Is This Just a Ritual?

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Rosh HaShanah - Thursday, September 13, 2007

Some years as I am preparing for the holidays, or even sometimes, at the services themselves, a pesky voice within me challenges me and asks:

Haven’t we been here before? Weren’t we at services last year, praying the same prayers, singing the same melodies, making the same commitments? Weren’t our intentions good then and yet, how far did we get? Aren’t we here this year with many of the same regrets?

Sitting in the peace of the sanctuary, how clear my vision is of how I would like to be in the upcoming year, yet how many times have I not even made it from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, without falling back into my old habits? It doesn’t even take ten days for me to lose sight of my good intentions for the new year and to break my newly made promises to myself and to God.

What we are attempting to do during these High Holy Days is audacious. What makes us think that we can change? That we have through conscious reflection and personal determination, the ability to reset our course? That it is possible to become someone different than who we have been?

My pesky little voice has lots of evidence on its side, arguing for a more pessimistic view of human nature.

First there is the biological reality. The high holidays rest on the assumption that we are the masters of our own fate, yet science reminds us that in many ways free choice is an illusion or at best a perception. Don’t I realize how much of my behavior, even my thoughts and feelings, have a physiological basis? Hasn’t it been explained to me, that when I say, “I’m sorry, I just wasn’t thinking” that is literally the case. Our bodies shut down our minds when we are overwhelmed with fear or anxiety and much of what we think of as reasons are really post facto explanations. There is also evidence that in addition to having a weight set point which is hard to overcome, we also have a happiness set point relatively unaffected in the long run even by great good fortune. You can’t fight city hall and you can’t fight human nature.

There are other arguments as well against the possibility of change, and there is some truth in all of them. You don’t really even need modern science or psychology to observe that tikkun hanefesh, the perfection of the self, is an illusory goal. It’s like many of the hikes I have been on. You climb and you climb and you climb, thinking you are approaching the peak. Exhausted and out of breath, you come to a crest, only to observe that another peak, invisible until that very moment, now stands before you.

We are not the first generation to have this realization.

Every evening before he went to sleep it was the custom of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak to take a cheshbon ha nefesh, that is to examine his thoughts and deeds for that day. If he found a blemish in them, he would say to himself, “Levi Yitzchak will not do that again.”

Then he would chide himself, ‘Levi Yitzchak, you said the same things yesterday.”

Then he would reply, ”Yesterday Levi Yitzchak did not speak the truth. Today he speaks the truth.”

We are here again this year, because, thank God, we are still alive, and being living beings, we have the potential to grow. We face challenges, some the same as in past years and some new, and continue to yearn for the Promised Land, for that better place to which our tradition points us.

How do we answer the pesky voice that dismisses all of our efforts as an empty charade?

First, I find it helpful to remember that progress and perfection are two different things. It is true that contrary to my hopes last Rosh Hashanah, I continued to miss the mark this year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there was no progress. Compared to the person I was twenty-five years ago, I am less reactive in general and more compassionate with my parents. Am I also more patient, less self-centered, more joyful? Well some things are a work in progress.

In this way tikkun midot, the perfection of our characters, is much like tikkun olam, the work we do for the perfection of our world. We would all recognize the foolishness of not acknowledging progress until every social justice issue was resolved. Our work on health care, for example, the focus of Shir Hadash’s recent community organizing efforts, is still incomplete. The Children’s Health Insurance Program for which we have advocated faces significant challenges from the White House and that is just one small aspect of our health care crisis. Still we had reasons for celebration this year. S-CHIP won some of its battles and our local three payer program offering health insurance to the non-destitute working poor, is being rolled out at this moment.

We are in a similar situation with regard to hunger in this country. As the Farm Bill is being considered in Congress, we know there is still food insecurity in our country and that Food Stamp benefits are woefully inadequate. There is much that needs to be done this fall to get Congress to increase these benefits. Still we can celebrate the good that the Food Stamp program has done in eradicating starvation in this country while writing our Congressional representatives to ask for increases and participating in efforts to raise people’s awareness of this issue..

It’s the same thing with tikkun middot. It is good to reflect on those areas where we have grown and to celebrate some victories. Our remaining imperfections should not totally close our minds to the ways we have made progress on the road of tikkun.

But finding the strength, the will, the keach, to engage in Tikkun Middot again this year, depends on more than recognizing past progress. I think it also depends on our capacity for hope.

The Hebrew word for hope is probably familiar to you as it is the name of the Israeli national anthem, HaTikvah, the hope. The origins of the word tikvah are disputed. Some say it is a cognate of the word, mikvah, or pool of water. It makes sense that in a dry desert, water and hope would be associated. But there is a second derivation that is equally interesting. Some say that the word tikvah, hope, comes from kav, a line or thread. It is the word used in the story in Joshua when the spies go to Jericho and promise to save Rahab, the woman who helps them, and her family. The red string that she is to place on her window when the Israelites come into the city is called tikvat chut, a thread of hope.

Hope is the small thread that connects us in our current situation to our more positive futures. Finding that small thread depends on many things, including our ability to get outside ourselves, and our ability to clearly see the world around us.

Hope was an issue for our ancestors Abraham and Sarah. They longed for a child for many years. When I read Genesis, it seems to me that they despaired. Why else would Sarah have complicated their family’s life by bringing Hagar in as a surrogate to give Abraham a son? Why else would Abraham have considered Eliezer, his household administrator, his posterity as he does in Genesis chapter 15, “O Adonai my God, what can You give me seeing that I shall die childless and the one who will inherit my household is Eliezer the Syrian.”

The Torah portion we read this morning, the one originally chosen for Rosh Hashanah by tradition, begins with the birth of this long awaited child. By choosing that reading, the rabbis are trying to teach us that even things we have despaired of are not impossible.

The rabbis, who observed carefully all of the connections in the Torah, noticed something else. They point out that the birth of Isaac follows after Abraham prays for Abimelech’s family, that they might be able to have children. One might presume from this a simple and direct connection, a sort of cosmic tit for tat, but the rabbis take it in a slightly different direction.

Abraham’s life changes, according to the commentary Tiferet Shmuel, because he is able to prayer for another as intensely as he prays for his own needs. In the book of Job as well, the rabbis see the turning point as the moment that Job prays for his friends. Taking the focus off ourselves, ironically helps us more than seeking our own happiness. Doing for others, does us good. A newly published book: Why Good Things Happen to Good People, reports on many medical studies that attest to the positive value of caring for others. Even small amounts of service to others have significant effects on our physical well being and on our outlook. This has been shown to happen with everyone from children and teens to older adults living in health care centers, and the effect continues for a significant period of time. In one interesting study Doug Oman of the University of California at Berkeley studied 2,000 individuals over the age of 55. Sifting out factors like physical health, exercise, gender, and smoking, he found that those who volunteer for two or more organizations have an impressive 44% lower likelihood of dying. Similarly another investigator, Allan Luks, found that while helping others, 43% of people felt stronger and more energetic and 13% felt fewer aches and pains. Marc Musik of the Univeristy of Texas found volunteer work substantially reduced the symptoms of depression. We find hope by giving hope to others.

We also find hope when we can open our eyes in new ways. In the Torah portion this morning we saw that miracles do not necessarily require a violation of natural law, or the intervention of divine creatures. Miracles can happen when we see what has been hidden from us until this moment. The angel gave Hagar life sustaining water, by helping her to see the well that was there all along. Much is set for us, but we have the power to decide how we will view the situation.

Most events or experiences can be seen from multiple viewpoints. In the thick of a crisis, when we are depressed, or when we have rehearsed the story of our lives in a particular way over and over, we feel that there is only one possible point of view. But if we can step back from the crisis, get help in lifting the depression, or break out of our well nursed resentments, we may be able to reframe our experience, and come to a different and better version of our story.

A physician told me about a woman who had a lot of difficulty with the scar that remained after her mastectomy. The doctor was worried about this woman’s future because even though she had very hopeful prognosis, she remained very anxious. For her the scar was a dark cloud constantly reminding her of her potential mortality. Then, at her next check up, the woman seemed much more relaxed. The doctor asked her what had changed. She said, a friend of mine has helped me see my scar in a new way. She calls it “my badge of courage”. She has helped me see that it represents the strength I had in fighting this cancer. Seeing her scar as a badge of courage, allowed this woman to go on to enjoy her life in a way that seeing it as a bell tolling mortality would not. Really bad things can happen to us, but depending on how we look at them, they can still fit into a story that gives us with hope and courage for the future.

Reframing helps for emotional as well as physical scars. The son of a single dad for years resented his father’s hard work during his childhood. He felt deprived of important things other kids had - homemade snacks when they came home from school everyday and dad’s who were there for every game and every school play. Even as an adult his attitude towards his father was full of resentment because of his perception of his father’s lack of caring. Then, he took a job out of town for a while to support his family and allow his career to continue to advance. Having made that difficult decision himself, he became open to looking at his childhood in new ways. He began to think about how his father’s hard work also created many of the positives of his childhood. He remembered the summer camps he attended, which were not cheap, and thought about the cost of his orthodonture. Perhaps he would not have made all the choices his father made, but he was able to reframe his experience and feel some appreciation that his dad might have been trying to care for him. Same son, same father, but now a very different relationship could develop.

Here we are at Rosh Hashanah services once again. The prayer book is the same, the melodies are mostly the same, the holiday is the same, but we don’t have to be the same, and that is the important thing. We can see ourselves and others differently in the new year. We can look beyond ourselves and gain strength from serving others. In our quest for Tikkun Middot, the perfection of our characters, we can celebrate victories along the way as we do in our struggles for Tikkun Olam. A thread of hope leads us to proclaim, “last year we did not totally succeed in our repentance, but today, today we speak the truth about our commitment to make this a good and sweet new year.”