Cantor Rebecca Joy Fletcher
If you are like me, the weight of the world feels heavy on your shoulders these days. So much suffering – mass hunger in Sudan; a planet that is hotter than it has been in thousands of years; the pain, mourning, and fear of our brothers and sisters in Israel, across Gaza, and the wider Middle East; an upcoming national election rife with acrimony. How, amid all this can I turn toward the upcoming holiday of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, with a sense of possibility and hope?
Though most of us translate Rosh Hashanah as the “Jewish New Year,” it is a bit more complicated than that. According to Rabbinic commentary, there are four New Years, including: 1) the 15th of Shevat, the New Year for the trees, 2) the first of Nissan, making the creation of the Jewish people and the birth of the Hebrew calendar, 3) the first of Elul, the New Year for the tithing of cattle, and 4) the 1st of Tishrei known as Rosh Hashanah, the day on which the world and humanity was created. As the Genesis story goes, on the sixth day of creation the human being (or earthling, as we like to say on the Farm) was formed from out of the earth, close on the heels of the world’s first Sabbath.
The creation of this human or “earthling” is an amazing, profound thing. Because of our intelligence and capacity to reason; because of our development of language, our moral awareness, and our capacity to self-reflect; and most of all, because of our free will. That’s why synagogue goers sing out joyfully on Rosh Hashanah “Hayom Harat Olam!” (“Today is the conception of the world!”) Because inside that new world, indivisible from it, free will has been born – the human capacity to build or destroy, to act with kindness or cruelty, to hope or to despair.
It is this capacity for free will which comforts me when I am feeling hopeless. I think about all that seems impossible to overcome, all the complicated messes all over the globe, and then I remember Maimonides. Maimonides was a great rabbi and thinker living in 13th century Muslim Spain and he encouraged people to state regularly in prayer, “I believe in the coming of the Messiah. And even though the Messiah tarries and is delayed, regardless I will wait actively every day until they come.” Now, I don’t claim to understand what the Messiah is, but I do yearn for a world of great and lasting peace. Therefore, even though this great peace seems to be very late in showing up, according to Maimonides I can still choose to step outside and wait with open arms and a courageous, hopeful heart for that great day to arrive. I can hope even though everything seems impossible – especially then!
So that’s what I am going to do this Rosh Hashanah, and I encourage you to join me: I’m going to choose hope. I’m going to let myself dream in detail of a world of great peace, a world my descendants will live in without fear or shame, a planet full of regenerative farms where no one goes hungry, and all our soil thrives. I will let myself imagine that I was part of helping to usher in that new world. I will revel in the stories of bravery, justice, earth-love, and unity I hear more than in stories of darkness. And I will let all this light me up inside so that I am propelled into action once the holiday ends.
And if inner voices of doubt arise, whispering that none of that’s possible and it’s too late anyway, I will sing back to those voices “Hayom Harat Olam” – today the human being was dreamt up and conceived! None of us can know how the story will end. So, today, even with so much loss and hurt, we can still begin. We can begin again. So, let’s do better this time, shall we?
Whether or not the Jewish New Year is part of your practice, we at Coastal Roots Farm wish you a year full of opportunities to hope and to act on your hope. And may we all be inscribed in the BOOK OF LIFE!