Rabbi Eliana's Divrei Torah

אחות קטנה תפילותיה עורכה ועונה תהילותיה
אל נא רפא נא לה למחלותיה
תכלה שנה וקללותיה… תחל שנה וברכותיה

The community of Israel is preparing her prayers
Please God, heal all her afflictions.
May this year end and take away its curses with it…
May a new year begin and bring with it blessings.

— Abraham Hazan Girondi (13th century Spanish rabbi), from a piyyut (liturgical poem) for Rosh Hashanah

***

This is how the sermon I was about to share today begins:

“Then Joshua called out to God in sight of the people, commanding: Sun – halt over Givon; Moon – stop over the valley of Ayalon. And the sun stopped in its tracks and the moon halted until the war ended.” (Joshua 10:12-13)

***

This is how the sermon I am actually sharing with you today begins.
An excerpt from my Facebook feed:

October 24, 2023

My niece and my sister arrived here safely, and I am relieved. 

We had this conversation on the way home from the airport:

Miriam: “How long until we get to your home?”

Me: “About twenty minutes.”

Miriam: “Twenty minutes is not too far?”

Me: “It is not too far.”

Miriam: “Auntie, are there many missiles here?”

Me: “There are no missiles here.”

Miriam asks: “Just very sometimes?”

“No honey, we don’t have missiles here,” I reply.

“So they are rare?” she continues.

“They are not rare. There are never missiles here.”

“Not even once or twice?”

“Not even once. Ever.”

I can see her smiling to herself in the backseat, and I sigh a sigh of relief.

But when we get to my house, the first thing she does is ask me which room is the shelter (safe room - ממ”ד). When the first text message beep comes in on my phone, she thinks it’s a missile notice. She asks if there are missiles at Grandma and Grandpa’s.

I am about to tell her it is not a missile notice, but by the sheer weirdness of life, it actually is a notice from my parents that they are okay though in the shelter.

***

Here’s the rub. It is not that I don’t have a sermon to share with you today. It is that what I thought I would speak with you about today turned so irrelevant in light of the events of the past few days.¹ It needed such a deep, deep rewrite that at this point nearly all that is left of it is an opening quote.

***

The book of Joshua opens with the battles of the Israelites as they enter the promised land. This quote comes from the story of their battle with the Amorites: “Joshua called out to God in sight of the people, commanding: Sun – halt over Givon; Moon – stop over the valley of Ayalon. And the sun stopped in its tracks and the moon halted until the war ended. …There was never another day like this before and there was never a day like this since in which God listened to [that is, performed a miracle because of] the command of a person …” (Joshua 10:12-14)

The sages were dumbfounded by this amazing miracle that happened for Joshua and the Israelites. How can it be, they ask, that God would perform such an amazing miracle for Joshua that far exceeds any miracles God had done for Moses when it is clear that Moses was… well, Moses? To make sense of it, Gersonides (and others) said that war changes our time perception, so the victory felt so quick to the warriors that it only appeared as if time stood still; in reality, it did not.  In this way, the commentators minimize the miracle by saying that it was a miracle of time perception rather than time itself standing still.

***

The earth takes approximately 365 and a quarter days to orbit the sun.

Which is 8,760 hours, or 525,600 minutes, or 31,556,952 seconds.

And despite this math, anyone will tell you that not all years last the same amount of time. Some pass by in the blink of an eye. Some last forever. It might not be a miracle, just a matter of time perception. But it is based on this time perception that each year takes its toll. And some years take a much higher toll on our health, on our psyche, on our souls.

5784 has been a year unlike any other I remember. It lasted so long, and has taken so much to deal with, that on the cusp of a new year we might ask if we can perhaps take some time off to recover before jumping into another trip around the sun. We are pushed and pulled by the constant threats on the news, the relentless demands of life, the nagging of our own thoughts.

In four short days, on October 7th, the earth will complete an entire cycle around its source of light, the sun, and it will be an entire year that the hostages spent in the dark with little to no sunlight. Underground. Without sufficient food or otherwise being able to care for their most basic needs. An entire year of acute suffering and torture.

In truth, you and I cannot claim that this year has lasted forever. We had short respites. Once in a while, most of us did manage to get some blissfully dreamless shut-eye. On occasion, there was a moment of escapism. A birthday. Tickets to the theater. A hug from a grandchild. Cuddling with a cat. And so, as hard as this year has been, as filled with grief and despair, there were moments of uplift or relief for all of us here.

But not for the hostages still held in Gaza, and likely not for their families.

There were probably very few moments of relief for the displaced Israelis from the south of Israel and from the north.

There were probably very few moments of relief for the people of Gaza.

There were also not many moments of relief for Israeli and Palestinian expats.

Or for American Jews with relatives and friends in Israel.

Or for Palestinian Americans with families and friends in Israel and in Gaza. 

And on and on. It seems that not everyone is affected to the same extent, but that does not mean that they are not affected.

Years ago, Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote a poem called The Diameter of the Bomb. It feels relevant to me as I stand here today. With your permission, I would like to share it:

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective
range—about seven meters.
And in it four dead and eleven wounded.
And around them in a greater circle
of pain and time are scattered
two hospitals and one cemetery.
But the young woman who was
buried where she came from
over a hundred kilometers away
enlarges the circle greatly.
And the lone man who weeps over her death
in a far corner of a distant country
includes the whole world in the circle.
And I won’t speak at all about the crying of orphans
that reaches to the seat of God
and from there onward, making
the circle without end and without God.

I am not an expert on bombs or on war. But I believe that the experience of the entire last year can be likened to the bomb Amichai describes, and that we, too, those of us in this room at least, were all caught in its diameter. Amichai points out that there is a hierarchy to pain and that in itself might be something worth exploring at some point. But to me at this point in time, what resonates most is how pain cannot be contained, it ripples and pours over and it reaches far and deep. It can cross great distances and it can change our perception of time.

***

Rosh Hashanah is supposed to help us with our time perception. The flow of time is endless. It is us humans that are finite. It is us humans that feel the need to mark time, to measure it in smaller segments that we can wrap our brains around. We measure it in weeks and months and years. It helps us feel that instead of one constant flow we are progressing; from last week to this week; from this year to next year. 

This division of time also allows us to put a barrier between ourselves and the time that passed. If we ignore how continuous time is, we can pretend, as we do on the High Holidays, that there is a moment in time that allows us to leave the past behind, wipe the slate clean and enter the new year fresh. 

The piyyut I opened with, “May the year of curses end and a year of blessings begin” (one of the best known Rosh Hashanah liturgical poems), represents this world view. The verse around which the poet, Abraham Girondi, builds his poem comes from the Talmud (Megillah 31b). Here is what it says:

“[The prophet] Ezra arranged the Torah readings so that Israel will be reading the curses (the rebukes) in Deuteronomy [at a particular time]. What is the reason for this? Abaye says, and some say it was Reish Lakish who said: ‘so that the curses of the year are done.’”

The rabbis are not discussing the actual curses in our lives. They are speaking about a piece of Torah text that we call the big rebuke, or the curses in parshat Ki Tavo. This parasha lists the curses that will befall the people of Israel should they fail to follow God’s ways. It is customary to read it in the synagogue in an undertone, as to not remind the universe of all the potential bad things that might happen. 

So the rabbis, who were not superstitious at all, explain that to be on the safe side, the Torah readings are done in a way that allows us to finish reading the curses from the previous Torah reading cycle before we enter the new year.  Each year represents a full reading of the Torah, and in each year we should not hear more than the specific number of curses ascribed. And to be on the safe side, because they were so not superstitious, they say that the readings were arranged to leave one extra Shabbat between the end of the parasha about the curses and the celebration of the new year. In this way, the curses will not touch the new year at all. We can leave them all behind.

But Girondi (and, following his poem, nearly everyone in the Jewish world) took the Talmudic reference and extrapolated from the biblical curses to the hardships of our own lives.  In this reading, while bad things (“curses”) happen to us in the course of our lives, we can leave them behind when we transition from one year to the next, just like the rabbis did with the Torah readings. That way we can enter a new year curse free. To make this abundantly clear he added a parallel closing verse to his poem: let a new year begin with blessings. It is nice to begin a year without last year's burdens, but it is even nicer to begin with a stash of blessings. 

With time, the belief has spread that when we are saying this formula, תכלה שנה וקללותיה תחל שנה וברכותיה, it has predictive force. "Let a year of curses end and a year of blessing begin” thus rose to a status of bracha, like other blessings we recite in the liturgy. This idea spread, and we see halachic discussions on whether we should recite this only on the first day of Rosh Hashanah or on the second day as well.  Because it is a problem to repeat it. As soon as we finished saying ‘and a year of blessings begin’ on the first night, we started a year of blessing, so we cannot go back and ‘close’ the previous year. We already entered the new one.

This might seem like a minuscule point I am making here, but I have meditated on it quite a lot lately. Even without knowing this history, there is an assumption in our liturgy that in order for blessings to begin, the curses need to end. That in order to receive the new year we need to be truly done with the last year. And that does not always feel possible.

***

An excerpt from my family’s WhatsApp group from the day before yesterday:

Brother: Let us know that you’re okay when it's over.

Sister: Okay. 

Sister: The explosions are really nearby

Sister: I hope Miriam is okay 

Dad: We were downstairs when it started. We are waiting in the stairway for it to end.

Sister: Did you hear the explosions? I don’t think we had a minute and a half to get to the shelters 

[There is supposed to be a minute and a half time between the air raid sirens and when the missiles actually hit]

Dad: I think it was about a minute

Sister to Brother: Do you have one as well?

Brother: Not at the moment, I just got notice of the siren you are having

Mom: In that case, Eliana, we are all officially okay!

Mom to Sister: perhaps get M out of school?

Sister: I don’t know if I can, I think the kids are still in the shelters

Sister: We just got a message from school that the kids are okay and we don’t need to take them home.

Me: I love you

Sister: We love you too

Me: I am having a hard time focusing on writing sermons for Thursday

Mom: hmm....interesting....

[a few minutes later]

Brother: [there was another air raid siren alarm] We are okay. We are prepared and ready   [Israeli flag emoji]

Sister: We are prepared too. [cookie emoji, popcorn emoji, drinks emoji]

Brother: As prepared as you get for the Superbowl?

Sister: No, there is no halftime show.

Sister: Though we do get fireworks

Dad: We are getting out of the shelter just now. 

Me: I am not sure I will have anything ready to deliver to my community this holiday [brain explodes emoji, crying emoji]

***

This is the story of my personal experience of this year. We each have our own. But I do think we are all caught in the clutches of a difficult historical moment that we did not ask for and cannot shake off to continue with our life as it was before. 

It is not only our time perception that is the problem. It is not only that it feels like 5784 lasted forever. It is also, and more importantly, that in some ways, between the beginning of that year and this moment in time, nothing has changed. Israel is still at war. Many of the hostages are still not home. Israeli civilians, as well as Palestinians, are living in daily danger. And the worry is taking a toll on everyone even remotely involved. 

Time does seem to stand still in some ways. And if the curses of the last year are so far from over, does it mean we cannot transition successfully to a new year? Does it mean we can’t open up to blessings?

I need to believe that is not true. I need to believe that it is possible to start a new year and its blessings even if we do not have the option of shutting the door behind us on last year’s curses.

Israeli musician Yehuda Poliker wrote this song² in 2001:

And this is our life lately. It could get better. It could get disastrously worse
“good evening, despair” and “good night, hope”
Who will go next? And who will be the next to go?

If a storm is the song of the wind
what is the sound hope makes?

We are living through a storm. And it is hard to imagine what might be the sound that hope makes. 

But I believe, I must believe, that even if it is possible that time stood still, and that at the same time everything changed and life was turned upside down – there is still hope for a good and sweet new year ahead. 

It might be that the sound of that hope is the sound of us coming together here today in prayer and wishing with all our hearts for a better, more peaceful, and safer year. It could be that the sound of hope is the sound of us rising to hear the shofar, marking a new year of possibility.

Shanah Tovah.

1. This is referring to Iran’s launching of over 180 ballistic missiles into Israel the day before Rosh Hashanah.

2. The song is called “Eich Korim L'ahava Sheli - איך קוראים לאהבה שלי”