High Holy Days Sermons 5785

By Rabbi Sarah Rosenbaum Jones

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Jessica Harris is a mom, wife, and daughter. She is an educator and a writer. And she is a survivor of ocular melanoma. Describing the nights before her annual scans, she says:

“I had insomnia last night. At 3:00 a.m. I was in bed, wide awake, consumed with thoughts, and unable to direct my mind to a peaceful place,” Writes Jessica Harris, a survivor of Ocular Melanoma. “After losing sleep last night, I realized that today I am clenching my jaw, I am jittery and cranky, and I am holding so much tension I gave myself a headache. I am anxious just thinking about how anxious I will be when my phone lights up with a phone call from my doctor. I am just waiting...waiting...waiting.”

Jessica is describing a phenomenon some call “Scanxiety.” Scanxiety is short for scan anxiety, the emotional response that comes with undergoing or awaiting results from a medical exam. ‘For me,” she writes, “the physical part of the scans is the easy part. It is the waiting for results that kills me.”¹

Aren’t we all just waiting? Cancer survivors, non-cancer survivors, adults, children, Jews, and non-Jews. We are waiting for the test results. We’re waiting for the phone call. We’re waiting for that email. We are all living between scans, whether or not we know it.

We live in an uncertain world. One only needs to glance back at the events of the last five years or the last five days to understand how unpredictable our world is. We have been shocked by a pandemic, political upheaval, and war. And it is impossible to know what personal anxiety each person in this room has had to carry day to day, moment to moment. Each person here has encountered surprises- both joyful and traumatic- that have rocked our worlds.

And…we despise uncertainty! So we do everything possible to create predictability. We check the weather to predict whether we should carry the umbrella to work. We share calendar apps to keep our families’ busy schedules straight. We meal plan, we fitness track, we make dinner reservations weeks in advance, we create plan A AND plan B, and, for the extra neurotic among us, plans C, D, and E!

We also project this need for certainty onto our children.

Whether you parent children or are involved in the lives of children, you’ve probably seen this natural longing to create predictability in the never-ending chaos of raising young people. When our children are young, this might manifest in the age-old practice of “scheduling backwards”...if we need to be at the event at 4:00, we’ll need to be in the car by 3:30, which means we’ll need to start mobilizing by 3:15, so she’ll need to wake up from her nap by 3:00….I see some of you nodding, you know what I’m talking about. Of course, in an effort to control every outcome, she will inevitably resist naptime, sleep until 3:30, and then need an emergency change of clothes!

When our children become teens, this yearning for control manifests in more intense ways– as early as freshman year of high school, some people begin thinking about how to set our teens up for college admissions. How will my teen balance their passions with activities that represent them well on an application? Which classes should they take? What choices can we make now to control this process in 2, 3, or 4 years? Of course, in our minds, we know that college admissions are an incalculable and often imperfect system. But, in our hearts, we want so badly to make everything okay for our families. No surprises, nothing left to chance. We focus on what we think we can control in our small corner of an uncontrollable universe.

Yet, we know that this is a fruitless endeavor. Certainty does not and cannot exist. As human beings and Jews, our historical and present experience teaches that we have to sit with the discomfort of not knowing every outcome. We have always been living between scans, whether we knew it. To be authentically Jewish is to be open to uncertainty in this unpredictable world.

Take the Talmud as the classic Jewish example of uncertainty. The Talmud is the corpus of nearly six hundred years of rabbinic debate. It contains sixty-three volumes of texts detailing intergenerational arguments about every topic you could possibly imagine. The primary form of the Talmud is dispute—one page of Talmud offers dozens of opinions on a singular topic. One might expect that many debates would lead to many conclusions. But, surprisingly, most of the debates end with the word Teiku. The literal meaning of Teiku is “let it stand,” a phrase that means the question is valid but has no answer. Some people say that Teiku is an acronym for “[Eliyahu the] Tishbite will answer all questions and difficulties.” In other words, only when Elijah the Prophet comes will our questions be answered! Until then, we just must live without knowing what and if there’s an ultimate truth. Six hundred years of compiling the ultimate corpus of Jewish law by the brightest minds in Judaism, and we’re left to sit with Teiku, not knowing an answer. Our rabbinic ancestors possessed a wisdom that we find so difficult to embrace today—the wisdom that even experts don’t always need to put on a veneer of knowing.²

Even Moses, the greatest prophet in our Torah, had to learn the lesson that it’s okay not to know every outcome. There’s a beautiful story in the Talmud about a moment from Exodus. Moses is describing God’s plan for the implementation of the tenth plague, makat bechorot, the death of the first born. Moses wants a plan! Before the plague is implemented, he wants to be prepared to dash out of Egypt ASAP. He wants to use the right suitcase, to put the route in his GPS, to figure out the traffic patterns. But he can’t! Because this is not really up to him, it’s up to God. So, Moses tells the Israelites that God will go to the Egyptians’ homes ka-chatzot ha-laila, around midnight. KA-chatzot. The Talmudic sages ask why Moses includes the ka, a modifier, instead of just saying midnight?

The Gemara answers: “Moses spoke in accordance with the principle articulated by the Master (aka God): Accustom your tongue to say: I do not know.”

In other words, the Talmud derives a crucial lesson from this one syllable, Ka: Accustom your tongue to say, “I do not know what’s going to happen.” A lesson that even Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher, needed to learn in a moment of uncertainty.

And here we sit on Rosh Hashanah, saying “I do not know.” I do not know all the ways that I’ve touched people's lives for the better in the last year. I do not know all the ways I’ve hurt those I love, and all the ways I should be making amends. I really do not know what the next year—or month, or week, or day, or moment—will bring to me, my family, my community, and my world. I do not know how to prepare for what’s to come. But here I am. Sitting in this room with these people who are my community who also do not know. We do not know; together.

Throughout these High Holy Days, we will sit together and recite the Unetaneh Tokef prayer, a haunting liturgical reflection on the inherent uncertainty of this season. The prayer begins:

On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,

And on Yom Kippur it is sealed.

How many shall pass away and how many shall be born.

These opening lines describe the only predictability in this world—we will all be born, and we will all die. It then moves into chaos, a hyperbolic expression of our fear of the unknown, by listing all the tragic ways one could die. By fire, by water. By sword, by beast. By the end of this list, we are incredibly uncomfortable, thinking of all the ways we could be taken from this earth.

Yet, the end of Unetaneh Tokef swoops in to give us guidance about how we might cope with this discomfort. It gives a nechemta, a comforting offering, to the question: What tools does my tradition give me to sit with the uncertainty?

It answers: Teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah.

Teshuvah, return to our best selves, aims to give us control over our moral behavior in an unpredictable world. The process of repentance and repair help us feel that we can set ourselves on the right path.

Tefillah, prayer, enables us to turn inward, creating mindfulness and spiritual resistance when the world around us is out of our control. When the author of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer was writing this, he was probably imagining this in a specific way, but we know that tefillah doesn’t have to look a certain way. Perhaps your tefillah is coming to your Jewish home and sitting amongst friends in the kahal, the community. Or perhaps it’s a long walk on the beach alone with your thoughts. Perhaps it’s a morning ritual on the yoga mat, or in your cup of coffee, or in the laughter of your children. The root of the word tefillah is pey-lamed-lamed, from the word l’hitpalel. This verb is the reflexive form of the verb “to assess.” When we pray, it is an act of
self-assessment, connection with oneself. Connecting with ourselves is grounding in an unpredictable world.

Tzedakah, righteous giving, offers us a tangible way to create generative change in our world. Tzedakah can be our giving of time, energy, or resources to make this world more just. Research shows that giving tzedakah doesn’t just change those around us—it offers us a way to feel empowered and in control of what’s possible.³ I look around this community and see so many do-ers, people who are eager to spring into action to make positive change. The Unetaneh Tokef prayer’s juxtaposition of t’shuvah and tefillah, inward-focused coping tools, with tzedakah, an action-oriented tool, recognizes that different strategies will work for different people at different times in their lives.

On Rosh Hashanah, everything is open for us. The gates are open, the book of life is open. We are given strategies- teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah, to cope with the unknown of what’s coming in the new year. Everything is uncertain for now, and that’s kind of the point of it all.

In ten days, we will sit here again on Yom Kippur, and things will feel more urgent. The afternoon service on Yom Kippur is called ne’ilah, locking, because it’s as if the gates of repentance are closing. Time is of the essence. We are told to lock the gates and feel certain that we have done everything possible to set ourselves for a new year of righteousness. Yom Kippur feels very serious and very final.

And then…just days later…we set up flimsy, wall-less, roof-less Sukkot! We sit in huts for seven days, not knowing when the wind will chill our bones, or when the Schach will blow off the top. Our tradition, which described certainty at the end of Yom Kippur, now comes to tell us…you’ve been punked. Our world is still fragile and shaky. Our ancestors wandered through the wilderness in frail dwellings, and you will too!

Yet, we call Sukkot z’man simchateinu¸ the time of our rejoicing. Some might wonder: What could possibly be joyful about fragility??

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory paints this picture: “What is truly remarkable is that [Sukkot] is called, by tradition, zeman simchatenu, our time of joy. That to me is the wonder at the heart of the Jewish experience: that Jews throughout the ages were able to experience risk and uncertainty at every level of their existence and yet [...] they were able to rejoice. That is spiritual courage of a high order. I have often argued that faith is not certainty: faith is the courage to live with uncertainty. That is what Sukkot represents if what we celebrate is sukkot mammash, not the clouds of glory but the vulnerability of actual huts, open to the wind, the rain and the cold.”

This teaching reminds us that our tradition is here to help us cope with uncertainty, not control it. We are taught by this amazing, complicated, millennia-old religion to muster up all the courage within us to persist in this uncertain world. And when the chaos, the anxiety, and the worry of “living life between scans” is too much for us to bear, we will lean on our tradition and our community… and maybe even find joy through the wind and the rain.

¹https://www.mindsetmomma.com/post/scanxiety-the-uncertain-side-of-cancer

²https://torah.org/learning/pirkei-avos-chapter6-11/?printversion=1

³https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/assessment/promotion-strategies/systems-advocacy-and-community-organizing/main#:~:text=The%20experience%20of%20participating%20in,different%20perspective%20on%20what's%20possible