Erev 1st Day Rosh Hashanah 5785
You can listen to Rabbi Howard's sermon here or read it below
So here we are. Crossing the threshold. Into the New Year. The old year is behind us – though it isn’t really. It might be fading, but it hasn’t gone. Maybe this last year will never go, will never leave us. The New Year is beginning – but before we can move on into the new that opens up before us, perhaps we do need to pause and remember. Today is, after all, Yom Ha-Zikkaron, our liturgy says, the day of remembering.
But what are going to remember from this past year? I imagine each of us in this community will have our own take on what we want to remember, what we need to remember - but that might be complicated by what we can’t help but remember, that we might prefer to forget. We can’t necessarily control what we remember. Some images of this past year – if we chose to look, and not everyone did – became indelible: ineradicable traces of what humanity is capable of. For good and ill.
I know that if you are Israeli-born, or have family in Israel, or friends there, this last year has been an agonising time for you, a time of heart break, of fear (which is ongoing), of being profoundly shaken up by this latest chapter in the fraught saga of a Jewish homeland. This conflict – and this is the case even if you have no immediate personal connection with those in Israel who have been living through this traumatic year on a daily, an hourly, basis - this conflict has effected us all. It’s been about identity, and history, and belonging, it’s involved soul and feelings, it’s been about anger and guilt, hatred, humiliation - and a terrible sense of vulnerability. It has been in a way unbearable – but it has had to borne, lived through, survived.
We’ve had no choice, this last year, but to go through and witness these events, in Israel, in Gaza, with as much of our humanity intact as we have been able to muster. This last year will never go, will never leave us. It has scarred the Jewish people collectively – in multiple ways. Scarred and scared. It’s awoken ancestral memories, and re-activated hidden wounds. There’s been so much hurt, and so much need for others to know our hurt, and, sometimes, for them in turn to feel the hurt.
So as we cross the threshold into the new year, we acknowledge all this. Here at FRS we are a Diaspora community - which means our ties to Israel vary from person to person: for some in the community those bonds are as strong as steel, as deep as life itself; and for others the ties have felt different, sometimes looser, more like chords of silk, entangling us, reminding us that we are bound together in ways that might not always be welcome, but that can tie us in knots, emotionally, intellectually, morally, spiritually.
For some in our community – and this is of course true of the wider Jewish community in this country - it has been a year of pride, and resolve; for others it has been a time of troubling self-questioning, or shame, a year of wondering what our Jewish identity is rooted in, what values do we hold dear, and why. Sometimes, sadly, disturbingly, it’s also been a year of self-censorship for those who felt they were not being sufficiently ‘on message’. All this has happened to us.
And whatever you stance on what has unfolded this last year, and what is still unfolding as we speak, we have all watched, sometimes appalled, at how the outside world conflates Zionism and Jewishness as if they are the same thing. Which they are not. And whether it’s been in the workplace or at school or on a university campus, or just on the street, on public transport, in shops, we have all had to manage this latest turn in the long, jagged arc of Jewish history.
There has been a lot of suffering this last year, this year that is now past, but has not passed. We have suffered as a people – and we have caused suffering as a people. The Jewish people are historically used to suffering, we know it in our souls; but we are not so used to thinking of ourselves as causing others to suffer. And this is something else we have had to bear this last year. Please understand me here – I am not making a political point, I am not talking about the necessity or otherwise of the suffering we have caused. I am talking about what our souls have had to bear, I am talking about the emotions we have had to go through, I am talking about the spiritual cost to our psyches, our minds, our hearts.
So, yes, the old year is still inside us – but now the year is turning, the New Year is opening up and we are here to celebrate that opening up, and what it offers us. This day in the Jewish year is a great gift, along with these ten days that open up tonight – they’re ‘Heaven sent’, so to speak – they are an extraordinary opportunity (and we have tasted that already this evening) because they offer us the chance to exorcise some of our pain, our confusion, our doubts; and to question our certainties. Certainties are psychic retreats – they make us feel safe.
Professor John Heimler, a good friend of this community back in the day, survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and thirty years later wrote a verse drama, The Storm, in which he said, “Uncertainty is our only certainty”. He worked with people as a psychologist, helping people discover where hope lay in the journey ahead, not by looking back but by looking forward, looking around at community, at family, at friendship, at what life could offer now. At the gifts that life offers every day.
So in spite of all the uncertainties with which we are faced, the New Year offers us the chance of a re-set. We used to start our Rosh Hashanah morning service with a quote from the prophet Isaiah - it seems to have disappeared in our new book which is a shame, though someone might tell me it’s still there somewhere – but I used to really value it’s radical hopefulness.
It was the voice of Isaiah channelling the divine consciousness within him: “For now I create new heavens and a new earth, and the past need not be remembered, nor ever brought to mind” – Wow! – “Be glad and rejoice in what I can create” (65:17-18).
This is extraordinary, this prophetic vision – that whatever we have gone through, we can move on, we can move into the new, we can celebrate a new beginning. We acknowledge that yes, everything is in a state of flux, of change, of chaos – all predictions you hear by all the so-called experts about this next few days, or this next year are just fairy stories, to scare us or comfort us, but they are fictions because none of us knows what the next day will bring, never mind the next year. “Everything, everywhere is always moving. Forever. Get used to it” – Brian Cox, playing Logan Roy, barked it out to his daughter Shiv in Succession. The character is a monster and a bully – but he is given some great lines. We can recognise the truth of the lines, as we do with Shakespeare: ‘Everything, everywhere is always changing, forever’ and yes, we better find a way of ‘getting used to it’.
And yet, last thought for this evening: maybe there are some things that don’t change, some values that endure, some truths that endure, from generation to generation. Our liturgy points the way to that. Yes, it’s wonderful to have a new machzor, and it’s bursting with new material - and yet something in it remains unchanging. It offers us a different frequency of existence to tune in to, a different world to live in, for a few hours, a few days, a different angle of vision that focuses us on what is unchanging in a world of uncertainties. It reminds us of our vision, our ancient vision that is the justification for our existence as a people.
The liturgy reminds us that kindness matters, compassion matters, justice matters. It reminds us that Jews have not been put in the world to create more suffering. Our task remains unchanging: to alleviate suffering, to avoid harm, to struggle with our innate destructiveness and allow our gifts for creativity and goodness to shine through.
We have this potential grafted to our souls – this is the radical hopefulness of the Jewish story. Whether it is in our own lives - at home, in our families, in our communities, in our society - or on the world stage, the relationship we have with others allows us to express our divine potential for making a difference for the better. Our New Year summons us and reminds us – this is also what Yom HaZikkaron means – we are reminded that the potential for making a difference is our task and our destiny.
Ken Yehi Ratzon
