If anything set me off it was standing on a cold pier on a cloudy day feeding the seagulls. If you live on a very large open body of water, you probably realize that the Tashlich ritual is not about casting away your sins into the water so fish can eat them, as much as feeding the seagulls. Much like the classic scenes in Finding Nemo, those birds as white as angels break that illusion in their stupid single mindedness. I can just hear them saying:
Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.
I usually do Tashlich alone, the morning of the second day of Rosh Hashanah before I set out for services. This year I was asked by my rabbi to lead. For whatever reason, nobody came. So when I thought I was doing something for the community, I ended up just taking a very long walk to the lake and performing tashlich by myself the seagulls, and a very startled duck. With the bread that was representing my sins, I did not just throw the sins away, but some negative thinking as well. Maybe throwing away such thinking is more appropriate than the mere sins which we ask forgiveness for on Yom Kippur. Tashlich is more about changing the pattern of thinking so we do not sin again. We take something we could eat ourselves, infuse it with the darkness within our selves and throw it away. But will our sin come back? We read in this week’s portion with Moses and Joshua standing before the pillar of cloud:
16. And the Lord said to Moses, Behold, you shall sleep with your fathers; and this people will rise, and play the harlot after the gods of the strangers of the land, where they go to be among them, and will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them. 17. Then my anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them; so that they will say in that day, Are not these evils come upon us, because our God is not among us? 18. And I will surely hide my face in that day because of all the evils which they shall have done, in that they are turned to other gods.[Deut 31]
God then tells Joshua:
23. And he gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge, and said, Be strong and of a good courage; for you shall bring the people of Israel into the land which I swore to them; and I will be with you.[Deut 31]
Joshua’s going to need that encouragement; he’s going to do his job only for it to fail. He probably feels a lot like Jonah, knowing how futile his job is. Even someone as optimistic and full of faith on God as Joshua, an optimism that got him and Caleb alone into the land in the first place, has got to feel the pessimism.
There is an environment in a synagogue that I find different during much of the High Holidays. I found a lot of people feel the same way about the High Holidays. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Admonishment of Conservative rabbis in 1953 rang through my mind the first day of services.
We have developed the habit of praying by proxy. Many congregants seem to have adopted the principle of vicarious prayer. The rabbi or the cantor does the praying for the congregation. In particular, it is the organ that does the singing for the whole community. Too often the organ has become the prayer leader. Indeed, when the organ begins to thunder, who can compete with its songs? Men and women are not allowed to raise their voices, unless the rabbi issues the signal. They have come to regard the rabbi as a master of ceremonies. Is not their mood, in part, a reflection of our own uncertainties? Prayer has become an empty gesture, a figure of speech. [MGSA, 101-2]
On the days where we stand in judgment, we pray the most soulless prayer of all because we don’t pray from our hearts. Avinu Malkeinu and Netana Tokef are performances and recitations not personal gut-wrenching spiritual pleas for our soul. I believe the rabbis cantors, organ players and choir all are in their own way praying their prayer, but lost in their incredible performance and personal prayer is the congregational prayer. Lost even more because the majority of the congregation doesn’t want to pray. They show up because it’s the one thing they do all year. That is all they do all year, yet they expect the same performance year after year. Any change comes with criticism. At my synagogue one of the most emotional moments in the service does not even exist in the liturgy, but is an additional reading from Ezekiel, one that has had a lot of criticism. Yet it is these same people whose dollars keep the synagogue alive. In one sense this empty spiritual day called Rosh Hashanah I in the prayer book is there to let me pray spiritually the rest of the year.
I do not believe like Heschel, that kavvanah, spiritual intention, is near extinction the rest of the year, only on these few days. Even the second day of Rosh Hashanah is such a different experience. Here is a much smaller congregation of people who really want to pray. Even when someone forgets to turn off the air conditioning on a 50°F day, it’s still warmer in the glow of being spiritual. I feel part of the prayer community instead of an audience.
Yet what I do fear is something Heschel did not imagine in 1953. The traditions as they are now might keep those who had gone to services every year once or twice a year for decades coming for those same old traditions and tunes. It is those same people I fear about as the numbers of walkers, wheelchairs and oxygen tanks found in the synagogue increase. Even that source of income for synagogue operations is running out as the Angel of Death does his task. In looking at the lack of spiritual meaning in the Rosh Hashanah service, I wonder if we are replacing the loss. If there is no spiritual value in this, the supposedly greatest moment of the Jewish year, why would the young people come to synagogue the rest of the year? The answer of course is most of the younger don’t return on their own for there is nothing there for them – at least not on that one day they show up. By the time they have families, it's too late.
Like Joshua’s mood getting his new position as leader and telling him he’ll do a good job but things are going to fail anyway, I contemplated this while walking back from the lake on that cloudy cold day. I threw my pessimism into the lake for the seagulls to chew on. Like Joshua, when he was in a minority of two to virtually everyone else, he kept his cool because he knew it was not him but God that would help get the job done. Standing near the banks of the Jordan, Joshua must have felt like this: both pessimistic but optimistically faithful.
Yom Kippur, from Kol Nidre to Havdalah will be only slightly different. There are personal practices that allow us to personally bring meaning. Fasting is of course the most obvious. Fasting is not as much about punishing ourselves, as having the discipline the Kavvanah, the intention not to eat. Yom Kippur I will fast. If I can make myself do something that is required by my body, how much more so can I make myself stop doing things destructive to my body and soul? Yet for tashlich, why did I not have anyone fill the tummies of seagulls and fish? Everyone wanted to fill their own bellies instead. The disciplines that come with spirituality are seen as an inconvenience, not a way of discipline and connection. Yet the prayers will be just as empty, only filling with meaning sometime when my belly is at its most empty.
The most meaningful service for me these Days of Awe will be the one this Shabbat – Shabbat Shuvah. This is probably one of the least attended Shabbat services of the year, since everyone is “serviced out.” It is the Shabbat where we think about our lives and where we are going. We pray an additional liturgy that we do not any other day of the year. For the first time ever, it will be out of a new siddur built on a foundation of Kavvanah. All of this in the deeply personal, intimate environment of the prayer community I have week in and week out. I wish all those young people would skip Rosh Hashanah and come to Shabbat Shuvah instead. For this, they might stay and thrive in the prayer community.
Sadly all I hear instead is those seagulls, young and old, of every movement saying
Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine.
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