Rosh Hashanah Day 1 - 5770/2009
For more than two thousand years, gifted writers have been composing piyyutim, or liturgical poems, which have made their graceful way into our various synagogue services. Whether L’cha Dodi on Friday nights, El Adon on Shabbat mornings, or V’Chol Ma’aminim, L’El Orech Din, Melech Elyon, Unetane Tokef or countless others on these High Holidays, all are the products of the creative efforts of these paytanim, as our tradition’s refers to them.
One such piyyut which is recited in the Sephardic tradition on the first night of Rosh Hashanah is titled Achot K’tanah- Little Sister- and was composed by Avraham Chazzan Girondi, a thirteenth century Italian paytan. It’s a complicated poem with a repeating refrain at the beginning of each stanza. That refrain’s three words have been a part of my high holiday consciousness since I first read them many years ago. Tichleh shanah v’killeloteha; let the old year and its curses be ended.
When we last gathered together as a congregation for Rosh Hashanah services, exactly one year ago today on the Jewish calendar, the financial world as we know it was coming unglued. Brokerage houses were failing, major corporations were in danger of total collapse, and we were beginning to understand the broader ramifications of an encroaching “great recession” that would claim countless jobs, depreciate thousands of retirement plans and bank accounts, reduce our salaries, and force many people from their homes.
Few, if any, have been left untouched and unscarred by what has happened in America this past year. Some are saying that we are beginning to emerge from our long and painful economic nightmare, but still- the words of Avraham Chazzan Girondi, written some seven hundred years ago, continue to resonate…. Tichleh shanah v’killeloteha; let the old year and its curses be ended.
This morning, however, external circumstances notwithstanding, we gather once again to stand together in judgment before God. At this critical moment, it is our great and awesome responsibility to hear the underlying message of Judaism’s penitential season, and to internalize its challenge to us.
The fundamental message, as I read it, is one of hope. We can bring about true and substantive change in our lives. We can change our lives for the better, make them not only more livable but more meaningful as well. In so doing, we can change not only ourselves but our families, our communities, and our world. Ad yom moto t’chakeh lo… God will wait us out even to the day we die to do t’shuvah. God never gives up on us, and therefore we must not give up on ourselves.
That is surely a hopeful message, one that I pray we can all hear and believe in. But the great challenge that it brings with it is that we must be the agents of change. We do not surrender either our autonomy or our free will in the process of t’shuvah, at least not in this Conservative movement. God will not change us no matter how fervent our prayers; we must struggle to change ourselves. We must alter our lifestyles, we must re-adjust our priorities, and we must re-calibrate all of the tools and conceptual frameworks that we use to define happiness, success, and fulfillment. That has always been true, but never more so than this year.
For a religious Jew, that act of spiritual re-calibration has always been accomplished by committing oneself to a life of Torah and mitzvoth, and thereby to the Jewish community and to Israel.
But much of the news of this past year seemed to fly in the face of this time-honored prescription for the good life. Ponzi schemes, trading body parts, money laundering, embezzling… there would appear to no longer be an axiomatic connection between the performance of mitzvot or even commitment to the Jewish community on the one hand, and the kind of moral/ethical behavior it is intended to produce on the other. If anything, the picture that has been created this year is one of an amoral (at best) Jewish community that plays into every despicable stereotype of how Jews do business and handle money.
If you wanted to write a script for anti-Semites, to give a working definition of Chillul Hashem- profaning the Divine name- you couldn’t do any better than to simply copy the news accounts of this past year. It has been a sad year indeed for the cause of God in our own religious house.
Here is the truth as I see it. Bad though the year has been for our community and its public image, there is nothing wrong with Judaism qua Judaism. The problem, rather, lies with the way some Jews- I’d like to think a very small minority- have used it as a way of disguising their crimes in a haze of piety and communal involvement.
Madoff was a Jewish communal hero until he became a symbol of evil. He gave millions to charity. The rabbis and others charged in the body-parts and money-laundering scandal were all pious pillars of their communities. Judaism was their cover, their veneer of legitimacy- not to be equated with the religious tradition that brings us together today, the one that emphasizes humility before God and man. We are all stained by association with the behaviors of that minority, but we are not them, and Judaism is not them.
The question that remains, however, is still a haunting one: given that we are not them, who are we, what do we stand for, and how do the timeless values and traditions of Judaism manifest themselves in our lives?
When all is said and done, the fundamental challenge that I referred to earlier remains the same, all the horrible stories of the year just ended notwithstanding. The quality of our lives remains largely in our own hands. We can rail against those who have brought shame to our community, and lament the way they warped and perverted Judaism, but that will say little about how we live our Jewish lives and do it better than them. Tichleh shanah v’killeloteha! Let the old year and its curses be finished. This is our time to shine, our time to be reborn and to start anew. Hayom Harat Olam! Today is the birthday of the world, within which we are all reborn.
How will you use that opportunity?
How will you more correctly and more consciously allow Judaism to shape your life as it should- uncorrupted by the values or lack thereof that led those other people astray? Nothing about Judaism’s transcendently ethical inner core is different than it was before this past year. How will you bring tzedakah into your lives? How will you bring chessed into your lives, acts of lovingkindness? How will you show that an authentic Jewish life is grounded in selflessness, and not in self? How will you use the painful losses of this year to arrive at a greater realization that your life is not about how much you have in material possessions, but rather how much you have whose value can never be estimated, and that happiness is more closely within your reach than you would imagine?
This coming year of 5770, I am initiating two initiatives in our congregation that I hope will afford all of our members, younger and older, a chance to answer those questions in an active and positive way.
For a long time, I have had the nagging feeling that although our congregation is capable of great kindness, we have made inadequate efforts in what the Orthodox community would call g’mach, an acronym for g’millut chassadim. Our Mutual Support Network has worked steadfastly and heroically to maintain contact with members who need bolstering, and often to help them with concrete needs like transportation to chemotherapy appointments and the like. Our Social Action committee has worked nobly to maintain our food drives, and manage our blood drives. But we are not where we need to be in responding to the many and different concrete needs that manifest themselves in a congregation of our size and scope.
We have many people in this synagogue who need assistance with the routine chores of living like shopping and errands, who could use a friendly visitor on a regular basis whether in their home or in a hospital, or maybe who want to come to shul on a Shabbat morning but need someone to get them there in their wheelchair, or just walk with them to make sure they don’t fall. During these difficult times, we may have people – we do have people- who can’t afford to buy clothes for themselves or their children, and would benefit from an organized communal effort to share what we no longer need or use. These are the small- or not so small- acts of chessed that make a community a community. They involve reaching beyond your comfort level, taking yourself out of your routine, finding time you don’t think you have, to significantly improve the quality of someone else’s life- maybe someone you don’t know. In a community that cares, these are the things that go on routinely. But they don’t happen by themselves. And they don’t happen enough here.
I have committed myself, with the help of our social worker, Ruth Kobrin, and I hope with our Social Action Committee and Mutual Support Network, to creating a more effective and wide-reaching g’mach network here within the Forest Hills Jewish Center, and I will be recruiting the help of all those who would offer it, from our seniors to our USY’ers. This will cost no one money, and it will significantly improve the nature and quality of our community. It’s time for us to live up to our own self-image of a truly caring community.
The second initiative will be focused primarily on the bar-bat mitzvah families who are celebrating their s’machot this coming year, but it can surely be expanded to include all those who are celebrating.
I learned just this week that the remarkable bar/bat mitzvah program of our sister Masorti movement in Israel that focuses on special need children has lost close to 70% of its funding due to budget cuts and decreased contributions. Last year, some 300 special needs kids- from homes religious and secular and everywhere in between- were able to have a meaningful and authentic bar/bat mitzvah because the Masorti movement made it available to them, trained them, worked with them and their families, and brought that special sense of joy and accomplishment to children who all too often don’t get to feel that.
Here in our congregation, just a year or two ago, we celebrated the bar-mitzvah of one special needs child, and I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house. In Israel, last year, the Masorti movement brought 300 families that joy. This year, for lack of funds, it is projected that they might be able to organize fifty or sixty.
I plan to be in touch with all of our bar/bat mitzvah families and ask them to make the Masorti special needs bar/bat mitzvah program the tzedakah project that their children undertake, to either encourage people to make contributions in their honor, and/or to give some percentage of the total gifts that the child is given to support the program. B’nei and b’not mitzvah can be ba’alei chessed, too… no one is too young to learn that they can make a difference in someone’s life. And I have spoken with our Religious School and Nursery School to incorporate this program into their regular tzedakah efforts.
This is not all I hope to do… but it’s a beginning. And I’ll need your help, and your participation.
In the final stanza of Achot K’tanah, Avraham Chazzan Girondi changes the opening words of the first line to a much more optimistic sentiment. No longer does he say Tichleh shanah v’killeloteha, but rather Tachel Shanah U’Virchoteha! Let the new year and its blessings begin!
I end where I began. The fundamental message of these Yamim Nora’im is one of hope. True change is possible, and we can live our lives so that they become a source of Kiddush Hashem, sanctification of God’s name. We can live our lives so that instead of people looking at the Jewish community and seeing Shylock- the ultimate Chillul Hashem- they will look at us and say “look at how their Jewish faith has ennobled them, and made them better people…” That’s the way you perform Kiddush Hashem without martyrdom. You don’t have to die to sanctify God’s name. We can do this… we really can.
In 5770, as much as ever before, we must do this.
