Rabbi Miriam's Rosh Hashana sermon - delivered Friday 4th October 2024
Chag Sameach.
This drasha has a physical anchor. Some baskets of conkers are being passed through the shul, and I invite you to take one and pass the basket on.
These conkers were collected before yom tov so are not mukseh, in case anyone is concerned.
As the baskets go around, I’ll explain why I’m handing these out. It’s because conkers seem to me to be the symbol of a British autumn and today I’m going to be sharing some thoughts about seasons.
And also, it’s sometimes helpful to have a physical object to hold as a kind of anchor. Feel the conker in your hand and the sense of holding it. Edmund de Waal, in his book The Hare with the Amber Eyes, tells the story of a collection of Japanese Netsuke, which are ornamental toggle like pieces of art, usually made of intricately carved ivory or wood. They are the size of a conker, smooth and holdable. Good to have in the hand or a pocket. Today we have conkers, intricately carved by Hashem, as our anchor.
As you receive your conker, look at it closely. Pay attention to the beauty of its design. Its perfection - or maybe its imperfection. The way it is designed to become a new horse chestnut tree. The way its glossy pattern looks like the polished wood of the tree it could become. Think about the associations you have with conkers - your childhood memories, your feelings about Autumn.
So if everyone now has one, hold the conker in your hand, take a breath, and be in this moment, in shul, on Rosh Hashana, the second day of the new year 5785. As the Jewish mantra goes
“may this year, with its curses, be over. May this year, with its blessings, begin”.
I’m going to read a poem.
The late year
By Marge Piercy
I like Rosh Hashonah late,
when the leaves are half burnt
umber and scarlet, when sunset
marks the horizon with slow fire
and the black silhouettes
of migrating birds perch
on the wires davening.
I like Rosh Hashonah late
when all living are counting
their days toward death
or sleep or the putting by
of what will sustain them—
when the cold whose tendrils
translucent as a jellyfish
and with a hidden sting
just brush our faces
at twilight. The threat
of frost, a premonition
a warning, a whisper
whose words we cannot
yet decipher but will.
I repent better in the waning
season when the blood
runs swiftly and all creatures
look keenly about them
for quickening danger.
Then I study the rockface
of my life, its granite pitted
and pocked and pickaxed
eroded, discolored by sun
and wind and rain—
my rock emerging
from the veil of greenery
to be mapped, to be
examined, to be judged.
Here we are. We have arrived at our late Rosh Hashana
Marge Piercy makes a compelling case for why Rosh Hashana falls in the autumn every year, particularly, having just had a leap month, in a so called “late” year, as we now head resolutely towards winter.
Seasons matter. We feel different - physically and emotionally - with each season. We humans have different behaviour and cycles based on the season. The teachers in the room will know that it’s harder for students to focus when the sun is shining outside. The doctors will know that hospitals are quieter in the summer when fewer seasonal bugs are around. Seasonality, I learnt recently, is a term in research and data science, where results are skewed based on the time of year.
Seasons matter in our own Jewish practice too. Our entire calendar of festivals is seasonal, reminding us of the agricultural past of our ancestors. Pesach falls during the barley harvest, Shavuot during the wheat harvest, Tu b’Shvat comes as the first blossom appears in Israel, and the fruits that are so associated with this time of year - pomegranates, grapes and figs - are harvested in the autumn. Unlike the Islamic calendar, when Ramadam can fall in the summer or winter, our calendar is resolutely seasonal.
And by the way, Jewish thinkers from Rav Kook to Franz Rosensweig to Rabbi Sacks have suggested that rather than being circular, Jewish time is more of a spiral, because we progress forwards towards something each year, rather than meaningless cycling.
So why is Rosh Hashana in the Autumn?
The first day that Jews started counting time was the day our ancestors were released from slavery in Egypt.
הַחֹדֶשׁ הַזֶּה לָכֶם רֹאשׁ חֳדָשִׁים
This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months, says Hashem.
Then in the next chapter:
הַיּוֹם אַתֶּם יֹצְאִים בְּחֹדֶשׁ הָאָבִיב׃
You go free on this day, in the month of Aviv. This Spring month. The Midrash says on this:
“See the kindness which God has given you — that God brought you out in a month that is fitting for going out: not hot, nor cold, nor rainy.”
It was the perfect weather for being a free person. And I think we experience that in Spring to this day - the feeling of freedom and possibility.
So if Spring was the perfect season to be free. What does this Autumnal time of year tell us about Rosh Hashana? Is it, as Marge Piercy says, because that we
“repent better in the waning
season when the blood
runs swiftly and all creatures
look keenly about them
for quickening danger.” ?
Is it our vulnerability at this time, where our souls are as bare as the trees, that makes it so ripe for Rosh Hashana?
I am drawn to this idea, but I want to suggest something a little different.
Katherine May, in her wonderful book “Wintering”, offers the idea that it’s actually in the harsh winters that our greatest transformation happens. She writes:
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs.”
Think about your conker. If it had been left on the ground, it could have bedded in there, preserved in the cold soil, until the spring, when it would start to become a new sapling. And amazingly, the tree that it came from is already growing the buds that will become the flowers in June that will get pollinated and become the new conkers next autumn.
In other words, magic happens even in the Autumn and Winter. Far from being times of freezing emptiness, the slowing down, the hibernation is partly what allows for the energy of Spring and Summer. And maybe this is why Rosh Hashana is at this time of year. I love Marge Piercy’s idea that we repent better when we feel vulnerable and exposed. But I want to tune it in a more positive way - that this is a time of year for making intentions, for laying the groundwork for our inner growth, for forming a kernel, a bit like a conker, to settle into change and development.
Seasons, I’ve come to believe, are our hope. After the biggest destructive upheaval in the Torah, the Flood, God promises never again to destroy the world. God’s promise could have ended there with the rainbow, but instead God adds on the following assurances:
“So long as the earth endures,
Seedtime and harvest,
Cold and heat,
Summer and winter,
Day and night
Shall not cease.”
These words tell us so clearly that seasonality is an antidote to death and destruction. That in the wake of awfulness, the turn of the seasons - even the turn of day and night - is something regular and reliable. The Torah tells us to lean into each season, to feel them, because they are part of God’s promise that there will always be renewal and hope. Nature here is our great teacher - it tells us that yes there might be awful winters, but spring will come again.
Perhaps this is why we pray for rain in a few weeks on Shemini Atzeret, and we pray for dew at Pesach. We know how the seasons should be, and so rather than long for a hot winter or a dry spring, we pray that they are their full seasonal selves. And of course these words take on an unsettling new valence in our time of climate crisis, where the seasons do seem to be shifting.
The book of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, has a different take on the idea of seasonality, telling us that seasons come in the ebb and flow of human behaviour and experience, not just in the time of year. The author writes:
(1) A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven: (2) A time for being born and a time for dying, A time for planting and a time for uprooting the planted; (3) A time for slaying and a time for healing, A time for tearing down and a time for building up; (4) A time for weeping and a time for laughing, A time for wailing and a time for dancing; (5) A time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones, A time for embracing and a time for shunning embraces; (6) A time for seeking and a time for losing, A time for keeping and a time for discarding; (7) A time for ripping and a time for sewing, A time for silence and a time for speaking; (8) A time for loving and a time for hating; A time for war and a time for peace.
But the poet Yehudah Amichai had a different approach. He writes:
A person doesn't have time in his lifeto have time for everything.He doesn't have seasons enough to havea season for every purpose. EcclesiastesWas wrong about that.
A person needs to love and to hate at the same moment,to laugh and cry with the same eyes,with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,to make love in war and war in love.
I don’t know about you, but Amichai’s words feel particularly resonant to me given the past year. It feels like the seasons of human experience have collapsed into one long blur of intense feelings - among them fear, confidence, sadness, hope, anger, resignation, longing, love, togetherness and apartness.
This past year, the horrific brutality of the October 7th attacks in Israel, which have affected all of us, two missile attacks from Iran, the year-long ongoing war, the constant violence, the fear that it could get even worse - the past year has been constant and relentless, without space to breathe, without seasonality. With such constant uncertainty and danger, both for our Israeli family and here in the UK, comes a feeling of scarcity and urgency. As Amichai says, a person
“doesn't have seasons enough, to have a season for every purpose”.
We have got smaller, turned inwards, we lack space. As the Torah says of our ancestors enslaved in Egypt, we are experiencing קֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ - our breath is short because of the hardship.
My teacher and mentor Rabbi David Levin Kruss gave permission to share with you that when he says the Amida each day, he has begun to stumble at the part where in the winter we say “mashiv haruach umorid hageshem” (God who makes the wind blow and the rain fall) and in the summer we say “morid hatal” (God who brings down the dew). Since October 7th it feels like one long winter to him - a cold, dark place in which it feels confusing to say a summer prayer.
So one huge prayer I have for this year, 5875, for us as individuals and for the world, is for a return to seasonality. Both the seasons of the year, and Kohelet’s seasons of human experience. For the world to slow enough that we can settle into a zman - a season, even in the hard times. Because some seasons are hard. Much as I long for total peace in Israel, I know that there will be more hard times ahead, just as winter’s frost and ice will come, just as we will have winterings in our own lives. And rather than fight against this, I hope we can face these realities, and move through them. But please Hashem, bring us one season at a time, bring us a reprieve from the relentlessness of the past year.
And so I offer to you the idea that seasons are in fact a source of hope. That while we might feel low as the leaves fall off the trees and the days darken, it’s the very cyclical nature of the seasons, with their ebb and flow, with their turning inwards to preserve and conserve, and then their flourishing outwards - that this is what allows for life.
This is why Rosh Hashana is now. Because while it feels like the world is turning cold and hard, this is in fact the beginning rather than the end of a new cycle. New beginnings - whether within you or in the wider world might be invisible over the coming months - this is what hibernation is, but today is where it begins.
So hold onto your conker today. If you like, you can keep it somewhere at home as a reminder that seasons are our hope. As a reminder that even though the seasons seem jumbled at the moment, we will get back to everything being in its season again. And as a reminder that YOU are a bit like a conker on Rosh Hashana. You haven’t fallen off a tree in the Autumn wind. That might be how you’re feeling now. But in this vulnerable, Autumnal moment, is the kernel of growth and renewal.
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