Rosh Hashanah Evening Sermon
October 3, 2005
Courage and Resilience
Rabbi Anthony D. Holz
This year, I completed thirteen years as the Rabbi of Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim. This year also marks a number of other significant personal anniversaries. For instance, in June and July, I marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of my ordination as a rabbi, forty years since Judy and I had our first date, and fifty years since my Bar Mitzvah.
Anniversaries and birthdays provide occasions for us to remember our past, where we have come from. Rosh Hashanah, our Jewish New Year, is another such occasion. Once a year, we, the members of the Jewish Community gather together to remember our past, and to renew our sense of who we have been and are and where we are going.
For Jews, our long history has a great deal of meaning. As we consider our rich Jewish past we have opportunities to zero in on those aspects with which we identify, those meanings of being Jewish which can best help us define who we are. This is why we need to be very careful how we view our Jewish past; it is clearly an aspect of our identity and who we wish to be.
For some, Jewish history is an endless, sad tale of one disaster succeeding another. First the Babylonians destroyed the Biblical temple in Jerusalem and took the people into Babylonian exile.
Then the Romans destroyed the second temple in the year 70, and ruthlessly suppressed all Jewish attempts to attain political independence. Then came the horrors of the Middle Ages, when Jews were expelled from one country after another, and when Jews became scapegoats and the repeated objects of discrimination and oppression. And, the culmination of all these disasters was the Holocaust, when some six million Jewish men, women and children were deliberately murdered by the Nazis.
As Jews experienced repeated disasters, little wonder that for many centuries, Jewish communities found it meaningful to observe a number of sad days of fasting of which the ninth of Av was only one.
Today, it is a fact that very few members of this congregation take any particular note of the ninth day of Av or even know when it occurs – let alone when other fast days such as Tzom Gedalia (the fast of Gedalia) occur. For us, there is little comfort and even less meaning in viewing ourselves as the eternal victims, the schlimazels of world history. And that is all to the good. Most American Jews today have difficulty in resonating with the image of Jews as perpetual losers. After 350 historical years of tremendous achievement in North America, after the emergence and growing power of little Israel in the Middle East, at a time when as Jews our Jewish children experience no real barriers to their personal advance or their societal acceptance, when who we are seems completely “out of sync” with the idea that we are the eternal victims of history, then it is more than time for us to fundamentally reconsider and rethink our past. For there is a great deal of our long Jewish history which supports rather than contradicts our modern, confident Jewish self-image.
The perception of Jews as the eternal victims of history is certainly one that anti-Semites are fond of and would happily perpetuate. However, to most Jews, our history is not a story of repeated tragedy, so much as a story of repeated resilience. Yes, like all human beings and like every community, we are subject at times to misfortune and even catastrophic disaster. But again and again, our past reveals a Jewish ability to bounce back, to recover and to move on to new achievement. So for instance, after the trauma of Babylonian exile our people returned to the land, rebuilt it and under priestly rule, created a new Jewish society which was both stable and productive. Witness a number of writings from that period, some of them preserved in our Bible.
Later, after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem with its Temple and crushed the Jewish nation, leaders of our people brought about a renaissance by emphasizing our identity as a Jewish religion. And as part of this renaissance, they wrote the Talmud and composed the Midrash.
In the middle ages, commentators such as Rashi helped make sense of the world in which Jews found themselves, and philosophers such Maimonides and Spinoza brought clarity and rationality to not only Jewish but human and Western thinking.
And, we all know how the destruction of European Jewry has been followed both by the creation of the modern state of Israel, and the flourishing of our own American Jewish Community.
We must be very careful of the myths, the symbolic narratives that we choose for ourselves. Yes, we do have many accounts of being oppressed and of being in exile. But we also have other more upbeat stories about ourselves.
So, for instance, one of the most enduring Jewish concepts is the idea that we are a “chosen people.” The sense is that we are fortunate, that God has chosen us and favored us much in the same way as parents choose to have children and favor them with their love. While the idea of being a “chosen people” has been criticized as self-centered and chauvinistic, implying that God plays favorites, it is surely optimistic language. We may link this also to the perspective of Rabbi Harold Kushner and other Jewish leaders who view God as limited, in the way that all parents are limited. As an older generation, we may wish good things for our children and may strive to bring such good things about, but we are limited. And so, from this point of view, God, who wishes us well, cannot prevent bad things from happening in a world that is unavoidably imperfect. But still, this is a myth that encourages optimism: If we believe that we are chosen, favored and special, then it follows that God wishes good things for us, and many good things not only have happened, but can happen and are likely to happen.
Modern scientists have described the “placebo effect,” in which people who are suffering from various ailments are sometimes given pills that have no particular medical value. But if the patients swallowing the pills believe that they can be helpful, then to a large extent, the pills will be helpful, leading to improvements in the patients’ health. There is great value in being optimistic. And this is especially so in a modern world that so much values the “can do” attitude. In the 19th century and earlier, most human beings believed that the world would fundamentally remain unchanged, and that when problems existed, there was very little that we human beings could do, other than having faith in God and in his gracious mercy.
But in the last 100 years, this attitude has changed among virtually all peoples in every corner of our planet. It is now a commonplace understanding that if things are bad, we need to do something about our problems, and that our actions may well lead to improvement. In theological terms, this is stated as: God helps those who help themselves. This is true for liberals as well as for conservatives; it is a perspective that has become dominant throughout our species.
It is against this background that we Jews need to remind ourselves afresh of where we have come from and who we are. Ours is less a report of repeated disasters as much as it is the recurring story of resourceful people who faced disastrous situations and bounced back. I invite you to read up about our Jewish past. Far more than passive resignation or pessimism, you will find repeated evidence of optimism and creativity and substantial personal fulfillment and achievement, even in a world which has sometimes made our lives difficult and painful.
As we mark the end of one Jewish year and look forward to the year to come, let us once again return to our roots. If we approach our past with contemporary hope and optimism, we will see our past as a model, a model that we can apply to all of our lives: Yes, our world is not always fair. Yes, sadness, loss, tragedy and even catastrophe are sometimes unavoidable. But as time passes, fresh possibilities arise and there is much that we can do. We Jews are a people of courage and resilience. This has long defined our ability to endure and flourish. This has been so for thousands of years in our Jewish past. This has been quite clear in the 350 years of American Jewish History; and in this historic synagogue we only have to look around us to see our ability to create beauty and meaning even in difficult times.
Tonight we mark the beginning of a fresh New Year. Let it be our prayer and our determination that such courage and resilience, such a partnership between the human and the Divine continue to mark us as individually, congregationally and communally as we proceed on our march through space and time. Amen