I am so not ready for the Jewish New Year. I wish I meant that I am still holding onto summer; after all, it has been hot enough. I also wish I meant that I need to menu plan, shop, and cook for Rosh Hashanah meals; that would not be true, though. No, what I mean is that all of the ritual tools meant to help me prepare spiritually have not worked.
For weeks now, I have followed the Jewish calendar’s countdown to year’s end. We had three weeks of admonition leading into Tisha B’Av, the day commemorating the destruction of both temples and many other calamities. Tisha B’Av was followed by seven weeks of consolation. During these latter weeks, we also began the Hebrew month of Elul during which the shofar is sounded each morning. The weeks of admonition and consolation refer to passages from the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah that are heavy on pathos, playing on our emotions. The shofar in Elul is an alarm calling us to attend to our misdeeds.
This year, though, the shofar was more of an alarm clock with a snooze button. I heard it, and I went back to what I was doing. It is not that I have been doing bad things and won’t stop. Rather, I have been doing “busy” things — work and family and life things all have a hectic pace full of the usual transitions from summer to school. In my push forward, I have not reflected on my actions or my relationships; I have not stopped to do the work the shofar calls me to do.
It is more like I heard the shofar sound, but I did not hear the sound of the shofar. The shofar does have a sound that is a straight call, the t’kiyah (blast). The next note is a sh’varim (broken), a blast broken into three waves. There is also the t’ru’ah (alarm), nine short staccato notes. Usually, when I listen to the shofar I feel the shift from call to wave to notes, sometimes I even feel the sound vibrate within me, too. Usually, the waves of brokenness bring me to a spiritual space where I consider what was or is hard in my life. After that, the alarm bells of the t’ru’ah come like the printing of a receipt for how I acted. When that all works, I come away reminded that the word shofar has the same root meaning as l’hi’shaper, to improve.
Is it too late to improve? Is it too late to enter the Jewish New Year spiritually prepared to return, to repent, and to atone? Rabbi Alan Lew in his book This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared writes, “A mindful awareness of our circumstances often makes things seem worse and not better…we may feel a sense of urgency, even of desperation, about our plight.”
He goes on to say that that urgent desperation “is the emotional basis of Selichot.” Selichot, a series of petitionary prayers, gets its own service the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah. Last night was Selichot. So, if the week leading into Rosh Hashanah is started by an urgent, desperate sense of needing to address our problems, then this year I am not not ready.
My not-readiness is an acknowledgment that Rosh Hashanah is a BIG deal. It is more than the culmination of all those rituals of the last many weeks. It is more than the start of a New Year. Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of the world, a celebration of all of existence, and an acknowledgment of both how big a role and how small a role we play in it. There have been times when I was ready, I was all too aware of life and death and living meaningfully. There have been other times when I did not know if I was ready or not, and the holiday itself guided me.
This year, as I enter not-ready, I know in a deeply spiritual way that to be human is to be unprepared. Not ready is real, and on Rosh Hashanah that will be enough. May the New Year be enough for all of us.
About Rabbi Jeremy Winaker
Rabbi Jeremy Winaker is the executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Hillel Network, responsible for West Chester University, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and other area colleges. He is the former head of school at the Albert Einstein Academy in Wilmington and was the senior Jewish educator at the Kristol Hillel Center at the University of Delaware for four years. Rabbi Winaker lives in Delaware with his wife and three children.
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