Erev Rosh Hashana Drash 5770
September 21, 2009
Nahman of Bratslav said: “On the day that a person does teshuvah, he rises above time, and he elevates all days above time….. for teshuvah is the nullification of time.” And so – here we are once again, at Rosh Hashana. It seems like less and less time passes between one Rosh Hashana and the next! I almost went to the extreme of saying that Rosh Hashanas run together – but that wouldn’t have been an accurate statement, because we’re all familiar with the feeling of being yanked away from sacred time, when we walk outside and witness the world going on with its business as usual. When Nahman talked about nullifying time, he was zoned into a different way of being with people. To him, the past and the future could cease to exist, because he could bring all of his faculties to bear. For him, there was just the present; and seeing things through this set of eyes, he – and anyone else who had this clairvoyant power –would always be where he started out – fresh, unscathed, full of possibility.
But nowadays, I wonder if this a good thing, to be so focused on the present? The Brazilian writer Ignacio de Loyola Brandao considers us poisoned by the media – so that, in the present, we seek nothing but celebrity, or the celebrity status that attaches to being mindful of who we think we are and how we’re representing our feelings to an imaginary public. So what can it mean today to think of deep spiritual knowledge and awareness only in terms of the present? And is it such a good thing that the way we fancy ourselves as Jews today amounts to what we can “cobble together” right now? Why are we so inept when it comes to accepting the weight of the past? What leaves us so ill-prepared, so arbitrary, when it comes to thinking about a Jewish future? ……Nahman didn’t know what we’re up against today.
Yet, right now in here we are awake in a way that maybe he could identify with. We’re present at the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe. Something happens, when we come in here together! In contrast to this, contemporary life is distracting. The world we move about in gets in the way of establishing the deeper bonds with one another we will be affirming over the next ten days. The Havurah intends to bring water to a poor village in Nicaragua and we’re looking for everyone’s involvement. Give whatever you can… just get involved; do something about poverty that is global and experienced in the developing world like nothing you’d otherwise believe here in this country. The rich nations – our own behavior vis a vis our squandering of resources that belong to everyone – are implicated. In here we realize these things. And yet, when we leave this hall we can become distracted by a present that overwhelms us. The trick is to stay focused.
We are not alone in this perceptual dilemma of living only in a disjointed present – with little deference to what came before and an inability to frame the future. It turns out that this is what philosophers are looking at closely.
One critical theorist at Duke University, Frederic Jameson, fathoms that our sense of time is now changed. Ever since the early 1970s, he says, we process things differently. Back in “modern times” we believed in the myth of progress. This evinced pride and excitement, if you remember the World’s Fair, and the era in which we put the first man on the Moon? Well, modernity is over, and we’re not at all convinced that “things are getting better”. We’ve gone global with our profit-seeking; we’ve eliminated the barriers to trade; we’ve digitized the marketplace, in order to move capital at speeds that by far outpace the movement of real goods. Now we have “flash trading”! We’ve transferred wealth when it doesn’t really exist, and when it does exist – in the form of social capital and resources we should be protecting – we’ve denigrated it. Everything gets measured in terms of what we can buy today. All of this goes on, while the political discourse about what our children will have in store for them in the future amounts to little more than shrill cries and recriminations.
Frederic Jameson and other postmodern commentators point out the overwhelming effect it has on our souls: the evidence of all this rapacious conquest is ubiquitous – in the arts, in music, in film, in architecture. Just look at the way our cities are designed – we see the same store logos, no matter how far away we travel, the same subdivisions, the urban shapes that greet us, at this point, on every continent! Even when we find a reclusive place that seems not yet to be engulfed, we live with the dread that at any moment it too can be absorbed in the inexorable “now”.
Jameson, unlike Nahman, underscores the anxiety that we live with, our eyes trained on what’s present, knowing that all bets are off for the future. Even if we can recall it, what use is the past to us, we want to know. To give you an example. . . Just look at how Woodstock recently got commemorated only 40 years after we thought we ushered in the messianic age! Ruminating about rock-music commemorations of the event, the columnist Gail Collins got it right when she seized on the imagery of a muddy traffic jam. I checked with my college roommate who was there, and he suffers from our cultural amnesia: he couldn’t actually tell me which bands he heard. A member of Big Brother and the Holding Company summed it up by saying that “we used to have acid flashbacks. Now we have acid reflux.” Gasp!!
There’s this TV show “Mad Men”. It’s about an era, which, on the face of it, should offer little allure to an audience today. It takes place before the rebellions of the 1960s, and it harks back to a period when men were in charge of everything and the social repression was thick and awful. Although Frank Rich wrote something about how this show is popular, in terms of its undercurrents of anger and dissatisfaction before a gathering storm, (presumably, one we can identify with now), it’s success, I think, is typical of what the theorist Jameson has to say about our treatment of the past. We reclaim it, but not necessarily towards learning something about ourselves. We stick our hands into the grab-bag, and invoke yesterday’s images haphazardly. So “Mad Men”’s treatment of the late 1950s and early 1960s preoccupies us the way that we might decorate our living room with period pieces. That’s all. Nothing more in the way of purpose.
Jameson has a term for this: he calls this pastiche. We used to invoke memories, in order to distinguish ourselves, dramatize improvements, or in some cases, in order to lament significant losses. What once stood in as satire is now gone, Jameson says. After all, it was long ago that the mythical status of “what used to be” was shot down. So what’s left?
But there’s more that comes along with this staccato conjuring of truth in the present, and I’d like you to think about it: He says it also means that there’s a “failure of the new”. In other words, the collage, or the photo album, may be “artistically” rendered, and yet it may also reflect the postmodern quandary of not knowing what’s next or what ought to be next. Pastiche amounts to corralling bits and pieces, fragments, of where we have been, but – let’s face it – it’s hopelessly insufficient. It’s shards, peeled bark, humanity in shreds. It’s the negation of a future, any future.
Can you imagine the sound of the Shofar being only shevarim – the broken, disunified notes?
I don’t know if any of you saw it, but there was this great film during the past year, called “Rashevski’s Tango”. On the one hand, it’s about a Jewish family living in Belgium, but it’s really about all of our families. It grapples with how we figure out who’s a Jew in 2009 and what’s the Jewish content of a polyglot, interfaith family and who’s to say whether or not there is anything of substance being sustained nowadays? It begins with the identity crisis that the death of a secular Jewish matriarch has brought upon a family. The matriarch was once married; her elderly husband left the marriage decades eariler, to go to Israel and become a Haredi rabbi. This one lives a separate life, the antithesis of everybody else’s. So there’s a granddaughter, and the film looks lovingly at both the non-Jewish boyfriend of this granddaughter, who, well into his thirties, has decided to convert and even get circumcised, in order to win the granddaughter’s affections. While this young man in love is going to what you and I might consider extremes, it comes out that the granddaughter’s mother (the daughter-in-law of the deceased matriarch) is not even Jewish. So what this means is that the boyfriend of the granddaughter will circumcise himself to be authentically Jewish for a wife who in the eyes of Jewish law was never Jewish in the first place! If this were not enough, there’s a young cousin, another grandson, who has served in the Israel Defense Forces – he has a strong Jewish identity – and now he’s returned to live in Europe and has no compunction about marrying his Arab girlfriend. . . You get the picture – talk about pastiche! The feelings of the younger generation characters in the film, very much “in the moment”, reign supreme and supersede all else.
Although the breadth and complexity of this tableau may seem mind-boggling, it’s our quandary today that being situated in a hodge-podge of cultural elements leaves us forever anxious about sustaining anything resembling a spiritually honest life. We’re assured interesting cuisine, and we can travel to great distances. We listen to World Beat; we get used to a “fusion” of sounds. We can bridge political chasms, which is good – but who will model ethics for us? Ethics are about lasting commitments, carefully considered and played out over an expanse of time – not just the fulfillment of wishes. Where will we learn humility and patience, if new media are training us to keep pace with who we think we should be, who we wish we were? Without lasting commitments there’s an impoverishment of the soul. Without the discipline that comes from spiritual practice – day in and day out – how can there be a “long view” of things? My daughter Gavriella used to say, when she couldn’t concentrate, that she was feeling “leapy”. We leap from present to past to future, and our capacity to demonstrate fealty to a community over a long sweep of time, to sit still, in order to celebrate what’s good and worth preserving, has eroded.
But we needn’t see ourselves like the grandfather in “Rashevski’s Tango” who made the decision to run away from today’s confusion, in order to sequester himself in a bygone world. We needn’t hold to extreme positions – either we’re ultra-orthodox or we’re multicultural. That kind of disjuncture tricks us into believing that we no longer have anything in the world to keep living for, to be present to in a larger way, or any larger community to keep checking in with over time, year after year.
There’s a bracha in the weekday Amida for prosperity. It’s not in the Amida for Shabbat or holidays, and certainly not in the Mahzor for the Rosh Hashana, so don’t go looking for it. It’s part of what you pray on weekdays, repeatedly, time and time again. What this bracha requests in the way of prosperity has been getting my attention while I’ve been davening for quite some time now, and as we begin another new year, it’s on point. As you probably all know, when we ask for prosperity, it’s not about our craving for a fancy car or for the recovery of the stock market, or good grades on a test. It’s about getting what we need in order to keep going. The signature to this bracha goes like this: Baruch Ata Ha-Shem m’varech ha-shanim. It’s a blessing for the years!!
In fact, one medieval commentator has written that, whereas all the other weekday petitions are for legitimate needs – for health, for justice, for intelligence – this bracha, for the years, pays no attention to our needs! It’s not about your feeling satisfied or my getting what I imagine will augment my portfolio or what we need to go out and buy – this bracha for “prosperity”. It’s about the years. It’s a prayer for us to recapture the long view, in which what we think we need right now plays a lesser role.
The postmodern theorist tells us that we have given up on there being anything new – that we have all but, ironically, enclosed ourselves in the present that plays like a broken record, or keeps playing oldies, as if we just remembered them for the first time, but we’ve discovered these oldies before. Well, what I want to say is that it’s time to break out and live for the future! Proust wrote that “works written for posterity should be read only by posterity, much as there are certain paintings that should not be looked at from too close up.” So how would you like your “book of life” to be read by the next generation years from now?!
This Rosh Hashana, let’s do what it takes to be a blessing for the years. May we reinvest in the rhythms of time and responsibility, of sustenance and sustainability, of demonstrating to one another – in the company of this vibrant community – a consistent engagement with a complex world that is close by us and is often in need of our good works. May this be the year in which we open ourselves to the te’kiah g’dolah, to the passage of time. And may the years flow through us like the music of prayer that draws us closer to one another, and gives us a reason to hang in there. When Nahman awakened to the present, all the souls of all time embraced him. Imagine how better off the world would be if we quietly joined hands and opened our eyes…….spanning the years!!
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