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Tekiah!
The great Rav Soloveitchik tells a story of pachad, of terror:
On the seventh day of Pesach, 5727 (1967), I awoke from a fitful sleep. A thunderstorm was raging outside, and the wind and rain blew angrily through the window of my room. Half-awake, I quickly jumped to my feet and closed the window. I then thought to myself that my wife was sleeping downstairs in the sun room next to the parlor, and I remembered that the window was left open there as well. She could catch pneumonia, which, in her weakened state, would be devastating.
I ran downstairs, rushed into her room, and slammed the window shut. I then turned around to see whether she had awoken from the storm or was still sleeping. I found the room empty, the couch where she slept neatly covered.
In reality she had passed away the previous month…
The most tragic and frightening experience was the shock that I encountered in that half-second when I turned from the window to find the room empty. I was certain that a few hours earlier I had been speaking with her, and that at about 10 o’clock she had said good night and retired to her room. I could not understand why the room was empty. I thought to myself, “I just spoke with her. I just said good night to her. Where is she?”
I am starting to think that I live much of my life in that half-second. I think so many illusory things. I think that I am what I used to be. I think that what I said and did months and years ago is still what I think today. I think that relationships don’t change. I think that I am my ambitions. I think that I am my failures. I think that I am a story with a lot of chapters. The Rav’s story about running to his wife’s sunroom sounds like a story about grieving. But it is actually a story about the ego.
Rav Soloveitchik tells this story in his sermon about the shofar on Rosh Hashana. The sound of the shofar is supposed to shatter us, exactly as he was shattered when he turned from the sunroom window. It is supposed to shock and scare us into the realization that the scaffolding of our self-image has crumbled, that we live lives of the wispiest illusion. Hirhur bi-teshuvah, he calls it – teshuvah by shock – by being scared out of our delusions to turn towards what is true.
I can relate to that sense of terror, when the armor of my ego shifts for a moment, and I get a glimpse of what I am not. All those pictures of how gifted and brilliant and generous I thought I was going to be; all those times I’ve thought I was an irredeemable jerk. All those stories I can’t stop telling myself about who I am. Occasionally I catch myself running downstairs to shut the window, as it were, and realize that none of that is as solid as I think it is.
Yom Ha-zikaron – the Day of Remembering. A psychotherapeutic notion of remembering has us recall what we have repressed from our past. We excavate our dark interior, confront our traumas, our shadows, make conscious our unconscious. A Rosh Hashana notion of remembering, perhaps by contrast, has us remember that we are not our memories. We are essentially simple, pure -- souls on a journey through a world. Along the way, yes, things happen to us. We make decisions. We grow, we break, we love, we damage, we repair, we heal, we scar, we calcify. There is work to do along the way. But our essence is not any of this.
As the Talking Heads describe Rosh Hashana:
This is not my beautiful house!
This is not my beautiful wife!
Letting the days go by, let the water pull me down,
Into the pool again, water flowing underground…
Or like the old High Holy Day joke that you’re probably thinking of even as I say these words:
The rabbi and the cantor are prostrating themselves before the ark, weeping, “Oy Ribbono Shel Olam, I am nothing!” The president of the congregation prostrates himself next to the rabbi and cantor and cries, “Oy, Heavenly Father, I am nothing!” The shammes creeps forward, bows his head and says, “Oy, I am nothing.” The Temple President whispers to the cantor, “And who does he think he is to say he’s nothing???”
Only in the most cosmic sense are we nothing. But even in the plain sense of things, perhaps much that we think we are, we are really not. For Rav Soloveitchik, that half-second of forgetting the tragedy of his wife’s death was an occasion for terror. “This is not my beautiful wife!” The Rav is shocked for a moment to remember that he is not a husband, not a caretaker for an ailing loved one. He is something else now, a mourner, an aveil, a widower. His responsibilities, his concerns and obligations, his emotions – all have shifted. But his essential self has not changed. He is a human soul moving through life while things change all around him.
Today there will be no sound of the shofar. It is Shabbat, so no shattering. Instead, the call will come more gently to us: Remember that you are a pure soul. Let your illusions that you are more or less than that softly loosen and lift away, like a cardboard turtle shell. Perhaps there is more relief than terror in that soft unpeeling. I thought I couldn’t live without the shell, but it turns out it’s just a costume. I am not who I was when I was ten or twenty or thirty. Thank God! Even then I wasn’t who I thought I was, but all the more so today. Let my ambitions and dreams peel away along with my shames and failures, into a little pile of the illusions they are. Underneath it all, I am just a soul, on a short journey through a great wilderness.
Zochreinu l’chayim, Melech hafetz ba-chayim!
Remember us for life, O King, O Queen, Who adores life!
We are souls on a journey across a narrow bridge, a journey in which we are sustained with mercy by a Source of Life Who loves life. We ourselves, and everyone -- everyone here tonight, everyone on the road around us when we leave -- simple souls in a universe of love. God willing we will have an entire year ahead in which to gather new illusions and ambitions and crises. But Rosh Hashana is Yom Ha-zikaron, the Day of Remembering – in which we are invited to remember, like the Rabbi and the Cantor, the President and the Shammes, that we are, if not nothing, then something small and tender underneath all our stories.
Zochreinu l’chayim…
And Yom Ha-zikaron is a day on which we are remembered as well by the Source of all love and all life, Who sees not the achiever, the scholar, the humanitarian – nor the criminal nor the failure – but the pure soul underneath all that shell.
The prophet Jeremiah (31:19) channels the Holy God marveling at how much She loves one such wandering child, who stands in for us all:
Ha-ben yakir li Efraim – that precious child, Ephraim, so dear to me
Im yeled sha-shu-im – that darling little boy
Ki mi-dei dabri bo zakhor ezkereinu od – so that whenever I speak of him I remember him more and more!
Al ken hamu may-ai lo – so that the thought of him warms me within
Rachem arachmeinu n’um ADONAI – I will pour mercy upon him – the word of ADONAI.
If only our own remembrances could be so warming, our own regard for our own soul and those of our neighbors so joyous and full. Zochreinu l-chayim – may we remember our real lives, and may we be remembered into life by One Who loves all that lives.
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Updated 09/21/2009 (rge)