Thursday, September 27, 2012

A Success that Misses the Mark

Yom Kippur Morning 5773, NYU Bronfman Center for Student Jewish Life

על חטא שחטאנו Al cheit she chatanu l’fanecha—for the sin we have sinned… for our failings… for the ways we have missed the mark…

The Hebrew language speaks about sin in terms of targets and slippages. To sin, להחטיא lehachti, is literally to “miss the mark.”

I’ve never tried to string a bow, loose an arrow, and hit a target, but judging from how much strength, precision, and patience it seems to require, I can only assume I would have done terribly in The Hunger Games. Sometimes, as the long and hungry minutes of Yom Kippur slowly tick away, I picture myself awkwardly raising an arrow to the taut bow. I’m already straining and my form is all wrong. And then, like a whisper in my ear, my own doubt distracts me—and the arrow falls lamely to the ground two inches in front of me. Nowhere near that bulls-eye. I failed.

Sometimes, even when we hit the target, but off somewhere in the outer edges, we also think to ourselves, “I failed.” We want that perfect shot. We want to succeed. And, somehow, success means only one thing. There’s one red bulls-eye, and our arrow simply must reach it with speed and precision.

None of us are strangers to this pressure to succeed—this pressure to excel at hitting that coveted bulls-eye. And the pressure seems to begin earlier and earlier these days—apparently, my wife and I are supposed to tour preschools this fall to ensure our 16-month-old son a spot in “the twos class.” We compete with our neighbors and our classmates for dwindling spaces in prestigious graduate school programs, or for research and travel grants. We put increasing pressure on ourselves to make more money, to earn more accolades.

And it seems that our cultural model of success is failing us miserably.

In her books The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well, psychologist and educator Madeline Levine demonstrates how our cultural obsession with success hurts us. In her work with middle- and upper-class adolescents, Levine discovered that pressure to conform to one, narrow model of “success” has contributed to a range of emotional, physiological, and behavioral problems among young people, including “stress, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, poor coping skills, an unhealthy reliance on others for support and direction, and a weak sense of self.” Levine is not alone Writers and researchers in education and adolescent psychology voice the worry that, in our manic scramble to “succeed,” we are failing at creating a culture of self-aware, self-confident individuals who can adapt to change and who, perhaps more importantly, have developed strong character traits and values. In our well-intentioned race to “the top,” we are neglecting to nourish a broad range of human emotional, psychological, and character needs. We are feeding ourselves on material success—on iPhone fives and on just one more minor and on another A for the GPA—but what are we missing? Levine tells of one affluent young girl, well on her way to admission to an ivy-league college, who turns over her arm to show the word she has carved into her own skin: “Empty.”[1]

“Empty” is a charge often railed against an entire generation—the generation and the demographic depicted in Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, the tale of a twenty-something named Hannah whose parents have cut her off financially and who struggles, as she says in one episode, “trying to become the person that I am.” Many critics argue that Hannah wants a “success” that has no substance—she simply wants to be successful. One Tablet magazine writer quips, “What neither character nor creator seem to understand is that success, defined on those terms, is impossible. If success is the goal, and if no other depths of feeling or breadths of interest are anywhere in evidence, what hope do these girls have other than making a spectacle of their lives?”

Don’t get me wrong—I like the show just as much as I know some of you do. I’ve talked to several of you about the strange experience of watching Girls—both the pain and the delight in seeing a struggle that many can relate to. Is it merely a show about self-indulgent, spoiled youngsters with an entitlement problem? Or is it a sign and a symptom of a broader cultural ailment? Levine argues that such a skewed vision of success is practically a cultural epidemic. She writes, “Many kids have become proficient at image management”—young people know how to appear successful. But, she continues, “[A] deeper examination of these children shows that their external success is superficial and even meaningless to them.”

Somewhere along the line, we have become caught up in a notion of success that leaves too many of us feeling empty. This “success” has gripped us tightly—so tightly that we can hardly breathe.

I have been thinking about success and failure a lot lately, as I watch my young son develop in ways that seem to me miraculous. Suddenly, it seems, he can throw a ball! For weeks, I had watched him try, and for the first time I really thought about how complex it must be—not just the aiming part, but knowing precisely when to let go of the ball. I watched him try and “fail.” I let him get frustrated. And then one day he held on to the ball much longer than usual, refusing, this time, to let it slip behind him. He threw the ball! Obvi, we all celebrated with a dance and some hugs and maybe a high five.

What am I teaching my son about “success” as he sets goals, misses the mark, and eventually reaches a target? What in our Jewish tradition can help guide me as a parent in teaching a more meaningful and realistic and emotionally healthy version of “success”? What in our Jewish tradition can guide each of us to a new kind of target?

The word מצליח—succeeds—appears many times in the Torah. Sometimes it implies that there is only one outcome that “counts” as success—hitting that bulls-eye. Often, the verb is associated with God: God is the one, the only one, who can truly be called accomplished and reliable. From the prophet Isaiah: “So is the word that issues from My mouth: it does not come back to Me unfulfilled”—literally empty, ריקם—“but performs what I purpose, achieves”—הצליח—“what I sent it to do.” Never a misstep, never a word spoken in vain, never a promise un-kept, never a goal un-reached. Certainly such “success” seems divine!

What about us humans? I think the verse in Isaiah points to an important factor in success, which is desire. When God says that all of God’s words “perform what I purpose,” the verb for “purpose” is חפצתי—what I desired. Every self-help book on success tells you: to succeed, you have to know what you want.

Today, on Yom Kippur, on our holiest of days—the day on which we acknowledge our missteps, our missed targets—what do we want… besides a sandwich right about now?

Many of us think we do know our goals for success: we can visualize ourselves in that career, or living in that beautiful house. But let’s make sure that what we desire is realistic enough, flexible enough, broad enough, ethical enough, emotionally and spiritually fulfilling enough—to really count for success.

From a Jewish perspective, some of the things that make us successful as people are not items to be checked off on a list—achieved once and displayed like so many trophies. “Honor thy father and mother? Check!” The Mishnah tells us that there are some obligations—some values we carry as Jews—that we never “check off the list.” There are some values we must fulfill again and again and again. Our rabbis adapted this list of values and inscribed it in our prayerbooks so that we might remind ourselves daily: “These are things that have no limit […]: honoring one’s father and mother, engaging in deeds of compassion, arriving early for study, morning and evening, welcoming guests, visiting the sick, providing for the wedding couple, accompanying the dead for burial, being devoted in prayer, and making peace among people. And the study of Torah encompasses them all.”

These verses kept coming to mind as I read Paul Tough’s book, How Children Succeed. Tough urges us to measure success not only by material success, but by emotional health, creativity, and empathy. He challenges what is known as “the cognitive hypothesis,” which he defines as “the belief, rarely expressed aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills—the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns—and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.” The cognitive hypothesis contributes to the preschool-rat-race and to parents’ spiraling fears about their child’s scores on a whole battery of tests that require her to regurgitate bits of information. But, Tough argues, what really contributes to success is not whether we instill in our child piles upon piles of discrete information, but rather, “whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.”

To tend to those things that are limitless—to take seriously an obligation to those items on the Rabbis’ list—requires emotional generosity and a great deal of empathy. It requires redefining success to include not only material wealth or professional accolades but how much we have integrated ourselves into our communities, how much we tend to learning for learning’s sake, how much we cultivate spiritual exploration, and how much we give to those in need. Success is measured by how well we tend to that which is limitless: our character.

And, during our 25-hour Yom Kippur fast, we remind ourselves of another important lesson for success: failure.

It’s something many of us fear. It’s something we even dread. I recall the many times when, as an instructor in NYU’s Writing the Essay, I received emails and phone calls from frantic parents about their child’s grade. Many of them were worried not about a literal failure—all of my students passed the class. They were worried about a B+. Trust me, I’m an overachiever, and my own definition of personal success is often, frankly, unreasonable. But I know, too, that I need days like today: I need Yom Kippur. I need it not to set the bar even higher, not to convince myself that all I’ve done over the past year is miss the mark again and again and again. I need Yom Kippur to remind me that missing the mark can help me to be a better person. I need Yom Kippur to help me recalibrate my notions of failure and success.

What matters for success—so says Paul Tough and Madeline Levine and positive psychology and educational experts and our Sages, the Rabbis, too—what matters for success is not so much how much information we can stuff into our heads. It is not so much how well we did on our SATs. It is, rather, how much grit and determination and passion and drive we bring to all our endeavors. It is our ability to envision not just hitting the bulls-eye, but the ways we might miss… and what we might do when that happens. It is developing our character and our values through habits, through daily and weekly and yearly practices that remind us that we are whole persons—brains and hearts and hands and souls.

Our target is not a small one, but an ethos. Our target—our definition of success—is not a bulls-eye. It is a way of being and acting in the world. This is what we desire.

The prophets remind us that what God wants of us is not that we “check off” items on a list. Not that we rack up accolades in just one area of human existence. We can succeed by imitating the God who declares, “For I the Eternal act with lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness in the world, for it is these I desire.”

חסד משפט וצדקה—Lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness. These are not achieved in isolation. These are not achieved with a quick tweet. They are achieved through a daily attention, in community, to a broad range of human needs—intellectual, material, emotional, recreational, financial, spiritual. Levine puts it this way: “While we all hope our children”—and, we might add, ourselves— “will do well in school, we hope with even greater fervor that they will do well in life. Our job is to help them to know and appreciate themselves deeply; to find work that is exciting and satisfying, friends and spouses who are loving and loyal; and to hold a deep belief that they have something meaningful to contribute to society.”

When our son was born, Rachel and I thought about the values we wanted to pass on to him, and we gave him a name that would serve—both for him someday, and for ourselves, too—as a reminder of those goals, those values. Ilan.

An ilan is a tree. A tree that drinks deep and reaches to the sky. A tree that can offer shade. A tree that must, if it hopes to survive the winds of the world, remain flexible. We read in the Mishnah:

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariyah […] used to say, anyone whose wisdom exceeds his deeds, to what may he be compared? To a tree—an ilan—whose branches are many and its roots few—the wind comes and uproots it and turns it on its face […]. But anyone whose deeds exceed his wisdom, to what may he be compared? To a tree whose branches are few and whose roots are many—that even should all the winds in the world come and blow on it, they will not move it from its place […].

Our success is measured not by what we know, or how much we know, or how many pieces of paper we have to prove that we know it. Our success is measured in our deeds. In deeds that increase our love of learning. In deeds that increase our empathy. In deeds that nourish our roots and that enable us to spread out our branches, sheltering others in our shade.

This Yom Kippur, may we each find the potential to be that tree, that person of whom the Psalmist writes: “[T]he Torah of the Eternal is his desire, and on that Torah he meditates day and night. וְהָיָה כְּעֵץ שָׁתוּל עַל פַּלְגֵי מָיִם אֲשֶׁר פִּרְיוֹ יִתֵּן בְּעִתּוֹ וְעָלֵהוּ לֹא יִבּוֹל וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר יַעֲשֶׂה יַצְלִיחַ He shall be like a tree planted beside streams of water, which gives its fruit in it season, and its leaves never fade, and all that it does succeeds.”



[1] Levine, Madeline. The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.
[2] Leibovitz, Liel. “The Unbearable Lightness of Girls.” Tablet. April 6, 2012.
[3] Levine, Madeline. Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. New York: Harper Collins, 2012.
[4] Isaiah 55:11.
[5] Daily prayerbook, adapted from Mishnah Peah 1:1.
[6] Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Jeremiah 9:23.
[9] Levine, Teach Your Children Well.>br>[10] Mishnah Avot 3:17.
[11] Psalm 1:3.

Don't Go It Alone

Rosh Hashanah Morning, NYU Bronfman Center for Student Jewish Life

Anyone who watched the sci-fi television drama Buffy, The Vampire Slayer knows that Buffy’s biggest challenge—the most pernicious demon she ever fought—was not a vampire or a monster or a giant snake or the incarnation of some primordial evil. No, the blonde former-cheerleader-turned-superhero fought an even mightier battle: A battle with her own inflated sense of responsibility.

You see, legend told Buffy that she alone stood between the ordinary and innocent people of her little California town and utter destruction. She had a noble mission to fight evil—and she had to fight it alone. Burdened with the weight of the world, she time and again averted literal apocalypse. Just one girl. Against all the evil in the world.

But, somewhere along the line, Buffy learned that she couldn’t go it alone. More and more, she came to rely on her friends and their individual talents to complement her strengths. They helped her investigate mysterious enemies, put her work into historical perspective, added humor and emotion, performed magical feats she could not accomplish, and plainly widened her individual perspective. If Buffy provided pure brawn and battle tactics, they provided other necessary components, and combined, they were Hand and Heart and Brain and Spirit—whole, and able to confront just about any enemy. In one episode, the group confidently sang out, “What can’t we face, if we’re together?”[1]

Cheesy as it may seem, this refrain—“What can’t we face if we’re together?”—relates to an important Jewish lesson, one I feel especially keenly during these Days of Awe, and one we might consider prioritizing this year, here at New York University, diversely talented as we are. We each bring different strengths to this community, but how often do we think of our strengths as linked? It is easy to get cordoned off into our own silos—pre-med, Steinhart, Gallatin; humanities majors, education experts; secular and all shades of religious. As students, as young professionals, as faculty and administrators, and as experts in our respective fields, we can get caught up in our own day-to-day responsibilities. Sometimes it can feel like the weight of the world rests on our individual shoulders. Such an overdetermined sense of our own role can be daunting and paralyzing; taken to the other extreme, it can turn us into callous megalomaniacs.

But what couldn’t we face, if we acted together?

We’re together during these Days of Awe: unlike the two most-celebrated Jewish holidays among a majority of American Jews—can anyone guess what those might be? [Hanukah and Passover]—we do not spend the Days of Awe secluded with our own families. On Hanukah and Passover, we gather in the privacy of our homes to mark the miracles our ancestors experienced. But on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur—the Day of Judgment and the Day of Atonement, respectively—we come together, in a public place, in a shared praying and learning community. Though we are tasked with taking an account of our own personal misdeeds and sins over the past year, these “High Holidays” bring us into community. We can neither retreat into ourselves nor inflate our sense of individual importance. We are in this process of taking account together. Even the confession we will utter on Yom Kippur will be a communal one, expressed in the first person plural: we have sinned, we have transgressed, we have missed the mark. Whether we have each committed every single sin on the laundry list we will together recite, we make communal confession.

How can this be, the Rabbis of the Talmud asked? Doesn’t the Torah teach that each person is responsible for his own sins alone? On the contrary, our Sages assert; each of our sins brings negative consequences upon the whole world! This comes to teach us, say the Rabbis, that כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.”[2]

What does it mean to be “responsible”—to be עריבים areivim? What happens when we act as though we truly believe and understand that we are each עריבים זה לזה areivim zeh la’zeh—“responsible, one for the other”?

What does it mean to be עריבים? The word itself is tricky. עריבים comes from the word ערב erev—“evening.” Neither day nor night, but the border-time, the time in-between. And, in Modern Hebrew,מעורב m’urav means “combined,” “mixed.” To be עריבים means to be attentive to those places where we meet: where our needs and desires bump up against the needs and desires of our neighbors. To be עריבים means to be “mixed-up” in one another’s fate.

kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.” And it is this mutual responsibility that transforms us from a collective into a community.

The medieval Jewish community—the kahal—served not only religious and moral but also educational, political, and administrative needs. The kahal ran the Jewish courts that adjudicated certain matters of civil, criminal, and religious law. The kahal managed business relations and negotiated with the non-Jewish ruling authorities. Even in the time of the Rabbis, in the first centuries of the Common Era, a Jewish community concerned itself with collective responsibility. A person eager to live a life according to the moral and ethical precepts of the Torah ought to seek out the right kind of community. We read in the Talmud, “[A] student of the Sages may not live in a city that does not have the following [essential things]: a court […], a charity fund collected by two officials and distributed by three, a synagogue, a [public] bathhouse, a [public] privy, a physician, […] a scribe, a [Kosher] butcher, and a teacher of young children.”[3] These are things a community must have in order to nurture and sustain those who would live according to Jewish values. A community needs a fair court to adjudicate the law and to resolve disputes. A community requires each of its residents to contribute to a social safety-net to provide for the needs of the poor and the orphan and the widow, and it distributes those funds fairly and impartially. A community cares for the spiritual and religious lives of its inhabitants. A community tends to the physical and medical needs of its residents. A community provides opportunities to record its deeds and its learning. A community ensures that people have access to appropriate food. A community educates future generations. The great Sage Rabbi Akiva even added that an ideal community must have “several kinds of fruit trees, because their fruit gives light to the eyes.”[4] Aesthetics and beauty, fresh air and natural resources—these, too, make a Jewish community whole and enriching.

Traditional Jewish law took community responsibility very seriously. Contribution to the communal charity fund, for example, is required of each individual, according to his wealth; of course, the specifics of this requirement are contested and argued and adjudicated in many cases throughout traditional Jewish literature—but the general sentiment is that community sustenance is up to the whole community. Community leaders carried great responsibility, too. In the Talmud, we learn that community officials must perform an annual inspection of public facilities and utilities like roads, plazas, and ritual baths; should they neglect their repair and upkeep, these officials incur guilt for any injuries or deaths that occur as a result of accidents.[5]

How will you tend to the upkeep of your communities this year? Will you participate in the political process as a way of ensuring attentive care over public institutions from which we can all benefit? Will you work to improve the education of children in your hometown, in New York City, across the world? Will you engage in spiritual exploration here with the Bronfman Center? Besides yourself, to whom are you responsible?

And how far can our responsibility extend before we feel, like Buffy, that there’s just too much evil to fight alone? Jewish law guides us to a notion of concentric and expanding circles of obligation: sustaining our own families must take precedence, for example, over our contribution to the community charity fund; those “closest to us,” says one Code of Jewish Law, must take precedence over every other person.[6] Even to care for “the poor of one’s own city” is my responsibility before I become obligated to sustain someone in a faraway land.[7] And a person cannot be expected to financially sustain another if he cannot financially sustain himself.[8]

Our own community involvements are not singular. We each exist in many communities—some of them overlapping concentric circles and some of them seemingly isolated cells. We live in tension. Princeton professor Kwame Appiah calls it the pull between “the idea that we have obligations to others, ties of kith and kind” the world over, and “the value not just of human life but of particular human lives”[9]—a pull between universal and particular, between global and local, between a broad sense of care for all our human “brothers and sisters” and our real ties of affection and responsibility for our families and friends. In his study of “community” ties in America, Robert Putnam finds that, when most people think of “community,” they cling to the most inner of inner circles; he writes, “For most of us, our deepest sense of belonging is to our most intimate social networks, especially family and friends.”[10] Community organizers seem to want to tap into this sense of affection and mutual obligation—this sense of identity and belonging—and build on it to connect to our ethical obligations to those in ever-widening concentric circles. In the past, the kahal confined its “community” obligations to “the permanent [Jewish] residents in a given locale”—even going so far as to “decide who might or might not settle there.”[11] But in a postmodern, “cosmopolitan” world—a world in which we might feel responsible to family and to friends and to neighbors and to fellow citizens and even to strangers—the borders of “community” can seem messy and confusing.

To whom are you responsible? I cannot answer that question for you, though I hope that, over the course of the coming year, some of us can begin to explore that question together—through Jewish learning, through social justice projects, through Shabbat celebration, and in our social interactions.

כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.”[12]

And who is “all Israel”?

If you argue that “all Israel” refers only to ethnic Jews and converts to Judaism, you could find evidence to back your assertion, sure. Rabbinic literature abounds with claims limiting how we might apply Torah precepts like “Love your neighbor as yourself.”[13] Our neighbors, the Rabbis sometimes argue, refers only to the Jewish people.

But the Torah also tells us that “the Jewish people” itself is a mish-mosh gathering, a diverse collection. When God frees us from Egyptian enslavement with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, we pour out of Egypt—men, women, children, and livestock. And with us, marching joyfully in the Exodus—with us an ערב רב erev rav—“a mixed multitude.”[14]

Today, the Jewish community is most certainly an ערב רב erev rav. Each of us has endured a different kind of Egypt. Each of us walks to freedom a little bit differently. But we’re all mixed-up in this together. And we’re mixed-up, too, in the widening concentric circles of community in which we find ourselves—the ערב רב erev rav of this University, this great City, our nations, the world.

As we build and strengthen a progressive Jewish community this year at the Bronfman Center, we would do well to recall, as the Talmud reminds us, that sometimes we must imitate God by gathering together diverse materials from which to shape our holy communities. God, Rabbi Meir was known to say, did as such when creating the very first human being: “The dust of the first man was gathered from all parts of the world.”[15] Isolated, specialized communities will not fulfill the ethic of this act of the creation of human beings in the Divine image—gathered, as we each were, from the humble dust, collected not from one, single source, but from all the places of the earth. Perhaps it is this very diversity in our origins that contributes to our holiness, as the Torah teaches, “for all the community are holy, all of them, and the Eternal is in their midst.”[16]

Be a part of that holiness, this year—that divinely-sparked essence within each human being that, gathered in community, can create amazing things. Be the Hand or the Heart, the Brain or the Spirit. Be the one strong enough to know you can’t go it alone.

כל ישראל עריבים זה לזה kol Yisrael areivim zeh la’zeh—“All Israel is responsible one for the other.” And together, there’s nothing we can’t face.



[1] References are to Joss Whedon’s FOX Network show Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, which aired from 1997 to 2003.
[2] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.
[3] Bavli Sanhedrin 17b.
[4] Ibid.
[5] See Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah, Hilchot Teshuva.
[6] Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah, Hilchot Tzedakah, 251:3.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, xv.
[10] Putnam. Because I purchased and accessed Putnam’s work on a Kindle device that does not support page numbers, I am unable to cite precise page numbers in referring to Bowling Alone.
[11] Katz 88.
[12] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.
[13] Leviticus 19:18.
[14] Exodus 12:38.
[15] Bavli Sanhedrin 38a.
[16] Numbers 16:3.
[17] Bavli Shevuot 39a-b.

A Year/A Learning/A Change

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5773, NYU Bronfman Center for Student Jewish Life

עולם מוזר [...] יש בדידות ,יש כאב [...] ומה יהיה מחר אין איש יודע Olam muzar […] yeish b’didut, yeis k’ev [...] u’mah y’hiyeh machar, ein ish yodea—“This world is strange […] There is loneliness, and there is pain […] And no one knows what tomorrow will bring.” [1]

Tonight and tomorrow, on Rosh HaShanah, we mark the birthday of the world in a time of change and uncertainty. Some of the changes we have seen are strange and wonderful; others, strange and frightening. And, indeed, no one knows what tomorrow will bring, situated as we are in a time of economic and institutional and political transition.

ומה יהיה מחר אין איש יודע u’mah y’hiyeh machar, ein ish yodea—“and as for what will be tomorrow, there is not one person who knows.”[2]

In some strange way, the words of this Israeli pop song make me think of that new text-messaging acronym: “YOLO: You only live once.” I’m sure this slogan is supposed to be upbeat and encouraging, but I can’t help hearing it fatalistically: “YOLO! Seize today, because tomorrow it’s probably just gonna get worse.”

Live the one life you’re given to live, and if you take too many risks, if you make too many mistakes, אין זה משנה ein zeh meshaneh—it doesn’t matter all that much.

אין זה משנה ein zeh meshaneh—literally, it doesn’t change. Within that phrase lies a key word for today: שנה. A year. The cycle of days that brings us back to the beginning. What does it mean for us, in this time and in this place, in this changed and changing world, to wish one another a shanah tovah?

For the students and teachers among us, שנה represents a familiar activity: learning. In Hebrew, shin-nun-heh, the letters and sounds that mean “earth’s trip around the sun,” can also mean to learn, to repeat, to go over again. Learning, for the Rabbis of our ancient tradition, meant reviewing and repeating. Young men memorized the debates and questions and disagreements of their rabbis, repeating not only legal outcomes but all the preliminary dialogue and debate. They preserved majority opinions and minority ones, too. They recalled and re-told tales of rabbinic wisdom and folly. They remembered and they repeated. An old model of learning, perhaps: the parroting students faithfully regurgitating information placed in their heads. Yet not entirely outdated or unhelpful: recalling and cherishing the lessons of the past and preserving lively debate so that we need not make similar errors in the future, so that we preserve our heritage, so that we benefit from the collected wisdom of the generations who came before us. In the Torah, we read that the ideal political ruler for Israel would carry with him at all times משנה התורה הזאת mishneih ha’Torah ha’zot—a copy of this Torah, this teaching.[3] Why? So that he might be accountable to the truths contained in it, so that he might understand his responsibility to the Jewish people, past present and future. He carries a copy, a second Torah, so that he might remain faithful to the “original.”

In these days and times, how can we tell a copy from the original? Do we even think it is possible to simply reproduce a copy? Would such a static, faithful copy be desirable? Lady Gaga “copies” Madonna who “copies” voguing houses in New York City… yet each “version” remains distinct. And, after all, didn’t the star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet “copy” Ovid’s rendering of the ancient Roman lovers Pyramus and Thisbe? Copies and originals blend; African beats become soul classics become hip-hop remixes become Afro-hip-hop fusion. Every repetition is a repetition with a difference.[4]

משנה, learning, can never be a simple parroting—and not only because direct copying is nothing more than plagiarism. Learning might be a repetition, a going-over, a turning back to the collected wisdom of Sages who precede us, but we also add our questions and our interpretations. We become part of future repetitions, like the bordering commentaries on a page of Talmud. Whether we consider our “Torah” to be the five books of Moses or our native country’s constitution or the canon of Western literature or Sondheim’s songbooks or the collection of the MET, we and our learning contribute to a conversation that long precedes us and, we fervently hope, will continue long after we are gone. A new year invites us to make משנה תורה mishneih Torah, a “second Torah,” of our own. Our “second Torah” must be recognizably linked to its “original” ancestor, else we run the risk of separating ourselves from generations upon generations on whose shoulders we stand. And yet our “second Torah” adds nothing to the vibrancy of contemporary life if it does not respond to the changes in our world.

I wish for all of us, then, משנה טובה Mishneh tovah—good learning.

And so we “repeat” the annual cycle. Another shanah turns. We sit through the same services. The shofar blasts the same patterns. We hear that melody again and again and again, forever it seems, l’olam va’ed!

And yet the world surprises us: patterns break; mutations emerge without precedent; variation abounds. Indeed, Judaism calls God משנה הבריות meshaneh ha’briyot—one who makes various creations. There’s even a blessing for it: When you see a monkey, the Talmud urges, or an elephant—a strange and wondrous creature you might not see every day—you take a moment to recognize the miraculous variety of God’s creation. “Blessed are You, Eternal, […] for making various creatures.”[5] It’s a blessing that inspires us to consider how we treat the natural world, how we take responsibility for the billions of organisms we cannot even see—those hundreds and thousands of species deep in rainforests or floating in the dark deep. And it is a blessing, too, about change.

Remember your high school yearbook, and those endless entries at the back, usually from people you barely spoke to: “Don’t eva change!” And those captions beneath the photos: “Most likely to…” “Least likely to…” We recall our days in patterns and predictions.

Well, if God—כביכול, if it were possible to say such a thing—if God had a yearbook entry, it might read: “Least and most likely to change—and to change others.” משנה meshaneh: God as the One who changes.

I’d like to think of the blessing meshane habriyot as a blessing over the undeniable fact that our Creator did not make us static. A statement of profound gratitude for the reality that our God changes each of God’s creatures. Yes: Blessed are you, Eternal our God, […] who makes different creations—who makes myriad creatures, strange and familiar. Yes, and: Blessed are you, Eternal, […] who changes creations—who surprises us each, during our lifetimes, with our own capacity for growth, with our amazing ability to remain recognizably ourselves and yet sometimes be utterly foreign to the life we thought or assumed or were told we would lead.

This is the same God who “turned the flinty rock to a pool of water” (Psalms 114).[6] Miraculous and terrifying! The reliable landscape floods and turns firm ground into waters in which we might drown. Blessed and miraculous! The unforgiving stone becomes a life-giving source of water. A new year opens us to the potential for a sudden change.

I wish for all of us an openness to משנה לטובה meshaneh l’tovah—the One who changes us for the better.

עולם מוזר Olam muzar—It’s a strange world in which we live. Constantly changing. At times inspiring. At times overwhelming. עולם מוזר כולו שלך Olam muzar, kulo shelcha—“This world is strange, and all of it is yours.”[7] The responsibility for the coming shanah lies with each of us.

With an eye to ten days from now, to Yom Kippur, our Day of Atonement, we begin our new year by reflecting on the past one, returning to our deeds and misdeeds. We make atonement through a process called תשובה teshuva—from a verb that means “return,” go back. שובו אלי ואשובה Shuvu elai ve’ashuva—“Turn to me and I will turn back, too,” says God.[8] Change direction. In Rabbinic parlance, תשובה means “reply” or “answer”: a dialectic process. The world asks us many questions, and it is up to us to respond. A new shanah is a call for us leshanot—to change, to become agents of change in a world that needs changing.

Sometimes the change we are called to bring about is external: alleviation of poverty, education of the next generation, enrichment of the arts. And sometimes it is internal: a change in our own habits, our own outlook. In this new shanah, as we return to our learning, to our mishnah, we return the same and yet different. The process of teshuva cannot be one of returning to the starting block exactly as we were, running in circles. Such a feat would be impossible, at any rate: each event, each moment in our lives changes us in some subtle way. And such a “return” would be empty and meaningless. Repentance is not about going back to the moment before we erred, but rather, changing our direction, changing our pattern, changing our behavior.

No matter how overwhelming it seems, no matter how powerless we may feel—if we see a need for change in ourselves or in the world, we simply do not have the luxury of sitting back and waiting for change to come. Rabbi Tarfon used to say, “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, yet neither are you free to desist from it.”

I wish us each a שנה טובה, a good year, and I wish that we each can seize an opportunity to be ראש שינוי, a leader of change.

עולם מוזר כולו שלך כשהתקווה איתך נשארת Olam muzar, kulo shelcha k’she’hatikva itcha nisheret—“This world is strange, and it’s all yours, so long as the hope remains within you.” אל תאבד אותה ,תשמור עליה Al t’abed otah, tishmor aleiha—“Do not lose [that hope]; protect it.” ומה יהיה מחר אין איש יודע u’mah y’hiyeh machar, ein ish yodea—“No one knows what tomorrow will bring.”

No one knows what tomorrow will bring, for this strange world is yours to learn and to know, to shape and to change, in this new year.

שנה ושינויים טובים shana v’shinui’im tovim, A good year, and good changes, to each of you.







[1] שיר תקווה (“Song of Hope), Miri Mesika, words by Michael Vaknin, translation by Rabbi Karyn Kedar.
[2] Ibid., translation by Nikki DeBlosi.
[3] Deuteronomy 16:18.
[4] With acknowledgements to Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble.
[5] Gemara to Mishnah Brachot 6.
[6] Acknowledgements to Professor Joy Ladin, whose workshop on the Psalms as transformative text continues to influence my thinking (from Transforming Beitecha 2010, CBST’s conference on LGBTQ inclusion).
[7] “Song of Hope,” transl. DeBlosi.
[8] Malachai 3:7.