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.
Showing posts with label Rosh Hashana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rosh Hashana. Show all posts
Thursday, September 27, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, October 3, 2011
We Will Be What We Never Always Were
If you’re a nerd like me, then you remember the sheer childhood joy of back-to-school shopping… and I don’t mean the new shoes. I mean the trip to the stationery store: all those pencil sets with matching erasers and sharpeners, all those empty folders waiting for labels and stickers, and, best of all, the blank notebooks full of promise. Each page clean.
Clean and empty, free of the grades and the mistakes of last year—like our souls at Rosh HaShana.
Except Rosh HaShana offers us no blank slate, no escape from last year’s missteps and sins. The Jewish new year precedes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The first ten days, the first ten pages of our Jewish notebook already are filled to the margins with the inescapable truths of this past year of faults and failings and misgivings and regrets. We read this morning in the U’netaneh Tokef prayer: “v’choteiv v’choteim v’sofeir u’moneh, v’tizkor kol hanishkachot”—and you write and you seal and you record and you count, and you remember all that had been forgotten—“v’tiftach et seifer hazichronot, u’mei’eilav yi’kareih v’chotam yad kol adam bo”—and you open the book of remembrances, and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being.
Rosh HaShana might be the new year, the birthday of the world, but it is also Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, and Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and Yom HaTeruah, the Day of the Blast of the Shofar that wakes us from complacency and proclaims our deeds.
Pretty scary. God remembers everything! All our sins, all our missteps, all our negative thoughts—everything we did openly and everything we tried to hide.
And yet, at the center of a holiday that proclaims God our King, our Judge, our Prosecutor, and our Witness in a trial where our lives are literally on the line, we also call God the One who remembers. God remembers not only all those sins and failings, but the good deeds we did, the times we tried our best. And God remembers that we are part of a long chain of tradition that includes some pretty amazing people—not only the faithful Abraham who left everything he knew to follow God into the unknown desert, but ordinary people, too—our family and friends who preceded us and who surround us, encouraging us to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.
Our High Holy Day prayer book tells us that God is constant in both reassuring and unsettling ways. God is eternally Malkeinu, our King. God rules over us in judgment, records all our actions, measures all our deeds, and remembers what we wish to forget. And God is eternally Avinu, our Father. God loves us unconditionally as a parent loves a child. God recalls our first words and keeps a photo of our first day of school on his desk, throughout the ages. God kvells over our accomplishments like a proud mother.
God’s constancy can offer comfort. In the Book of Numbers, we read, “God is not like a human being, to be capricious, or like a mortal being, to change his mind” (Numbers 23:19).
For some of us, though, all this constancy and steadiness can be unsettling. Is there room for change? What if our lives don’t fit into the mold? What if we want to reinvent ourselves?
Some of us are nothing like the children we were on our first day of kindergarten. Many of us change our names (or our nicknames) or our hair or our major. We move to a new place. We take up a new hobby. We work hard to change destructive habits and develop healthier ones. We stop going to shul. Or we go to High Holy Day services for the first time in years. We reshape and reinvent our identities. How does that change fit with the concept of an ever-present, ever-constant, ever-steady God who remembers all about us—good, bad, and in between?
Yeshiva University professor Joy Ladin is among those who find a God of constants and absolutes both challenging and dissatisfying. As a transsexual woman, Professor Ladin cannot fathom a God who requires us never to change. We don’t have to have radically changed our bodies and our gender identities to understand Professor Ladin’s message.
When we look at Rabbinic texts like the Talmud and codes of law, we see a God of absolutes. This is the God of the High Holy Day liturgy, changeless, presiding over the heavenly court with the infamous book in which all our deeds are recorded eternally. But, Ladin asserts, the God of Torah can be “impulsive, unpredictable, and constantly exceeding human categories of understanding.” Though the Torah assures us that God does not “change his mind” (va’yitnachem), we read in the story of Noah that God “regretted” (va’yinachem) ever having created human beings and so decides to flood the earth (Genesis 6:6). For hundreds of years, the Israelites suffered under Egyptian slavery, and then suddenly, va’yizkor, “God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” (Exodus 2:24). And God transformed the people, in one radical moment, from slave to free.
Especially in the Psalms, we read of a Deity who can radically alter the shape of our lives and our identities—even the world in which we live. In her own writing, Professor Ladin focuses on Psalms as a source for thinking about transformation Jewishly. She sees in the Psalms a “really wild, imaginative energy.” God enacts “radical social transformation”: “He raises the poor from the dust, lifts up the needy from the refuse heap” (Psalm 113:7). God changes the shape of the earth: “Jordan ran backward, mountains skipped like rams, hills like sheep” (Psalm 114: 3-4). God makes the unexpected possible, changes our fate in the blink of an eye: “We are like a bird escaped from the [hunter’s] trap; the trap broke and we escaped” (Psalm 124: 7).
Professor Ladin revels in the radical shifting described in the Psalms: “[W]hen I read the Psalms,” she says, “[…] I don’t see steady-state categories.” And this is immeasurably reassuring because, as Ladin says, “no steady state is me.”
The God of Psalms—a God who can radically change anything and everything at any moment—is yet the same God who writes and seals and records and counts. We might find an always Eternal (capital “E”), constant God, imposing and restricting and even, as Ladin does, “boring.” We might worry over the chance to never have a clean slate, to never know the joy of a blank page, to never have the opportunity to be radically different than we were yesterday. But Judaism does not trap us into just one kind of God. Jewish tradition offers us the God who is eternally Malkeinu and eternally Avinu and yet a God who, in Ladin’s words, “isn’t everything all the time,” a God who can instead be “like this or like that,” a God who can be with us now, in this particular moment.
Our lives are like the Psalms. They twist and turn. They are emotional and specific. They can be, as Ladin describes some of the Psalms, “one ridiculously long sentence” in which each line makes sense on its own, and yet changes meaning once the next line is read. Every action we take, every new iteration of our identity, makes sense as an event in isolation. And it makes sense as a part of our ongoing, unpredictable life narrative. And it makes no sense at all if we expect ourselves to be always “the same,” constant.
When God tries to tell Moses exactly Who it Is who is sending him to Egypt to free Israel, God gives something that doesn’t sound at all like a name. What is your name, Moses asks, and God answers: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. In the Charleton Heston version of the story, this goes something like: “I AM THAT I AM.” But Biblical Hebrew has no present tense for the verb “to be.” And so what serves as God’s “name” here is perhaps better translated, “I will be what I will be.”
As we begin this new year, let’s take our inspiration from the God who remembers us and measures us and counts us and loves us and transform us. Let us let ourselves be what we will be. Let us remind ourselves, as Professor Ladin urges, that “God knows that I’m a spectrum of possibilities that’s going to keep being realized”—in unimaginable ways. Let us remind ourselves that this new year isn’t about clean slates or blank pages. It’s about a constellation of relationships and emotions and experiences that are both utterly the same and radically different than anything we could have expected of ourselves.
[This post was given as the Rosh Hashana sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there. Quotes of Joy Ladin are taken from the workshop presentation “Transformation as a Jewish Spiritual Path” at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah’s “Transforming Beitecha” conference, March 7, 2010 , which I attended. Psalms 113 and 114, part of the Hallel cycle, along with Psalm 27, traditionally recited during Elul (the month preceding the Days of Awe) were the Psalms Professor Ladin brought to her workshop for analysis and discussion.]
Clean and empty, free of the grades and the mistakes of last year—like our souls at Rosh HaShana.
Except Rosh HaShana offers us no blank slate, no escape from last year’s missteps and sins. The Jewish new year precedes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The first ten days, the first ten pages of our Jewish notebook already are filled to the margins with the inescapable truths of this past year of faults and failings and misgivings and regrets. We read this morning in the U’netaneh Tokef prayer: “v’choteiv v’choteim v’sofeir u’moneh, v’tizkor kol hanishkachot”—and you write and you seal and you record and you count, and you remember all that had been forgotten—“v’tiftach et seifer hazichronot, u’mei’eilav yi’kareih v’chotam yad kol adam bo”—and you open the book of remembrances, and what is written there proclaims itself, for it bears the signature of every human being.
Rosh HaShana might be the new year, the birthday of the world, but it is also Yom HaDin, the Day of Judgment, and Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance, and Yom HaTeruah, the Day of the Blast of the Shofar that wakes us from complacency and proclaims our deeds.
Pretty scary. God remembers everything! All our sins, all our missteps, all our negative thoughts—everything we did openly and everything we tried to hide.
And yet, at the center of a holiday that proclaims God our King, our Judge, our Prosecutor, and our Witness in a trial where our lives are literally on the line, we also call God the One who remembers. God remembers not only all those sins and failings, but the good deeds we did, the times we tried our best. And God remembers that we are part of a long chain of tradition that includes some pretty amazing people—not only the faithful Abraham who left everything he knew to follow God into the unknown desert, but ordinary people, too—our family and friends who preceded us and who surround us, encouraging us to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be.
Our High Holy Day prayer book tells us that God is constant in both reassuring and unsettling ways. God is eternally Malkeinu, our King. God rules over us in judgment, records all our actions, measures all our deeds, and remembers what we wish to forget. And God is eternally Avinu, our Father. God loves us unconditionally as a parent loves a child. God recalls our first words and keeps a photo of our first day of school on his desk, throughout the ages. God kvells over our accomplishments like a proud mother.
God’s constancy can offer comfort. In the Book of Numbers, we read, “God is not like a human being, to be capricious, or like a mortal being, to change his mind” (Numbers 23:19).
For some of us, though, all this constancy and steadiness can be unsettling. Is there room for change? What if our lives don’t fit into the mold? What if we want to reinvent ourselves?
Some of us are nothing like the children we were on our first day of kindergarten. Many of us change our names (or our nicknames) or our hair or our major. We move to a new place. We take up a new hobby. We work hard to change destructive habits and develop healthier ones. We stop going to shul. Or we go to High Holy Day services for the first time in years. We reshape and reinvent our identities. How does that change fit with the concept of an ever-present, ever-constant, ever-steady God who remembers all about us—good, bad, and in between?
Yeshiva University professor Joy Ladin is among those who find a God of constants and absolutes both challenging and dissatisfying. As a transsexual woman, Professor Ladin cannot fathom a God who requires us never to change. We don’t have to have radically changed our bodies and our gender identities to understand Professor Ladin’s message.
When we look at Rabbinic texts like the Talmud and codes of law, we see a God of absolutes. This is the God of the High Holy Day liturgy, changeless, presiding over the heavenly court with the infamous book in which all our deeds are recorded eternally. But, Ladin asserts, the God of Torah can be “impulsive, unpredictable, and constantly exceeding human categories of understanding.” Though the Torah assures us that God does not “change his mind” (va’yitnachem), we read in the story of Noah that God “regretted” (va’yinachem) ever having created human beings and so decides to flood the earth (Genesis 6:6). For hundreds of years, the Israelites suffered under Egyptian slavery, and then suddenly, va’yizkor, “God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” (Exodus 2:24). And God transformed the people, in one radical moment, from slave to free.
Especially in the Psalms, we read of a Deity who can radically alter the shape of our lives and our identities—even the world in which we live. In her own writing, Professor Ladin focuses on Psalms as a source for thinking about transformation Jewishly. She sees in the Psalms a “really wild, imaginative energy.” God enacts “radical social transformation”: “He raises the poor from the dust, lifts up the needy from the refuse heap” (Psalm 113:7). God changes the shape of the earth: “Jordan ran backward, mountains skipped like rams, hills like sheep” (Psalm 114: 3-4). God makes the unexpected possible, changes our fate in the blink of an eye: “We are like a bird escaped from the [hunter’s] trap; the trap broke and we escaped” (Psalm 124: 7).
Professor Ladin revels in the radical shifting described in the Psalms: “[W]hen I read the Psalms,” she says, “[…] I don’t see steady-state categories.” And this is immeasurably reassuring because, as Ladin says, “no steady state is me.”
The God of Psalms—a God who can radically change anything and everything at any moment—is yet the same God who writes and seals and records and counts. We might find an always Eternal (capital “E”), constant God, imposing and restricting and even, as Ladin does, “boring.” We might worry over the chance to never have a clean slate, to never know the joy of a blank page, to never have the opportunity to be radically different than we were yesterday. But Judaism does not trap us into just one kind of God. Jewish tradition offers us the God who is eternally Malkeinu and eternally Avinu and yet a God who, in Ladin’s words, “isn’t everything all the time,” a God who can instead be “like this or like that,” a God who can be with us now, in this particular moment.
Our lives are like the Psalms. They twist and turn. They are emotional and specific. They can be, as Ladin describes some of the Psalms, “one ridiculously long sentence” in which each line makes sense on its own, and yet changes meaning once the next line is read. Every action we take, every new iteration of our identity, makes sense as an event in isolation. And it makes sense as a part of our ongoing, unpredictable life narrative. And it makes no sense at all if we expect ourselves to be always “the same,” constant.
When God tries to tell Moses exactly Who it Is who is sending him to Egypt to free Israel, God gives something that doesn’t sound at all like a name. What is your name, Moses asks, and God answers: Ehyeh asher ehyeh. In the Charleton Heston version of the story, this goes something like: “I AM THAT I AM.” But Biblical Hebrew has no present tense for the verb “to be.” And so what serves as God’s “name” here is perhaps better translated, “I will be what I will be.”
As we begin this new year, let’s take our inspiration from the God who remembers us and measures us and counts us and loves us and transform us. Let us let ourselves be what we will be. Let us remind ourselves, as Professor Ladin urges, that “God knows that I’m a spectrum of possibilities that’s going to keep being realized”—in unimaginable ways. Let us remind ourselves that this new year isn’t about clean slates or blank pages. It’s about a constellation of relationships and emotions and experiences that are both utterly the same and radically different than anything we could have expected of ourselves.
[This post was given as the Rosh Hashana sermon for Bates College Hillel in Lewiston, Maine. Many thanks to the amazing students there. Quotes of Joy Ladin are taken from the workshop presentation “Transformation as a Jewish Spiritual Path” at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah’s “Transforming Beitecha” conference, March 7, 2010 , which I attended. Psalms 113 and 114, part of the Hallel cycle, along with Psalm 27, traditionally recited during Elul (the month preceding the Days of Awe) were the Psalms Professor Ladin brought to her workshop for analysis and discussion.]
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