When some top Israeli journalists were interviewed last week in Yediot about what they want for the following year, answers included typical self-help proclamations such as, “Read more,” “Write more,” “Spend more time with my kids,” or, as Yair Lapid wrote, “Only do what I really feel like doing.” I thought to myself, Oprah has finally reached Israel. We have finally become a society in which each of us can happily wish ourselves to happiness in our own little bubbles while ignoring our surroundings – and call that success.
Rosh Hashana is an interesting time that way. We are encouraged in a sort of individualistic introspection. Sure, we stand as if we are together in synagogue with lots of other people, we smile at each other and we nod in recognition and if we’re lucky perhaps even sing together. But for the most part, it seems that in the western culture of 2008, what is on most of our minds is our own personal success. Career, relationships, money, fitness, that kind of thing. If you have all that, you’re doing good. Thank God.
Yet, long ago, before money replaced food as the sustaining life force, at a time when the produce grown from the ground bore a real resemblance to what went into our mouths, when people literally worked with their bodies in order to feed themselves and their families rather than to bring home a paycheck to pay the bills for someone else to manufacture macaroni and cheese in a little cardboard box that is the color of a neon light and the consistency of Elmer’s glue – back then, the prayers of Rosh Hashana had a very different meaning. Then, when people stood together to ask God for a good year, they were not in it for themselves but for the whole nation. After all, if it rains for me, it rains for my neighbor. If drought comes, we all suffer the same fate. There was no praying for a fatter paycheck for me at the expense of my next-door neighbor. There was no such thing. Sustenance for one meant sustenance for all, and hunger for one was hunger for all.
Interestingly, in fact, much of this group fate was less about nation than about geography. People who lived in close proximity, whether Israelite, Canaanite or Moabite, experienced the same droughts and diseases. And when Philistines came and destroyed all in their paths, our neighbors on the next hill had to protect their children and their fields from the same enemies whether they happened to be monotheistic worshipers or not. There was something arguably universal and socially interconnecting in the fear and humility that guided the thoughts about the year to come.
This theme of universalism is quite poignant in the Rosh Hashana liturgy. Notions of “hayom harat olam”, that this is the birth of the world – as opposed to Passover, which is the birth of the nation – imply that we are relating to God less as Jews per se and more as human beings. Rosh Hashana is less about our particular Israelite culture and more about our connection to God as members of one humanity. We are counting the years, 5,759 according to the Torah, from the creation of the world, not the creation of the Jewish people. We stand before God without our relativistic cultures, but with a profound purity of spirit. We are searching for that piece inside of us, the zelem elokim, the reflection of God’s oneness within ourselves. We are trying to expose the part of us that has not been tainted by social conventions, competition, greed, power, hatred and abuse.
But I fear that we, as a Jewish community, are quite far from finding that humanity within us. Too many synagogue experiences have become more about power, control, and maintaining individual social status and less about understanding our real interconnectedness. We spend fortunes on clothes, hats, jewelry, vacations, hotels, and ways of making ourselves stand out in the crowd. I think about what would happen to the world if one holiday season, we take all the money we would have spent on making ourselves look good and put it into one zedaka box. I think we might actually be able to eliminate poverty in Israel for at least that one holiday season. But we as a community and a society are, sadly, quite far from that ideal.
In fact, I think that in today’s Jewish world (particularly the Orthodox world that I know more than any other), synagogues have become places that fulfill an ego need within us more than a place for us to develop our Godliness. We see people we like to be with, we smile at friends, we compliment one another on how great they look, we gossip, we tell jokes, we talk about the weather, if we’re lucky we share invitations for meals, and we feel good. The predominant model of community-ness which is all about making me feel, well, noticed. Like I count. Like I exist. I go to synagogue because it makes me feel like I belong somewhere, like someone will notice if I’m not there. I have a synagogue, therefore I am.
But there is another model of community, which is where we are not there to welcome those we recognize, but to welcome those we do not recognize. Where the point is not to make ourselves feel good but to make others feel good. Where we are not worried about how we feel ourselves, but we are concerned about how our actions make another person feel. Where we emphasize not how great we all look or how successful we are, but we work to harness our interconnectedness, and use our energies to heal the pains in the world. Where we come together to ask the question, how can we eliminate some of the enormous suffering that human beings experience in this world of ours? We are not asking others to be responsible for our happiness, but are acting out of our own responsibility towards others.
I am still searching for this kind of community, where these values are welcome and expected, and where others share my desire to use community as a platform for bringing God into the universe rather than promoting individualistic power. I write this blog in the hope that I can help create such a community, somehow, somewhere. It’s perhaps a start, though I’m not entirely certain.
My prayer for 5769 is that the Jewish people will nurture our own humanity, and act out our Godliness in real expressions of care, compassion and interconnectedness. And that we will find again the deepest meanings of mutual responsibility.
Shana Tova.
Elana
