Facing the Unknown - Rosh Hashanah Sermon 5771 by Rabbi Tirzah Firestone

I once knew a genealogist who spent many years researching Jewish towns and shtetls lost across Europe. Once he was in the stacks tracing Jews lost in the Holocaust, and he kept encountering the same city of birth again and again. UN’CANOWIN He had never heard of this place so he felt that he was on the verge of some important discovery. Because so many people hailed from this place, UN’CANOWIN.

But he could not find UN’CANOWIN on the map. Any map. Finally he brought his work to his teacher: had he ever heard of this place? His teacher looks over the reems of documents he brought in, then looked up at him:  Place of Birth: UN’CANOWIN??? That doesn’t say UN’CANOWIN, that simply says: Unknown.

This RH is a little like that. So many changes afoot, and so much that lies ahead that we simply cannot know. So much UN’CANOWIN /UNKNOWN In our lives in our community, and beyond it, in our world.   

So thank you for being here and for your blessings tonight as we walk the path between known and unknown. Comfortable and Uncomfortable. Tonight I‘d like to walk  that edge with you, and with your permission, take a look at what some great thinkers have to say about facing the changes that lie ahead.

First the comfortable:  We are all here together! And we have this amazing opportunity, the time and the space in which to come home to our selves. You’ve heard of cleaning up our carbon footprint? These holidays are for cleaning up our karmic footprint. For 10 days, beginning tonight and through YK, we are on a kind of sacred retreat: doing the deep soul work of teshuvah, returning to our selves with both clarity and compassion, to self correct.

You know the ropes. This is the season we take personal responsibility: we  clean up our messes, straighten out our miscommunications; we take off our masks,  &make peace wherever possible …and through our prayers, we lift off to a cruising altitude of Tiferet of Briya to take a good look at our lives. How are we doing? Are we on purpose? Are we accomplishing our life’s goals?

All this is wonderful. But there’s a danger…

The danger is that we can get so good at our self-reflecting, so absorbed in our own personal flight plan, that it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Martin Buber said it well: “To begin with oneself but not end with oneself, to start from oneself but not to aim at oneself, to comprehend oneself but not to be preoccupied with oneself.” 

Yes, we must plumb our inner depths, and do our inner work and become more and more transparent.   But to what end?

What Judaism –like all the great religions- seek to remind us is that once we have said HINENI, here I am, the inner work always goes on, but there must be a shift of identification from our own separate selves, our individual “I” to a vaster sense of who we are.

This year, as every other year, we look from above at our lives and self-correct. But this y ear, perhaps more than any other year, we might also look from above at our larger self, the world. As our teacher, Reb Zalman says, the Shechinah, is found right here in the form of the living earth. She IS our larger self. And she is ailing.

We may not even read the newspaper or be consciously listening to the news, yet we feel her ailing cry nevertheless. The impact of what is going on in the world seeps into our psyches and nervous systems because we are not separate. We are all cells of her body. And so along with the polar bear in the Antarctic and the elephant in Sri Lanka, the blue whale, the Mountain Gorilla and even the Monarch Butterfly, all of whom are fighting for their lives, as are the earth’s human children, we too experience the struggle for life. The cry is in the air that we all collectively breathe. It is all of our cry.

But it’s not so simple. Counter-balanced with the cry of the world is an exultant cry over the joy of simply being alive, the joy of friendship, music, relative health, beauty, all the opportunities we have to grow, to change, to love. And we should never feel guilty for our joy and the delight in our lives. I’m remembering Rabbi Abraham J Heschel’s : Just to be is a blessing, just to live is holy. Judaism is all about paradox: we are meant to revel in the radical amazement, the miracle of being alive. At the same time, we are told: Lo tuchal l’hitalem, we are not allowed to turn away from the cry of our fellow creature.

The tension between these two opposites has been huge for me this year. On the one hand, I believe that God revels in my joy. Just look at the rich era we get to be alive in! The entire world, its people, music, sacred texts etc are all available to us, and the technology with which to access it! I truly believe that Divinity delights in our experience; tastes life through our human senses. On the other hand, this beautiful world is more in peril than ever before. And it is simply not enough for me to live into the comfort and beauty that I am so graced with, without also extending myself to the immense suffering around me.

Carl Jung said: At the core of every one of our life’s journeys is one central question. And each of us must work with that question. That quest.

The question that I have asked myself for much of my adult life is: What does it mean to be a Jew  today? And this year’s tension now fuels this question:

What does it mean to an MOT, member of the Tribe: one of the most ancient tribes alive on earth?  

A tribe that has survived for hundreds of centuries, a tribe that itself knows all about near-extinction! 

Does Judaism have any innate wisdom about living in a time when life is so dangerously at a precipice?

I realize I am exposing my innermost neuroses here, but who else am I going to share this with? And what better time? What does it mean this year, to be Jewish? Is it enough, I ask myself, to do our own persona teshuvah?  

In our prayers this year, do we include our part in the oil spill in the Gulf Coast? Our part in the growing divide between rich and poor in the world? Our part in the destruction of so many species… including our own?

OK, we are squarely into the Uncomfortable section now. But if we are not asking these questions, RH, the birthday of the world, is reduced to a self growth workshop or worse, a toothless relic from our past that feels good but goes no where.

So I looked for answers in the mystical teachings about Rosh Hashana,  and that primal horn we blow, the Shofar. And I found something interesting and again paradoxical. The sound of the Shofar was used in our ancient days was a call to triumph in battle. And yet on RH, Talmud tells us that the sound of the Shofar is meant to sound like weeping.  And not our own weeping but that of our enemies! Again the tension between exultation and compassion…

The Chasidic masters taught that the shofar’s cry is a metaphor for the journey that every one of us makes in our lives. Each note mimicks a stage in our soul’s waking up process.

The first unbroken call: the Tekia is our innocence. Like a child afloat in its mother’s womb or a youngster still in the magic of childhood, like Adam and Eve in the Garden, or like new lovers. All is right in the world. We are still in a state of oneness.That is the first blast we will hear tomorrow.

But things change. We don’t get to stay in the Garden. Life inevitably changes and gets more complex. We encounter pain. The pain that comes with change and loss. The pain that comes with failure and illness and death.

We break. We shatter. We cry out.

These are the next sounds:
Shevarim literally means breaking.

Truah means shattering.

Why these names? Why these sounds?

Our ancient tradition understood that we cannot wake up, truly wake up without first breaking up and breaking open our hearts to the unknown, and to the cries around us.

Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Kotsk taught that the sobbing staccato of the shofar’s broken notes teach us that in God’s eyes nothing is more whole than a broken open heart.           

If we succeed, if we can go through the shattering that comes in so many forms throughout our lives, then we inherit a greater power. A new momentum, a new vessel.

This is the sound of new wholeness we hear in the final blast, the tekia gedola.

First there is innocence.

Then a fissure, a break, a shattering.

But if we dare to face our pain, the teachin g goes, dare to allow our hearts to break fully, then a new wholeness, a new power awaits  us.

As I wrestled with my questions this year I was delighted to find this deep teaching about innocence, shattering,  and new wholeness also discussed by several eco-psychogists and philosophers who are also wondering: How do we live our lives now, in this intense and yet glorious time?

One of them is Joanna Macy, the great octogenarian eco-philosopher and activist. Amazingly, her work parallels the stages of the shofar’s blasts:

She says there are four stages to the inner journey of the world-lover today:

The first stage is gratitude. We dive back into innocent joy and appreciation for this incredible life we live and for the gift of choice, that we can take stock of a situation and change course. When we are thankful, Macy teaches, it loosens the grip of the predominant message of our society: that we are insufficient and inadequate and that we NEED more: more stuff, more entertainment, more approval, more. When we are simply grateful, the dissatisfaction our culture breeds, and the greed that comes out of it is quelled. In this way, gratitude is incredibly subversive. Our joy and gratitude help us remember that we are sufficient. 

When we are sufficient, our heart opens and we begin to feel our love AND our pain. Pain over what is going on in the world, pain over the terrible legacy we are leaving behind for our children to deal with.

This second stage, are like the broken notes of the shofar.

When we Dare to experience our love and our brokenness, Macy says, when we  face into our pain, leaving behind our denial, and instead face our helplessness and our fear, we shatter, but

When we do, we begin to know the immensity of our heart, and our private anguish opens outward to each other. A door opens and we learn the true meaning of the word compassion: to “suffer with” all of creation.  

And Joanna Macy being a Buddhist, does not say this but I say it: When we open the doors of our private fears and anguish outward to each other and to the mysterious power in the Universe. Then we start to receive into our emptiness, into our brokenness, a new way forward.

So what does it mean this year, to be Jewish?  Perhaps it means that in the sound of the shofar we hear the cry of the children and the animals of this world, and we allow it to break open our hearts. Or maybe it means that this new year we commit ourselves to stepping out in the area of our concern, without losing our joy. Or simply that we pledge ourselves to make reach out, make connections.

Bishop Desmond Tutu, the great South African activist said:
“There is a movement at the heart of things to reverse the awful centrifugal force of alienation, brokenness, division, hostility, and disharmony.”

We are all part of this movement, part of this “con-spiracy,” if we choose to be. To be a Jew today, which has always meant to stand up in defiance of oppression and injustice, to uplift this world with righteous acts for others, …now must mean to turn Sheker, falseness, into Kesher, connection:

For each one of us, this might mean something different. Some of us must turn inward to heal our families, or strengthen our community. And others of us might take a stand to fight environmental destruction, poverty or intolerance,  in one of its many forms. 

Whatever we do, our deep tradition and the great thinkers of today seem to be telling us that we must feel deeply, and in the words of the Kotzker Rebbe and Andrew Harvey: to follow our heartbreak, the shattering cry that we hear deepest within. To allow the Divine Spirit to break us open so that  new depths of tenderness for all life can be born.

 This new year we cannot hang on to the idea that all is well and its business as usual. It is not. This year Judaism must mean more than building our own numbers, safeguarding our own ethnic continuity. There is a tidal wave of change happening. And as a Jew, as a person who is committed to waking up more and more to both the joys and the suffering of this world, I want to be part of the change.

I hope you do, too.

May each of us, all of our loved ones, and the greater Self we share, our World, be granted new life this year.

Shanah Tovah and Good Yom Tov.

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