This is the sermon I gave at Temple Beth Emeth v'Ohr Progressive Shaari Zedek in Brooklyn, NY, on Erev Rosh Hashanah, September 4 (so early in the secular year!):
Here we are again. Another Rosh Hashanah has arrived—this one disconcertingly early in the secular year. Together with Jews around the world, we come together for this High Holiday season, which is devoted to soul-searching and repenting for all the ways we have gone wrong in the past year. We have begun to recite together the various prayers of confession and pleas for forgiveness: “Avinu Malkeinu, we have sinned against you…. Avinu Malkeinu, be gracious and answer us, for we have little merit. Treat us generously and with kindness, and be our help.” “Forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement!” There are many more, especially when we reach Yom Kippur, ten days from now. We will recite Une-taneh-tokef, that strange and disturbing listing of all the ways we might die in the coming year, declaring that these days, which we also call the Days of Awe, are the time when God makes that decision.
For those of us, myself included, who don’t think of God as a Being seated somewhere with an enormous Book called the Book of Life—a Being more or less human-looking though clearly far more powerful than we are, some kind of cosmic Santa Claus—for us, there are many other ways to understand what happens during these days. We might think about the concept of God forgiving us as a way to forgive ourselves, or the idea of God accusing us as a reminder that it is critically important to our development as rational and moral human beings that we take a step back now and then to evaluate how we’re doing.
There is one idea that is nowhere in our liturgy for the Days of Awe. That idea is that, having completed this year’s project of examination, repentance, and atonement, we will not need to do it again next year. It is assumed, in our liturgy, on our calendar, and in our texts, that every year, when Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur come, we will have plenty to repent for.
After Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we will celebrate Sukkot, our joyful harvest holiday. The biblical book that is traditionally read on Sukkot, though, is not especially joyful. We read Ecclesiastes, which is probably best known because of the song “Turn, Turn, Turn,”—its lyrics come from chapter three of Ecclesiastes. The book is not only applicable to Sukkot, but to the Days of Awe as well.
The book of Ecclesiastes is traditionally attributed to King Solomon, late in his life, in part because it addresses the pursuit of wisdom, and Solomon was known for his wisdom. Ecclesiastes talks about the cyclical nature of things, and takes a general attitude that all is futile—we don’t know what will happen, we can’t fathom how God’s justice works in the world as innocent people suffer and evil people go unpunished, and in the end we die alone and can’t take any of our worldly riches with us. It can be a kind of depressing read.
As we sit together for another Rosh Hashanah, entering the 10 days of repentance that culminate on Yom Kippur, we know—don’t we?—why there’s no hint in our liturgy that we might not need to be back here next year. It’s true that if repentance were once and done, none of you would be here for me to give a sermon to next year, but that’s not the reason. Rather, as Ecclesiastes puts it, “There is not one good person on earth who does what is best and doesn’t err” (Kohelet 7:20).
Every one of us has reason to repent, every year. Every one of us missed the mark this year, and missed it again and again. Every one of us needs to do t’shuvah—we need to turn back toward God. Here the word “God” means the ideal of who each of us would be if we were always able to do right. We are here to turn, to return, to realign our intentions and our actions with the ideal of who we want to be. And it’s something we have reason to do every year. The cycle continues. Is that something to be depressed about?
Most of you probably know the myth of Sisyphus. The story goes that in ancient Greece, he made the gods angry in various ways, and was condemned to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain. Every time he got the top, the boulder would roll back down to the bottom and he’d have to go down and start all over again. The real punishment of this is not in the labor itself, but in the futility of the labor. Sisyphus successfully pushes the rock to the top of the mountain, but his work is for nothing. The rock bounds down to the bottom again. Every single time. Forever. And he knows it.
Author and philosopher Albert Camus wrote about the Myth of Sisyphus. He describes the punishment as an “unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.” He envisions Sisyphus’s work as “the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.”
Sisyphus’s plight fits right in with the view of the world of the author of Ecclesiastes. In the first chapter of Ecclesiastes, we read: “One generation goes, another comes, but the earth remains the same forever. The sun rises, and the sun sets—and glides back to where it rises. Southward blowing, turning northward, ever turning blows the wind; on its rounds the wind returns. All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full; to the place [from] which they flow the streams flow back again.” (Kohelet 1:4-7)
Neither the myth of Sisyphus nor the book of Ecclesiastes offer the hope that as the cycles continue, something might change. However, Camus, in his essay on the Myth of Sisyphus, offers something different. In the myth, the Greek gods intended to punish Sisyphus. But Camus sees in Sisyphus joy. The joy comes in embracing the cycle, in owning it and not hoping or wishing for something different.
And who is to say that pushing that boulder up the mountain is the same every time? Did the gods of the myth truly understand the human man, Sisyphus? Surely there was horror and agony in the beginning, at the recognition of an eternity at this work. But later, perhaps there are times when, watching the boulder roll back down the mountain, Sisyphus feels strong, knowing that he will succeed at pushing it back up again. Or perhaps in that walk down the mountain, he feels at times serene, because he knows his job and his purpose—to push that rock up the mountain again. On still other walks down the mountain, perhaps he feels grateful for the respite between trips up the mountain. Perhaps he begins to talk to the rock, to consider it his partner in this fate. As Camus puts it, “His fate belongs to him. His rock is this thing.” He is not looking anymore for a way out.
Albert Camus was not a fan of religion, though it would probably be more accurate to say that he was not a fan of Christianity. He didn’t like the hope that Christians were urged to have for a life after death. He believed that an afterlife was a way to make people reconcile themselves to a miserable life, and prevent them from trying to change their condition in this world, because they would get a reward later. Needless to say, he did not believe there was life after death.
In this attitude he was not far off from the Jewish position. We do not focus on what might or might not happen after we die. Though there is Jewish discussion of what might happen after death, we acknowledge that ultimately we have no idea. Therefore, as Camus would have it and Ecclesiastes too, we must focus on this life, and own it, and make the most of it. We are not in a waiting room where what happens doesn’t matter because the real thing comes after we die. This life is what we’ve got. The author of Ecclesiastes says, “Only this, I have found, is a real good: that one should eat and drink and get pleasure with all the gains one makes under the sun, during the numbered days of life that God has given him or her; for that is his or her portion.” (Kohelet 5:17)
If each of us is Sisyphus, I would suggest that life itself is our boulder. We spend the year pushing it up the mountain—its clay getting under our fingernails, its weight smashing our toes when we slip, its weight tiring us and making us sweat, its movement up the mountain giving us moments of exhilaration and achievement. Then we reach the top and it rolls back down again. The high holidays are the period when we are walking down the mountain and preparing to push the boulder up again.
We consider: How could we position our bodies differently so that it feels more like we’re working with the boulder than against it? How can we appreciate the moments of achievement more, rather than focusing so much on bruised toes and broken fingernails? How do we find the joy in pushing the boulder up the mountain?
In our tradition, we find our people frequently climbing mountains. In the Torah portion we’ll read tomorrow, Abraham climbs a mountain with his son Isaac, in order to sacrifice him. This is perhaps the opposite of Sisyphys’s plight—Abraham expects to climb this mountain once, to perform an irreversible, life-changing act. If he climbs a mountain again, he will hardly be the same person.
When the Israelites approach Mt. Sinai, they ask not to go too close because they are afraid, and Moses climbs the mountain alone to receive the Torah. Here, again, though Moses climbs the mountain more than once, the result is life-changing for him and for the Israelites, all the way down to us, because he receives the Torah in our myth.
So we have before us two types of mountain-climbing myths. Abraham and Moses climb mountains, and everything changes, while Sisyphus climbs his mountain with his boulder over and over and nothing really changes, except perhaps his attitude, echoing the book of Ecclesiastes.
In our lives, we find both. Sometimes we go through a year, or an experience, that challenges us, and ultimately changes us. Other times, we go through the cycles of our lives and find ourselves in the same position, doing the same thing, again and again. Both of these are the nature of life. Truly life-changing events are not so common. The rest of the time, we get up, go to work, go through our day, and it’s pretty much the same day after day.
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t change through the cyclical parts of our lives; it’s just harder to see. The cycle of going through the year, getting to the Days of Awe, and taking a step back for 10 days to look at the cycle before we begin it again, is where we can make evolutionary change. Our sage Maimonides said that true t’shuvah is not achieved until we find ourselves in the same situation where we made our mistake, and we don’t make the same mistake again. Without the cycle that puts us through the same challenges, how could we achieve that t’shuvah? If I repent for losing my temper with my children because I’m stressed, how do I know I’ve really repented unless I get stressed again and am again in a situation where I am inclined to lose my temper with my children? Fortunately for me, I’m sure to have lots of opportunities to try that one again.
The author of Ecclesiastes is right: Life is made up of cycles—cycles of seasons, cycles of life, cycles of behavior, cycles of the secular year and the Jewish year. The cycles are punctuated by life-changing moments or events now and then. It is for us to bring meaning to the cycles, to have determination that we can make life better for ourselves and those we love, through t’shuvah that leads us to alter our behavior. The Days of Awe are a gift to us, part of the cycle that is also a respite from it. This is the time for us to assess where we want to adjust our attitude and our behavior, to make the coming year incrementally different from the past one, and, we hope, incrementally better.
Let us embrace not only this opportunity, but every day in the coming year when we have strength to go on. As the author of Ecclesiastes writes, “How sweet is the light, what a delight for the eyes to behold the sun! Even if a man lives many years, let him enjoy himself in all of them.” (Ecclesiastes 11:7-8) May we make the most of these Days of Awe, and go forward with appreciation for our lives and the opportunities they hold for doing better than we have in the past, even within the seeming sameness of the cycles of life. Amen and l’Shanah Tovah u’metukah—have a good and a sweet year.
Comments