Erev Rosh HaShanah

SERMON  ROSH HASHANAH EVENING 5786

Rabbi David Edleson  Temple Sinai   South Burlington, Vermont

HATIKVAH

Last year at the High Holy Days,  our theme was “There is nothing as whole as a broken heart.”   This Hassidic teaching from the Kotzker Rebbe seem fitting for a year when our hearts were shattered by the events of October 7 and even more by the events of October 8 when the tsunami of Jew-hatred poured out while terrorists were still killing people in Israel and Israel would not be going into Gaza for weeks.  We were afraid, disoriented, and heartbroken at the loss of life and the scale of destruction.

This year, I thought in my immense wisdom, that it was time to focus on resilience and to look toward renewal and a future of hope.

But tonight, as we gather on this New Year, I am not feeling very resilient.  I’m afraid of what is happening and what will happen.  I want to be honest about that.   During these High Holy Days,  I dread, I dread the endless news that is coming from the UN, from European states recognizing a Palestinian state, from the bombing in Gaza, about Netanyahu’s government, and these will far too often portray Israel not as a democratic nation with significant flaws or with a deeply problematic coalition in power, but as the great Satan in the world, a role Jews have played for millennia and sadly still do.    All this is, of course, just political theater that will not help the Palestinians one bit and will very likely make their situation worse, and that too makes me very sad. The Palestinian people deserve so much better than to be used as political poster children by wealthy nations to deflect from their own domestic problems and polarization. 

So I’m not feeling particularly hopeful and resilient right now.

The other day, I was driving home and listening to one of my favorite podcasts,  Identity/ Crisis with Yehuda Kurtzer from the Shalom Hartman Institute, and he had on his co-President of Hartmann, Donniel Hartman.  The show title was “Holding it Together” and Yehuda asked Donniel, “how are you holding it together?”   Donniel said that as hard as it is in Israel, he feels it is much harder on the rabbis that he works with at Hartman. He said, “congregations should know that your rabbi is not ok. They might be doing their jobs but they are not ok.”   I lost it. I  had to pull my car over. 

I am not ok.   We are not ok.   It is all just too much.  The constant arguing.  The broken relationships.  The tensions in our community and trying to navigate it without alienating everyone.  And more than any of that, the incredible weight of sadness and fear.  

I remember Larry David on Saturday Night Live doing his Bernie Sanders imitations and saying over and over, “we’re doomed.”  Some days it sure feels like that. 

The prophet Ezekiel also seems to express what I think many of us are feeling, at least at our darker times, in his famous vision of a valley filled with dry bones.  You know, the one that inspired the song “the toe bone’s connected to the foot bone,” and so on.  God commands Ezekiel to prophesy to them, and the bones rattle and reconnect and the skeletons grown new flesh and sinews and when they can finally breathe and speak, what do they say?   

וַיֹּ֘אמֶר֮ אֵלַי֒ בֶּן־אָדָ֕ם הָעֲצָמ֣וֹת הָאֵ֔לֶּה כׇּל־בֵּ֥ית יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל הֵ֑מָּה הִנֵּ֣ה אֹמְרִ֗ים יָבְשׁ֧וּ עַצְמוֹתֵ֛ינוּ וְאָבְדָ֥ה תִקְוָתֵ֖נוּ נִגְזַ֥רְנוּ לָֽנוּ׃

 “O mortal, these bones are the whole House of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, our hope is gone; we are doomed.’

“We’ve lost our hope”   Avda Tikvateinu

Tikvah.   Hope.  Hope is crucial for any sort of resilience, because hope is the belief that things can change.   The belief that we can change is the foundation of t’shuvah, or repentance.  It is the foundation of these High Holy Days.   The belief that we can change.  That things can change.  Hope.  Tikvah.

Tikvah is an interesting word in Hebrew.  It appears over 100 times in the Hebrew Bible.    It’s root - koof-vav-hey, kaveh – has a core meaning of binding together or twisting together fibers, usually to make a chord. That’s why in the book of Joshua, the red cord that is hung from a window as a signal is called a tikvat chut shani, a red cord.

That is, to take many weak parts and by binding them, make them a stronger whole, stronger than the sum of its parts, and some that binds things together.    That is the root of the Hebrew word Hope.  To come together.  I hope that the ties that bind us are stronger than the forces trying to pull us apart.  I fear they might not be.  

Another meaning of the word Tikvah is found in  Genesis, when Jacob is blessing his sons.  In the midst of delivering blessings in verse, Jacob suddenly stops and cries:     

לִישׁוּעָֽתְךָ֖ קִוִּ֥יתִי יְהֹוָֽה׃ {ס}

I call out for your salvation! 

It is often translated as “I hope for your salvation,” but I think that is missing the emphatic nature of this blurted out line.   It is more of a demand, or a call for action, a cry of the heart.    In this way, hope is not just a passive wish, it is a call to action.  Hope is what can lead to us from paralysis into action.

Well-known Oberlin Professor and Environmentalist David Orr said it this way, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up………. You can't go to despair, that’s a sin. And ‘optimism’? You just don't know enough. Hope is the sweet spot . If you're hopeful, you have got to be active.”

In Hebrew,  hope is also purifying.  A Mikvah, a ritual bath, in which Jews purify themselves shares the same root with hope.  Despair, hopelessness clouds us like sin because it keeps us from seeing the Infinite Light that is always shining in us and the world around us. 

At our Tashlich tomorrow, may we cast not only our personal wrongdoings into the water, but also the times when we fall into hopelessness. 

Of course, Tikvah usually means hope, to have faith that the future can be better than we fear.  In English as well, the root word of ‘hope’ also means to have faith. 

Hope and faith are closely connected, but in our secular society, “hope” is less triggering word. 

Hope is faith that change is possible, and while we have seen setbacks we never expected, we have also lived through amazing change we couldn’t have dreamed of. 

There is a kind of faith that is centered on certainty and often turns fanatical.  But there is a kind of faith that is centered on the humility to admit we don’t know so much.  We don’t know everything about a situation.  We don’t know how the horrors that are happening now might play out in the future.  They may well become catalysts for positive change.  We don’t know the future.  It is not knowable.

Tonight, on this Rosh HaShanah, let’s learn better how to sit with not-knowing. Imagine letting go of your sureness,

letting your  moral certainty. 

Embrace the virtue of humility.    

Step down from your high-horses. 

See others as people, not opinions.    

We don’t know how all this will play out in the future.  We don’t know who is right and who is wrong and can’t until we are looking back on it.

And in not-knowing, in letting go of our certainties there lives resilience. 

Certainty is rigid.  Certainty is not resilient, but admitting we don’t know means accepting the possibility that out of tragedy good will come, and perhaps great good. 

At the Leo Baeck School in Haifa, the oldest Reform Jewish institution in Israel, and it has a school, a community center used by Jews and Palestinians and it has an Jewish-Arab Coexistence Center.  The Rabbi for Leo Baeck, Oded Meir, told me that every day at assembly they read this line from Jeremiah, which is from the traditional Haftarah on second day Rosh HaShanah.    

וְיֵשׁ־תִּקְוָ֥ה לְאַחֲרִיתֵ֖ךְ נְאֻם־יְהֹוָ֑ה וְשָׁ֥בוּ בָנִ֖ים לִגְבוּלָֽם׃

And there is hope for your future
—declares GOD:
Your children shall return to their borders.

Hope is a choice we make.  

It is not an innate attitude.  It is a choice.  It is an act of faith and humility.   Perhaps God and humans together will find a new way of binding ourselves back together, to our common humanity in a way that is stronger than before.  It has happened before.

And as Jews, we are stronger than we fear.  While these past years have exposed some serious fault lines in the Jewish world, we are a resilient people who know from long history that the vagaries of the world come and go, and we are still here.  No people is as resilient as we are.  No people have seen as much tragedy and as many miracles.  Hope is our brand.  

In the poem Hatikvah by Naftali Herz Imber we read, “Kol Od Balevav Penimah”  As long as deep in the heart the Jewish soul looks to the future.    Now b’levav here is interesting because it is spelled with two beits, not one, the usual “lev”.  It is the same in the V’ahavta, “b’chol levavcha.”   Our rabbis have long read this as teaching us that the human heart is always divided, between our good and bad inclinations, between faith and despair, between our longing for spirit and how much we need to get done in a day.

Many of us have divided hearts tonight.  We feel torn, we see the pain on both sides. 

May God bring those two hearts together and bind them into Tikvah.  

May embracing not-knowing help them come together. 

Let us choose hope, and life, and blessing.

Also in the poem Hatikvah, we read    “Od lo avdah tikvateinu.”  We have not yet lost our hope.” This is a deliberate reversal of those lines from the dry bones in Ezekiel.  It is a call to choose hope.

And perhaps the greatest prophet, Isaiah, tells us that hope gives us strength. He writes:

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The ETERNAL is God from of old,
Creator of the earth from end to end,
Who never grows faint or weary,
Whose wisdom cannot be fathomed—

נֹתֵ֥ן לַיָּעֵ֖ף כֹּ֑חַ

Who gives strength to the weary,
Fresh vigor to the spent.

Youths may grow faint and weary,
And young people stumble and fall;

But they who hope in GOD shall renew their strength
As eagles grow new plumes:
They shall run and not grow weary,
They shall march and not grow faint. 

Wings of Eagles.  Hope, faith, gives us wings of eagles.

Rabbi Abraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook, the great mystic rabbi of the last century, who was also the first chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine, took the image of Eagles wings and called on all of us to see the light in us and in the world, and on wings of spirit to lift ourselves up.

עלה למעלה עלה, כי כח עז לך, יש לך כנפי רוח, כנפי נשרים אבירים. אל תכחש בם, פן יכחשו לך, דרש אותם, וימצאו לך מיד.

Go up towards the heights, Arise! For you have the strength. You have wings of spirit, wings of mighty eagles.

Do not forsake them, lest they forsake you.

Seek them, and they will find you immediately.

On this Rosh HaShanah, may we find the faith, the resilience, the hope we need to dust off our wings of spirit so that we, as individuals and as a people, can lift ourselves up and bind together, help repair this world.  

This year, together let us find the strength of spirit to choose hope.  

Ken Y’hi Ratzon