Rosh Hashanah, Day One, 5769, 9.30.08
I’d like to thank my teacher and friend Reb Mimi Feigelson for some of the ideas in this sermon.
There are two new years for our people that require serious attention to cleaning. The first, of course, is Passover when we clean all the hameitz, the leavening out of our homes, change all the dishes we use, buy almost all new food and only then we can celebrate the holiday of being freed from slavery.
The second new year requiring serious and intense cleaning is the one we are observing now, Rosh Hashanah. But this cleaning is much harder than the one required for Pesah. We are called upon each year during the month of Elul, which ended last night at sun down, to clean out our psyches, our hearts and our souls. We are expected to look at our activities, actions, relationships, behaviors and even our thoughts and feelings over the last year to see which parts of our lives we are satisfied with and which parts require changing.
As I said this type of cleaning is much harder than the physical one that we do for Pesah. There is no objective standard for cleaning our souls, no moment when we can say with confidence that we have cleaned the corners of our consciousness enough for us to be sure we are written in the Book of Life.
And unlike for Pesah, there is no formula that we say making any mistakes we have not acknowledged null and void. We have to decide on our own when our work is complete.
We have to delve deeply into our emotions, motivations, intentions and actions in every one of our relationships. We have to be honest with ourselves which is sometimes much harder than it seems. We have to be sure that we are not overlooking a slight to one person here or an insult to another one there. To make things a little easier, we can go to our friends and ask them if we have offended them during the year so we have an objective as well as subjective way of knowing the affects of our actions.
But for those things that are between us and God, we have only our own ability to be honest. One of those examinations that we must do is to ask ourselves if we are living up to our own expectations. It’s easy to look at the people in our lives, parents, siblings, partners, children and know what they expect from us. And we can decide to meet their expectations or not.
But we have our own expectations of ourselves, we have the ideas and plans, the promises and the longings, some of which we almost can’t even admit to ourselves. But this is the time of year when we have to do that.
We have three verses in chapter 22 in Dvarim, Deuteronomy that help us move from what the outside world expects from us to what we expect from ourselves.
These three verses tell us that if we find anything that belongs to our fellow, including livestock or clothes, we must return it to him. If we don’t know where to find him, we have to take this object into our homes until he comes to claim it. We cannot hide ourselves from this obligation.
We have the rabbinic writings in our Talmud that tell us how to carry out this mitzvah, this commandment when we find a physical object.
But Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlov, the 18th century Hassidic master sees the meaning of ‘every lost thing of your fellow’s’ not as a physical object but as a spiritual experience, a longing for spiritual fulfillment. These longings are often lost from us without our even knowing they are gone.
Most, if not all of us, have had spiritual moments, moments of awe and great joy: from watching a rainbow form after a rain storm to seeing a magnificent sunset, from watching a child take his or her first steps to seeing our children get married. All of these experiences, while being spiritual highs, have one other thing in common, they never last very long. It’s almost as though we have them and then we lose them. These are the lost objects that Rebbe Nachman is talking about.
To return to our verses about lost physical objects, we need to ask a question. At what point can the finder keep the object; at what point can he know the owner will never come back to retrieve it?
In the Talmud, we learn about the concept of 'ye'ush,' which literally means despair. Unless the owner has despaired of ever finding the lost object, nobody else can claim ownership of it. But the moment the owner accepts the fact that he or she will never find the object, anyone else can claim it as theirs.
Rebbe Nachman asks us what happens when we lose one or more of our 'spiritual objects:' When we lose our faith in people or institutions that we have believed in; when we lose love for someone who has been dear to us; when a deeply held philosophy or theology no longer works for us. In other words, when we find ourselves in the midst of deep despair, when we give up on those things that created our basic framework, who finds and guards those lost objects?
We can all probably guess what Rebbe Nachman’s answer is. Of course, he says it is God. God finds those spiritual pieces that we lose and he holds on to them until we are able to reclaim them and put them back to work in our lives. As we know one of the attributes of God is erech apayim, great patience. God will never tire of holding our losses for us until we reclaim them. And that is a great comfort.
This is a very important way to look at our spiritual losses but my teacher at the Ziegler School for Rabbinic Studies and dear friend, Reb Mimi Feigelson takes it one step further. We do not have to rely solely on God to keep our lost spiritual objects. We all can be the holder of each others’ lost objects.
My friend Betty, whom many of you met at my installation, was the holder of my dream to be a rabbi. I would literally lose that dream and every six months Betty would remind me of it until I was finally able to remember it myself.
We know each other very well in our congregation. Think back over the years about friends and the dreams they have talked about. Which friends have lost their dreams over the years? Which ones can you remember for them? Perhaps now is the time to tell our friends that we have been keeping their lost dreams and will hold on to them until they are ready to reclaim them. How comforting would that be for all of us?
We need to reclaim our old dreams that we have lost sight of. Let’s each of us look into the corners of our minds and hearts for the dreams we have lost. Let’s ask our friends which dreams of ours they have been holding on to so that we can more easily reclaim them. And let’s tell our friends the dreams of theirs we have been holding on to for them. As we pray together today, let us ask to be reminded of our dreams, the ones that meant so much to us when we were younger. As we remember then, let us find a way to put even a part of them into action. We are not our dreams but we are only as alive as our dreams are current and vibrant inside of us. May each of us be written into the Book of Life and may each of our dreams begin to be realized one piece at a time over the next year.