Rabbi

Melissa Klein

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David Smith

Vice President

Madeleine Langman

Vice President

Bronek Drozdowicz

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Izzy Studzienko

Recording Secretary

Barbara Katz

Corresponding Secretary

Anita Goldman

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Cary Oshins

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Gwen Greenberg
Janet Glassman
Julie Mackey
Leslie Collins
Lisa Schnell
Mark Stein
Sharon Minnick
Sylvia Sussman
Rochelle Topolsky

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Rosh Hashanah Sermon [cont'd]

I imagine that I am not alone in having been taught as a child that the Book of Life is open during this season, and that God is writing down every misstep we make during the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. According to what I was taught, our behavior during this season determines our fate for the next year. This season stirred up fear—fear of a God who was watching closely and judging and preparing to punish us for our wrongdoing. When I was a young adult, one of my teachers mentioned how much he loves this time of year, and I could not understand what he was talking about, as these were days of fear and dread.

Thankfully, my theology and understanding of this season have evolved and deepened with time, and I too have come to love and appreciate the blessings of High Holidays. Our tradition gives us the opportunity each year as the month of Elul arrives to take stock of our lives and to make amends, and to experience a rebirth into a New Year. The essence of our work in this season is teshuva, a process by which we repair our relationships with one another and with the Divine. As we studied earlier today, the early rabbis considered teshuva to be one of the things that existed in the world even before Creation—which means that the potential for change and transformation is a core aspect of the human experience. There is always hope for repair and return, and God is eagerly waiting for us to do teshuva—the gates of teshuva are always open, even until our last breath. This is a season of tremendous hope, as we move towards being more at peace with ourselves, as we learn to let go of hurts and guilt and the expectation to be perfect.

And yet, even if we do not believe that God is waiting to punish us, the beginning of a New Year is a fearful time. We do not know what the New Year has to bring—who will live and who will die, who will become sick and who will experience physical healing, who will become rich and who will become poor. There is so much that is out of our control, so many things of which to be afraid. One important aspect of teshuva is learning to overcome our fears, and as I will explore in this sermon, to move from a sense of fear to a sense of awe.

We commonly refer to this season as the “Days of Awe”, the Yamim Noraim. The word Noraim is from the Hebrew root yod-resh-alef, which means both fear and awe. Thus, Yamim Noraim can be translated as both “Days of Fear” and “Days of Awe.” What is the relationship between fear and awe? Fear is the expectation that something bad will happen, and in healthy doses, can keep us from taking unnecessary risks and motivate us to take care of ourselves. However, fear, especially when it’s related to things over which we have little or no control, can also be paralyzing and make us withdraw. As Abraham Joshua Heschel notes in his book God in Search of Man (p.77), “Awe, unlike fear, does not make us shrink from the awe-inspiring object, but on the contrary, draws us near to it.” Experiencing awe, which he describes as “the sense of wonder and humility inspired by the sublime” is “compatible with both love and joy.” Perhaps fear and awe are described by the same Hebrew word, yirah, because they are both reactions to moments of danger and uncertainty, to that over which we do not have control. We have the choice to respond to challenging situations we face with either fear or awe, and a core task of the Yamim Noraim is to notice where our fears are holding us back and to let go and allow those places of fear to transform into awe.

As many of you know, my partner Neysa and I became mothers this year. As new parents, we have encountered many new fears—will our child be healthy? Will he be happy? Will he be safe? Will he become independent? Whom do we trust to care for him when we’re not around? Are we being good enough parents? As we have discovered new fears, we have also been learning that facing these fears is a path to draw closer to God’s presence and to a sense of the miraculous.

One such powerful experience of facing our fear happened just a few weeks ago, during Elul, the month of preparation for High Holidays. Our son Tani, who was about 7 months old at the time, was not sleeping well—since his birth, he had woken every 2 hours at night to eat, and I was beginning to get very run down. I started reading books and consulting with other parents on how to handle Tani’s sleep issues. What I discovered is that there are a lot of feelings and judgements around babies and sleep—there are those who let their babies cry and learn to soothe themselves to sleep and those who do not believe in what is referred as the Ferber method or “the cry it out method.” As a new, inexperienced parent who wants the best for my child, it was hard to sort out what the best thing to do was. If I let my baby cry, would he feel abandoned? If I didn’t get more sleep, would I ever be able to work again?

Ultimately, I realized that I was afraid of leaving Tani alone and letting him cry, and that I needed to push through this fear to help Tani (and his Moms) to sleep better. With moral support from our pediatrician and friends, we decided on a night to put Tani in his crib following our bedtime routine and let him cry himself to sleep, if need be. It was not easy to leave Tani that night; however, what ultimately helped me through was inviting God’s help. A few minutes before we put Tani down to bed, I took out a permanent marker and a set of white pajamas and wrote the Hebrew names of the protective angels that are part of the bedtime shema on his pajamas. I also wrote a phrase from Psalm 27, the Psalm for the High Holiday season. There is a verse that reads, “My father and mother have abandoned me and God will gather me up.” While we were not literally abandoning Tani, leaving him alone and upset had a quality of abandoning him, and I wrote the end of this verse, hashem ya’asfeini, God will gather me up, on his pajamas as well, and I put him down in his crib and closed the door.

The next forty-five minutes as he screamed were one of the most difficult moments I have gone through and also the most spiritual. I davenned, I prayed to God to be with Tani, to protect Tani, to help Tani fall asleep, to help him with something with which I could not help him, I prayed the last line of Adon Olam, hashem li v’lo ira, that God be with me so that I would not be afraid. I prayed and prayed and wrote in my journal and realized that what I was really afraid of was that the baby might die. This was a profound insight for me, and as I continued writing, I realized that this was something to which I needed to entrust God—we need to be vigilant in our care as parents, but ultimately how long he is going to live is in God’s hands. Realizing that life and death are in God’s hands has made me so much less afraid.

As this insight came, I noticed that the baby was no longer crying. Since that moment, while we are still in the process of helping Tani learn to sleep, I have been moved by a sense of awe that babies can learn to soothe themselves to sleep, and while I feel a loss that my baby no longer needs me as much at night, I also feel a sense of how awesome it is that babies develop independence and grow away from their parents, and how awesome it is that God is my partner in watching over our baby. That night I felt that I was in the presence of a miracle—not just that he slept much better than he ever had, but also that this experience opened me up to God’s presence.

During these Yamim Noraim, which we might translate as days to nurture our sense of awe, I pray that we gain courage to face our fears, to notice where fears are holding us back, and to invite God’s help in overcoming those fears. As the beloved Rebbe Nachman song goes, “Kol Haolam Kulo gesher tzar me’od, vhaikar lo lefached clal” All the world is a very narrow bridge—we are on a narrow bridge between life and death, wealth and poverty, sickness and health, and the essence is to not fear at all, and rather to move through our fear to a place of awe and wonder. May we all be blessed with heightening our sense of awe as we travel through this 10 days—and also with good nights sleep. Amen selah.