The following is my sermon for Erev Rosh HaShana at Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.
Shana tova. Tonight we greet each other this way, eating apples and honey and thinking about a sweet new year. We proclaim, “Today is the birthday of the world.” It is a day of renewal and joy. Yet today is also a day of responsibility and even trembling: U’netane tokef kedushat hayom, ki hu norah v’ayom. Let us proclaim the holiness of this day, for it is terrible and full of dread.
During these ten Days of Awe, our liturgy is pleading and humble. Through the rest of the year the Reform prayerbook edits out certain references to a theology of reward and punishment; for example, our Shema omits a paragraph where God warns that, if we do not obey God’s commandments, God’s anger will “flare up” against us, interrupting the natural order of the world and causing calamity. But reward and punishment fill the pages of our High Holy Day liturgy. We address God as King and as Judge—all-powerful, towering above us, lowly and unworthy. We plead with God not to close the Gates on our prayers for forgiveness. In some synagogues, congregants weep and wail as they recite the u’netane tokef prayer: “On Rosh HaShanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed: How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be; who shall live and who shall die; […] who shall perish by fire and who by water; […] who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled, who shall be poor and who shall be rich.” This litany of disastrous consequences, often distanced from our modern understanding with beautiful organ music and cantorial improvisation, seems harsh. For some of us, in some years, it can be nearly impossible to face, to recite those cold and indeed dreadful words.
It is dreadful to pray to a God who is deciding, right now, “who shall be poor and who shall be rich” when our nation struggles through a long economic depression. When our loved ones or we ourselves fear for our job security or face yet another month unemployed. It is dreadful to pray to a God who is deciding, right now, “who shall live and who shall die” when our minds and hearts are with someone lying in a hospital bed. When we live each day with the knowledge that a terminal disease threatens our very being or someone we hold dear. It is dreadful to pray to a God who is deciding, right now, “who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled” when each day can be a battle against stress or depression or a learning disability. I confess, sometimes when we’ve reached u’netane tokef in our liturgy I have sat in the pew thinking, “Give me a break this year, God. I cannot say these words.”
It is hard to pray a liturgy that depicts God as so very invested in reward and punishment. It is hard to voice precisely how little control we have over crucial aspects of our lives: the economy that secures or threatens our sustenance and shelter, our own health and the health of loved ones, natural disasters like the devastating floods in Pakistan, accidents like the oil spill whose effects continue to alter the landscape of an entire region of our country. It is hard to pray when we have seen in our own lives that God doesn’t always seem to respond and make everything better. During these Days of Awe, faced with the knowledge that so much in this world is out of our control, how can we pray?
From praise to thanksgiving to supplication, our Bible and rabbinic literature depict Jews praying to God for various reasons and in different ways. The prophet Daniel models a confessional prayer seeking mercy and forgiveness, much like the confessions we will offer on Yom Kippur. Like our modern-day liturgy, Daniel’s prayer begins with intention and attitude: “I turned my face to the Lord God, devoting myself to prayer and supplication” (Daniel 9:3). Daniel turns his prayer to confession with words like those we pray at the end of Avinu Malkeinu when we say “be gracious and answer us, for we have nothing.” “We have sinned,” Daniel laments, “we have gone astray. […] With you, God, is the right, and the shame is on us to this very day” (Daniel 9:5,7). These are the kinds of prayers we offer during the Days of Awe, and perhaps less often during the rest of the Jewish calendar. They are prayers that profess collective belief in human powerlessness.
Jewish tradition offers us other ways to pray, too. We call upon God as one who remembers the covenant. God remembers Sarah and Rachel in their intense desire for children. As we read each Rosh Hashanah, God remembers Hannah. In these stories, human beings cry out to God, emotional and vulnerable, and God not only hears but grants their requests, blessing each with a son. How many of us have prayed that same prayer, pining for a miracle? In the story of Hannah in the Book of Samuel, we read that Hannah, so distressed by barrenness, wept, refused to eat, and began to pray: “[I]n the bitterness of her soul, [Hannah] prayed to the Eternal, weeping all the while” (1 Samuel 1:10). Praying silently, only her lips moving, Hannah appeared drunk to the priest Eli, who chastised her until Hannah promised that she had drunk no wine but had been pouring out her soul to God. We do not know the entirety of Hannah’s prayer, but we do know that she made a vow: if God granted her a son, Hannah would dedicate that son to service in the Temple. And of course, this is what happens—despite her barrenness, despite the ridicule she endured, despite Eli’s misunderstanding. “Elkanah knew his wife Hannah and the Eternal remembered her. Hannah conceived, and at the turn of the year bore a son. She named him Samuel, meaning, ‘I asked the Eternal for him.’” (1 Samuel 1:19-20).
I can certainly relate to heartfelt prayers going misunderstood. And I can relate to Hannah’s despair and the loneliness she must have experienced when even her own husband could not comprehend how deep was her desire for a child. It is harder for me to understand the end of the story, where God remembers Hannah. Will God remember each of us, in our distress, by granting our prayers?
Yet something else happens to Hannah. She prayed for a son, yes, but perhaps she prayed, too, for comfort. Perhaps she prayed for a lessening of her loneliness and isolation. Leaving the Temple, perhaps Hannah is so confident in her prayer that she has no doubt God will grant her a son. I’m not sure I can have that kind of confidence. But I take comfort in the peace Hannah gained from pouring out her soul to God: “And she went on her way, and she ate, and was no longer downcast” (1 Samuel 1:18). That is to say, Hannah gained comfort through her prayer, even before it was literally answered, simply by saying the words. Sometimes letting go of our loneliness, voicing the deepest desires of our souls, and pouring out our fears can be liberating. I find in Hannah’s tale a hint that prayer can be effective even when we see no recognizable “answer.” It can help us to let go of some of the things over which we have no control.
Yet prayer is not only about results, nor is it only about our comfort. In shaping our daily liturgy, the rabbis taught that prayer is a call to action. Each day, after reciting the blessing for Torah study, the rabbis instituted the practice of reading aloud an adaptation of a passage from the Mishnah: Eilu devarim she’ein la’hem shiur… “These are things that are limitless, of which a person enjoys the fruit of this world, while the principal remains in the world to come. They are: honoring one’s father and mother, engaging in deeds of compassion (gemilut chasadim), arriving early for study, morning and evening, welcoming guests, visiting the sick,
providing for the wedding couple, accompanying the dead for burial, intentionality in prayer, and making peace among people. But the study of Torah encompasses them all.” This text, recited each day, states unequivocally why we engage with Judaism, why we pray, why we study ancient texts in a language that has become for many of us distant and challenging. In Hebrew, “to pray” is a reflexive verb, something one does to oneself: lehitpalel. To examine oneself, to go inside oneself. The rabbis wanted to ensure that our prayers neither wandered into the territory of narcissism nor remained in the mode of prostration and wailing. Instead, they built into our liturgy a reminder of Judaism’s ultimate aim: to do mitzvot in the world. If Torah does not lead us from this sacred space into the world to fill bowls at the soup kitchen or listen to the stories of the residents of the nursing home or advocate for peace in Israel and all the world, then we have not prayed.
So what do we do with u’netane tokef? When we already bear so much responsibility and pain, how do we find words to carry us through the Days of Awe into the new year?
As I have been preparing for these Days of Awe, coming from a summer of working in hospital chaplaincy, surrounded by terminal illness and death and often hopelessness, I have been thinking about a different prayer, from Psalms. It is a text that many people lean on when they want to believe that prayer is magical and immediate, that God responds straightaway, in humanly recognizable terms, giving us all that we ask for. We are suffering now, people say, but God will provide for us in the future, suddenly and without precedent. “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy” (Psalm 126:5). Many times, I have heard this phrase as a surrender: there is nothing more I can do, so I will wait for God. I am here, suffering, but God will suddenly turn all of this upside down.
Indeed, Psalm 126 is a vision of some unknown future when God will reverse the plight of the Israelites in Exile:
When the Eternal restores the fortunes of Zion
---we see it as in a dream---
our mouths shall be filled with laughter,
our tongues, with songs of joy.
[…]
They who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.
Though he goes along weeping,
carrying the seed-bag,
he shall come back with songs of joy,
carrying his sheaves.
Certainly, such a vision promises that God will reverse expectations, allowing us to reap joy where we have planted only tears. But I want to think just about that one line: “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.” At least for me, raised in the suburbs and now a confirmed Brooklynite, sowing and reaping are not daily activities. I often think about the backbreaking work of preparing the soil, bending to cast the seeds over the ground, but then I skip to the part where we’re all gathered around the table eating the bread. We have reaped, and we joyously benefit from what we worked so very hard to plant.
But reaping is hard work! Now, at the beginning of our Days of Awe, we prepare to reap what we have sown this past year. That is the essence of u’netane tokef. Today is terrible and full of dread because we face the consequences not of the whims of some faraway God, but because we, renewing our commitment to Jewish tradition each year, reflect upon our own actions. How have we enacted our prayers, transforming the pouring out of our emotions into mitzvot in the world?
To affirm that “those who sow in tears will reap in joy” ought to be neither a surrender nor an admonishment. If we do not find ourselves reaping in joy at the moment, we need not assume that it is all our fault, that we are being punished for the tears we have sown. And if we do find ourselves at this moment sowing in tears, suffering and worried, we cannot assume that God will turn it around, make everything better.
How can we approach prayer during these ten Days of Awe? We can approach it thinking, “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy.” We can approach it knowing that our tears matter—to this community, to one another, and to God. We can approach prayer knowing that we must not only sow but reap; we must attend to those crucial tasks the rabbis included in our daily prayer routine: caring for the sick, celebrating life’s joyous moments, studying Jewish tradition, and honoring our nurturing relationships. We can approach prayer hoping that our own efforts to reap what we have ourselves planted will be matched by an ability to see the joy around us, to see the small miracles amidst the challenges we each face. Our tears are necessary; they sink into the fertile ground and sprout up a newly-appreciated ability to recognize joy. We cannot control events like earthquakes and cancer diagnoses, ultrasound results and economic downturns. But we can do the hard work of shaping our reactions to those events.
I think this is how prayer worked for Isaac—the young son who, as we will hear tomorrow morning—lay atop a pile of dry timbers, his father holding the fire and the knife. Likely traumatized by his experience on the mountaintop, Isaac disappears from the narrative in Genesis, while Abraham buries Sarah and arranges for Isaac’s marriage. The next time we see Isaac, he is pensive. Isaac does not cry out or pray for God to return his mother to him; he does not petition for anything. We read, “Vayetze Yitzchak lasuach basadeh lifnot erev vayisa einaiv vayar v’hinei g’malim baim”¬—Translation here is complicated by the verb lasuach, used rarely in the Bible. “And Isaac went out to lasuach in the field at the coming of evening, and he lifted his eyes, and he saw, and—behold!—camels approach!” (Gen. 24:63). The rabbis of the Talmud interpret lasuach as “to meditate” or “to pray” (Brachot 26b). So at twilight, as one day ends and another begins, Isaac walks out into the field, his head and his spirits lowered, meditating and praying. His prayer does not revive his mother from the dead; instead, Isaac’s prayer changes the way he sees the world.
“And he lifted his eyes, and he saw, and—behold!—camels approach! And Rebecca lifted her eyes, and she saw Isaac, and she fell from her camel. […] And Isaac brought her to the tent of Sarah his mother, and he took Rebecca as his wife, and he loved her, and Isaac was comforted after the death of his mother” (Gen. 24:63-64,67).
Isaac went to pour forth his sadness in prayer; his evening meditation allowed him to lift up his eyes and look again at the world, despite the grief he still carried. And, in looking up, the world surprised him. He found Rebecca, found the ability to risk loving again in spite of loss, found comfort. The tears he sowed and the prayer he offered allowed Isaac to reap in joy.
These Days of Awe, may our prayers represent our willingness to pour forth our tears and to do the work of reaping what we have planted. May our prayers make us ready to lift up our eyes and see the world anew. May our prayers be, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel urges, “our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living” (Quoted in Lawrence A. Hoffman, The Way into Jewish Prayer, 15). Today is full of awe. Vayisu eineinu. And we lift up our eyes.
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