Happy Rosh Hashanah! I Think?
Do you mean that it is more than a day off of school? Oh yes. This is the season in the Jewish calendar that is brilliant and potentially very powerful, community shaping and healing. Maybe – just maybe—this is one of the reasons that the Jewish community has survived and thrived over the millennia amid stiff oppression.
Rosh Hashanah is best known to we gentiles as the Jewish New Year. But if we only knew. It is nothing at all like the narcissistic individualistic New Years of the west. We can only recommit ourselves to individual self-improvement resolutions that last maybe a month—OK maybe a week.
For the Jew, this season is far more than that. This is a time for each pious Jew to get a spiritual, emotional, and relational re-do. Let’s face it, who has not screwed things up in the last month, much less year? I certainly have. Some of my bonehead actions and choices have been destructive to not only me but to friends and family. I can really try to make things right—but that is very hard to do often. That is the point of this blog site. Reconciliation is tough—real tough. Cheap forgiveness comes pretty easy—but an experience of the real McCoy is rare and hard to come by.
Imagine with me a time when an entire family, or community all come together committed to making things right for all unresolved issues of the previous year. This is the apparent goal for all Jews all over the globe each year at this time! Imagine the possibilities. I am not aware of anything remotely like this in my western European individualistic culture and mentality. Maybe there would be something among some First Nations peoples or maybe something from Asian cultures perhaps.
The event begins annually on the 1st of Ellul (August 15th this year) and continues through Rosh Hashanah (Sept. 13th) to the eve of Yom Kippur (Sept 22). Each Jew is to explore the ways that they have hurt others, robbed, gossiped, slandered, showed disrespect, etc. and do ‘teshuvah’ (deep repentance). Teshuvah involves not only the important asking for forgiveness, but also making reparation—paying any debt, making things right.
But reconciliation is two-way. For the community to experience a renewed shalom, there must also be forgiveness from the victim. At the end of the 10 days—just before sunset—just before the Yom Kippur, in many modern Jewish communities they say a wrap-up prayer similar to this,
I hereby forgive all who have hurt me, all who have done me wrong, whether deliberately or by accident, whether by word or deed, May no one be punished on my account. And I forgive and pardon fully those who have done me wrong, may those whom I have harmed forgive and pardon me, whether I acted deliberately or by accident, whether by word or deed. I am now ready to fulfill the commandment of “to love my neighbor as myself.
Imagine the possibilities if these prayers were really meant? Suspend your cynicism and resistance to this for a moment. Sure, these are mere words, but imagine if it was real. Not just you meaning this, but those around you—those you hurt this year, those who hurt you. Imagine the Judge God waving His hand over the community and saying, “It is finished!” Imagine the healing in the community. Imagine the healing between that community and others around it? Imagine starting each year with a re-do. Relationships which had degraded through increasingly entrenched negative feelings and anger –defused— and injected with a powerful new start?
For the Jew, this is a very serious exercise. Why? Because Rabbis teach that there are consequences—serious ones for not pulling this off. It is understood that annually on Yom Kippur (The Day of Payment) that God rises to the bench as the Judge of the Universe and opens the trial of each man’s heart. If they have no unresolved crimes, they are declared ‘tsaddiq- righteous’ and are blessed with a year of life. If there are any unresolved crimes, crimes that are not fully repented of, or not fully forgiven, then the person is declared ‘rasha’(-wicked)’—and are dealt a year of death.
I have been on board with the ritual up to this point. Here is my question to the Rabbis. Who pulls this off to the point that God says—“That’s good enough!” Who is tsaddiq? Or what can be said if everyone is annually found ‘rasha’-guilty?