon, so may it be G-d’s will.
ivdu et hashem b’simcha!
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