Many years ago, I found myself in the bottom of 30 foot hole digging in an archeological ruin in Israel. My discoveries were hardly earth-shattering although my partner and I found a floor of the very earliest Cannanite dwelling in Tel Dan. If you ever read ‘The Tel’ the very first floor of the very first settlement was what I dug up. It wasn’t very exciting. After all we didn’t’ find any interesting jewelry or intact pots. But the very act of finding something someone left behind or even the stone floor upon which they walked gives rise to an active imagination. What did they do with this item? Who walked upon these floors? What were their names? And so forth. The questions we ask reflect our need to know everything and our imaginations take us to the past to give clarity to our present.
I have often thought about that week or so down in the hole digging. Finding the remnants of a life and reconstructing that life through an active imagination with relatively scant evidence is an exercise that never ends and evinces more and more questions.
I always thought about the snippets of people’s lives through the lens of archeology and, of course, through memory. But I never really thought about the snippets of my life and what people would find after I was long gone.
But I had a taste of it a couple of months ago.
By the time I had left my house – in a fashion – after spending 14 or 15 weeks in quarantine and not going out anywhere, just like all of you, I felt the pressing need to get to the temple and to resume some kind of normalcy. It was a place of focus and comfortable assurance that there was going to be a continuity in my life and the life of the temple.
And so, when I got the temple I did a quick survey to see what I had missed and get clues about what happened while I was gone. Everything looked pretty much same. Although there were some distinct changes: hand sanitizer was everywhere, the first elements of the new video system were making an appearance and there was a leak in my office ceiling. Then I came into the sanctuary and immediately I saw the moment my life changed. It was written all over the bima.
We closed the temple almost immediately after Purim. On the bima were the two megillot we read from. There was Purim mask and a grogger, a copy of the Purim speil and a yahrtzeit list from the last Shabbat we gathered: March 6. It was an eerie feeling seeing the remnants of my life that were suddenly abandoned so that I, like all of us, could stay safe and deal with something that so few of us even pondered. And coming back to those suddenly abandoned things got me wondering about the other things we abandon and, if we returned to ponder all those things, what would they tell us about ourselves?
As we begin these Days of Awe, that is a thought worth pondering. The machzor – the prayerbook for the Days of Awe comes from the Hebrew root “chazar” which means ‘to return.’ The customary idea is that it is a guidebook to return to the state of spiritual purity we once enjoyed unsullied by sin and malice. But in light of the virus and our return to a new kind of normal life – a normal which has yet to shake out – I am looking at the machzor – the book of return – to guide us to return back on our lives and all the things we left behind. Like the megillahs on the bima and a yahrtzeit list from 15 weeks prior, we might be surprised at what we have left in our wake.
I’m hope most of us would look back and feel pretty good about ourselves. And I think it would be a pretty accurate assessment. We are generally good people and truly want to make the world a better place. The law of kindness is our lips and we live out our years ethically and honorably.
And yet, even though we are sure of own basic decency, we still come together for these Days of Awe. There is some spiritual gravity that brings us closer to God and to the Godlike which dwells in our innermost parts. We may be good. We may think of ourselves as good. But we also know we are in need of repair. We seek that forgiveness we all know we need. We ask God and each other to cover up these things we are not proud of about ourselves. We seek to Kippur – as in Yom Kippur – Day of Covering Up. And we ask God to Kippur our shortcomings not to erase them but, rather, to offer us the permission to start again. Today is the moment we are given the permission to look over the shards of what we have left behind this year and, without judgement or threat of punishment of any kind, embrace the possibilities of a new year – a year of growth, wisdom and leaving remnants of honor and glory behind us from this Rosh Hashanna to the next.
We begin that process tonight. But we begin in the oddest of ways. I don’t recall ever reading in the annals of Jewish history how a community engaged the Days of Awe in the middle of a pandemic. Though there were many dire situations where Jews could not be Jews in public, there was never something quite like this. This is the strangest of these strange days because, for the first time ever, you can’t see anyone, you can’t be seen and I have no idea who is worshipping with me tonight. We can lament the situation but let’s not. Let’s try to take what the pandemic has given us and see if each of us can, individually, build something quite meaningful. Let’s use this moment as a gift.
Instead of being together feeling a little intimidated or constrained in our worship let’s take the moments these upcoming days afford us do something truly remarkable: the chance to engage in a real return that not only takes us to a place where our sins are not noticed but, perhaps even more importantly, to a place where we can look over the things that we left behind over the past year or maybe even the past lifetime and wonder if these shards and fragments of our lives were ennobling and brought light into the world or whether or not our deeds and words were demeaning, destructive, and reflected wasted chances for something better. Picking up those shards is hard but what better way than to do it and not worry about what the neighbours think? They can’t see you anyway. Tonight you can get emotional about prayer and maybe for the first time ever, maybe not, make a connection with something bigger and more meaningful than your own little world and, in doing so, widen your circle so that the shards you leave in the coming year are life giving and light giving.
When I was in that hole many years ago and standing on the floor of the first Cannanite dwelling more that 5000 years old, I picked up the stones of the floor and tried to reconstruct a narrative about what life was like for the person who walked on it. I will never know if my narrative was right or wrong, accurate or way off base. But that stone was part of a life in the same way that the shards and pieces of our lives have been left behind. To revisit them and to pick them up carefully examining their contours helps us to create a narrative of where we have been and presents us with a choice as to what kind of remnants we want to leave behind over the next year.
In the end, we use those shards and we once again examine and build a new life out of those building blocks. Our shards are our handiwork, but they are pieces of what we were, not telling-stones of what we can be. The still small voice – the Divine voice – is reaching deep within our souls and giving us the chance to bend over, pick up the shard, examine it and return it to our lives as a moment of joy or a moment of regret that we need to correct.
The journey begins anew tonight. The machzor is open before us. The words to return to God beckon us. The phrases to return to our shards and fragments summon us to a new place, a new us, and, in doing so, give us the opportunity to leave moments of light behind us. And to turn our fragments of sin into light is power and promise of this great day.
Shanna Tova – A year of blessing to all of us as we pray for the moment when we can share together again. May we all, even in our confined state, leave behind remnants of light, glory and honor in the coming year.
