Some Post-Rosh HaShanah Thoughts

1. On Bowing to the Ground:

Bowing all the way down with my head to the ground on Rosh HaShanah this year, I suddenly felt the intense vulnerability of this position. I can’t see what is coming this way and I am not physically prepared to react, prostrate. I relinquish myself; I submit myself entirely to God’s mercy. I have to trust that things will work out, not because I can see them and control them, because I can’t. And that is the truth.

Avinu Malkeinu Haneinu ve’Aneinu ki eyn banu ma’asim. Aseh imanu tzedakah va’hesed vehoshienu. “Our father, our king, have mercy and answer us, for we have no deeds.” We are nothing. In the end, what can we say for ourselves? We’ve tried? We’ve struggled? There is so much undone, so much imperfection. In the end of the day, we have no deeds, no words. And that is a great relief. To simply give oneself up to God’s mercies. Aseh imanu. . . vehoshieinu. “Deal with us in charity and loving-kindness and save us.” Save us. After Rosh haShanah and after Yom Kippur, what will come out of it all – hoshanot, petitions for deliverance. What will come of all this is our realization that it is not reall in our hands, that we are very much in need of deliverance, daily, yearly, each minute. We submit, we let go, we trust.

Is this teshuvah, “repentance”? Doesn’t it require us to act to improve ourselves, to do better in the world? Yes, yes, but sometimes I think that at the base of most problems is a misperception about our relationship to this world, that maybe the best way to improve oneself is to really understand, in the deepest way possible, that one is not in control, to be able to truly submit oneself to God. Maybe this is what teshuvah means – a return to God, a return to an understanding that God is one’s Source, a total submission of the self. Once we realign ourselves, everything else falls into place.

2. On the Shofar Blasts:

This year, the shofar blasts reminded me of the shofar blasts outside the Jericho walls, loud and powerful, able to knock down obstacles. We put up all kinds of barriers around ourselves, protections built of fear and of ego. Can the shofar blasts help us learn to knock them down, to open up to what is out there without fear or hesitation, to knock down the illusion of individual separateness and let us feel a part of the universe, like a wave in the ocean, a blade of grass in the lawn, a note of sound carried on a wave of such sounds by the shofar?

Toot, toot, toot. The brokenness of the shevarim and the cries of the teruah are always surrounded by the oneness and unity of the tekiah. The tekiah gedolah gathers up those separate sounds and surrounds them, melting them into a single unit, along with our separate selves.