Rosh Hashanah 10/7 Teshuvah 5785
by Rabbi Aaron Philmus
L’Shanah Tovah Tikateivu
On behalf of my family we wish you a year that is filled with goodness and sweetness.
After we hear the shofar blasts again today, we will sing Hayom Harat Olam – today the world is born. Today’s Torah reading begins with birth too, the miracle of Isaac, born to Sarah in her old age. And the Haftarah tells of the birth of Shmuel to his once barren mother, Hanna. When a child is born there are endless possibilities, what shape will this child’s life take? On Rosh Hashannah we are invited to open ourselves to that same tremendous possibility and potential. What shape will our lives take in this new year that is being born? No matter what happened in the past year, we are called by the shofar to imagine that a more meaningful and authentic life is possible just ahead of us.
We call our holiday prayerbook a machzor –which means cycle– because this whole month of holidays is just that, a cycle of renewal and rebirth. On Rosh Hashanah, the 100 blasts Shofar and the many hours of praying initiates us into this cycle. Ten days later on Yom Kippur we are fasting and being cleansed by Divine love and forgiveness. Fifteen days from now under the full moon of Sukkot, we will be surrounded and covered by the clouds of the Shechina the Divine Presence in the form of a Sukkah and we will shake the 4 water loving plants that are native to the land of Israel while praying for rain and blessings. And finally, in three weeks will be the grand crescendo, the ultimate new year’s party. On Simchat Torah we will dance ecstatically in circles around the Torah to celebrate the completion of its annual cycle, reading the last column and then rolling back to the beginning.
But this year the holidays feel different. This year everything feels different.
Simchat Torah literally means the joy of the Torah. Last year when the time came to celebrate the completion of one Jewish story, we were at the beginning of a very different one. On October 7th, 2023 as we gathered here in this sanctuary, the deadliest and most brutal attack on Jews since the Holocaust had just unfolded in Israel.
I remember many congregants asking me that day, as our 9-piece klezmer simcha band was hesitantly warming up on the bima, “How can we celebrate on a day like this?” The Bat mitzvah girl and her family were standing in the middle of the sanctuary looking nervous. “How can we dance after what just happened to our people?” Simcha? The joyful energy of the day is in its name and yet everyone had a pit in their stomach. Everyone was short of breath.
Based on the facts of Jewish history I wondered how many times Simchat Torah must have been celebrated under the shadow of violence and fear.
I remembered the writings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust, and the teaching he gave on Purim. He made a connection between the holiday of Purim and Yom Kippurim, as it is called in the Torah. He said that Yom Kippurim can be translated and interpreted to mean the day that is like Purim. In that just as you are obligated to fast on Yom Kippur, whether or not it feels like the right thing to do (unless you have a medical condition, in which case you are commanded to eat), so too on Purim we are obligated to find joy, whether or not we find ourselves in the Warsaw Ghetto. We cannot, he said, be defined by our outside circumstances, however real and terrifying they may be. The Torah reminds us that we are more than our fear. The timelessness of the Torah lifts us up beyond our current situation; it reminds us that our story, the story of the Jewish people, is much larger than any particular moment in history. I thought of how his words must have brought great comfort to his community. That even in the Warsaw ghetto there was the possibility of transmuting darkness into light.
I think about how, in 1965, Eli Wiesel described visiting Russia on Simchat Torah. He watched young Soviet Jews dance around the Torah in public despite the threat of the KGB. He wrote that “our Jewish youth refuse to inherit their elders’ terror. Let the local press deride them, let their oppressors implode with anger. They refuse to be robbed of their Jewishness and have their annual yontef beneath the open skies ruined.” Even in the USSR they were able to find seeds of light amidst the darkness.
Last year on Simchat Torah I called everyone together and said, “Our brothers and sisters in Israel cannot dance around the Torahs, so we MUST dance! It will be a form of prayer. As we dance with the Torah, and touch and kiss and lift up the tree of life at the center of our circle, it will be our prayer of strength and light that will ripple out to the greater circle of the Jewish people and out to the entire world.” Even on October 7th, 2023 – surely the darkest day in recent Jewish history – we could not let the darkness overwhelm us and prevent us from doing this holy work.
Since then I have heard from so many of you who fear for family and friends in Israel. For far too many Shabbatot we’ve cried together while singing Acheinu (our brothers and sisters) which is the traditional prayer for the return of hostages and still today, 362 days later, 97 of them are still in the tunnels, some of them are no longer alive.
I have also felt the hurt and distress from beloved members of our community who cannot bear the fact that as Israel attempts to eliminate the threat of Hamas and Hezbollah, innocent people are being harmed and killed. Some of my Jewish brothers and sisters have expressed to me their anger and sadness that there even is a Jewish state at all.
I can’t begin to tell you how difficult the past year has been for Jewish leaders, myself included. As Hamas and Israel waged war in Gaza, conflict was raging in the diaspora too. This year the Burlington LGBTQ pride parade was led by a sea of Palestinian flags along with a huge banner that declared “Jews for a Free Palestine.”
I too want Palestinians to have freedom, dignity, and safety but as I watched the march I reflected on the fact that it is impossible to be openly queer OR openly Jewish in the Middle East, unless you live in Israel.
A few groups behind them, there we were, Ohavi Zedek and Temple Sinai, waving rainbow Jewish star flags and blowing the shofar. We were singing songs about building the world with chesed, with loving-kindness, in the face of a very painful fracturing in the Jewish family. I spoke to many Jews who were so distressed about the conflict that they chose not to march that day at all.
What could I say to comfort and empower my congregants, young and old, who were afraid to be visibly Jewish in public, let alone say they supported Israel? When someone insisted that October 7th was justified because Israel is a genocidal colonialist regime, how could I respond without letting anger poison my words?
I know from my deep knowledge of history, and from the depths of my soul, that the Jews are an ancient, indigenous language, tradition and people returning to their homeland. So how should I respond to those who say we don’t belong there at all? I know the majority of Israelis want to live peacefully with their neighbors in the Middle East, a region where Jewish and Christian history and presence have been systematically erased by Islamist extremists. How should Israelis respond when terrorist armies openly state their willingness to sacrifice their lives and the lives of their people in order to eradicate the Jewish state and the Jewish people? As the Israeli author Amos Oz, of blessed memory, put it , “What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap, and starts shooting machine gunfire into your nursery?”
As a rabbi, and as a Jew, I am committed to teaching that every human is created in the image of G-d, so how do I respond when I listen to Jews who are so blinded by their righteous rage that they refuse to acknowledge the suffering of Palestinian civilians? How do I attend to all the facets of this conflict with wisdom, loving-kindness and integrity, as I feel obligated to do? Often, in the thick of this difficult year, I could not imagine how to even begin.
The Netivot Shalom, a treasured chassidic rabbi of Jerusalem, wrote that Rosh Hashanah is not about judging the previous year, it is about looking forward to the future. Unlike on Yom Kippur, on Rosh Hashanah there is no vidui confessional prayer, no Ashamnu bagadnu, no Al Chet (pound chest), no MENTION of the past year, NO looking BACKWARD. Rosh Hashanah is about G-d’s decision to lovingly continue the project of creation and today WE are renewing OUR commitment to creating and living, REALLY living, the best life of our lives, by aligning ourselves with the will of our Creator.
In our prayers today and in the 100 blasts of the shofar, we are announcing that in spite of twelve months of individual failures, and in spite of how many hardships our people collectively faced last year, we have all agreed together with G-d, to not give up on this sacred project called life. We have agreed to write ourselves into the book of life.
Returning to the Torah and Haftarah readings today, to the miraculous births of Isaac and Samuel, we return to the power of possibility. What will this new year bring and what will we bring to it? On this day we face forward. Instead of looking back and focusing on avenging the wrongs of the past what if the nations of the world turned their focus around to face forward. What if all nations concentrated on building a brighter future for their children? What possibilities for peace and prosperity could we imagine then?
Our machzor – our prayerbook, our guide to this cycle of time – speaks endlessly on Rosh Hashanah about crowning G-d as the Melech haOlam Ruler of the universe. And in the musaf service today there are three sections, the first of which —Malchuyot— is all about Crowning the Creator, an acknowledgement that ultimately we are not in control. You don’t necessarily need to believe in G-d to connect to this concept. When we are mindful of our smallness –- in relation to the oceans and the mountains, in relation to the millenia that have come before us and eons time that will stretch on after us, we are acknowledging that there is something awesome and transcendent about this world. We know that it is bigger than anything we can imagine, and that it is all simultaneously contained within us, as we are b’tzelem elohim, each of us a fractal image of the greater whole.
The Piaseczno Rebbe, the rebbe of the warsaw ghetto, teaches that instead of attempting to find G-d out there in the great beyond, Rosh Hashanah is an opportunity to seek deep inside of oneself, through quieting the mind, to have an encounter with the Shechinah, with the part of G-d that dwells inside of me. “Maybe,” he says, “maybe that Creator energy that is judging me today is actually not out there but really within me.” Maybe it’s all happening inside of us.
The Hebrew word for prayer lehitpalel is a self reflexive verb, meaning that Jewish prayer is something you do to yourself. And the root letters of this word palal means to judge. So as Jews, when we pray we are to look inward and do a self-assessment. Today we ask ourselves, “Am I ready to step forward and stand before The King, to step into my higher self this year?”
The Torah calls this day Yom zichron Teruah, day of remembering the sound of the shofar. Today we listen deeply and try to remember the sound of our inner voice, our inner shofar. The voice of our higher self calling us to change and grow to our full potential. Here at the head of the year, we pause and we stand and we listen. We do a lot of praying but really the mitzvah of the day is to listen. Can you hear that inner shofar inside asking, “Do I really want to live?” Before I can ask my Creator for another year of life, first I must ask myself, “Do I want to live? Really LIVE this year?” Here at the head of the year we listen, and we remember– to who we truly are and who we might become. And though we often think of memory as a glance in the rear-view mirror, on Rosh Hashanah memory is a map to where we want to go.
During the Israel Hamas war of 2014 Rabbi Jonathan Sacks peace upon him asked, “Is this it? After all the tears and tragedies of the past, do we still have to live in fear? Is Jewish history Groundhog Day? Do things never change? To which I think one of the answers is the key word of this time of the Jewish year. Teshuvah. Repentance… Teshuvah tells us that history can change because we can change. Our character is not pre-programmed in our genes. We can act differently tomorrow than we did yesterday. Yesterday’s enemies can be tomorrow’s friends. It happened between Israel and Germany, Israel and Egypt, Israel and Jordan. History can change because WE can change and WE are the makers of history… U-teshuvah u-tefillah u-tzedakah can avert the evil decree. There is nothing inevitable in the affairs of humankind. The greatest gift God gave us was the ability to change. Jews never accept defeat. Because of that, after all the hammer-blows of history, we are still undefeated.”
We say teshuvah means repentance, but the word literally means, “to return.” However, we can’t return to a place unless we know it exists, and we can’t get there unless we know the way. We begin by remembering who we are and where we come from.
Teshuvah always starts from that place where we feel like it is impossible to change, and yet our ancestors left us with an eternal promise, that there is an endless capacity for new realities and new paradigms to evolve and emerge. Our sages taught that teshuvah, returning to the land of your soul, remembering who you really are, is in fact the very thing that makes creation possible.
If you told a Jewish prisoner at Bergen-Belsen in 1944 that there would be, within four years, an independent Jewish state recognized by the United Nations and that one of its strongest allies would be Germany — not only would they not have believed you, but they likely could not have even imagined the possibility.
As Israel defangs Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houtis, and eventually topples their supreme leader the Ayatollah of Iran, we see not only Israelis celebrating, but crowds of Lebanese, Syrian and Iranian people dancing in the streets too. With the power of teshuvah, can we boldly imagine that someday the Arab and Persian world will come to see Israel as a partner in helping to stabilize, strengthen, and unite the middle east? With messianic vision can we glimpse beyond the fog of this war to a time when the children of Isaac (the Jews) and Ishmael (Muslims), who separated from each other in our Torah reading today, will someday have an Abrahamic family reunion?
And can we imagine for ourselves, for the Jewish people a future where even with our sometimes painful differences, we can do the hard work of listening to each other’s stories and perspectives rather than ‘cancelling’ the people with whom we disagree? Can we imagine listening with curiosity in order to understand better, rather than to judge and critique? When we look to our most precious shared heritage, the Torah, we see that the Jewish people have never done well when we adopt an us vs. them attitude. Indeed, in the book of Genesis, story after story teaches us that when we are pitted against each other, it often ends in tragedy. Can we remember that we are an extended family with a shared covenant, a shared history, and a shared future? Can we use that memory to inspire us as we continue to forge ahead, doing the hard but necessary work of tikkun olam, repairing the brokenness of our world?
On Simchat Torah, at the end of this high holiday cycle, we will read the last column of the Torah parchment telling of Moses’ death while the Israelites are poised to enter the promised land. And then we will wind the Torah all the way back to creation … and begin again. Why do we read the first book as soon as we finish the last? Abigail Pogrebin, author of My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, 1 Wondering Jew answers that, “The Jewish people have never let the enemy author our last chapter. Torah is its own propellant and engine. We always proceed. (Since Oct 7th) Simchat Torah will undoubtedly forever be embedded as a ritual of defiance. We return to Genesis no matter what: God said, let there be light. And there was light. God saw the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.”
As we enter this time of the creation of the world, our first act must be to look into the dark waters of chaos that were unleashed in the past year and have the courage to say “let there be light.”
On Rosh Hashanah the shofar calls us to join our Creator in renewing each day with light and to join G-d in the holy work of “Separating the light from the darkness.”
We are an eternal people who do post traumatic growth really well because we never stop remembering and telling our story. On Tuesday night Iran fired 200 ballistic missiles at Israel, the largest aerial attack in its history, and thanks to G-d and thanks to America for the Iron Dome defense system because there were only 3 minor injuries. An Israeli friend of mine Akiva Gersch posted on social media that “When this war is over we’re going to have to add a new book to the Hebrew Bible for the first time in about 2,500 years.”
Three weeks from now we will complete this machzor, this cycle of rebirth, as we gather here in this sanctuary for Simchat Torah. We will hug the Torah close to our hearts in the center of the circle, little children will be bouncing up and down on their parents shoulders, older children, teens, and adults will be running in circles and our elders will be standing at the perimeter clapping joyously with a full view of it all. Walking, running, and dancing in concentric circles around the Tree of Life. That is exactly what our people have been doing all along ever since we stood together in that giant circle around the foot of Mt Sinai. However, as we enter another year, another dance around the sun, let us remember that we are not doomed to just go in circles. Jewish time is like the shape of the round challah and the shofar, an unfurling spiral always going deeper and deeper, always reaching higher and higher.
The One who said, “let there be light,” is inviting us right now at the head of the year to circle up and gather IN the scattered holy sparks, to rebuild little Jerusalem of Vermont, and usher in a future that will be brighter than we can even imagine.
Shanah Tovah and Gut Yontif!
