Erev Rosh HaShanah: Nefesh Service
Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2019/5780
I’ve always had a thing for the Beatles. I used to love the lyrics: When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now! Really? Will you still need me, will you still feed me? When I’m 64?!
OK, so for the record, on August 22nd of this summer I turned 64 and I can still feed myself! Paul wrote that song when he was 17 years old and I’m guessing 64 seemed really old to him. Paul is now 77 years old, and here I am, 64, and still yakking about the Beatles.
Amazingly, all that great music the Beatles wrote, music that literally changed the world, happened over the brief span of seven years. The movie Yesterday which came out this summer cleverly imagines a world in which the Beatles never existed and how different a place that would be. The first photograph of the Beatles together was taken on, yes, August 22nd of 1962 and the very last picture of the fab four together was taken on, believe it or not, August 22nd of 1969!
I have often wondered through the years, what gave the fab four such staying power? One possibility is that the members of that band were able to reinvent themselves at every turn. They went from rock and roll to folk to pop to psychedelia to mash-ups of all the above, ultimately creating styles never heard before.
If I have learned anything over the past 64 years or so, it is that while time becomes ever more precious with each passing year, it is never too late to reinvent oneself. You are never too young or too old to seek out a new way of being.
On Rosh HaShanah we celebrate creation, and we celebrate the human ability to recreate or reinvent ourselves. To become something new. To follow dreams, to change errant ways, to forgive, to move on.
Rosh HaShanah represents a singular moment in time. We are in the sweet spot! The past is finished and the future has not yet begun. And for ten days we hover magically in-between, very much like when converts to Judaism go to the Mikveh – the ritual bath – and suspend themselves in the waters for that brief moment. For that instant they are not who they were before, and not yet who they are going to be, and it is a special moment. Fleeting, but special.
Rosh HaShanah proclaims: Today the world is born, today we begin again! Walk into an orthodox shul on Kol Nidre and you might find the male Jews wearing kittels – the traditional burial shrouds. They take this rebirth thing fairly seriously. The past dies that night, and we are reborn at the closing of the gates.
Americans take this seriously too. Statistically, the average American changes professions 7 times over the course of their lives. Not seven jobs, seven careers!
You can see reinvention everywhere. I thought of the screenwriter who became a rabbi at the age of 54. Or President George HW Bush trying out skydiving at the age of 91. Or Gladys Burrill who ran the Honolulu Marathon at the age of 92. Or one of my personal faves, Susan Boyle, mocked for her appearance and her age and her silly dream of becoming a singing star when she came onto the Britain’s Got Talent stage at 47 years old: she ended up stunning the world with her version of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Mis and signing an album deal.
Temple Israel has been busy reinventing itself over the last decade or so with a principal interest in being a warm and welcoming place, because we sensed that this is what the members of our congregation were yearning for.
In business they call reinvention an “adjacency strategy.” Moving to the next step to keep with the times. An interesting case in point is the Nokia company. It began by producing rubber boots and through a series of reinventions wound up in the telecommunications business.
I recalled what I once heard about Laura Ingalls Wilder who, as a woman growing up in the late 19th century, never believed she would do much more than help around the farm and bear children. Her many attempts at writing were rejected by publishers, but she persisted and finally published her first work Little House on the Big Woods when she was 65 years old.
I thought of the many retirees I have met here at Temple who investigate all sorts of new realities when they leave positions they have had for years. And how many of them are drawn to helping others less fortunate.
Reinvention comes in many forms. I thought of Oshea Israel and Mary Johnson-Roy who were here with us for Selichot Saturday night. Mary’s son was murdered by Oshea, who was given a second degree murder sentence. Mary’s first response was who is this animal who killed my child? But then she encountered his mother who asked her to forgive her son his terrible deed. She decided to visit Oshea in prison where they talked for two hours and he repeatedly said how sorry he was that he had taken her son’s life. He asked if he could hug her and as they hugged, Mary said she felt something rising from her soles and leaving her. Her hatred for this young man left her. The two are now neighbors and they travel together telling their story. An almost unbelievable act of reinvention and forgiveness.
I thought of Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist, and her challenge last week to the UN General Assembly to wake up and change old established habits and antiquated solutions. She implored: How dare you suggest that the problem can be solved with just business as usual? The eyes of the youth are upon you – change is coming whether you like it or not. Every day we see the growing ranks of the next generation calling on us to either reinvent our relationship with the physical planet, or get out of their way!
Much of what we read in the news today peddles despair. If it bleeds, it leads. But every so often, you see a hopeful piece. The NY Times recently ran an article by Al Gore on climate change called It’s Not Too Late. The article jumped off the page to be read because it was one of the few messages that doesn’t make one despair. It affirms the long standing Rosh HaShanah tradition that human beings are capable of reinventing themselves and embracing change for the common good!
The cynical biblical author Ecclesiastes (from which we sang “Turn, Turn, Turn” earlier on) famously said that there is nothing new under the sun. Everything has been done already. He was so wrong. Every second offers us the opportunity to reinvent, to effect change, to “take a sad song and make it better.”
Every year we get ten full days’ worth of that moment. In the next ten days, you do not need to be saddled with what you have done up to this point; the future is not already preordained. It is yours to design! This is the moment to reinvent ourselves.
There is no stage of life when you cannot ask yourself: What is my life’s purpose? And if the answer no longer speaks the truth to you, then reinvention might be a good move.
Did you know that you can have a second Bar or Bat Mitzvah at the age of 83? Because Judaism determines 70 as the age of wisdom, thirteen years later you can be called to the Torah yet again! It is as though wisdom means “today is the first day of the rest of my life!” One is never too old to begin again! Or, as a well-known Jewish Minnesota musician who reinvented himself several times used to say: Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
So here we are, poised at the beginning of a new year with yet another opportunity to reinvent ourselves. To value our days and use the time granted to us wisely. And every minute counts.
To realize the value of one year, ask a student who has failed a grade. To realize the value of a month, ask a mother who has given birth to a premature child. To realize the value of one week, ask the editor of a Sunday paper. To realize the value of one hour, ask lovers who are waiting to meet one another. To realize the value of a second, ask a person who narrowly avoided a car accident. To realize the value of a millisecond, ask someone who has won a silver medal.
Remember, on this holy day we affirm that the past is finished, and the future has not yet begun. This is our week to hover in the beautiful moment of being “in between.” Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift! That’s why it’s called the present.