Second Day Rosh Hashanna

Congregation B’nai Israel – Boca 2026

In my first year of rabbinic school, 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.  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 think 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 something of an epiphany during the year of COVID that I am sure you will be able to relate to, to one degree or another.

I think I spent 14 or 15 weeks hunkered down at home with nowhere to go. I wanted to see what was going on with the temple and if everything was okay.   

When I got the temple everything looked pretty much same.  Although there were some distinct changes: hand sanitizer was everywhere 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.

Remember, COVID closed down the world right after Purim. And I mean 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.

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. But let’s explore the machzor as a book of return and let it guide us to return back in memory and recall all the things we left behind.  Like the megillahs on the bima and a yahrtzeit list from months before, we might be surprised at what we have left in our own wakes.  

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.

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 today on the second day of Rosh Hashanna.  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 so, I wish you a Shanna Tova – A year of blessing as we begin our journey of replacing the shards of regret and sin with light, joy, and blessing.

Shanna Tova