Erev Rosh Hashana Message
September 22, 2006
Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton

Shana tova and Shabbat shalom. Happy New Year, and happy birthday to the world. What lovely confluence of events, and dates, we celebrate tonight. Neither too early or too late, this year we celebrate the 5767th birthday of the world, as we calculate it according to the torah of our people.

What do you get for a world that has everything? I couldn't even find a category of cards in three digits, never mind four! But truly, we don't celebrate the age of the world; we celebrate its newness, actually, its renewal, this and each Jewish new year.

We celebrate our joy over the newborn year, not its news.

We celebrate the politics of meaning, not the meanness of politics.

We celebrate hope over despair, for something that is new brings with it the possibility of good, of redemption, of moving towards wholeness, fulfillment and light.

We celebrate our joy of its promise, what is yet to be and has thus never yet been - the ages we will turn this year; the new lives we will usher in to being.

We are all like parents tonight, no matter our age, staring in awe into the clean, clear face of this newborn year, wondering not so much how it will change, for we know it will grow and develop, but how much it will change us.

The year's number, as it usually does, gives us some insight into what the year might offer. Numbers, letters, words, and phrases take on shapes independent of their surface meaning through gematria, the Jewish way to play around with words and their numerical value.

Sometime, I assign the number value to each Hebrew letter of the year, which leads to another word of the same numerical value. Sometimes, I play with the letters, shifting and substituting, to see if the game will lead to a similar or further revealing word.

This year, there is a powerful message in Torah that adds up to 5767. It is found in Leviticus 23:22, and you may recognize it from the verse quoted on the envelopes found on our greeting table, or clipped to grocery bags that will be available in the lobby throughout the holiday season's services.

This year equals: "When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field to its very border, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave the corners of your field for the poor and for the stranger …" .

There is a further message, though. It's not just that the year name and numbers reminds us of our obligation to care for those around us, and in our midst. There are three more words in the verse: ani Adonay eloheyhem; I am Adonay your God.

This is what I glean here: it is our work, our task, not that of an outside or unseen force, to feed the hungry, to pick up our excess and distribute it most effectively to those in need. This is what we are called to do, this birth-day; to renew our efforts to reclaim what we know is right and necessary; to respond to the aleynu's call, at each and every service when we sing, and bend and bow to its message, letaken olam, to repair the world for the sake of all peoples who dwell on this earth. .

On Rosh Hashanah, we sing, and bend, and bow, as fully as we can. We get as close to the ground as we ever do ritually, even closer than the traditional posture of a mourner during shiva. This lowering does not necessarily signal a lessening of oneself. It is a signal of power, our power, to give ourselves fully and completely over to the work of transformation and repair, healing and wholeness.

The bowing of the grand aleynu during the high holy days can be like our own personal tekiah gedolah. With our bodies, or our kavanah, intention, in pronouncing the words, or our presence and witnessing, we can bend, or make ourselves hollow, like the ram's horn. Tonight, because it is the evening, we don't hear the shofar's new year call. It is sounded in the mornings, for we regard the shofar, as the Rambam taught, as a wake-up call for the spirit.

And we won't hear it at all this first day of 5767, because on Shabbat, we rehearse the time when the world has already reached perfection again, as we imagine it did on the seventh day in a beautiful garden. On the first day of this new year, we will remember for ourselves, and our community, each call we have heard, each call that has resonated within us, each call to which we have responded - to tend and to till; to drive and to visit; to house and to welcome; to feed and to nurture; to agitate for change; to march and write and petition and call and rally and lobby and speak; to connect, only connect, to recognize that each and every action, no matter its size and scope, makes a connection, makes a different.

When we reach the shofarot moment tomorrow morning, and pronounce the aleynu, may we fully invoke, and hear, and take the aleynu's call.

This Rosh Hashanah, may every wish for a good and sweet new year bring us closer to the call, to taking on the many and varied tasks that comprise this year's leaving of "the corners of the fields."

May tomorrow's remembered little teruahs, those short sharp calls, be our bursts of optimism; the slow plaintiveness of the shevarim our sighs of longing to contribute what we are able; our long tekiahs our cries of hope and optimism, once heard and realized, as we move into the second day, and the rest of the new year, help us truly celebrate the joy, the meaning and the hope of the new year.

Shana tova umetuka.