Erev Rosh HaShanah

    Shana Tova! It is a new year, a time for introspection and fresh starts, and a time to rethink and renew our vows to make the world better. How will we brighten up the lives around us this year? How will we make our community strong, our world safer? How will we live up to our best expectations for ourselves, how will we be our truest selves?

    I’ve been thinking a lot this year, throughout the month of Elul and the on-ramp time to our season of Teshuvah, about the root of the word - to return. I thinkI care a lot about naming that true meaning of the word because it’s an important key to understanding the way Judaism speaks of sins and repentance. So I keep that in mind and I try to speak from that perspective of missteps and returning to center when I talk about sins and repentance, atoning and forgiving, at this time every year. But this year especially, the need for return to oneself felt very strong for me. It felt like a long year, to me at least. A lot of highs and lows, joys and sorrows, peace of mind and complex feelings of all sorts, and all this on a personal scale as well as on a national or even global scale. What would it take to return to the self? What self do we each need to return to?

    I am sure that for every person, there is a different time, a different self, a different place and mindset to which they would like to return, in which they felt they were most at home and in balance. But I suspect for most people, that time is somewhere in childhood. That’s not to say that when we speak of teshuvah, everyone is actively thinking about their childhoods and seeking to return to that sort of innocence as they absolve their sins. But it is to say that there is something eternally comforting about nostalgia and returning to the things that soothed us in our earliest memories. When the news cycle is full of bad news and everything looks bleak and full of heartbreak, there is nothing like a fairy tale and an escape into juvenility to help us recover the courage and faith to face the adult world.

I believe this to be why there have been so many attempts to recreate beloved childhood tales as live-action films for adults to view and relive their youth in a slightly updated way. It seems Disney plans to remake all of their classic cartoon musicals into live-action films, and now there’s even a gritty remake of the Nutcracker on the horizon, a story retold in ballet form almost every winter in almost every ballet company. Because these repetitions are comforting. They bring back memories of comfort, of a time when the world felt smaller and the soothing of a good story felt more immediate and complete.

    Recently, a favorite author from my adolescence announced that one of her books is being made into a movie for the first time. The author, Francesca Lia Block, adapted the screenplay herself and has been working for a long time to put together the perfect team to make her imagination come to life on the big screen. She now has that team, and production is set to begin. In response to this news, I’ve been rereading the series, “Dangerous Angels”. One of my favorite characters in the books is a young girl named Witch Baby who goes around asking the adults in her life, “What time are we upon, and where do I belong?” But they don’t seem to understand her question. She is the only character who seems to see the trauma in the world and need the sort of comforting that I as a child found from reading this book, but since the others don’t see the pain and don’t need that kind of comfort, they have trouble figuring out how to give it to her. So she has several adventures throughout the series where she tries to go out and find answers of her own, but as Dorothy says best in the Wizard of Oz, there’s no place like home, and Witch Baby eventually comes back to allow her family to comfort her in the way they do know how. At one point, she narrates that her heart feels like “a teacup covered with hairline cracks,” and describes sound it might make inside her if it shattered and jostled around in her chest. I found this imagery beautiful as a young girl, and every time I revisit this series I find that the writing transports me back to the time in my life when I read it for the first time. It reminds me of my earliest heartaches, the first time I overcame an emotional hardship, and the beginnings of building adult resiliency. It’s mostly subconscious, but rereading these books refreshes memories far beyond just the stories themselves, and they return me to a center I’m often not even fully aware of coming away from.

    When we make teshuvah, when we attempt to return to center, we are coming from some sort of brokenness, like Witch Baby’s. A loss of innocence, a place of hurt, a disillusionment. The rabbis taught that state of brokenness was a sign of real living, and that the teshuvah of a broken heart is the greatest gift to God. The Psalmist tells us, “The true sacrifices to God are a broken spirit, a broken and crushed heart.” The Prophet Micah tells us, “Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy; Though I am fallen, I shall arise; Though I sit in darkness, the LORD is a light unto me,” and the midrash on this expands, “If I hadn't fallen - I would not have gotten up. If I hadn't sit in the dark - I would not have light.” The brokenness and the darkness that we learn to see in the adult world is what allows for adult resiliency, for love, for learning how to fix the cracks in the world. Without those first moments of disenchantment, we would be unable to do the Tikkun Olam that we are commanded to. But getting from the point of hurt to the point of using that pain for good takes recentering, it takes remembering who we are and where we come from and it takes returning to that home and self.  

    The haftarah for the traditional second day of Rosh HaShanah contains what I find to be among the most haunting lines in all of the Tanakh: “Thus said the LORD: A cry is heard in Ramah— Wailing, bitter weeping— Rachel weeping for her children. She refuses to be comforted For her children, who are gone.” The only matriarch not buried at Machpelah with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah, Rachel is the mother that calls us all home to her. In the haftarah she is wailing for the exiled Children of Israel, but perhaps she is also the maternal voice that whispers comfort to all of us when we reread or rewatch or relisten to the stories of our youth. She is calling us, who seem to have gone astray, back to our centers. She wants us to remember who we are, and where we belong. In some grand cosmic sense, that’s different for each person, but in a basic spiritual sense, right now, where we belong is here in shul on the High Holy Days, listening to the same tunes that our families have chanted this time every year for longer than any one of us can remember. If nothing else this High Holy Day season, I hope these memories of prayer soothe your soul and usher you into a new year of strength and surety.

    I believe strongly in the evocative power of childhood, of the need to return to a home with maternal comforts, to acknowledge the heartaches of adulthood but with nostalgia of youth. I see the power in these visits down Memory Lane, and although there may be those who can get stuck, trapped by the strength of that power, I find it also gives a great energy for those seeking to return to their proverbial center, in order to move forward in life toward an honest expression of the self. This Rosh HaShanah, may we find ways to return to that center, that comfort, that youthful starting place, in order to remember how to build strength, character, and goodness throughout the oncoming year.