"I told you life is uncertain" - 3 Rs for the Jewish New Year

 I’ve been thinking a lot over this last week about the English comedian Spike Milligan (1918-2002) – who else would you think about at the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah? He chose his own epitaph, to be written on his tombstone after he died. It reads : “I told you I was ill”.

Maybe this is just how my mind works, making this connection, but it feels like every time I speak during this period of the Jewish year - the ten days  between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement - there’s one theme I return to each year, a touchstone for what’s at the heart of this seasonal pilgrimage, this voyage of reflection and return and hopefulness for new beginnings.

And that touchstone of mine doesn’t read “I told you I was ill” but “I told you life is uncertain”. Because what we learn each day of our lives - but this annual period of reflection gives us the opportunity to think about in a concentrated way - is just how much uncertainty is built into the fabric of life: we have so little control over our futures, which rarely unfold as we would like them to – ill-health arrives, relationships fail, we suffer job losses, financial worries, our children don’t do what we want them to (or our parents, or our partners), those we love die on us; also our bodies are vulnerable, our minds too, our emotions can oscillate wildly, as if we are on a roller-coaster.

And the transience of life can feel unbearable. “Like a cup so easily broken, like grass that withers, like flowers that fade… like a dream that fades away”. Our liturgy offers us these words each year - and we glimpse into the reality of this as we say it, and then we forget it; we embrace it - and then we shut it away until next year. It’s hard to keep this in consciousness: human beings are fragile creatures; and everything can change, or end, in the twinkling of an eye.

So: “I told you life is uncertain.” And that’s all before reflecting on what it means to be bound up in a larger world in which the dramas of history, and societal discontents and environmental crises and, yes, pandemics, force us to recognise how little we are in control of our destinies, our fate – and how desperately we want to be in control. How much we wish we could stem the tide of uncertainty - which is life. And yet our only certainty is uncertainty – and what kind of consolation is that?

As the old Jewish year fades away and a New Year begins, there’s both so much to say about where we find ourselves right now and what these last six months have been like – but also I feel how little new there might be to say. Because we know we aren’t leaving the old behind and starting something fresh – for everything is overshadowed by the ongoing drama we are living through. And because we are in the midst of it, we really have no perspective to look at what is happening, what transformations are under way, what the shape of our society, our community,  our family, our own lives, will look like in a year’s time.

We’ve had to struggle this past six months, and the struggle is not over. We know this: the struggle is emotional, mental,  psychological, spiritual – maybe financial and practical too – and it’s an ongoing struggle with what Philip Roth once described as the “relentless unforeseen”. And it’s the reality of how that ‘relentless unforeseen’ – otherwise know as ‘life’ - has played out this past year that leaves us holding so much inside ourselves and with so much to talk about - and yet maybe with nothing to say. I do find myself tongue-tied and hesitant, struggling to make sense of what is going on. There’s so much we don’t know, and can’t know, about what our futures – personal, communal, national – are going to look like.

Maybe all we know is what our questions are – our tongue-tied and hesitant questions - as this New Year begins: How do we keep going? How do we maintain continuity in our lives? How do we keep connected with people? How do we make plans? How do we stay optimistic? How do we keep our sense of humour? How do we keep hope alive? How do we keep our dreams alive of a better future?

We are being tested - perhaps, for many of us, as never before. So how do we face this New Year, with its limitations (how will we manage another year of ‘glass life’? how will we face another year of masks, of constraints, of fears?); but also how do we face this new year with its possibilities? How might new avenues, new opportunities, open up for us from out of the chaos? What new paths through the wasteland will open up? What streams will bubble up amidst the barrenness of life? How should we prepare for this new year and its tests?  

Well, for once, I’m not just going to pose the questions - although I do think that questions can be more useful sometimes than answers. Because questions open things out for us, let our imaginations breathe, while so often answers can shut things down, can blunt the spirit and dull the mind. But having given voice to the questions I’m going to offer a route-map (of sorts) to suggest how we are going to get through this next period, how we are going to survive, maybe even thrive, how we’re going to keep our hopefulness alive as this New Year opens before us. 

We are going to do it, I would suggest, by sticking to the ‘3 Rs’. I’m not referring (obviously) to that old English joke-mantra ‘Reading, Riting and ’Rithmatic’ – they have their place, but that’s not what I’m talking about. My 3 Rs, our 3 Rs, are something else.

First is Resourcefulness: we individually, and we in the Jewish community, are going to be resourceful. You just have to look at what’s happened during this last six months to see that the community of which I am part, here in Finchley, are already A* students in that. New ideas have emerged, new ways of connecting, new possibilities for helping each other and supporting each other. New programmes and schemes and ideas have blossomed - and yes, Zoom has been crucial to a lot of this, and what would I have given to have bought shares in the company back in January. This is Resourcefulness and we have seen it writ large and it’s the first R we need, and we have it already within us, and it will see us through this crisis, this communal and national trauma we are living through. The human spirit, our spirits, are adaptable and inventive – what a Resource they are, what a Resource we have within us for creativity and imagination and adaptability.  

And that takes me to my second R: from Resourcefulness to Resilience. Yes, we are fragile, yes we are vulnerable, yes we can sometimes feel anxious or troubled or even defeated – but I have witnessed in many I have talked to and worked with, much Resilience, which is an inner quality that is universal. But I suppose Jews know something about this from a collective perspective: we have possessed Resilience for millennia, and have needed it for millennia, Resilience to persevere when life is difficult, when the odds seem stacked against us - and , heaven knows, the odds have so often been stacked against us as a people, but our collective resilience has carried us through.

We are the great survivors, defiant in our resilience - and it’s a mental quality, an imaginative quality, a spiritual quality, that we draw on now and it is rooted not just in our history and the deep knowledge that we have survived far worse that this pandemic, but that through our tradition, through our liturgy and our poetry, through Torah and storytelling, through our music, and humour, through our staying attuned to our Jewish vision in spite of adversity, we have Resilience built into our psyches; Resilience is in our psychic DNA. 

And that Resilience can be nurtured in countless way – though appreciating our gardens, through nurturing our friendships and connectedness (even remotely); through art and music and literature, through appreciating the natural world around us, through our faith traditions - through all these ways, and countless more (and you will each have your own anthology of what nurtures you) we have nurtured our Resilience and it will help us through this next period, with all the uncertainties. Our personal resilience is an unquenchable spirit within and we will work on it and support each other with it as this year goes on, into the winter darkness and out the other end into spring again. What a Resource we have, this Resilience, incarnated within us, within our souls. So, that’s the second R.

And the third R? What’s going to see us through this destabilising period alongside Resourcefulness and Resilience is – and I hesitate to say it, it’s disappointingly old-fashioned, it’s almost quaint, it’s not cutting edge, it’s definitely not new – it’s Righteousness. It’s what we already know: that to be a Jew means to be engaged in a life containing acts of Righteousness. It’s a difficult word to talk about because it’s often confused with self-righteousness, the smugness of thinking we are good people without having to actually back it up in relation to any other human being. Maybe I should use the Hebrew word – chesed – “acts of kindness motivated by love”. (Maybe that sounds better. But it doesn’t begin with R).

Perhaps though saying that Righteousness is the third R that we need, in order to see us through this next year, may be more radical than it at first sounds. Maybe I should double down on this third R – or double up – and call it Radical Righteousness: gratuitous acts of kindness, generosity, compassion, caring, love…no doubt it’s what you already do, or aspire to do. But a year is opening up in which I would suggest that Righteousness enacted in everyday life is transformative: it matters more than we know - to others who are recipients of what we give and do. And it matters to us - our souls are enriched and enlivened by the Righteousness we share.

I am not talking about being grandiose about this. When all around us in the culture there are endless examples of scepticism, cynicism, selfishness, bombast, contempt, fearfulness, injustice, discrimination, then a personal  commitment to being accountable for our moral and ethical choices, large and small, as best we can, can give us hope - because we know that this makes the world a better place. Who else is going to build an interpersonal world that is worth living in? We start with ourselves.

As Jews it doesn’t matter what your theology is, it never has, we don’t burn heretics – indeed progressive Jews assimilate them into our prayer books, the iconoclasts and atheists and doubters, whether Kafka or Phillip Roth, Nelly Sacks or Natalia Ginsburg, if they have something to say that helps us live well, and stay true to our vision then they have a place in our liturgy. If they help us towards chesed, righteous living, then that’s what matters, not their religious beliefs, or lack of them. And us too. It’s not through belief, but through action, through the good we do – that’s how we bring a blessing to each other and our communities and our society. Radical Righteousness.

OK, that’s it. Our 3 Rs, our basic rubric for the year: Resourcefulness, Resilience, Righteousness. We are already doing it. Let this be a year when we keep on doing the basics – because when we do them with heart and soul they won’t just help us survive, they’ll help us thrive. Because when we bring them together  - Resourcefulness, Resilience, Righteousness - they aren’t any longer just basic, mundane, ordinary, they aren’t just perpetuating the status quo, when we bring them together in ourselves and enact them, they are not only transformative, they are actually Revolutionary. 

In a previous, more confident, era I might finish here with a rousing (even if somewhat tongue-in-cheek) ‘Viva La Revolucion’ – but in an era when some of us have learnt not to put too much faith in ideological conviction, I’ll just stick with a more down-to-earth Shana Tova : wishing you a good year…

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, on the evening of the New Year, Friday, September 18^th, 2020]