Holy Blossom Temple Bulletin September 2010| Elul 5770/Tishrei 5771
What Rosh Hashanah is about | In Perspective by Rabbi John Moscowitz
Isn’t it interesting that the intense prayers of Rosh Hashanah — which is a more serious day than Yom Kippur; our lives are on the line, after all — make no mention of individual needs? Think about it: We arrive at synagogue often burdened by worries — the health of those close, tensions with those we care for most, business and financial concerns and more may fill us, or at least distract us. But the prayers don’t go there; they don’t attend to what preoccupies each one of us as the New Year dawns; they don’t even much help us review our past year. Instead, all of this is subordinated to something larger, much larger: God’s sovereignty. We are consumed by survival matters, small and large, and the tradition appears to turn a deaf ear. Remember God’s kingship, it implores; make God’s name sanctified in all you do; fear God; serve God with the work of your hands and the intentions of your heart. Who can worry about God when we already have enough on our plate? What is going on? The tradition is neither uncaring nor unwise. By paying almost total attention to God’s power and eternality, by evoking the sense of awe and drama about the gift of human life, its brevity, its preciousness, its precariousness, the Rosh Hashanah liturgy and experience
put our eyes where they belong: on this extraordinary privilege bequeathed us by the One Who Brings Life to Be. The very expressions of gratitude implicit and explicit in the prayers bring us from our private and parochial concerns to an awareness of how fortunate we are to be in Life itself. Out of that refined awareness, a kind of alertness unique to that moment, we pray, not only for more of life — more years, more health, more happiness for ourselves and for those close — but also for a better life, not in our neighbourhood alone, but also across God’s world for all. So remembering and affirming God’s ultimate sovereignty takes us not out of the world, but back to the world: of our lives, of all of life. We then emerge from the two days of prayer with renewed confidence, both in what we have been given and in what we can do with it. God is the Life-giver, but we are the bearers, the carriers of Life. On Rosh Hashanah, we praise the former, literally to the Heavens. We thereby find ourselves more capable to do the latter — as God would want and as we so need. jmoscowitz@holyblossom.org
Our clergy wishes all a happy and healthy 5771.