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Rosh Hashanah 5765-2004: Mauvaise Foi and T'shuvah
by Mark Nazimova

George Burns once said that “the secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible.”  If that’s true, I’m in trouble.  I only hope that, in the spirit of this season, you’re all in a forgiving mood.

First, I’m going to provide an exceedingly concise summary of the Torah portion.  Let’s do it back-to-front: from the second scroll we read Numbers 29:1-6, which says that the first day of the seventh month—that’s today, if you haven’t been paying attention—is to be a holy day, on which we should refrain from work.  It also describes what offerings from the herd, and what offerings of grain and oil, we were supposed to make, back when there was a tabernacle in the Sinai wilderness, and later on when there was a Temple in Jerusalem.

From the first scroll we read Chapter 21 of Genesis.  Here, God makes good on an earlier promise to Sarah about having a child, and she gives birth to Isaac.  Then Sarah gets upset when she realizes that Isaac will have to share his inheritance with Abraham’s first son, Ishmael, so she tells Abraham to drive Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, out of their encampment.  Abraham is troubled by this, but God tells him to do it, and not to worry, as God will make a great nation of Ishmael, just as he will of Isaac.  Abraham drives them out, with some bread and water.  In the desert, after Hagar and Ishmael have finished the water, Hagar despairs; but an angel tells them not to worry, and with the help of God, Hagar sees a well of water.  Ishmael grows up, gets married, and all is fine with Hagar and Ishmael.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Abraham has an encounter with a local king, Avimelech; the outcome is that he gets formal title to some wells at Be’er-Sheva.

Okay, that’s the bare bones of the parsha.  Now, the question is, what does all this have to do with Rosh HaShanah?

I think today’s parsha was chosen to be read on Rosh HaShanah in order to tell us that today is the beginning of 10 days of questioning.  And 10 days of perceiving ourselves accurately, of self-awareness.  And 10 days of letting go.

But let’s start at the beginning: the beginning of the parsha, and the beginning of the holiday. 

The beginning of this parsha is about memory:

“Now the Lord took account of Sarah as He had said, the Lord dealt with Sarah as He had spoken.”

“As He had said… As He had spoken.”  Clearly, this is telling us that God remembered God’s earlier promise to Abraham and Sarah about having a child.  It’s telling us that God always remembers.

The beginning of this holiday is also about memory: it was first known as “Zichron Teru’ah[1],” “a reminder by (horn-)blasting[2],” before it was ever known as Rosh HaShanah.  Later, the Rabbis of the Talmud referred to it as Yom HaZikaron, a Day of Remembrance.  There’s clearly a message for us here about memory. 

Traditionally, the main connection between Rosh HaShanah and memory is that God can judge our lives because God remembers all the good and bad that we’ve done.[3]

Now, I don’t literally believe that there’s a supernatural divinity who’s watching me and knows when I’ve been naughty and when I’ve been nice.  But I do have a sense that I’m called to account by something greater than myself.  And I have a sense that, in this season, I’m called to account even more emphatically.

I’ve heard that Leonard Fein's definition of a Jewish atheist is: one who knows exactly what the God he doesn't believe in demands of him.

Anyway, my mother always tells me that God helps those who help themselves.  So let’s rely less on God’s memory, and more on our own, to examine our lives this Rosh HaShanah.

In order to be called to account—to call ourselves to account—we have to review what we’ve done during the past year, we have to remember.  Only then can we think about it, and try to right our errors, our mistakes, our willful wrongs, and only then can we turn to a better way, can we make t’shuvah.

But it’s a funny thing about our memory.  It can be a bit… well, selective.  We filter some things out, and we see other things through a lens that distorts the image just enough to flatter us.  If our memory were a camera, it would be filtering out those pimples and wrinkles, and distorting us to make us look thinner.

But it’s not a camera.  Our memory is our “inner eye,” it’s how each of us perceives our self.  In my case, it filters out certain unpleasant truths, for example, that I almost never return calls from an old acquaintance who could really use hearing a friendly voice.  With a clear inner eye, I would see that he needs friends, and I’ve been ignoring him.

My inner eye also filters out all those occasions when I’ve acted in bad faith because I over-promised my heart and my hand. When I remove the cataract of bad faith from my mind’s eye, I perceive that I’m playing games with the truth because being honest would be too painful, or because I refuse to admit that I can’t do everything I want.

My inner eye also distorts my memory, so that in my mind’s eye, I’ve given to charity more often than I really have, and given money or food to people in need on the street more often than I actually did.

Rabbi Alan Lew wrote about this dichotomy—between what we think we did, and what we actually did; between how we think we live, and how we actually live—in his book about the High Holy Days titled This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared.  To quote Rabbi Lew:

We keep trying to pose for the snapshot of our life, but on Rosh HaShanah our deepest need is to see the tape.[4] 

This is a tape that never stops rolling.  We may look lovely in that snapshot, that picture of kindliness and good cheer we present to the world at large, but when we come home and take out our frustrations on our spouse and children, that tape is still running.  …  What would the tape reveal when our guard was down?  …  The tape didn’t stop running in between the events we imagined were important.  It caught all those small, in-between moments too, the moments when we thought no one was watching.  … That motorist to whom we have … given the finger, or that woman whom we … ogled….[5

I don’t know about you, but if a tape of my life existed… especially if someone had edited a version with… well, not the highlights…  but, you know, the Lowlights of Mark Nazimova’s year 5764… There would be a few scenes where I would think, my God, I really did that?  And in general I think I would cringe a lot as I watched it.

But for all that it’s painful to review, Lew notes that it’s not enough to glance quickly and then look away; he says that “We have to look at this tape long enough to see the recurring patterns.”[6]  Did we just give someone the finger, or does it go deeper, to having a problem controlling our anger?  Did we just ogle someone, or do we let our lust take us over?

Today’s parsha reinforces this emphasis on seeing and on perceiving by repeating key words: 

…Sara saw the son of Hagar…   [7] 

The matter was exceedingly bad in Avraham’s eyes…[8] 

Do not let it be bad in your eyes…[9] 

Let me not see the child…[10] 

God opened her eyes, and she saw…[11]

Our tradition provides us with some tools for seeing, and for penetrating our ethical blindness; one of these is the pointed question.  It’s often presented as a question that God asks us. 

According to the Torah, God’s very first question, ever, is to Adam, after he and Eve have eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, try to hide from God in a thicket of trees.  God asks Adam:  “Where are you?”[12]

Now, of course, God knows everything, so why would God bother asking this of Adam?  Why ask a question if you already know the answer?  Because you can get the person you’re asking to realize something about himself or herself.  In effect, your question can be a midwife to greater self-knowledge.  It can transform the person who’s answering the question.

These kinds of questions can get me to acknowledge to myself something that—unconsciously—I’m doing everything I can to avoid seeing.  The right question can shift an unpalatable truth from my blind spot to the center of my attention.

When God asks a question, when we ask a question of ourselves, to the degree that we lie, or equivocate, or fudge, to that degree we also create a stumbling block to seeing ourselves as we really are, a stumbling block to seeing our relationships and the people around us as they really are, to seeing our place in the world as it really is.  And if we duck the question entirely, we never see the tape of our lives that’s hiding behind our carefully posed snapshot.

The question we have to answer today, on Rosh HaShanah, is God’s first question in the Torah, “Where are you.”

Leonard Fein wrote that:

…Judaism isn't about how or why; it is about where, as in "Where are you?" and "Where is your brother?" It is not about God's answers; it is about God's questions—and our responses. ... [It’s] our response, both communal and personal, to Judaism's insistent questions that commands our attention.

... You don't have to take God literally in order to take God seriously.  Our tradition isn't especially interested in what you believe or don't; it cares about how you live.  Judaism's questions are gifts meant to point the way to a life of purpose, of meaning.

When the question "Where are you?" is asked, the tradition admits of only one answer: Hineini—here I am.

To paraphrase Sylvia Boorstein[13], to say hineyni is to acknowledge the truth of the present moment, to recognize what needs to be done, and to be prepared to do it.

But why is it so damn difficult to see ourselves with an honest mirror, and to be able to admit to ourselves that we are where we are, to say hineyni when we’re called to account?

Someone wrote that “the truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.[14]”  It makes us miserable because the truth is something we’ve been trying to avoid.  Because it’s painful.  Acknowledging the truth, looking at it eye-to-eye, can shake our world.

It shook mine.  Back in college, I was screwing up every which way.  To give you a little idea, I went from a 3.67 GPA my first term, to a 0.89 my second term, and it took me seven and a half years to get a four year degree.  During one of my worst moments, I felt like I had hit rock bottom, and that it was finally time to see a therapist.  But, later that day, I became just functional enough to get a little work done, and so, I told myself, I could take the therapy option off the table again.  Man, that was close.  I nearly had to uncover buried experiences and buried emotions that I just barely sensed were down deep inside, and that scared the hell out of me.  The idea of uncovering them turned my gut inside out and shook me to my core.

In college, I wasn’t willing to risk my equilibrium, such as it was.  A lot of us have a similar aversion to risk, an aversion to upsetting our personal world, to losing the careful balance we’ve achieved in our lives.  This aversion to risk is especially relevant between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur. 

Sometimes I think that the more we have in life—the richer our life in terms of relationships, in terms of career, and in terms of material trappings—the less we’re willing to risk our self-image, the less we’re willing to risk our familiar ways of behaving, the less we’re willing to risk our careful balance of neuroses and ethical shortcuts.  The less we’re willing to risk our equilibrium.  We’re afraid to let go of our old world, our old habits, our old fears, our old perceptions, no matter how dysfunctional they are, no matter how dysfunctional we are.

Which brings me back to our parsha.

We actually read two different parshiot on the first and second days of Rosh HaShanah.  Two days of Rosh HaShanah, two different chapters—Chapter 21 today, Chapter 22 tomorrow.  That begs the question, what do these two portions have in common?

In each one, God tells Abraham that he has to lose a son.  Today, Abraham is told to exile his first son to the desert.  Tomorrow, Abraham is told to take his second son and kill him as a sacrifice.  One son right after the other.

We fall into the habit of thinking that our possessions, our relationships, our family are stable and secure.  When everything feels secure, why should we risk a part of ourselves by peering into an unflattering mirror, by looking at the tape and not just at the posed snapshot?

It’s analogous to something I’ve observed on the subway: passengers who, from their appearance, seem to have little money, are more likely to give to homeless panhandlers.  Passengers who seem to have more money are less likely to give.  Somehow, the more you have, the more you have to protect.

The common message of the Rosh HaShanah Torah portions, with their exile of Ishmael and binding of Isaac, is that that which is most valuable to us, even that, is always in question.  If you doubt this, you only have to remember the more than 170 children who died a few weeks ago in Middle School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia, in Russia.  Or you can return to the setting of Chapter 21, Be’ersheva, where earlier this month two buses were blown up.  Or you can just look at the gap in our skyline where there used to be two towers full of people.

Nothing is as stable and secure as we’d like to think.  Look at Abraham.  Everything that he holds dear, he’s forced to give up, permanently or temporarily: first he has to leave his home in Ur, then he has to leave his father’s house in Harran, then circumstances push him to temporarily leave his wife, and finally he has to exile his first-born son and kill his most beloved son.  And, mind you, this is someone whom God has blessed.  Where does that leave you and me?

We might as well let go of our posed snapshot, and open ourselves to the possibility of changing.  In the words of the Unatana Tokef prayer, we are like pottery easily broken, like grass that withers; so why waste our fleeting life by basing it on distortions or deception, by pretending, by living falsely?

This is asking much of us.  As we try to change our behavior, to the degree that we’re successful, we’ll be losing—not a child, but a very familiar part of ourselves.  For me, the process feels like trying to write with my wrong hand: it means retraining my reflexes, and going against my grain.  I avoid it.  I put it off every few days until I conveniently forget about it.  To effect change in myself, I need to make it a priority, and I need to persevere.  It’s very difficult to lose our dysfunctional or unethical baggage.  Hey, they wouldn’t call it baggage if it didn’t have handles for us to carry everywhere.

But remember: at the end of each Rosh HaShanah parsha, each of Abraham’s sons is still alive, and later goes on to become a patriarch of a great people.  The thing for us to focus on isn’t what we’re losing, it’s how we’re transforming ourselves.

This is the central project of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, and it’s worth our effort.  If we achieve just a little bit of our goal this year, we can say we’re successful.  And in the words of Hillel, if not now, when?

— blow shofar now —

Let today be a Zichron Teru’ah for us, a reminder by shofar-blasting.  Let the shofar call each of us to attention this Rosh HaShanah.  May it deepen our self-awareness, and may it loosen our grip so that we give ourselves the freedom to change that of us which needs changing.

L’shanah tovah.  May you each have a sweet, a healthy, and a fruitful new year. 

Mark Nazimova