This Year: You Belong. Here.
Not Another Rosh Hashanah Email: Dispatch #76
💡 Think:
Everything changed in March. Or was it February? Definitely by April. 2020 came in with a bang . . . Taking a step further back, the Jewish year, 5780, included the last quarter of 2019 - and with it the frightening uptick of violence against visibly Jewish people in Brooklyn culminating in the attacks in Jersey City and Monsey.
5780 has been a hell of a year.
Rather than attempting to adapt Judaism to the brave new reality of global pandemic; Zooming from isolation in attempts digitally recreate the Synagogue experience, we did something else.:
We decided to bring Judaism back to where it was always meant to be: Centered around the home.
This is not a knock on the shul, which is beautiful and important, but rather the ossified vision of it preserved in the midcentury amber of American Jewry - the creaking scaffolding of the denominational silos that define Jewish institutional life.
But Judaism was never about that. Judaism was at home. That’s where the Shabbat candles are kindled, the mezuzah placed, the charity box affixed . . . Even those parts of Judaism that are explicitly communal - the prayer quorum - can be held in a private home.
So this summer, as the world took shelter, we turned inward. 10 different mitzvos, ten points of connection, that brought Judaism back to where it always was: The home.
This acting of reclaiming the center of Jewish life, of turning inwards, has resonance with the message of Rosh Hashanah.
The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Chasidic movement, compared the shofar’s call to the primal scream within each and every one of us.
We can’t find the words to express the essence of our souls, the essence of our being. Like a son in pain calling out to his father, the complexity of thought and intricacies of complex ideas no longer matter. It is the raw unvarnished voice, unshackled and unfettered, that the father hears.
The call of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is that primordial scream, the eternal voiceless call of the soul expressing its desire to return to its Creator.
“I am a Jew. I am here,” it says. “I don’t want to hide or conceal my essence any more.”
Later we can find words for that call, but now all we can do is cry out — and then the king, our father, will come to us. We will be united and renewed for a year of sweetness and blessings.
But first we call from our depths as we dive inwards, deep calling unto deep - the depths of my essence to the depths of the essence of the One. And that look inward, is the ultimate going home, to where we always were!
Shana Tova!
🏃 DO:
🍎 Join our socially distant, spiritually close Rosh Hashanah.
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🎬 Watch:
It’s been an interesting year. I don’t always leave the home, but when I do, it’s to hear the shofar!
📚 Read:
📯 Many different communities will be blowing the shofar to the outdoors this year. A Short History of a Big Mitzvah: Bringing Shofar to the Streets!
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