On the New Year: How Do We Keep Our Hearts Open?

 A snail walks into a police station and says to the desk sergeant, “Two turtles attacked me!”. The desk sergeant opens up a file and says “Okay, describe exactly what happened”. The snail says, “I don’t really remember, it all happened so fast”.

It all happened so fast. We’ll come back to that.

That’s not a great joke actually, if truth be told; in fact, I’m not sure it makes sense. After all, both snails and turtles are slow creatures, so in terms of relative speeds it wouldn’t be slow to a snail if it was attacked by a turtle; but we needn’t get all Einsteinian about it. It might have made you laugh - and thus I’m following the Dalai Lama’s wise words: ”You  have to always start with playfulness. With a joke. Make people laugh to open their heart, and then you can tell them terrible truths after, because they are ready”. (Who knew? The Dalai Lama’s a secret sadist).

Anyway, I digress. Are you ready? Are your hearts open? How do we keep our hearts open? How do we keep our hearts open when it all happens so fast. What a year we’ve had, what a time to test our capacity to keep our hearts open:  to each other, to life, to the daily assault from the ‘moronic inferno’ around us - Saul Bellow’s peerless phrase.  Temperatures rise, the world burns, ice melts, whole countries flood, populations are homeless, famine rages, pandemics sweep across our land, loved ones go. It all happens so fast. You shake hands with a new prime minister on Tuesday and take your last breath on Thursday. It all happened so fast.

Each year we come together in the synagogue and repeat the same words. B’Rosh Hashanah yikatayvun  ‘On Rosh Hashanah it is written’ … U’v’Yom Kippur y’chat’aymun ‘And on Yom Kippur it is sealed’… ‘for all who live and all who die…’ and we modern Jews, who probably no longer believe in this Book of Life imagery literally, nevertheless might still wonder about what it all symbolises; we wonder how things are connected, we wonder about cause and effect, we wonder about how the way we live effects the world around us, effects our own destiny; we wonder if the way we live – what we buy, what we eat, what car we drive – does it make any difference to our personal fates, to our nation’s life, to our planet’s life?  

 

And even though we have moved beyond reading much of our liturgy literally, don’t we still feel - in our hearts, when they are open - that the texts of these prayers are still speaking of vital questions about life? B’Rosh Hashanah yikatayvun – the translation in our Reform machzor (prayerbook) doesn’t actually say that our future is ‘written’ on Rosh Hashanah: it interprets the Hebrew by opening up the image, to reveal a truth at its heart.

Our translation says: ‘On Rosh Hashanah we consider how judgment is formed…’ – which is what we are doing today, and in the days between now and Yom Kippur. We are considering, judging, how the choices we make in life, the way we live our lives, effects what unfolds next – for ourselves, for our families and neighbours, our country, our bruised and battered earth.

Jewish tradition calls today Yom Ha-Din: ‘the Day of Judgment’. So today is about judgment, and self-judgment. The judgment is not coming from some deity on high but it is coming at us nevertheless. Fire and flood, starvation and disease are the responses - indirectly and directly - to what we do, and what we don’t do, they are in part the disturbing consequences of how we live, the judgments on how we live, individually and collectively in our interconnected world.

So these are days of judgment, times of judgment. And this year, as we sweltered in that 40 degree heat just a couple of months ago, we didn’t just have a glimpse into the future. What dawned on many of us was the terrifying realisation that the future has already arrived. This is the future: cataclysmic climate change, interacting with growing global economic inequality – in the UK it’s a dozen years of faith-based economics that nobody is allowed to call wicked, or sinful, or even shameful – with environmental disruption and economic deprivation embedded within systemic political dysfunction and the worldwide retreat into populist nationalism – this is the future, now, and it’s a dementing, toxic environment in which to have to keep one’s heart open.

This is the world we live in now and I don’t need to spell it all out for you because you know it anyway, you are living with it every day, and you might wake up at four in the morning inexplicably anxious - and yes, we’ve seen the  shattering of liberal optimism and belief in the inevitability of social progress and it has all happened so fast - and now a  European war is on our borders, and our sleeplessness is haunted by paranoid thoughts (or are they paranoid?): where will that first tactical nuclear device fall? and what will the fall out of that be, on the skins of our bodies and our children’s and grandchildren’s bodies and lungs? and how will the West respond? It happens so fast.

There’s an extraordinary couple of sentences in our High Holy Day liturgy – they only come once (which is quite a refreshing change from a lot of what we say, and repeat, over and over). But these two sentences are planted right at the end of these Ten Days, in the final Neilah service on Yom Kippur, when the mood is shifting, from solemnity and inward-lookingness to something more upbeat, hope-filled, as we start to turn back towards the world outside with renewed optimism and energy.  

They come immediately after we’ve sung, for the umpteenth and last time, those consoling, stirring, faith-filled words: “Adonai, Adonai, el rachum v’chanum…” – “God, the Eternal, merciful and compassionate …forgiving sin, wrong, and failure, who pardons”’. It’s a familiar text. And then, a heartbeat later, comes this. The text is nearly a thousand years old, but it could have been written yesterday: “When I think of the cities and communities which seemed so firmly based, and which are now ruined or have disappeared without trace, I am shaken” – and each year when I read it I do feel shaken, I feel like the liturgy has caught me out with a sucker punch, it’s below the belt really, because it comes so late on in the day, as Neilah is drawing to a close.

We’ve just been lulled into the comfort of that familiar mantra listing those Godly attributes and there it comes, unannounced: the six o’clock news thrust in our faces – cities destroyed, communities that disappear (fire, floods, starvation, disease), lives that seem so “firmly based” – and don’t we go around believing that our cosy lives are firmly based, more or less? – and it can all disappear, this text says, from one year to the next, from one hour to the next. Who knew last Rosh Hashanah that by this Rosh Hashanah we’d all be able to write an MA thesis on the geography of Ukraine? It all happened so fast.

But then comes a second sentence. Seamlessly the text continues – and here Judaism’s radical chutzpah is on full display: having laid us low with the brutal reminder of the unpredictability and fragility of life it then says, the very next words, U’v’chol zot – ‘But, despite all this’ – that’s the most provocative, defiant, breath-taking swerve, segue, in the whole of our liturgy – ‘But, despite all this’, it says, ‘we still belong to God, and still we look to the Eternal One’.

It's madness really: ‘But, despite all this’ – all this destruction and chaos, all this upheaval, displacement, savagery, heartbreak and loss – ‘we still belong to God…we still look to the Eternal One’ – it is a kind of madness this love affair the Jewish people have with God. Love affairs do derange the senses - but, yes, it’s true, the Jewish people do still look to, bind ourselves to, Adonai, the divine energy threaded through our history, and that animates all of life.

And then we are off again, the text doubles down, moves into, or retreats into, familiar territory: “Adonai, Adonai, el rachum v’chanum…” – “God, the Eternal, merciful and compassionate …forgiving sin, wrong, and failure, who pardons’. That’s the very last time we say this in the High Holy Days.  

That gut-wrenching description of the whole deeply disturbing world we inhabit – and we do recognise it, and it does shake us, because it is our reality:  Grozny, Darfur, Aleppo, Mariupol - it speaks a truth, those words, and we aren’t used to such plain-speaking in the liturgy. But the liturgists of old smuggled in those two subversive sentences nevertheless, sandwiched between that repeated mantra of God’s infinite capacity for love, compassion, forgiveness.  

And maybe one of the reasons why we repeat so often those sentences about God’s compassion and lovingkindness is not that the liturgy is trying to soothe us, or hypnotise us, into believing something we may find it hard to believe, or experience, but to remind us of something else: that actually it’s we who contain these qualities, these so-called ‘divine’ qualities, within us. We know what it is to love, we know what it is to feel and act compassionately, with kindness, with generosity. The liturgy keeps reminds us what is inside us, because we forget, we forget so easily.

We are so bound up with our faults, our failures, our lacks, our difficulties, our struggles, our guilt, that we can lose touch with our better natures: our capacity for care, for empathy, for generosity. We forget, so the liturgy keeps harping on about this stuff to remind us who we are. It’s disguised in all this language about God - but actually we don’t know anything about how God is, so we make it up. We made it up, historically - it’s part of our unique gift for Jewish storytelling, for Jewish mythological thinking:  we created a whole world view, reflected in our liturgy, about the divine presence and divine qualities.

And when we listen to it now - sing it, whisper it, in faith or in scepticism - we need to remember that in essence it’s not telling us about something out there, but telling us something, reminding us about something, in here: in our souls, in our hearts; if we keep them open, we can show love to thousands, we can be generous, we can learn to be slow to anger, we can learn to fill ourselves with love and compassion, we can pardon those who hurt us, we have this potential incarnated within us. But we need to be reminded: ‘Look who you are, look who you can be, look what you can do’ - the liturgy is like a mirror reflecting back on us: ‘You can do this, you can be this’.

On Rosh Hashanah we consider how these qualities are formed in us, inscribed in us - and how they become atrophied in us, how they become erased, these divine qualities in our hearts.

Can we keep our hearts open when so much chaos and disturbance reigns around us? And within us? When disasters strike – we saw it with Covid and the Ukrainian refugees – it is so often amazing how generously people respond: food, shelter, clothes, money, hospitality, communities forming for practical and emotional support.  This is being open hearted. But it can be hard to sustain when life is tough, when times are tough, when you feel your own well-being is precarious, when you know that in the UK there are 3000 food banks, and millions of children and adults dependent on charities and faith communities for basic necessities.

But let’s leave political failures of vision, and moral obtuseness, and the sins of systemic injustice for another day. This is our Jewish new year, our opportunity for a new beginning, a new realisation that in spite of so little being in our hands, there is still so much in our hands, and in our hearts, that we can do to make a difference.

And as we reflect on our lives, our choices, which is what we are called to do at this season, we can hold in mind how Seamus Heaney once put it, incomparably:

“The way we are living,/ timorous or bold,/ will have been our life.”  This is it. The future is now. And it all happens so fast.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, September 27^th, 2022]