Rosh Hashanah 5770

In his collection of stories on the High Holy Days, Sippurei Yom Hakippurim, Shai Agnon, the towering figure of modern Hebrew literature, makes repeated use of the symbol of the tallit. For Agnon it comes to represent much more than a mere piece of cloth. In one of the stories, Pi Shnayim, “Twice Over,” the protagonist sits at home before the holidays unable to decide which of two tallitot to wear. Like some of us, he owns more than one. The first one he received as part of an inheritance. His father-in-law was a great scholar and had an extraordinary collection of sefarim, of holy books. When his father-in-law died, the books were divided up by the children. One special book that was sent to him was sent wrapped in a tallit. This tallit came to represent his past, the old world; the voices of his predecessors. The second tallit was very different; he had purchased this one for himself. When he made aliyah to Israel, he bought a new tallit. He had moved into a neighborhood full of Hasidim and whatever type of tallit they wore, he wanted to have the same kind and fit right in. This second tallit represented everything he hoped to be. It was his unrealized future.

So with the two tallitot before him, the story unfolds. Our man conducts an internal debate on which one he should wear to synagogue that holiday. The new one, the one that represents his future, symbolic of the life he so desperately wants, or the old one, the one that signifies his past, not only his father-in-law, but the learning and values of the old world, an almost mythical yesteryear that he sought to embrace. He agonizes, deliberates, sits in anguish, measuring the merits of each one and finally, unable to decide, he lays them both out, closes his eyes, and takes whichever one is closer and runs to shul. He arrives at shul, and walks in… to an empty sanctuary. Services are over. His deliberations caused him to miss the critical moment of prayer. His inability to decide between the two tallitot prevented him from arriving at all. Agnon writes: “There I was like an apothecary, so long at work mixing powders for a drug, that in the meantime the patient dies.”

If you are sitting in this room, then you have made it further than the character in Agnon’s story. Agnon’s story gives voice to the truth that our lives, limited in length, contain a finite number of opportunities and, far too often, inertia and indecision at critical moments result in our undoing.

Today, Rosh Hashanah, is not merely about counting time from 5769 to 5770 but, as Agnon’s story brings home, about making every opportunity count. The ancient Greeks actually had two words for time. The first word refers to the passage of time, the steady progress of minutes, hours, and days – chronos. The second kind of time, the moment of decision or opportunity, is called kairos. Today, on Rosh Hashanah we are alert to both kinds of time, a new year and new opportunities. Our tragedies are when we fall victim to Mark Twain’s lament that “I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.” Our joy, our aspirations, our heroism – all are found in our ability to be present and responsive to the challenges and opportunities of the moment.

History is filled with instances when we have been faced with a choice of how to respond at a critical juncture, to go one way or the other, to take action or to linger in our inertia. I think of over 100 years ago, when Russian Jewry faced persecution and pogroms and the first wave of immigration, aliyah, took place. A group called the BILU, an acronym for Beit Yaakov L’khu V’nelkha, “O House of Jacob, get up and go,” were Jewish pioneers who transformed Jewish life by taking courageous steps towards the creation of a Jewish State in the Ottoman empire. I think of Theodore Herzl, who in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, hatched the plan for a political State of Israel, boldly announcing, “If you will it, it is no dream.”

Just over fifty years ago, when American Jewry was hemming and hawing over the modern State of Israel, the spokesman for Modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, employed the poetic imagery of the Song of Songs to speak to our people in one of his most famous addresses, called “Kol Dodi Dofek, The Voice of My Beloved Knocks.” On Yom Ha’atzmaut 1956, just over a decade following the Holocaust and a few short years after the establishment of the State of Israel, he called Diaspora Jewry of his generation to task. Reeling from the physical and spiritual trauma of Auschwitz, Jews were numb to the theological and practical implications of a modern Jewish State. Soloveitchik compared us to a slumbering lover. While we slept, the voice of our beloved, our destiny, was knocking; we couldn’t or wouldn’t hear it and were missing the moment of opportunity. Soloveitchik’s address, given in Hebrew, is often titled in English “Fate and Destiny.” To be a people of fate, he explained, is to be a people who resign themselves to a condition, a set of circumstances, to be passive participants in the unfolding of chronological time. To be a people of destiny signifies a deliberate and conscious existence, a people that has chosen to chart out its own destiny and seize its moment.

So where are we today? As a Jewish people, as a community, gathering together on Rosh Hashanah, we need to ask: when someone looks back to characterize our historical moment, what will they say? By all accounts, our age is a decisive one, for us as Jews, as Americans, and as members of a common humanity. There is a palpable caution in the air, as we sit nervously weighing the options before us. Whatever the issue is, no matter what your politics may be, one can sense it. Health care, the economy, the wars that we fight – we are unsure as to which foot to put forward. Israel faces mounting threats from Iran and increasing criticism in the world court, where even her most liberal supporters are hard pressed to see peace with neighbors who refuse to recognize her right to exist. Our core institutions like JTS and UJA face generational challenges. Our apprehensions, of course, are deeply personal. In the year gone by, I have sat with many members of our community, deeply bruised by the loss of a job, the loss of security. Many of us are searching for a path forward. Like the figure in Agnon’s story, we know we have to take our next step, but we are not sure quite how – and in our indecision, we risk missing the moment.

Today, fifty years after Soloveitchik’s speech, a hundred years after Herzl, I believe we are in the midst of a moment of destiny. Long after our lives have ended, I think people will look back at this juncture in history and ask whether we missed our moment. I believe this not because America and Israel have never faced challenges before, not because our anxieties are of a different quality or quantity than ever before. I believe that our moment is a decisive one, a moment of destiny, because I am a Jew. To be Jewish in 2009, 1959, 1909 or any other time, means that you lead your life, each day, believing that it is a moment of destiny, that the demands of today are insistent and particular and pressing in a way they weren’t yesterday and won’t be tomorrow. Heschel wrote that “Every age, every epoch constitutes a turning point.” To be Jewish means to be part of a nervous, unsettling, and angst-ridden condition that also inspires, motivates, and stirs us to activity at every age.

Many of you may remember the bestselling book Passages, by Gail Sheehy. It came out in the 1970s, making it a bit before my time, but then again, when you are a Rabbi, nearly every book you read is “before your time.” From what I understand, the book caused quite a stir because it was the first popular psychology book to map out the developmental stages of adult life. Sheehy claimed, and I think this is now widely accepted, that it is not just children who go through emotional and intellectual maturation, but adults as well. Each passage, whether it is during your 20’s, 40’s, 60’s or 80’s is inevitable. Some of these passages are marked by events that are natural and joyous, such as going away to college, getting married, having children, or getting a job. Others are unexpected and often sad, such as losing a job, divorce, the untimely death of a loved one. But no matter what the event or developmental stage, each passage leaves a person exposed and vulnerable. Each passage, joyous or tragic, brings with it a degree of pain as we leave the familiarity of one stage for the uncertainty of the next. Yet by allowing ourselves to be exposed and vulnerable, we are also yeasty and embryonic again, capable of stretching in ways we hadn’t known before. These passages are inevitable and it is not within our power to pretend they are not there. What is in our control, however, Sheehy tells us, is our response: whether we choose to view a passage as an opportunity for change, to renew and redefine ourselves, to recreate both ourselves and the conditions in which we live. “Life,” wrote the poet Friedrich Hebbel, “is not anything; it is only the opportunity for something.” Who we are – as a people, as a nation, as an institution – is a function of our ability to move with deliberate intention, in Hebrew, kavannah, through life’s transformative moments.

Last year, on Rosh Hashanah I announced my intention to see the Park Avenue Synagogue community through fresh eyes, to experience it “as is,” and to learn its melody before I sing my own. It has been an exciting year and I am grateful for all the kindness extended to me, to Debbie, and to my family as we have settled in, and for the patience you have shown as I have begun to learn the rhythms of our synagogue. Every single day, I am humbled by the deep and textured commitments made to this synagogue; every single day, I am thankful to my predecessors for having built the institution now entrusted to my care.

This moment, our moment, my moment, must be a moment of destiny for our synagogue. We dare not be passive participants as tectonic shifts take place. We must leverage the challenges facing us, Israel, and humanity and create the right institutional response. We will not resign ourselves to fate. It is simply unacceptable to say that “I was bored in Hebrew School so my children will be as well.” We will create anew and challenge the models in place. It is inconceivable to me to conduct a Shabbat Service that does not speak to the hearts and minds of those hundreds of members we seek to serve. You may come or not, but we must aspire towards a prayer experience that serves the needs of your Jewish soul and the souls of those who have yet to walk into this building. We cannot act surprised by the decision of our grown children not to enter the synagogue of their youth when we ourselves are not doing outreach to unaffiliated twenty- and thirty-somethings. How can we grumble about tepid support for Israel, the future of Conservative Judaism, and a decreasing investment in the social service agencies of New York City and national Jewish life, as if we ourselves are not stakeholders

If you are concerned about Israel’s future, then you can begin to show that concern by joining me and thousands of other Americans as we protest the president of Iran’s visit to the U.N. this Thursday at noon. I didn’t choose to live at this moment of history, but I do, and so do you, and it is my intention to leave Israel, my Judaism, the Judaism of my children, and the Judaism of the community I have been charged to lead in better shape than it would be without me. It makes no sense to me to wax nostalgic about Jewish life as if it were a fairy tale, with stories of our parents’ seder tables and grandparents’ love of Israel. Shouldn’t we strive for a Jewish life today as good as yesterday? Shouldn’t tomorrow be even better?

Charles Dickens began David Copperfield by announcing: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” Today, on Rosh Hashanah, there’s a new book, and we’re going to write it. Too often we say to ourselves, I’ll change some other time. Right now is not the best time for me, I can’t commit to anything at the moment. When things are different, when I can manage, when the weather changes, when I get some help, when the children go to school, when they come back for the holidays. Right now, as we stand on the precipice of a new year, we dare not say “when we get to it.” We know that every moment counts. It is now that we must take action, not later.

Today is a day to begin anew, to make a change in essence, a redirection of the inner person. Habit and conditioning often combine to keep a person torn between inertia and the desire for improvement. We are like the man in the old story, stuck in a prison for many years, simply because he never realized that the door to his cell was never locked.

Against all the forces which proclaim that we cannot change, the High Holy Days teach that we have the capacity for change. It is not a choice between optimism or pessimism. It is about putting one foot in front of the other. Speaking at a moment of crisis in the 1920s, one of the greatest preachers of the twentieth century, Rabbi Israel Levinthal, explained that we are all given the choice of how we pilot the ships of our lives. We can drift, he said, or we can steer. We can surrender to the elements, or we can move deliberately and with intention towards our hoped-for destination.

In this room, right now, there are men and women, sitting with the difficult choices, the tallitot of life before them, wanting to understand how to move forward in what appears to be intractable situations. A father and son, unable to reconcile after a hurt long in the past, but still eclipsing the present. A young couple, stuck for far too long in a status quo, unable to take the brave step forward to commitment. A retiree seeking to reconstitute himself in a new chapter of life. A spouse mourning the loss of a life partner, unable to find a path forward. These are not made-up stories, these are your stories and there are so many more, at least as many as the beating hearts in this room.

For the last several years, every summer I find myself teaching another one of my children how to ride a bike. I have come to realize that the most difficult part of learning to ride a bike isn’t balance – once they are moving, kids pretty much get it. The trickiest part isn’t stopping; they figure that out along the way, sometimes the hard way, but they figure it out. The hardest part isn’t turning; that actually comes rather naturally. The toughest part for a child about riding a bike is starting, going from a complete standstill and pressing forward.

The High Holy Days are intended to give us the courage to start up again, even when we have stumbled and fallen. My favorite
midrash associated with today is about God’s creation of the world. The midrash tells us that before God created this world, the one in which we all live, God had in fact created many worlds, but was unhappy with each of them. Only after several failed attempts did God finally arrive at our current configuration. Think about it for a second, this is God we are talking about, God doesn’t make mistakes, yet this midrash tells us that even God had to have that painful realization, that moment of reflection, necessary to leave one world behind and create a new one.

Today is Rosh Hashanah, a day when we ask ourselves to be creators of worlds. We look at the world in which we have lived and ask if it is the one which we want for next year. As Martin Buber wrote “In the man who does teshuvah, creation begins anew; in his renewal the substance of the world is renewed.” (On Judaism, p. 67) For some of us, the task is to create an entirely new world because the current one is no longer working. For others, it will simply be to approach the same world with renewed and creative energy. Either way, we must find the courage which God found, to draw on the right mixture of faith, self-reliance, and resilience to push forward to become the families and individuals we so desperately want to be. Each of us must take new steps in the days before Yom Kippur, commit to creating new worlds, to letting go of a past stage with its satisfactions and failures, all in order to find the richness of the next.

There is a story in the Talmud about a man named Eliezer ben Durdaya. He came from a fine background and a great future was predicted for him. However, he strayed from the righteous path and his life was derailed by his own shortcomings. One day he heard a voice from heaven tell him “Eliezer ben Durdaya, you have no share in the world to come.” He was moved to repentance and he cried out “Harim bikshu alai rahamim, O ye mountains, plead for me.” When they refused, he said, “Shemesh v’yareah, sun and moon, plead for me.” They also turned him down. He then said, “Kokhavim u-mazalot, stars and planets, plead for me,” and they too refused. Finally, Eliezer sat down and, after much soul searching, he melted in tears and said, “Ein ha-davar talu elah bi, it depends on nothing except me.” With that, a voice from heaven proclaimed, “M’zuman hu l’hayei olam ha-ba, he is now ready to take his place in the world
to come.”

Rosh Hashanah is our bridge to tomorrow. The tools to get there are here, in this community, in our families, within each and every one of us. Let us reach within and grow, step by step, with intention, and together we will arrive at our destiny.