A return to connectedness. That is why we work to repair our relationships with one another and with God. We are returning to connectedness. We are plugging back in above to the place from which we came. And we are reasserting our deep buried knowledge of our essential connection to others.
The midrash says that when God first created the human, the human was both male and female and then God split them apart. That is why we all have a basic loneliness and a yearning for connection. We unconsciously remember a time we were part of a larger whole.
And on Rosh Hashanah we return to this original connection, our original connection both to God and to each other.
The Sefat Emet says that on Rosh Hashanah we experience a slight taste of the world before creation, an undifferentiated world where all was God and all was therefore one without separation.
Notice the repeated emphasis in our Rosh Hashanah davening on unity – we celebrate God’s kingship by asserting that there will be a time when all creatures will join together as one unit (agudah ahat) in worship of God. On that day, God will be one and His name will be one. We are pointing back to pre-creation and forward to the end of times when we will circle back to this state of total unity.
Having a glimpse of such unity could help us live better. Many of the obstacles we face in spiritual growth, the impediments to balance and happiness and life satisfaction, are related to our extreme self-absorption and isolation. We view everything from the skewed perspective of “me,” as if we are each the star of the movie, and when we suffer it often involves our egos in some way or simply our soul’s lack of connection.
The tefillot of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are all phrased in the plural and done in community to draw us back out of this mirage of separation back into the world of connectedness, to an experience of a life that is connected above, connected to those around us and also connected richly to those who came before us and to those who will come after us. We are embedded, essential members of an eternal chain. We are plugged in to the God who joins us all.
May it be a year of connectedness for all of us.
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Beautiful. I love the idea of connectednes and aguda achas, and will be more aware of it this Rosh Hashannah.
ReplyDeleteI find the sfat emet very troubling; the idea of G-d as one and unity doesn't seem to leave much room for me? But I want to exist! And G-d wants me to exist or He wouldn't have created me and the world! In the world-to-come, at least we can bring our post-creation reality to the unity, but imagining a return to a pre-creation unity feels empty and scary.