Historians and Teachers

Erev Rosh Hashana Sermon, 5768

by Rabbi Alexandra Wright

Can I begin by welcoming everyone to the service this evening, and particularly those who are visiting this synagogue or these High Holyday services for the first time – new members, visitors from out of town, family and friends of members, as well, of course as our own members.  Baruchim ha-ba-im - a warm welcome to everyone who is here tonight.

There is always an uneasy tension in the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah.  We hold in ourselves the expectation of a new year, and these awe-inspiring services.  If sanctity is measured by full attendance at synagogue, then these days are indeed the holiest of the year, days of apprehension and anticipation as we stand on the cusp of the year.  Rosh Hashanah announces the prospect of hope for new beginnings, an optimism for the future, and inspires us with the desire to turn over a new leaf.  Whatever we leave behind us during the past year, these festivals give us the possibility of starting again, of looking forward and asking ourselves: how can we change?  How can we bring reconciliation in place of conflict?  How can we contribute to the lessening of the dangers in our world, whether global warming, climate change or the social problems which beset our inner cities?  No other festivals allow us to free ourselves from the burdens of the past, to lay them aside and to renew ourselves, in the words of the midrash: to ‘remake ourselves in the ten days between New Year’s day and the Day of Atonement’ through repentance. No other days affirm so readily the possibility of change and transformation or acknowledge the state of motion and impermanence with which we must inevitably live. 

But there is also another side to this coin.  The past and its shadows, the calamities of the world, whether the natural disasters of earthquakes, typhoons, tornadoes or floods and the human cost of tragedy, or the man-made conflicts of war, pollution and violence, and the personal vicissitudes and stumbling blocks we must overcome, often deprive us of hope, leaving us unable to ward off the helplessness and despair that sometimes overwhelm us.  If our predecessors were obsessed and driven by the thought of leaving behind the past, of progress and moving forward, in our own generation, we have become compulsive memory-holders, taking up the past, re-shaping it and moulding it, sometimes simply wrapping it up as it is to bring it into the present.  Of course, we are people steeped in memory, instructed at every turning corner of history to ‘remember’.  To remember that we were slaves in Egypt, to remember that God brought us out Egypt with a strong hand and outstretched arm, to remember the forty years of wandering in the wilderness and the promise of a land made by God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  We clutch at memory, like children holding the worn out toy of its childhood - the destruction of the Temple, the Babylonian Exile, the expulsions and massacres, the burning of books, the pogroms and child conscriptions, the boycotts and round-ups, the pointless labour and ruthless deceptions, the burnings and gassings, the utter futility of destruction and the terrible vacuum of loss that took place in Europe in the last century.  The prescription to remember – lo tishkach – “do not forget” has been the propelling force of Jewish history.  There is no laying aside of the past.  Recall it, remember it, is our catechism for the present and the future, it is our litany, our warning if ever we try to let go of it.  To remember is not simply to recall, to reflect on past days, but quite literally to re-member, in the sense of somehow putting the past back together in the present.  To re-member – is to re-assemble, to re-build, to bring something with us and to hold it intact in the present.

“Remember the days of old” says the Psalmist, be mindful of the covenant made by God with Israel on Mount Sinai, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, remember what Amalek did to the Israelites in the desert when they had left Egypt  These are the burdens of history, its tragedies and triumphs.  However much or however little we have learnt of our own history, they have become part of our collective memory.  And more personally, we carry the legacy of our parents or grandparents, the recollections of ourselves in younger days, the songs of innocence of our children, lost in the puzzling maze of their adolescence.  All these remembrances cluster and crowd together in a way that is overwhelming, creating a helter-skelter of images and words, thoughts and feelings, obligations and pressures.  The past becomes too heavy to bear, often complicated, its responsibility too burdensome.  Memory ceases to be the moral obligation it once was, what Edmond Fleg called “the foundation of hope”, but a load of cargo, a confusion, without signposts.  We look back and see the world in conflagration, spiralling out of control and into chaos.  Gone is gratitude for the past, dismissed is humility at the greatness, the courage and faithfulness of past generations, scoffed at are the sacrifices and the honest belief that there might be a shape to human existence, a providential journey towards a better future.

Looking back at the past year, we ask ourselves what are the events that have stood out above all others, that have punctuated these past months and imprinted themselves on our memories.  And I think there are three things that crystallise the struggle that exists between the meaninglessness of history and the need to make sense of the past, to give it some kind of contextual significance and understanding.

Shortly after the festivals this time last year, Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death.  He was executed on December 30th, and internet technology gave those of us who were ghoulish-minded to do so, the opportunity to witness the last sordid moments of his execution and the responses of those who saw it.  The legacy of his ruthless regime remains: thousands of Western troops killed in Iraq, hundreds, if not thousands of Iraqis murdered and injured by car bombs, mortar attacks in Baghdad and the cities of Iraq.  Every day, every news bulletin I listen to and image I watch, I am reminded of a phrase given by the troubled, despair-ridden playwright Eugene O’Neill: “There is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again, now.”  Such nihilism does not sit well with Judaism and yet consider the way in which we struggle with the deaths of young soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq, the massacres and rapes of women and children in Sudan, as though the present is a reeling film of the past that only plays itself over and over again.

The second event was the massacre at Virginia Tech which took place in April of this year.  Thirty-two people were shot dead and in the aftermath of the violence, the raving voice of the perpetrator was played over and over again, his face projected on to our screens and into our newspapers, as though we could elicit some understanding or explanation from his crazed mind and sickening actions.  Dunblane, Breslan, Virginia Tech and tens of other schools and colleges become a meaningless list.  These shootings and murders become a refrain in the past and again and again, they are replicated in the present, and dangerously become inevitable in the future.  And then the past becomes not a ‘foundation of hope’, but a circular movement, round and round it goes, mindless, hopeless, teaching us nothing.

And more recently, disturbingly is the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.  I find myself like a voyeur, hungry to know what has happened to this little girl, deeply uneasy by the latest developments of suspicion against her parents.  Her disappearance symbolises a terrible horror and paralysing fear that feeds into our most primitive being.  The child-catcher snatches up a vulnerable, defenceless child and her presence evaporates into nothing. Yet her face remains, the indelible mark of her eye and the ubiquity of that poster with her photograph reminds me of a passage from the French Jewish philosopher Emanuel Levinas who speaks about the way the face of others make certain moral claims on us: “The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility…The face is not in front of me (en face de moi), but above me; it is the other before death, looking through and exposing death.  Secondly, the face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice in his death…” (quoted in Judith Butler, Precarious Life, The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004).

What is it about these three events that crystallise and express something about the world in which we live and our response to its overwhelming catalogue of tragedy and evil.   It is not that we are immune to the sadness or grief of those parents, it is not that we don’t feel sickened by the massacre of innocent students or the dark responses to the execution of Saddam Hussein, it is that we simply cannot wrest from these events any kind of meaning.  The natural inclination of humanity is to create sense, meaning, understanding of what happens around us.  That is what enables us to let go of the past, to use memory creatively and sensitively, to sing a new song, to build a new structure, to find originality of thought, to become students and practitioners of a good life, to create that foundation of hope.

Judaism does not preach the nihilism of O’Neill, it looks outwards and forwards.  Perhaps we have lost a little of our faith in progress, but that may be because the advances of medical science, quiet, on-the-side peace-making remain quiescently marginalised, and the endeavours of Nelson Mandela whose convention of world leaders on July 18 of this year to address some of the world’s toughest challenges, was squashed unceremoniously between Britain’s expulsion of four Russian diplomats on July 16 and Russia’s dismissal of four British Embassy staff on July 19.

“The past is a double-edged weapon” writes Edith Bruck in her poem on remembrance, “When my hour comes/I’ll leave behind/perhaps an echo/for man, who forgets/and remembers and starts again…” (RSGB Machzor, page 788).  Remembrance is an unfolding of the past, into the present, without the dewy eye of nostalgia, or the grief of past pleasures, without the irrationality of fears for the future.  Memory is not only the reconstruction of the fragments of history, for we are not merely historians; memory is to love and to cherish, to regret and hold dear, but as importantly to change, to move forward, to bring change and to change ourselves. 

Then he turned his face to me one last time,

as on the day he died in my arms, and said, I would like to add

two more commandments:

the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not change,”

and the Twelfth Commandment, “Thou shalt change. You will change.”

I end with these words from Yehuda Amichai’s poem “My Parents’ Lodging Place” and with a prayer that each of us, as we enter the still holiness of these days of repentance and awe, will know that the past and memory, and the present and our own righteous deeds, are not the goals for the future, but the means for change.   For it is through these means that we must live and pray that the coming year will be a year of strength and courage, healing and reconciliation, gentleness and peace.  Amen.

Rabbi Alexandra Wright

The Liberal Jewish Synagogue

Erev Rosh Ha-Shanah 5768 – 12th September 2007