Rabbi David’s Rosh Hashanah Morning talk 5782
On Rosh Hashanah morning last year, I talked about no-win scenarios. I noted that at that moment, based on most understandings of the science of viral transmission, there was no clear path forward for many activities that was both healthy and safe, and that allowed us to gather together in person. Returning to having things like services and school meet in person was certainly the most spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally desirable course of action; however, from a public health perspective, it was clearly not the best course of action at that moment. Everyone desperately missed all of the benefits that we experience from gathering together with others, but we also recognized that those benefits would have to be sacrificed in order to prioritize the health and wellness of the greater community – something that the Jewish value of Pikuach Nefesh requires of us. I then shared the notion that finding ways to cope with and to navigate through no-win scenarios is an inherently Jewish characteristic, one that is actually built into the Torah and other Jewish teachings, and also one that we have modeled and embodied, over and over again, throughout the history of our people. My hope was that as we started the new Jewish year, we might be able to look to Judaism for insights into how to deal with the extraordinarily difficult situation in which we found ourselves.
Well, it’s a year later in the Jewish calendar, and circumstances are similar enough that I strongly considered giving that exact same talk again. As I wrote to the congregation in early August, when I left for my vacation at the end of June, I thought and hoped that when I returned in August, I would come back to a world of decreased, if not barely-there, preventative measures for COVID-19. At that time, it seemed as if we were just about done following daily reports of new cases, and that preventative measures like masking and social distancing would likely soon become artifacts of the past. I had been envisioning that our kids would soon be returning to a fairly normal school year, and that I would soon be returning to work, and to life, in a way that closely resembled February 2020 – not February 2021. I think most if not all of us were more than ready to resume our quote unquote “normal” lives, and in a Covid-vaccinated world, it seemed likely that that would be the case.
Unfortunately, the certainty that most of us probably experienced about that Covid-vaccinated world back in May and June was undermined by circumstances that are beyond the scope of this talk, and instead we’ve ended up with a reality that is, once again, filled with questions and precautions and Zoom and uncertainty. Once again, many of us are faced, on a daily basis, with questions about what is and isn’t safe, what is and isn’t realistic to do, and what is and isn’t likely to happen. As a rabbi, I’ve had to return to grappling with questions like “How can we safely conduct services and classes and programs and religious school, and concurrently, how can we help our community to stay connected to each other and to Judaism when the basic act of gathering together is not objectively safe nor easy?” As a father, I’ve had to return to grappling with questions like “Is it safe for my kids to go to school every day, to play with their friends, to go visit colleges, or to go basketball games?” As a person, I’ve returned to grappling – as we all do – with questions like “What kind of mask is safe and comfortable to wear?” and “Do I think it’s safe to meet a friend for lunch inside, or outside, or to go to someone’s house, or to visit and hug my parents?” I imagine that most, if not all of you, have struggled with similar grapplings.
Personally, I am deeply, deeply exhausted from the constant uncertainty, from so many aspects of life that I never really needed to ask questions about in the past having become gray areas that require so much extensive evaluation. For most if not all of us, before March of last year, our psychological and social and intellectual capital rarely had to be used to explore questions about some of the most basic parts of our daily lives. Unfortunately, for much of the time since then, that’s sadly become the norm. Like, I’m sure, so many of you, I have found this uncertainty about everything to be draining, difficult, and painful – and I think I’d do almost anything for it to go away.
I think that in the fairly comfortable lives that most of us lead, there’s little that’s as difficult for us as uncertainty. We are incredibly blessed to live in a time and a place and in a way in which we feel like there’s so much in our lives that we can count on. We count on food being readily and easily available to us in so many different ways. We count on shelter and health care and recreation and education and community being available to us, often without us needing to do very much to make those things happen. We count on information and entertainment being available in the palms of our hands at a moment’s notice. We live in a miraculous moment in time.
And yet over this past year, so much of what we count on has been disrupted, has been lost. For some people, their livelihood, their homes, and their well-being has been disrupted. Health, and safety, and love, and life, has been lost. For many others, the losses have not been foundational, but they’ve been fundamental. Many of us stopped being able to send our children to school, so they could learn and socialize and have fun and experience community with their peers. Many of us stopped being able to share meals and spend time with friends and family and members of our community. We all stopped being able to pray together in our Sanctuary, and to be able to stand next to each other while sharing a cookie or a bagel in the social hall while talking about the world or catching up on our lives or just appreciating a good snack together. So much has been lost, so much has become uncertain, and just when we thought we were on the verge of being able to get a lot of that back, we’re again knee-deep in uncertainty about which things are gone, and which things are on the verge of going away again.
I’ll note that it’s not only the Covid-19 pandemic that has amplified the presence of uncertainty in our lives. The political and social conflicts in our country over the last several years has led to the frequent feeling that any time you check the news, another seemingly disastrous story might be found there. And, as social unrest, political strife, and international conflicts have become prevalent, evidence of the indisputable effects of climate change on our planet has started to become equally present in our lives. Wildfires and deadly heatwaves and unprecedented flooding and giant storms are new unpredictable realities that challenge some of our most basic assumptions about what it means to live where we live, and to inhabit our planet. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that there are many things in the world around us about which we can no longer be nearly as certain as we once were.
Fortunately, I believe, we Jews are the practitioners of a tradition for which ambiguity and uncertainty are defining characteristics. One of my favorite cultural expressions of this comes from the classic sitcom Frasier, in which Frasier, the main character, who is not Jewish, dates a Jewish woman whose mother thinks that Frasier is Jewish. The woman he’s dating stops by his apartment one afternoon with her mother, and to be helpful, Frasier and his family decide to pretend that they’re Jewish. When Frasier‘s brother asks him how to do that, Frasier says “Oh it’s easy – just answer every question with another question.” This approach works for much of the visit, although the misunderstanding leads to a variety of funny moments.
This is one of the classic stereotypes about our people, and yet, it’s one that rings very true. Judaism is a religion of questions, not answers; a tradition that’s about the journey, not the destination; and a culture that emphasizes process, more than results. I think that answering questions with more questions, living with deep-seated uncertainty, is such a fundamental aspect of being Jewish that most of us are barely aware of it. This way of relating to the world around us is everywhere in the Jewish world. Much of the Torah, our people’s sacred text, is about the Israelites’ journey to the Promised Land, and yet the Torah’s narrative ends before we arrive there, and the people make the journey without a clear idea as to where they’re going or how they’re going to get there. We pray to a Divine Being that has many different names, the name that we most commonly use is not spoken the way that it’s written, and in fact we don’t know how to properly pronounce that name. Our sacred text starts with two different versions of the story of creation, and there is no clear explanation given as to which one is correct, or why both are there. One of our most defining religious practices – the only one that’s in the story of creation – is to not work on the Sabbath, and yet what does and doesn’t count as work is never articulated in the Torah. In fact, the Torah is filled with vague descriptions of many vital practices, which is why we have a much larger additional text, the Talmud, that goes into detail about many of these practices. However, there are two different versions of the Talmud, written in two different places, and neither of them regularly provides conclusive explanations of the Torah’s ambiguities. Instead, Talmudic explorations of nearly everything are expansive and wide-ranging, and almost always provide majority opinions, minority opinions, and sometimes other minority opinions.
We are a people who are, apparently, supposed to be comfortable with uncertainty, with not having an abundance of definitive answers. We’ve lived for the better part of the last two millennia without a land of our own, constantly at the mercy of the government of whatever non-Jewish country we ended up in, most of the time never really knowing for sure how secure our way of life was in those places. And yet, we’ve persevered. Judaism and the Jewish people have survived for at least 3000 years, and I think that our flexibility, our adaptability, and our willingness to embrace what life has to offer while being comfortable with a large amount of uncertainty in our lives, is at the core of how and why we’ve survived. The things that are most foundational to our identity – values like prioritizing life and health, not worshipping idols, pursuing justice, and practicing lovingkindness – are not attached to any specific time or place, but instead can be and have been transferred from community to community, from country to country, from one part of the world to another (next week, on Yom Kippur morning, we’ll discuss some of these values when I explore the question of what we do that’s Jewish in our everyday lives. Your answers to that question will be part of my talk – please log on to our website between now and then and share your thoughts). Our dynamic, ever-evolving tradition is uniquely suited to handle uncertainty – whether it’s uncertainty about identity, or existence, or the basic circumstances of life. A people who answer questions with more questions is a people who should be able to handle it, and to endure, when faced with circumstances that are not yet resolvable.
Unfortunately, we currently live in a culture that doesn’t handle uncertainty very well, but instead prefers definitive labels. Labels like, Liberal or Conservative. Reform or Orthodox. Pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine. Success or failure. I find the prominence of the last set especially problematic – there’s almost nothing in life at which anyone can be completely successful, or at which someone completely fails. No baseball player always gets a hit, no politician always takes the proper course of action for their constituents, no rabbi always says or does the right thing, no medical treatment always protects everyone who gets it, nor does it fail everyone who gets it, either. It’s tempting, and it’s easy, to want to label people or things as being 100% of something, and it can be satisfying to then tell other people about the labels you’ve come up with. Measuring everything in this kind of black-and-white way can feel good in the moment, but in reality, almost everything actually exists in some kind of uncertain and ambiguous state of gray – which means that those labels are both inaccurate and limiting. Being alive, being human, is a complex, messy, glorious combination of an enormous number of beliefs, preferences, experiences, and associations. When we try to reduce anything or anyone to simple descriptions or labels, we oversimplify things that are complex, we eliminate their potential to be the multiplicity that they are, and we both lose our ability to realistically relate to them, as well as eliminating their ability, for us, to be whatever they are and whatever they’re going to be. We are the people who pray to something that is dynamic, not static (grammatically, our most commonly used name for God, Yud Hey Vav Hey, is actually a combination of the past, present, and future forms of the verb ‘to be’). When we get mad at someone or something for being in flux, for being undecided or uncertain, we may be doing what’s become the norm in Western society, but we’re going against Judaism by taking away that person or thing’s ability to grow and change and evolve, by taking away its ability to answer questions with more questions.
I’m aware that my takeaway message this morning is more procedural than it is particular. Jewish tradition does not specifically address how to act during a global viral pandemic, or how to deal with global climate change – but it does model how to approach difficult and complicated scenarios. Jewish tradition teaches us that there are no simple answers to complex questions, and that we shouldn’t expect them from others. It teaches us that we always can and should ask more in-depth questions, and that we should not become frustrated or angry when we don’t get easy answers – nor when we don’t get the answers that we want to hear. It teaches us instead to practice our values to the best of our ability, to kindly yet firmly remind our fellows of these values when we see them veering away from them, and to do our best to apply our values to whatever new situations come along. Throughout our history, we’ve been enslaved and redeemed, our most sacred site has been destroyed twice, we’ve been exiled from our homeland multiple times, and 1/3 of our population on the planet has been systematically exterminated. We’ve dealt with enormous uncertainty, countless times – and yet we’re still here. We must be on to something.
These days, we live with so much uncertainty, that I think we rush to label and define in order to have something that feels certain, something that we can count on. As we start this new Jewish year, we need to be vigilant in the face of this drive to simplify, so that we can better remember our true nature as Jews, which might allow us to better cope with the uncertain. The inherent nature of Judaism teaches us to celebrate and to perpetuate complexity, instead of to gravitate towards the simple, and to remember that the solutions to complicated problems are rarely tied up in neat and simple packages. May 5782 be a year in which we better remember, and better embody, this inherent nature of Judaism: to tolerate the uncertain, to celebrate complexity, and to resist the easy appeal of oversimplifications. May we weather the rising tide of uncertainty in our lives, and in the world, both with grace and compassion, and by replying to significant questions with even better ones. Ken yehi ratzon – may this be God’s will. And let us all say “Amen.”
