Finding Our Resiliency - Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon

What do you do when the bottom drops out?  

I’m sure many of us are asking this question- specifically this year.   

Every year, I prepare for the High Holy Days with one thing in mind. I ask myself, “What do I need do to make this next year better than the year before?” Then I plan, ready when Rosh Hashanah hits to act. Each year I have a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for the coming year. I greet the High Holy Days with a sort of religious faith that this year will be the best one yet.   

But this year seems different. For the first time, I’m not sure I can authentically say that I know, that I believe, that the coming year will get any better. I pray this pandemic ends, I hope for a vaccine, I yearn to once again gather. But if I’m being honest, if I’m being authentic, I can’t make promises or plans, even to myself.  

Jews know this feeling well. We have countless examples throughout history of facing the future when the bottom drops out. For thousands of years, onlookers have marveled at the way our people have survived. Some have credited our enduring presence with our dedication to learning, others to our close knit communities, still others to our Jewish practices that we can perform in any land and any time. 

But I think what has kept us going is our resilience.  And like our ancestors, it is our resilience that will keep us going in the face of the uncertain future that each of us are facing now.  

The paradigmatic tragedy of the Jewish people, the one we base all others on, occurred when the First Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BCE. In a flash, the Babylonian armies had laid siege to our holy city, setting fire to our most sacred site and razing it to the ground. Testimonials from that time describe a “lonely city” once filled with people now a “widow” among the nations (Lam 1:1). The streets are deserted, the priests sigh, the maidens weep.   

With the temple in ruins the people are marched enmass from Jerusalem all the way up north to Babylonia and forced to remake their lives in exile. For some the decision to leave was too much. There is a haunting story of a group of priests who climb atop the Temple’s ruins offering their keys to God, before casting themselves down upon the rocks (Taanit 29b)  

But most went and it was heartbreaking. One of the more famous Psalms in our tradition describes a group of people who sat beside the waters of Babylon and wept. They pine for a life that was. And when a group of locals asks them to hum one of their native songs they cry out “how can we sing God’s song in a strange land?” (Psalm 137:4). Exile has stopped up their voice. 

I’m glad we have a record of this sadness. Our ancestors needed to feel this way. We need sadness. We need despondency. We need sorrow. We can’t move toward redemption and light if we ignore the tragedy and reality of our situations.   

I imagine that a subset of our people never those waters of Babylon. But many did. Many found a way to persevere. The Bible records a powerful turning point in the history of the Jews in exile, found in a speech by that generation’s great prophet, Jeremiah. Looking out at his generation, lost and forlorn Jeremiah implores them to find their resolve and make a home in their new land: 

Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters…multiply there, do not decrease. Seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to God in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper. (Jeremiah 29:5-7). 

Jeremiah’s command is deceptively simple: start living your life. In the face of adversity, find that little well of resilience that lives within you. Build your homes. Plant your gardens. Jeremiah goes on to tell the people to have faith that one day they will return home to Jerusalem, that God has plans for them, that they should look to the future with hope. But in the meantime, they can’t hit pause on life. 

For many of us, life has been paused. Even if you do everything right during this pandemic there will be aspects of your life that are frozen. For some of us these are our relationships. We’ve managed to find a way to see or call the most important people in our lives, but a large subset of others are lost to us. We don’t casually greet them at a social gathering or synagogue programs and we only realize their importance when we look at the gaping hole left by their absence. For others it’s a pause on our goals. Some of us might have lost a job. Others of us have frozen our search of a spouse or our quest to have a child. Many of us mourn the canceled activates, the missed trips, the hobbies left uncultivated. 

It is as if we have been forced to sit Shiva for the lives we had been living. 

We lay down by the rivers of Babylon and grieve. We sit squarely in the fear of an uncertain future unable to sing the songs we once sang. How can we sing such a song in this strange land we find ourselves in? 

But like our ancestors, each of us is blessed with a wellspring of resolve. We are resilient. And each of us can rise again. Our world is broken, we feel in exile, but it doesn’t mean we can’t find our own ways to follow Jeremiah’s advice: to plant, to build, to sow, to love. 

Our proverbs teach, “a righteous person can fall seven times and rise” (Prov 24:16) and that is exactly what we each must do. 

So how do we tap into that inner strength? How do we find that spark of resilience buried deep within us? 

First, know that you have been here before. True, no one has faced the exact challenge of our current era – every moment is unique- but each of us have overcome some challenge in our past. There is a powerful teaching in our Zohar that every time the Bible skips forward in time, using the phrase “And it came to pass” there was usually some kind of sorrow or loss found in that passage of time (Zohar 1:119b). Life is defined by periods of seemingly inescapable hardships, punctuated by moments of calm. But when we look back on a life lived, we find that somehow we escaped the inescapable. And we will do that for this current moment. 

Every one of us has a proven history of mourning deaths, finding new relationships, reconciling broken friendships. Every one of us knows how to heal, to mend, to salve our broken hearts. The only thing that separates this moment from those is that we don’t have models and mentors for overcoming pandemics. Every one of us is groping blindly, but together. 

And this leads me to my next piece of advice, work to forgive yourself when you fail to meet your own expectations but don’t give up on yourself entirely. Every one of us is imperfectly navigating this crisis. Not a day goes by that I don’t think that I’m failing someone. When I’m doing decent work at the congregation, I usually feel like a bad dad and husband. When I’m getting my home life right, I feel that I’m failing you, my congregation. Sooner or later, when we feel like we can’t do anything right, we stop trying. We give up. We despair. 

But the resilient keep marching forward. We forgive our inadequacies without growing complacent. We don’t hit pause on our lives. We figure out a way to keep going, albeit imperfectly. There is an ancient debate in the Talmud between two Rabbis, Hanina and Hiyyah about what to do in the face of the insurmountable challenge of preserving the Jewish tradition in a time of crisis. Hanina advocates for an all or nothing approach, “I’ll let the tradition fade away” he intimates “and when the crisis ends, I’ll help the community find its way back.” Hiyyah, disagrees. He would go to the ends of the earth not to let the tradition slip, even weaving nets to catch deer to make parchment to write the books his students might read. It’s no surprise that Hiyyah seems to win the debate. Time marches forward and so too should life. It might look different. It’s might be unbearably hard, but we must press on with the tools we have. 

And when we do, we might begin to see that there is good to hold onto even in this moment. Some of us have taken Jeremiah’s advice. We’ve literally planted gardens or fixed our up houses. Other’s have cultivated long-lost pieces of ourselves. We have learned to bake sourdough, gotten in shape, finally read that book or watched that show. Still others have reconnected with family we might not have have enough time for before the crisis hit. 

But I know that’s not everyone. And seeing your friends seemingly thrive on the curated façade of social media when you are struggling or stretched thin can only make this moment harder. 

But even if you don’t do any of those things I mentioned, even if your greatest goal is to make it from one minute to the next, you are still doing something worth celebrating. Every one of us has done something courageous over these past months, even if simply stepping outside. Every one of us has shown compassion, even if listening to a friend when you, yourself are running on empty. Every one of us has moved past our own experience in some way to turn on the news and send love from afar to a stranger we see on the screen. 

I admire everyone of you because, whether you realize it or not, at some moment during this crisis, you have embodied, even fleetingly, the best that is humanity. And that’s something to celebrate. 

But perhaps the greatest power many of have had over these months is the power of hope. To understand exactly what hope is and why it matters, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief Rabbi of Great Britain once wrote: 

One of the most important distinctions I have learned in the course of reflection on Jewish history is the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is the belief that things will get better. Hope is the belief that, together, we can make things better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope. Knowing what we do of our past, no Jew can be an optimist. But Jews have never – despite a history of sometimes awesome suffering – given up hope (The Dignity of Difference p. 206) 

The current state of the world makes it very difficult to be optimistic. There is too much unknown to have a rosy picture of the future. But nevertheless, I have hope. I believe that however much this current moment is difficult, I have within me the answers to make it, at least, a little better. I know that I have the strength to find a little more community, the tools to achieve a little more piece of mind, the means to have just a bit more balance. And so do you. We have an uncertain future ahead of us and we can’t promise ourselves everything will turn out fine. But we can hope. We can believe in our resolve to make tomorrow bit better than today. 

Two thousand years ago, a group of Rabbis were walking through the ruins of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, when they saw a group of foxes wandering among the rubble. They rent their garments in sorrow at what their religion had become. But one Rabbi, Rabbi Akiva started laughing. His companions turned to him, perplexed. Why laugh at a time like this? Akiva pointed to a prophesy he knew in the Bible, that the nadir, the lowest point of Jewish life would be found when foxes roam among the Temple’s ashes. Surely, he reminded them, that means that when history marches on, other prophesies, of old men and women sitting among the gates of a rebuilt Temple would be true as well. 

For many of us, this year is our nadir. But like Akiva, we can find images hidden within that give us hope for a better future. It might be an unexpected phone call, an act of kindness from a neighbor, a simple hello from afar when we stand atop our stoop.  There are millions of reasons to hope, all around us, if only we let them in. 

You may be feeling like our ancestors, sitting beside the waters of Babylon without a song to sing. But I believe you can get up. I believe that you have a symphony to give the world. 

Menachem Mendel of Kotsk once wrote: 

Three ways are open to a person who is in sorrow. One who stands on a normal rung weeps, one who stands higher is silent. But one who stands on the topmost run converts sorrow into song. 

So follow Jeremiah. Plant your gardens even with crooked rows. Build your houses even if the walls slant. Don’t wait. But most of all sing. Your tune may look different today. It may be broken, your voice may crack, you may stutter and stammer, but keep singing, even behind a mask. I promise you, the imperfect tune you compose will be beautiful and perfect.