Congregation Netivot Shalom

Erev Rosh Hashanah
September 22, 2006 / 01 Tishrei 5767
Diane Bernbaum

Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova.

It is an honor to be asked to address the congregation at the start of the Yomim NoRaim.  When Eric Seder called and asked if I would give this drash, I  immediately realized I had a very daunting task, first because this is not a service  I regularly attend ( more on that later) and also because I was told “you can talk about anything you want,”  which to me is a much more challenging directive than preparing a drash that is supposed to reflect a particular narrow piece of text, like a weekly Torah portion.

Soon after I knew I would be standing here tonight I attended a wonderful 4 day retreat, the opening session of a two and a half year training for Bay Area Jewish educators called MTEI, the Mandel Teacher Education Initiative, coordinated by our very own Vicki Kelman and Gail Dorph.  One of the things we talked about on the retreat was how to begin to determine if we were all teaching the “Big Issues” in our schools.  One of our instructors, Katherine Simon, pointed out what most of you probably already know - that in the world of secular education, most teachers are so concerned about teaching the nuts and bolts, objective, measurable facts of a subject they often totally ignore the large moral issues hidden in the subject. For example, in teaching The Good Earth, she observed a teacher concentrating on teaching the plot and steering clear of all conversations on the treatment of women in 19th century China. Katherine quoted Nel Noddings an emerita professor of Educuation from Stanford who said:  “when we consider those things that matter most deeply to human beings—the meaning of life, the possibility of gods, birth and parenting, sexuality, death, good and evil, love, happiness—we may well wonder how the standard set of subjects became our curriculum.”

So on the last day of our 4 day retreat our room full of Jewish educators was challenged to come up with ways to figure out if our schools were teaching the Big Issues.  In a burst of hubris, my first thought was that of course Midrasha dealt with the big issues.  Most of our classrooms are staffed by teachers skilled at encouraging students to engage in discussions on topics that really matter to them.  I thought of the Nel Noddings quote: “the meaning of life, the possibility of gods, sexuality, death, good and evil, love, happiness?”  That read like a Midrasha course catalogue. While K-7 religious schools are charged with the task of teaching the basics of Hebrew, holidays and Jewish history to make their students comfortable in the synagogue and their Jewish homes, our high school teachers can build on that knowledge base to get to the depths of conversations on Jewish identity and ethics, taking time to debate the two or more sides to every question teens have on their mind.

When the MTEI staff asked me however, how we taught the Big Issues of Rosh HaShanna and Yom Kippur at Midrasha, my mind was blank.  Because the holidays come so close to the start of the school year, when teachers are still concentrating on getting everyone to know everyone else’s names and also because they fall outside of the curriculum of most courses, it’s unusual for a teacher to cover those holidays in their classrooms.  And in the days when I was a teacher of 2nd through 7th grade religious school students, I didn’t do such a good job of getting to the core values of Rosh HaShanna and Yom Kippur either.

When I was a religious school teacher, Rosh HaShanna and Yom Kippur always seemed so totally internal and cerebral. I was grateful they fell at beginning of year with barely any class time before they came and went.  Other holidays provided months of curriculum.  Purim had a great story and some very delicious food. For a month before Purim I would devise board games incorporating all the facts of the story of the Book of Esther.  We would do plays. We would bake hammantaschen. And the day after the megillah reading it was time to dive into the study of Pesach.  There was only a month between the two holidays to rehearse the Four Questions, make a handmade haggadah, have a model seder, and learn the story of the Exodus.  Chanukah had latkahs to make and dreydel games and a captivating story.  Even though Tu B’Shvat didn’t have a historical theme, there were endless ecological activities to do, plus a really tasty seder.   Sukkot had all those decorations to make, and the novelty of holding class outside in the sukkah.

But Rosh HaShanna Yom Kippur?  There was no historical story to grab the kids’ interest.  The only art project I could think of was making New Year card for mom and dad, which would take about 20 minutes.  We could bake honey cake, make lists of things we were sorry about and I had one story in my repetoire: “If Not Higher” about a rabbi said to go up to heaven every Elul. Lovely story, but it only takes 5 minutes to tell.  I didn’t know how to introduce 9 year olds to the process of introspection.  To me this was a holiday pretty much devoid of the fun stuff to teach and it was all about abstractness that I wasn’t good at bringing to the classroom.

But before the MTEI staff was to ask us to look at our schools to see if we were teaching the Core Values of Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur, they first asked us to determine what the Yomim Noraim meant to us personally.  We began one afternoon session with the challenge to think about:  “What are the core ideas for the High Holidays that engage your own need for meaning and purpose?  How are the holidays meaningful for you?”  We were to write in our journals and then debrief our thoughts with a partner.

Without thinking a lot I jotted down what I thought were the Right Answers, the answers I’d probably been taught in religious school myself.  This is a time for self-reflection, a time to put the past year into perspective and to think about the year to come.  It is a time to mend our relationships with others, to ask for forgiveness from people we may have offended, to start things afresh.  It’s a time to figure out the kind of person one wants to be.

But then I stopped scribbling.  In all honesty, do those things happen?  It’s bad enough that these holidays happen at the beginning of the hectic school year, an impossible time for anyone who is involved in education, or anyone who is a student or the parent of a student.  But in truth, even when I retire, I don’t think I’m going to go around asking people I have offended to forgive me, or take a careful stock of how I’ve let myself down in the past year.  I wish I was more like that, but it’s just not me.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love being in shul on Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur.  I like the liturgy, the music, and seeing everyone.  I like the rabbi’s little stories that weave in and out of the service, the drashot, and the break from the ordinary world.  But I’m not so sure I too often do the hard internal work that the holidays demand of us.

So as I was writing in my journal at the conference, I confronted the fact that the first answers I had given to the question “How are the holidays meaningful for you?” were not particularly honest answers.  Reflection and atonement were part of the holiday.  They can’t help but be if you spend enough hours in shul over the holidays, but somehow those words didn’t describe how the holidays were most meaningful for me.

Then came the flood of REAL answers.  This holiday, that as a teacher, I thought was pretty devoid of customs, at least ones I could teach elementary school aged students, has become full of personal customs that I didn’t realize were so important to me until then.

Let’s start with the meals. Three of them have special meaning.  Remember I told you about 5 minutes ago that I don’t always attend this service?  I think that habit started with an Erev Rosh HaShanna soon after we moved to Berkeley 30 years ago.  I had invited a young man who taught religious school with me to come to our house for dinner, planning to go with him to services after we ate.  But the meal was so wonderful and the conversation so intriguing, we didn’t rush through and go to davan.  He told us that it wasn’t the custom in his family to rush off to shul on Erev Ro HaShana and those words gave me permission to do the same. Since then I’ve learned that if I’m lucky enough to get an invitation for a meal on Erev Rosh HaShana, or if I have the energy to invite people over, that in its own way is as meaningful a holiday celebration as davening. And on the second day of Rosh HaShana even though I don’t usually plan it much in advance, I frequently manage to host what I call my “ladies’s lunch.”  We usually end up being women of a certain age, whose kids grew up together, who don’t have partners, or whose partners don’t come to shul on the second day of the holiday.  The feelings of companionship around those holiday tables stick with me more than conversations I may have had with my mahzor in shul. I used to host an annual break fast for Yom Kippur.  At first it was lots of fun.  Then I started realizing that I was spending Yom Kippur afternoon feeling like a party hostess and not a penitent. I would straighten the house during the afternoon break and would rush home before the end of Nillah.  It stopped being fun, and I stopped doing it.  Even when Netivot started hosting a community break fast I found I preferred to just go home and scramble an egg.  But this year we have an invitation to a home where we have never been before and I’m really looking forward to it.

The foods of the holiday weren’t a big thing in my family.  I’m not like friends of mine who bake honey cakes or make home made candy for all their friends.  I’ve never made taiglach and even tsimmes is new to my culinary repetoire.  But I do have a memory of how Rosh haShanah food made all the difference. It was our first year in Berkeley.  We had gotten married and moved across the country just a few days before the holiday and were still living in a friend’s house, probably sleeping on the floor, looking for an apartment to rent.  I had made plans to go to services at Hillel but when it was time to eat dinner before hand, my friends with whom we were staying weren’t home and Ed and I looked in the refrigerator and were left with something very un-holiday like for dinner.  My memory is hot dogs.  I hope I’m wrong.  In a desperate move to make this a holiday dinner I sliced up an apple and dipped it in honey.  And cried.  But at least it was a holiday meal.

When I was growing up, we used to have a holiday custom in our family on the afternoon of Yom Kippur.  Pardon me for admitting that we were not an observant family, but in the break between the morning service and nillah my father would announce, "Let’s go for a drive.” This may only have happened once, but the memory of it was so strong, this one afternoon drive morphed into a holiday custom. I was probably in high school and our drive took us to visit the lake cottage we lived during the summers until I was five.  I had memories of the cottage being big, with a large front lawn.  I guess it was big for a toddler, but when we visited that Yom Kippur afternoon I saw it was tiny and set nearly right on the road.  Taking a drive before Nillah may only have happened once when I was growing up, but it was so meaningful that when I went to college, I remember announcing that it was my family custom and gathering up friends in that break before Nillah to drive to the glorious woods of New Hampshire, a short distance away, where  walking among the trees with their brilliantly colored leaves was much more spiritual an experience than the morning prayers had been.  And when Ed and I first moved here and I shared the custom with him, he convinced me that after morning of davening, it was best to end the holiday at Pt. Reyes, watching the sun slip off the continent.  A very inspiring way to think of the Gates of Heavan closing.

That Yom Kippur afternoon custom was replaced with another. Once Netivot started holding services at Northbrea, which is really close to our home, a steady flock of friends would ask to spend the Yom Kippur break at our house, spread out on couches and beds and the floor.  As people moved away, the requests stopped coming, all except for Margo Lucoff, who came every year until her death, and who I think about all afternoon on Yom Kippur.

But perhaps the one thing I do that makes these holidays the most meaningful to me are The Cards.  I am still old fashioned enough to send out New Year cards.  Until recently, my dining room table was heaped high with piles of cards, stamps and my beat up old rolodex.  Lest you are sitting there thinking, “But I always thought I was her friend and she’s never sent ME a card,” let me explain.  Most of these cards go out of town.  They go to my college friends.  To my high school friends. To family.  I only have two first cousins and even they are only half-cousins, so in lieu of any close relatives, I desperately cling to all the 2nd and 3rd cousins I have, and sending them a card once a year seems to be how I stay in touch.  I even send a card to the woman who was my counselor at Camp Ramah 46 years ago. It gives me a chance to connect with current and former work colleagues.  I send them to women who were my sons’ religious school teachers in kindergarten and first grade.  To families we first met when our kids were together in Little League and child care. To two women I went to Hebrew school with in 50’s. To the Jewish neighbors on the block,  I look at the rolodex and see a map of my life.   I carefully touch each card in the box and think about each person.  Sometimes I realize that they have dropped out of my life and I sadly take the card and throw it out.  Sometimes I realize that someone isn’t in the box who should be and I make a new card.  Sometimes I look at the cards and think, “But it’s been so long since I’ve seen her, I wouldn’t know her if I passed her on the street.”  But then I remember that our fathers shared an office for years and when I saw her last after of gap of 40 years, she was coming off a hard divorce and seemed so glad to reconnect.  I address the card. I realized the other day that I have current addresses for nearly 100 former Midrasha teachers.  Surely I can’t keep sending cards to all of them.  Usually a few years after they stop teaching at Midrasha, I remove their card from the box, but sometimes, after a few years, I’ll run into one of them at a wedding or the Berkeley Bowl and they tell me how much they miss getting the annual card, so I make a new card for the rolodex so I won’t forget them the next year.  And so the pile of cards each year is bigger than the pile from the year before and once or twice in the process I have to run back to Afikomen, realizing I haven’t bought quite enough.

I used to write little notes on each card, filling everyone in on the past year.  I soon realized it was easier to write it all out in a letter and Xerox it. I talk about our sons, the way work is going for both Ed and myself, and where our travels have taken us. To write it, I look back through the calendar on my desk.  Scrawled notations of dinners with friends, symphony performances, out of town house guests, all things that don’t make it into the letter as well as those that do, flood me with memories of the year gone by. In a way, my annual letter becomes my Yomim Noraim introspection.  I must admit, at various points in the process of preparing the cards, I tell myself I’m nuts.  This realization usually happens when I hand my credit card either to the clerk at the post office, the Xerox store or Afikomen.  Or when I’ve been working for 3 evenings and am still only up to the K’s in the rolodex.  I tell myself this is the last year. It’s way too much work and costs too much money  But then a week later  cards I’ve received in response adorn my mantle and friends I haven’t heard from in a year call or send an e-mail and thank me for staying in touch and I know I’ll go through the same process again next year.

So there I was at the MTEI retreat, realizing that more than giving me a chance to be introspective, the holidays were much more meaningful to me because I sent hundreds of New Year cards and ate a lot of meals with people I really cared about. I was a bit embarrassed by this revelation to myself. My partner for this exercise was consumed with her own holiday guilt.  A young woman who teaches nursery school, she admitted that she doesn’t attend services at all, a fact that displeased her mother and about which she was obviously struggling. As I tried to put her at ease, telling her there was not one right way to find meaning, I wondered if we all think that others find more meaning in the holiday than we do.

As for me, I was delighted with the exercise, a chance to figure out why it was I really loved this holiday.  But perhaps it is also time to add a new custom to my list.  So, if I have hurt or offended anyone in this past year, in any way, I would like to ask your forgiveness.  And my wish for you is that you will have a chance over the next 10 days to reflect on what it is about this holiday period that is meaningful to you.  You may be surprised with your answers.

L’Shana tova Tikotavu.  May you all be inscribed for a hear of health, peace and fulfillment.