D’Var Torah

5785 (October 4, 2024) Rosh HaShanah II

Rabbi Micah Friedman

     In the passage we read today and yesterday from the Torah, this day in our calendar is not called Rosh haShanah but Yom T’ruah – the day of sounding the shofar – or, the day of crying – a day of calling out. Yesterday, I spoke about how our tradition sees crying out – and listening to the cries of others – to be sacred actions – G-dly Capacities – holy behaviors – that we practice on Rosh haShanah through sounding the Shofar and, critically, through listening to the sounds of the Shofar. Indeed, I believe that one of the central spiritual activities of Rosh haShanah is the opening of our hearts to our own grief, to the grief of others, and to our common mortality. At the same time, however, Rosh haShanah is clearly a day of joy and celebration – a day of sweet foods and sweet wishes for the year ahead. After all, today is the day of apples and honey – when we take a sweet fruit and pour more sweet, sticky stuff all over it and enjoy.

So, my question today is how does this holy day of Rosh HaShanah contain these two divergent moods?: grief and joy – facing our mortality and feeding our hope for the future. To be more precise, I hope to explore together over the next few minutes how our praying together can help us to move through the heavy reckoning with our mortality towards a hopeful attitude about the future that lies ahead?

Of course, we do not need to reach all the way back to the destruction of the Temple in order to find inspiring examples of how people who have witnessed inconceivable destruction hold on to hope – and, critically, allow that hope to move them to act on that hope. Last week, the Southeast of the US was hit by a devastating Hurricane which took the lives of more than 100 people, may their memories be a blessing. The stories of destruction and desperation emerging from North Carolina have been heart-wrenching as people watched their family homes swept away by raging rivers and ration their food and water to hold on to life until more aid is available. 

At the same time, from North Carolina, we are hearing stories of inspirational resilience – of neighbors rescuing each other in kayaks – of neighbors sharing their water with each other – and families opening the doors of their homes to people newly made homeless from the desolation of the storm. 

Our open-eyed witnessing of pain, suffering, and grief does not need to overshadow or negate our faith that there is still reason to be hopeful. The fact that we have shed tears does not mean that we may not yet sing with joy. On the contrary, in our biblical tradition, we can frequently find a faithful notion that:

הזורעים בדמעה ברינה יקצורו
“those who sow in tears will reap in joy.”

We could relate to this biblical framework – this prophetic vision of hope for the future – as a guarantee. We could say – look, Jeremiah said that G-d promises us the future will be better and, therefore, whatever we do in our own lives is not so important. We could see the prophetic promise of a better future as an excuse or cover to simply spend our short time on this earth however we please, without any regard for how our actions will shape the future. 

However, as you surely are aware, this is not the way Jewish tradition teaches us to relate to our lives and the choices we make each day. Rather, the optimism of our prophets is taken as inspiration for each of us to do our part to bring healing to our world. The messianic promise of redemption is not meant to render our actions meaningless, or irrelevant in the big picture. Rather, the messianic promise of a redeemed world is understood by our tradition to lend great significance to every choice we make in our lives. 

There is a particular short teaching in the Babylonian Talmud – Masechet Sanhedrin 98a – which comes to represent this aspect of classical rabbinic theology. In response to an apparent tension between two prophetic passages, one which asserts that there is a fixed time for the future redemption and one in which G-d promises to speed up redemption if we return in teshuva, a sage named Rabbi Aleksandri taught:

 זכו אחישנה לא זכו בעתה

If we merit – if we act with merit, with goodness, and integrity, redemption will come speedily and if not – if we do not act with integrity, goodness, and merit, then redemption will still come, but only in a fixed time in the distant future. 

This teaching clearly emphasizes that our actions are important for the future of the world. If we are able to cultivate the hope we need to act in ways that can bring us closer to a redeemed world – to an ideal world – then we may actually be able to bring about this transformation of reality. 

This brings me back to the Shofar and to what we’re here to do together today – to pray. It is true that the Call of the Shofar is associated with the crying of human throats – with the tears of Sarah and Hagar, of Hannah and of the mother of Cisera. However, at the same time, the Cry of the Shofar is also associated in our tradition with the Voice of G-d. At Mt. Sinai, G-d was revealed to our ancestors amidst the sounds of the Shofar and, every fifty years, we are commanded to sound the Shofar as a call to freedom. In the 50th year known as the Jubilee, we echo G-d’s voice by sounding the shofar and advancing the G0dly ideal that every human being should be free. 

As much as the sounding of the shofar is meant to break our hearts, the sounding of the shofar is also meant to heal our hearts as we embrace the optimism of the prophets. This is why in our Musaf Amidah of Rosh HaShanah we quote verses from throughout TaNaKh that give voice to the hopeful prophetic dream of freedom and redemption. In our Musaf Amidah, which we will recite very shortly, we pray that all living creatures can be united in awe and reverence and we imagine that our awe and reverence can spread out across the earth – bringing truth and wisdom – hope and inspiration – to the hearts of all. 

As we pray together today, I hope that we find in the words of our ancient prophets – and the words of our new Machzor – inspiration to continue to cultivate hope for the future. May we continue to feed our faith that we may yet see peace in our lifetimes and that we may yet make different, healthier, and better decisions within our own lives. 

Through our prayer and our actions that follow, may we write our names in the book of life, blessing, peace, prosperity and goodness.