Ritual and Memory
Erev Rosh Hashana 5763 Sermon by Rabbi Julie Schwartz (2002)
On the street where I grew up in the Queen City or Cincinnati as others may call it, there was no question that everyone on the street was Jewish. There was no question that everyone on the street celebrated Rosh Hashanah. The only questions concerned how early you had to go to services, how late you came back from services and which relative’s house you went to for lunch after services. My family went to Cousin Ida’s house each year on Rosh Hashanah afternoon. Because my extended familywent to different synagogues and came back at different times, some members of the family were probably just beginning their chicken soup while other relatives were enjoying Great Aunt Anna’s honey cake. I believe that I was more than thirty years old before I could actually figure out just how I was related to Cousin Ida and whose aunt, Aunt Anna was. Rosh Hashana involved family, food, and prayer. Its annual rituals are my precious memories.
I know that so many here have similar memories. You can list the official rituals with which you have learned to greet the New Year. You remember back and wonderful tastes and smells fill your mind’s eye. You can replay the scenes of walking into shul, opening the holy day prayerbook and wondering if we would really, ever, truly reach the end of the book. I pray that these are memories filled with special treats, moments of humor, and the experience of the spiritual.
In fact, not everyone has these memories. Those who have chosen Judaism and converted to it face a different challenge: the absence of childhood Jewish memories. They can only imagine being young and soaking up Judaism through the eyes of a child. They work at creating their Jewish present without the guidance of an immediate Jewish past.
And certainly there are many others among us whose families were not able to provide such Jewish memories. Not every family has a Cousin Ida and not every person grew up in a neighborhood that made a Jewish holiday its official holiday. Not every parent knew the ways to make the New Year a sweet occasion nor found ways to involve the children so that apples and honey became a cherished Rosh Hashanah flavor. And we must admit, not every Jewish home even if it had all of the flavors and smells and actions of a Jewish home, not every home was happy. So even if one walks out of that place with specific Jewish experiences or knowledge, that also doesn’t guarantee memories that are meaningful or pleasant or ones that we want to keep.
Each of us enters this sanctuary with our own gifts and our own deficits. Each of us begins this New Year in the same room but in a very different spiritual place. We are one another’s Jewish family but we are strangers at the same time. We search for a place that provides us with shared memories and allows us to experience, if only for a moment, that incredible sense of harmony, of belonging, of knowing that we are in the right place. And this search is so important, so desired, so needed that we return year after year to a synagogue, to this synagogue, to words and music and ceremony and ritual. It is the same for all of us, we are all engaged in this search yet at different stops along the way. And especially this year, a year of days that came after September 11, its shock and pain. Perhaps this will be the year, we pray in between the words of the prayerbook, perhaps this will be the year that I feel at home. Perhaps this will be the year that I feel connected and related and the puzzle pieces will come together and I will experience the real majesty and meaning and meeting that teases me at this season. Perhaps this will be the year that I find IT, whatever that IT is, God or Harmony or Peace or Knowing or just plain, IT, I’ll know it when I see it.
We know well that study may help us understand the IT that we are seeking. We know that being surrounded by good people, friendly people makes us more comfortable as we search. We know that understanding the words of the prayerbook and knowing all of the tunes to the songs makes us feel more sure of ourselves while we sit in this place, tired after a long day. And all of this preparation for the holiness of the season is crucial and worthy. But even the best intellectual awareness and the most delicious challah will not necessarily lead us to the enlivening of our souls. For us to have a spiritual, soul-ful, meaningfilled, yuntif experience, something more needs to happen. We must find a way to a place beyond our heads. This is a place where we are freed from the specific, the time bound, and the cognitive. This is a place where our hidden memories flow smoothly like honey over apples. This is a place where our neshamah is in dialogue with the ages, with God.
In fact, modern psychology has taught that there is a way to find our memories and to unlock the secrets that are eternally ours. Strange to find religious truth in psychology but Carl Jung taught of the collective unconscious, a force that connects people at a level of which we are unaware. He wrote of the archetypes that unify human experience and give us the models and metaphors for understanding our existence. Other psychologists have expanded upon this notion and in fact, our ancient rabbis seemed to even have an awareness of it. The rabbis taught that we were all at Sinai, in fact we will read on Yom Kippur a passage that tells us this. Yes, all Jewish souls ever yet to be were present at the moment of revelation and shared in that experience. That would be our collective unconscious/conscious memory. Whether one was born a Jew or chose Judaism, whether one had a wonderful Jewish upbringing or mourns the lack of one, all of us who are now Jewish souls were there at Sinai. All of us can claim that memory. The challenge is in finding our way back to that moment and accessing the treasures of our Jewish identities.
That portal to our collective has always been within our grasp – it is the hidden power held right within our ritual acts. Ritual offers us something that can touch us in ways that we cannot always define. A smell or a picture or a feel. The strength of ritual that it reaches beyond our conscious brain and moves us to our subconscious and so gives us entrée to the collective unconscious of our Jewish identity.
The most basic of all rituals is that one that links us to God’s very first action, the creation of light. God moved out of nothingness and spoke the first words, words recorded for us human creatures yet heard by no human creature. God said, y’hi or, let there be light and y’hi or, there was in fact light. And so when we, limited by our flesh and blood bodies, light a candle, when we light shabbas or yuntif candles, we are joining in the spirit of the first action of our universe. God created light and we, mere humans, we too have the remarkable capacity to emulate the Divine and cause a limited, human form of light. We begin each holiday with this simple action and we are joined across the millenia with the creation of the world, the very first Rosh Hashanah.
And indeed it still holds such power, this first ritual. All across the country, all across the world, at different hours based on different clocks and different practices, all of us, all of us Jews participate in one same action. I remember my first Rosh Hashanah away from home and the wonderful realization that the candles lit before me at the Hillel service were somehow the very same candles that I knew my mother was lighting at my childhood home so very far away. I remember lighting yuntif candles in Jerusalem and knowing with that same certainty that the time differences were melting away and somehow my mother was already lighting her candles, still those same candles in another, no the very same dining room.
And it is said to have had the same power for our forefathers. The rabbis tell us that the pain felt by Father Isaac over the death of his mother Sarah was enormous. Finally he continued with his life and married Rebecca. But his ultimate comfort came when with Rebecca’s entrance into his life, Shabbat candles were again lit in his home.
With the same mystery and magic, we part the secular world from the sacred as a quiet little match meets the wick of the candle. A tiny act. Yet our tradition has taught that it is this one act that transports us across oceans and centuries, healing all wounds, reuniting all families.
And it is more than that as well. The flame of the candle is a dynamic creature. It dances, it plays with us, it invites us to join it. Jews who sway as they pray are likened to the flame of a candle. Indeed, each letter of the Torah is likened to a flame. Each letter of the Torah is meant to have a life of its own and to represent each of us Jews who were there at Sinai. Each letter flame is alive, urging us too to be fully alive and find life in Torah, in God, in the world of the soul. The story is told of Rabbi Hananiah who was martyred by the Romans for his refusal to abandon his faith. They burned him together with his precious Torah. His students called to him, Rabbi, What do you see? He called back, the parchment is burning but the letters are jumping from the flames and ascending up to God. The flame of the candle envisions worlds for us that we cannot touch or fully understand. Riding on its invisible crest, we too could jump to God. The flame of the candle is filled with power and yet fragile enough to be snuffed by a breeze. Our souls are just so as well.
So the lighting of the candle, the image of the flame, even the very motions of lighting the candles gift us with possibilites. Why does mama encircle the candles three times? No my bubbe used to draw her hands around the candles seven times. Three, seven, the circles are simple Jewish woman’s form of dancing in place. The world is being changed as those arms move gracefully around. The atoms of matter are being rearranged so that peace is drawn into the home and all that was difficult and rancorous from before has now vanished. It is magic and it is wonderful.
A young marine sat with me once. Rabbi, he said, let me tell you my story. I have not really told it before but after last week’s seder and the woman lighting the candles, now it needs to be told. I am from East Germany. I left when I was twelve. Before that my parents took me to strange meetings with people whose names I never learned and whose faces I was told to forget. We met in different places, in dark basements, never the same place twice. People sang songs that I didn’t understand and made me repeat words that I didn’t know. And there were candles lit and always the woman lighting them, sometimes my own mother, always the hands would encircle the candles in that same magical way as last week. A group of us children were taken away from our families early one morning and brought out to the country, to a place we did not know. And then we were thrown, pushed, somehow lifted over a fence and then we ran until others came for us and I found myself in a children’s home. And then adopted by an American family who told me when I was eighteen and living with them in the US, that I was a Jew. I had been hoping to attend a Jewish service now that I was in the military. And this was it. I was too scared for a long time to mention it to others but now that I have completed my basic training, now it seemed safe to come to a Jewish service. And it was the seder and I saw those hands moving around the candles. And I remembered my mother again.
Can we give these candles the permission, the power to lead us on the journey to which we have been called? Jewish traditions as divergent as the Chasidic Jewish community and the New Age Jewish community share the custom of meditating on the flame of the candle. We who live in the world of books and spoken world sometimes struggle with actions that move us beyond the tangible. But Judaism is always about more than we can see or explain. We simply begin with the obvious and then leap forward from there. The custom of candle flame gazing involves such a leap. (take a candle and hold it up.)
Tonight I ask you to join Jews from different ages and practices and to dare allow the candle to lead you into finding your connection. The Zohar, the foundational book of Jewish mysticism first teaches this practice. We are to focus on the candle flame and slowly quiet our breathing and bodies…Use the flame to center your body… Now begin to discern the five colors all living within the same image… Breathe slowly, in and out but keep your eyes on the candle….See first the red and yellow, colors of emotion, of richness, of energy, of life…Now see the fleeting dash of white. It is almost beyond our grasp. Reach for the vision of white, look for it as you look for your soul….Now go another step in your focus and see black, the darkness around the flame….It is a deep, soothing black. It is velvet and its softness comforts you. The black allows the candle to shine and be seen and serve its purpose…. And now, search for a color that you don’t even know is there, search for the blue…Hidden deep within the focus on the flame is blue. Focus so intensely on the flame as you plead with it to allow you to see the blue. Searching for blue will let this flame lead you to see other flames Can you see flames from the candles on your table at home or flames from candles of some Rosh Hashanah long ago…flames from other holidays, flames from your earlier lives…Allow the flame to communicate with you. Let its movement engage you….Let the flame invite you to enter it….And now quietly, allow the flame to take you into your soul. And there to find your Mystery.