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.
So consider: The day when most Jews choose to come to synagogue is not the day that commemorates the creation of the Jewish people. It is not the day when we were granted the Torah – a miraculous revelation from Heaven, teaching us a uniquely Jewish way of life suffused with justice, righteousness and holiness. It is a day with no especially “Jewish” reason at all.
We are moved to show up all together to mark the day when the world, as a whole, was created – a world of heaven and earth, of light and darkness, of seas and mountains, fields and valleys, of beasts and bugs and fish and birds and human beings. A world that God declared is “very good.” A world with everything in it – except that, when you look closely at it, it is a world without Jews.
The beginning of the Jewish myth is a reverential and then ever more complex accounting of the world rather than of a people, of a universal state of being rather than of a religion. It feels it must begin with the history of the entire human species, vouchsafed direct contact with a passionately caring and awe-inspiring Creator. We do not begin the Torah with Sinai, or with Abraham. We begin with an unfolding of the world, as such.
Here we are faced with a delicious paradox: It seems that to be ultimately concerned with the world in general, the world itself, the world beyond ethnic or religious categorization – is itself quintessentially Jewish.
Ever since Jews were granted political and social freedom in the Western world, beginning some 200 years ago, there have been so many talented and idealistic Jews whose souls have been enflamed by this very vision – the vision of a world without particular religions or nationalities. A world united by its understanding that we are all brothers and sisters taking up our small part in the drama unfolding under a universal heaven and earth.
Jews have been in the forefront of working for this revolutionary redemption of the world, for its restoration to its primeval state of peace and grace, to becoming a beautiful world without Jews. Think Karl Marx or Rosa Luxemburg.
Others were not such passionate revolutionaries, but committed themselves wholeheartedly to a way of life based on such universal values. Such Jews have been prominent examples of cosmopolitan living in the literal sense of the term. Think … Ralph Lauren (who, I am told, is getting an aliyah at Park Avenue Synagogue as we speak).
And creative, talented and idealistic Jews have continuously contributed, generously and mightily, to the well-being of the world as a whole.
Here is an excerpt from a letter written in 1969, by some simple Jewish peddlers and artisans. They were 18 families living in Soviet Georgia and they wrote to the United Nations Human Rights Commision, demanding the right to leave the Soviet Union and return to their homeland, Israel. By that time the Jewish community in Soviet Georgia had survived in that primitive region for at least 2000 years. They proudly acknowledged what the Jews had contributed to the world. They wrote:
“The Jews gave the world religion and revolutionaries, philosophers and scholars, wealthy men and wise men, geniuses with hearts of children and children with eyes of old people. There is no field of knowledge, no branch of literature and art, to which Jews have not contributed their
And, I would add, more that their share! How many Jews are there in the entire world? There are fewer Jews in the entire world than there are people in New York State, less than 15 million in a world of over 7 billion. Altogether we comprise maybe .2% of the world’s population. Not 2%, but .2% – one-fifth of one percent. And yet Jews worldwide have earned over 20% of all Nobel Prizes between 1901, when the prizes started until today. That means that Jews have been represented among Nobel Prize winners at over 100 times their relative population size.
What does this mean? I do not wish to be misunderstood. I emphatically reject using these data for the purposes of advocating some theory of Jewish exceptionalism.
But the amazing data remain. How shall we think about them? How shall we speak about them? I think these data can serve to confront us with what I called before the “delicious paradox” of Rosh Ha-Shanah, the thoroughly Jewish, very parochial, particularistic day – celebrating the most universal of themes, the birth and existence of the universe itself. Rosh Ha-Shanah calls us to embrace the whole world in awe and in joy. But this ancient Jewish celebration also preemptively recognizes that the passionate universalist yearnings of modern, post-Emancipation Jews are only one part of the drama of living.
Rosh Ha-Shanah calls upon us to celebrate the whole wide world’s being, a world in which we, as Jews, are a tiny, insignificant fragment, almost non-existent. Yet we are called to celebrate this vast universe specifically as Jews. This is one dimension of the significance of the central symbol of Rosh Ha-Shanah, the shofar. In the 1970’s Natan Sharansky was imprisoned in Russia for years because he demanded the right to live as a Jew. This was considered high treason against the universalist revolution being promoted by the Soviet regime. But Sharansky refused to cave in. Ironically it was only thanks to his years in prison that he had the time to ponder the meaning of his Jewish identity. Sharansky and other “refuseniks” eventually caused an upheaval in world and Soviet opinion. They created so much pressure that they were instrumental in bringing the downfall of the Soviet regime, to the benefit of not only the defiant Jews, but of every freedom loving person.
Looking back at it, Sharansky realized that it was precisely through their insistence on their own Jewish particularity that they became a blessing to the entire world, to all peoples and individuals seeking their freedom. Sharansky was inspired by an observation offered by the American Jewish writer, Cynthia Ozick, who took the shofar as a model. She wrote:
“If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain.” (Front matter, When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, by Gal Beckerman.)
This delicious paradox has the potential to be a great gift to the world, the wide world that we celebrate today. But too often we fail to keep the paradox alive. We grab hold of only one end of the rope and let the other fall to the dust.
A growing segment of the Jewish people only speaks the language of particularity. That segment of the Jewish people consists of at least two different groups. One is very focused on religious observance. Nothing else merits their respect. When they celebrate the creation of the world they do so because they truly believe that the entire world was created solely so that they can thrive in their own ghetto. For another group religion is less important; it all boils down to national survival. The world is not a place of great beauty and diversity. It is a place of danger and hatred. And the only relationship we should have to it is one of cold-blooded wariness.
It is no wonder that so many other Jews flee from deeper engagement in their Judaism out of the repulsion they feel toward these two groups. I, too, find both the ultra-religious and the ultra-nationalist ideologies, currently in vogue among many Jews, abhorrent. They are a betrayal of the true message of the Torah and our religious culture as exemplified by Rosh Ha-Shanah. But the lesson too many people have learned from their rejection of ultra-Jewish identities is that Jewish living must be kept tightly wrapped and circumscribed. The world is wide. Judaism is narrow. The world is the main course while Judaism is a side dish of peculiar flavor, to be tasted only if one is still very hungry.
Sadly, such compartmentalized conceptions of Judaism influence even those of us who seek to be Jewishly engaged while also serving as good world citizens. Not long ago I was talking with someone who is a loyal and good Jew. I asked if they could think of anything that Judaism had given the world. Unlike those unsophisticated Jews of Soviet Georgia, though, this American Jew did not have an answer. The question stumped him. This was not the way he thought about his Judaism. For him Judaism, however personally meaningful, was a private matter that was irrelevant to the welfare and destiny of the rest of the world.
But the delicious paradox of Rosh Ha-Shanah means to steer us away from such compartmentalized thinking. The shofar blasts mean to alert us, to wake us up to the special relationship we are to enjoy and foster with the world.
What should be the relationship between a nation and the world or between a religion and the world? For some the answer is simple. They see themselves as a part of the world just like every other nation or religion, and are entitled to be left alone. Such nations or religions mind their own business and stay outside of the world’s concerns, issues or attention. Philosophically, their relationship to the world is static, just as their vision for the world is static. The world is what it is and ever will be.
A more activist version of this view sees the world as an arena of perpetual conflict and power plays. Safety in isolation is impossible. The world is a jungle in which every nation must look out for itself.
Whether quiescent or activist, however, these two views are essentially amoral in their assessment of reality. Their only issue is survival.
In reaction to these two philosophies, others have seen themselves as destined to be the leaders or saviors of the world. Apathy or cynicism has been replaced with a sense of mission. The nation or religion will take over the world for the world’s own good – even if the takeover has to be a hostile one. For such nations and religions the world is a needy case that must be rescued, an object upon which the nation or religion shall execise its will and power. This way has led to endless conflict and bloodshed.
Is there any other way possible? Is it possible to avoid the irresponsible solopsism of the one and the hubristic imperialism of the other? I think there is. I think Judaism offers the world such an alternative way.
One of the many great gifts of Judaism to the world is a different concept of Time. Time is not cyclical and therefore inert. Judaism rejects the pagan notion that time is ruled by Fate, that birth and death are part of an eternal wheel that mindlessly spins and “there is nothing new under the sun.” Our Torah includes that phrase in order to recognize its power on the human imagination, and then to utterly reject it. The Torah begins at the beginning because beginnings are not the end; they are beginnings which lead to further developments. The world unfolds in history. Every moment is suffused with the potential for significance.
Judaism produced a self-defining myth that teaches that Judaism itself is a product of the world, of time and effort and memory and trial and error. As our Torah tells it, Judaism does not antedate the world and is not revealed as the world’s saving secret. It is the expression of one nation’s taking responsibility for itself in relation to God, to other peoples and to all the world. How do we celebrate the birth of this amazing world? Not by carnivals and lighthearted parties. We celebrate by pausing to take stock of our lives, to reconnect with our ideals and our commitments.
A contemporary Jewish teacher, the Maggid (which means “story-teller” or “preacher”, Yitzhak Buxbaum, offered these thoughts about what Judaism and the Jews offer the world:
“ […] the Jews are a rare example of this ancient thing where each individual people or nation had their own God. A people, a nationality, and a religion in one. It’s ancient, in a sense primitive. […] I don’t know if there’s another people who exist [today], with this. But one of the things (this gives) [that defines] Judaism is that the Jews have taken their peoplehood and offered it up to God. That we’re not supposed to be after our aggrandizement as a nation, for power or money, but at Sinai we gave our people up to God. And we can teach that to the nations. […] We haven’t succeeded in that fully, it doesn’t mean the Jewish people have done a totally wonderful job of that, but we have made a beginning, in a sense, and that’s something we can teach the nations — how do you take your nationhood, and being Americans or Mexicans or Portuguese, whatever your nationality is — how do we take that nationality, that cultural unit of great power, and sanctify it by making your food connected to God, your clothes connected to God, your dances connected to God — to connect every aspect of nationhood to God. That’s one area where the Jewish people can perhaps offer something to the world.”[http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/article/judaismtranscript/]
“To offer our peoplehood to God.” As we celebrate the birth of the universe we also recall the Aqedah – the Binding of Isaac – Abraham and Isaac’s willingness to offer up everything to God. To do this we thrill to the sound of the shofar, a sound that emerges out into the open by forcing our life-breath through the narrow end.
We have given the world so much already. What will we be able to give the world in the future? What can we give the world this year?
We can’t all be Nobel Prize winners. But we can all hear the shofar calling us all to be good Jews. Wouldn’t that be a great gift to give to the World on her birthday?
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