by Larry Rosenwald, Laura Tennenhouse
and Aliza Arzt
and Aliza Arzt
It was impossible, this year, to write something for the newsletter about the High Holidays that took no account of the attacks of October 7th and the war in Gaza. But it was equally impossible to have just one person write something; we are a diverse community, and no one voice can represent it. So we invited members to contribute a reflection, and below are the reflections we received. The writers wrote independently, without any attempt at coordination, and any points of connection between one reflection and another are accidental.
By Larry Rosenwald
It is impossible, for me at least , to enter the Days of Awe without being urgently aware of the Hamas attacks of last October 7th, of the Israeli hostages still in captivity, and of the Israeli war in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, many of them children.
We might, of course, regard the Days as a refuge, however temporary, from those horrors, and turn to thinking about teshuvah as if we could do that thinking without remembering those horrors. No doubt some will, and I think I can see where they’re coming from; we all need refuges, even those who are denied them, as the hostages are denied them, Palestinians living in Gaza are denied them.
I myself, though, cannot make such a separation; any mode of teshuvah severed from the war in Gaza would feel empty to me, and weightless.
What mode of teshuvah, then, would I connect with that war?
I am drawn to passages in the machzor about speech. Speech, in relation to that war, is pretty much all I have, mine to use or misuse. “All I have is a voice to unpack the folded lie,” as W. H. Auden wrote. What will the machzor teach me about that?
I am tempted every year to chant the al cheyt quickly, carried along by the nusach and the feeling of being in community with others chanting. But the al cheyt is an ordered list, a form I love, and like other lists it has its priorities. Among them are speech, what we do with our mouths, our words: bevitui sefatayim, b’dibur peh, b’tume’at sefatayim, b’tipshut peh, bilshon hara, the sin we have sinned before you in idle chatter and the way we talk, in foul speech and foolish discourse, in speaking badly of others.
One might regard these sentences as describing modes of speech that we simply need to refrain from, preferring silence to the misuse of speech. We have sinned by way of loshn hore, “slander” more or less, so all we need to do is not commit that sin, be silent when tempted to say that kind of thing.
Not a bad idea, often: to hold back, to refrain from speech with all its dangers. And that certainly is what we are taught in the meditation at the end of the Saturday morning Amidah: “guard my tongue from evil and my lips from lying; may my soul be silent – nafshi tidom - towards those who insult me, may my soul be as dust to them.”
But not a sufficient idea, nor the only idea the text allows. Sometimes our sins of speech are to be remedied not by humbler speech, by softer speech, but by more louder speech, bolder speech. And I say this not only because I hold that view in my own life – “silence is death,” after all - but because our texts, some of them at any rate, tell us that too. “Do it that my soul may sing to you and not be silent, v’lo yidom,” says Psalm 30, for example. And then there is Jonah. Jonah’s failure, in relation to God’s first command, is that he remains silent and does not rebuke. Silence can be a sin. After Jonah repents, he breaks his silence and speaks. What he says to the Ninevites is simple and direct: “forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown,” nothing more than that, nothing less than that. He does not speak harshly, he does not make ad hominem attacks. Nor, however, does he speak in humility. He does not seek no dialogue. He does not say, I see your point of view, I see where you’re coming from, I confess that I may be wrong, I imagine that the truth lies somewhere between us. His judgment is absolute. Hence, I imagine, his fear of being disbelieved, rejected, stoned, slaughtered. But he spoke what he was given to speak.
When Yom Kippur is over, I shall for the most part go back to being the civil and courteous person I was (or think I was) before it, as Jonah goes back to being Jonah after his action of rebuke. But only for the most part, I hope.
I keep thinking in this connection of some of the last sentences of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which seem to me a guide to distinguishing between moments for listening and moments for rebuking. “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience,” he writes, “I beg you to forgive me.” But then he writes, “If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.” Not quite my language, but it teaches us this, that if sometimes we need forgiveness for overstatement and impatience, at other times we need forgiveness for understatement and patience. If sometimes our speech is not temperate enough, at other times it is not intemperate enough, not prophetic enough.
I hope in this new year to have the wisdom to discern when I need to be temperate and when I need not to, and the courage to act in accord with the instructions that wisdom provides.
By Laura Tennenhouse
One of the things I like about Yom Kippur services is how connected I feel with the community. It’s “we have sinned” and “forgive us,” and the threat of being “cut off from your people” is meant to be scary. I’m often not clear in my own mind how much that “we” means “the people in the room,” or “all the Jewish people” or “all the people in the world.” All are so very important.
I don’t remember who it was that came to me last fall and said I shouldn’t just cry about the war in Gaza; I should do something, I should speak up, I should go to a protest and demand a ceasefire. It seemed like a good idea. I was still reeling from the horrors of October 7th, and yet I couldn’t imagine any number of Palestinian deaths that could make it right. The devastation was escalating and a frightening number of people seemed to want genocide. I went looking for a Jewish group to protest with, because I was uncertain and afraid of standing next to antisemites while I yelled at my government about the state of Israel being wrong. I was shocked by how many people said, “You are not Jewish.” Not merely, “You’re wrong,” or “how dare you say such a dangerous thing,” but trying to cut me off from my people.
In a time of war like this, the Yom Kippur hope of reconciliation, tshuva, and connection is hard to even reach for. (There might be a ceasefire agreement in a few weeks but even if both sides sign it would take a long time to rebuild peace and even longer to restore trust.) So am I part of the community of the whole world? I cannot speak for Gaza, any more than I could speak for Afghanistan. I can only make the roughest effort to beg for their lives. Am I part of the community of the people of Israel? A lot of American Jews don’t think I am, but the people of Israel is bigger than they are. And I am part of the community of Havurat Shalom. Which I know doesn’t always agree with me, but never tries to cut me off from my people.
From Lament to Promise
By Aliza Arzt
Although you’re reading this around High Holiday time, it was actually written on Tisha b’av and Eicha (the Book of Lamentations) is very much on my mind. The feelings expressed at the end of the Book of Lamentations resonate greatly with the “triple dread” that surrounds me daily: the
situation in the Middle East, the upcoming presidential election and the plight of unsheltered immigrants in Massachusetts (not to mention everywhere else). Two verses at the end of Chapter 5 of Lamentations highlight the pain, worry and powerlessness that have skewered many of us this past year. Here is verse 17:
ה ִלֵּבנוּ ַעל־ֵאֶּלה ָחְשׁכוּ ֵעיֵנינוּ
ֶו
ַ:
על־ֶזה ָהָיה ָד
Because of this our hearts are sick, because of these our eyes are dimmed
Verse 21:
ָנשׁוָּבה ַחֵּדשׁ ָיֵמינוּ ְּכֶקֶדם
ְי ֹהָוה | ֵאֶליָך ְו
ֲ:
הִשׁיֵבנוּ
Take us back God, to Yourself and let us come back; renew our days as of old!
These two verses, juxtaposed, express an unsurprising message: things are terrible; make it better, God. The second verse would make a good and hopeful end to the Book of Lamentations. But it’s not the end of the book. There’s one more verse:
ִּ:
כי ִאם־ָמ ֹאס ְמַאְסָּתנוּ ָקַצְפָּת ָעֵלינוּ ַעד־ְמ ֹאד
For truly, You have rejected us, bitterly raged against us
Feel free to substitute “life”, “politics”, “inhumane behavior” or anything else that we tend to focus on for “God” if it’s more comfortable. Many of us feel powerless to do anything except rage and cry. We have no answers. We have no solutions. We have only tears and anger.
Even though the book of Lamentations ends with despair, when we chant the book on Tisha b’Av, we don’t stop there. We repeat verse 21 as we beg God to help us to return, to do “tshuva”. I like this idea of ending on a note of hope, but I don’t like the last word “דםֶקֶכְּ“,” as of old”. Why should things go back to the way they used to be? Why go back to (or continue with) insisting on one correct view, one victim, one villain, one solution? Where has it gotten us? Even our own Tanach (Bible) has moments when it rises above the usual scenarios of conquest and destruction that characterize biblical “international relations”. Consider Isaiah (19:23-25):
In that day, there shall be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians shall join with the Egyptians and the Egyptians with the Assyrians, and then the Egyptians together with the Assyrians shall serve [God]. In that day, Israel shall be a third partner with Egypt and Assyria as a blessing on earth; for God of Hosts will bless them, saying “Blessed be My people Egypt, My handiwork Assyria, and My very own Israel”
ָנשׁוָּבה ַחֵּדשׁ ָיֵמינוּ
ְי ֹהָוה | ֵאֶליָך ְו
ֲ:
הִשׁיֵבנוּ
Take us back God, to Yourself and let us come back; renew our days!
By Larry Rosenwald
It is impossible, for me at least , to enter the Days of Awe without being urgently aware of the Hamas attacks of last October 7th, of the Israeli hostages still in captivity, and of the Israeli war in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians, many of them children.
We might, of course, regard the Days as a refuge, however temporary, from those horrors, and turn to thinking about teshuvah as if we could do that thinking without remembering those horrors. No doubt some will, and I think I can see where they’re coming from; we all need refuges, even those who are denied them, as the hostages are denied them, Palestinians living in Gaza are denied them.
I myself, though, cannot make such a separation; any mode of teshuvah severed from the war in Gaza would feel empty to me, and weightless.
What mode of teshuvah, then, would I connect with that war?
I am drawn to passages in the machzor about speech. Speech, in relation to that war, is pretty much all I have, mine to use or misuse. “All I have is a voice to unpack the folded lie,” as W. H. Auden wrote. What will the machzor teach me about that?
I am tempted every year to chant the al cheyt quickly, carried along by the nusach and the feeling of being in community with others chanting. But the al cheyt is an ordered list, a form I love, and like other lists it has its priorities. Among them are speech, what we do with our mouths, our words: bevitui sefatayim, b’dibur peh, b’tume’at sefatayim, b’tipshut peh, bilshon hara, the sin we have sinned before you in idle chatter and the way we talk, in foul speech and foolish discourse, in speaking badly of others.
One might regard these sentences as describing modes of speech that we simply need to refrain from, preferring silence to the misuse of speech. We have sinned by way of loshn hore, “slander” more or less, so all we need to do is not commit that sin, be silent when tempted to say that kind of thing.
Not a bad idea, often: to hold back, to refrain from speech with all its dangers. And that certainly is what we are taught in the meditation at the end of the Saturday morning Amidah: “guard my tongue from evil and my lips from lying; may my soul be silent – nafshi tidom - towards those who insult me, may my soul be as dust to them.”
But not a sufficient idea, nor the only idea the text allows. Sometimes our sins of speech are to be remedied not by humbler speech, by softer speech, but by more louder speech, bolder speech. And I say this not only because I hold that view in my own life – “silence is death,” after all - but because our texts, some of them at any rate, tell us that too. “Do it that my soul may sing to you and not be silent, v’lo yidom,” says Psalm 30, for example. And then there is Jonah. Jonah’s failure, in relation to God’s first command, is that he remains silent and does not rebuke. Silence can be a sin. After Jonah repents, he breaks his silence and speaks. What he says to the Ninevites is simple and direct: “forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown,” nothing more than that, nothing less than that. He does not speak harshly, he does not make ad hominem attacks. Nor, however, does he speak in humility. He does not seek no dialogue. He does not say, I see your point of view, I see where you’re coming from, I confess that I may be wrong, I imagine that the truth lies somewhere between us. His judgment is absolute. Hence, I imagine, his fear of being disbelieved, rejected, stoned, slaughtered. But he spoke what he was given to speak.
When Yom Kippur is over, I shall for the most part go back to being the civil and courteous person I was (or think I was) before it, as Jonah goes back to being Jonah after his action of rebuke. But only for the most part, I hope.
I keep thinking in this connection of some of the last sentences of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which seem to me a guide to distinguishing between moments for listening and moments for rebuking. “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience,” he writes, “I beg you to forgive me.” But then he writes, “If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.” Not quite my language, but it teaches us this, that if sometimes we need forgiveness for overstatement and impatience, at other times we need forgiveness for understatement and patience. If sometimes our speech is not temperate enough, at other times it is not intemperate enough, not prophetic enough.
I hope in this new year to have the wisdom to discern when I need to be temperate and when I need not to, and the courage to act in accord with the instructions that wisdom provides.
By Laura Tennenhouse
One of the things I like about Yom Kippur services is how connected I feel with the community. It’s “we have sinned” and “forgive us,” and the threat of being “cut off from your people” is meant to be scary. I’m often not clear in my own mind how much that “we” means “the people in the room,” or “all the Jewish people” or “all the people in the world.” All are so very important.
I don’t remember who it was that came to me last fall and said I shouldn’t just cry about the war in Gaza; I should do something, I should speak up, I should go to a protest and demand a ceasefire. It seemed like a good idea. I was still reeling from the horrors of October 7th, and yet I couldn’t imagine any number of Palestinian deaths that could make it right. The devastation was escalating and a frightening number of people seemed to want genocide. I went looking for a Jewish group to protest with, because I was uncertain and afraid of standing next to antisemites while I yelled at my government about the state of Israel being wrong. I was shocked by how many people said, “You are not Jewish.” Not merely, “You’re wrong,” or “how dare you say such a dangerous thing,” but trying to cut me off from my people.
In a time of war like this, the Yom Kippur hope of reconciliation, tshuva, and connection is hard to even reach for. (There might be a ceasefire agreement in a few weeks but even if both sides sign it would take a long time to rebuild peace and even longer to restore trust.) So am I part of the community of the whole world? I cannot speak for Gaza, any more than I could speak for Afghanistan. I can only make the roughest effort to beg for their lives. Am I part of the community of the people of Israel? A lot of American Jews don’t think I am, but the people of Israel is bigger than they are. And I am part of the community of Havurat Shalom. Which I know doesn’t always agree with me, but never tries to cut me off from my people.
From Lament to Promise
By Aliza Arzt
Although you’re reading this around High Holiday time, it was actually written on Tisha b’av and Eicha (the Book of Lamentations) is very much on my mind. The feelings expressed at the end of the Book of Lamentations resonate greatly with the “triple dread” that surrounds me daily: the
situation in the Middle East, the upcoming presidential election and the plight of unsheltered immigrants in Massachusetts (not to mention everywhere else). Two verses at the end of Chapter 5 of Lamentations highlight the pain, worry and powerlessness that have skewered many of us this past year. Here is verse 17:
ה ִלֵּבנוּ ַעל־ֵאֶּלה ָחְשׁכוּ ֵעיֵנינוּ
ֶו
ַ:
על־ֶזה ָהָיה ָד
Because of this our hearts are sick, because of these our eyes are dimmed
Verse 21:
ָנשׁוָּבה ַחֵּדשׁ ָיֵמינוּ ְּכֶקֶדם
ְי ֹהָוה | ֵאֶליָך ְו
ֲ:
הִשׁיֵבנוּ
Take us back God, to Yourself and let us come back; renew our days as of old!
These two verses, juxtaposed, express an unsurprising message: things are terrible; make it better, God. The second verse would make a good and hopeful end to the Book of Lamentations. But it’s not the end of the book. There’s one more verse:
ִּ:
כי ִאם־ָמ ֹאס ְמַאְסָּתנוּ ָקַצְפָּת ָעֵלינוּ ַעד־ְמ ֹאד
For truly, You have rejected us, bitterly raged against us
Feel free to substitute “life”, “politics”, “inhumane behavior” or anything else that we tend to focus on for “God” if it’s more comfortable. Many of us feel powerless to do anything except rage and cry. We have no answers. We have no solutions. We have only tears and anger.
Even though the book of Lamentations ends with despair, when we chant the book on Tisha b’Av, we don’t stop there. We repeat verse 21 as we beg God to help us to return, to do “tshuva”. I like this idea of ending on a note of hope, but I don’t like the last word “דםֶקֶכְּ“,” as of old”. Why should things go back to the way they used to be? Why go back to (or continue with) insisting on one correct view, one victim, one villain, one solution? Where has it gotten us? Even our own Tanach (Bible) has moments when it rises above the usual scenarios of conquest and destruction that characterize biblical “international relations”. Consider Isaiah (19:23-25):
In that day, there shall be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians shall join with the Egyptians and the Egyptians with the Assyrians, and then the Egyptians together with the Assyrians shall serve [God]. In that day, Israel shall be a third partner with Egypt and Assyria as a blessing on earth; for God of Hosts will bless them, saying “Blessed be My people Egypt, My handiwork Assyria, and My very own Israel”
ָנשׁוָּבה ַחֵּדשׁ ָיֵמינוּ
ְי ֹהָוה | ֵאֶליָך ְו
ֲ:
הִשׁיֵבנוּ
Take us back God, to Yourself and let us come back; renew our days!
Larry Rosenwald, Laura Tennenhouse
and Aliza Arzt are members of Havurat Shalom.
and Aliza Arzt are members of Havurat Shalom.
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