Rabbi Arnowitz: Erev Rosh Hashanah Opening 2024 ~ The Labor of Creation

The Rosh HaShanah evening talk is a chance for us to think about what question or questions we should be trying to answer with these Ten Days of Repentance, which include Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. This talk is designed to help us frame those questions.

The year is 70CE. The Roman general, Vespasian, and his legions have besieged Jerusalem. Inside the city zealots have taken control and they will not yield to the Romans. Worse yet, they won’t let anyone into or out of the city. It is clear the cause is lost, and Rabbi Yohanon ben Zakkai is running around begging the zealots to surrender, but they will hear none of it. The people are starving, children are crying out in thirst, the fires of the holy precincts have gone cold. Seeing all is lost, he desperately wants to go negotiate with the Roman General. SO, he devises a risky scheme that would have made Steve McQueen jealous. Calling two of his disciples, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus and Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hanania, he tells them to carry him out of the city in a coffin. Apparently corpses were not allowed to remain in the city overnight, and you can imagine how many were being carried out at the time.

The plan works and Yohanon ben Zakkai, though unable to save Jerusalem, becomes the founder of the first Rabbinic Yeshiva in Yavne. The destruction of Jerusalem may be the greatest mass tragedy in the early history of our people. Death and starvation, the destruction of the Temple, the centerpiece of what it had meant to be Jewish for over a thousand years. Every 9th day of the month of Av we sing in lament:

הֲשִׁיבֵ֨נוּ יְהֹוָ֤ה ׀ אֵלֶ֙יךָ֙ (ונשוב) [וְֽנָשׁ֔וּבָה] חַדֵּ֥שׁ יָמֵ֖ינוּ כְּקֶֽדֶם׃

Take us back, O LORD, to Yourself,

And let us come back;

Renew our days as of old!

כִּ֚י אִם־מָאֹ֣ס מְאַסְתָּ֔נוּ קָצַ֥פְתָּ עָלֵ֖ינוּ עַד־מְאֹֽד׃

For truly, You have rejected us,

Bitterly raged against us.

And yet out of that cataclysmic event in the history of the Jewish people, out of this perceived rejection and abandonment not only by the nations of the world but even by God, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai begins the process of building a new Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism. Prior to Yavne, there was really no such thing as a rabbi as we know it. After Yavne, rabbis promoted for their learning replace as the religious leaders the kohanim who were promoted for their lineage, prayer replaces sacrifices as a form of worship, Torah reading becomes a weekly public ceremony in a new kind of religious edifice, the synagogue. From the throes of destruction is birthed the most creative era in Jewish history, one that would spread around the world with the exiled people and influence nations and history, academia and human discovery.

The year is 1283. For almost 100 years crusading Christian warriors had been marching across the continent to battle the Muslims in Jerusalem. Along the way the knights and soldiers didn’t seem to differentiate between Muslim and Jew. The Holy Land was a long way away and armies are an impatient bunch. They’d been massacring Jews on the Rhine and the Danube, the Jews of France had suffered particularly. Europe and relations between Christians and Jews would never be the same.

But here in Spain, looking for access to a world more beautiful than that of the Crusades and to the King Messiah himself, Moses DeLeon and his colleagues have been secretly collecting the mystical teachings that had come down through the generations, at late night meetings they went into trances and channeled the spirits of the rabbis of the Mishnah. The result – a new collection of mystical texts that would come to be known as The Zohar HaKodesh. The Crusades would ever be remembered among the great tragedies of the Jewish people. And yet birthed from the painful century by Jews seeking a new, mystical way to sense the holy around them when it seemed more remote, one of the most creative and impactful works in the storied literary history of the Jewish people – one that would bring Eastern mysticism to the West and influence the mystical side of all the Abrahamic faiths.

From the Zohar would come the kabbalists of Tzvat in the 1500s and the Hasidim of Eastern Europe in the 1800s. And even those movements would grow out of historic tragedies. Isaac Lurias’s kabbalah and the mystics of Tzvat were born of the Spanish Expulsion in 1492 and the Hasidic Movement founded by the Baal Shem Tov exploded in popularity in Eastern Europe in the 1800s even as pogroms and Antisemitism swept across the land.

We can even see the pattern in the rise of Zionist movements after the Dreyfus Affair and more pogroms in Eastern Europe and of course, the founding of the State of Israel after the Shoah.

The year is 2023. In January a group of Israeli Defense Force reservists band together to form the group, Achim Laneshek, Brothers and Sisters in Arm, with the aim of protesting the Judicial Reform effort in Israel and, as they saw it, fighting for Israeli democracy. As you would imagine for a group of IDF reservists, they are incredibly effective in organizing logistics, getting people out to the streets for mass demonstrations, and communicating with thousands of members effectively. Perhaps you recall the images or even had the chance to be one of the tens of thousands of people turning out on Saturday nights in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. A large part of the effectiveness of those efforts was Achim Laneshek.

And then, another date in 2023. It is October 7th and this  extraordinary organization shifted instantly into a humanitarian aid organization. Among their many incredible accomplishments was rescuing 2500 families from conflict zones while the IDF was engaged in combat, procuring housing for displaced people and aiding the IDF in its search for missing people employing technical skills and experience. Over the days and months that followed, they founded a sub-organization called First Line Med that started collecting and distributing medical supplies to army units and clinics as well on the homefront. They organized the rescue of animals left in the conflict zones and hot meals for families of the injured. In the face of tragedy and confusion, they created a highly effective humanitarian organization to bring safety, comfort, and strength to their fellow citizens.

So how does this happen? How is it that in each of these examples and countless others, our people have faced something so threatening, but find the ability to transition quickly from tragedy to creativity, from experiencing sadness to finding reasons to feel joy, from anger to compassion? The answer is in the very foundations of who we are as Jews. Forged in the crucible of Egyptian slavery and genocide, the Jewish people rose from the shores of the Nile to build a new kind of society in the mountains of Judea – one that would change the course of the human story.

In the liturgy for this holiday, just after we blow the shofar during the musaf service, we say “HaYom Harat Olam, Today the world stands as at birth.” In fact, every scriptural reading for the holiday includes birth and parenting episodes of one form or another – Sarah and Isaac, Avraham and Ishmael, Hannah and Samuel, and Rachel and her exiled children. And all of these episodes are painful and tragic in one way or another, the exile of Ishmael, the binding of Isaac, Hannah’s desire for a child and then giving him to the service of the Temple, Rachel weeping for the Jewish people being tossed about on the sea of world history.

Why on a day to celebrate creation do we use these painful birthing and parenting images? Because creating something new cannot happen without pain and labor. This belief has made Judaism a hopeful tradition, a tradition that believes it will survive through and even thrive in difficult times.

Hayom Harat Olam, today the world, or at least our world, stands at a painful crossroads. Is it again the throes of birth of a new era for the Jewish people? We feel the pains of tragedy, loss, and abuse, and when that happens our faith calls upon us to make something new from it. The question we should be asking ourselves this High Holidays is, what will we create from this painful moment?

Today, we can see ourselves in one of two ways. Either we are experiencing yet another in a long line of tragic events that has defined our people, inheritors of a tradition of tragedy. Or we can see ourselves as yet another generation with the opportunity to transform our tradition and the world, inheritors of a creative, dynamic tradition that is begging us to birth the next great step forward for the Jewish people. Both may be true, but I choose the latter and I hope you will too.

We choose it by holding our tradition even tighter than we did before, by treasuring our texts and our wisdom and our drive to repair the world; by involving our children, teaching them how central they are to the Jewish future and how essential the Jewish future is to the world. 

And most importantly, I don’t know what the creation born of this moment will be. None of us do just yet, but each of us has the opportunity to contribute to something new based in the old, something sacred planted in ashes, something essential for the spirit of the future.

What question should we be asking ourselves as we embark on this season’s accounting of our lives and our purpose? What can I be doing? How can I be contributing? How can I be part of whatever comes next? How might whatever comes next depend on me? You have ten days and a lifetime to find the answer to those questions.

May we all join together to be part of the next great moment, the next great movement, in Jewish history and may we all be part of the tikkun, the repair so needed in the world right now.