Shana Tova,
Four years ago on Rosh HaShana of 5762, everything was about 9/11/2001. It permeated all our thoughts, all our desperate wishes for a good year, all our fears about what the year, or years, ahead would be like. There was no escaping it.
This year I want to report back about a different 9/11: Sunday, 9/11/05, the wedding of our member Justin Tucker to Yael, a young woman from New Jersey. Rachel and I have been to such wonderful weddings this year and some of the happy couples are here in shul today. But no one but Justin and Yael dared to get married on Sunday, September 11. So it wasn’t hard for them to book the hall even on relatively short notice: No one wanted to get married on that date. A date filled with such memories of sadness and tragedy. Yom Hazikaron, memorial day, to hate and ruthlessness – religious ruthlessness – rather than love and compassion which are the hallmarks of a wedding.
Yet Justin and Yael’s wedding was one of the happiest, most freilich weddings I have been to. Not only the Jews were dancing, but the huge contingent of gentiles – almost all of the groom’s wedding party – were ignited with simcha. Our former Rabbinic Intern, Rabbi Marc Gitler who was at the wedding, at one point remarked that the gentiles were dancing the Hora better than the Jews. There was passion and love, and I believe that even beyond the joy of a typical Jewish wedding, there was a desire to respond to the hatred and death of 9/11 2001 with the love and life of a Jewish wedding on 9/11 2005. Mazel tov and Yesher Koach to Justin and Yael – a new memory for 9/11. A new irony of juxtaposition of the happiest times with the saddest times.
On this day of the birthday of the world and the birthday of mankind, on Rosh Hashana, we celebrate the laughter that comes from such irony: The irony of seeing so much good in this world, so much good that human beings are capable of achieving, while at the same time bearing witness to the horror that mankind can inflict on the world and on fellow human beings. Rosh Hashana is the holiday of Yitzchak, of ironic, unexpected laughter.
I hope by now everyone has seen the post Katrina pictures of the man from Zaka wading hip deep in a flooded shul to save a Torah and then piling them in a boat and heading out through the bayou, really a neighborhood flooded by Katrina’s devestation. These pictures were the the number one e-mail that I got from more people than anything else: The Zaka rabbi saving the Torahs in New Orleans in a motorboat and golaches. These images are not funny, but they are ironic, they are Yitzchak: Goodness in the face of a horrible reality, that warms our heart instead of destroying us.
A 9/11 wedding, the Zaka Rabbi with the Torahs: Yitzchak would be proud and so would Sarah. For Sarah was the one who coined the concept of Yitzchak. At first she was ashamed of laughing, denying it to the angels and Avraham. But then she became proud of it, proud enough to name her son Yitzchak. After 90 years childless, she was promised a child. She was given a child. After so many years alone, with no one to care for, no one to carry on her legacy. Her son was a miraculous good, but it came on top of 90 years of sadness and disappointment. So she laughs at the irony: She accepts a world filled with so much good on top of so much bad.
Today we read about a bris – the bris of Yitzchak representing the covenant for all Jews. Only the Jews can celebrate such a ceremony publicly, giving the kid who has to undergo the procedure Manishewitz wine while the operation is taking place. Then that same wine reappears every Shabbat and holiday and under the young man’s chuppa. Maybe that’s why the minhag is to use white wine under the chuppa so as not to be so attached to the bris! Our Bris for Judah – a great simcha, but you are nervous and on edge. And then part of the ceremony requires blood. And that blood needs to be drawn – metzitzah. And part of our perfect little boy is snipped off. Rache and I have done two s’machot bat for our daughters – intricate ceremonies with friends and relatives. But doing a bris is different: It combines elements of the greatest joy and of the pain our people has endured. You would never have a ceremony where you hurt your kids – would you? Except for a bris. It is a tense time; it is a time where joy and pain come together in irony.
Rachel was a great trooper through it all. I had to do all the changings for the next week, but Rachel was a trooper. I am always amazed at how women allow their kids to go through it. I solute them!
What is this institution of brit milah? It’s the deal with Hashem, that the only people who can have this special covenant with God are people who can undergo a bloody operation and shout out afterwords, Mazel tov! That is the world of irony that we live in on Rosh Hashana. So much good which we need to celebrate, while at the exact same time so much bad we need to recognize. The good cannot allow us to forget the bad, but God forbid we view the bad without thinking of the good.
If I could tell you the people who are struggling in our community to find and hold onto jobs and careers, and yet, in the forefront of their concerns is not mere survival or getting ahead, but how can I keep the Shabbat with this job? How can I get a job if I keep Yom Tov? In the pain of the struggle to find and maintain a job, in the pain of the bris, is the joy of the covenant, the joy of loving God in the most pressing and difficult situations.
And in Israel, where you really learn to live with hope and despair at the same time, with the tragedy of being hated by those who live near you and the unbelievable miracle of a Jewish State coming simultaneously, they even say a Shehechiyanu at a brit. They are so overjoyed that even with the pain they can thank God for allowing them to see the moment of the covenant as bloody as it is for their little boy.
So you can imagine poor Sarah “Biyom Higamel et Yitzchak” not on the day of the “weaning of Yitzchak”, as is frequently translated in a superficial way, but according to our tradition, “on the day of the “Bris of Yitzchok on the eighth day” “Hey Gimel Mal” Sarah, all nervous, seeing the blood and the pain that she knows not only Yitzchak experiences, but all the future generations of Jews will have to face, from enemies and from a hostile world, from Yishmael and Edom and others.
On this tramatic day of the bris, Sarah forgot how to laugh. We, too can’t always laugh. Sometimes we’ve had enough. Sometimes we see evil and we cannot be comforted by the good that exists as well. Sarah felt it was a time for “Garesh et ben ha’ama hazot” – “Get rid of this son of the servant who will not mix with my son, Yitzchak.” No one could tell Sarah then, and no one can tells us now, when to see the irony, when to laugh. It is something so personal, unique to each individual. Laughing in this world, and seeing irony, is almost supernatural.
But the Torah gives us hints: Poor Ishmael was “metzachek” – he was pointing out the same ironies that Sarah had seen when she gave Yitzchak the same name. How could she see Ishmael “metzachek” and then say send him away from MY Yitzchak?? The Torah seems to be showing us the contradiction.
And the Torah seems to be telling us on Rosh HaShana, as we begin the New Year, that we need to see the world as a great bris. That we need to remember not to forget to look for the irony, to laugh: to never forget the good that is present in spite of the bad in this world. Sarah forgot how to laugh, but on Rosh HaShana we have to learn how to laugh, and on Yom Hazikaron, the day of memory when we remember the good times and the bad, both the righteousness and the evil which coexist in our world, we have to remember how to laugh, how to live with the irony.
In Nechemia, Chapter 8 we are told of the first Rosh HaShana th people observe after returning from Babylonia after the destruction of the First Temple – 70 years of exile. The people hear the Torah which they have not had for so many decades and they start crying. But Ezra HaSofer, who understands Yitzchak, tells them to go celebrate. READ THE PASUK Perhaps at a brit we would want to cry, so instead we celebrate and say mazal tov and eat. Perhaps at a wedding on 9/11 we would want to cry and forget Yitzchak, but we dance and sing more with an added zeal and we eat!When we see Jews in Israel or anywhere forced to leave their homes simply because they are Jews we want to cry, but when we see Jews NOT turning the difficult decision of disengagement into a civil war, we have to take comfort and say, “Umi K’amcha Yisrael” “What nation is like the People of Israel?” When our care for survivors of Katrina is able to move on to saving Sifrei Torah in moterboats and golaches, we have to see the irony in the midst of all the devastation around.
I hope we do not forget the laughter and irony into which our forefather Yitzchak was born. We remember the sadness, we see the evil and tragedy around us, and we live with it because we know that there is goodness as well, so much hope that springs from every baby naming, every bris, every wedding and every sound of the Shofar.
Don’t worry Sarah: Ki veyitzchak yikareh lecha zera: Your descendents are born with the ability to laugh – even with tears in their eyes. And because we can laugh we know we can prevail, we can move forward into a year of hope and world of hope. Because we can see the irony of the world, we know that one year, hopefully this year of 5766, will be the year that God will hear our laughter and transform it into unbounded joy – where there will be no more irony and suffering and pain, but only peace and safety and acceptance for God’s people and God’s Torah, “Simcha l’artzecha vasason l’irecha” – Joy to our beloved land and celebration to our beloved City of Jerusalem as we say in the davening today.
With the sound of our Shofar may all of our laughs, filled with tears or filled with joy, be accepted by Hashem in heaven, and may we all be blessed with a year of sweetness and forgiveness and innocence. May our mother Sarah look down and once again remember the joy of her youth, the joy of her son and the joy of knowing her people are still alive, and may her laughter, too, be filled with simcha g’dola, that everlasting simcha which is the sum total of all good in this world which will one day obliterate the bad which surrounds it.
Wishing all of us a gut gezunta yor, a Shana tova um’tuka and a chag sameach, a holiday of joyous laughter. |
