A friend asked me yesterday if I was ready for Rosh Hashana.
I said, "yeah, think so."
It was clear that the question was not just a conversation starter, but was coming from a more personal place. "Why do you ask?"
"Everyone in Yerushalayim seems to be running around, busy buying things to get ready -- I think my wife and I took care of everything we needed, but I'm starting to get nervous amidst the flurry of activity..."
~~~
The Torah does not call Rosh Hashana, "The Day of Judgment," rather a Day of זכרון of Memory (Vayikra 22:24).
The first thing to note is that given that Rosh Hashana is the only holiday that is rooted in an event which antecedes human history itself, i.e. the creation of man, you would not think there is much to remember. There are no "mementos," no old photographs, no re-enactments...
Remember the day before the Big Bang? Beautiful weather...
If anything, Pesach, I would have thought, would be a much more fitting candidate for the name "The Day of Memory," remembering our leaving Egypt. We ate matza then, we eat matza now...
This said, perhaps if we meditate on what we know about Memory, we can try to extract a principle to guide us practically over the next 48 hours (maybe even 72).
When a person tries to remember an old acquaintance's name, or a friend's birthday, he instinctively closes his eyes. No one starts looking around to see if maybe there is a clue around the room he's in -- he looks inside of himself. He knows it's in there somewhere because it was in there once and has no where to go. Being unable to remember something one knows he once knew can be immensely frustrating for this reason. Where did it go!?!
There are things you don't have to remember because they live on the forefront of your mind. It's right their on your dashboard. Your name, for example.
However, there is something which you may think is impossible to forget but is actually the epitome of our forgetfulness -- you yourself.
Throughout the year, we are busy doing what we need to do: working, studying, exercising, spending time with family. Contrary to popular belief, human beings are not built to mutli-task; when we're busy crunching numbers or writing reports at work, we must devote all of energies to it. That is not the time to be pondering whether or not this job is the fullest fulfillment of your strengths and passions.
So too with all of the moving parts in our lives, and in a certain sense, that's the way it should be because being paralyzed in philosophical or existential internal monologue is not a way to live. However, we must pause to plant a flag on this point -- by definition, we forget ourselves in the day-to-day workings of our lives. Our names get used wherever we go, but who we are, if we don't revisit it, will be left in the dust years in our past when we last asked ourselves the big questions of life.
Moreover, we make mistakes in life. We sometimes miss our mark. Our true mistake, however, comes in the wake of the mistake. Socially-engrained Catholic conceptions of guilt drag us down, identifying ourselves intrinsically with our faults, and distancing us from the ideals that we once wished to live by. "Ideals" become labeled "Fantasies," and we further forget who we are.
Tangentially, but nevertheless significant in out time, we live in the self-proclaimed Age of Information. We boast of our exponentially increased production and consumption of information, but at the same time pine for inner harmony within the sea of that same information. Knowing has ousted Thinking. Research has shown it to be true, but all of us have experienced it: you're researching a company for work, or a topic for a thesis paper -- at some point, you have so much information, that you lose sight of what exactly you're trying to prove...
Lastly, although every one of the mitzvot are meant to allow us to access our inner reality and through it Hashem, we can analogous to the above, lose sight of this. The tefilin don't need to be wrapped, nor the candles lit, nor the Torah learned -- the mitzvot our to enrich us! G!d is not an Asiatic despot nor is He a tyrannical industrialist who must produce mitzvah-widgets at minimum cost with us working the conveyor belt. Hashem created the universe and gave us the mitzvot in order that we should be able to live special lives of purpose and meaning and taking pleasure in the splendor of it all.
The Zikaron, the Memory, that we are supposed to come to on Rosh Hashana is remembering ourselves -- not in a self-indulgent way -- but rather rediscovering, and clarifying the ideals, the sense of mission, the goodness that we have inside of us. It is no accident that we're not meant to run around doing mitzvot on Rosh Hashana. The only Torah mitzvah on Rosh Hashana is hearing the shofar, the inner cry of the human spirit. The clarity we achieve now is in order to make a "Rosh" a "Head" for a year of activity in mitzvot, at work, and in our communities.
The blackout in New York City in 2003 brought out the best of New Yorkers. Everyone remembers that episode fondly. Under pressure, the goodness burst through the infamous rough exterior of the city's inhabitants. However, we don't have to wait for push to come to shove to discover what we're made of.
This is the crux of man's creation, and our re-creation every year. Be'ezrat Hashem we should all merit this Rosh Hashana to tap into the best of ourselves, remember that Hashem loves us and wants us to have a life of vitality and fulfillment, and that all He is waiting for is for us to remember who we are first.
-----
This article is based on the a dvar Torah delivered by Rav Beryl Gershenfeld on parshat Shoftim 5771.
The first thing to note is that given that Rosh Hashana is the only holiday that is rooted in an event which antecedes human history itself, i.e. the creation of man, you would not think there is much to remember. There are no "mementos," no old photographs, no re-enactments...
Remember the day before the Big Bang? Beautiful weather...
If anything, Pesach, I would have thought, would be a much more fitting candidate for the name "The Day of Memory," remembering our leaving Egypt. We ate matza then, we eat matza now...
This said, perhaps if we meditate on what we know about Memory, we can try to extract a principle to guide us practically over the next 48 hours (maybe even 72).
When a person tries to remember an old acquaintance's name, or a friend's birthday, he instinctively closes his eyes. No one starts looking around to see if maybe there is a clue around the room he's in -- he looks inside of himself. He knows it's in there somewhere because it was in there once and has no where to go. Being unable to remember something one knows he once knew can be immensely frustrating for this reason. Where did it go!?!
There are things you don't have to remember because they live on the forefront of your mind. It's right their on your dashboard. Your name, for example.
However, there is something which you may think is impossible to forget but is actually the epitome of our forgetfulness -- you yourself.
Throughout the year, we are busy doing what we need to do: working, studying, exercising, spending time with family. Contrary to popular belief, human beings are not built to mutli-task; when we're busy crunching numbers or writing reports at work, we must devote all of energies to it. That is not the time to be pondering whether or not this job is the fullest fulfillment of your strengths and passions.
So too with all of the moving parts in our lives, and in a certain sense, that's the way it should be because being paralyzed in philosophical or existential internal monologue is not a way to live. However, we must pause to plant a flag on this point -- by definition, we forget ourselves in the day-to-day workings of our lives. Our names get used wherever we go, but who we are, if we don't revisit it, will be left in the dust years in our past when we last asked ourselves the big questions of life.
Moreover, we make mistakes in life. We sometimes miss our mark. Our true mistake, however, comes in the wake of the mistake. Socially-engrained Catholic conceptions of guilt drag us down, identifying ourselves intrinsically with our faults, and distancing us from the ideals that we once wished to live by. "Ideals" become labeled "Fantasies," and we further forget who we are.
Tangentially, but nevertheless significant in out time, we live in the self-proclaimed Age of Information. We boast of our exponentially increased production and consumption of information, but at the same time pine for inner harmony within the sea of that same information. Knowing has ousted Thinking. Research has shown it to be true, but all of us have experienced it: you're researching a company for work, or a topic for a thesis paper -- at some point, you have so much information, that you lose sight of what exactly you're trying to prove...
Lastly, although every one of the mitzvot are meant to allow us to access our inner reality and through it Hashem, we can analogous to the above, lose sight of this. The tefilin don't need to be wrapped, nor the candles lit, nor the Torah learned -- the mitzvot our to enrich us! G!d is not an Asiatic despot nor is He a tyrannical industrialist who must produce mitzvah-widgets at minimum cost with us working the conveyor belt. Hashem created the universe and gave us the mitzvot in order that we should be able to live special lives of purpose and meaning and taking pleasure in the splendor of it all.
The Zikaron, the Memory, that we are supposed to come to on Rosh Hashana is remembering ourselves -- not in a self-indulgent way -- but rather rediscovering, and clarifying the ideals, the sense of mission, the goodness that we have inside of us. It is no accident that we're not meant to run around doing mitzvot on Rosh Hashana. The only Torah mitzvah on Rosh Hashana is hearing the shofar, the inner cry of the human spirit. The clarity we achieve now is in order to make a "Rosh" a "Head" for a year of activity in mitzvot, at work, and in our communities.
The blackout in New York City in 2003 brought out the best of New Yorkers. Everyone remembers that episode fondly. Under pressure, the goodness burst through the infamous rough exterior of the city's inhabitants. However, we don't have to wait for push to come to shove to discover what we're made of.
This is the crux of man's creation, and our re-creation every year. Be'ezrat Hashem we should all merit this Rosh Hashana to tap into the best of ourselves, remember that Hashem loves us and wants us to have a life of vitality and fulfillment, and that all He is waiting for is for us to remember who we are first.
-----
This article is based on the a dvar Torah delivered by Rav Beryl Gershenfeld on parshat Shoftim 5771.
