Erev Rosh HaShana

Behold, the gates are opening! Many of us have been waiting in front of these gates for some time now. Some of us may have begun lining up since Tisha B’Av to get the latest teshuva update. Some prefer to wait until Elul, or even up until Selichot. Some of you in the back maybe just walked up this evening. The more time you’ve spent in preparation, waiting in this line, the quicker you might be able to find what you’re looking for beyond these gates, or the more time you might find you have to leisurely look at multiple options for this year’s teshuva. But even if you don’t like to think too far ahead about these Days of Awe, these gates are opening for you, too, and soon you will have your own opportunity to seek out what you hope for and need beyond them.

As Rosh HaShanah begins, the Gates of Repentance and Judgement begin to swing open, and at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, they will again close for the year. We peek inside, glimpse beyond the veil of Divine mystery, and see our own past, present and future. We face the mistakes we have made and take stock of that which we must atone for. We look inward at our own spiritual life and pray in earnest to better connect with God and each other. And we look ahead at all the ways we will aim higher, try harder, be stronger in the year to come, if only we will be inscribed for blessing in the Book of Life, that large and lofty book that awaits just on the other side of these gates.

We are told each year in our High Holy Day liturgy about these gates, but Rabbi Eleazer, one of our earliest rabbis who helped to write the Mishnah, is recorded as having claimed that the Gates of Prayer closed and were locked permanently when the ancient Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. To support this dramatic claim, he cites the Book of Lamentations, “Also when I cry out, He shuts out my prayer.” However, before we let that information discourage us too much from continuing to pray, he does continue by saying, “Yet, though the gates for prayer are locked, the gates for tears are not, for it is written [in Psalms], ‘Hear my prayer, God, and listen to my cry; do not be silent in the face of my tears’.”

We are faced with so many gates, each with their own patterns of opening and closing. We stand now before the Gates of Repentance and Judgement, hopeful for a good deal on the latest teshuva, looking ahead at the line and wondering how long this is going to take, eager and anxious, excited and a little bored, all at the same time. We know this is a limited time offer, and we need to be here now to take advantage of these gates opening now.

We pray all year, not just for repentance and compassionate judgement, so what does it mean that those gates are closed? For one possibility of historical explanation, Rabbi Eleazar himself lived through the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. How many of us, in moments of our own deepest heartbreaks and hardships, have felt like prayer was simply no longer an option, that there was no one listening anymore, that a new way had to be forged forward to readjust to some new, terrible reality? The early rabbis who wrote the Mishnah did just that. Rabbi Eleazar might have said that the Gates of Prayer closed on that fateful day, but he and his colleagues then proceeded to recreate a new Judaism, one where heartfelt prayer replaced physical sacrifices, where sages replaced priests, where study and knowledge replaced purity, where tribal affiliations fell away and all the remnants of the Israelites were as one community and family, a community that could maintain its ties to each other and the holy land no matter how far any one Jew traveled away from Mount Zion. They forged a new path forward in order to create and maintain a strong foundation of Judaism that the rest of us to always return to, no matter how closed off we feel at any given moment from God and prayer.

And in those moments where the Gates of Prayer feel the most closed off, when we are in the narrow places of oppression, or in the dark belly of a giant sea monster, or by the waters of Babylon, or carried off to the hedonistic city of ancient Rome, or in the Warsaw ghetto, or any other moment that feels like it may be the end of the Jewish people, the Gates of Tears are always open. The Gates of Wailing will always receive our cries of anguish, our earnest pleas to return to a normal life, our demands that Am Yisrael Chai.

So yes, tonight we stand in anticipation for the Grand Re-Opening of the Gates of Repentance and Judgement. Hopefully the only tears any of us will shed over the next ten days will be the cathartic tears of a truly moving spiritual experience. But after Yom Kippur, when these gates close and we fully turn toward our new year, with all the promises we make to ourselves, God, and our loved ones during our time of atonement and resolutions, there will need to continue to be moments of the same fervent spirit with which we pray on the High Holy Days. There will need to continue to be introspection and dedication to our goals if we want this coming year to be at all different, better, than the one we are leaving behind. And there will continue to be fresh tears, fresh difficulties and hurts, failures to achieve perfection, new incidents for which to atone next year. As long as we remember to cry out to the Gates that are always open, perhaps the Gates of Prayer will open up for us again as well, and along with them, maybe new gates: Gates of Compassion, Gates of Justice, Gates of Comfort, Gates of Love, Gates of Welcome. May these gates never close.

As we enter through the gates of a new year, may we remember to always open the gates of our own hearts to the Divine spirit that moves through each of us, open toward others, and open for allowing ourselves to grow. Amen and Shana Tova.