The following sermon was delivered by Rabbi Ariana Katz on erev Rosh Hashanah 5781.
September 18, 2020 • 1 Tishrei 5781
Shanah tovah, once again. The wheel of the year is turning, and there is something so brazen about marking Rosh Hashanah right now. A little too on the nose, reflecting on the year that was, and the unknown challenges of the year ahead, don’t you think?
It is, as it always is, a profound joy to welcome the new year with you, on our third High Holy Days together. Wow. Though we are far apart from one another, it brings such comfort to mark this time together. We are adapting, because we must. Evolving to meet the new world in front of us each day. Bringing in the new year necessitates reflecting on the year that was, who we were in the past year, who we commit to becoming. What the world was in the past year, and what we commit to building up in the year ahead.
For some of us here tonight, the past year has been filled with profound personal tragedy, sickness, death, loss of income or employment, relationships ending, infertility, pregnancies lost, gender affirming care delayed or denied, incarcerated loved ones in harms way, separation from beloved family and friends, the continued brutalizing of Black and brown bodies, environmental loss and devastation, work as educators, health care providers, essential workers increasing risk and stress. For all of us here tonight, the past year has been filled with isolation, loneliness, fear for what is to come, despair for the horrors and injustices of this country and this world.
And for all of us, this year has also shown us growth. Resilience. Bravery. Humility. Honesty. Humanity. Vulnerability. Strategy. Love. Passion. And of course, dark humor.
But tonight, something is beginning. The world outside is just being conceived, with unknowable growth and promise on its way. Over these Yamim Noraim, these Days of Awe, we will hold many truths at once. Earlier this month, Michele our board president shared Torah from facilitator and author Adrienne Marie Brown, who said "apocalypse and temporary utopia co-exist." Perhaps this resonates with what the year has been like for you--moments of temporary utopia amidst profound destruction. Over these Yamim Noraim, we will stretch to allow apocalypse and utopia to co-exist in our hearts and our bodies. We will use the wisdom of one another, our ancestors both genetic and claimed, our received and co-created tradition, to hold many truths at once.
Hayom harat Olam. Today, the world was conceived. Stretch into the renewal of this season, of your commitments, of how you show up for your most beloved, how you react with as your best self to your least beloved. Stretch into the world that is being born, in all its potential.
This is awe inspiring time--full of fear in what is being destroyed, what is decaying, and hopefully awe of what is transforming. As you might have remembered from last year’s high holy days, our focus for the year was a bit...premonitory. Makom, Divine place, the experience of noticing the land you are on as sacred. The experience of understanding the Divine through knowing about the beauty of the earth. The transformation of a random spot into a Makom Kadosh, realizing you are in holy place. It turns out we would all be understanding the places we reside in new ways for the second half of 5780.
Beginning tonight, we elevate time. How we spend our days, and assessing what is called from us in this moment has filled conversation and prayer for at least half a year in quarantine. When the spaces we travel are so incredibly limited, how do we instead lift up the time we spend?
Beloved teacher and activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote famously in The Sabbath about just this connection between space in time. “
The seventh day is a palace in time in which we build. It is made of soul, of joy and reticence. In its atmosphere, a discipline is a reminder adjacent to eternity.”
He continues, “The Jewish contribution to the idea of love is the conception of love of the Sabbath, the love of a day, of spirit in the form of time.”
While we cannot physically be together tonight, we build sanctuary in the way we sanctify time. Through our intention, we create a place we can visit. Through moving into “time out of time,” stepping out of the crush of each moment as it flows without recognition into the text, we instead experience eternity. In 5781, we welcome meditation on sacred time, to number and give meaning to our days.
Heschel writes so beautifully about the opportunities to reimagine our priorities when we engage thoughtfully about time. “The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work...the Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude, but the climax of living.”
It offers us pause: why do you rest? Is it to restore energy, to “get back out there?” Or because your body demands it of you? Or because rest, restoration, pleasure, are the reasons for life? We do not all have the luxury to spend our time however we choose--if any of us at all do. We work to survive in a capitalist society that does not prioritize human thriving above amassing wealth and power. As my hevruta often says to me, “it’s not you, it’s capitalism.” We have so little control over our time and energy, as parents, children, as workers, as people for whom your mere existence is resistance, who can think of thriving? But in the time you can control--how does it reflect your values, your hopes and dreams for this world? The reason for living?
Author, activist, philosopher, and feminist Grace Lee Boggs, of blessed memory, is known for asking this particularly singular question that calls us to contextualize the moment we are in: “What time is it on the clock of the world?” Focused, powerful Torah. In the 1974 book she co-wrote with her husband James Boggs, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, they vision all of human history on a clock, every minute representing 50 years. They argue that the age of revolutions was only four or five minutes old...Scientific revolutionary thinking...In 1974 when they were writing, the US Civil Rights Movement began merely 15 seconds previously.”(1)
Time is both incredibly close, and incredibly fast moving. How dare we imagine any one moment as isolated, or immutable? How dare we imagine any of our suffering as isolated, or immutable? The Boggs’ help us contextualize movements into moments. By choosing to imagine the clock of the world linearly, we can see just how interconnected thousands of moments are into each other, and how recent even borders, revolutions, and moments are. How history is told, written, framed, can completely reshape the reality of what happened. We must guard this question carefully.
For Jews, time is not linear, or at least, there are other ways to tell time. Time loops back on itself, fulfilling the “Jeremy Beremy” concept of the Good Place (the idea that time actually looks more like the cursive handwriting of the word Jeremy Beremy. The dot over the “i” is: Tuesdays, July, and "occasionally...the moment where nothing never occurs."
This is best seen in Tisha b’Av, the national day of Jewish mourning, in which we commemorate every tragedy that has befallen the Jewish people, which somehow coincidentally happened on the same day on the calendar. But just 15 hours into the holiday, we set our sights on the future, the coming of Liberation, which we are so convinced is on its way we sweep our house to get ready for Messiah’s arrival. Over the span of one day, we are in the depths of despair for losses 3000 years ago, and convinced a perfected future is on its way. Apocalypse, utopia.
The Boggs family “stressed their long view of history because so that we can understand that things are always changing.” (2) Our Jewish tradition stresses a spiral view of history so that we can understand moments are so deeply interconnected.
At Selichot last Saturday we had the opportunity to hear some of our members sing this beautiful song from Annie Zylstra, with the lyrics “I believed in solid ground, until I saw the Earth in motion.” For me, my experience of time is similar to this feeling, of standing in the ocean, and feeling like I am not moving, knowing I am not moving, until I see that the waves have carried me yards from where I started.
I am struck by the danger of acclimating. Of not knowing what time it is on the clock of the world. Of not stepping out of a linear push that blends each moment into the next. Anne Helen Petersen wrote of this peril, of becoming acclimated and numb to each moments change, how the powerful take advantage of our getting used to each next horror, to pacify us. She wrote of the danger of this being:
In short: we acclimate. We decide this is just the way things are, and that the number of deaths — in our community, in our country, in our world — is acceptable, because if it were unacceptable, wouldn’t we be expected to act differently? Wouldn’t we ask our elected officials to behave differently? Wouldn’t we fight until it was acceptable again? But we’re too exhausted for that.
There is a lobster pot reference here…
By sanctifying time, we notice it. By sanctifying time, we bring intention to our days, and rather than being carried away and numbed without knowing, we are invited to be active agents in how our time plays out. We sanctify time when we choose how to tell it--how we mark our days by the Jewish calendar, instead of only by the secular Christian calendar. We sanctify time when we mark history in generations of movements, speaking the names of our teachers then sharing their teachings. We sanctify time when we refuse for each moment to be about hoarding, conquest, and production. We sanctify time when we know the phase of the moon, the season of planting we are in, the pattern of the migratory birds. We sanctify time when we truth tell about how far we have to go.
Heschel teaches that “the likeness of G!d can be found in time, which is eternity in disguise.” The likeness of G!d can be found in noticing time--the ways in which we learn from our past, dream for the future, dedicate our present to fighting for justice and for one another. By sanctifying time, we refuse to let ourselves be fooled that incremental (or sometimes, tectonic) shifts that result in more death, more despair, more destruction are acceptable. By taking note of the time, we are called to the presence of Divine becoming.
We are being called to face profound challenges in this moment. In our personal lives and in our collective lives, the suffering is and may be so great. What time is it in Divine becoming? How are you being invited into the becoming of this moment? How can you pay greater attention to what is transforming? Asking Grace Lee Boggs’ question, “what time is it on the clock of the world?” invites us to take a pause and ask, “what time is it in Divine becoming?” and “for what is this moment calling?”
May it be a year of transformation for good. May the clock strike the hour of justice.
May we act on the teachings of this time.
May we be blessed on the merits of our ancestors.
May we move into time out of time, to tase utopia and eternity, to build it now.
May you and your beloveds be written into the book of Life for goodness and blessing.
Shanah tovah.