We call them the High Holy Days, but our ancestors had a better name for them – the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, or in an alternative translation, the Fearsome Days. What is so fearsome about them? Perhaps some of our ancestors were terrified by the imagery of these days, of the Heavenly courtroom, and the judgement, and the books of life and death. In my rabbinate, I haven’t encountered too many people who take those images literally. But there is something terrifying about these days I believe -- something that our ancestors were perhaps trying to capture by using the metaphor of those Heavenly Books – and that is, Change. This is the New Year. There is much to celebrate in the fact that we are here to welcome it, and there is much comfort in doing that welcoming in accordance with our ancient traditions, which are (for the most part) so unchanging.
But no amount of traditional prayers and liturgy can cover up the fact that 5765 will witness extraordinary transformations, and that in itself can be terrifying. Of course some of those transformations are wonderfully predictable, and will be revealed most clearly in our children. Infants will start to walk; toddlers will start to talk; elementary school kids will for the first time join sports teams and write compositions; middle schoolers will hit puberty; high school boys will come to tower over their balding fathers; young women will be almost unrecognizable in their sophistication. These changes are coming; all we can do is fasten our seatbelts for the ride.
But we know, don’t we, that not everything the new year brings will be predictable, or wonderful. We’ve lived long enough and endured enough surprises to know that there is no crystal ball. We know how fragile life is and how painfully limited we are when it comes to protecting that which is most precious to us: our health and well-being, and that of those we love. We look around and remember who isn’t next to us; we think about the people who once were there, but who aren’t there this year because of death, or because of illness, or because our relationship with them has fractured, or because life’s vicissitudes have taken them far away from us. That’s the flip side of the phenomenon of change. Just ask the grieving families of Beslan, of Beersheva, of Darfur, of 9/11, of Cecilia Zhang and Holly Jones. When we think of those people who lost so much to unpredictable fate, and as we think of the year ahead, it’s hard not to experience these days truly as Yamim Noraim.[1]
Of course unpredictable change is not only about loss. Many of us can also look around and see new additions -- people sitting next to us on Rosh Hashanah we never could have imagined, panim hadashot – new faces, faces of those who have come in the past year to people and enrich our lives. New spouses, new partners, new inlaws, new children, new friends. And we can also look at ourselves and think about how we’ve changed since last year, how we’ve changed in ways we can feel very proud of, and how we’ve changed in ways we have to make teshuvah for.
Predicted or unpredicted, wonderful or disappointing, we bring all these changes here to Rosh Hashanah with us. Change is everywhere, and perhaps that is what the reassuring constancy of Rosh Hashanah paradoxically acknowledges more than anything else. When we hear the piercing sound of the shofar; when we hear a yontif tune sung the way we remember it done in our childhood; when we taste those apples dripping in sweet, sticky honey; we know we’ve got something to hold on to and we feel the presence of Tzur Yisrael, our God the Rock of Israel in the midst of an unpredictable world and a self which is in a constant state of flux.
No biblical figure epitomizes our radical vulnerability than Job. Job is portrayed as someone who does everything right and who prospers initially, but then suffers catastrophic loss. His children all die, he is reduced to poverty, and he is afflicted with a miserable skin disease. His wife gives up on him; using a Hebrew euphemism, she says Barech Elohim va-Mut “Curse God and die” (2:9). In the midst of all these upheavals, Job cries out in an attempt to understand their meaning, and – contrary to the expression, he isn’t terribly “patient” about it. While his so-called friends argue that he must have sinned in order to deserve his misfortune, Job insists that his own virtue had not been compromised, and that sin could not be the explanation for his suffering.
Towards the end of the book, Job finally hears from God. Out of the whirlwind, God provides the long anticipated divine response to Job’s complaint, and this is what he says: Aifo hayita b’yasdei aretz? “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if you have understanding, who determined the measures of the earth…or who laid the cornerstone thereto…or who shut up the sea with doors when it broke forth and issued out of the womb” (ch.38), and God continues in a similar vein for several chapters.
Reading God’s words to Job, we wonder, what kind of answer is this to Job’s question about his own suffering? Wouldn’t we expect something which more explicitly justifies God’s decree regarding Job? Perhaps something explaining that Job had in fact committed a sin he was unaware of? (Surely, God could have dug up something!) Or at least some assurance that Job would be rewarded in some other way to compensate for his earthly suffering? How does this speech about Job’s absence at Creation provide any kind of response to Job’s spiritual crisis? It doesn’t seem to, and yet – amazingly, at the end of this long discourse of God’s, Job says Al ken em’as ve-nihamti al afar ve-efer “Wherefore I recant and relent, seeing I am dust and ashes” (42:6). Bewildered, we ask ourselves, what was there in God’s speech that led Job to recant and relent, after so stubbornly resisting for so long?
As Yisrael Knohl argues in his book The Divine Symphony, Job was persuaded by God’s speech that his entire understanding of the origins of the world and of man’s place in it was wrong. Job had his entire life taken for granted the Creation model that we see encapsulated in Genesis 1. In Genesis, you’ll recall, human beings are the last of God’s creatures, and it is for their benefit that the world was created.[2] Pru u-rvu “Be fertile and increase,” God tells the first man and woman, “fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth.” (Gen.1:28). The implication of this portrayal of Creation is that humanity is the pinnacle of Creation. Humanity is like the sun; everything revolves around it.
What God convincingly conveys to Job, Knohl says, is the notion that the Genesis model of Creation, which assumed that humanity was at the center, misses the mark. For if the universe was created for the sake of humanity, then it follows that justice for human beings should govern the human experience. If human needs are at the center, then the world should work in such a way that if someone acts justly, they will be rewarded with health and prosperity. And if someone acts wickedly, they are punished. But in Job’s case, he was a good man who lost everything. He experiences his suffering as a violation of the Genesis reading of Creation which he had taken for granted, and which -- until God’s speech -- was the only reading he knew.
When God asks Job, where were you when I laid the foundations of the Universe?, the implied answer is: you were nowhere, mister; creation didn’t involve you at all except as one of many minor players. The purpose of Creation was not necessarily or only to meet the needs of human beings. It is far vaster than that. Job’s bookkeeping, by which he concluded that since he had followed all of God’s laws and therefore expected to be rewarded, was meaningless. God’s fullness far surpasses humanity and its needs. By looking at the grandeur of Creation, and realizing our small place in it, we acquire a certain modesty – and that modesty (“I am but dust and ashes”) is perhaps what led Job to finally relent at the end of God’s discourse, and make some peace with his condition. In the new scheme, the various terrible things that happened to him don’t necessarily represent the results of some divine decision about him. It’s not “about him” at all. This realization meant he could now stop fighting his fate.
Read this way, the Book of Job therefore proposes a Copernican revolution in our understanding of our own place in the Universe – no more humanity at the center as in Genesis; rather, humanity as just one small part of God’s Universe, meriting no favouritism or special treatment.
For us, this notion may or may not provide comfort at a time of great suffering, loss, or spiritual crisis. But the cosmic geography lesson Job learned has implications beyond just our personal suffering. I’d like to spend a few minutes with you thinking about three other areas in which Job’s lesson might be instructive for us.
First, in the world of interpersonal relationships, most of us know that a Genesis type understanding of ourselves as being at the center of the universe can often get in the way of our relationships with other people. It is of course natural for children to perceive of the world as revolving around themselves, and to view other people as existing for the sake of meeting their needs. However, as children mature, most begin to gain a consciousness of the legitimate needs of others. Letting go of our need to be at the center of the universe is a lifelong process that some of us are better at than others, or we’re better at it at some times than at others. Rosh Hashanah is a good time for us to review how we’ve behaved with the others in our lives– have we been as aware of their needs as we’ve wanted them to be aware of our own?
Have we had expectations of perfection in others, while assuming that others will forgive our weaknesses and foibles? Job challenges us to examine where we’d place ourselves if we were to draw a flow chart of our relationship with others. Where were we, God says to us, when the universe was created? Who are we to assume that our needs and desires are always paramount?
The second place I see in which this Jobian-Copernican revolution plays out is with regard to our relationship to Jewish law and tradition. Many of us consciously or unconsciously subscribe to the notion that the criterion for deciding how to observe Jewish tradition is whether we feel that particular tradition is interesting, nice, convenient, compelling, or not. In so doing, of course, we put ourselves at the center. Just as in the Genesis model all of creation was made for us, so we approach Jewish tradition as being made for us, and therefore it is our right to pick and choose what “works” for us. A Jobian reorientation would have us consider instead that the system of mitzvot has a claim on us, as each of us is but one of millions of heirs to the covenant established between God and the patriarchs. Does this mean that we need to entirely cede our independence and autonomy over to the external authority of tradition? No, Job is never asked to eradicate his own individuality. But this reorientation does mean that we are part of a community and we are each links in a chain going back to Abraham and Sarah and ahead into that unpredictable future, and we therefore have important responsibilities beyond meeting our own needs, responsibilities which may lead to a very different approach to Jewish ritual, Jewish communal life, and God.
Finally, as I think about this Job-inspired reorientation, I’d like to speak about Israel and the Jewish people. Israel reminds us of course that it’s not always a good thing to be at the center of attention. How many headlines, how many UN resolutions, how much of the world’s attention is focused on our one little homeland the size of New Jersey? With all the oppressive regimes in the world and all the persecution and human rights abuses that take place in it, the inexplicable spotlight on Israel’s blemishes is both dangerous, and infuriating.
Much of this phenomenon is out of our hands. We in this room have control neither over the policies of the government of Israel which may arouse the wrath of nations or groups in the world, nor over the inexplicable and enduring phenomenon of anti-Semitism which long preceded us in its ugly history. If the world seems excessively focused on Israel and the Jews, there is little we can do about it.
However, there is something we can do in light of Job’s teaching, and that is we can and must be on the lookout for signs of ethnocentrism in ourselves. We have a long history, going back to Abraham, of seeing our people as bearers of a unique covenant with God. That’s fine, as long as it doesn’t lead us to a negation of other people’s unique relationship to God, or other people’s value as human beings. As the Book of Amos says, Halo khivnei Kushiyim atem li bnei Yisrael n’um Hashem “To Me, O Israelites, you are just like the Ethiopians declares the Lord. True I brought Israel up from the land of Egypt, but also the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir (9:7)”. Yes, God redeemed us from Egypt, and that was amazing and definitely worthy of being celebrated for generations and millenia to come. But God also redeemed other peoples. Israel is, for Amos, but one nation among many. His view is not necessarily shared by some other biblical writers who do forefront Israel’s status as am segula. But Amos’s view is part of our legacy as well and if we find ourselves becoming too self-absorbed as a community, we should remember Amos’s critique. If we forget that the bnei kushiyim of Darfur were also created in the image of God, and that their welfare should also be the subject of our concern in addition to our natural concern for our own people, then we should remember Amos’s critique. If we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of assuming our own virtue, then we should remember Amos’s critique. Any attempt to build a Jewish identity on the idea that we’re more virtuous or more important than others, will inevitably fall like a house of cards in the face of our own failings, made all too clear in the Bible, and in any honest process of teshuvah.
So we’re not superior as a people, but we’re certainly not inferior and of course have as much right to live as any other – which puts the Jewish state in the position of facing some excruciating ethical dilemmas. Israel has had to confront these dilemmas as it attempts to ensure the security of its own citizens in the face of the horrific suicide bombing campaign of the last four years. At the height of these attacks, during that awful period a couple of years ago when it seemed that there was an attack on civilians somewhere in Israel every week and we were afraid to turn on the news every day for fear of what we would hear, the people of Israel naturally demanded that their government “do something” to stop the carnage.
And thus was born the security barrier which is now going up, resisted initially mostly by the right in Israel for its own ideological reasons; the barrier which has been the subject of so much international controversy and condemnation. I had a tour of parts of the barrier when I was in Israel in July, at least some of the sections that either have already been built or are going up at this time in the city of Jerusalem itself and environs. It is of course not pretty, but then no one claims that it is. The difficult question that it poses for us, in the context of my subject this morning is, are there limits to what we can do to protect ourselves when those protective measures severely impact on the human rights of others? The barrier divides families, and divides landowners from their land; it limits access of many innocent Palestinians to hospitals and schools and other services they need to live their lives and which we take for granted. Our group visited a neighbourhood which is slated to be completely surrounded by the barrier, with access to the neighbourhood only through army checkpoints. That’s a ghetto, and we of all people know about ghettos. At the same time, that barrier deters suicide bombers who set out with an intention of killing and maiming as many innocent Israeli civilians – men, women, children, old people – as they can.
Can the route be improved on? Absolutely, and that process is going on right now in response to July’s Israeli Supreme Court decision. But can it be made not to impact on the human rights of the Palestinians? I’m afraid not. There are places, especially in Jerusalem, where there is just no good place to put the thing. If it’s about us, and our need for security, then Israel has got to go ahead and build the barrier, minimizing but not eliminating the negative impact on the Palestinian civilian population with whom we share Eretz Yisrael. We build it, and pray that one day peace will allow for it to come down. In the context of a world which has in it places like Darfur, and Chechnya, and Iran, and North Korea, this barrier is not one of the worst human rights violations that exists. The barrier, ugly as it is, doesn’t kill anybody; in fact, there’s a good argument that it saves lives, Israeli lives.
My own opinion is that I don’t think Israel has any choice in the current climate but to build the barrier, along as humane a route as possible. But this Rosh Hashanah, as it continues to go up, I think we have to be honest with ourselves. For even as the rabbis teaches us that saving one human life is equivalent to saving the whole world, leading us to affirm that anything that can be done to stop the terror must be done, Amos reminds us that other peoples have sacred narratives as well, and Job brings its own message about just where our particular lives stand in the scale of the universe. It is a sobering lesson for Jews the world over as Israel does what it needs to do.
So in these three areas – our personal interactions with others, our relationship to tradition, and our attitude toward Israel and the Jewish people, I think that Job provokes us to think hard about our assumptions, and how they play out in our actions. But of course, there’s a paradox in Job that bears some comment. God’s whole speech about Job’s ultimate insignificance takes place in the context of a personal dialogue which God is having with Job. How many people merit personal responses from God to their personal spiritual dilemmas? For someone so insignificant, Job sure seems to earn a lot of personal attention from the Creator. And perhaps it’s the very fact of that response which Job really craved, some acknowledgement from God that despite the vastness of Creation, and despite the fact that Job wasn’t there when God laid the foundations of the Universe, and despite the fact that Job can’t make it rain or send lightning bolts -- despite all those things which are very true, God knows that Job exists, and God the Almighty considers him worthy enough to respond to. If we read the text in this way, we’re left with the question – is it Job’s realization of his own insignificance which leads him to “recant and relent”, to make peace with his fate, or is it the realization that he’s still important enough for God to care about despite his insignificance that does the trick? If the latter, then perhaps Job doesn’t come to eliminate the Genesis conception entirely. After all, Judaism could never go all the way to the logical end of God’s argument in Job, which would be the Aristotelian view that God just doesn’t care about individuals. That would run counter to the overwhelming preponderance of Jewish texts and teachings. Such a cold and austere God could never have sustained our people through all the difficult times we’ve endured, times when our faith in a loving and caring God was about all we had to hang on to.
Rather, the Job text provides a balance point to Genesis 1. As the Hasidic saying goes, every person should walk around with two sayings in his pockets: “For my sake the world was created” and (from our Job passage) “I am but dust and ashes”. We need them both. No, we’re not the center of the universe. But we’re also not as insignificant as a termite either. Or rather, our existential reality has elements of both that we need to draw upon as the need and circumstances warrant. For those who are plagued by feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred, the notion that they were created by a loving God who cares about them is critically important. For others, who have become accustomed to being at the centre of their family dynamic, who’ve assumed that their needs are principal in the workplace, who’ve neglected to think about the impact they have on others, who’ve dismissed the legitimate claims of other ethnic groups, for these folks the awareness that they are “but dust and ashes” is what they need to nurture. For many of us, of all the changes and transformations we have to deal with, this kind of paradigm shift is among the most difficult to deal with because it goes so deep to the core of our neshama, and the assumptions we’ve always lived by. The Yamim Noraim come once a year to help us step out of automatic pilot for a time and think about who we are and what assumptions lie behind our beliefs and actions.
So in keeping with the mood of the Yamim Noraim, even as we celebrate Rosh Hashanah as the birthday of the world, let’s make this birthday celebration a time to reflect deeply on the relationship between our Creator and ourselves, and on our relationship with other people and with other peoples. If we do so, then even as we inauguarate a year which will bring a dizzying and terrifying amount of change, we can still truly say “Happy Birthday.”