
By Rabbi Rachel Barenblat / Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires
The Jewish year now ending has been unlike any other I’ve known. Near the end of last year’s holiday season our world turned upside-down, and for many of us it still hasn’t returned to normal. I don’t know whether life will ever feel again quite the way it did before the Hamas attack, before the war in Gaza, before the community fissures revealed by our different responses to the war in Gaza: before everything we’ve witnessed and felt and mourned.
It’s natural to yearn to go back to before a rupture or a tragedy. And it may be difficult to open ourselves to the promise of a sweet new year when the old year has held bitterness for all of us who care about the peoples of that beloved land. Our spiritual work now is learning how to carry the old year as we move forward. We need to hold the old year gently, not ignoring its traumas but not clinging to them either. And we need to cultivate hope for what 5785 may yet be.
In a way, 5784 has felt like one long Tisha b’Av. (And reading Lamentations last month: wow, a lot of those lines evoked what we’ve seen over the last year in Israel and in Gaza.) Tisha b’Av hurts. And… it’s precisely from that low point that we begin the seven-week journey of teshuvah that culminates in Rosh Hashanah. From the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up. This is what our sages call “descent for the sake of ascent”: falling is the first step toward lifting higher.
So many have experienced unthinkable loss across Israel and Gaza. I know that nothing can make them whole again. I pray for a just and lasting peace, and for the healing they all need. And I pray that from the low point of this painful year, our peoples can rise into a better and different future. As Jews we always live in hope of transforming (with God’s help – whatever that word means to each of us) “our mourning into dancing” (Psalm 30).
For me the fundamental message of the high holidays is that change is always possible. The whole journey of teshuvah (repentance / return / turning our lives around) is predicated on the rock-solid certainty that we can change. Change takes work. It may be uncomfortable. It may not be linear. But we are never “stuck” with who we have been. We can always look inside, admit our mistakes, work to be better, make amends, and then make better choices next time.
I have an easier time wrapping my head around personal and interpersonal teshuvah than around organizational teshuvah or national teshuvah. It’s one thing to do our teshuvah work in relationship to each other. It’s another thing to get our institutions to examine themselves and change, or to change the course of our nation. And yet – isn’t that the very promise of democracy, that together we can steer the ship of state in the direction of our highest ideals?
Hasidic master R. Nachman of Breslov teaches, “If you believe that you can destroy, believe that you can repair.” We may not be able to fix the broken places that 5784 revealed to us… but we can still seek to bring repair in every way we can. And there is beauty even in our broken places – or, via the Japanese art of kintsugi, especially in our broken places. Kintsugi is the art of repairing pottery with liquid gold: not hiding the cracks, but making the broken places shine.
The old year revealed a lot of brokenness. Some of the breakages have been going on for a long time: for years, or even decades. Ringing in 5785 won’t magically fix them. But as we welcome the Jewish new year, we can strengthen our capacity to hope. We can shed cynicism and world-weary despair. We can open our hearts to the possibility of change. And from that place, we can go forward into a new year that we pray will be better than what came before.
Rabbi Rachel Barenblat is the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires in North Adams. Follow her at velveteenrabbi.blogs.com.