On our way from synagogue on Wednesday afternoon, the second day of Rosh Hashana, we happened to meet an old friend of ours, a woman whose son died in an even more pointless way than Asher did.
She and her husband have reached out and offered us support, but we haven't accepted that offer yet - not because we don't like them, but because we've been overextended. There's too much to deal with, and our emotions are exhausting.
Our friend gave Judith a hug and said, "What a shitty holiday this is," which was both deeply honest and a bit surprising from an orthodox Jewish woman, speaking about one of the three most sacred days of the year in the Jewish calendar.
The main theme of the Jewish calendar between the beginning of the month of Elul, the last month of the the year, and the last day of the eight day holiday of Sukkot is repentance, judgment, punishment, and reward. The assumption is that if you've been good, or if you sincerely resolve to be good ("good" here means "keeping God's commandments), you won't die next year. Otherwise, you will die. The logical corollary is that if someone did die last year, God was punishing him for something. This is hardly a comforting thought for people in our position.
Another underlying theme of the High Holiday Liturgy is that, in fact, it is impossible for a human being to be good enough to merit life. If we are alive, it's because God is doing us a big favor, not because we deserve to live.
So along with the hope for renewal, which is a joyous emotion, there is a dark sense of foreboding and fear. There's a promise: you can have a new beginning. But there's also a threat, and the threat is more powerful (and believable) than the promise.
A hymn recited on the eve of Rosh Hashana says: Now there is an end to the year and its curses, now there is a start to a year and its blessings. But we said the same thing last year, and we didn't get blessings! What could possibly make us think that a year from now, we'll look back and say, "Too bad we're saying goodbye to this year and its blessings"? We know from bitter experience that a year from now, we'll be relieved to be rid of the year's curses, yet, somehow, we'll be optimistically looking forward to blessings this time around.
Not that there haven't been blessings for us, even in a year of tragic loss. Perhaps even the people in Burma whose homes were destroyed and families were decimated can think of a blessing or two. In life, as in a gambling casino, you ultimately lose to the house, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you won't have enjoyed a good stretch of the game.
None of this is a particularly new discovery. Before Asher died in an accident, and two of our friends, Angela and Gerald, died of cancer, and our friend's daughter Timora died of cancer as a teenager, and Asher's friend Eric hanged himself, we knew that many people die cruel and untimely deaths, deaths that make the Rosh Hashana liturgy difficult to take. The men who composed the prayers also did not live in an ideal world where good people lived to healthy old age and bad people died of diseases and accidents before reaching their prime. They knew as well as we did that life is often cruelly unfair.
So what did they mean by these prayers, and what can we mean by reciting them?
I have three answers.
One is social: we need the solidarity of participation in communal worship to keep ourselves together.
The second is, perhaps, magical or mystical: we hope that, by the force of our prayers, the world will become a good one, ruled by a merciful God.
Finally, we have deep need to give liturgical form to our fears about the uncertainty of life, in order to deal with them.
Zelig Lider, a wonderful man our age, whom we knew slightly over the years, one of the founders of a Jerusalem congregation, known for the intensity and beauty of its prayers, which meets just once a month and on the holidays, went into a coma just before the holiday and died on the second day, a great loss. The curses of the year have begun already.
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