1st day Rosh Hashanah 5784
Are you in the mood at this point in our service for something a bit different? A bit of light relief maybe? I hope so. I want to try something out with you. The sermon slot is probably not normally associated with light relief but anyway I’m going to talk to you a bit about Rosh Hashanah, the New Year - but I’m going to ask you to do something, something participatory, if you can. (Don’t worry I’m not going to break you into groups and get you to converse with your neighbour)
What I want you to do as I talk is to stop me, interrupt me, if you think there’s something wrong with what I am saying, not factually wrong, but something strange about what I’m saying, or the way I’m saying it, or just how I’m talking to you. You’ll have to put your hand up, or call out, or get my attention somehow - I’ll try and keep attentive to what’s happening - so catch my attention and tell me what’s wrong. (It’s a bit too much for me to do this those on Zoom as well, for which I apologise, but I’ll still keep connected with you). This is an experiment, go with me on it. Stop me when you are ready and tell me what’s wrong.
Because “Rosh Hashanah is not merely a turning of the calendar page; it is a profound spiritual opportunity to pause and take stock of our lives…as we gather today on this sacred occasion our hearts are filled with both anticipation and reflection. Just as the sun sets and rises again, so too does the cycle of time bring us to this moment of renewal and introspection.
{{I am reminded of the words of the Psalmist, who wrote, "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." (Psalm 90:12)}}
In the Jewish tradition, we greet the New Year with a mixture of joy and solemnity. Our joy stems from the knowledge that we are given the chance to begin anew, to mend relationships, to rekindle our spirits, and to aspire to be better versions of ourselves. Our solemnity comes from the recognition that the choices we make bear consequences, not only for our own lives but also for the world around us.
The shofar's call pierces the air, and it is as if God's own breath is reminding us to awaken from the slumber of routine, to awaken to our higher purpose. This is a time when we stand at the crossroads of the past and the future, contemplating the path we have walked and the journey that lies ahead.
As we dip apples in honey, we are reminded of the sweetness that life holds. Each apple slice becomes a metaphor for our aspirations: the hopes, dreams, and intentions we carry into the coming year. The honey, a symbol of abundance and delight, reminds us that even in times of challenge, there is sweetness to be found. Yet, just as we savour the sweetness of the honey, we are also aware of the underlying bitterness of life's struggles. The two are intertwined, each enhancing the other.
{{The blowing of the shofar is a central theme of Rosh Hashanah. Its sound echoes through the ages, calling us to wake up from our spiritual slumber. The shofar's three distinct blasts – the tekiah, the shevarim, and the teruah – evoke a range of emotions within us. The tekiah's clear, strong note beckons us to open our hearts and minds, to embrace the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. The shevarim's broken, wavering sound reminds us of the fractures in our lives and our world that need mending. The teruah's staccato blast invites us to confront the dissonance within us, to acknowledge the places where we have fallen short and seek to make amends.}}
In this season of reflection, we engage in the spiritual practice of teshuvah – returning to our true selves and to our Divine Source. Teshuvah invites us to confront our mistakes with humility and to turn toward a path of growth and healing. It is a courageous act, acknowledging our imperfections while recognizing the boundless potential for change that resides within us.
As we stand on the threshold of a new year, let us remember that the journey of transformation is ongoing. It requires effort, intention, and the courage to face both our light and our shadow. May we embrace the teachings of our tradition, finding inspiration in the stories of our ancestors, and may we be guided by the values of compassion, justice, and love.
Let us use this sacred time to deepen our connections – with ourselves, with each other, and with the Divine. As we hear the shofar's call, may we heed its message and step forward with purpose and hope. May this New Year be one of blessing, growth, and renewal for us all.
Shanah Tovah u'Metukah – a Good and Sweet Year to you all.”
[[This part of the service was interactive, to a degree, with people making suggestions, but nobody actually twigged what was going on]]
So what was wrong with what I’ve been saying? It was quite informative, thoughtful after a fashion, maybe a bit bland, innocuous, it had a smattering of the usual rabbinic cliches and platitudes, but on the whole it was pretty inoffensive. I’ve heard a lot worse sermons. For some reason it reminded me of custard, it had a certain warm glutinous smoothness, but how nourishing was it really?
It didn’t touch the heart or quicken the spirit, it lacked any real moment of illumination, it lacked the unpredictable, it certainly lacked humour - all of which is to say that it lacked ‘soul’ (for want of a better word). Why? Because it was a “500 word sermon in the style of Rabbi Howard Cooper, generated by ChatGPT”.
It wasn’t me: it was a simulacrum, a facsimile, of me, it was literally Artificial Intelligence, created to sound like me, to mimic me in a way, it was not human - it had no soul - it just bore a spooky resemblance to my living, breathing, human, idiosyncratic self.
ChatGPT - and there are others like it, programmes of information, misinformation and disinformation, programmes that blur the boundaries between truth and falsehood, programmes that can inform but can also fabricate, programmes that can assemble information but also dissemble and falsify - I think we need to talk about ChatGPT. There’s going to be a lot of it coming our way in the months and years to come - when we contact companies, when we seek health care, it’s going to be in schools and our homes and inside our lives - and it raises some real questions about what it means to be human, and how we connect to one another. It’s only since last RH that it’s suddenly become omnipresent - the synagogue is using it as well - it’s all around us, for good and for bad - it’s double-edged, as so many technological developments have been in our history. It’s going to do away with the core work of many professions - accountancy, law, financial planning, insurance, if you can get a half decent sermon from ChatGPT, maybe rabbis can be phased out too.
Who knows? We are on the cusp of the new and of dizzying changes in how we live: it’s not just technological of course, these changes - it’s in the weather we endure, it’s in the global financial insecurities, it’s the erosion of liberal democracies and the growth of racist and illiberal authoritarianism, it’s the continental war on our doorstep that enters our living rooms, it’s the mass migration of millions of peoples, the tectonic plates are shifting - and our small lives are caught up in this, it’s hard to keep up.
On the one hand, we carry around in our pockets a machine of immense power that gives us access to all the information in the world (useful and useless), it keeps us connected to others in ways both simple and outlandish, it’s been transformative in ways both benign and malign in how we live. It’s certainly expanded what is possible. On the other hand a lot of daily life seems for many to become more and more of a struggle: try getting a GP appointment, try contacting HMRC, try renewing a passport or a driving licence. Try changing your email address with companies. Try negotiating the scams and frauds directed at us. You can add your own experiences. How many hours of time, how much frustration, it’s daily, hourly, it’s endless.
First world problems, you might say - and they are. Yes, what a blessing it is to live in the relative security and relative comfort of the first world - but the shadow side of this technologically-saturated life is our immersion in the dense entanglement of just manging our lives on a daily basis. “I spend so much of my life just managing my life”, a friend said to me recently. Yes, it can be so demoralising, dementing - and it can take us away from what might be more productive and joyful ways of living.
But if we can’t get off this juggernaut, maybe the New Year gives us an opportunity to pause a while, just to look around us and reflect on what’s happening to us, where we are in life, where life is going, where our life is going? Time perhaps to recalibrate.
For us Jews these are days of reflection, of introspection, these so-called ‘Days of Awe’ - but here I worry about sounding like my Chat avatar - but nevertheless there’s no getting round the fact that these Days of Awe, Yomim Noraim, are a longstanding part of our tradition, and you have come here today for many reasons I guess. But one of them, and you may feel this straightforwardly or you may be resistant to it, one of the reasons you’ve come (or are watching on Zoom), one of the reasons we gather today, is that as well any sense of duty or obligation, or in memory of parents, or out of a residual nostalgia, the usual stuff, and as well of course as seeing each other and celebrating together, we also might retain a residual faith, or an inkling, that this period has a potential for something new, in our personal life, our spiritual life, our emotional life, the life of our souls, what makes us human. We’ve been given this gift, this opportunity, once a year, to look inwards as well as outwards, to remind ourselves that the state of our souls is significant: they do become atrophied, numbed, exhausted by life; and they need - we need – to be given attention. We need time to breathe, time for inspiration. Time to consider how we are living, and how we want to live.
And when we look inwards we know: we are not robots, though we might act automatically, even robotically. We are not automatons, but we are programmed - by our genetic makeup, our background, our education, our class, our parental environment, how we were brought up, how free we were to express ourselves growing up, how frightened we were of expressing emotions - anger, aggression, possessiveness, love, timidity, sexual feelings - both nature and nurture have programmed us to an extent, and we can spend a lifetime trying to de-programme ourselves and discover and express our deepest, truest self, or selves, for we are incorrigibly plural, like the Torah, which tradition says has 70 faces, 70 aspects (B’midbar Rabba 13:15), we mirror that in our own unique multiplicity. As the poet Walt Whitman said “I am large, I contain multitudes”.
But however programmed we might be, or feel, we still know we are not machines - though we can break down, we can and do wear out, our souls get weary, bruised, battered, which is why it seems important to remind ourselves of what it means to have a soul, even if we aren’t sure what that is, or whether it exists. But if it does have any meaning, to speak of the soul, maybe it’s a way we have developed to talk about, a way Judaism has developed to talk about, our human individuality and the awesome way those tens of thousands of genes are coiled into every molecule of our DNA and we each are universes, multiverses, of consciousness, and all that rich and messy profusion of personal history and neurological complexity adds up to the unrepeatable wonder of who each of is. Nobody like us has ever been, or will ever be.
The New Year reminds us that being human is a mystery. How can it be that we are capable of such joy and creativity in life and also be capable of such destructiveness as well. How can our capacity for delight co-exist simultaneously with our experience of pain and suffering? Because we are not machines, pre-programmed, we have to develop our own human intelligence - and by intelligence I’m not talking about A-level and PhD intelligence or smartphone intelligence - I’m talking about spiritual intelligence, for want of a better phrase. We have to develop and hone our own sensibility to what our unique purpose here in the world is. Yours and mine. There’s no website for it. You can only find it inside yourself.
‘Today is the Birthday of the world’ - our liturgy offers us a poetic image, a symbol we can make use of, an invitation to celebration and to begin again to ask the most fundamental questions about who we are: what stops us becoming truer to our better selves, what blocks us, what prevents our enjoyment of life, our productivity, our capacity for generosity, compassion, our passion for justice? We aren’t machines but we might find that something in us keeps coming up like a ‘system error’ and prevents us living in ways more congruent with our values, our idealism, our hopes for the future. Because we do lose touch with our vision. With our idealism. We become cynical, we do get defeated by life. We do end up saying, feeling, ‘there’s nothing that can be done’. But that can’t be the end of the story. The end of the story for us individually, or for humanity.
Estragon: Nothing to be done.
Vladimir: I’m beginning to come round to that opinion.
Yes we may have moments when we might share Samuel Beckett’s bleak vision in Waiting for Godot - although the humanity of his characters, the humour in his characters, defy that bleakness. There is always ‘something to be done’. The symbolism of the New Year is a reminder that change is possible: our souls are still open enough to sense that through reflection or prayer or reaching out for help to others - or a combination of these things - change is possible. We aren’t machines. Machines might be efficient but they aren’t kind. They don’t care - only we can care, and only we are in need of that attention we call care.
We are vulnerable - and that means we can sense the vulnerability in others. We are dependent - and that means we need other people. Of course we have strength and courage too, a capacity for love, for self-sacrifice. But we need each other. In our fragility and in our fortitude, we enter these days sensing that the stakes are high. These are Days of Awe - ‘awesome’ has become bit of a buzzword, it’s used by people who’ve been colonised by watching too many reality TV shows or American movies - we need to redeem it, this notion of awe, because it is speaking of the power of teshuvah, of transformation, at this season: something new can open us for us, inside us.
What is awesome, awe-inspiring, is that as Jews we are bound up in cycles of time and history where we can discover that what we do matters: small acts of random kindness can change the world as much as large acts of fighting for justice, and struggling for societal change. Both the so-called small and the so-called large are radical investments in hope. We are a people who have been pounded and beaten down in the crucible of history, who have gone through innumerable traumas, but we haven’t abandoned our tradition, our heritage, but come back time and again and say: we will not be defeated by the forces arraigned against us - by those who say that the crises we face, in the environment, or in our current European war, or in the vast structural injustices and deprivation in our own country, are too difficult to address, or are not our responsibility - we are not going to let cynicism have the last word. Nor are we going to let those who feel antipathy to us daunt us. We are a people who travel in defiance of despair, who carry this absurd commitment towards hope, towards change. We carry it in our souls, our psyches. Because we are Jews and human and not machines we know that the future is not programmed, but radically open, it is still unwritten and we will join in writing the script of what will come to be. We do it not with omnipotence but with humility. This is our destiny, we whose spiritual intelligence is uniquely sensitised to both pointing to what is false in society, what is unjust, what lacks compassion, what lacks a moral core, what lacks humanity - and my God there is plenty of that to point to, to call out - but whose spiritual intelligence is also attuned to what we can do, what role we can play, individually, collectively, what ways we can enact our Judaic vision of justice, compassion and wellbeing.
This is our agenda – let’s hope these Days of Awe give us the space and time to take the next tentative steps forward on this journey of the ages.
