Rosh Hashanna Morning 2025 – Gainesville
Rabbi Cy Stanway
Several years ago, the tabloids had a field day when the beautiful, young, troubled Christina Onassis committed suicide, leaving behind her five-year-old daughter. In a phrase that probably encapsulated much of her tragic depression, the papers defined her as the “heiress to the Onassis fortune.” In other words, Christina Onassis died being best-known for the promised riches she would now never inherit. Her only child, the quintessentially “poor little rich kid”, now assumes that same dubious title.
About the same time, the papers had a second chance to pin even more labels on another soul. Already the victim of his fame, J.Paul Getty Ill was kidnapped, maimed and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Like Onassis, Getty is also defined by his status as the “heir” to riches, in this case, those of his oil tycoon grandfather. Evidently there is a certain amount of pain for these people who find their identities already circumscribed by a life that has gone before them. They are defined entirely by their wealth – as if they were all sporting personalized license plates proclaiming “Rich ‘R’ Us.”
It seems to me that the tale in these stories is not specific just to those who happen to inherit vast wealth. In fact, every one of us carries around disappointments with us and is laden with regrets stretching back from our earliest days. The question we must ask ourselves today is simply what to do with all those regrets and disappointments and all that aggravation, some of which has stayed with us for decades.
As Jews, it helps to look at those who we consider our heroes. The Talmud asks the question, “Who is strong?” and answers, “The one who subdues his yetzer – often understood as impulses or reactions.” This is all very well and good but it is also a total impossibility. No one can control all their impulses. We get angry when things don’t go our way. We feel cheated when we did everything ethically and someone else beats the system. And we are frustrated when we keep trying something and seem to get nowhere.
The Hebrew word for ‘subdue’ – ‘kavash’ – has an interesting etymology. It is a very old word, appearing frequently in the Bible. I am convinced that our English word ‘quash’ has these Hebrew and Aramaic beginnings. It is usually translated with words like ‘subdue’ or ‘dominate.’
But root of the word really means ‘to make a path through.’ Modern Hebrew uses this word, by the way, to name a street a ‘kvish’ – a path through the city. So, when our Sages tell us that the strong man ‘kavashes his impulses’ it more accurately means that he is strong because he can find a way through the debilitating and detrimental effects of his or her impulses for anger, disappointment and frustration.
As Jews, we have a long history of frustration, beginning right from the start. Abraham was frustrated with his sons, Joseph’s brothers were frustrated with Joseph, Isaac and Ishmael are so far apart on the personality spectrum that they are always at odds with one another, and Jacob and Esau are so perpetually at each other’s throats, literally and figuratively, that they needed to separate for twenty years so they would not end up killing each other! And Moses must be the king of frustration and anger and depression.
Here was a man who knew God face to face, who spoke with God as a person speaks with a friend, who heard promises about a Promised Land and a happy and prosperous people from the Big Guy Himself and who, time after time, gets so frustrated that there are occasions that both He and God want to abandon the people and leave them to their own devices. It is one of those truisms that the people who are our inspirations for living are filled with the same emotions that all of us feel. Maybe that is why Jews never put halos on pictures of our Sages, our prophets, or our forefathers and mothers. They were simply human filled with all the human stuff that we are filled with.
But these people are special because they made a kvish – a path through their debilitating emotions and found a way to leave it behind them, not forgetting it, just passing beyond it. And maybe that is what the Promised Land really is.
Maybe it’s a process and not a place. Learning how to make that path through difficult obstacles is what Yorn Kippur is about and if we can learn that, then this day can be the kind of day the Rabbis who developed it wanted it to be: a day not just of decision but of moving forward despite the tzoris we know lies in front of us.
Many of us have plenty of reasons to be mad at God who, we believe, has shown us a Promised Land but seems to have put obstacles on the way towards it. And how to we react when we have done everything right but things don’t go our way? We want to hit something. There is good biblical precedent for this.
When Moses was being ganged up on by his rebellious Jews who demanded water after Miriam died, instead of speaking to rock and getting the water, he hits it twice. God’s reaction is strange. He forbids Moses from getting to the Land of Israel – sort of an excessive punishment – and He explains His actions by saying “Because you did not believe in Me to sanctify Me in front of the people.” Huh? What does hitting a rock have to do with sanctifying or believing in God?
Maybe it would help if you knew that one of the names for God was “Rock.” So it could be argued, midrashically-speaking, that Moses was really striking God, almost saying “Why did You give me such a burden? Can’t you see that this people is always complaining and never satisfied? And how come I have to lead them?” And then when Moses tells the people near the end of his life, “God was angry because of you,” what he really may have been saying is “I am angry at God because of you because you are the ones who made it impossible for me to enter the Promised Land.”
Being angry with God is not such a bad thing. I had a good friend who taught me a wonderful pastoral lesson when he said that God could take our anger. I think he is right. The Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz wrote a story called ‘Bontshya Svayg’ or ‘Bontshya the Silent.’ Bontshe is a victim of poverty and degradation who never complains about his miserable lot in life, so that when he dies he goes straight to heaven, greeted by a chorus of angels, and is invited by the highest judge of the heavenly tribunal to ask for anything he wants as his just reward.
And what is Bontshe’s greatest wish? “What I’d like most of all,” says Bontshe, “is a warm roll with fresh butter every morning.” Hearing this, the judges and angels hang their heads in shame, while the prosecutor breaks out in contemptuous laughter. Bontshe came to symbolize the passive, ignorant, hopeless condition of the typical shtetl Jew.
To meekly accept the way things are as God’s will is to let injustice rule, to let suffering be the norm, and to willingly bind ourselves with slavery. Is this what it means to be Jewish? Sadly, there are times in our history when we had no choice.
Indeed, what is the classical picture of the Jew? It is the skinny man with hunched shoulders and thick glasses poring over a page of Talmud. Only rarely were the images of the brave Maccabees. And yet, the images of our prophets and biblical heroes are not images of meekness. They are images of rallying against injustice and surmounting the obstacles and then leaving them behind. This is what it means to make a ‘kvish.’
What we should learn from our ancestors is that there is nothing wrong with disappointment and anger but rather with hanging on to it forever. God can take our anger. Even people can take our anger. The problem is what happens when we hang on to it and not let it die a natural death.
Someone made some interesting observations about Jacob and Esau, the sons of Isaac and Rebecca, the grandsons of Abraham who were in constant competition and conflict, the perfect soil for anger and resentment. He writes:
“We sometimes misread the story of Jacob and Esau by believing that Esau made one of the worst deals of all time when he sold his birthright to his brother for a bowl of stew. The sorry fact is that we make worse deals all the time — at least Esau got a meal out of the transaction.
How have we sold our birthright cheaply?
By giving up our power to forgive in exchange for the right to judge, we lose our chance to be forgiven.
By holding on to our favorite grudges and maintaining our pet grievances, we give up the chance to get forgiven.
(At least) Esau got a nice bowl of hot stew in return for some stuff – maybe not a lot of stuff, but stuff, nonetheless — and we are willing to forfeit the treasure of eternity for the sake of staying angry.”
Jacob’s real strength comes not from his cleverness but rather from his ability and desire to finally make peace with his brother – twenty years later, to be sure – but he had finally put that anger behind him. He could not forget it but he could live with it in the past and could stop putting his brother before him as an omnipresent obstacle.
How many of us though do just the opposite? Rabbi Harold Kushner points out that there “are too many people who could not enjoy the last third of their lives because the first two-thirds did not turn out the way they had hoped. Their last years, sometimes their last decades were marked by unhappiness and resentment because they never made it to the ‘promised land.’ Their careers, their marriages, their families never quite turned out the way they hoped they would. They never got over their anger at God for the way their lives turned out, for all the things that happened or didn’t happen in their lives. Often they were people who might have had much to look back on with pride and pleasure, but they could never see things that way. They were not only alienated from the synagogue, they were alienated from life itself, in the way that self-pity and constant complaining about that that happened years ago can drive others away and leave you lonely, giving you one more thing to complain about.”
The ones who make the effort to forge the path are the ones who can, at least, get on with living. How do we do this? My computer gave me the answer when it tried to correct the word “forge” and turned it into “forget.” (It might have been a Divine intervention or maybe just a spelling mistake!) But, nonetheless, it’s interesting that the word “forge” makes up most of the word “forget.” To forge that kvish that path means we must engage in a delicate balance of remembering and forgetting.
There is the Greek legend of the waters of Lethe. The legend is that when a person dies they end up on one side of the River Styx, the first river in Hades. There they would wander for all eternity unless they paid the ferryman to take them across the stream and, if they did that, they could make their way beyond that bank to the River Lethe. That is where they had a choice. The only price they had to pay to cross the Lethe was that they had to drink from the waters, waters that caused you to forget absolutely everything for all eternity. Everything gone; the bad memories but also the good ones. The times of great disappointment and the times of great achievement. It would be as if you had never tasted even the smallest part of life. You would be a perpetual fetus.
Would you drink such waters? Imagine forgetting everything Your children’s pain, but also their accomplishments. A difficult marriage but also the joyous years. The failures but also the successes. And so on, and so only. It has been said that life can be painful if you do it right. To have only good memories is not an option. Even the writer of the 23rd Psalm had to go through valley of darkness before being led to still waters.
It is the nature of life.
Knowing that, then, how do we remember and forget at the same time? The interesting thing about the word ‘kippur’ as in ‘Yom Kippur’ is that it comes from the word meaning ‘to cover up’ or ‘to hide.’ Covering up is a kind of forgetting and forging ahead. We hide who we were with who we are now. When someone becomes ‘baal teshuvah’ a devoted and dedicated Jew, turning away from the path of sin, they are not changing their souls – they are changing their directions and, in doing so, covering up who they once were so that they do not have to carry it around with them for the rest of their lives.
In the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” there is a scene that really captures what it means to have this sense of remembering and forgetting at the same time. After 40 years in prison, Red is before his umpteenth parole hearing. They ask all the usual questions, “Do you feel that you have been rehabilitated,” and so forth. Red’s response is, in my opinion, the real climax of the movie. He says to his parole board, “Rehabilited? Well, now, let me see. You know I don’t have any idea of what that means. I know what you think it means, sonny. What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did? There’s not a day goes by that I don’t feel regret, not because I’m in here or you think I should. I look back on the way I was then – a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense to him. Tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone and this old man is all that’s left. I got to live with that. Rehabilitated is just a … word. So you go on and stamp your forms sonny and stop wasting my time, because to tell you the truth, I don’t really care any more.”
It is only when we leave the hurts and the disappointments where they belong, behind us, that we can make a kvish for ourselves. The pieces of who we are can never really disappear but whether we wear them on our hearts or put them on a shelf determines how successful we will be.
Rabbi Kushner tells a remarkable story of a young artist whose art was just taking off. On opening night his exhibits were a huge hit but the next morning woke up to the news that someone had broken into the gallery, slashed his paintings, smashed his ceramics and took a sledge hammer to his bronze sculptures. Kushner remembered a midrash. It is said that when Moses came down from Sinai the first time and saw his people dancing around the Golden Calf. He was so angry he smashed the first set of Tablets containing the Ten Commandments. Our rabbis wondered whatever happened to those pieces.
They suggest that they accompanied Moses in the Ark of the Covenant with the whole pieces. Kushner suggested the young artist to do the same thing. Collect a sample from each piece and put in on your mantle. Look at it not as a sign of the world’s cruelty but of the possibility of beauty and his success in bringing the beautiful to light.
Of course there are people who have had a hand in shattering our dreams and our hopes and who would like to see us fail. Like Moses, we have an opportunity to see what we do with the pieces. Do we remember the anger and how we laid down our dreams or do we remember the joy in dreaming in the first place? And do we remember our failures or, do we do as Moses who, at the end of his life articulated pride, not regret, gratitude, not bitterness and praise, not envy.
When we have forgiven, as Moses had, we are not letting the people off the hook. What we have done is tell them that in order to move forward we have to remember all that was good and all that was fulfilling despite the pain, the rejection and the sorrow that came with it. They say that to forgive is divine. I ccould not disagree more. To forgive is the most human thing we can do. But it takes great strength of will to cut a kvish through the anger and frustrations and disappointments of life.
We may never get the Promised Land. Hardly any of us ever do. So what? Do we think that we are entitled to it? There is no promise of quid pro quo anywhere in our machzor. And yet, and yet, just because we have not gotten to that Promised Land where everything is perfect and everyone loves us and we never feel pain or sorrow, does not mean we can not stand on the mountain of our accomplishments and look forward, maybe even catching a glimpse of that Promised Land? And if it stays just beyond the horizon, so be it. And, while it is true that we will have occasional hard paths, black keys instead of white ones, stings and stones, the truth remains that we will still have lived our lives with integrity and honesty, felt the joy of accomplishment and the freedom of forgiveness. We can stand on the mountain and see just how blessed we really are.
But first we must cut a path. We begin cutting on the edge of this New Year and we begin to cover the broken shards and sharp-edged pieces of our lives not so much to forget them but to make an conscious effort to avoid stepping on them and giving them the power to tell us which direction we should take. These Days of Awe is that time.
Let us then cut our paths. Let us cover up the shards that have hurt and cover them up with forgiveness and mercy. Let us see the blessings of our lives instead of the disappointments. And finally, let us stand on the top of our mountain at the edge of a new Promised Land – one that we may never get to but only get to glimpse – and, in that glimpse, feel the joy and the honor of accepting God’s invitation to be a part of such a holy journey.
May we see our Promised Lands soon and in our day. Amen
