Rabbi’s Weekly Message

Illustration: New Year’s card, with stylized holiday-appropriate fruit, the apple and the pomegranate.
 

            Annually recurring events naturally put us in the mind of where we were, last year at this time; or for that matter, many years ago at this time. This is true at both the communal and the person levels. With Rosh Hashanah approaching, I felt drawn to reconnect with my own past. I took my late father’s High Holiday prayerbook off the shelf.  It filled me with nostalgia to see his marginal notes. It was the book that he used at the pulpit while conducting the worship at Temple Emanuel of Paterson, NJ, where he concluded his distinguished career.

            I was looking for a particular poem added in that edition to the traditional prayers. For those of you who still have the black “Silverman edition” of the machzor, it is on page 17: “Hymn for the Eve of the New Year”.  It is a Sepharadi poem, composed by the thirteenth century liturgical poet Abraham Hazzan Gerondi, and chanted in Sepharadi congregations, although not typically in the Ashkenazi synagogue. The refrain, in English translation, is haunting: “A year of sorrows draweth to its close!” Thinking about the parlous state of affairs in the year now ending and filled with foreboding about the year about to dawn, that was the prayer I sought out.

            Since I preach lifelong learning, lifelong engagement with the sources of Jewish wisdom, I practiced what I preach and devoted some study to this poem. The results were surprising! First, the line that I remembered, a translation by the famous Jewish versifier Solomon Solis-Cohen, was a watered down version of the original Hebrew, which is: tikhleh shanah v’kileloteha—“May this year with its curses end.” In the last stanza, the refrain turns positive. Solis-Cohen gives “Begin, New Year—and bring that joyous day!”. The original is “Tachel shanah uvirkhoteha”, which literally means, “May the year and its blessings commence.”

The bigger surprise for me was learning that the title of the Hebrew original is “Achot Ketanah”, “a little sister.”  That is an allusion to the Song of Songs 8:8: “We have a little sister, and she is not yet developed. What shall we do for our sister on the day she is spoken for?”  Now, a love song wondering about how to raise our younger sister seems a pretty far stretch for a poem about the old year and the new!... Until we remember that for the Rabbis, the literal meaning of the Song of Songs was not its inner and deeper significance. They understood the rapturous expressions of groom and bride to be a love song between God and the people Israel; God, the groom and our people, the bride. Once understood rabbinically, the poem is a plea for God to strengthen us to withstand the sufferings of exile and ultimately to reward our desire for a redeemed world.

The poem, once better understood, says just what I would wish to share in this message. The year now ending has had its fill, not only of sorrows, but of curses—the curse of the movement to “Globalize the Intifada” achieving unparalleled popularity, the curse of our Jewish people assailed from Left and Right, as well as the curses of an unending war in Ukraine, a devious China gaining ever more of a stranglehold on critical sectors of the world economy, and a world still careening towards devastation. We so much yearn for those curses to abate.

Yearning is not enough.  We need to act.

But voicing the goal is often the purpose of prayer. The Rosh Hashanah poem keeps us focused on the need to imagine a better world.  With God’s help, we can move the needle in the correct direction, in the new year.  May this be God’s will.