Aspirations and Execution

Rabbi Melanie Aron

S'lichot — Saturday, September 12, 2009

The Havdalah prayers that we recite each Saturday night are really the Havdalah of Rabbi Yehudah. This is the Havdalah service that has become normative in Jewish life, but recently, in an old article by Rabbi Richard Israel, I learned that there were once other Havdalah ceremonies. One of the most famous, uncovered by the outstanding 20th century scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Sholom, is the Havdalah of Rabbi Akivah. Scholars date it to the Geonic period, the period when the Babylonian Talmud became dominant in Jewish life, and believe that it was associated with Rabbi Akivah because of its mystical qualities. Rabbi Akivah, as you may recall, alone emerged intact when he and three other rabbis attempted to enter pardes, the garden of mystical speculation.

One of the important concerns of this Havdalah is forgetting, because forgetting can be frightening. Modeled on the words that are recited at the conclusion of the study of a masechet of Talmud, the hadran, it tries to promote remembering.

This Havdalah invokes Elijah, as does our regular Havdalah, but here Elijah is not in his conciliatory role of bringing parents and children together. Instead he is a champion, as on Mt Carmel when he defeated the 450 prophets of Baal. In this Havdalah Elijah is welcomed as the one who will overcome the forces of the “other side” that try to erase our memories.

Nowadays we laughingly attribute forgetting to senior moments, but mystics understood it to be the work of Potah, Sar HaShichichah, minister of forgetting.

Why would remembering be especially important to us on this Selichot eve?

At the simplest level, being willing to look back and remember is essential to the process of Teshuvah. If we are unwilling to reflect on the past, if we move so quickly on to the next thing and the next thing, then there is no opportunity to appreciate where we have gone wrong and where we need to make amends. Remembering our misdeeds requires that we overcome the normal tendency to minimize and forget our own mistakes.

Remembering is not just about our misdeeds, but is also about our aspirations. On Selichot we need to be able to remember our own values and commitments, our vision of our highest self. In addition to remembering our goals for ourselves and for our interactions with our families, we need to remember that our responsibilities extend beyond these inner circles, to the larger world about us. Especially this year when many of us are facing more challenges, it is easy allow the needs of the poor and wretched in places we don’t visit daily, whether East San Jose or East Timor, to fade from our sights.

Once Darfur has used up its 15 minutes of spotlight, once we have made our donation to Nothing but Nets for the children suffering from malaria, once the reporting on the cuts to our state’s social services moves to the middle pages of the paper, how can we make sure that we continue to remember those who are in need.

The Center for Jewish Life and Learning at our JCC has chosen Peter Singer’s book, The Life You Can Save, as its community read this year. I have mentioned Singer’s challenging philosophical work in some of my past High Holiday sermons. He’s the one who questions why we judge someone harshly if they fail to rescue a baby drowning in a kiddie pool while drinking a latte, but let ourselves off the hook when children are dying every day of hunger and diseases we could cure with resources we really could spare. This book is an easy read, but is as thought provoking as anything Singer has produced. I hope we will have opportunities to talk about it in the year ahead.

Finally, Selichot is about remembering who we are. We are Jews with a rich heritage of remembering. Zachor et yom HaShabbat-remember the Sabbath Day and appreciate the works of creation. Zachor ki avadim hayitem- remember that you were slaves, and be sensitive to the stranger. Zachor et asher asah lecha amalek- remember the Amalekites who cut down the weak and the stragglers and do not act as Amalek. The Torah uses the word remember frequently; 169 times according to the scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who understands remembering to be the essential Jewish act. As we will see later on Yom Kippur, the prophet Jonah fails in almost every way but when asked who he is, he remembers that he is a Jew.

The tradition that developed the Havdalah of Rabbi Akivah, believed in times that were more dangerous for forgetting, among them the end of Shabbat. But there are also times that are more auspicious for remembering. Selichot is designed to create such a time for each of us- a time to remember who we are, what we have done, and to what we aspire.