Despite Everything
Dear friends,
Believe it or not, Rosh Hashanah is just three weeks away. At The Shul we are putting in place the strict Covid protocols that will allow us to come together safely these High Holidays. And we are preparing what promises to be a unique, musical and artistic experience of communal return.
The Hebrew month of Elul is in full swing. Early every morning, and sometimes in the middle of the night Jews come together to prepare for the High Holidays by singing Slichot, prayers of apology and repentance.
One early morning this week, as I was wandering the streets of Brooklyn with Manu we were urged into the local Uzbeki synagogue to complete their minyan. When we came out I discussed the concept with little Manu. He’s knows about saying Todah, thank you, to God. Most mornings I’ll ask him what he wants to thank Elohim for today, and he’ll answer with one of his recent superhero acquisitions. He also knows about praise to God. After gratitude I ask him what he wants to say "wow" about, and he will look around and pick a tree or a cloud or a building to marvel over. He also knows about requesting things from God. After thanks and wow, I’ll ask him what he wants to ask of God today, and he will ask for some superhero toy, and for a toy for one of his friends or family members. Gratitude, praise, request, those are the pillars of Jewish prayer and the kid knows them well. But apologizing to God, we hadn’t touched upon that yet.
I explained to Manu that these prayers we did were slichot, from the Hebrew word slicha, meaning apology. “We were saying sorry to God,” I said. “Why do you think we say sorry to God?” Combining four-year-old simplicity with deep instincts about the imagination of the divine Manu answered: “Sometimes we hurt God’s feelings.”
In the Jewish imagination, God is a vulnerable, emotional partner who is continuously hurt by our lack of attention, our meanness, our betrayals. We sadden God all the time by forgetting Him, by breaking our vows, by not being the love-partner She thought we would be to Her.
The final ceremony of vows between us and God in the bible takes place in the eighth chapter of the Book of Nehemiah. At this point, the Jews that returned to Zion had been there for some decades. It was a choppy return, with painful setbacks and difficulties, far from the easy, happy return they imagined once the Babylonian empire that had destroyed their lives was vanquished by the Persians. Like our bumpy return, theirs was clunky.
The covenant begins with the words: ובכל זאת, “and despite everything.” Despite the fact that things feel out of whack, that it’s been far longer than we imagined in this pandemic, that the numbers are rising again, that half of our country sees the other as lunatics or worse, that we are stuck with each other and with our deep, deep problems, that we know we brought these problems on ourselves, despite it all we come together to sign a covenant with God, to recommit ourselves to the values that we know to be true, to love, to goodness, to community: to Torah.
On Yom Kippur we will read the description of this moment in Nehemiah. We will hear how the poets, the thinkers and the musicians together told the story of how of our people up until that moment. We will feel the gnawing sense that both us and those who came before us screwed up big time, lived without gratitude, respect, appreciation, abandoned God in the form of love and justice. And yet we will see that the covenant that was signed by leaders of every family in Jerusalem was not an apology. There were many types of sacrifices offered in the Temple but none were called Korban Slicha, an apology sacrifice. Instead we rededicate ourselves to maintaining our relationship with God through upholding the community, seeking truth and justice and doing our very best to avoid the mistakes that our parents and us have done to bring us to where we are.
Despite everything, we return. And in our return we wipe away whatever hurt we caused our emotional love-partner, God.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha