Tonight we enter a unique rarefied space called the Days of Awe. For ten days, our tradition says, we are suspended between life and death as God examines our deeds. Do our good deeds outnumber our sins? Have we lived a particularly grim, sinful life these past 12 months? The answer, so the teaching goes, determines where we’re going to end up over this new year. Will we live a blessed life, a reward for good and right behavior? Or will we perish – by fire or water, hunger or thirst, or any other ignoble way to go?
It’s fair to say that for most 21st-century Jews, this formulation of our fate as humans has faded away as something we actually believe in. There are just too many doubts, too many experiences we’ve had in life that make this “God’s judgment” motif quaint. We just don’t buy it. Our fate is not in God’s hands. Even scarier, our fate is in our own.
And yet, all this week, the leitmotif of my days and nights, too, is: the new year is coming. I feel it in my soul—an excitement combined with some awe and trepidation, too. I am carrying all sorts of complex truths about the planet we live on right now. My suitcase is heavy, laden with the weight of climate change, political upheaval, and the persistent ache of injustice. The terrain upon which we tread is rough and steep. It’s not easy living in this world.
Our ancestors went through periods when they imagined that life would settle into a knowable, easy rhythm. There would be no significant horror or damage or catastrophe, just a steady state of relative calm. Everything, they thought, would be restored to how God meant it to be.
But more frequently, our rabbis feared for the future. They saw us as an unempowered minority in a hostile world saw no way out. We couldn’t fix this awful mess of a world from beneath the pile of troubles. They developed a dream. God would reach in and transform everything in an instant with a Messiah, and then history would end, and we would live for eternity, studying by God’s throne.
I am not a prophet or the son of a prophet, but I stand before you tonight with a different kind of promise. The load we carry will not lighten. The road we walk will not be smooth. The path ahead remains steep and uncertain.
But I can guarantee that we will welcome in this new year with joy and exhilaration. Rabbi Larry Kushner called Rosh Hashanah the annual meeting of the Jewish people. And we have a seat for you! We will sing and pray together. We will hear new melodies and familiar ones, too. We’ll hear ideas and poetry. It will feel good to be together, seeing old friends and new ones. It will be wonderful to experience how we continue to grow and change.
The world breaks our hearts every day. It disappoints and scares us. It makes us feel as if a giant asteroid is heading right for our heads. But here we are—we Jews persist. We’ve got something that’s worth hearing and remembering.
On this new year, even if just for the length of a High Holy Day service, come lay your burden down. Come sing, and pray, and bless, and just sit with your people in the sanctuary. Feel the warmth and the love. This is what Temple Beth Avodah is all about. This is how we endure—not by escaping the world’s weight, but by sharing it – together.
Before Shabbat 