Being Rosh Hashana and all, I have to begin with a confession: When you bring a rabbi to town you generally hope that he or she knows the basics, that their learning curve is something like this: But as all of you who know me know, my learning curve has been more like this: So just this year I learned some important details about Rosh Hashana that somehow hadn't come up on my radar before. I knew that when Rosh Hashana falls on Shabbat, as it does this year, we don't blow the shofar. I had always understood that this was for the same reasons that one doesn't traditionally play musical instruments on Shabbat -- because of the fear that someone would carry an instrument, to mourn the destruction of the Temple, and so on. So I was surprised to learn this year that when Rosh Hashana falls on Shabbat we also are supposed to omit singing avinu malkeinu and the thirteen middot -- ADONAI ADONAI el rachum v'chanun...
I was, of course, embarassed that I didn't already know this. But, once I got over a little of that, I became fascinated by how these ommissions change the basic energy of the holiday. Apparently the sense is that a typical weekday Rosh Hashana is a little bit like a trial: God sits on the Throne of Judgment, deciding whether we get life or death, and the sounds of the shofar and of Avinu Malkeinu and ADONAI ADONAI are formulas that are supposed to move God towards mercy. The shofar sounds like a baby crying, and it is supposed to make the milk rise up in God's breast. In Avinu Malkeinu we beg God and humble ourselves. The thirteen middot remind God of God's mercy and kindness and are supposed to inspire God to move from the seat of judgment to the seat of mercy.
But on Shabbat there is no trial. The seat of judgment is vacant. God is already all mercy. We are already all beautiful and sinless. There is no need for crying and begging and cajoling. And so these pieces of the service are left out. Which makes Rosh Hashana very much like any other Shabbat and our service tonight barely different than any other Friday night service of the year. But there are still a few tiny little additions and changes, and in the absence of the bigger ones, they stand out more than usual. For example, we add into the Avot part of the Amidah a little piece which says ZOCHREINU L'CHAYIM MELECH HAFETZ BACHAYIM... Remember us to life, MELECH who delights in life... A little later in the amidah we add the three u'v chen's, which talks again about the divine malchuyot, the aspect of God which is somehow, in the eyes of the tradition, like a king.
I'm always looking for a way to understand this king stuff, and this year I found a hint, of all places, in Totem Salmon, a beautiful book written by Freeman House, who lives along the Mattole River in Humboldt County. Totem Salmon is all about a project which a bunch of locals did for well over a decade, trying to restore wild salmon to the Mattole. One small piece of the big project involved mapping "trashed channels," a technical term for spots in the river that are stripped of vegetation because the hillsides erode away. The loss of a cover of trees causes the water to heat up and kills spawning salmon. Trashed channels are often a by product of logging. The Mattole group had government maps and photos made after a flood year, which showed huge trashed channels, some a mile long and as much as a hundred yards wide. It was now four relatively dry years later, and the local folks were going out to document the destruction for themselves. They hiked down the waterways, maps in hand, expecting to find these enormous areas with eroded banks and sun baking the water. To their astonishment these huge stripped areas could not be found. The surveyers wondered if they were lost, if their compasses had all failed simultaneously. But ultimately they understood:
The banks of the river are covered with red alder, a tree the grows quickly and has cones with thousands of little seeds inside. It turns out that the red alder drops its seed cones right about the time of the first winter rains. In flood years the water pours down the banks and tears out the alder sprouts, and the river rises and washes the seed cones out to sea. But dry years are more common than flood years in California, and in dry years the waters rise and fall more gently. The alder seeds tend to pool in the eddies of the stream and establish themselves quickly. Once established, they shade the water and prevent the banks from eroding further, at least until the next flood. Freeman House writes: "The landscape was showing us one of the ways it healed itself." And he goes on to say, "We were rediscovering that all learning is collaborative and that the collaboration extends beyond humans to the landscape and the many intelligences imbedded therein."
I love that phrase: "the landscape and the many intelligences imbedded therein." My beloved Rav Kook says, "the smallest fragment has elements of greatness in the depths of its being."
The processes of return and recovery, known in nature as the pooling of alder seeds in a streamside, known in Jewish tradition as teshuvah, are both smaller and greater than we can see. We are in some ways like the alder cone, opening in response to many specifics of light, temperature and rainfall to disburse our seeds. We are a tiny part of an enormous, brilliant movement of life and change.
We are different than an alder cone, though, in that -- while we too respond to the particularities of our environment -- we can choose how we respond, whether we open or remain closed, give our seed to the river or withold it. And because of the gravity of that power of choice, we might feel like all we have is choice, like we live in a vacuum, apart from the wind and the rain and the larger movement of things. Rosh Hashana is a day to feel the full force of our power to choose, our ability to open or close at will. Today is the day to contemplate the choices we have made, the ways we have directed ourselves, towards life and health, or towards erosion, dessication and death. It is the day to feel the seriousness of choice, the way in which, as the Rambam says, the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance of our choices of good or evil. We are asked to feel that our will is crucial, to feel horror and regret at misused choice, to rue our departures from the path of goodness.
At the same time, though, Rosh Hashana is the day to consider the aspect of God which is melech, queen, king, sovereign, emperor, which is to say that God and not our own will dominates the landscape. We are asked today to realize that there is a good, brilliantly restorative essence which is central, in power, next to which we are small and light, like an alder cone dropping from a branch into a little tributary of a small coastal river. Melech hafetz bachayim -- the Dominant Force that delights in life, "the landscape and the many intelligences imbedded therein." We might think of God's malchuyot, God's sovereignty, not like a person, a ruler with a heavy fist, but like a landscape with many intelligences imbedded therein. In this perspective we exist in a landscape, a setting, of brilliant complexity, a landscape whose movement is towards restoration, healing, teshuvah, return, what Rabbeinu Bachya calls "the holy order of the divine.". That is not to say that there are no countervailing tendencies, that there is no erosion, or that we are without choice in this holy order. Only that our choice exists in the context of a greater, kinder, wiser intelligence than merely our own, that we are not in a void in which our own moral power is the only power.
It is to say that the smallest detail, whether we turn this way or that way, say this or don't say that, occurs in a landscape of many intelligences directed towards restoration. Or one might say that our power to choose good or evil, and that of our neighbors to do the same, exists in the context of a universe dominated by love, a beautiful, holy universe, whose love and beauty we can augment or diminish, and likewise can our neighbors. But we, our will and our choices, are not the whole landscape, not even most of it.
Increasingly I see this as the heart of faith, this awareness of divine malchuyot -- sensing the world as a landscape with many intelligences imbedded therein, in which we each participate as a small but crucial part, free but not alone. Faith means to me knowing that this quality which dominates the world is in each small, specific part as well, including each of ourselves. "The smallest fragment has elements of greatness in the depths of its being." There is a dread in the gift of choice -- we alone are accountable for how things turn out. It all rests on us. And this is true. It does. We are responsible for each of our own actions and thoughts. We alone can turn them in the direction of good or away from it. But if this is all of the landscape that we perceive -- ourselves alone on the high dive, silence around us as we leap into the void -- then I think we miss the essential point, which is that the air around us is full with holiness, resonant with love, that we stand poised to leap in a landscape with many intelligences imbedded therein, intelligence directed towards restoration, return and reconnection.
It was a huge surprise to Freeman House and his friends to find that there was other restoration going on beyond their own efforts, that the landscape in which they struggled had its own intelligent plan alongside their own. As they watched the salmon dying in their watershed, they were filled with grief, and they felt like theirs was the only energy between the fish and total annihilation. As it turned out, their efforts were both crucial and very, very small. The damage caused by wrong choices is absolutely real and consequential. The survival of the beautiful fish is threatened by specific choices towards greed and indifference. It is not to say that the salmon could not be completely destroyed -- because they can -- or that the efforts of the little group with their handmade hatcheries are not an essential part of their survival. They are --central, crucial, essential. But the restorers are not alone in their efforts. They are assisted, supported, dominated by the divine malchuyot, the intelligent, active quality of holy love which seeks life and good.
Sometimes it seems like it is wiser, more realistic, to see the world as falling apart than to see it as healing itself. Sometimes it seems more realistic to see ourselves as if we are the only intelligence between life and total destruction -- and helpless at that -- than to see ourselves as part of a divine landscape of many intelligences, healing and being restored through many small brilliances -- like little alder seeds that pool and stick to hillsides and keep things from caving in quite so often. But of course this realistic pessimism, or pessimistic realism, is only one possible way to look at a very complex picture. Rosh Hashana, the birthday of the world, proposes another: Melech hafetz bachayim. The King who hungers for life, craves life. Last year we prayed that we would be written in the Book of Life. And all of us here tonight were granted our request, another year of life in this amazing landscape of divine malchuyot, a year to advance things or to set them back, and probably for most of us a little of both. But even as we set our shoulder to the plough for another year, I hope that this holiday allows each of us to feel the enormity, the kingness, of that wisdom and intention for good and to be renewed by it, to be filled with faith. And, of course, to be inscribed for another round!
Copyright 1999 Margaret Holub
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