Congregation Netivot Shalom

Rosh HaShannah

Sep 29, 2011 / 1 Tishrei 5772

Peter Berck

The Land Before Slichah

Shannah Tovah

(sung) B'rosh ha shannah yikkateivun...

The Holy One, Blessed be he, was sitting on the throne of justice. It is his favorite throne. It is a Lamino chair, with its functional curved lines and skinny frame, covered in a fine ram skin that dates from the first Shabbat of creation. The judge’s bench in front of him is a lovely black walnut that He saved from the flood, which contrasts nicely with the rich American chestnut wall paneling that he did not save from the Chestnut blight. The motto engraved on the bench is “Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may live, and inherit the land which the Lord your God gives you.” The apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil sat on his desk, preserved with the two bites missing and signed by Adam and Eve. At the back of the room, there is a sculpture of a pillar of salt in its own small sea of brimstone. On the side wall, on their own dais are the silver scales of justice. The Book lies open on the bench always ready to give its exhaustive evidence. This is the room He uses on his favorite day, Yom HaZikaron, the day when even angels are judged.

The King of Kings enters the room after the traditional three knocks on the door, “All Rise,” and the Rosh HaShannah chant: “How many shall be born and how many shall die...”

An Angel of the tribe of Justice takes the sins out of the book and puts them on the sin side of the scale. He does this precisely, carefully checking each sin against the Al Heit catalog. We lie, we cheat , we steal, we are zealots for bad causes. Then an Angel from the tribe of mercy puts tshuvah, tfillah, and tzedakah on the scales. He often leaves his thumb on the scale too, just for good measure. If good deeds still don’t win, then the case is remanded till Yom Kippur.

But, there wasn’t that much work to do in those days after the first Shabbat and before Earth had its first billion squabbling people. Animals and angels simply aren’t capable of most of the deeds listed in the Al Heit catalog.

And then the red phone rang. It was Abram and he was all upset about the Sarai situation, again. The Holy One Blessed be she moved over to the more comfy throne of mercy. It was an old kitchen chair she bought at a church yard sale, proceeds to famine victims in Somalia. At the back of the room was a copy of the Menorah from the Knesset garden that says “Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, saith the LORD of hosts”. She settled into the mismatched pillows that flowed all over the floor. She helped herself to some pomegranate seeds. Adam and Eve were cuddling in one corner, the skins she had made for them thrown helter skelter on the pillows. Issac, Ishmael, Jacob and Esav were playing bridge and David and Mikhal, long since having said their I’m sorries, were having a serious discussion about whether man needed to know about the Higgs boson. The chorus was singing El Rahum v’hanum and the Holy one tried to tune out that annoying voice in the background saying I’m sorry this and I’m unworthy that. She needed to focus on the Sarai situation.

Sarai had started it after all. It was the Holy One Blessed be She who determined who came into this world and who passed out of it. And for reasons of her own, no children had been granted Sarai, yet.

Abram was a young man in Haran and wrote an amazing thesis. There was only one God. It was radical and gained him many souls. It was a clear precise image or more precisely a clear precise lack of an image. No more idols, no more random sacrifices. Sarai was his wife and his partner. Her tent had candles, Shabbat and Challah. But make no mistake, inventing all this stuff was work, and that didn’t leave much time for other activities. They were off on the lecture circuit and somehow the children just didn’t come.

The sheep have children. The slave girls have children. The Philistines have Children. Lot has Children. Lot’s daughters have children and it is wicked! Even dogs have children. But Abram and Sarai have no children. Why oh why them? Abram and Sarai are blameless. Perhaps they squabbled here and there. Abe: Lamb again? Sarai: We are lamb herders. Lamb herders can’t make chicken Caccatori because they haven’t any chickens. I have a great Kosher recipe for it, but Abe, we got to work with what we got. But there was no reason for a radical change of behavior on Rosh Hshannah. HaShem told them Abram would be the greatest of nations, but he still didn’t open Sarai’s womb.

Sarai wakes up in the middle of the night. This happens often. She knows that HaShem will make a great nation out of her husband. But she is sterile. How will the master of the Universe keep his promise? Is she not the vessel for the Jewish people? Will Abram take another wife, a younger wife, a smarter wife, a more fecund wife, an altogether better wife. Abram is a rich herdsman and a prophet. Won’t one of the souls he made in Haran, or more likely one of their very cute and comely daughters take Abram away. Won’t the Tanach record, Sarai Abram’s sterile wife was not the one? The promise pursues her.

If Sarai had fed Abram rotten lamb, or accidentally dropped a tent peg on his sore toe, she could have said, Slichah! But what is the word for I have made you sad and anxious because the Lord has not granted me children?

I went to high school with Sarah and Hannah. We were sixteen and took health class together. All in all it made no impression on us because the state, in its wisdom, had ordained that we should learn about our human souls only by discussing pig’s bodies. One day, adoption was mentioned. The after class lunch table lit up. This was a revelation. After all, at sixteen our interest was in having sex and not having babies. Even looking at the opposite sex causes babies and ruins your lives. You might not even go to college. You might turn out like Marge Simpson. But suppose that really happened, suppose you and your sweetheart couldn’t have babies. This disturbed the young ladies very greatly. And it was only a hypothetical. Not too much later, I learned about Hannah’s and Sarah’s dreams when they were only sixteen. There were babies in their dreams. They saw babies everywhere -- in their arms and at their breasts, on the road, and in the clouds. Yes, already their souls yearned for children. A few years later we were twenty and spent a holiday weekend at a friend's country house. There was a grown woman pouring out her heart before her friends. She was very successful in everything she touched, truly famous. Except one thing. She could not have children. A mere male, I did not understand this thing.  But it made the young women sad, very sad. In the appropriate season, Hannah and Sarah became mothers, and it was I who travelled Sarai’s road.

Sarai got much older. Children got more important. Those conversations with the Holy One made it clear to her that her inventions and Abram’s thesis weren’t going to get much use if there weren’t descendants. This was still a simpler time, fewer people, and there was going to be only one who dug the same wells as his father Abraham. Among all their souls there wasn’t that one. Sarai had gone to high school too. She got an idea. Adoption.

In those days the adoption procedure was that you gave your slave to your husband and the resulting child would be yours. Hello dear, I’m kind of middle aged at best and I want you to have a child with my young, beautiful maid. Abram, the one who argued with the Holy One over justice for Sdom, is not recorded as saying a word to his wife. I’m pretty sure what he said was Hineni.

The women were best friends. I have seen it so many times. They went to Irish bars together. Laughed about boyfriends and their boyfriend’s naivety. Spent the Holidays. Complained about the client from hell. Found compassion and gave compassion. And then one day, one of them got pregnant. The plum stained her rug, her voice grated, and the expressions of compassion suddenly became too judgmental.  You’re too something... you’re too pregnant. For you a door has opened and for me it is closed. It is too painful to look at you through the closed door. I can’t make it through to share your experience so we must part. And they weren’t friends any more. 

Leah and Pennina, Rachel and Hannah.

So it was with the slave Hagar and the mistress Sarai. The pregnancy raised one up and lowered one down. But in those days there were no therapists and there was no ritual to solve this problem. We do not hear Sarai or Hagar asking for forgiveness. They do not go to Shiloh to pour out their heart to the Lord. Nor to the Temple with a free will offering. Nor even a simple Slichah. Rosh HShannah does not come with its demand to make things right between people and then between God and People.

Ishmael is born. My inner boy thinks that Ishmael got the best blessing in the whole Torah. “His hand will be against every man and every man’s hand will be against him.” You can just imagine all that boy energy. First one up in the morning, last one to bed. No naps, never. Mom and Adoptive Mom would both be exhausted.

Meanwhile the barren, elder Sarah, gets kidnapped again. God, Lord of Wombs, shuts up all the wombs in Avimelech’s kingdom (or others suggest spreads male impotence.) Avimelech restores Sarah and he apologizes and does all he can to make the world right again. Abraham forgives him; we know this because he intercedes with the Lord for him. And so Avimelech is our model for Rosh H’Shannah. Sure he sins; Lo Tigonov!; sure he gets a little rough love from the Justice Throne Room, but he faces up to his sin and he makes peace between man and man the best he can. And he does it twice. Once for Sarah and once for the Well. And over the well, Abraham too makes peace between man and man. The Holy one Blessed be She was pleased to hear this story over tea on the throne of mercy.

Well the wild ass of a man grows up. Imagine. You adopt a cute little baby, suffer through your slave girl being elevated to wife in your husband’s eyes. And the baby doesn’t turn into the hoped for quiet man who lives in tents. No, he is a wild ass of a man. Parent teacher conferences by the dozens. A thousand trips to the bow store for strings, rosin, arrows and none to the book store. Making good on the sheep accidentally injured. The bull he rode through your neighbor’s tent. And as he reaches his majority at age 13, he is clearly not the heir that HaShem promised your husband.

Then, another pregnancy. God Remembered Sarah. What did Sarah do to be remembered? The text is silent. Abram and Sarai started as the smashers of idols. They were the servants of the Throne of Justice and the King of Kings, even if they talked back a little. On the day they served food to their first strangers, that was the day that they served the throne of mercy. Babies are dealt out from the throne of mercy. In that room there are no scales, just acts of hesed.

“All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.” But on Yom Hazikaron we all have the same sins. We lie we cheat we steal we are zealots for bad causes. It is the deeds of loving kindness that are all different. This one builds a parapet on his house and that one takes the eggs but leaves the mother bird. This one says you are now a Swede, take your passport and go. That one smiles as he puts the latte in front of you. And that smile has the power to make you say, Stay and I’ll explain, rather than “It is late in the Term to ask that question Fella.”

This one serves the homeless, the widow, the orphan and the stranger who dwells among us.

There is only one alphabet of sin, there are many of hesed. For we can do deeds of kindness for both the living and the dead. We accept, we give birth, we care. We donate, we empathize, we…we better skip if in polite company. We give, we help, we don’t say I. We joke, we sing karaoke, we laugh. Yes we laugh with Sarah until this very day. We mend, nosh, and we offer. We pray, we are quiet, a kindness to others. We relate, we sing, we touch. We unite, we veil the bride. We are we, not I. and we play xylophones to the yak and zebra, with love.

While the torah begins with God’s deeds of lovingkindness, the clothing of Adam and Eve, it is Sarah and Abraham who we revere for human’s deeds of lovingkindness. They remember the stranger and Abraham buries the dead in the Cave by the Terebrinths of Mamre. Isaac and Ismael share the honors of burying their father in the Cave. The Holy one doesn’t get to bury any dead till the last verses of the Torah.

So it is after the first deed of lovingkindness that Sarah conceives and laughter comes to the world.

Hormones surge. Tables turn. Now Sarah is telling Abraham to get that kid and his mother out of my house. That is when the red telephone rang and HaShem moved over to that other throne room.

The text doesn’t record it but the Holy one talked herself blue in the face. She put Eve on the phone to explain about loving all one’s boys, not always an easy task-Cain and Abel were hers. Even though Sarah and Eve were to be suitemates for Eternity in Machpelah, it was to no effect. Finally HaShem gave in to one of his own principles: if the problem was made between people, then it had to be solved between people. Abraham and Sarah made this problem. Abraham by listening to his wife Sarah and now HaShem’s parting advice was that he had to solve this problem by listening to his wife Sarah. Oh, the blow of sending Ishmael away was softened by Abraham knowing what we can never know — that our children will be ok forever and ever.

Then came the test, which is tomorrow’s story. What Abraham and Isaac had to show for this ordeal was the horn of the Ram. A Ram’s horn, properly hollowed out is a shofar. Whatever is occupying the Holy Ones attention — the red telephone asking succor for troubled spouses, the purple telephone asking for deliverance from homophobia, the grey telephone asking aid for malnourished children in Somalia, the green telephone asking for a Palestinian state and the Blue telephone with conflicting messages on a new state — the shofar’s calls for justice and mercy are always heard.

The shofar blew for the law on Har Sinai; for the forgiveness of debt and the end of slavery on the Jovel; for the walls of Jericho and at the liberation of Jerusalem.

Today, the Shofar says, “remember that test you put to Abraham.” Take, please, a minute of your infinite time and listen to us. Forgive us. Save us. “Remember that 99 yearlong test you put to Sarah.” Take, please, another minute of your infinite time and listen to us. Love us. And let us love you.

One day we all will love our neighbors, our spouses and our children as we love ourselves. On that day, the Great Shofar, the one made from Abraham’s ram, will blow. And there will be both justice and mercy and then the Shofar shall blow no more.

L'Shanah Tovah Tikatevu.