Shmutz

Rabbi Melanie Aron

S’lichot — Saturday, September 24, 2011

With our Selichot service tonight, we are acutely aware that a year has gone by. Hopefully, it was a year filled with accomplishment and joy, with satisfactions and cause for celebration. With gratitude in our hearts, we express our thanks for all the good we experienced.

But if this year was a normal year, it has also left us with regrets and disappointments, with relationships in need of repair, with hurts that we have caused by deeds whose impact we did not rightly anticipate, or because of those times when we chose to act without caring about the damage we would leave in our wake.

Our tradition uses many images to speak to us of this regret, of the negative consequences of our actions which we wish to overcome. One very concrete image used is shmutz.

What is Shmutz? It is dirt, but not just any dirt. One dictionary defines it as , “a little dirt,” another as an “Unidentifiable globule of something or other.” Smutzik is what Grandma says about the face of her beloved grandchild, as she takes out a tissue and wipes something off, but shmutz itself is not so lovable.

How does shmutz come to be the symbol of all of the negative leftovers from the year gone by?

Jewish mystics speak about God engraving sacred letters not only on the tablets of the Ten Commandments, but also upon our hearts. One mystical teacher, the Sfat Emet, Rabbi Judah Leib Alter of Gur who lived from 1847-1904, writes, in the words of Rabbi Art Green’s translation, that :

“The human heart is the tablet on which God writes. Each of us has the word life engraved in our hearts by God’s own hand. Over the course of the year that engraving comes to be covered with grit. Our sins, our neglect of prayer and Torah study, the very pace at which we live all conspire to blot out the life that life written deep within our hearts. On Rosh Hashanah we come before God having cleansed ourselves as best we can and ask God to write that word once again and to seal it up on Yom Kippur, so that the sensation of being truly alive may not depart from us through the entire year.”

The way that I think about this image, is not so much God’s engraving life on our heart, as our own individual truth, that which is our own unique gift, engraved in our hearts. It is there, easy to see and obvious as we begin. But little by little, life happens, we are not always true to our own individual message. The shmutz collects, obscuring or even distorting our truth.

What starts out as a little misunderstanding, becomes a rift. What is initially a temporary accommodation becomes a way of life. Old habits which were an expression of our values are eventually replaced by new ways of doing things that were not consciously chosen. Why did I stop lighting Shabbat candles, one woman I was visiting in the hospital this summer, asked herself, I can’t remember making a decision, it just happened. When did my financial troubles seep into every decision I made, when did my anger at my ex, pollute my relations with my neighbors, my friends, my children, when did I become so cynical that I cannot rouse within myself the energy for those kindly acts towards others that used to sustain my spirit.

If we don’t wipe the slate clean from year to year, the shmutz will just accumulate, becoming more and more difficult to remove, taking us further and further from the dreams and hopes we initially had for our lives.

Through the children’s films we viewed tonight we were reminded of the inevitability of change. Time passes, children become teenagers, and young adults turn middle aged and become old. Though the days can be long, the years are short. In the movies, attaining one’s dreams, however ridiculous they seem to others, was possible. Can that be the case in the real world as well? Even if we are not going to be the superheroes, explorers or chefs of our childhood fantasies, what is it that we can take with us from our dreams to bring into fruition in our everyday lives?

We are here at an unusual time for prayer, at an hour that for earlier generations was more appropriate for dreams then for gathering as a community. Perhaps this late hour is to silence, at least a bit, the voice of realism, the nay sayer to our aspirations. Perhaps we gather late at night because in earlier generations they could imagine that only by candle light, could we see beyond the shmutz to the delicate engraving on our hearts.

Hashiveinu- help us to return O God, help us to return to the best that is in us, to ideals and ideas that can prompt us to goodness in the year to come.