As a New Year Approaches

This week, some of us saw the full moon. If you are a faithful Daily Beacon reader, you read about the Harvest Moon (a name given to the full moon at this particular time of year), the full moon that provides longer light than any other full moon and has long been a companion to those harvesting in the fields as summer wanes and autumn waxes. Jewishly speaking, this was the full moon of Elul, the last moonth before we enter a new Jewish year. And whether we saw it or not, whether we heard about it or not, whether we thought about it or not, the moon was full and is now waning toward the dark fertility of the new moon of Tishrei, the day on which we will begin our Jewish New Year, 5785.

For rabbis and cantors who lead communities in worship, the last two weeks of the month of Elul are filled with a mixture of long days, significant anxiety, sleepless nights, and excitement about the opportunity to create sacred space for our communities to experience the music, liturgy, and ideas of this holy season of Jewish time. Each year, we ponder how to make the experience meaningful, relevant, and timeless. This is a heavy responsibility, and any Jewish clergy who tells you they are totally ready, is either trying to fool themselves or you. Most of us will tell you, if we are being honest, that we never feel quite capable of fulfilling this duty no matter how much we prepare. Although I have had the honor to do this holy work for three different communities over the past 20 years, the Yamim Nora’im/Days of Awe, always bring me to my knees, literally and figuratively, as much as I look forward to the sacred potency of this time. 

Four years ago, we entered the Days of Awe online for the first time. As we tuned in for services, and I began to sing an uplifting tune for the new year, the faces of my beloved community made it clear that something was terribly wrong. A voice broke in through my singing … Ruth Bader Ginsburg had just died, the news breaking in the hour before our services began. Fears about what this would mean for our country mingled with the fears of living through a pandemic. At a time when we were feeling most in need, we were profoundly aware of the great loss of our traditional ways of being in community.

This year, once again, we enter a new year with very real concerns about existential threats to true democracy and justice. In addition, many of us are feeling a responsiblity to be able to wrap our heads and hearts around this crisis on more than one continent. We are, perhaps, feeling torn about how to think, feel, respond, as Jews in diaspora, to the war that has been raging for nearly a year, the actions of Israeli government, rising antisemitism, and all the forces that seem to be capitalizing on the devastation, division, and fear.

How do we find meaning in rituals and liturgy that are so old that we may want to dismiss them as antiquated? 

One of my beloved teachers taught, in the name of her beloved teacher, that the words in our prayer books are like dehydrated, freeze-dried food. If you merely read them, they may not satisfy your appetite for spiritual nourishment. However, the more we learn about these words written, so long ago, the more capable we are of infusing them with the dew of the fields, the rainfall and snowfall, the sweat of our brow, and our shared and solitary tears of laughter and grief. The words of our ancestors come alive in many ways, as they have for generations of Jews. In sharing these words across generations and geography, we realize that, although their circumstances may have been vastly different than our own, the underlying humanness of these words of gratitude, praise, fear, awe, petition, penitence, and question, are as near as our breath.

How will we welcome and celebrate a new year – a Yom Harat Olam/Day of Birthing a World – in the midst of so much uncertainty? With the same courage, doubt, hope, concern, fear, frustration, and appreciation for life’s gifts as has been mustered for millenia – in good times and tragic times, times of despotism, nationalism, triumphalism, war, and fragile detente. We will utilize new and old tools for creating meaning through song, poetry, conversation, silence, and community.

As the moon wanes, for me, it is a potent reminder of several things: 

1) There are certain unalterable truths that I can count on whether I observe them or not, and even if someone claims the opposite is “the truth.” Among these truths are the cyclical rhythms of night and day, weeks that end with Shabbat, months, seasons, years, and the fixed holy days of Jewish time. These truths comfort and steady me in turbulent times when truth feels like it is being hidden behind a thick and toxic smog of human subterfuge. 

2) Judaism provides a tradition that is both fixed and open to evolving with us. It provides a structure for inquiry and questioning and a capacity to hold differing views with respect and appropriate tension. It also allows me to wrestle, grow, and change, and does not require that I subscribe to a rigidity of belief or thought.

3) The new year is fast approaching and there is MUCH to do to prepare, even as I will never be fully prepared. From the beginning of Rosh HaShanah until the end of Yom Kippur, I and you will have time to sit with our feelings, thoughts, and the complicated imagery of the Aseret Yamei Teshuvah (Ten Days of Turning), in the company of one another and many others around the world who will also partake in this annual turning and recalibrating toward the direction of our best selves. 

May we feel strengthened in this new year to activate new ways of building the world we wish to live in and leave to our children’s children.

b’vracha ~ in blessing,

Rabbi Jessica