Rabbi Joshua Waxman: September 2006 Archives

It’s fascinating to see the wide range of intense emotions that fasting has generated on Virtual Talmud, from gratitude and appreciation to distaste, even disgust.

I think one of the reasons we may have such strong feelings on the subject is that fasting stands outside of much of our day-to-day experience of Judaism, with its emphasis on thankfulness, divine service, celebration, and giving back to the world. Fasting draws on another facet of Judaism, one that is generally less pronounced–that of penance.

As Rabbi Grossman reminds us, the Torah tells us that on Yom Kippur we are to “afflict our souls” as a part of the way we make atonement. We don’t bathe, we don’t eat, we don’t drink, we abstain from sexual intimacy. It can feel foreign, like someone practicing self-flagellation to cleanse himself or herself of sinfulness which, in a way, it is.

Perhaps it’s our ambivalence about fasting and other forms of penance that we recognize when we wish fasters a ‘tzom kal’–an easy fast. If the purpose is to afflict our souls, wouldn’t an easy fast sort of defeat the point? It’s clear that we fast for a variety of reasons, and some find it more meaningful than others. But I think the different philosophical bases for fasting may be part of why this practice is harder to get behind emotionally than many others in Jewish life.

May we all have an easy–and meaningful–fast.

I’m disappointed by Rabbi Stern’s pessimism.

There’s no question that there is much to be dismayed about in the year that is drawing to a close, and I can’t dispute the prevailing mood of anxiety and concern. Which is why Rosh Hashanah is all the more important.

It promises a new beginning and, more than that, it promises real change–the possibility of heading down a new path. Midterm elections are coming up in a few months, and at this moment senators are debating a proposal that could reassert limits over presidential power. Germany just pledged a large contingent of U.N. peacekeeping troops for Lebanon, and the United States has named a special envoy to deal with Sudan.

It’s possible that all of this may come to naught, but that possibility is a certainty when we give in to despair and–worse–complacency. Rosh Hashanah isn’t about rosy-eyed optimism, and it certainly acknowledges the real difficulty in implementing lasting change–personally or internationally–but it does affirm that such change is possible. It’s a lesson we would do especially well to take to heart after a trying year.

A year of peace and blessing for us all.

This week is the final countdown to Rosh Hashanah, the day when our fates are written for the New Year. The liturgy tells us that God sits in heaven judging all people and writing our fates in a giant book–“Who will live, and who will die; who will see fullness of years and whose death will be untimely.”

The sad thing is that for many Jews, the very imagery of the holiday that is supposed to spur us to mend our ways can make it hard for us to get there.

A king on a throne? There was certainly a time that that image invoked reflexive awe and reverence, but today it can sometimes feel downright quaint. God writing our fates in a book? Most Jews today don’t think of God as a puppeteer pulling the world’s strings, deciding who is rewarded and who is punished.

So what to do?

It would be tragic if the imagery of Rosh Hashanah kept Jews from realizing the main point of the holiday which, in a word is: Change. Not apologize, not forgive–all of those are simply(!) means to an end of entering the New Year as a different, hopefully better, person than the one who said good-bye to the last one.

Rosh Hashanah promises us that change is possible, but as anyone who’s ever been through a 12-step program knows, genuine change is hard. How do you recreate yourself on the anniversary of Creation to be a person not bound by the same resentments, frustrations, cycles, and demons that have marked your life to this point?

The answer, I think, is two-pronged: fear and hope. The fear serves as the motivation to change, since real change is so hard to accomplish. The iconography of the king on the throne may not work for us, but recognizing our lack of control over what will happen to us in the coming year can. Stopping to acknowledge, as the "Unetaneh Tokef" prayer does, our powerlessness, that we may die this year, can serve as a spiritual shake by the shoulders–the slap in the face from reality we may need to get the process started.

The other piece of the equation is hope–the trust that if we begin the difficult and painful process of change we will be supported, will be met halfway. Once again, we don’t need the traditional imagery of the holiday to convey that point to us. Instead we pray, surrounded by community, confessing shared sins and making shared promises to try to do better. It is the support of the community, reaching out together to appeal to God, that can give us the strength to make the New Year a truly New Year.

As a rabbi, I find myself in a bit of a bind when it comes to the question of synagogue membership and the High Holidays. On one hand, I’d never want to turn anyone away who wants to pray at the holidays–who would? And we don’t–non-members can still purchase tickets at my synagogue, and we always make sure that even those are discounted for anyone who can’t afford them.

So why charge fees at all? Well, besides the obvious point about synagogues’ needing to pay the bills, which Rabbi Grossman points out, there’s the additional issue of community. In short, simply purchasing–or not purchasing–High Holiday tickets reinforces a consumer à la carte mentality: Pay for what you want, leave the rest.

This is great when it comes to cell phones–I just signed on for a new plan, and it was great to select only the options I wanted and not to be charged for services I don’t need. But unlike a cell phone plan, a relationship with a community isn’t–or at least shouldn’t be–utilitarian.

Can you imagine a membership plan that included High Holiday tickets plus entrance to another holiday of the member’s choice, two pastoral meetings with the rabbi, coffee at kiddush but no Danish, and no more than one life-cycle event per year? True, you might pay less, because you only purchase what you use, but you lose much more–a sense of belonging, of emotional connection, of expansiveness, of knowing you have a stake in something and that it has a stake in you in return.

Organizations that promote no-membership High Holidays may have found a great outreach tool and capitalize on resentment against membership dues that are justly criticized as too high. But by encouraging a consumer approach to Judaism–shop for the best bargain, never make more of an emotional commitment than you have to–they may be doing the Jewish community a grave disservice.

Rabbi Stern raises some very legitimate points about how disenfranchising it can be when prayers are in Hebrew if you don’t understand the language. That being said, I don’t agree with his solution of abandoning the siddur (the Hebrew prayer book) altogether. A couple of other possibilities:

• find a better siddur – Rabbi Stern’s point about the dry, uninspiring English translations and readings is well taken. This is especially the case for the old-style siddurs many of us grew up with: “We thank Thee for the tasks we shared together, and for the hours we communed with Thee”! Fortunately, there are some fabulous, modern prayer books out there. "Kol Haneshamah," the prayer book of the Reconstructionist movement, used a Hebrew scholar and poet to translate the prayers into English that maintains much of the imagery and power of the original. It also contains many additional moving and thought-provoking supplemental readings, as do a variety of other more recent prayer books.
• supplement, don’t remove – enrich services with elements besides the Hebrew prayers. Guided meditation, additional readings, chanting, movement–all of these are ways to get at the power behind the words, even if we can’t understand them.
• praying is about more than just understanding the words – at times we tend to get very intellectual about prayer which is, after all, not fundamentally an intellectual enterprise. Understanding is good, but the ancient (and modern!) words have a power that goes beyond just comprehension. Whether it’s knowing that these words have been spoken by countless generations, or trigger a childhood memory, or simply keep our minds busy so our souls may truly pray, there is a value to using the Hebrew even if we don’t understand every word.

Bottom line: the Hebrew of the prayer book is poetry. More to the point, it’s our people’s poetry. We should add to it, adapt it, update imagery for modern sensibilities, certainly skip sections, and use plenty of English as well–but we ignore it at our peril. As poetry, the prayers contain much more than we understand on first–or second, or hundredth–reading, and there is much that gets lost in the translation.