Hadesh yameinu kekedem
Hadesh: renew and make new. I don’t imagine that anyone who has gone through a particularly hard time – illness, loss, divorce, depression, and the like, would say that those experiences were ones to be grateful for. But I know that my own prayer last year was to be somehow transformed and renewed by the experience. Cancer is not a gift, but what I learned about myself, what I experienced from this community, from my family and close friends, were gifts beyond compare.

It’s not easy in the midst of difficulty to see the possibilities still before us. When we are young and hopefully unscathed by life – renewing ourselves comes easily.

Children absorb many experiences that at the time seem monumental and insurmountable. But they recover and rebound with renewed spirit. Unfortunately, as we get older and experience the challenges that life has to offer, sometimes it becomes harder to renew ourselves. We start out ready to turn over a new leaf, and then we find ourselves right back where we began. We promise ourselves to do things differently, and sometimes we succeed. But most of the time it takes an encounter with uncertainty to really make the process of renewal and return very real.

Hadesh means that we pray to be revived with the wonder and enthusiasm of our youth. It means that we seek to find the vigor of life we may have lost or neglected. So often it is when we get stuck in our ways, resigned to our current reality that renewal seems out of reach.

But the renewal of life is indeed the main spiritual theme of these holy days. our return to godliness and to our truest selves-- Teshuvah – is possible because we see God not as a exacter of strict retribution but rather as the Power that makes for forgiveness, the power that impels us to renew and transform our lives.

Rosh Hashanah is the day that celebrates the the birth of the world and its continuous renewal. In Rabbi Alan Lew’s book, This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared he writes: “In the beginning, God created us out of nothing. It’s all down hill from there, and that’s the part that belongs to us – the long, slow return to nothing. But if we stop resisting it for a moment, it is precisely this return that can save us. It is precisely this return that can renew us…” (p. 121)

Yameinu. Our days – renew our life and the length of our days. What are the things that make up our busy lives? And when we pray that our days be renewed, what exactly are we asking for?

I once heard Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, talk about the challenge of spirituality vs. religion. As I have taught often about keva and kavannah, the fixed nature of ritual vs the fluid, changing nature of it, Wolpe called that the difference between religion and spirituality. He quoted the naturalist Burrows, who said, ”Do you want to see something new? Take the same walk you took yesterday.”

When we think of all the things that fill our lives the people, encounters, relationships, even the synagogue community, we must remind ourselves, as Wolpe said, that life isn’t about enchantment, it’s about re-enchantment.” Everything that fills our days as wondrous as they may be – eventually lose some lustier. And we then have a choice, abandon them – the friend, the house, the car, the job, the synagogue – or recognize that everything that is truly valuable is constantly opening up before us, showing us new beauty each and every day.

Hadesh yameinu – renew our days, re-enchant our days. Because the question isn’t whether life, the world, religion, entertains us all the time, but whether we are deep enough, mature enough, holy enough, spiritual enough, to see the beauty that is there.

What will it take this year to not harp on what you don’t have, what you haven’t achieved, what you don’t like, and instead, see the incredibly good fortune with which we have been blessed. When we look at our days and what fills them, we should be grateful on the basis of smell alone! We live in an extraordinary time - imagine the difference of living in a medieval city versus what you encounter when you leave your home each day.

I don’t mean to be trite. But I do think that opening ourselves to be re-enchanted by beauty that is already there is what we are called to do at this time.

Kekedem – As before. This is perhaps the most challenging word of the entire phrase. What before? Or should I say, before what? Sometimes we say, renew us as in the beginning, but the beginning of what? What are the days of old? And really, since we can’t turn the clock backwards, how do we, in a sense, go “back to the future”?

Are we saying we want to return to the days of Abraham and Sarah or of Moses – literally returning to the wilderness of wandering? Do we think that the time of the rabbis was somehow more secure than our day? Perhaps when we have been through a challenging time, we want to believe that the past is somehow better than our present.

But if we go back to the book of Lamentations – let us imagine that the dream of the people was to be transformed, redeemed like their ancestors of old – who heard the voice of the divine, who experienced miracles, and who learned that the only way to get through the wilderness was to become a nation, become a community in the ways of old.

Think of our own reality for a moment. So many of us seek to go back to a time when peace in Israel and the middle east was tangible; we seek to go back to the days before Sept. 11 when we thought freedom and democracy were enough to always protect us from an attack on American soil. We seek to go back to the days immediately following 9/11 when the world’s sympathy for America was palpable, and when uniting to fight against terror in all of its forms was a shared goal.
We are 3 years after September 11 we have entered into conflict with Afganistan and Iraq, neither of which has resulted in victorious conclusion, with our troops back home. We are farther away from peace between Israel and the Palestinians than we have been in a long time. Hadesh yameinu kekedem are like words spoken in a dream.

The truth of course, is that we cannot go back. the past cannot be renewed. We cannot return to those days before – but we can dream of the future in our desire to renew ourselves and the world.

In Psalm 126 we read, B’shuv adonai et shivat zion,hayinu kecholmim, we will be like dreamers when we are returned to Zion. To be in exile is to dream of home, to have hope is to believe that around the difficult bend possibility resides. The Psalmist continues: Hazorim b’dimah b’rinah yikzoru, we who sowed with tears will reap with song.

Our lives are filled with great joy and sometimes great sorrow. We live in a landscape of peaks and valleys, and knowing that after a high peak might come a low valley and that after a long low stretch of desert might emerge a breathtaking vista is the meaning behind the Psalmist’s words. We who experience suffering must also be able to rejoice. This is the meaning of kekedem. We seek the same hope for the future that our ancestors did, based on their history, their life and their faith.

As we begin a new year together tonight we are grateful for the renewal, the revival, and re-enchantment of our lives.

We know that we will have to stand up to challenges that come our way, in order to remain alive, for each of us has encountered or will encounter loss, pain, hardship, and real searching.

Nonetheless, we pray that as we make our way into the new year, we will be able to say that we have arrived safely. We are here to live another year, to anticipate the future and give thanks for our past. We are here to renew sacred vision and with courage, to begin again.

Hadesh Yameinu Kekedem -- Let our days be renewed as they have been before.