Making the world better for our presence

By Rabbi Berel Berkovits

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- ROSH HASHANA is once again upon us. Another year has passed, with all its memories, thoughts, emotions and struggles. Some of us have been happy, others have suffered; some have died, others are here. And so I stop and ask myself some difficult, even troubling, questions, which force me to re-evaluate cosy positions and attitudes.

“And G-d spoke to Adam, and said to him: ‘Where are you?’” This first divine challenge to man, which took place, according to the sages, on the first Rosh Hashana, reverberates through the centuries. Where are we, and where do we stand? What of the past, and the future? Am I a better person since last year, more caring, more sensitive? Have I helped others, opened my home and heart to them? Have my priorities been right? Have I studied Torah, kept mitzvas, become more spiritual, more refined, closer to Go?

Or have I drifted ever further away?

Sometimes one wonders whether there is room for G-d at all in 2000. In this brave new world which even Huxley could not have envisaged, what place is there for the divine? Paradoxically, we probably have more need of G-d now than ever before. This last century of awesome technological achievement, after all, is also the century of unparalleled violence and victims. There is no natural equivalence, it seems, between scientific discovery and moral progress.

I remember the insight of the Kotsker Rebbe: that G-d is to be found wherever you make room for Him — even in this post-modernist world, in which everything goes.

Rosh Hashana calls on us to allow G-d in. But first we must find Him, and sometimes — especially for post-Holocaust man — it is agonisingly difficult.

My uncle, Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, argues in his “Faith after the Holocaust” that the real issue is, “Where was man?” And yet we still seek to understand where G-d was in that savage world, in which another of my uncles was done to death in a Hungarian labor camp, and my grandmother and aunts were gassed for the crime of wanting to live as Jews.

And although I do not have — perhaps never will have — the definitive answer, this much I do know: G-d was there, as He was with Isaac, whose akeidah we read of on Rosh Hashana; as He was with Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon, who saw — while being burned to death by the Romans wrapped in a Torah scroll — “the parchment burning, but the letters flying in the air”; as He was with the Jews of medieval Europe, of Christian Spain, and of the Chmielnitski massacres, who chose death over conversion; and as He was with the Chasidim in Auschwitz who, having put G-d on trial and found Him guilty, proceeded to a fervent Ma’ariv (Evening) prayer service. He was there with them, and because of them. They are our proof that the Kotsker Rebbe was right.

The Jewish people have suffered as no other people. But we have also survived as no other people. “All things are mortal, but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains,” wrote Mark Twain. And not only have we survived; we have also found the vitality to rebuild — against all odds — our nation and our Torah.

We have even found the energy to split into countless different factions, and to fight one another: religious against secular, Orthodox against Progressives, modern-Orthodox against fervently Orthodox — as if we have learned nothing from history. Perhaps, in some perverse way, this should be a source of encouragement, and even hope. Dead men, after all, do not fight one another.

And so when I feel dispirited, I think of those who dedicate their days to the study of Torah — to preserve the spiritual heritage of our martyrs. And I think of the undaunted religious refuseniks whom I met in Moscow in 1983, and the realisation of the assurance I gave them that one day they would be free to keep Torah in freedom.

And I am encouraged, and inspired, for I know that the Jews have a long past, and, with such people, an even longer future.

George Steiner once said: there are two kinds of people — those who love Tolstoy, and those who love Dostoevsky. On Rosh Hashana, we are all Tolstoyans. All the great macrocosmic themes are there: the grand epics, the sweep of history, war and peace, the universal panorama. “All you nations, join together… for G-d is supreme, awesome, a great King over the entire world.”

He is in charge, not us. “And about the nations it shall be said: which to the sword, and which to peace; which to plenty, and which to famine.” Over the great issues, we have precious little control. Whether or not it is clear to us, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

This is malchuyos, the first great theme of Rosh Hashana. Seeing things in perspective, recognising the transience of all human “isms,” acknowledging them for what they are: brave experiments, rather than sure answers; faltering steps, rather than final destinations. To accept that G-d alone is the King infinite, eternal and all-powerful. To understand that man can approach the divine, only if he does not believe that he is himself divine.

But on Rosh Hashana, we are also Dostoevskyans, probing the microcosm of our individual psyches. We look searchingly at ourselves, analysing our weaknesses and contradictions. We are called upon to reform — ourselves, rather than the Torah; to evaluate our lifestyles, our pursuit of wealth, power, sex, pleasure; to live upwardly mobile lives, such that when we leave this world, it is a little better for our presence.

That is the second great concept of Rosh Hashana: zichronos — the ability to remember, to take stock, and to give an accounting. Without a past, there can be no future. “For the memory of each individual comes before You: the work of each person in the light of his task, and the actions resulting from mortal footsteps; man’s thoughts, and calculations, and the prejudices of human deeds.”

And then there is shofaros, the third great message of the day: the piercing simplicity of the ram’s horn. And as it sounds, each year, I think of Sighisoara, a picturesque little town in the Transylvanian Alps, of which my father was the rabbi; of 1943, when the trains came, clearly marked, “for the Jews and gypsies.”

And I think of Sighisoara’s simple Jews, who came to my father with a request, heart-rending in its simplicity. “Rabbi,” they said, “we know they are coming for us on the Holy Day, but we do not know when. Perhaps we should blow the shofar as soon as we get to synagogue, so that at least we will have fulfilled the mitzvah before we are deported.” And l think of the loneliness and anguish of my father’s decision — to blow the shofar as it is always blown, rather than disturb the celestial order.

What was the shofar blasts, the teki’as shofar , of that year? It was not the shofar described by Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah — G-d’s call to man: “Wake up, you who are slumbering! Examine your actions, come back, do teshuvah, and remember your Creator, you who forget the truth because of temporary attractions.” The Jews of Sighisoara were all too awake.

lt was the teki’as shofar of Rabbi Saadya Gaon, addressed by man to G-d, which declares man’s ability to transcend personal wishes and desires; the sshofar that proclaims the unbreakable bond between the Jews and their G-d. “Punish us as You may,” it seems to be saying, “we are still Your people. We cling fast to Your Torah. We live by Your mitzvas. And, if need be, we die for them.”

In 2000, we are not called upon to die for Torah. We are asked to affirm our Jewishness, to fight indifference, to strengthen our Judaism, to transmit Torah to our children.

Rosh Hashana is once again upon us. Something within me awakens, another turning-point. What of the past, and the future? Am I a better person than last year, more caring, more sensitive? Have I studied Torah, kept mitzvas, become more spiritual, more refined? Am I closer to G-d, or have I drifted ever further away?

JWR contributor Rabbi Berel Berkovits is the Registar of the London Beth Din. Comment by clicking here.

© 2000, Rabbi Berel Berkovits