Rabbi's Message
Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton
First Day, Rosh Hashanah 5766
October 4, 2005

There are many ways to look at an unknown vista. To some, it is the adventure of the new that is most compelling, to travel to a foreign country, to read a new and previously unfamiliar author, to try a new skill or game. Others prefer the comfort of familiarity, the security of a tried and true approach, route or experience.

Our tradition acknowledges both in the closing phrase from the book of Lamentations, the verse that regularly concludes our Torah services, and periodically punctuates our Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy: Hashivenu Adonay eleha venashuva, hadesh yameynu kekedem - re/turn us Adonay, let us return, and then, the key clause for us tonight: renew our days, as of old.

Another phrase from the same chapter of the Tanakh, the book of Lamentations adds up to our year's sum of 766:

Eicha 1:7 "what was before"

It echoes the word kedem from our Torah service phrase.

What was before. Renew our days as of old. These are sentiments that both the risk-taker and the comfort-seeker might share, especially in the face of the devastating losses posed by the type of destruction experienced by the subjects of the book of Lamentations.

Eicha is a five chapter lament about the destruction of a city. Though it was not destroyed by the floodwaters brought on by a hurricane, the phrases of its laments resonate through the centuries and across the boundaries of particular circumstance.

The destruction of what those Jerushalmi'm had known peeled away what was a thin veil of normalcy. The first verses of the first chapter lament the loss of precious things, the status of leaders no longer able to function, people in exile, bitterness, shock, a nation weeping and wailing, deserted roads, a city emptied of its citizens, infants in captivity, residents searching for bread, uncleanness.

They eventually returned. A city was renewed, its physical, cultural and psychic structures rebuilt, not from scratch, and not without scars from the impact of the tragedy.

Rabbi Richard Hirsh, in his comment in our mahzor about the hashivenu verse, asks:

Why does so much of religious longing find its voice in the appeal to antiquity? What is it about the past, real or imagined, that makes it a destination of choice for the soul that seeks renewal? Why look backwards instead of forwards?
Perhaps the answer lies in the word hadesh, which means both "new" and "renew." We cannot become the person we long to be by ignoring the persons we have been. In order to become "new" we have to "renew" - we have to recover moments of holiness, accomplishment, and integrity from our past and bring them forward into the lives we are continuously shaping"

Our country's experience of nature's devastation through hurricanes that hit Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, and particularly the impact of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana, the city of New Orleans, and the smaller coastal communities on the Gulf of Mexico, resonate powerfully this erev Rosh Hashanah.

So many of our values - those core principles we hold dear in both of our civilizations, our American civic culture, and our Jewish heritage - have been shaken to the core by this recent disaster. To the extent that recovering moments of holiness and integrity from our past in order to bring them into our future, as Rabbi Hirsh suggests, is a central element of teshuvah, of our religious and spiritual renewal, to reflect upon its aftermath becomes a religious and spiritual imperative for us this season.

During these Days of Awe, we will encounter a prayer that begins Shema Koleynu or "Hear our voices," continuing, "accept our prayers with mercy and good will. It continues with our hashivenu phrase, "renew our days as days of old," and then turns to a different series of pleas: "Do not cast us away … do not cast us off as we grow old; forsake us when our strength departs."

Our commentary under the line identifies this as one of the most well-known and dramatic of HHD prayers, yet also problematic. Why should our liturgy, as this precise moment of openness and sensitivity, evoke the image of a God allowing the aged and infirm to be cast away? What safety and protection is there for the weakest among us - or for any of us as we may become, or are, in our lives?

The commentary concludes: "We pray for the strength to make God present for each other, that the weakest, oldest, frailest might find consolation and a sign of blessing."

That some of the weakest, oldest and frailest of the Gulf region, especially those in the devastated city of Light, were let down so cruelly, is known to us all. Last month, the elderly in hospitals and nursing homes were keening their own version of the phrase in our Shema Koleynu - al tashlikhenu l'et zikna - do not abandon us in our old age.

The same section of Torah that gives us that essential phrase ve'ahavta l're'ekha kamokha, love your neighbor as yourself, also includes the phrase vehadarta mipnei zaken, bring honor, or splendor to the elderly. My friend, mentor and teacher, Rbbi Daely Friedman, gave the Hebrew name Hiddur to the Center forAging and Judaism of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, from this verse. In a commentary published on line last week, she notes how far we are from realizing this biblical commandment of respecting the aged and showing honor to the elderly.

For untold numbers of older people in New Orleans, the nightmare came to pass. Far from being revered and protected, elders were abandoned and victimized. The residents of St. Rita's Nursing Home, in St. Bernard Parish, waited for days for help that never came. Despite their frantic efforts to save themselves, barricading doors with wheelchairs and bureaus, at least 31 drowned in the raging waters. Older people waiting on highway overpasses were left behind as younger, stronger evacuees rushed past them to fill buses headed toward safety.
Nor, she adds, could their safety be assured once evacuated, as the explosion of the bus carrying elders fleeing Hurricane Rita tragically demonstrated.

It is the Talmud that offered this insight to the Western world --
that the measure of a society is in how it treats its elderly. The international news media, and our own as well, noted with wry and bitter irony the contrast between the responses of the poorest of Asian nations and regions following the devastating tsunami of two years ago, with that of our own officials and leaders.

Michael Ignatieff, writing in the New York Times magazine, termed the government's betrayal of our most vulnerable citizens a breach of contract, a contract implicitly held with all Americans simply because of their citizenship. In his scathing essay, he holds as a given that there are those whom our government habitually treats with callous unfairness. The poor and dispossessed of New Orleans, as the poor and dispossessed of all our urban centers,

"know that they live in an unjust an unfair society. They know that their schools aren't much good, that their police protection is radically deficient, that their economic opportunities are few and that their neighborhoods have been starved of hope and help.

"Knowing this, the people of New Orleans still believed that, as Americans, they were entitled to levees that would hold, an evacuation plan that would actually evacuate them , and a resettlement plan that would get them back o n their feet. They were entitled to these things simply because they are Americans and because these simple things, while costly, are well within the means of the richest society on earth."

Ignatieff suggests, and I agree, that it was not the water that destroyed the city of New Orleans so thoroughly, as devastating and tragic as the loss of lives and property surely is. The force of the breach was human, no less than the one that destroyed the walled city of Ancient Jerusalem. The healing and repair, the returning and renewal will come. In secular terms, Ignatieff describes the source of this repair as "millions of acts of common decency.

Yet just as much as a civic contact was breached, so was a moral covenant. Rabbi Friedman issues a shofar call of awareness to "our nation's moral frailty. Hurricane Katrina laid bare the vast poverty, racism and deprivation so many of us manage to routinely ignore; it challenged our basic sense of the fairness and humanity of our society."

Early in the relationship with all humans, God once broke God's own contract/covenant, and it came in the form of a flood. The world was subsequently renewed, as was the brit, with the promise never again to destroy the world by flood. [Gen 9:9]

It was the Hebrew prophet Robert Zimmerman, also known as Bob Dylan, who said -

God knows there's gonna be no more water
But fire next time.

Dylan's lyric continue:

GOD KNOWS
Word and Music by Bob Dylan
1990
God knows you ain't pretty,
God knows it's true.
God knows there ain't anybody
Ever gonna take the place of you.

God knows it's a struggle,
God knows it's a crime,
God knows there's gonna be no more water
But fire next time.

God don't call it treason,
God don't call it wrong.
It was supposed to last a season
But it's been so strong for so long.

God knows it's fragile,
God knows everything,
God knows it could snap apart right now
Just like putting scissors to a string.

God knows it's terrifying,
God sees it all unfold,
There's a million reasons for you to be crying
You been so bold and so cold.

God knows that when you see it,
God knows you've got to weep,
God knows the secrets of your heart,
He'll tell them to you when you're asleep.

God knows there's a river,
God knows how to make it flow,
God knows you ain't gonna be taking
Nothing with you when you go.

God knows there's a purpose,
God knows there's a chance,
God knows you can rise above the darkest hour
Of any circumstance.

God knows there's a heaven,
God knows it's out of sight,
God knows we can get all the way from here to there
Even if we've got to walk a million miles by candlelight.

Just as our tradition teaches that each aliyah, each section of a torah reading must end on a note of hope of comfort, so must I respect that imperative. I close this message by noting that the words tikvah and mikvah share the same root, "hope" and "healing pool of water."

It is hope that can, and must transform the toxic waters that flooded one American region, and the entire American consciousness.

May our sacred sources imprint their teachings on us, that we may be ever alert for the piercing cries that will be heard again - that we ourselves will utter in the days ahead - do not abandon us in my old age.

May this new year heal the breeches in the levees of our souls. May the flood of emotions that may have challenge and paralyzed us be transformed into a flood of sustained and measured hesed, loving kindess and compassion, for ourselves and for others. May our engagement in these values fill our lives with purpose, may our days be whole and holy.