In a few minutes, the Hazzan will chant the repetition of the Musaf Amidah, and the essence of Rosh Hashana will be declared aloud and strong. Three times the shofar will be sounded, and three times we will declare: Hayom harat olam. Today the world is born! Although we oftentimes mumble through this passage, without really taking in its meaning, I want us to dwell a bit on what the Machzor is inviting us to consider today.
The concept that the world is born today comes from a discussion in the Talmud about when the world was created: Was it in Nissan, in the Spring, or in Elul, the month that just ended? The more popular opinion was that of Rabbi Eliezer who claimed that the creation of the world began on the 25th of Elul, making Rosh Hashana the day when human beings were created. Why, we might wonder, would we celebrate the creation of the whole world on the 6th day of creation, on the birthday of humanity? Our tradition holds that all of creation is renewed each year on Rosh Hashana, and it’s renewed in accordance with our actions and how it is judged. Of all of creation, it is only human beings who have the unique ability to make choices and therefore, to affect the renewal of creation.
If we look at the Torah’s telling of the creation of the human, the very first thing that God did after placing us in the garden was give us a choice. God said: You can eat from every tree in the garden except for the tree of knowledge of good and bad. Think about it: why did God bother giving us a tree that we weren’t allowed to eat from? Clearly, it seems that God wanted us to have to make a choice.
And so today, on Rosh Hashana, when creation is renewed, we celebrate our free will to choose the life we will live and the world we will live in. Today the world is born.
At this time of year, the Book of Life is open, and we pray that we will be written in it. But if we look carefully, what the prayer says is: V’chotam yad kol adam bo - every person’s own signature is in it. We write ourselves in the Book of Life. We get to choose our lives.
Sadly, my friends, I must say that it’s not that simple. We know it’s too naive to say that we can choose everything. People who suffer from serious depression or mental illness cannot choose to get out of it any more than someone with a physical disease or disability can choose to get out of it. So much happens in our world that we do not choose that we might give up on the notion that our choices create our reality. For instance, the Unetaneh Tokef, the centerpiece of the Rosh Hashana liturgy, says:
on Rosh Hashana it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
who shall live and who shall die, who by fire and who by water, who will have ease and who will be afflicted
And then:
uteshuva, utefillah, utzedekah maavirin et roa hagezera
Teshuva, prayer, and righteousness avert the severity of the decree.
We might see this in the machzor, and wonder if we can believe it. When good people - people who do these things: teshuva, tefillah, tzedekah - are not able to avert the terrible decree of cancer, car accident, heart attack, we might dismiss the whole concept of Rosh Hashana. We might conclude the way Elisha ben Abuya did. According to the Talmud, when he saw a child die while trying to fulfill the exact two mitzvot for which the Torah specifically promises "long life," he lost his faith and concluded, leit din v’leit dayan, "there is no judgement and there is no Judge."
Elisha ben Abuya’s despair speaks to the grief that we certainly feel when there is a death and when our circumstances seem to be beyond our control. In modern psychology, there is a principle called “learned helplessness.” When a person comes to believe that they have no influence over their situation, that their actions are futile, the person will become depressed and will remain passive even in an unpleasant or harmful situation. That’s why we need the message of Rosh Hashana. Even if we’re not sure if we believe that there is a Judge or Judgment, we need this Yom HaDin, this day of Judgment. We need this day that celebrates human free will to do teshuva, to make choices, we need to affirm that teshuva, tefillah, tzedekah DO maavirin et roa hegezera, returning, prayer, and righteousness DO avert the severity of the decree.
The prayer does not say that these things avert the evil decree altogether. Rather, they avert, the roa hagezera, the evil-ness of the decree. We may not always be able to choose our circumstances or even if we will live, but we certainly can choose how we will live. Our choices do matter. We cannot control everything, but we do choose how we experience our lives. Rav Joseph Soloveitchik calls this turning fate into destiny. Going from the Holocaust to the State of Israel, he writes, this is our mission in the world as Jews, to go from being a passive object of our circumstances to being an active subject, to creating our own destiny.
The message of Rosh Hashana is that we must feel a sense of urgency in choosing the destiny that we create for ourselves. The Book of Life is open now, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. So don’t put off choosing your life - TODAY the world is born.
A three year study was done of people who are considered extremely happy. One of the key qualities found in people who were happy versus people who are not happy is that happy people felt that they were in charge of their lives, even when living in difficult circumstances. Unhappy people, on the other hand, felt like victims. They allowed external events to control the direction of their lives and blamed others for their situation. One of the happy people the researchers spoke to was Hannah, who was able to survive the Holocaust as a child when her parents sent her away to live with another family, while most of her own family was killed. How could a person who so clearly had been a victim manage to not feel like a victim? Hannah answered the question, “Certainly I have been terribly hurt. I felt extreme sadness, pain, and loss. But I will not allow myself to be enslaved by the past. Feeling that I’m a victim of the Nazis gives them a perverse power over me. It would keep me in their hands and allow them to continue damaging me and my family fifty years later.”
This is what Rav Kook calls the “heroism of the soul,” that is, our ability to engage our free will to do teshuva, to be freer, more alive, more connected to our Divine essence. And that’s what we celebrate today when the Book of Life is open.
When we look honestly at our lives, we’ll likely notice that something feels off. We’ll realize that we’d like our Book of Life to read differently. We might think that using our free will means that we have to make some big change, like choosing a new career or spouse or moving to a new place. But that’s most likely not the solution, as they say, “where ever you go, there you are.” Rather, Judaism suggests that it’s the more subtle, even internal choices, like teshuva, tefillah, and tzedekah, that change our experience of our lives, no matter what the external circumstances.
Each of us decides what choices we want to make today, but I’d like to suggest a few aspects of teshuva, tefillah, and tzedekah I personally have been working on.
First is forgiveness. The laws of teshuva teach that Judaism only requires us to forgive those who have asked for our forgiveness. But what about the people who’ve really hurt us who’ve never asked for forgiveness, the ones that still burn us up inside? We have a choice, but not forgiving means choosing to live in bitterness, choosing anger, and choosing resentment, which poisons our own lives.
Forgiveness, like the other choices we might want to make, is so hard. Brain research shows that the more we repeat our thoughts, the more we create pathways in our brains that lead us to back to the same thoughts, the same thoughts of anger and resentment. But we can choose to create different pathways, to train our brains to forgive. The daily siddur offers us an opportunity to do that. Immediately before the Shema that is said at bedtime, the following is recited: “I hereby forgive anyone who has angered or antagonized me or who has sinned against me, whether against my body, my property, my honor, or against anything of mine, whether willfully or carelessly, whether through speech, deed, or thought.”
Forgiveness is not condoning the wrong that was done, but it’s choosing to not to have our one precious life sucked away by someone else’s actions and instead giving ourselves the gift of having the life of our own choosing.
Next is gratitude. UC Psychology professor Robert Emmons published a book this year called Thanks: How the science of gratitude can make you happier. He also showed that gratitude makes us healthier, leads us to sleep better and live longer. Not only that, but gratitude can be cultivated through our choice to practice gratitude, for example, by keeping a gratitude journal and writing down all the things we are grateful for throughout the day.
Of course Judaism has known this for a few thousand years. The rabbis instructed us to say 100 brachot each day. We have blessings to express gratitude for taking a sip of water, for seeing trees bloom, for wearing new clothing, for opening our eyes in the morning, and for going to the bathroom! Actually, if we lived a fully observant life and prayed three times a day and said blessings before and after every meal, we’d easily get to 100 blessings every day. Imagine the new pathways we would create in our brains, if we chose to cultivate gratitude.
The same goes for choosing our speech carefully. We all understand why Judaism forbids lashon hara, evil speech, gossip, and slander. Beyond hurting people, it just spews negativity and meanness into the world. A few months ago, my husband Roger and I decided to expand the concept of lashon hara to any negative speech. He and I have a tendency to be a little like Doug and Wendy Whiner, complaining about everything, seeing the worst, the problems, and criticizing each other. But we didn’t want our lives to be like that, so we made a choice. No lashon harah, meaning no negative speech. In the creation of the world, the world came into being through God’s speech; God said, let there be light, and there was light. So, too we humans create our world with our speech. We too can choose to create light - and joy and love and appreciation, when we choose to stop criticizing, complaining, and gossiping.
Next is what Abraham Joshua Heschel called radical amazement: that sense of wonder, awe, and perpetual surprise. How do we choose to live in a state of radical amazement? Heschel noted that as civilization has advanced, our sense of wonder has declined. So, one way is to observe Shabbat, to choose to enjoy a day without television, computer, cell phone, and work to simply enjoy the glory and wonder of the world.
We can choose to bring moments of Shabbat into our weekdays by setting aside time for prayer or by saying blessings when we eat or simply by practicing mindfulness in our mundane activities. I had the opportunity to attend Jewish mindfulness meditation retreats where they gave us a full hour to eat breakfast in silence. No newspaper, no radio, no distractions, nothing else to do, but sit there and slowly chew my food and experience it fully. I have to tell you that I ate the best strawberry I’ve ever tasted in my entire life. There wasn’t anything particularly unique about this strawberry, except for the amount of awareness that I was able to have while eating it. We cannot control everything that happens to us in our lives, we can choose how we will experience life. We may be stuck in traffic on the 101, but we choose whether we get aggravated and practice road rage or whether we notice the beautiful sunset behind the traffic and practice enjoying life.
Giving Tzedekah is a choice we make that also averts the severity of the decree for the person giving it. Not because we’re somehow magically paying God to reward us with a good life, but because in giving away our money, time, or resources we cultivate a sense of abundance rather than scarcity. Two weeks ago in our Torah reading, Moses warns the people, “because you would not serve God in joy and gladness over the abundance of everything, you shall have to serve your enemies in hunger and thirst, naked, and lacking everything.” How true that is. When we feel that we lack everything, we end up serving the enemies of envy and self-pity, but when we choose to be generous, we realize how much we have and we serve God in joy.
And we can choose to avert the severity of the decree not only for ourselves but for those who are overburdened with sorrow because they are suffering an illness or the death of a loved one. I hear this from congregants all the time. Their pain is tempered by those many, many people in the community who reach out to them and give them meals, comfort, and support.
So, it seems that even if we cannot control the events of our lives, Teshuva, Tefillah, and Tzedekah do determine our destiny. We may not be able to change the decree, but we can change the severity of the decree. We have a choice. When we celebrate the birthday of the world, what we really celebrate is the human being’s free will, given to us by God on this very day. Our Torah and our traditions gives us guidance in how to make choices, such as the choice to forgive, to feel gratitude, to use our speech to increase holiness and honor, to experience radical amazement, to give to others, but it is up to us. The Book of Life is open, and we sign our name with our own hand. Creation is being renewed today; let us celebrate Rosh Hashana by engaging our free will to create the world we want for ourselves, for our families, for our community.
L’Shana Tova Tikatevu.
|
