Sep 29 2008 - Any new year is filled with possibilities - (Erev Rosh Hashanah 5769)

Any new year is filled with possibilities. When we as members of B’nai Chaim come together at this season, we look forward to what excitements and challenges life may have in store for us. This is what makes entering a new annum so delicious and gives to this holiday that quiet undercurrent of optimism.

Like a car moving from a stop at a newly green light, beginnings usually start slowly. And we all have said to ourselves at one time or another that all beginnings are hard. They take faith. They take patience. They take our putting one foot in front of the other until, at some point, we realize that we are walking in a direction, with purpose and determination, having acquired a sense of what we are doing.

What I am getting at is that although some of us may be pausing for these High Holidays in mid stride, others of us may be able to mark this day as a starting point of new ventures. In order to arrive, we have to have such a starting point. Taking that first step may be like beginning to climb a mountain, or meeting new people with whom we might want to team up so that we can compete as a team or form a community. At first, we may feel a bit awkward. At first what we may be trying to do may seem so much bigger than we are, so much more than we think we can accomplish.

Although for some like myself, this next exercise may be more of a challenge than for those of you who are younger, can you remember what your first day at kindergarten was like? For me, it was the beginning of a journey whose end was unknowable, unimaginable, seemingly unreachable...and, for some of us, it was daunting, to say the least. For me, there was traumatic angst, although I could hardly have known what those words actually meant at the time or have identified the emotions in myself. I just knew that I was scared and anxious, and didn’t want my mom who had brought me to this strange smelling, all too big place, to leave me there by myself with all these new faces.

If kindergarten is a chore for you to get back to in your memory, then do you remember a first Colorado mountain you climbed? You looked up to the summit and thought: I’ll never get there. Look how far away it is. Look at what I have to do to get there. What am I doing? What am I doing here? This is insane. But, you put one foot in front of the other and off you went anyway.

I imagine that this was something like what the folks who founded this congregation thought when first they met together. Who are these other people? Do I want them in my life? Do I want to be in theirs? And how do we do this Jewish thing? Where do we start? What’s involved in getting this endeavor off the ground? What’s the plan? Where are the resources going to come from? How much of it will have to come from me?

I think that this is the nature of what every B’nai Mitzvah student goes through at the beginning of his or her studies. I know that the doubts about accomplishing it accompany almost every one of them as they think about having to invest something of themselves, their energy and time in the enterprise. There is that within them that nags that they could just forget about it.

I think about Abraham who could well have stayed put and have refused God’s urgings to get himself up and going. After all, he was an old man when God’s call to go to a new land came to him. It would have been easy to turn away from the voice and not look forward but just stay anchored to the life he was living there in Haran.

It’s hard trying something new. It is hard, for example, to come back into life when a loved one dies. It is hard to step forward and take on that overwhelmingly huge but absolutely necessary project at work that’s been hanging over your head like a sword. It is hard to bring a new life into one’s family. It’s hard to move to a new house and get things into their places, enabling us to feel finally ready to move on. It is hard to cope with the avalanche of feelings when a marriage fails. It is hard to pick ourselves up after an illness and declare ourselves ready to get back into things. It is hard to make these beginnings.

At funerals, we often read the passage which reminds us that life is a journey. For some, that journey may involve what may seem to others as dangerous, high adventure. People who go skiing by jumping out of helicopters, folks who paraglide, white water raft, climb the steep rock faces of cliffs, vie for Olympic gold medals, or skydive may seem driven, daring, crazy and also a bit alluring to us. We might, enviously, compare our activities to theirs and think of ourselves as boring, mundane or stuck-in-the mundane- by-standers in the fast flow of life. But, being able to do those things is not the measure of the person.

Want that adrenaline rush? Try standing in front of a classroom of teenagers if you want real challenge. Try making a presentation to a group who are judging your performance in some way, like being a rabbi at High Holiday season! Try leading something you’ve never led before. Try saying that you are sorry when you know that you’ve offended someone, especially someone you love; when all your life you’ve really hated the taste of crow. Talk about taking chances. Talk about putting yourself on the line. Talk about having to have courage!

You see, it all depends on what we classify as high adventure because we all know that the grass is always more excitingly greener on someone else’s lawn. Oh, and let’s consider of this—probably the hardest of all challenges for any human beings: try raising kids to be grounded and moral and decent in these modern (or post modern) days and then tell me about how hard someone else’s high adventure experiences are!

Like Abraham who listened to a voice he could not be totally sure of, we each take our chances; we each have dealt with new beginnings. If we prepare for them, if we practice intensively, if we monitor our self talk and envision our goals, we stand a much better chance of succeeding. But, like Abraham, we may step forward and do things throughout our lives that later, upon reflection or in retrospect, amaze us. Wow, when we think back on some of the roads we traveled, some of what we took on and succeeded with, we really do amaze ourselves.

Sometimes we just have to laugh to think that we actually got away with what we did. Amazed or relieved or amused, we know that there was certainly and always a beginning; and we made the effort, broke out of our personal inertia and started, hoping for the best, fearing to be overwhelmed by what could have been the worst outcomes.

That’s what we are doing here tonight. We have taken this evening from any arbitrary Monday evening and imbued it with specialness. I mean: is this Monday evening actually any different from any other Monday evening? Well, in a very real way, we know that it is. It is so because we Jews have demarcated this day as the beginning of a brand new year. This birthday of the world, this Day of Remembrance, this Day of the Sounding of the Shofar offers us new challenges, new perspectives, and new opportunities, if we but cognize and embrace them.

I would offer you a story to bring this sermon to a close. It is a bit off track for Reform Jews because it speaks of two students’ search for the Messiah. We don’t put much stock in the idea that anyone is going to redeem our world. Rather, we believe that if change is to come, we shall have to be the ones to take on the challenge and bring redemption about. But, there were these two Yeshiva bochers who after studying very hard for many years, searching and yearning, actually discovered in their studies the secret way to bring about the coming of the Messiah. Now they knew that this was powerful stuff they had come upon. “It could bring peace and healing and wholeness to all of Creation!” Not telling anyone, they knew that the secret was bound up in a special nigun, a wordless melody. The students learned that if they would sing this unusual tune at the right place, the path to an unknown hidden cave would be revealed to them. In that cave, they would find King David asleep; he was waiting to be awakened in order to begin the era of peace.

The students sang the nigun, and the book from which had uncovered the secret then told them: Travel to the north and sing to a certain emerald colored lake there. Starting the journey with great trepidation, they finally arrived after days of great exertion. But the lake then told them to go to another location where they would find a river that they must sing to. This, they also did. But the river told them to travel south to a certain tree, a towering date palm, and sing to it. Although now greatly fatigued, this, they also did. But, the tree directed them to the East, to a narrow passage through a mountain range...to a crevasse, to a solid wall of rock that seemed to touch the very vault of heaven. There they were to sing to the rock and the cave of King David would open.

But, the rock warned them, when the cave opened, there would be only a brief moment for them to go to the bed of King David and to take healing water from a bowl at his foot and apply it to his hands and feet. They must not hesitate for even a split second. And, they must know that upon entering the cave, they would find its walls lined with gold, and diamonds, silver, emeralds and pearls. They must ignore these and complete their mission.

The young men found the rock and, trembling, sang the nigun. Immediately the cave appeared and breathlessly, the students entered to fulfill their sacred mission. But, then, the glitter of all that precious material caught their eyes and they began to ogle all that surrounded them. “Ah, what would it hurt if I were to pick up just a few of these bobbles, these precious gems with which I could so much good?” they said to themselves. And at that precise moment, King David arose and waited for the reviving waters. But, alas, the students didn’t notice; they were busy filling their pockets.

From nowhere a crash of thunder and the sound of blaring shofarot blasted the students’ ears. Lightning struck and blinded their eyes. King David lay down again; he returned to his slumber, and the cave closed.

The students immediately were transported back to their school from which they had come. That moment of distraction had undone all their efforts and defeated the entire enterprise. (Three Times Chai, King David’s Cave,” pp. 113-15, Laney Becker, Behrman House Inc.).

We stand at the entrance of a New Year and have within each of us some knowledge of how to make the changes, how to make the improvements that a New Year encourages. We have, for example, some understanding of how to begin bringing more harmony to ourselves, our families, our neighbors, and, indeed, the world. While not a messiah claiming nigun, we each have the song of life surging within us, and if we can buck up our courage and our spirits, staying focused on the resolutions we feel surging within us, if we can make that first step and retain our senses of hope and courage as we move forward into the coming days and weeks and months, perhaps we can better the efforts of those well meaning but too- easily-distracted young men. If we can ignore the non-essential, who knows what good we may each accomplish?

I wish upon us all God’s approbations and blessings in our endeavors and attempts as we take our first steps into this New Year.