Temple
Beth Jacob of Newburgh
Rabbi
Larry Freedman
Shana tova u’metukah. A good and sweet new year to you
all. You look good. All dressed up, ready for a new year. It’s nice to be back in this room. It’s like visiting an old friend. I’m
glad we are here though I look forward to being completely over there at 290
North Street as soon as possible.
We are planning a fun afternoon in the sukkah in a couple of weeks to
give you all the best and latest update of the progress of our joint
campus. I hope to see you then,
October 7th at 11:30 AM.
But until we gather there, I want
to ask why did we gather here?
What are we doing here? Why do we all come together like this
every year? We enter into prayer
to a God we barely address the rest of the year. We enter into very complex liturgy whose words span
centuries carrying the hopes and fears of Jews centuries, millennia gone by and
yet we barely engage the simpler and more uplifting Shabbat tefillot. We come here as modern people only to
use pre-modern poetry in order to make sense of a post-modern world. What are we doing here?
One thing we are supposed to be
doing is to be honest with ourselves.
So let me ask you to be honest with yourself. Answer honestly to yourself why you are here. Just because? Tradition?
Because someone else asked you?
Because the person you are sitting next to cares about this so you come
along? For the kids? For the grandkids? For your parents? For your grandparents? To hear the music? To use the music as a way of meditating
on the themes of the Yamim Noraim?
To consider the meaning of prayers? To hear the sermon?
To pray? To reach out to
God? To atone for your sins? Guilt? Something else, perhaps? Or perhaps you have no idea.
One reason I like to be here is
the celebration Rosh Hashana brings.
It’s a new year, a new start.
It’s a celebration of another chance to do good things and we celebrate
with family and friends. We have a
big meal and go on a hike and take a break from the world, all dressed up to
think about the possibilities to come.
That is the great theme of Rosh Hashana. If that is not your experience, you’re not doing it
right. Leave the all day dourness
to Yom Kippur. This is a fun
day. Okay, so sitting in synagogue
may not be “fun” but it should be uplifting. It should be. Your friends are here, the music is
good, a sense of continuity is felt.
And you get to think about yourself; to focus just on you. You are thinking about what you’ve done
wrong, sure, but also what you would like to do this year. What is coming up this year? What are your goals for this year? What do you look forward to this
year? This is the story of Rosh
Hashana. The liturgy is just the
wrapping on the gift of a new year.
(The music is the bow.)
Unfortunately, that wrapping is a
machzor (the High Holiday prayerbook) that may not speak to us. I will tell you that the Reform
Movement is working hard on a new machzor. We are going to test out one section of it as part of real
world piloting process on Yom Kippur.
The editors are getting very creative in their attempts to retain the
traditional sound of the High Holidays but use a more modern way to impart the
themes of the holidays. It will be
good to get your feedback from the experience. Until then, however, we have our current machzor which is
good but, for me, gets bogged down with a vision of God I struggle with.
In the machzor, we approach God
in a very personal way, as though God is a being in direct contact with
us. This is the way the authors of
the prayers imagined God. But this
imminent God concept is hard for me.
For others, it is just right.
Many people love an imminent God.
But me, not so much. I find
I relate better to a transcendent God, a larger force or presence or even a
mystical notion of God-as-everything.
That’s what stirs my soul.
I return to the machzor as a metaphor, a guide, a path really, to get me
to the themes of the day. I’m not
too literal about it so when I say the words and address prayers to the
imminent God, I know in my heart, I have the kavannah in my head, that I am
using those finite words as a path to something infinite.
The problem I have with the
imminent God is its specificity. The more specific the definition of God, the
less I can believe. Those who are absolutely certain what God is, they leave me
cold. The more sure of God, the
less impressed I am by their evidence.
However, the less evidence I am given, the more sure I feel, the less
clear the definition, the more I can embrace it. I enjoy the ideas of those who seek a sense of
something larger than themselves, who spin a poetry that moves from the
concrete to the abstract. They themselves are never really sure what God is and
that lack of knowing makes me know.
It is the abstract that I find moving because it is the abstract where
this human brain can try to comprehend that which exists on a plane far beyond
our human awareness.
And that is why for me, this day
does not bog down with words I can’t understand. This day is an evolved pathway to something larger than
myself and something I need. I
need a chance to think about myself and how I behave and I need language that
will help me do that. Sometimes I
cling to the ancient words. But
sometimes there are modern poems that help as well.
The editors of the new machzor
found this poem and tried it out in a test version. It is a modern prayer entitled T’filat Ha-derech which is
also the name of the very old and traditional prayer for the traveler, for
someone on the road. It’s by Varda
ben-Chur.
Let’s investigate this poem. The start could not be more
traditional: elohai. My God. How many times do we look to God and begin meekly, “My God,
please hear me.” And how many
times do we have no actual prayerful interaction in mind but just yell out, exasperated “My
God!” We could begin this poem in
this way, “My God! Save me from
these drivers!” It is a plea, a
gasp, an exhortation to no one in particular when we get frustrated. We say, “Lord, these people are getting
on my nerves” and we find ourselves needing language that will lead us to a
higher power because, lordy, lordy, lordy, the powers down here are not
saving me from crazy drivers.
My God, protect me from the
drivers who pass on the right. Sometimes we come here and we
seek support for the little things.
Sometimes we turn to God not to help us cure cancer, not to help us end
war but to help us get through the day when someone passes on the right, when
someone throws an unintended insult, when someone does pretty much anything
that drives us crazy. I am just
trying to make my way down the road and these road rage crazies curse me? They curse me? They put my life at risk! The nerve! In the car, with the radio on, moving at a quick clip,
there’s little time for reflection.
Something goes wrong, blame the other guy.
And then there is the finish to
the poem when we are not in the car.
The radio is not on. We are
moving at a slow thoughtful pace.
Rosh Hashana is here. A
celebration with family and friends and a chance, a welcome chance if we do it
right, to think of our own actions.
We turn to God directly, or we turn to God as a path to our souls and,
if we are brave, we get to the heart of it. My God, today is not about You keeping them from me. Today is about me and about being
honest about me and if You have any grace and mercy, and if I have any honesty
at all, you will save them from my curses.
By the end of the poem we know,
we know, that if they can be the problem, I can be the problem,
too. If they can be caustic, I can
be caustic, too. And bottom line,
I don’t know where those other drivers are but I know where I am. I am right here. And I need to take responsibility for
myself. My God, save them from my
curses, too. My God, lead me to
understand something about myself.
My God, let me not worry over the literal words of my prayers. Just let me speak to something,
anything, in order to have the dialogue I need to be true to myself. Let this night and tomorrow morning be
the chance, the rare chance I have, to be honest so I can be the best I can be.
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