|
|
|
Drash – Rosh Hashana 5782
Caryn Granek
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
We had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way
—in short, the period was so far like the present period,
that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received,
for good or for evil,
in the superlative degree of comparison only”
These famous opening words of “A Tale of Two Cities” describe the conditions in England and France in 1775, the year the novel begins. Dickens points out that this description is very much like his own time – 1859. He hints at the universality of life – that there is nothing new under the sun.
The best of times was enjoyed by the ruling classes in both countries. They were out of touch with the common people who lived in intolerable conditions.
The words used in these paragraphs contrast light and dark, good and bad as well as hope and despair - a duality that is not only a theme throughout this novel but a theme that resonates through our lives right now. Dickens could have been writing about our times – what may one day become known as The Time of Uncertainty.
Rosh Hashana is known by many names - one of which is Yom HaZikaron - a day of remembering.
So let’s think back and remember. Rosh Hashana last year was difficult. We had no idea that it would be so gloomy. The rising death rate from coronavirus around the world made the “who by plague?” line in the liturgy chillingly real and horrifyingly bleak. Millions were afflicted with illness, and some will always suffer long term implications. There was job loss and economic deprivation.
There was discontent on the streets. Divisions based on race, politics, border closures. Anxiety about climate change. Tension and anxiety about everything. Hardly a sweet Rosh Hashana.
Eighteen months later and we are in another not so sweet Rosh Hashana.
The ongoing separation from family and friends, from one another in this Kedem community and the significant life disruptions that continue to challenge us - looking forward to tomorrow is a struggle. Everybody has been impacted adversely: for eighteen months, our lives have been narrowed, curtailed, distanced. And yet this season of the Jewish year asks us to try to lift our heads and look at the bigger picture.
Yom Hazikaron – a day of remembering. The greatest adversities endured by the Australian people since Federation have centred on war, pandemic and economic depression. Each has been global in scale and the effects have echoed down to future generations.
How many of our childhoods have been shaped by the experiences of our parents – scrimping and saving after the experience of the Great Depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after the war experiences. Events of this scale do not come and go without altering normal life after the storm has passed.
Those touched by the Depression were frugal for the rest of their lives. Those returning from the second world war, or those who survived the concentration camps, suffered from what we now call PTSD but at the time they were not understood or supported.
Trials such as these change a nation and the values of its people. What is it that has enabled those generations to endure two world wars, the Spanish flu pandemic, an economic depression?
In all of these crises the same attitude gave all Australians a sense of purpose. They had a belief that they were part of something bigger than themselves –a belief in the idea of community and nationhood – and they had a sense of duty to defend the values so dear to them.
I want to suggest that perhaps the idea of personal sacrifice for the common good may have been prevalent. An old fashioned idea perhaps - just as religion has become an old fashioned idea today. However it is possible that religion also provided a powerfully binding force for those facing hardship violence and possible death,
In the seven decades or so since WW2 we in Australia have enjoyed peace and prosperity by and large. We have loosened our ties to the British empire and now proudly stand as an independent nation beginning to struggle with our identity and history.
We have retreated from religious dogma and are more likely to demand and expect prosperity in this life rather than sacrifice now and hope for salvation later.
Religious authority has lost its authority to unite us and so the question becomes: What will sustain us – what ennobling ideas will help us through these times of uncertainty?
Do we have the galvanising forces required to withstand this adversary determined to put us in our place and keep us apart?
We can talk about weapons of self defence – whether it be lockdowns or vaccines. But perhaps we need something more.
Yom Hazikaron – a day of remembering. Let’s think back 76 years to 1945. What must it have been like to be a Jew approaching Rosh Hashana in 1945? The camps had been liberated, yet there was a growing realisation that one third of the Jewish people had been murdered. Europe was a wasteland of destruction. Beyond the Jewish dead, there were also countless who were sick, wounded, refugees, and displaced persons. The British controlled Palestine and they made getting there exceptionally difficult. Arab hostility to any Jewish presence was relentless. A large percentage of the world’s Jews were frightened, broken, powerless, and homeless.
As Rosh Hashana came into view in 1945, the first nuclear bombs had been dropped just weeks before; hostilities had ceased, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed.
Had you told a Jew in 1945 what the Jewish world would be like at Rosh Hashana 2021 – even with all our fears and troubles – that Jew would have thought that you were conjuring up an unbelievable fantasy.
Here’s our current reality: There are close to 15 million Jews in the world. Almost 85% of us live in freedom in either Israel or the United States. Compared to all historic measures, antisemitism – though still a significant problem – is relatively controlled.
The largest community of Jews in the world lives in the independent state of Israel, now approaching seven million Jews, comprising 74% of the population.
Last year the US News and World Report ranked the state of Israel as the eighth most powerful country in the world. The United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Morocco and Bahrain have signed peaceful diplomatic relations with Israel which represents a critical turning point in the region - one that will make Israel more secure for decades to come.
In the Diaspora Jewish communities show an encouraging level of resilience. During these challenging times we, in Victoria are in good shape too - able to manage our destiny better than at almost any point in the past. There will always be anti Semitism but when the Premier of our state recently called it out saying: “Antisemitism is unacceptable and evil and we have a zero tolerance approach to that in our state” we have every reason to feel optimistic about our future security as a Jewish community.
The question remains however – how do we live in this world of uncertainty? Uncertainty, for many of us, is terrifying. It is a blank canvas onto which we can paint our fears.
Our leaders know little and cannot make promises. We cannot rely on them to inspire optimism, and yet what we most long for is to know that, despite all of the unknowns, we are going to be OK.
Our souls crave hope at a fundamental level because it is crucial to our survival. Hope offers us the choice to see beyond our current circumstances to something better.
How do we live in what is becoming known as “the new normal”?
There is one word that serves as an answer to these questions. It is HOPE.
Hope is a Jewish story. On this Yom Hazikaron we remember the journey of our spiritual ancestor Abraham. Our tradition tells us that he heard the call of the Divine to leave his homeland, to leave all that was familiar to him, and to go, with his wife Sarah, to a place they did not know. Abraham was told to leave all the things that were familiar to him – his land, his birthplace and his father’s house – and to begin a new kind of life – an uncertain life - in covenant with God.
For what purpose were they to begin this journey into the unknown?
The Torah tells us that it was “To become a blessing to the world.”
Genesis is about that covenant as it affects individuals and families. The rest of Torah is about the covenant as it applies to the life of a nation. The Jewish story, still unfinished, is about the journey from multiple forms of slavery to freedom. Our Torah is the template of responsible freedom, it is our constitution of liberty.
Yom Hazikaron. We remember another moment in the Jewish story. The Israelites finally fled slavery in Egypt, and Pharaoh’s army was chasing them. They reached the edge of the sea. There was nowhere to go. They were trapped, and afraid. Moses lifted his staff and the sea parted. A spectacular miracle!
The famous midrash, written some 1500 years ago offers a different version – less grand but more inspiring. The Israelites were gathered at the water’s edge, Moses lifted his arms... and nothing happened. Panic raced through the crowd. Then a man named Nachshon stepped into the sea, and kept walking. The waters rose to his knees, his waist, his shoulders, and the Israelites nearby stared in horror.
The moment the waters came up just over his nostrils, the sea parted, and the people rushed behind him, towards freedom. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sotah pages 36b-37a, Mechilta Beshalach 6)
In a moment of terrifying unknown – of uncertainty - faith and hope meant walking forward anyway. Feeling fear, doubt, even despair, but not letting it stop him.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “to be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair... Judaism is a sustained struggle against the world that is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet.”
It is no accident that so many Jews are economists fighting poverty, or doctors fighting disease, or lawyers fighting injustice, in all cases refusing to see these things as inevitable. It is no accident that after the Holocaust Jews did not nurse resentment and revenge, but instead turned to the future, building a new Jewish nation whose national anthem is Hatikvah, ‘The Hope’.
It is no accident that Judaism has been opposed by every empire that sought to deny people the freedom to be equal-but-different. It is no accident that Israel is still today the only free society in the Middle East.
To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. There is no greater challenge.
Throughout history, when human beings have sought hope they have found it in the Jewish story. Judaism is the religion, and Israel the home - of hope.
Yom Hazikaron – a day or remembering. One last memory in the form of a story.
In January 1945, Chaskel Tydor, an Auschwitz prisoner, was forced by the Nazis to set out on the infamous “Death March” with thousands of other prisoners. As he was about to leave, Tydor was approached by an emaciated prisoner, who handed him an object wrapped in a rag. “Take it,” the prisoner told him. “I’m too sick to survive. Maybe you will make it. Take this shofar. Show them that we had a shofar in Auschwitz.”
Tydor survived the march through the snow to the town of Gleiwitz. From there, the shofar went with him to Buchenwald. It remained with him until he was liberated on the 11th of April, 1945 by the American army.
On Rosh Hashanah 1945, while on the boat to Palestine under the British Mandate, he blew the shofar for a group of young survivors – many, like him, from Auschwitz – in view of the Carmel mountain range. They were about to reach the Promised Land.
If Jews could blow the shofar with hope for the year ahead on Rosh Hashana 1945, then so can we. In this new year, in the face of turmoil and uncertainty, doubt and fear, in the world and in our own lives, may we choose to hope. May we live with hope.
Let us begin the new year with their determination – that tomorrow will indeed be better, because we will make it so. Shanah Tovah.
Caryn Granek
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
We had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way
—in short, the period was so far like the present period,
that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received,
for good or for evil,
in the superlative degree of comparison only”
These famous opening words of “A Tale of Two Cities” describe the conditions in England and France in 1775, the year the novel begins. Dickens points out that this description is very much like his own time – 1859. He hints at the universality of life – that there is nothing new under the sun.
The best of times was enjoyed by the ruling classes in both countries. They were out of touch with the common people who lived in intolerable conditions.
The words used in these paragraphs contrast light and dark, good and bad as well as hope and despair - a duality that is not only a theme throughout this novel but a theme that resonates through our lives right now. Dickens could have been writing about our times – what may one day become known as The Time of Uncertainty.
Rosh Hashana is known by many names - one of which is Yom HaZikaron - a day of remembering.
So let’s think back and remember. Rosh Hashana last year was difficult. We had no idea that it would be so gloomy. The rising death rate from coronavirus around the world made the “who by plague?” line in the liturgy chillingly real and horrifyingly bleak. Millions were afflicted with illness, and some will always suffer long term implications. There was job loss and economic deprivation.
There was discontent on the streets. Divisions based on race, politics, border closures. Anxiety about climate change. Tension and anxiety about everything. Hardly a sweet Rosh Hashana.
Eighteen months later and we are in another not so sweet Rosh Hashana.
The ongoing separation from family and friends, from one another in this Kedem community and the significant life disruptions that continue to challenge us - looking forward to tomorrow is a struggle. Everybody has been impacted adversely: for eighteen months, our lives have been narrowed, curtailed, distanced. And yet this season of the Jewish year asks us to try to lift our heads and look at the bigger picture.
Yom Hazikaron – a day of remembering. The greatest adversities endured by the Australian people since Federation have centred on war, pandemic and economic depression. Each has been global in scale and the effects have echoed down to future generations.
How many of our childhoods have been shaped by the experiences of our parents – scrimping and saving after the experience of the Great Depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after the war experiences. Events of this scale do not come and go without altering normal life after the storm has passed.
Those touched by the Depression were frugal for the rest of their lives. Those returning from the second world war, or those who survived the concentration camps, suffered from what we now call PTSD but at the time they were not understood or supported.
Trials such as these change a nation and the values of its people. What is it that has enabled those generations to endure two world wars, the Spanish flu pandemic, an economic depression?
In all of these crises the same attitude gave all Australians a sense of purpose. They had a belief that they were part of something bigger than themselves –a belief in the idea of community and nationhood – and they had a sense of duty to defend the values so dear to them.
I want to suggest that perhaps the idea of personal sacrifice for the common good may have been prevalent. An old fashioned idea perhaps - just as religion has become an old fashioned idea today. However it is possible that religion also provided a powerfully binding force for those facing hardship violence and possible death,
In the seven decades or so since WW2 we in Australia have enjoyed peace and prosperity by and large. We have loosened our ties to the British empire and now proudly stand as an independent nation beginning to struggle with our identity and history.
We have retreated from religious dogma and are more likely to demand and expect prosperity in this life rather than sacrifice now and hope for salvation later.
Religious authority has lost its authority to unite us and so the question becomes: What will sustain us – what ennobling ideas will help us through these times of uncertainty?
Do we have the galvanising forces required to withstand this adversary determined to put us in our place and keep us apart?
We can talk about weapons of self defence – whether it be lockdowns or vaccines. But perhaps we need something more.
Yom Hazikaron – a day of remembering. Let’s think back 76 years to 1945. What must it have been like to be a Jew approaching Rosh Hashana in 1945? The camps had been liberated, yet there was a growing realisation that one third of the Jewish people had been murdered. Europe was a wasteland of destruction. Beyond the Jewish dead, there were also countless who were sick, wounded, refugees, and displaced persons. The British controlled Palestine and they made getting there exceptionally difficult. Arab hostility to any Jewish presence was relentless. A large percentage of the world’s Jews were frightened, broken, powerless, and homeless.
As Rosh Hashana came into view in 1945, the first nuclear bombs had been dropped just weeks before; hostilities had ceased, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed.
Had you told a Jew in 1945 what the Jewish world would be like at Rosh Hashana 2021 – even with all our fears and troubles – that Jew would have thought that you were conjuring up an unbelievable fantasy.
Here’s our current reality: There are close to 15 million Jews in the world. Almost 85% of us live in freedom in either Israel or the United States. Compared to all historic measures, antisemitism – though still a significant problem – is relatively controlled.
The largest community of Jews in the world lives in the independent state of Israel, now approaching seven million Jews, comprising 74% of the population.
Last year the US News and World Report ranked the state of Israel as the eighth most powerful country in the world. The United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Morocco and Bahrain have signed peaceful diplomatic relations with Israel which represents a critical turning point in the region - one that will make Israel more secure for decades to come.
In the Diaspora Jewish communities show an encouraging level of resilience. During these challenging times we, in Victoria are in good shape too - able to manage our destiny better than at almost any point in the past. There will always be anti Semitism but when the Premier of our state recently called it out saying: “Antisemitism is unacceptable and evil and we have a zero tolerance approach to that in our state” we have every reason to feel optimistic about our future security as a Jewish community.
The question remains however – how do we live in this world of uncertainty? Uncertainty, for many of us, is terrifying. It is a blank canvas onto which we can paint our fears.
Our leaders know little and cannot make promises. We cannot rely on them to inspire optimism, and yet what we most long for is to know that, despite all of the unknowns, we are going to be OK.
Our souls crave hope at a fundamental level because it is crucial to our survival. Hope offers us the choice to see beyond our current circumstances to something better.
How do we live in what is becoming known as “the new normal”?
There is one word that serves as an answer to these questions. It is HOPE.
Hope is a Jewish story. On this Yom Hazikaron we remember the journey of our spiritual ancestor Abraham. Our tradition tells us that he heard the call of the Divine to leave his homeland, to leave all that was familiar to him, and to go, with his wife Sarah, to a place they did not know. Abraham was told to leave all the things that were familiar to him – his land, his birthplace and his father’s house – and to begin a new kind of life – an uncertain life - in covenant with God.
For what purpose were they to begin this journey into the unknown?
The Torah tells us that it was “To become a blessing to the world.”
Genesis is about that covenant as it affects individuals and families. The rest of Torah is about the covenant as it applies to the life of a nation. The Jewish story, still unfinished, is about the journey from multiple forms of slavery to freedom. Our Torah is the template of responsible freedom, it is our constitution of liberty.
Yom Hazikaron. We remember another moment in the Jewish story. The Israelites finally fled slavery in Egypt, and Pharaoh’s army was chasing them. They reached the edge of the sea. There was nowhere to go. They were trapped, and afraid. Moses lifted his staff and the sea parted. A spectacular miracle!
The famous midrash, written some 1500 years ago offers a different version – less grand but more inspiring. The Israelites were gathered at the water’s edge, Moses lifted his arms... and nothing happened. Panic raced through the crowd. Then a man named Nachshon stepped into the sea, and kept walking. The waters rose to his knees, his waist, his shoulders, and the Israelites nearby stared in horror.
The moment the waters came up just over his nostrils, the sea parted, and the people rushed behind him, towards freedom. (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sotah pages 36b-37a, Mechilta Beshalach 6)
In a moment of terrifying unknown – of uncertainty - faith and hope meant walking forward anyway. Feeling fear, doubt, even despair, but not letting it stop him.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “to be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair... Judaism is a sustained struggle against the world that is, in the name of the world that could be, should be, but is not yet.”
It is no accident that so many Jews are economists fighting poverty, or doctors fighting disease, or lawyers fighting injustice, in all cases refusing to see these things as inevitable. It is no accident that after the Holocaust Jews did not nurse resentment and revenge, but instead turned to the future, building a new Jewish nation whose national anthem is Hatikvah, ‘The Hope’.
It is no accident that Judaism has been opposed by every empire that sought to deny people the freedom to be equal-but-different. It is no accident that Israel is still today the only free society in the Middle East.
To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair. There is no greater challenge.
Throughout history, when human beings have sought hope they have found it in the Jewish story. Judaism is the religion, and Israel the home - of hope.
Yom Hazikaron – a day or remembering. One last memory in the form of a story.
In January 1945, Chaskel Tydor, an Auschwitz prisoner, was forced by the Nazis to set out on the infamous “Death March” with thousands of other prisoners. As he was about to leave, Tydor was approached by an emaciated prisoner, who handed him an object wrapped in a rag. “Take it,” the prisoner told him. “I’m too sick to survive. Maybe you will make it. Take this shofar. Show them that we had a shofar in Auschwitz.”
Tydor survived the march through the snow to the town of Gleiwitz. From there, the shofar went with him to Buchenwald. It remained with him until he was liberated on the 11th of April, 1945 by the American army.
On Rosh Hashanah 1945, while on the boat to Palestine under the British Mandate, he blew the shofar for a group of young survivors – many, like him, from Auschwitz – in view of the Carmel mountain range. They were about to reach the Promised Land.
If Jews could blow the shofar with hope for the year ahead on Rosh Hashana 1945, then so can we. In this new year, in the face of turmoil and uncertainty, doubt and fear, in the world and in our own lives, may we choose to hope. May we live with hope.
Let us begin the new year with their determination – that tomorrow will indeed be better, because we will make it so. Shanah Tovah.
Drash - Kol Nidrei 5782
Marlo Newton
Why do we daven kol nidre ‘forward’? Isn't it despondent, to assume we are going to need absolution from our vows before the year has really got going? One teacher told me it was from the times of persecution, when we knew that we might be asked, in the year to come, to vow allegiance to another G-d, and so had a kind of advance “fingers crossed” [ironic] against making a false vow.
Then why do the Sephardim, closest of us all to the Marrano history, still recite the Kol Nidre ‘backward’. As a plea for forgiveness of past false vows in the preceding year.
One reason is that the version looking backwards was the first one.
It was Rashi's son-in-law, Rabbi Meir ben Samuel (early 12th century), who changed the original phrase "from the last Day of Atonement until this one" to "from this Day of Atonement until the next". Meir ben Samuel likewise added the words "we do repent of them all", since real repentance is a condition of dispensation. There was also the distinct concern that a person would die with unfulfilled vows having been made since the previous Day of Atonement, so annulling these vows in advance might diminish the weight such unkept vows imposed on a person at one’s death.
It was Rabbeinu Tam, however, Rabbi Meir be Samuel’s son, who also tried to change the perfect tense of the verbs ("which we have vowed", "have sworn", etc.) to the imperfect. Whether the old text was already too deeply rooted, or whether Rabbeinu Tam did not correct these verbal forms consistently and grammatically, the old perfect forms are still retained at the beginning of the formula, but a future meaning is given to them.[32] Yes, as a grammarian it does my head in.
These changes were accepted in the German, northern French, and Polish rituals but not in the Spanish, Roman, and Provençal rituals.[33] The “old” version is, therefore, usually called the "Sephardic". The old and new versions are sometimes found side by side.[34] Because it is traditional to recite Kol Nidrei three times, some Sephardic communities and even some Ashkenazic communities (especially in Israel) make a point of reciting both versions (usually referring to the previous Yom Kippur in the first two iterations and the next Yom Kippur in the third).[35]
I like that idea – looking backwards and ahead. The older version makes sense if we have spent Elul out doing teshuvah with our fellow human beings and are now asking forgiveness from Hashem, to repair the final relationship before we can ask for a good new year.
Thinking about a Kol Nidre that is forward facing, we already have in mind forgiveness from Hashem for false vows made to God, but what might we need forgiveness for in advance in our dealing bein adam lechavero?
I’ve been watching a lot of tv lately. I know you’re shocked.
One of the shows that hit deepest was Annabel Crabbe’s Msrepresentation, about the systematic exclusion and silencing of women in Australian politics, since white settlement. Most of what she put on view we accept now as abhorrent, but what didn’t we see in the moment?
What didn’t I see? What will I not have vision enough to see in the coming year?
I’ve also rewatched the entirety of West Wing, one of my formative experiences of the American story and one I have celebrated for its storytelling and loved for its characterisations. Watching it twenty years later – yes, it’s been that long- I couldn’t help being struck by the dismissal of women’s concerns in the larger political picture, always sacrificed for something more important in the moment, and in everyday acts in the workplace, like not taking RSI seriously because it only affected the women-dominated secretarial pool.
What didn’t I hear then? What will I miss hearing in the coming year?
I watched the “Black Lives Matter” marches and the women’s marches and I couldn’t understand intersectionality or why it mattered because it didn’t matter to me. I let acquaintances play down the importance of the battles for people of colour with the excuse that I was tired of trying to be “woke”.
What didn’t I do? For God’s sake yes For God’s sake what won’t I do in the coming year?
We stand before you this day
Shaking and bowed down with a psychic exhaustion.
Last year I refused to be part of an online service - I felt I could not pray without the community around me – I could not wish someone good yontev, or well over the fast, over zoom. I hated every minute of the zoom services and I didn’t go to them all. It didn’t help.
This year I truly thought we’d make it. Then a wave of delta davka inside our own community destroyed that hope. To be a free people, in our own minyan. That was the action that took away our freedom. The freedom of a few denied the freedom of the many.
It’s been that kind of a year. The freedom of a few to ignore the election result of the many resulted in a Capitol riot that threatened democracy at its very seat. The freedom to continue to invest in fossil fuels overriding the sacred duty to the land that we were taught all the way back in Bereshit. The freedom to tell mildly amusing jokes that hurt and offend groups we don’t know so well, or care for that much. The freedom to ignore the claims of injustice and oppression if they don’t relate to our struggle.
I would argue that an active and painful struggle to face the mistakes of our past is how we argue for the chance of another year.
What didn’t we do? What won’t we accomplish in the coming year?
The freedom to make promises to our children is precious, and we lost it last year. We promised them a birthday party this year. We promised them a holiday. We promised them a cure. We broke that promise. We broke a lot of promises “bein adam lchavero”.
In the year to come, let us not make empty promises. Let us not make pontifical statements from our islands of privilege, but let us stop and learn in time, to say I didn’t know that, I’ll have to rethink that.
Sara Ronis, one of the teachers i learn form on daf yomi asks in relation to the famous lamed vavniks, the 36 righteous who sustain the world: What might it mean to treat ourselves as though we are one of the 36 who have God’s explicit permission to be in God's presence every day, who sustain the world through their actions and presence?
As some of you know, or might be delighted to discover, there is a custom to indicate the Hebrew year with a verse (or part of a verse) that is equal to that year in gematriya. You know, Aleph equals 1, Bet equals 2 etc. Such words or phrases are called chronograms. The custom has spread to written correspondence and email, as a way to enrich the meaning of the current year. Here are some biblical phrases that equal תשפ"ב 782. (The number of thousands in the year—currently 5000—is often omitted.)
Daniel Matt, another Sefaria friend has put together chonograms for the year 5782
פסוקים לכבוד שנת תשפ"ב
7) לֹֽא־תִשְׂנָ֥א (ויקרא יט, יז)
7) You shall not hate (Leviticus 19:17)
וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם (במדבר ו, כו)
And may He give you peace (Numbers 6:26)
28) עַ֣ד אֲשֶׁר־אֶרְאֶ֗ה (קהלת ב, ג)
28) Until I could see (Ecclesiastes 2:3)
Until I could see. What did I not see? What will I witness in 5782?
At funerals, and sometimes at Yizkor, we read my favourite reflection for this time of year. Birth is a beginning and death a destination, and life is a pilgrimage, from defeat to defeat to defeat until, looking backwards or ahead, we see that meaning lies not in some high place along the way, but in having made the journey step by step - a sacred pilgrimage. Let us encourage one another to look backwards and ahead, and continue our sacred pilgrimage - together. Ken Yehi ratzon.
Marlo Newton
Why do we daven kol nidre ‘forward’? Isn't it despondent, to assume we are going to need absolution from our vows before the year has really got going? One teacher told me it was from the times of persecution, when we knew that we might be asked, in the year to come, to vow allegiance to another G-d, and so had a kind of advance “fingers crossed” [ironic] against making a false vow.
Then why do the Sephardim, closest of us all to the Marrano history, still recite the Kol Nidre ‘backward’. As a plea for forgiveness of past false vows in the preceding year.
One reason is that the version looking backwards was the first one.
It was Rashi's son-in-law, Rabbi Meir ben Samuel (early 12th century), who changed the original phrase "from the last Day of Atonement until this one" to "from this Day of Atonement until the next". Meir ben Samuel likewise added the words "we do repent of them all", since real repentance is a condition of dispensation. There was also the distinct concern that a person would die with unfulfilled vows having been made since the previous Day of Atonement, so annulling these vows in advance might diminish the weight such unkept vows imposed on a person at one’s death.
It was Rabbeinu Tam, however, Rabbi Meir be Samuel’s son, who also tried to change the perfect tense of the verbs ("which we have vowed", "have sworn", etc.) to the imperfect. Whether the old text was already too deeply rooted, or whether Rabbeinu Tam did not correct these verbal forms consistently and grammatically, the old perfect forms are still retained at the beginning of the formula, but a future meaning is given to them.[32] Yes, as a grammarian it does my head in.
These changes were accepted in the German, northern French, and Polish rituals but not in the Spanish, Roman, and Provençal rituals.[33] The “old” version is, therefore, usually called the "Sephardic". The old and new versions are sometimes found side by side.[34] Because it is traditional to recite Kol Nidrei three times, some Sephardic communities and even some Ashkenazic communities (especially in Israel) make a point of reciting both versions (usually referring to the previous Yom Kippur in the first two iterations and the next Yom Kippur in the third).[35]
I like that idea – looking backwards and ahead. The older version makes sense if we have spent Elul out doing teshuvah with our fellow human beings and are now asking forgiveness from Hashem, to repair the final relationship before we can ask for a good new year.
Thinking about a Kol Nidre that is forward facing, we already have in mind forgiveness from Hashem for false vows made to God, but what might we need forgiveness for in advance in our dealing bein adam lechavero?
I’ve been watching a lot of tv lately. I know you’re shocked.
One of the shows that hit deepest was Annabel Crabbe’s Msrepresentation, about the systematic exclusion and silencing of women in Australian politics, since white settlement. Most of what she put on view we accept now as abhorrent, but what didn’t we see in the moment?
What didn’t I see? What will I not have vision enough to see in the coming year?
I’ve also rewatched the entirety of West Wing, one of my formative experiences of the American story and one I have celebrated for its storytelling and loved for its characterisations. Watching it twenty years later – yes, it’s been that long- I couldn’t help being struck by the dismissal of women’s concerns in the larger political picture, always sacrificed for something more important in the moment, and in everyday acts in the workplace, like not taking RSI seriously because it only affected the women-dominated secretarial pool.
What didn’t I hear then? What will I miss hearing in the coming year?
I watched the “Black Lives Matter” marches and the women’s marches and I couldn’t understand intersectionality or why it mattered because it didn’t matter to me. I let acquaintances play down the importance of the battles for people of colour with the excuse that I was tired of trying to be “woke”.
What didn’t I do? For God’s sake yes For God’s sake what won’t I do in the coming year?
We stand before you this day
Shaking and bowed down with a psychic exhaustion.
Last year I refused to be part of an online service - I felt I could not pray without the community around me – I could not wish someone good yontev, or well over the fast, over zoom. I hated every minute of the zoom services and I didn’t go to them all. It didn’t help.
This year I truly thought we’d make it. Then a wave of delta davka inside our own community destroyed that hope. To be a free people, in our own minyan. That was the action that took away our freedom. The freedom of a few denied the freedom of the many.
It’s been that kind of a year. The freedom of a few to ignore the election result of the many resulted in a Capitol riot that threatened democracy at its very seat. The freedom to continue to invest in fossil fuels overriding the sacred duty to the land that we were taught all the way back in Bereshit. The freedom to tell mildly amusing jokes that hurt and offend groups we don’t know so well, or care for that much. The freedom to ignore the claims of injustice and oppression if they don’t relate to our struggle.
I would argue that an active and painful struggle to face the mistakes of our past is how we argue for the chance of another year.
What didn’t we do? What won’t we accomplish in the coming year?
The freedom to make promises to our children is precious, and we lost it last year. We promised them a birthday party this year. We promised them a holiday. We promised them a cure. We broke that promise. We broke a lot of promises “bein adam lchavero”.
In the year to come, let us not make empty promises. Let us not make pontifical statements from our islands of privilege, but let us stop and learn in time, to say I didn’t know that, I’ll have to rethink that.
Sara Ronis, one of the teachers i learn form on daf yomi asks in relation to the famous lamed vavniks, the 36 righteous who sustain the world: What might it mean to treat ourselves as though we are one of the 36 who have God’s explicit permission to be in God's presence every day, who sustain the world through their actions and presence?
As some of you know, or might be delighted to discover, there is a custom to indicate the Hebrew year with a verse (or part of a verse) that is equal to that year in gematriya. You know, Aleph equals 1, Bet equals 2 etc. Such words or phrases are called chronograms. The custom has spread to written correspondence and email, as a way to enrich the meaning of the current year. Here are some biblical phrases that equal תשפ"ב 782. (The number of thousands in the year—currently 5000—is often omitted.)
Daniel Matt, another Sefaria friend has put together chonograms for the year 5782
פסוקים לכבוד שנת תשפ"ב
7) לֹֽא־תִשְׂנָ֥א (ויקרא יט, יז)
7) You shall not hate (Leviticus 19:17)
וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם (במדבר ו, כו)
And may He give you peace (Numbers 6:26)
28) עַ֣ד אֲשֶׁר־אֶרְאֶ֗ה (קהלת ב, ג)
28) Until I could see (Ecclesiastes 2:3)
Until I could see. What did I not see? What will I witness in 5782?
At funerals, and sometimes at Yizkor, we read my favourite reflection for this time of year. Birth is a beginning and death a destination, and life is a pilgrimage, from defeat to defeat to defeat until, looking backwards or ahead, we see that meaning lies not in some high place along the way, but in having made the journey step by step - a sacred pilgrimage. Let us encourage one another to look backwards and ahead, and continue our sacred pilgrimage - together. Ken Yehi ratzon.
Drash - Yom Kippur 5782
Rabbi Fred Morgan
When Sue and I first arrived in Australia, there were two major, contentious topics of conversation among students of Australian society: the first was about Aboriginal reconciliation; and the second was about migrants, or the sort of people we want to settle in this country. Today we can add two more, the COVID pandemic and climate change. The first two go back virtually to the beginnings of European settlement in this land, and they dominate its history like twin song-lines running through its cultural landscape.
The great social commentator Donald Horne links these two themes in his 2003 book, 10 steps to a more tolerant Australia, which, by the way, Deborah Stone reviewed when she was review editor of the Australian Jewish News all those years ao. According to Horne, it’s all about what he calls the “disease” of xenophobia, an irrational hatred of those who are different from ourselves. The illness of xenophobia has never been more prevalent, not only in Australia but across the globe. Whatever its political, social and economic effects may be, this disease is undoubtedly destroying our soul. That’s what I want to concentrate on over the next few minutes, and especially with regard to the question of migrants; more specifically, those people that officialdom calls nowadays “illegal maritime immigrants”, or as we know them, refugees who arrived by boat.
Early on in my rabbinic service here in Melbourne I was invited to join a demonstration at the Maribyrnong Detention Centre. The Centre at that time was being used to house a large number of “boat people” who had arrived without proper papers from Central Asian countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, South Asian countries like Sri Lanka and Cambodia, and other theatres of violence. To me, back then, this was simple human rights issue, a matter of justice and of Torah. We Jews should care about these people because they like us are created “in the image of God,” and because, as it says in Torah, “we know the feelings of the oppressed since we were oppressed in the land of Egypt.”
Though the refugees were in detention, they were innocent of any moral wrongdoing. What we didn’t know at that time but learned subsequently was that their human dignity was being eroded by their punitive treatment in the Maribyrnong Detention Centre. For example, the women in detention were regularly humiliated by the guards when seeking sanitary products. Through a seminar we held on the issue of asylum seekers, we were able to enlist the support of Walter Jona z”l, a great humanitarian as well as parliamentarian (they’re not necessarily the same, of course). Walter asked to see the evidence for these claims, and once he was on board, he wielded his considerable influence behind the scenes to ameliorate the women’s situation.
Once we showed that we were able to do something to protect the dignity of others, it restored their hope. As my teacher Rabbi Hugo Gryn often said of his Holocaust experience, quoting his father in the camp, a person can live for three weeks without food, they can live for three days without water, but they cannot live for three minutes without hope. Caryn Granek taught us eloquently on Rosh Hashana about Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who maintained that we Jews are “agents of hope.” Sacks argued that hope is a distinctively Jewish response to crisis, the only viable, effective response to the trauma of living, the human condition. When we lose hope, life becomes a “vale of tears” to us.
About five years ago, a few people at TBI got together to see what they could do to aid refugees, many of them “illegal maritime immigrants.” This group called itself Project Dignity. It included “the two Karens;” two remarkable women named Karen, who are involved professionally in working with refugees. I call them the karnayim – that’s my Hebrew pun. The Hebrew term keren is a horn, like a horn of plenty. The two Karens are truly karnayim, “horns of plenty,” for their clients.
In the beginning Project Dignity ran programs to educate the community at large about refugees and to give a break to refugees themselves, for example, panel discussions and film showings, social gatherings at the synagogue and field trips to places of interest around Melbourne. During the COVID lockdown attention shifted to the physical needs of the refugees, who are on bridging visas or other forms of short stay permits that give them no security or access to any welfare benefits. Dozens of volunteers prepared frozen meals which were then distributed to refugees all around the outlying suburbs of the city. Eventually, through the course of Melbourne’s six lockdowns, the focus shifted to delivering boxes of fruit and vegetables and bags of bread and groceries on a regular basis to people who without these deliveries would be in great distress. This has gone on since March 2020, for 18 months. Over that time, the Project has delivered the equivalent of several thousands of meals. Some members of Kedem have participated actively in this life-giving mitzvah. I saw Bev Gelbart at our food distribution centre just yesterday morning, and Lionel Appleboom was there on another occasion. The Project is “dignity” in practice. The recipients rely on these regular gifts of food, but equally on the sense of human kindness and chesed that lie behind them.
Recently, in the chaotic period immediately after the Taliban occupied Kabul and claimed sovereignty over Afghanistan, Sue and I delivered a supply of food to an Afghani refugee whom we had come to know. He invited us in and, in his very basic English, he began to share with us his fears for his family left behind in Kabul, his wife and children including his endangered teenaged daughters. He got them on a video call and asked us to speak with them, though they had no English beyond “thank you” and “okay”.
It was at that moment, when I saw his family on screen and realised that they were sitting in their home in Kabul, unable to go outside because they are women, unable to escape, unable to attend school or get a job, with their father and husband sitting alone and isolated in a bare room in the outskirts of Melbourne – it was at that moment that I began to understand what being a refugee is really about. It was heartbreaking to see their tears and to feel their desperation, to know that there is so little that can be done to help them, that is, both the family still in Afghanistan and the father and husband “boat person” in Melbourne - because the political will is simply not there. The immediacy of their reality, the terrible fear that they live with from moment to moment, the face-to-face trauma of the encounter, the affront to human dignity was nearly overwhelming for us.
Nearly overwhelming, I say, because we still hold on to hope. The story is not yet completed. Despite the despicable cruelty of the Taliban, dignity is not gone. If we react with dignity, with hope, then dignity and hope remain alive.
So, what can we do? One thing is what I’m doing right now: speak out, share your concern for those who are stigmatised as “refugees”, insist that they be treated as we would want to be treated. Do not be a silent bystander. Keep the issue alive, learn about it, contact your parliamentarians about it. We can treat the issue with the seriousness and urgency it deserves.
We can volunteer to feed the refugees here in Melbourne and thus keep their spirits alive through tending to their physical well-being. We can accompany the Afghani refugees on this journey of horror that some of them now face. We can put them in touch with agencies that can advocate on their behalf.
We can lobby our political institutions and parties and help them to focus on the humanitarian aspects of the refugee crisis. We can use our votes to recast politics, away from the politics of fear to what Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks called a “politics of hope.”
In doing these things we add our personal commentaries to the haftarah for this Yom Kippur morning, Isaiah’s critique of the Yom Kippur Fast. Let’s hear what Isaiah says:
Is not this the fast I desire – to break the bonds of injustice and remove the heavy yoke; to let the oppressed go free and release all those enslaved?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and to take the homeless poor into your home, and never to neglect your fellow human being?
Then shall your light burst forth like the dawn, and your wounds shall quickly heal, Your Righteous One leading the way before you, the Presence of the Eternal One guarding you from behind.
Then, when you call, God will answer, and when you cry, God will respond “Hineini, I am here”. [Isaiah 58:6-9a]
These words were spoken more than 2500 years ago. Yet they remain as relevant, as poignant today as they were at the time of the Babylonian exile. They were spoken to our ancestors who, like us, were created b’tzelem Elohim, in the divine image, about how they should treat others – the oppressed, the enslaved, the hungry, the dispossessed, the marginalised – because they, too, are created in the divine image.
Isaiah tells us, if when we are called upon, we answer Hineini, I am here, then God, when called upon, will respond Hineini, I am here. How can we understand this assertion? It is much as what happened when Sue and I sat with our Afghani friend whose family is stranded in Kabul. We had the power to listen and respond to his story, his almost unbearable pain. We all have that power, to listen to those in pain and suffering. And insofar as we have that power, we can each of us say Hineini, I am here. When we do that, we stand in for God – so to speak - on behalf of our fellow human being who is suffering, who is oppressed or hungry or in despair. We show them that there are those out there who care, and so we restore hope to a desperate situation.
As Isaiah assures us, when that is our Fast, the “light shall burst forth like the dawn” with healing in its wings, and we shall have done what we can to fulfil our destiny. By observing this kind of Fast, we act to overcome xenophobia and we restore wholeness to our soul and to the soul of our nation. Perhaps it is just for this purpose that we were created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image.
So may we be sealed in the Book of Life. Ken y’hi ratzon
Rabbi Fred Morgan
When Sue and I first arrived in Australia, there were two major, contentious topics of conversation among students of Australian society: the first was about Aboriginal reconciliation; and the second was about migrants, or the sort of people we want to settle in this country. Today we can add two more, the COVID pandemic and climate change. The first two go back virtually to the beginnings of European settlement in this land, and they dominate its history like twin song-lines running through its cultural landscape.
The great social commentator Donald Horne links these two themes in his 2003 book, 10 steps to a more tolerant Australia, which, by the way, Deborah Stone reviewed when she was review editor of the Australian Jewish News all those years ao. According to Horne, it’s all about what he calls the “disease” of xenophobia, an irrational hatred of those who are different from ourselves. The illness of xenophobia has never been more prevalent, not only in Australia but across the globe. Whatever its political, social and economic effects may be, this disease is undoubtedly destroying our soul. That’s what I want to concentrate on over the next few minutes, and especially with regard to the question of migrants; more specifically, those people that officialdom calls nowadays “illegal maritime immigrants”, or as we know them, refugees who arrived by boat.
Early on in my rabbinic service here in Melbourne I was invited to join a demonstration at the Maribyrnong Detention Centre. The Centre at that time was being used to house a large number of “boat people” who had arrived without proper papers from Central Asian countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, South Asian countries like Sri Lanka and Cambodia, and other theatres of violence. To me, back then, this was simple human rights issue, a matter of justice and of Torah. We Jews should care about these people because they like us are created “in the image of God,” and because, as it says in Torah, “we know the feelings of the oppressed since we were oppressed in the land of Egypt.”
Though the refugees were in detention, they were innocent of any moral wrongdoing. What we didn’t know at that time but learned subsequently was that their human dignity was being eroded by their punitive treatment in the Maribyrnong Detention Centre. For example, the women in detention were regularly humiliated by the guards when seeking sanitary products. Through a seminar we held on the issue of asylum seekers, we were able to enlist the support of Walter Jona z”l, a great humanitarian as well as parliamentarian (they’re not necessarily the same, of course). Walter asked to see the evidence for these claims, and once he was on board, he wielded his considerable influence behind the scenes to ameliorate the women’s situation.
Once we showed that we were able to do something to protect the dignity of others, it restored their hope. As my teacher Rabbi Hugo Gryn often said of his Holocaust experience, quoting his father in the camp, a person can live for three weeks without food, they can live for three days without water, but they cannot live for three minutes without hope. Caryn Granek taught us eloquently on Rosh Hashana about Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who maintained that we Jews are “agents of hope.” Sacks argued that hope is a distinctively Jewish response to crisis, the only viable, effective response to the trauma of living, the human condition. When we lose hope, life becomes a “vale of tears” to us.
About five years ago, a few people at TBI got together to see what they could do to aid refugees, many of them “illegal maritime immigrants.” This group called itself Project Dignity. It included “the two Karens;” two remarkable women named Karen, who are involved professionally in working with refugees. I call them the karnayim – that’s my Hebrew pun. The Hebrew term keren is a horn, like a horn of plenty. The two Karens are truly karnayim, “horns of plenty,” for their clients.
In the beginning Project Dignity ran programs to educate the community at large about refugees and to give a break to refugees themselves, for example, panel discussions and film showings, social gatherings at the synagogue and field trips to places of interest around Melbourne. During the COVID lockdown attention shifted to the physical needs of the refugees, who are on bridging visas or other forms of short stay permits that give them no security or access to any welfare benefits. Dozens of volunteers prepared frozen meals which were then distributed to refugees all around the outlying suburbs of the city. Eventually, through the course of Melbourne’s six lockdowns, the focus shifted to delivering boxes of fruit and vegetables and bags of bread and groceries on a regular basis to people who without these deliveries would be in great distress. This has gone on since March 2020, for 18 months. Over that time, the Project has delivered the equivalent of several thousands of meals. Some members of Kedem have participated actively in this life-giving mitzvah. I saw Bev Gelbart at our food distribution centre just yesterday morning, and Lionel Appleboom was there on another occasion. The Project is “dignity” in practice. The recipients rely on these regular gifts of food, but equally on the sense of human kindness and chesed that lie behind them.
Recently, in the chaotic period immediately after the Taliban occupied Kabul and claimed sovereignty over Afghanistan, Sue and I delivered a supply of food to an Afghani refugee whom we had come to know. He invited us in and, in his very basic English, he began to share with us his fears for his family left behind in Kabul, his wife and children including his endangered teenaged daughters. He got them on a video call and asked us to speak with them, though they had no English beyond “thank you” and “okay”.
It was at that moment, when I saw his family on screen and realised that they were sitting in their home in Kabul, unable to go outside because they are women, unable to escape, unable to attend school or get a job, with their father and husband sitting alone and isolated in a bare room in the outskirts of Melbourne – it was at that moment that I began to understand what being a refugee is really about. It was heartbreaking to see their tears and to feel their desperation, to know that there is so little that can be done to help them, that is, both the family still in Afghanistan and the father and husband “boat person” in Melbourne - because the political will is simply not there. The immediacy of their reality, the terrible fear that they live with from moment to moment, the face-to-face trauma of the encounter, the affront to human dignity was nearly overwhelming for us.
Nearly overwhelming, I say, because we still hold on to hope. The story is not yet completed. Despite the despicable cruelty of the Taliban, dignity is not gone. If we react with dignity, with hope, then dignity and hope remain alive.
So, what can we do? One thing is what I’m doing right now: speak out, share your concern for those who are stigmatised as “refugees”, insist that they be treated as we would want to be treated. Do not be a silent bystander. Keep the issue alive, learn about it, contact your parliamentarians about it. We can treat the issue with the seriousness and urgency it deserves.
We can volunteer to feed the refugees here in Melbourne and thus keep their spirits alive through tending to their physical well-being. We can accompany the Afghani refugees on this journey of horror that some of them now face. We can put them in touch with agencies that can advocate on their behalf.
We can lobby our political institutions and parties and help them to focus on the humanitarian aspects of the refugee crisis. We can use our votes to recast politics, away from the politics of fear to what Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks called a “politics of hope.”
In doing these things we add our personal commentaries to the haftarah for this Yom Kippur morning, Isaiah’s critique of the Yom Kippur Fast. Let’s hear what Isaiah says:
Is not this the fast I desire – to break the bonds of injustice and remove the heavy yoke; to let the oppressed go free and release all those enslaved?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and to take the homeless poor into your home, and never to neglect your fellow human being?
Then shall your light burst forth like the dawn, and your wounds shall quickly heal, Your Righteous One leading the way before you, the Presence of the Eternal One guarding you from behind.
Then, when you call, God will answer, and when you cry, God will respond “Hineini, I am here”. [Isaiah 58:6-9a]
These words were spoken more than 2500 years ago. Yet they remain as relevant, as poignant today as they were at the time of the Babylonian exile. They were spoken to our ancestors who, like us, were created b’tzelem Elohim, in the divine image, about how they should treat others – the oppressed, the enslaved, the hungry, the dispossessed, the marginalised – because they, too, are created in the divine image.
Isaiah tells us, if when we are called upon, we answer Hineini, I am here, then God, when called upon, will respond Hineini, I am here. How can we understand this assertion? It is much as what happened when Sue and I sat with our Afghani friend whose family is stranded in Kabul. We had the power to listen and respond to his story, his almost unbearable pain. We all have that power, to listen to those in pain and suffering. And insofar as we have that power, we can each of us say Hineini, I am here. When we do that, we stand in for God – so to speak - on behalf of our fellow human being who is suffering, who is oppressed or hungry or in despair. We show them that there are those out there who care, and so we restore hope to a desperate situation.
As Isaiah assures us, when that is our Fast, the “light shall burst forth like the dawn” with healing in its wings, and we shall have done what we can to fulfil our destiny. By observing this kind of Fast, we act to overcome xenophobia and we restore wholeness to our soul and to the soul of our nation. Perhaps it is just for this purpose that we were created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image.
So may we be sealed in the Book of Life. Ken y’hi ratzon