We must celebrate.
Dear friends,
This week I was reminded that we are about to celebrate. We opened the year at our Hebrew school with Shehecheyanu and apples and honey and blasts of the shofar and cries of Shana Tova Umetukah! And I felt all of the impediments to celebration fall to the side, and the spirits rise up into the place from which we can see how beautiful this world is.
It’s true, there are horrors in the world, in which us Jews are implicated and involved. And still, this Rosh Hashanah we are going to celebrate. We are going to rejoice. We are going to sing to the Beloved. Not even now, but especially now. Because we need it and the world needs it and if there’s a God somewhere in this upside down, pained world, as I firmly believe, God needs it more than any of us.
In his podcast, The Emerald, Joshua Schrei said: "when all that had to be done had been done, And all that needed to be let go of had been turned over to the prevailing winds, Beloved, I have a feeling our ancestors sang- they sang aloud to You."
Our ancestors no doubt sang in Babylon and in Egypt and in Jerusalem under siege, and in the new lands that so many generations found themselves in after being forced out of their homes, and in the ghettos of Europe and even in Auschwitz. Our prophets sang when the leaders of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea brought destruction upon their people, and when they saw with perfect clarity the horrors their societies were wreaking upon the poor, the hungry, the immigrants, the widows and the orphans. In all of these times they responded to the commandment to “Rejoice on your holiday” with song.
“So I’ve been called in the midst of it all to remember You, Beloved, ”Schrei continues. “Because outrage alone, that short burning flame, is not going to cut it. I need to articulate mighty rivers of unmet longing. And cry out to the great maddening mysteries and sing songs that do justice to a Beloved that feels at times here, and at times very far away- The world we want to create.”
“Celebration is a confrontation,” Heschel taught, “giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.”
We have to confront the world we live in. We have to confront the doubts about the meaning and purpose of our lives.
“Despair,” preached Heschel, “is due not to failures but to the inability to hear deeply and personally the challenge that confronts us,”. He raves on: “God is both present and absent. To celebrate is to invoke his presence concealed in his absence…To celebrate is to contemplate the singularity of the moment, to enhance the singularity of the self. What was shall not be again.”
The great rabbi was right. What was shall not be again. We are endowed, as Hannah Arendt taught, with the capacity to begin. Natality, she called it. That is the miracle of humanity, the source of our capacity to be “endlessly destructive and endlessly creative,” as my father says.
“I am beginning to despair, and I can see only two options, go crazy or turn holy,” said Adelia Prado, “And the times perhaps call for a type of holy madness.”
Monday evening we dive into this new year with sweetness, song and as holy a madness as we can muster. I can’t wait to celebrate with y’all.
Before I sign off two invitations - join me at 9:00am this morning for meditation and study to kick off our pre-High Holidays speech-fast.
And please add your name to this Jewish-American call to end all atrocities in Gaza on this week in which Israel intensified its offensive there this week.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha