Shalom to everyone!

It’s great to see so many fellow congregants and guests, all here together.

As we all know, here at Shomrei, and in countless other communities everywhere, today is one of the 2 or three days in the entire year when so many of us make an effort to come to the synagogue.

Why?

I think I get Yom Kippur. But why have we chosen today – Rosh Ha-Shanah – to do this? We could just as well decide to show up on Passover – the anniversary of our freedom – or Shavuot – the anniversary of our receiving the Torah. In fact, a generation ago, in the Soviet Union, the great day of congregating was not Rosh Ha-Shanah at all. It was, instead, Simchat Torah.

Don’t get me wrong! I think it’s wonderful that we are here together! But I think it might also be great if we tried to understand this phenomenon a little more.

What, then, is the magnetic meaning of this day? The answer is found in our prayers.

Hayom harat `olam

Today is the birth-day of the world

We proclaim – with these words and in many other variations – that today is the anniversary of the creation of the world. We are here to celebrate the world’s existence.

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So – a shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture – when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a very expensive suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and Italian silk tie, leans out the window and asks the shepherd, “If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?”

The shepherd looks up and down at the man,  then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly answers, “Sure. Why not?”

The man parks his car, whips out his  notebook computer, connects it to his cell phone, surfs to a NASA page on the internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

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So much has been said this evening, so much has taken place here, among us. What more can I say?

I hope that for each of us tonight there have been some moments of beauty, of sadness, of exaltation, of warmth, of thoughtfulness, of recognition.

I am so grateful to have helped some of our community members give birth to their new prayers, their new S’lichot – prayers of forgiveness – prayers that we offered tonight.

This night we have gathered to begin a long day’s journey to atonement. We reach deep down into ourselves to confront our sins and failings. And we ask God to forgive us. We pray and recite and proclaim and chant words, words, words of petition and appeals for forgiveness.

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Rosh Ha-Shanah is a wall-eyed day.  It looks this way and that. It has us contemplate two core themes simultaneously. Today is a day of beginnings and it is also a day of returning.

These themes of beginning and of returning pull in different directions –  One theme – beginning – is forward-looking. The other theme – returning – has us turning around and looking back.

Today is a day of beginnings,  for it is the beginning of a new year. The synagogue is bedecked in white, symbol of a clean, fresh start.

And it is a day of returning, for it is the season of teshuvah – of Repentance. We are called to re-think, to review our lives, our actions, our beliefs and goals. The white kittel is like a death shroud, a reminder of our mortality, meant to get us to rethink our life choices and values.

But, while these foci pull in opposite directions, they actually end up launching us into an elliptical orbit powered by their complementary forces. As we spin around these two themes, each one pulls us towards itself and then back to the other.

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יום כפורים תש”ע
כל העולם כולו גשר צר מאד, והעיקר – לא לפחד כלל!

The whole world is a very narrow bridge – but the main thing is not to be afraid at all!
Many of us love to sing this song. Yet -let us be honest – Ours is a season of fear.

Just recently our local Montclair paper – I refer to the NY Times, of course – observed that the Toronto Film Festival was full of “movies laden with doomsday predictions, conspiracy theories (and facts) grim statistics, alarming charts, dire predictions and shreiking, whimpering and failing men and women.” (9/17/09 – Arts section, Manhola Darhis, “Watching a Nation Fall Apart, Entertainlingly). Whether we turn to cultural reporting in the media  or to our political realities, on the national or global level, or when we look to our Jewish concerns, here, abroad, or in Israel, and even if we turn to our mahzor – our prayer book for these Yamim Nora’im – these Fearsome Days – fear is all around us. Small fears and medium fears, and very large fears. What are we afraid of and what are we afraid for?

We are afraid of people and of ideas. And some of them are, indeed, frightening. We are afraid of what is said – and of what is not said; we are afraid of what is – and of what might be; of what is being done – and of what might not be done. We are afraid of God – and we are afraid of those who fear God.

Fear is all around us. And those blessed among us, who are not afflicted with fear, are surrounded by those who are – so that fear is really all around all of us.

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ראש השנה תש“ע

היום הרת עולם– On this day the World is born

Today I would like to engage in an interpretive meditation on one of the classic prayers of Rosh Ha-Shanah, recited three times in the Mussaf Amidah, as a kind of refrain punctuating the various other themes of the day.You may clsoe your eyes, if you like. And if you doze off, that’s okay, too. Imagine, the first nap of the New Year! Enjoy!

היום הרת עולם – On this day the World is born – Rosh Ha-Shanah marks the birthday of the world. Let us imagine the rounded belly of the Cosmos, heavy with child, expectant, suffering the jolts and stresses of her Global Fetus. Finally it turns, descends and emerges into full view, drenched with blood and mucous, crying out screams that sound like the cries of the shofar. 

The world is born.

What world is it that is born today? What is a World?

We could say that the world is the totality of things – everything that is. Let us close our eyes and try to imagine that.

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