Why is Jewish Time Different From All Other Times?

Back on September 19th, the Jewish Standard published another op-ed by Adas Emnuo President Lance Strate, just in time for Rosh Hashanah. With the Jewish new year just a few days away, the piece entitled, Jewish Time, seemed very, well, timely. The subtitle ran, "Where memory, nature, and history combine," and here is how it went:


Have you forgotten that the seasons have no regard

for the sovereignty of the sun

and instead attend upon

the grace and glory of the moon?

have you forgotten that the day begins

with evening’s song

and ends with shadow’s conquest of the hills?


I never heard any talk about “Jewish time” until I moved to New Jersey. When I was growing up, my family belonged to a Reform temple in Forest Hills, New York, and maybe it still retained a strong sense of its German-Jewish origins. Punctuality is a value, some say an obsession, present in powerful form in British as well as German culture, and by extension the Anglo-Saxon-dominated culture of the United States. And it was marginalized groups that were known to possess a different sense of time from the mainstream.

That’s why, back when I was a college student in the ‘70s, I heard references to stereotypes about “Indian time” for Native Americans, “Spanish time” for Latinos, and “Black time” for African-Americans. But back then, I never heard anyone talk about “Jewish time” or “Hebrew time” to explain why, for example, services scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. might not actually start until 8:15 or 8:20.

I’m not sure if it’s because the times have changed, or because New Jerseyans are different from New Yorkers, or because of a different mix of ethnic influences, but the reasons don’t matter. What matters is that it’s possible to have more than one sense of time. Just as there can be many different times, so that “to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” there can also be many different senses of time. We may think of clock time as the time, but it is a form of machine time, and there are alternatives that are forms of natural time and human time.

As an undergraduate, learning about intercultural communication, I recall hearing that in many non-Western cultures, if someone asks you for help and you respond with, “I’ll be there in five minutes,” it would be considered an insult. To us five minutes is a very short time, and the point is to emphasize a speedy response. But in non-Western cultures, that response is taken to mean that you consider those five minutes, however short a time that may be, to be more important than the other person who is asking for help. Instead, the reply should be, “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” By not quantifying time, we instead are providing quality time. And true quality time is about making human relationships our priority.

Mircea Eliade, a scholar of comparative religion, argued that there are two different senses of time, which he referred to as sacred and profane. Profane time is what we experience in ordinary, everyday life, and clock time is one example of it. Sacred time, on the other hand, is the sense of time that is associated with religious, spiritual, and mystical experience. During sacred time, we depart from the ordinary passage of time and stand outside of history, connecting instead to eternity. And sacred time often is associated with an act of creation or foundation. The exodus from Egypt and the revelation at Sinai are examples of sacred times that cut across all of our history. That is why we say that every generation of the Jewish people participated in these events.

On Shabbat, we enter into a sacred time that connects us to the origin of the world according to Genesis. In keeping the Sabbath, we ritually re-enact God’s resting on the seventh day, following the completion of Creation. And we also connect to the sacred time of “in the beginning” every year during the High Holy Days, reflecting the ancient idea that God is continually renewing the act of creation.

Rosh Hashanah provides us with a different sense of time as well, because the Jewish New Year, which we sometimes refer to as the birthday of the world, begins at the end of summer, not the dead of winter. Admittedly, there are good reasons to start the year in January, after the winter solstice, as the days begin to get longer. But you don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate the fact that there is a different sense of time associated with the “school year” that begins every September. It’s a sense of time that teachers, students, and their parents all are quite familiar with. And it’s a sense of time that Rosh Hashanah fits in with quite well. There is something at least as natural (if not more so) about beginning the new year at a time when summer vacation and summer doldrums have come to a close.

We follow different senses of time in celebrating both the Jewish New Year and the secular New Year, and we may also observe (but probably not celebrate) one or more fiscal new years for any businesses or organizations with which we are associated. Of course, the idea of having several new years rather than just one is nothing new for us; traditionally, the Jewish calendar has four different new years days. Each new year represents a somewhat different sense of time.

For most of us, the secular calendar is the calendar, and therefore the time, in the same sense that clock time is the time. It’s how we think about and experience time. And that’s why you always hear people commenting about how the holidays are coming early, or coming late. Some years ago a colleague of mine observed that Chanukah was coming early that year, and I replied that, no, it was Christmas that was coming late. He did a double-take for a moment, and then nodded in understanding.

When we talk about the holidays coming early or late, we mistake the measure of time, the calendar, for the phenomenon it measures, the passage of time. We confer upon the secular calendar an authority it does not deserve, as if it were itself an absolute time, and not a human invention. Religious beliefs aside, the solar and the lunar calendar are different ways of keeping track of the days, providing different senses of time, neither more or less correct than the other.

I can’t help but conclude that Albert Einstein’s encounter with the sacred time of the Jewish calendar, juxtaposed to the profane time of the secular calendar, played a role in his arriving at the theory of relativity, that the passage of time is relative to the speed at which you’re moving, and there is nowhere in the physical universe where anything is at rest. In other words, there is no place in the physical universe where time is absolute.

And then there’s the different sense of time that comes from living in the year 2014 and the year 5774. On the plus side, come Rosh Hashanah we won’t have to get used to dating our checks and the various forms we fill out with 5775 instead of ‘74. On the minus, we lose something very significant in not following our traditional way of counting the years, and following a numbering system that originates from a religion other than our own. It makes perfect sense in Christian theology to bifurcate history into before and after periods. And Jewish scholars adapted to the practice of the majority by adopting the alternative terms, “Before Common Era” (abbreviated as BCE) in place of BC, and “Common Era” (abbreviated as CE) in place of AD. That terminology has been adopted widely in the scientific and scholarly community.

Even so, the division of calendar years makes it difficult to talk and think about events that occurred before the Common Era. Consider the awkwardness of the statement that King Josiah reigned in Judah from 641 to 609 BCE. How many years would that be? More importantly, this division of history serves as a subtle form of delegitimation of most events that happened in antiquity, including the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the enormous intellectual achievements of ancient Greece, the extraordinary military accomplishments of Alexander the Great, and the rise and fall of the Roman Republic and its transformation into the Roman Empire, as well as most of the history of the Jewish people before the diaspora.

Of course, saying that we are about to embark upon the year 5775 naturally leads to the question, 5,775 years since what? The traditional answer is, since the creation of the world, which relates to Rosh Hashanah as a sacred time of eternal return. But science has shown that that estimate is more than a little bit off, the planet Earth estimated to be 4.54 billion years old, and the universe itself clocked in at 13.8 billion years. If ever there is cause to marvel at the glory of Creation, isn’t that cosmic time scale reason enough?

But if our calendar does not stretch back to the origin of the world, the question remains, 5,775 years since what? An easy answer would be, since someone began counting. And that’s not such a far-fetched response. We trace the invention of the first writing system, cuneiform, to somewhere around 5,500 years ago. That only puts us off by approximately 275 years, and often these dates are pushed back after new archeological finds. But more importantly, the introduction of the written word by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia was the product of a slow evolution of various systems of notation, dating back about 10,000 years ago, to the beginnings of the agricultural revolution. In other words, dating back to what we understand to be the beginnings of civilization, as opposed to nomadic, tribal, hunter-gatherer ways of life. These systems of notation were used to keep track of property, so that numerical notation came first, before the development of a complete writing system. Writing was invented by accountants.

What this means is that it’s been 5,775 since the origin not of the world, but of civilization. Our calendar marks and celebrates the beginnings of civilization, the first steps on the long road forward from tribalism, a journey that takes narrative form in the story of Abraham as God tells him to go forth from the Mesopotamian city of Ur “to the land that I will show you.”

We say that Rosh Hashanah and all our holidays begin the night before, but that too does not recognize the special quality of Jewish time. In our tradition, the day begins at sundown, not at some arbitrary point in the middle of the night. And of course that follows again the archetype of Creation, in which first there is darkness, and then God brings the light into being. The 24-hour day is derived from the Earth’s rotation, but the point when one day ends and the next begins is also relative, the product of different conventions. Similarly, the concept of the month is based on the cycles of the moon, even though the naming and days allotted to various months can vary in different calendar systems. And likewise, the year is associated with the Earth’s orbit around the sun.

Of all our calendar categories, only the 7-day week is more or less arbitrary, having the least to do with any natural phenomena. We therefore can understand that the fourth commandment of the Decalogue, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God: you shall not do any work,” does more than direct us to observe Shabbat, as well as engage in labor on the other six days. And it does more than ask us to take part in a ritual re-enactment of creation, and act as a means of separating and thereby sanctifying the sacred time of the Sabbath from the profane time of the other six days. The fourth commandment also establishes the 7-day week as a unit of measurement. There was no need to turn to God’s authority for the day, the month, the year, or the seasons for that matter, because they are based on the observable cycles of nature. But the 7-day week required outside legitimation to gain popular acceptance. And while we were not the only people of the ancient world to use this time measurement—don’t forget the Babylonians of Mesopotamia—it’s due to its appearance in Jewish tradition that the 7-day week is now in use throughout the world.

Jewish time is different from secular time. Jewish time is not homogenous, not like clock time, and not like our contemporary movement towards a 24/7/365 society. Jewish time is a sense of time that distinguishes between the sacred and the profane, and that measures the days, the months, and the years in its own way. Jewish time includes a sense of relativity, whether it’s Einstein’s theory, or a rabbi waiting 10 more minutes before beginning the evening’s prayers. It follows that Jewish time emphasizes relationships, and especially I-You rather than I-It relationships, as a human time, a natural time, and a sacred time, and not a machine time. Jewish time is historical time, looking backward through the history of civilization, and looking forward in hope and in faith for better days to come.

And Jewish time is above all else a sense of time based on memory. The repeated commandment to remember goes to the heart of our sense of time. Without memory, there is no history, no sense of the past, nor any anticipation of the future. Without memory, there is no knowing, no understanding, no learning. Without memory, there is no keeping time, there is only serving time, becoming servants of the monolithic time of our clocks and calendars. How do we achieve our exodus from our bondage to these instruments of our own design?

Through the miracle of our memory, by remembering to treasure and embrace our own special sense of Jewish time, in this season of renewal, and all year round.

History and Freedom

You may recall from two previous posts, Hannah Arendt, Jewish Philosopher, and Hannah Arendt and Charlie Chaplin, that I occasionally serve as a guest blogger for the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.  And this past August, when we went over potential dates for my next installment, one of the possibilities was September 17, and that leapt out at me because it was Rosh Hashanah.  And as it turns out, I found a perfect quote for the occasion, so I wrote it up ahead of time, and it was posted on their blog on Rosh Hashanah morning. You can see it in its original context, with the same title as here:  History and Freedom, but I'm also happy to share it with you here on our congregational blog.  And I want to say thank you to Bridget Hollenback, the Hannah Arendt Center's Director of Outreach and Social Media, who provided the images for my post on their blog, which I've taken the liberty of including here as well.  So, without further ado, here is my Hannah Arendt Quote for Rosh Hashanah: 

The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random.  Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future.  Only then—but from that moment on—will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.

 -Hannah Arendt, "Moses or Washington" (March 27, 1942) 

This eloquent quote from Hannah Arendt moves through a series of metaphors for historical consciousness. The first two, history is a hotel, and history is a vehicle, are rejected as misleading.  Hotels and vehicles are both transitional spaces, areas inhabited on a temporary basis, not permanent dwellings.  History is not a place we visit for a short period of time, or a place we merely use to get from point A to point B. Arendt further implies that history is not a commodity to be bought and sold, used and disposed of according to our mood.  But this is less a statement of fact than an admonition, in response to the fact that it is indeed possible for individuals to reject and deny their past, to ignore and abandon their history.  It is a commonplace to say that we cannot choose our parents, and the history of humanity that Arendt is concerned with is, after all, an extension of our personal and family histories.

   

 As an admonition, Arendt's remarks may seem to be a simple restatement of George Santayana's famous 1905 quote, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  And clearly, she shares in this sentiment about the importance of collective memory and the need to learn from the errors of previous eras. But she goes beyond this simple formulation by invoking the metaphor of history as a burden. History has gravity, history has weight, and the longer the historical memory, the heavier the baggage that accompanies it. Historical mass accumulates over time, and also through innovations in communications.  In oral cultures, where writing is absent, history as we understand it does not exist; instead there is myth and legend, preserved through oral tradition by way of continued repetition via oral performance.  Given the limitations of human memory, details about the past are forgotten within a generation or two, and the main function of myth and legend is to reflect and explain present circumstances.  This collective amnesia allows for a great deal of cultural flexibility and social homeostasis, a freedom from the burden of history that literate cultures take up.  The written word first makes possible chronological recordkeeping, and later historical narrative framed as an ongoing progression of events; this linear conception of time replaces the cyclical past of oral tradition, and what Mircea Eliade referred to as the myth of eternal return.  And so we hear the complaint of school children in generation after generation, that history is so much harder now than it was for their parents, because now there is so much more of it than ever before. 

 History is a burden, one that becomes too much to bear if all we are doing is living in the past, in rigid adherence to a fixed and unchanging tradition.  But Arendt adds the complementary metaphor of history as a blessing.  The burden can become a blessing if we use the past to understand the present, to serve the present, not to overwhelm or command the present.  The past can inform the present, history helps us to see why things are the way they are, why we do the things we do; being mindful of the past is a means to help fulfill Arendt’s goal ofthinking what we are doing.  But it is not enough simply to live in the present, and for the present.  We also have to look towards the future, to work for progress in the moral, ethical, and social sense, to enlarge the scope of human freedom.  And in light of this goal, Arendt invokes her fifth and final metaphor for history:  history is a weapon.  It is a weapon not to destroy or dominate others, or at least that is not what Arendt intends it to be, but rather a sword of liberty, an instrument to be used in the fight against oppression.

   

This quote reflects Arendt's overriding concern with human freedom.  The battle for freedom that she refers to is a collective struggle, not an individual quest.  It can only be achieved by political cooperation and unity, not by solitary escape from tyranny.  The commonly used phrase in western cultures, individual freedom, while not without value, all too easily eclipses the necessity of freedom as a shared responsibility, and in excess becomes oxymoronic.  As the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., so eloquently put it, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" and "no one is free while others are oppressed."  Freedom for all, shared freedom, requires a sense of affiliation, kinship, connection, which in turn requires a sense of continuity over time. Just as individual memory is intimately related to individual identity, our collective memory is the key to group identity.  History is the foundation of community. 

Historical consciousness, which is derived from literacy, did not become widespread until after the diffusion of typography.  In addition to making written history widely available, print media such as calendars and periodicals made individuals aware of their place in history as never before, down to the basic knowledge of the year, month, and date that we all take for granted, not to mention awareness of our date of birth and age.  And as the great historian of printing, Elizabeth Eisenstein explains, more than any other factor, it was the printing revolution that gave rise to modernity.  The irony is that as printing made the past more accessible, it also made it seem less valuable, resulting in modernity's ahistorical tendencies.  Focus shifted from venerating tradition to revering progress, from looking back to origins to looking forward for originality.  This is exemplified by the fact that printing gave us two new literary forms, the news, and the novel. 

And so we get Henry Ford saying, "history is bunk," and dystopian novels like Brave New World and 1984 portraying future societies where history is either deleted or subject to constant revision.  Without a sense of the past, sensitivity to the future is undermined, and with the advent of instantaneous electronic communications beginning with telegraphy in the 19th century, more and more emphasis has been placed on the now, the present tense, leading us to lose touch with both the past and the future.  Conceptions of the past have also been affected by the rise of image culture, beginning with photography in the 19th century, so that a coherent sense of linear history came to be replaced by a discontinuous, and therefore incoherent collection of snapshots evoking nostalgia, as Susan Sontag observed in On Photography.  What Arendt makes clear is that contemporary present-minded ahistoricism risks more than Santayana's Sisyphean purgatory, but a true hell of oppression and slavery. 

So far, I have stressed a universal interpretation of this quote, and ignored its particular context.  Arendt's admonition originates in a column she wrote for a Jewish newspaper, Aufbau, published in New York for German-speaking Jews, as part of a critique of the Reform movement in Judaism.  The movement originated in 19th century Germany, as a response to the Enlightenment, and the Emancipation initiated by Napoleon, wherein Jews were released from ghetto confinement and given a measure of equal rights and citizenship.

To accommodate their newly established status, the Reform movement sought to recast Judaism in the image of Protestantism, as just another religious sect.  Apart from a liberalizing and modernizing of worship and religious requirements, this meant abandoning Jewish identity as a people, as a nation in exile, so as to give full political allegiance to the new nation-states of the west, and embrace a new national identity as citizens of Germany, or France, or England, or the United States.  Consequently, the Reform movement rejected Zionism and made loyalty to the nation of one's birth a religious duty.  Jewish identity and tradition were thereby reduced, compartmentalized as only a form of religious belief and practice, their political significance abandoned. 

 Arendt's criticism is consonant with Jewish tradition, as the Torah repeatedly asks the Jewish people to remember, to remember the Exodus, to remember the revelation at Mount Sinai, toremember God's laws and commandments, to remember God's commitment to social justice.  Rather than make an argument for a return to Orthodoxy, however, Arendt's concern is characteristically philosophical.  Immediately before concluding her column with the passage quoted above, Arendt makes a more specific appeal regarding models of political leadership and moral guidance: 

As long as the Passover story does not teach the difference between freedom and slavery, as long as the Moses legend does not call to mind the eternal rebellion of the heart and mind against slavery, the "oldest document of human history" will remain dead and mute to no one more than the very people who once wrote it.  And while all of Christian humanity has appropriated our history for itself, reclaiming our heroes as humanity's heroes, there is paradoxically a growing number of those who believe they must replace Moses and David with Washington or Napoleon.  Ultimately, this attempt to forget our own past and to find youth again at the expense of strangers will fail—simply because Washington's and Napoleon's heroes were named Moses and David. 

Written in the dark times that followed Hitler's rise to power, the outbreak of the Second World War, and the establishment of Eichmann's concentration camps, Arendt's words are all the more poignant and powerful in their call for taking pride in the Jewish tradition of fighting for freedom and justice, and for an awareness that the cause of liberty and human rights have their roots in that most ancient of documents. 

Arendt's criticisms of the excesses of Reform Judaism were widely shared, and the movement itself changed dramatically in response to the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel.  Reform Judaism reversed its stance on Zionism, and remains a staunch supporter of the Jewish state, albeit with a willingness to engage in criticism of Israeli government policies and decisions.  At the same time, Reform religious observance, while still distinct from that of the Orthodox and Conservative branches, has gradually restored many elements of traditional worship over the years.  And the celebration of Jewish culture and identity has become normalized during the past half century. 

For example, witness Aly Raisman's gold medal-winning gymnastic routine at the recently completed London Olympics, performed to the tune of Hava Nagila; Keith Stern, the rabbi at the Reform synagogue that Aly attends, explained that " it indicates Aly’s Jewish life is so integrated into her entire soul, that I don’t think she was looking to make a statement as a Jew, I think it was so natural to her that it's more like, why wouldn’t she use the Hora? It shows again her confidence and tradition in a really fundamental way."

   

Raisman's musical selection made an important statement as well, in light of the International Olympics Committee's decision not to have a moment of silence during the opening ceremonies to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the death of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in a terrorist attack.  I think that Arendt would be nodding in approval at the way in which the teenage captain of the United States women's gymnastics team, in her own way, followed the example of Moses and David. 

Arendt's passage about history and freedom is a fitting one, I believe, for a Quote of the Weekpost scheduled to appear on the same day as Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which is also said to be the birthday of the world.  The calendar year now turns to 5773, and 5,773 years is roughly the age of history itself, of recorded history, of written records, which originate in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization.  And while Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are referred to as the High Holy Days, and are popularly thought to be the most important in Jewish tradition, in truth it is the Passover that is the oldest, and most significant, of our holidays, lending further support to Arendt's argument.  But even more important than Passover is the weekly observance of the Sabbath day, which is mandated by the Fourth Commandment.  And in the new Sabbath liturgy recently adopted by the American Reform movement, there is a prayer adapted from a passage in the book Exodus and Revolution by political philosopher Michael Walzer, that is worth sharing in this context:

Standing on the parted shores of history

We still believe what we were taught

Before ever we stood at Sinai’s foot;

That wherever we go, it is eternally Egypt

That there is a better place, a promised land;

That the winding way to that promise

Passes through the wilderness.

That there is no way to get from here to there

Except by joining hands, marching together.

The message of this prayer is that only by working together can we transform the burden of history into a blessing, only by working together can we wield the shared history of humanity in the service of human freedom and social justice.  This is what Arendt wanted us to understand, to commit to memory, and to learn by heart.

Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Evening 5773

THE BOOK OF LIFE

ROSH HASHANAH 5773

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

Every morning I arise at dawn, hop on my bicycle, and ride down to Overpeck Park. As I hit Fort Lee Road, I pass the giant utility poles that are home to the parrots of Leonia. They squawk their greeting, and I tip my helmut hello. On my right I pass the Leonia section of Overpeck. The 6:00 AM walkers are already doing their loops, just as the sky is alighting.

I cross over to the larger Ridgefield section of Overpeck, and begin my own triple loop, each about 2.5 miles long. As I round the first bend, the tip of the Manhattan skyline comes into view. It never fails to surprise me. I pass the ball fields and there on the horizon is the Empire State Building, and further down, the new World Trade Center.

The sun is just coming up, and often it shines on the side of those skyscrapers, casting them in striking hues. Turning again, I ride along the river, the dawn sky reflected in a palate of pinks and oranges over the water as the sun rises.

The water is placid, the sky is brilliant; the birds wing their way over the water.  Sometimes a sculler glides along, causing barely a ripple. All is well with the world…  except it isn’t.

The Leonia section of Overpeck Park, as many of you know, contains a memorial to those lost in 9-11. The Ridgefield section of Overpeck Park once revelaled a glimpse of the twin towers that are no more. Every morning that I take my idealic bike ride the subtle but persistent reminder of our national tragedy is there. The reminder that our beautiful world is also a troubled world is there.

This week we are celebrating the Jewish New Year. That’s why we’re here. But this past week also marked the 11th anniversary of 9-11. The commemeration this year was so much more muted than last year, for the tenth anniversary. That is understandable.

But for me the anniversary of 9-11 is not muted—for two reasons:

My visit the week before last to ground zero, 

and my worry over a nuclear Iran.

Permit me to explain why each affects me deeply, and the lessons they impart, as we gather in prayer and reflection at this new year.

A meeting connected to my work at the Jewish Publication Society brought me to a building next door to ground zero. I had not visited ground zero before, so I arrived early to visit the site. It was a weekday morning, but already hundreds of people were lined up. I heard languages from around the world. As you make your way to the entrance you see photographs of people gathering in the wake of 9-11, and holding vigils on every continent.

Ground zero is not a quiet place these days. It is a booming construction site. But once you enter the Memorial Park, the surrounding noise seems to fade away. You come to the edge of the memorial pools, water cascading along the sides. First I am struck by the enormity of their size. These pools represent the exact footprints of the twin towers. They are huge, and 30 feet deep. The void that absence creates is so palpable.

Then you come to the edge and you begin to see the names of the deceased. You begin walking around the edge of the square. Row after row of names. I begin to read one, then tens, then scores. There are hundreds of names; hundreds of hundreds. There are too many names to possibly read.

But seeing each individual name you begin to realize the enormity of the loss. Every name a precious soul. Every name a whole universe. Every name beloved by someone who grieves to this day.

The water streams on; as life goes on. But the falling water is also, I think, our tears. They never run dry.

Away from the pool are a grove of newly planted trees. In the words of design jury chair Vartan Gregorian: “The voids left by the destruction are the primary symbols of our loss. While these voids remain empty and inconsolable, the surrounding plaza’s design has evolved to include teeming groves of trees, traditional affirmations of life and rebirth. The result is a memorial that expresses both the incalculable loss of life and its regeneration.”

In the front center of the grove stands one tree taller than the rest. It looks healthy and vibrant, but support cables are by its side and there are scars on the trunk. This is the Survivor Tree: the calloway pear tree found as the only living thing at ground zero. Rescuers, looking in vain for signs of human life, found none. But then they found this scorched eight foot stump, and thought it too was dead, until they saw the roots were still intact. Carefully they removed the charred tree and brought it to the Parks Department Plant Nursery in the Bronx. For nine years the tree was nursed back to life, almost succumbing a second time during a particularly bad storm. Two seasons ago it was brought back to ground zero. Last year President Obama laid a wreath at its base. The Survivor Tree is now 30 feet tall. This year it blossomed, on the first day of spring, astounding New Yorkers.

I have a picture of the survivor tree that I took on my cell phone. I will pass it around. Behind it is the new World Trade Tower. The new tower is some 93 stories tall, and due to be completed in 2013. From the ashes, life. The irrepressible life force of a tree. The irrepressible life spirit of a nation.

We Jews can relate to that. We know what it is to face tragedy, and to overcome tragedy by affirming life in its wake.

As Jonathan Saks, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, writes in his book To Heal a Fractured World:

What was it about Judaism that led Jews, in circumstances that should rationally have led to despair, not merely to survive, but to respond with a new burst of creativity? For that, historically, is what happened. The division of the kingdom after Solomon led to the flowering of prophecy. The destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile reinvigorated the study of Torah. Responding to the destruction of the Second Temple , the sages created the vast rabbinic literature: Mishnah, Midrash and the two Talmuds. The encounter with… Christianity gave impetus to Jewish bible commentary; with Islam, to Jewish philosophy. The crusades led to new forms of north European Jewish pietism. The Spanish expulsion evoked the mysticism of Safed. The Holocaust, in human terms the worst tragedy of all, led to the single greatest affirmation of the collective Jewish will to survive: the birth of the State of Israel.

Our common scripture and our common history cherish life; venerates life. Amidst the cleared away rubble ground zero is coming to life again. The museum that will tell the story is not open yet, but if you want to glimpse some of that story, if you want to sense the inexhaustible life affirming potential of everyday people, then stop in at St. Paul’s Church just a block away. The story of their ministry in the wake of 9-11 is inspirational. People of all faiths joined hands, night and day, to comfort the afflicted and assist the rescuers. Three months after 9-11, the church helped sponsor the lighting of a Hannukah Menorah at ground zero. Light against the dark.

Which brings me to my second reason for speaking on the eve of this new year. Our beautiful world is still a deeply troubled world. Thomas Friedman wrote that our greatest failure prior to 9-11 was a failure of imagination. Our failure to imagine how committed to evil some people can be. Our failure to imagine how such people will employ any means to justify their ends. Our failure to imagine that there are religious fanatics who cherish not life, but death.

Today I am haunted by my perception that we are still failing that test of imagination. We just don’t want to believe that there are people who hate us. The Islamic republic of Iran has said, repeatedly, that America is the Great Satan and Israel the Little Satan. Its president, the head of state, has said, repeatedly, that he wants to wipe Israel off the map. Its top cleric has said, repeatedly, that Israel is a cancer to be eradicated.

We don’t want to believe it because we are not hateful, spiteful people. We don’t want to believe it because our religious traditions abhor the very notion of suicide bombers and the slaughter of innocents. We don’t want to believe it because we forget history very quickly.

Well, even as the Jews rise from the ashes time and again, we are haunted by history. We are told to remember, remember, never to forget.

So we remember that, in the lifetime of many of us here today, people of good will did not, could not believe what a man named Hitler could do.

What an emperor named hirohito could do... What a supreme leader named Stalin could do… What a chairman named Mao could do… What a regime called the Khmer Rouge could do… What a tribe called the Hutsis could do… What a clan called the Janjaweed of Darfur could do… What a mullah named Omar and a shiek named Bin Laden could do…

How much history do we need to forget in order to delude ourselves once again?

And as noted columnist Charles Krauthammer, a man I respect but rarely agree with, argues, relying on a theory of deterrence like that of the mutually assured destruction doctrine of the Cold War era is dangereously misguided. He gives three reasons:

1. The Soviet quarrel with America was ideological. Iran’s quarrel with Israel is existential. The Soviets never proclaimed a desire to annihilate the American people. For Iran, the very existence of a Jewish state on Muslim land is a crime. an abomination. 

2. America is a nation of 300 million, Israel 8 million. America is a continental nation; Israel, a speck on the map. As former Iranian president Rafsanjani has famously said: “Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” 

3. Irans’s clerical regime rules in the name of a fundamentalism for whom the hereafter offers the ultimate rewards. The classic formulation comes from Tehran’s fellow Jiahdist Al-Qaeda: “You love life and we love death.” Try deterrring that.

We just can’t wrap our heads around that . “You love life; we love death.” We don’t want to believe it because it runs counter to everything we have been taught. To our deepest values. To our most cherished principles.

I know this is grim stuff, but with the window of opportunity rapidly closing, can we begin the new year by avoiding the most dangerous situation in the world? Never mind the existential threat to Israel?

We pray that our leaders, here and in Israel, will be determined, wise and courageous as they wrestle with the weighty decisions that must be made, and will be made.

Allow me to close on an optimistic note. Al-Qaeda and Teheran are right about one thing. We do love life.

Look at the words we read in our prayerbook this evening: “Zochreinu l’hayim: remember us unto life, Sovereign who delights in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life, for Your sake, o God of life.”

We love life, as that pear tree that would not die loves life. As the victims loved life. As the rescuers loved life. As the rebuilders love life. As our Jewish heritage loves life. As our nation loves life.

Life will find a way. It always does.

We will write ourselves into the Book of Life, because that is who we are.

 “There shall come a time,” Isaiah said, “when none shall hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain. When they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. When every man shall dwell under his vine and fig tree, and none shall make them afraid.”

On this Rosh Hashanah we say, as we do each and every time we raise a glass: L’Hayim! To life!

Rabbi Schwartz's Sermon for Rosh Hashanah Morning 5772

MEMORABLE JUDAISM

ROSH HASHANAH MORNING 5772

RABBI BARRY L. SCHWARTZ

When I was growing up, my family made the two hour trip from Peekskill, New York to Brooklyn, New York once a month. It was not an especially pleasant drive from suburb to city.  Each trip had its share of potholes, crazy New Yorkers, and traffic jams.  Yet we made the trip every month, every season, every year.  The reason, quite simply:  Grandma and Grandpa.

One of the things I remember about my grandparent’s home was this:  It was small, but it was full of pictures. There were photographs everywhere.  In fact, I still marvel at how many photos could be displayed in such a small space.  My grandparents had one picture each of their own parents, a handful of themselves, and several of their two sons.  The lion’s share of photos, however, were of us, the grandchildren.

In one sweep of the eye I could see my great grandparents, grandparents, and parents all on their wedding days.  I could see my father in knickers, at his high school graduation, in his Navy uniform.  I could see myself as a baby, as a Bar Mitzvah.

The visits were timed to include major Jewish holidays.  So there were also pictures of us lighting Hannukah candles, and celebrating Pesach.

The memories of those visits are still vivid, some forty years later.  I can still see my grandparent’s home like it was yesterday.  Their faces and their embrace.  I can still smell the food, still hear the stories, still sing the songs, still speak the Yiddish (a bissel), still picture the neighborhood.

On the way home, we always stopped for fresh bagels.  I mean real Brooklyn bagels.  Are there good bagels on this side of the river?

Zicharon.  Memory.  This sermon is about memory.  And here is my thesis:  The secret of Jewish continuity is family, and the secret of family continuity is memory.  Put another way:  what keeps Judaism alive is the bequeathing of our heritage from generation to generation, and what motivates one generation to pass on its values and traditions to the next, is memory.

Without memory, we become orphans in history.  Without nostalgia, we lose touch with our past.  Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos, a return to home, and algia, pain.  A desire to return home so strong, it hurts.

In a positive sense, nostalgia is a yearning for feelings so dear that we are moved to perpetuate them.  If our Jewish memory is joyful, we receive it as a gift and want to share it with those who come after us.  If our Jewish memory is hostile, or simply indifferent, then it will come to an end, with us.

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artzon recalls that when he was a child, he and his sister loved to look through their parent’s photo albums.  He writes, “we loved the pictures of their ski trip to Tahoe, of their wedding, of their first apartment, or moving into their first house.  We would gather time after time to see the albums.  Somehow, we never tired of looking at those pictures, reveling in memories and the love.”

Then Rabbi Artzon continues:  “Those albums brought us great joy until the day our parents got a divorce.  Once my parents separated, my sister and I stopped looking at those pictures.  They had become too painful for us to see.”

Rabbi Artzon concludes with a larger point:  “Divorced from the Jewish heritage, memory albums no longer inspire; they accuse.”

And so, permit me to ask you a personal question. Regarding your own Jewish memories: Do they inspire, or accuse? Are they nostalgic, or alienating? Do you summon them with enthusiasm or trepidation or indifference?

I began by sharing my visits as a youth with my grandparents. My paternal grandmother and grandfather were both immigrants. My maternal grandmother (I never knew my paternal grandfather) was native born, but in the totally Yiddish world of the turn of the century lower east side. They were joyfully and proudly Jewish and to this day it brings a smile to my face.

Take a moment, if you will, and summon a Jewish memory that brings a smile to your face…

Now, a follow up question, inspired by an old adage that I cherish so much that I use it at every baby naming I do.

 “Let us consider our world not so much as inherited from our ancestors but as borrowed from our children.”

What memories do we want to create for our families?

What legacy do we want to leave for the next generation?

What shall we do today that will bring a smile to our children tomorrow?

Judaism sanctifies time.

Are we celebrating Shabbat in ways that summon a smile?

 

Do we make time for a special Shabbat evening meal, complete with white tablecloth, candles, Kiddush, challah, blessing of the children, good food, good conversation, and everyone home?

Is our Seder a joyful and meaningful affirmation of peoplehood and history, or a rush to the food?

Judaism sanctifies space.

Are we celebrating our holy places in ways that summon a smile?

Do we make time for the joyful experience of synagogue, camp, retreats, heritage tours, israel?

Judaism sanctifies people and relationships.

Are we celebrating the milestones of life, and extending a helping hand to those in need, in ways that summon a smile?

If we seek greater rootedness in our dizzying world, have we deepened our ties to community and tradition?

If we seek greater family unity in a fractured society, have we taken a second look at venerable rituals that bind the generations ?

If we seek indelible memories in a disposable culture, have we done anything out of the ordinary?

What might we do, as a congregation, out of the ordinary? Innovative and compelling enough that in the end we will say: that was special? That was transformational? I will always remember that?

I welcome your ideas and your passion.

A Shabbaton at the synagogue?

A multi-generational weekend retreat in the Poconos?

A heritage tour to Eastern Europe?

A family trip to Israel?   

At this New Year, let us challenge ourselves:

Am I living a Jewish life worthy of memory?

Is there joy in my Judaism, or only obligation?

Am I secure enough in my identity that my children will be in theirs?

Am I willing to think big?

Experiences of Shabbat, holidays, social justice work, Israel are “mishpacha memories,” Jewish family experiences that lodge in the mind and are not forgotten. Memories that will bring that smile and sense of connection…  ten, twenty, thirty years from now.

The memory albums of our lives will inspire or accuse. For sure, they take years to assemble, and years more to penetrate to the very core of who we are. Only now, for example, do I fully appreciate the impact of those monthly shleps to Brooklyn, and of course, in the broader sense, the legacy of my immigrant grandparents. So, having begun this sermon in terms of personal memory, let me then conclude the same way.

As I was mulling over this theme some years ago, I experienced a powerful moment of family continuity, right in front of my computer. I had read about a then new website: ellisislandrecords.org. I learned that from 1890 to 1922, more than 20 million immigrants came to America via Ellis Island. Meticulously recorded ship manifests chronicle each and every arrival. An army of volunteers, largely from the Mormon Church, put all these manifests on disk. When the Ellis Island website went online, the response was overwhelming. Millions of Americans began searching for their roots.

I was one of them. I began my search with my maternal great grandfather, because I knew the specifics of his arrival. He had saved the ticket that brought him to America, and he so treasured it that he passed it on to his daughter, my grandmother, who framed it. My grandmother gave it to me shortly before her passing at 100 years of age. It is on my wall, next to the certificate proclaiming my great grandfather a United States citizen. He saved that paper too.

Logging on to the website when it was not overloaded proved formidable, but then I was in, and several clicks later—there it was. Just one entry: One of twenty million. Line 21. Leo Lorber. Age 20. Ship: The Pennsylvania.  Port: Hamburg, Germany. Date of arrival: Nov.18, 1899.  Funds upon arrival: $15. The handwriting on the manifest was identical to that on the ticket. The same clerk had issued my great grandfather’s ticket and recorded his journey. A century later his great grandson, who bears his name, would rediscover the entry.

Zicharon. Memory. The secret of Jewish continuity is family, and the secret of family continuity is memory.

At this New Year, we dedicate ourselves anew to securing the link that binds the generations.

At this New Year, we dedicate ourselves to singing the song of our people, the song that will never be lost.

At this New Year, we raise the cup of thanksgiving:

L’mishpacha–to family!

L’zicharon–to memory!

L’hayim–to life!