Weeping and Laughing: Erev Rosh Hashanah 5785

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 3 October 2024

EK

What a time to start a new year. And what a year it has been. For the world, for our Alyth community, for us – for us all as individuals. We have accompanied one another through the joys and sorrows of the life of this community, whether big or small, life-changing or simple and momentary. There will be many of us who feel not only totally unprepared for this year, but also like this is really not the time. As Iranian missiles are aimed at Tel Aviv, as we and the wider Jewish community still reel from the attacks of 7 October, as our own Alyth community continues to navigate changes of leadership – is now really the time to celebrate a new year?

We did not want to begin this new year without acknowledging all those challenges, as well as the many others that go unspoken – and in doing so, as we so often do, we turned to our rabbinic tradition to show us the way.

In the Talmud, we read the story of four rabbis who are one day walking in Jerusalem and come across the ruins of the Temple – the Temple that once stood tall and proud, until it was destroyed by the Roman Empire. The rabbis who are walking were among those who would have seen the Temple as children – for whom the destruction was a shattering of an order and a way of life that had existed before them for hundreds of years.

Three of the rabbis weep and rend their garments – in mourning for that loss that they feel.

But Rabbi Akiva laughs.

When the other rabbis ask him why he is laughing, Akiva throws the question back at them, asking: ‘Why are you weeping?’ They say to him, the place that was once considered so sacred that if someone who was not a priest were to walk upon it they would die, is now being trampled by foxes.

HK

The Judaism that we know, born out of Rabbinic Judaism, began from a place of loss and grief. The rabbis not only lost their temple, but also the centre of their ritual and religious life as they knew it.

Like the rabbis of the Talmud, our future is uncertain. Our homeland is in turmoil as missiles continue to rain down upon the residents of Israel. For many, their Rosh Hashanah will begin in shelters, separated from family.

Closer to home, our own spiritual and ritual home looks far different to how it did at this time last year, with new leadership, and a new building.

Whilst filled with potential, the question of what happens next carries with it a huge amount of anxiety.

Our narrative does not shy away from embracing that raw emotion, feeling the pain, the discomfort, and allowing ourselves to sit in it and weep, even at times of joy.  Although on Rosh Hashanah we celebrate the sweetness of the year to come, we also grieve the loss of what we had.

This feeling of pain is echoed in the cries of the shofar, that we will hear throughout the next two days. The final blessing we will make over the shofar tomorrow is:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה יְהֹוָה שׁוֹמֵֽעַ קוֹל תְּרוּעַת עַמּוֹ יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּרַחֲמִים:

Blessed are You, who in mercy hears the ‘teruat amo’, the cry of your people.

This blessing omits the word shofar, using instead the call of teruah, the most broken of the blasts of the shofar.

Our text uses the shofar as a representation of our collective cries. Mishnah Rosh Hashanah tells us the length of a teruah blast should be the equivalent of 3 whimpers. In Midrash we read that when Sarah hears about the near loss of her son Isaac, following the story of the Akedah, she ‘cries out six cries, corresponding to the six shofar blasts.’

Rabbi Shelia Shulman wrote, ‘The sounds of the shofar cry out for us what we cannot say, the unspeakable pain, whatever in us that is both furious and bereft, beyond or before words.’

As we move through the blasts of the shofar tomorrow, we are encouraged to feel our pain and find release through its cries.

Maimonides teaches that these cries are also designed to awaken us from our slumber, and help us to consider our own actions, and how we can move through and embrace the change that lies ahead.

EK

Sometimes change and uncertainty don’t evoke weeping. In our story, Rabbi Akiva’s response is not to join the other rabbis in weeping, but to laugh. He laughs because he sees something different. He laughs because the sight of the fox walking upon the site of the Temple does not awake in him feelings of grief.

Rabbi Akiva instead speaks of the prophecy that predicted that the Temple would be destroyed. And he says that he laughs because if that prophecy came true, so too would the prophecy that foreshadowed the restoration of the Jewish people and the redemption of the world.

In actively choosing to hope, Rabbi Akiva makes a change and breaks the cycle of mourning. He doesn’t say the other rabbis should simply get over it, but gives a new way in which to respond. He is not just thinking about the past, he is also thinking about the future.

Tomorrow morning, before we hear the sound of the shofar, we read the story of the Binding of Isaac, in which Abraham is commanded to sacrifice his son. The blowing of the shofar reminds us of the fact that Abraham had another option – that there was a ram caught in the thicket all along, which he was able to sacrifice in place of his son.

May we, like Abraham, have the power to see the possibilities. For in the words of Rabbi David Seidenberg, this day of Rosh Hashanah is one ‘pregnant with eternity’, pregnant with possibilities of what might happen, and what we might do.

HK

Like the ancient rabbis, we are looking at a world drastically changed from that which we knew last year. And not only has our world changed, and our building changed, and our rabbinic team changed, but we too have changed. Not one of us is the same person as we were when we sat in these chairs a year ago. Through each cycle of the clock, we become a different version of ourselves.

Change can be scary and exciting all at the same time. We can grieve for what we have lost, whilst still marvelling at what is to come. But ultimately we must feel. Because when we deny ourselves the opportunity to truly feel, and supress our emotions, we may end up feeling more stressed and broken than we did at the start.

As we stand on the brink of a new year, filled with potential, we may not feel ready to embrace the inevitable change that lies in wait. The past year may have left us feeling fatigued or emotionally drained. We may not yet feel the active choice of hope that this time of year demands of us.

But, as the author and journalist Matt Haig writes in The Comfort Book: ‘You don’t need to know the future to be hopeful. You just need to embrace the concept of possibility. To accept the unknowability of the future is the key, and that there are versions of that future which are brighter and fairer than the present. The future is open.’

We do not know what the future will hold, where we will be sitting a year from now, who will be next to us. It is not yet written what we will experience, or who we will be. All that is decided is that change is inevitable. How we cope, how we react, is still yet to be decided.

May we feel able this High Holy Days to come as we are, bringing in the grief and joy of the past year, the hurt and the love that we have experienced.

But may we also come into it with a heart willing to embrace the openness of the future.

And may we meet one another where we are this year, and along the way may we also be open to meeting the newest versions of ourselves.