Whether you loved it or hated it, Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster, The Odyssey, accomplished something as improbable as Odysseus making it home. For a brief moment in time, the world was talking about Homer, Greek translation, Bronze Age myth, and what it means, after all our wanderings, to come home. For me, and perhaps for you, it prompted a return to the places where I first encountered The Odyssey: a junior high English class taught by Mrs. Reed, and a college comp lit class taught by the legendary Michigan Professor Ralph Williams.
The specific scene to which I want to draw your attention comes late in the story, in Book 19 of The Odyssey, when Odysseus has at last returned to Ithaca after twenty years away, ten years fighting the Trojan War and another ten struggling to make his way home. He is in disguise; no one, not even his wife Penelope, knows who he is. An elderly housekeeper named Eurycleia – as it happens, Odysseus’s childhood nurse, who knew him long before the war and his long absence – is instructed to wash the stranger’s feet, a customary act of hospitality. As Eurycleia fetches the water basin, she reflects on her absent master, roughly the same age as the visitor before her. She takes his leg in her hands, and her fingers pass over the scar on his thigh, a mark left by a wild boar during a hunting expedition when Odysseus was young. In that instant, she knows who he is. And Odysseus knows she knows. He restrains her before her emotions give him away. Eurycleia regains her composure, conceals what she has discovered, and the final drama of Odysseus’s return begins to unfold.
Unto itself, the scene is a small one, made famous by Erich Auerbach in his book Mimesis, where he uses it as a point of departure to compare Homeric and biblical narrative – a subject to which we will return. On a larger scale, the scene encapsulates one of the most fundamental themes of Homer’s epic poem: homecoming; in Greek, nostos, meaning “return.” The moment when, after a long voyage, or even an exile, a person returns to the place from which they first set sail. Homecoming is one of the most enduring and engaging storylines we know. Odysseus, for that matter, is hardly the only royal whose return from exile has captured our attention this summer. A homecoming is, of course, a physical journey. But it is also a deeply spiritual and psychological journey, from how we left to what we gained and lost along the way, the identities we assumed, the burdens we carried, and ultimately, the degree to which we remain recognizable, to others and to ourselves, when we reenter the precincts that first gave us life.
This evening we begin Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, bidding farewell to the Hebrew year 5786 and greeting 5787. For you, your loved ones, the Jewish people, and all humanity, I pray that the year ahead be filled with the blessings of health, happiness, and most of all, shalom, peace.
Tonight is our homecoming. Each of us has traveled some distance in the year gone by – across physical miles and across seasons of the spirit, joys and losses, departures and arrivals of our own. Tonight, we return. To this sanctuary. To the High Holiday prayer book and its melodies. To memories of holidays past – the tastes, smells, and sounds of tradition. We are not the same. My brother visited from Los Angeles the other week; we had not seen each other for a bit. “Man, you went grey!” he greeted me as only a brother can. Eighteen years and counting, your once salt-and-pepper rabbi is now considerably more salt than pepper.
We have changed physically. We have changed in spirit. There are members of our community and our families no longer here but forever present in our hearts. And thank God, there are new lives, new families, and new faces among us. Some of us grew up in this very sanctuary, some in other sanctuaries, some within the fold of Jewish tradition, some in different traditions. No matter the journey that brought us here, tonight each of us returns home – to tradition, to community, to God, and to the highest and truest selves we are capable of becoming.
The Hebrew word for return is teshuvah, from the root shuv, meaning to turn, to return, to come back. We commonly translate teshuvah as “repentance,” but its more literal meaning is “return,” the spiritual calling of these Days of Awe. The homecoming of Rosh Hashanah is a source of profound reassurance: a wave of nostalgia and sweet memory mingled with acceptance and the promise of renewal. But no return comes without its aches, pains, and challenges. Not just the empty seat at our individual tables, but the scars we carry as a community. Earlier this evening, we marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, an indelible wound seared into the soul of our city and our national psyche. In the days ahead, we will undoubtedly speak of those slain on October 7th and in the painful years since. These scars do not disappear with the passage of time. “The body keeps the score,” as the title of Bessel van der Kolk’s book teaches. Trauma, from the Greek meaning “wound” or “hurt,” remains stored within us, persisting in the ways we react, retreat, and defend ourselves, sometimes reenacting old dramas long after their immediacy has faded from conscious memory. It is not only the individual body that keeps score. The body politic keeps score as well. Communities and peoples carry memories lodged deep within them, memories that continue to shape how the present is understood.
To be a Jew, for better or for worse, is to know something about bearing scars. Our ever-present challenge is to name them and claim them without allowing ourselves to be owned by them. This summer, together with Rabbi Pink and Rabbi Solmsen and a group of Park Avenue Synagogue teens and their families, I participated in the Ride for the Living, a journey to Poland that included a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Unlike many such trips, which conclude with a memorial service, Ride for the Living culminates in a sixty-mile bicycle ride from the gates of Birkenau to the Jewish Community Center of Krakow, where we celebrated Shabbat with nearly seven hundred others. I will be the first to admit that biking gear and Birkenau are not an obvious pairing. I was not entirely sure what to expect. In retrospect – and I hope the experience becomes a Park Avenue Synagogue teen tradition – I understand more clearly what the journey was asking of us. We faced the darkest chapter of our people’s history, fulfilling the command never to forget, and committed ourselves to another obligation: to choose life. The scar is part of us. It remains and must remain, but it does not get to own us.
It is a lesson for us as a people, but also as individuals, as we engage in the process of teshuvah, of addressing the he said/she saids of the year gone by. It has always struck me as both significant and a little puzzling how Maimonides defines a person who has achieved complete teshuvah. If a person finds themselves once again in exactly the same circumstance in which they previously fell short, possesses the same capacity to act as before, and this time chooses differently, that, Maimonides teaches, is teshuvah gemurah, complete teshuvah. But how can that be? We cannot go backward in time. No circumstance ever repeats itself precisely. Maimonides was a smart guy. What might he have meant? Perhaps he simply meant that teshuvah requires us to revisit the wound, be it a hurt we inflicted or one inflicted upon us. And it is in that moment – when the wound is touched, and the old script begins to play, and yet we respond differently – it is at that point that we fulfill the calling of these days. The scar remains. How could it not? But it no longer gets to determine the narrative.
Again and again, the holidays return us to this same theme of revisiting old wounds without being ruled by them. Consider the Torah and haftarah readings of Rosh Hashanah. The childhood rivalry of Isaac and Ishmael; Ishmael’s expulsion and near death; Isaac bound upon the altar and nearly sacrificed; Hannah’s anguish, prayer, and the long-awaited birth of Samuel; Rachel weeping for her children. The thread binding these narratives is their attention to the scarring experiences of youth: rivalry, separation, fear, longing, and loss. In reading them, the tradition is inviting us to return to the formative stories of our shared first family, to ask how those earliest dramas shaped the people they would become, and then apply that same method to ourselves. What happened to us? What stories do we continue to reenact without even realizing that we are doing so? The psychoanalytic term, my therapist tells me, is “enactment”: the way an old emotional drama can be repeated in the present without us consciously intending it. As Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We think we have left it behind only to discover that we have carried it with us all along.
Because one of the most intriguing and disorienting things about life is that so many of the people with whom we spend our days – our colleagues, our friends, our children, our partners – were not around in our youth. They did not bear witness to the experiences, good and bad, that formed us. They do not necessarily know what we carry. In that sense, all of us move through the world in disguise, not only from one another, but often from ourselves.
All of which, I believe, explains why the most repeated theological metaphor of these Days of Awe is not that of sibling or of spouse, but of parent and child. K’rachem av al banim, “As a father has compassion for his children.” Ha-ben yakir li Ephraim, “Is Ephraim not my precious child, my beloved son?” And, of course, the words we will repeat again and again: Avinu malkeinu, “our parent, our Sovereign.” It is not merely because, while only some of us are spouses, siblings, or parents, every one of us entered this world as somebody’s child. Nor is it because the parent-child relationship is necessarily simple, uncomplicated, or even loving. We know that it can be none of those things. The metaphor is repeated, I believe, because one of the defining characteristics of parents is that they are the people who have known us from the beginning. They knew us before the roles and relationships we presently inhabit and the disguises we have learned to wear. They remember when certain patterns first took hold. They know the scars we bear, the scars we may no longer remember acquiring, even scars that may predate our arrival in this world, the fears, hopes and emotional inheritances handed down to us before we even had words to name them. Parents are the people who know where we began and how far we have journeyed since.
How are we supposed to feel when we arrive here on the holidays? Perhaps something like this. You grow up in your parents’ home. You leave. You wander, you travel. You succeed, you fail. You acquire wounds and wisdom, habits and disguises. You become the person you become. And then, one day, you have the chance to come home, to the place that gave you life, to the people who knew you before you knew yourself. You walk back through the door different than when you left – in a disguise of sorts. And yet somehow, the ones who knew you before the journey still recognize you. They know your scars, scars that are not denied or erased, but rather, in a sense, washed and cared for with love. They see the person you are, together with every earlier version of you, all at the same time. And then, because there are still more versions of you yet to come, you are sent back out into the world, urged on to become that best version of yourself. That is how a parent feels when a child comes home to visit. Best as I can tell, that is how God feels about each one of us when we walk through these doors on the High Holidays.
Some of us are here with our parents. Some of our parents cannot be with us this evening, but they are in our hearts from afar and perhaps watching us on livestream. And some of our parents are no longer here in real time, but remain present in our memories and in the thousand ways a parent continues to live within their child. All of us, our tradition teaches, are children of the one Parent who knows us better than we know ourselves. The person we are. The person we were. The person we have tried to hide. The person we have yet to become. The Parent who knows the journeys we have taken, the disguises we have worn, the wounds we carry, and the scars whose stories even we have forgotten. And still – not despite it all, but because of it all – we are welcomed back. To this sanctuary. To one another. To ourselves. In a parent’s eyes, the scars remain, scars to your beautiful. Teshuvah does not ask us to be the same person who first set out. It asks us to return as the person the journey has made us, to be recognized, to continue changing what must change, and to out on the path ahead informed by the past but never beholden to it.
God’s voice beckons: Pitḥu li petaḥ eḥad shel teshuvah. “Open for Me even a tiny opening of teshuvah . . . and I will open for you an opening wide enough . . . to pass through.”
Welcome home. Shanah tovah!
Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.