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 Yet not entirely outdated or unhelpful: recalling and cherishing the lessons of the past and preserving lively debate so that we need not make similar errors in the future, so that we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.
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