The Stories We Write

As we greet the New Year, I want to welcome each and every one of you. May we all be inscribed in the Book of Life for a year of health and happiness. For me, this Rosh Hashanah is especially sweet as for the very first time, I get to welcome both my parents and my in-laws to celebrate Rosh Hashanah together. Mom, Dad, Mom, Dad – I didn’t choose any of you, nor for that matter did you choose me. But if I were to do it all again, I would pick all four of you any day.

So with everyone present, I ask your indulgence as I share an observation about my extended family with you, my congregational family. If you were to walk into any of our homes, here in New York, in Pittsburgh, or in Los Angeles, on each of our coffee tables, you would find a wedding album – photographs documenting the day Debbie and I got married. That said, if you were to review the albums closely, you would discover, as I did, something very interesting about them – namely, that each album tells a very different story. Let me explain. If you were to look at the New York edition, you would find that the first page is a photograph of our wedding invitation, followed by a picture of Debbie and then one of me. This is followed by pictures of our families, Debbie and me under the huppah, the party, concluding with a parting shot of the happy couple. Now, if you went to Pittsburgh to see the album at my in-laws, you would begin with a picture of Debbie, then Debbie and her mother, then Debbie and her siblings, then her grandmother, and eventually around page six, in a group shot, you see me – the groom. The rewriting of history is no less startling at my parents’ home in Los Angeles. There the album begins of course with the primary male/female relationship, the groom and his mother, followed by the mother and the father of the groom, and then me with my brothers, and only then do you catch sight of a wedding crasher dressed in a white gown, who upon closer examination looks a lot like the mother of my four children. And so it is throughout. The Los Angeles album features only my hometown Rabbi, any references to Pittsburgh clergy have been expurgated. In the Pittsburgh album, one would never know that there were any guests who were not born in that great rectangular state of Pennsylvania.
As I thought about these albums, I was struck by their differences, which will – at the very least – make for lively dinner conversation in my home later this evening. It is fascinating, really. I am positive we were all at the same wedding, and yet there exist very different records of the event. Each album tells a different story, each constructs a different reality. Each family had the identical set of pictures to choose from and in each book, the order, the emphasis, the beginnings and the endings lead to very different narratives of that wonderful day.

This evening begins Rosh Hashanah and with it the Days of Awe – the most sacred time of the Jewish year. If there is one image associated with Rosh Hashanah, one constant graphic, visual image, it is that of a book. L’shanah tovah tikatevu, we say to each other. “May you be inscribed in the book for a good year.” B’sefer hayyim brakhah v’shalom, we chant. “In the book of life for blessing and peace.” Again and again, the tradition returns to the evocative image of a book sitting open before God with pages filled with the stories of our lives, drafted by our own hand, the narratives of who we are.

And so this evening, just as we have opened our mahzorim, I want you to imagine yourself opening the book of your own life, to consider the events, the actions, the proceedings that have made you who you are today. I want you to engage in that divinely inspired task of composing the narrative of your life up to now and for the year to come. Our task is as exciting as it is awe inspiring, to compose our own stories – personal, professional, national - past and future.

You see, the events of our lives arguably have an element of objectivity. They are the proofs, if you will, distributed by the wedding photographer. The manner in which we compose and tell our stories, however, is anything but objective; it is entirely up to us. As human beings, we are inveterate storytellers. And there is no story we like telling more than our own: how we chose our profession, how we met our loved ones, how we became the people that we are today. Consider your own personal mythologies that you have generated over the years. The pivotal conversation that changed the course of your life, that teacher who made you rethink your career path. That job you didn’t get way back when, but how it was the other job that opened up so many new doors. I, for example, am often asked how it is I decided to be a Rabbi. I have told the story enough to recognize that I have a very specific way of doing so. I know the story so well that I can almost predict where I will pause and inflect. But this predictability does not mean our stories are canned. Rather they are our personal canons, palimpsests upon which the rest of our lives are composed. We all have stories we tell of ourselves and of each other – repeatedly. These stories reflect how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen by others. Cognitive scientists have long noted that our identities are constructed through an endless series of micro-narratives, which we eventually abstract into an overarching macro-narrative of our lives that selects certain plot features by which we build our sense of ourselves – as individuals, as families and as a nation.

Even the question of where we begin and end our stories is far from a value-free decision. “A beginning is an artifice,” wrote Ian McEwan in his novel Enduring Love, “And what recommends one over another is how much sense it makes of what follows.” The very first comment on the Bible by the great medieval Jewish commentator Rashi alerts us to the importance of beginnings and endings. He asks why, if the point of the Torah is to teach the mitzvot, the commandments, does it begin with the universal story of the Garden of Eden? Shouldn’t it rather begin with Chapter 12 of Exodus, the first legal section of the Torah? The same question could be asked of the ending of the Torah, which leaves the Children of Israel on the banks of the Jordan, not yet having entered the Promised Land. This oddity so perplexed scholars that for one period in Biblical scholarship, the Torah was referred to not as the Pentateuch, but as the Hexateuch, with the book of Joshua included as the sixth book. After all, how could the Torah possibly end without a record of the conquest of Canaan? The truth is that the answers to these questions – why the Torah begins with a theme of universal significance and concludes with a destiny unfulfilled – are perhaps the very forces that have shaped the contours of the Jewish conscience and the Jewish condition for thousands of years.

Whether it is the Torah, the Passover Haggadah or the events of our lives, where we begin and where we end, what we put in and what we leave out is, in fact, the key to our identities. How we choose to organize and assimilate our experiences into story form is both our greatest challenge and our greatest responsibility. Each of us is given the choice – every day, but never more than over the High Holy Days – of how to craft our narratives. Each of us is given the choice of whether we live our stories or whether our stories live us. Are you an active author of your story, or do you passively allow your story to be written for you? Far too often, for far too many of us, our authorial hand slips. The events we choose to draw from are destructive, and the blessings in our life, overlooked.

I look around this room and I see a million snapshots – many, thank God, joyous ones– births, weddings, b’nei mitzvah and weekday moments of joy. But we have also come to share many sad occasions, some public and some deeply private. The pain of divorce, of infertility, of personal or professional setbacks, for you and often for your children. There are many in our midst who are coping with loss, failure, grief of some kind. People have been betrayed, hurt, injured. Yes, there are probably some things in this world that are beyond forgiveness, and sometimes there are no words to soothe the pain. But in every case, in the wake of every sorrow, at some point, a person must ask him- or herself whether that loss will become the central defining moment of one’s life? Will you be so consumed by disappointment that you will be plagued with a perpetually wounded sensibility? It is the very power of crafting our narrative that is often our undoing. We spotlight certain events and ignore others. We emphasize or overlook according to a calculus that may in fact be entirely harmful to our own self-understanding and detrimental to our future. Far too often it is our inability to look beyond present heartache that results in our being immobilized in our pain. We become stuck in the moment – the pages of the album jammed together, unable to flip forward.
On this day of Rosh Hashanah, we commit ourselves with renewed vigilance to the stories we write and the stories we live. It is not merely coherence that we seek; rather we seek to organize the facts of our lives in a way that can strengthen, not weaken, that is truthful but not demoralizing. The facts are the facts, and there is no changing them, but the stories we tell determine who we are and who we will come to be.

I began by speaking of my parents and I will leave you by sharing something of my children. When one of my children was born in Chicago, it was, for a period of time, touch and go. The fact that none of you have any idea which one of my children I am speaking about is an indicator that this story, unlike that of many parents, has a truly happy ending, or more accurately – a happy beginning. And yet to the day I die, I will never forget that month of my life, sitting in the pediatric ICU with my newborn child, as my kid fought for life, and life and reality came to a screeching halt for me and Debbie as our entire universe was hanging by a thread.

I will never forget the sage advice given by our pediatrician one morning as our child’s health began to improve and we were finally being released into the world with a child whose condition would demand, for the foreseeable future, constant vigilance, frequent check-ups and regimented medication. We were all well aware of the uncertain road ahead when the doctor pulled me aside and said, “Elliot – you have a choice. You can consider yourself the parent of a child trapped in a condition, or you can choose to see yourself as the parent of a beautiful kid, a parent who like any other parent, sooner or later discovers that no child is created perfect and every child has his or her own hurdles.” “Either way,” he continued, “you will be just as vigilant, just as caring and just as careful; but make no mistake, it will be this choice that will determine everything about your family’s future.”

It is this lesson, this sage advice given to me by my child’s physician, that is the crux of the task before us this evening. Do not take lightly the pivotal events of your life. Now is not the time to gloss over the moments of profound pain and joy that have collectively made us who we are. We must be responsive, we must be reflective. Yet the gift of Rosh Hashanah is to be able to see our life story in a new light, through different eyes, and with a renewed vision. Step by step we need to lift ourselves out of the dungeon of determinism and allow for our stories to be rewritten. We are free to recreate ourselves, empowered to shatter the bars that imprison us. The facts are the facts, but the stories we write, the narratives we bring before God, that we pass down to future generations, are ultimately our own to compose.

L’shanah tovah tikatevu. May we all be written in the Book of Life for a year of health, life and peace.