Please rise. You may be seated. Now take a deep breath and focus – on my
sermon, obviously, but on where we are and what we’re doing right now. About hungering to live the special moments
God puts into your lives, what we can gain when we encounter the record others,
even ourselves from the past, leave to us of such moments they’ve had, and the
great sin of failing to treasure both.
A lot of what I do is
what I just did – give stage instructions.
And if you’ve been here for a Bar or Bat Mitzvah on Shabbat, you’ll know
I have a sort of routine for giving to the expanded congregation of non-regular
attendants some of the choreography, some of the rules and regulations to
follow while with us, for the simchah, for the event. My goal is always to be welcoming and
non-judgmental, while still trying to get the major points across. And one of those is always about not using
cell phones and other devices, in particular, to take pictures.
From a halachic
perspective of course doing anything with your phone is a problem, not just taking
pictures. But not only does that not
help get the point across for many of the guests, it’s also because the biggest
problem, as I see it, is with the need to take pictures at a time like that - you
are stealing from yourself and probably from others in trying to do so.
So, what do I usually
point out? I ask why would you want to
spend this whole special event trying to take pictures instead of participating
in it firsthand? That actually does catch
the attention of a few people and invest them in experiencing and not just recording.
In Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade there’s a line where Indiana complains to his father for
not remembering something but rather having written it down in his now stolen
journal. “But I wrote it down so I wouldn’t have to remember it!” is the
father’s answer.
That is why we take such
pictures, to remember, and in remembering, to “live again.” Recording should be an aid to memory. It is vitally important to remember the
lessons of the past and to experience them again. To connect, in a second-hand yet direct way,
with those who loved us and cared for us who we can only know in such
ways. It can be very powerful even, to
have that sort of interaction with a picture.
That in itself can be, a sort of first-hand experience if we let
it.
But what happens when
recording doesn’t work? When it
distracts? We suffer today because of
this. Because we are still programmed,
innately I think, to want a picture to speak directly to a momentous
occasion. For those of you in the know
about such things – this is, I would contend, the attraction of Instagram. To elevate the average picture to something
more like art – because that’s what we want these captured moments to be.
But if you’ve ever
scrolled through endless pictures on your phone wondering what you are looking
at, you recognize that this isn’t what we’re getting when we snap everything we
see.
Not only did we probably
miss the original experience by doing that, which is pretty awful to admit, we
now have worthless pictures that we can’t even have a meaningful connection
to.
But think of this
scenario instead. What happens when you
stumble upon old pictures of your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents,
kept safe over decades and now brought again to light – at least for me, it’s
fascinating. It’s hard to think today that
once, taking pictures or movies had to be done somewhat judiciously, making
even “casual” pictures more significant.
Coming from a time when the ability to “half-experience” and
“half-record” and do neither well was less developed and thus less a problem.
Those sorts of pictures –
sure, in part because they’re old, but I think because they were, just a little
more curated, just a little more thoughtfully taken, are the sorts of pictures
that one can have a real “first-second-hand” experience with. You might not have been born, but your
Zayde’s smile at 12 is still the same one you knew at that age, however long
ago that was, when he showed it to you, too.
Rosh Hashanah, the Head
of the Year, is also known Yom Zichron Truah, the Day for Remembering
the Shofar, and even simply, Yom HaZikaron, the day of memory – “living”
memory if we are lucky.
And shortly in the Mussaf
service, we will recite the Zichronot section, recalling how our past as
Jews is made up of countless moments in which God remembered us and was there
to guide and strengthen us.
And that tension between
experiences, recording and remembering and living – it’s here with us in our
liturgy as well. Because, while if I’ve
done my job right, you have your phone off – if you’re looking to have that
first-hand experience – something spiritual, something transcending, something moving
– the way we feel at say a wedding or a funeral perhaps – I wonder if that’s
happening. I really do. No doubt for some it does happen. And I bet for many - here and there - as we
hear the Cantor chanting some melody that is full of yearning and pathos, we
are moved. That it happens as we share
with our children or grandchildren the holiday.
But I also bet that for
many of you, for much of our service, you may be struggling. And that struggle may not be limited to just
the High Holidays. It’s probably true
about much of the rest of what I’ll call “organized” Jewish life.
I find that so
frustrating. I want so desperately for Jewish
learning and Jewish observance to be deeply part of all your lives. For you all to want to put down whatever else
might distract you so as to be immersed in this time we share together, and in
Jewish life all year long. But I
recognize that it can seem silly, impossible for that to happen.
That’s why I want you to
consider the types of pictures I mentioned before. Today, during those moments that might not
feel transcendent, that aren’t of the sort where you’re in awe -- today as we pray
from the machzor, the prayer book, and you find yourself wandering, consider
this.
The machzor, and all our
rituals, are like leafing through an old family album. We are looking at this picture with something
written with a fountain pen, in Yiddish, inscribed on the back, of a stern man
and a strong woman, staring out at us.
The picture is captivating, it draws us in. I’m connected to these people! What they did in their lives led to me being
here in mine.
And then we keep
looking. We find older images still –
sketches, paintings. Ancestors who seem
ever more and more different from us, but still our ancestors, still
part of our story. And now we find the
oldest artifacts – carved on stone, made in mosaic. Would you reject these? Would you put them in a shoe box with the
pictures of you in a powder-blue tux or with tremendously teased up hair?
No! You would display that stele, that sculpture,
that scroll, that manuscript as your most prized possession. “This was painted by one of my ancestors 200,
400, 700 years ago!” People would be in
awe of that. You would be in of awe
that!
That is what we encounter in the machzor today, in the Torah reading
today. Perhaps you’re the family
genealogist and you recognize many of these pictures and can read Aunt Sylvia’s
handwriting on the back of the picture – then these prayers and readings may
certainly speak to you in a deep and broad and powerful way.
But even if you’re just
looking at these pictures for the first time, knowing that some how you’re
connected to them – that is still a powerful experience to be had.
That is the way to approach our Jewish heritage and our Jewish
observances. Think of them as the box of
very old photos, as the precious heirloom, as the museum piece made by someone
with your same last name – alive with memory!
Now for me, that speaks
to my dedication and devotion to stay true to the prayers and traditions as we
have inherited them. Because to overly
rely on contemporary updates in place of the traditional ones, even the
difficult traditional ones, and some are even for me – is to slot that teased
bangs and mullet prom picture into the frame in place of the sepia-toned
photograph of my great-grandparents at their wedding – why would I ever do
that?
Yet that isn’t to say
that every so often I do manage to take a really special picture that is worth
keeping. I think we can all agree that
many of the readings we say in American English today might feel stilted and
dated in just a decade or two - there are prayers that must, and have, and do,
make the cut. Even in English.
The prayer for our
country, is an example. A country that
even with all its problems has treated Jews like human beings, deserves it.
A prayer for Israel – a
true miracle worthy of something new added.
A prayer to call a woman to
the Torah. Yes, that must be there.
A prayer for that same
woman to remember her deceased wife at Yizkor, yes, how could we not have that?
Yet as much as I value
these old prayers and old rituals and old readings just the way I would rightly
value ancient evidence of my family’s long history. I still yearn most for an experience now and
today.
The machzor is addressing
exactly this, too. At those points you
can freely and fully interact with the service directly and first-hand, go for
it.
But for those times you
might not be able to, try considering that you aren’t looking through a
thousand bad shots of someone’s floor accidently taken with their phone. Rather, that what we hold is the carefully
collected and curated, well-staged and well-lit record of the prayers our
people have come to feel are the best, most representative, most comforting,
challenging, endearing, enduring, for us on this day. Arrived at over countless generations, and
the experiences of countless Jews – and here they are, distilled into this one
book.
That’s a reminder to live
life not showing up to the Bat Mitzvah taking pictures before anything
even happens - or taking pictures straight through the touching speech by the
grandparents and thus missing it entirely.
Our tradition encourages
us often to “turn off” and just experience the world – on Shabbat and on
Holidays. And other aspects of our
rituals foster a similar worldview of thoughtfulness and even constraint. The concept of kavannah, “intention”
is meant to make us focus on the mitzvah, the prayer at hand.
We should take from the
High Holidays a lesson for living – looking not to snap a photo of everything,
every day but rather to experience as richly and deeply and directly the
momentous and mundane of life – for living is the greatest gift of all and to
not embrace it is to reject what our tradition teaches is why God created us in
the first place.
Yet we should also learn
that there are certain moments that really are going to stand the
test of time. And that those timeless
moments call out to us even when they aren’t our own direct experiences. They nevertheless speak to us of universal,
timeless experiences. Our machzor is one
example Judaism gifts to us with its collection of such treasures. We should make our encounter with the
services today one of wonder and awe and curiosity at the treasure box we hold
in our hands, for in it, we will see ourselves in the mirror of the past, and a
pathway towards meaningful and holy moments in our future.
L’shanah Tovah Tikateivu
& Gut Yontif
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