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Thursday, September 13, 2007
Shana Tova
It's Rosh Hashana, a time for reflection and resolution. Haaretz has this morning a set of stories, predicting what our world will look like in 2027 - financial markets, high rises, popular culture, journalism, international relations. Nothing too unpredictable (at least no bad predictions about a nuclear escalation but nothing too innovative either). Anyone feels like taking a shot? or sharing some resolutions?
Have a sweet year and Gmar Chatima Tova.
Posted by Orly Lobel on September 13, 2007 at 03:42 PM | Permalink
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"An Ethical-Humanist View of Rosh-Hashanah"
By Israel Knox
According to tradition Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are *yamim noraim*, days of awe, solemn days. Rosh Hashanah marks the beginning of a period of penitence and Yom Kippur completes it.
The Jew who labels himself 'secularist' or 'agnostic' is baffled by these holidays. He has not been able to cope with them as he has, for example, with Passover, by extracting their historical, poetic, and cultural elements, and just bypassing their religious content....
The basic trouble is that the very terminology of the Holy Days--sin, repentance, forgiveness, Kingship of God--sounds alien to the secularist. It is at best an echo out of his remote past. And the fact is that for many in the synagogue too these words are no longer meaningful and do not correspond to genuine experience. But if there is an ethical-humanist dimension to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, then it should be possible to invest this terminology with contemporary signficance and provide a reason for regarding these Holy Days as a common possession of all Jews.
There is a wonderful Hebrew-Yiddish phrase, *heshbon ha-nefesh*. The phrase connotes a taking stock of one's soul, an inner accounting, a sitting-in judgment upon oneself. As we make our *heshbon ha-nefesh* we confess our failure to span the gap between conscience and conduct, between standards we profess and the actions we perform. We remember what we should have done and did not do. This chasm between *believing* and *living* may or may not always be surmountable, but the refusal to try to span it is *sin* and the will to bridge it, at least to narrow it, is *atonement* and *redemption*. Sin is the gap between our promise and our conduct, between our standards and our action.
The linkage of religion and righteousness, the insistence upon their inseparability, represented the most exalted and radical advance in the long history of religion, and perhaps in the whole of human thought, and this was the singular accomplishment of the prophets of Israel. These men were mountain peaks in the history of religion and their message was plain and direct. God is the God of righteousness and He abhors injustice. God's law is a summons to holiness--to help the widow, the orphan, the stranger in the gate, and above all, to love one's neighbor as oneself. And *neighbor* was everybody: all who were in need, who were victims of injustice, who were hungry and destitute. For the prophets, faith was not exhausted in lip service to dogma or a creed; faith was *faithfulness* to a covenant of righteousness. And sin was falling away from the covenant, or circumventing it, or corrupting it, or even externalizing it in rites and ceremonies without embodying it in conduct.
The prophets did not reject rites and ceremonies as an enhancement of life, as a crystallization of tradition, and as a concretization of collective memory. And they discerned their symbolic value as an expression of man's reaching out to something or to someone transcendent--something so near, because in our own groping toward the ideal there is an ineffable quality, and something so far, because so much of the ideal eludes us as we seek to attain it. Sin was now defined as social and ethical; it was located in the community and it involved the diminution of dignity through poverty and ignorance and man's inhumanity to man....
The Hebrew-Yiddish word for repentance is *teshuvah*, and it means a turning and a returning: a *turning* from the wrong path and a *returning* to the right one. Sin is falling away from the covenant, from the law of righteousness, and repentance is both a subjective change of heart and an objective change of social relations and conditions in community through right action. Atonement is not private and introspective only, but also public and outgoing. It is at-one-ment with humanity and history and with the God of history, or, if you will, with that which is highest and best in history, in the universe.
The social and ethical aspect of sin is never lost sight of in Judaism, and the Talmud informs us that while all sins are forgiven on Yom Kippur, the transgressions against one's fellowman are outside of God's jurisdiction and can be forgiven only by the one who was wronged....
Rosh Hashanah stresses the universalist motif. The prayers are not for Israel alone but for the entire world--for its redemption in righteousness and truth. There is the poignant plea in them for the establishment of the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom is to be one of righteousness and truth, in the spirit of brotherhood and neighborliness, and the annhilation of tyranny and inequality. The Kingdom is the ideal, the aim and object of the messianic expectancy and is in the future. But like the messianic tension within us, it is already a component of the present, pointing toward the road before us. The going and the goal are one. *Kingdom* and *kingship* have an archaic ring for us, since they come to us from another epoch, but we ought not to regard such words literally.
The kingship of God is noteworthy for its negations, its flaming *no* to idolatry, whether it be of man or of things. Idolatry is the ultimate and absolute loyalty to the *part* rather than to the *whole*. The Kingship of God was for ancient Judea what parliaments are for us today. It was a check upon the unbridled whims of the ruler; it was the voice of social justice; it was a constant reminder of the supremacy of the law of righteousness. Nowhere else did such a check prevail, and there was no appeal from the total authority and ruthlessness of the tyrant. Now was it always effective in Judea, but there the ruler could at least be branded as one who did evil in the sight of God.
Our world is in crisis, and with Hamlet we repine that the time is out of joint. How are we to resolve this crisis? What is the remedy for our ills? It is incumbent upon us to realize that loyalty to a fragment, to a part, must merge into the comprehensive loyalty to the whole. The *one* must not swallow up the *many*, but the *many* must not stand in opposition to the *one*. The orchestration of the *many* into a *whole*, without imparing the uniqueness and distinctiveness of those who compose the *many*--that must be our immediate enterprise, if there is to be deliverance for humanity. Some of the prayers in the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are for the disappearance of idolatry from the world and for the consummation of the Kingship of God. Never was this as urgent as it is today when mankind stands upon the very edge of a precipice with the abyss stretching before it.
The Kingdom of God is symbolic of oneness of mankind in freedom, righteousness and dignity. And if God is what is best and highest in *us*, reaching out to that which is best and highest in the *universe*, then God is not in Heaven, but is a power in the world and in us for transforming ourselves and the world in preparation for the Kingdom.
Originally published *Point of View*, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn 1961), pp. 3-4, 8; reprinted in *The Jewish Spectator*, Vol. 27, No. 7 (September 1963), pp. 7-9, and taken here from Philip Goodman, ed., The Rosh Hashanah Anthology (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 1992), 153-156.
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | Sep 13, 2007 10:29:38 PM
Shana tova!
Posted by: Liz Glazer | Sep 15, 2007 3:38:34 PM
This article by Israel Knox is beautiful. As a young man I was always contemplating what my social duty and responsibility was and to what degree am I to place myself and abilities into the social needs and demand from day to day. I really didn't understand the spirit that place me in the position of accountability of myself to the individuals needs of my fellow-man. *As a young man; I would try to just set in class and not say anything. But my heart and mind wasn't at peace. I was aware that many of my fellow student didn't or couldn't grasp certain theory surrounding electron theories. A situation arosed when I knew that many of my fellow students didn't understand the theory and they seem to me to be embarrassed to admit that they didn't understand the subject matter. So, I would attempt to ask a series of question to help direct the class toward important points to help and assist them to develop understanding of the subject matter. Sometimes professor would become very upset at me for asking so many questions. Sometimes, I felt that he knew that I understood the theroies that was being taught... My concern was to assist my fellow students in their desire to grasp and understand what was being presented. I would even volunteer to tutor students that were having problems with the subject matter after class. By reading this article. I now have a deeper understanding of my desire to help build the bridge of understanding and assist those who may be fearful of publicly acknowledging that they did not understand. Thank you, for helping me to understand that spirit that made me directly accountable to my brothers and sisters desire to educate themselves and each other collectively. One of the teachers jokingly told me that I will flunk the class and will not receive a degree. When I was alone with him; I informed the teacher I did not need another degree. Another degree is like saving toilet paper that was totally useless, but somehow provides the holder of this paper a false sense of security. In America, it seems that there is an attempt to teach students how to past a test... And not educating the students to understand the essence of critical thinking.
Posted by: donald myers | Sep 21, 2007 4:32:21 AM
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