Rav Kook, the first Chief Ashkenazic Rabbi of pre-state Israel, once said -- poetically and prophetically -- “Hayashan yitchadesh, the old shall be made new.”
Another name for that, inevitable in this joint High Holiday - election season, is (wait for it here, folks!): “change.” A topic this big has no pithy summary, but today we’ll look at change in liturgy and in life; we’ll consider when change is not so good, and when it’s needed but we fear to go there. And we’ll remember at the opening of these Ten Days of Tshuvah, with Rav Kook, that we *need* to change. We need to make the old new.
Sometimes, though, the old just gets older – or even the new gets old fast ( -- like headlines on the state of our economy; but that’s for a different sermon…. This one’s about: How and when things change, and how they stay the same).
I once heard a short story about synagogue practice -- ostensibly by Franz Kafka -- that really grabbed me. A very short story: “One day a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy.” [pause]
*
On the surface, that Kafka is pretty cynical about ritual. But can you blame him? How about that shul where everyone, but everyone, makes a slight bow just as they enter the door. Touch the mezuzah and kiss your hand, fine; but bowing at the entry – why? Well, back in 1913, the synagogue’s first rabbi was six-foot-four – and the door was six-three! He bowed, to avoid a concussion. They bowed, in emulation. And the story goes, they still bow to this day.
Or what about the brisket recipe, handed down generation to generation, that begins “carefully discard an inch of perfectly good meat from each end.” Why? Great-grandma did it that way. Why? Her brisket pan was too small; she had to.
How about our liturgy – have we caged the leopard in this here machzor? Have we tamed something once so vital, declawed it, drugged and dulled its dynamic danger, reduced it from three-dimensions to two? Even Reconstructionist liturgy can still feel stilted: too many words, too arcane; too much Hebrew to be accessible, too much baggage to be nimble. The fixed words, the “kevah,” can too easily crowd out our kavannah, spiritual intention.
Cantor Rachel offered a positive drash on Kafka: “There’s all the power and mystique of a leopard buried right there in our liturgy,” she said; “scratch the kevah, and it’s still there.” Nice: don’t see each repeated word or prayer as another bar in that leopard’s cage -- instead, make our rituals tools, to release the leopard’s power. Much less cynical.
Can we invite the leopard in right here, at Wheaton High School? I hope so – gain the power of the old, and the challenge and power of the new.
Last year, Cantor Rachel arranged a gospel-esque version of the opening lines to the Shofar service. Per the listserv exchange that followed, for some it was a welcome infusion of energy, a new entry-point to the liturgy, a brave expansion of melodic vocabulary. For others it was a foreign intrusion, an unwelcome diversion from “tradition.” It was for all, though, a chance to reflect on change – on how liturgy and ritual evolve.
Was that particular change so good that this gospel number becomes an annual part of our liturgy? Who knows – but look out for that leopard, soon ;-).
Uttered prayer itself, as this morning’s Haftarah tells it, goes back to Hannah. Praying (for a child) with such fervor, lips moving and body trembling, the priest thought her a crazed drunkard, a danger. Can we again make our prayer dangerous, subversive, unpredictable, energized, alive?
We can certainly try. This morning we introduced a new tune for that central piyut, Unetaneh Tokef – a melody that made the Israeli pop charts, in wide use there, which invests those ancient words with contemporary Sephardi and Ashkenazi musical styles and interpretations, against the sobering backdrop of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In remembrance of the fallen, the liturgy is enlivened. Tragedy and triumph, the leopard’s peril and power, are intertwined. The old is made new.
Twenty-six-hundred years ago, the Prophet Isaiah had claws, attacking the sham show of his materialistic contemporaries, who claimed to love God while subverting justice for God’s children. Our rabbis had the wisdom to make his shimmering angry masterpiece the Yom Kippur Haftarah.
I heard this version of Kafka’s leopard story from Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who bemoaned how “Many synagogues read [that] Haftarah as another droning piece of the machzor.” “Unfortunately,” Waskow wrote, its predictable placement threatens it with being “not a challenge to the liturgy but a part of it [1]” – a caged cat.
Here, in nine days, we’ll spring that leopard from these very pages. We’ll find the kavanah behind Isaiah’s kevah, let loose his leopard-like intensity and prophetic urgency. If we’re willing, we’ll make his old words new, make them our own – reclaim his intention to shake things up.
And thus, we move from liturgy to life.
*
A leopard stalked into our sanctuary – or our home, our office, our school. Three weeks (or months or years) later, it had become part of our routine. Maybe. Perhaps we embraced the change, faced the danger and grew from it. Or, we saw it, and called animal control.
Seriously, which would you do? Which have you done? Forget for a moment Kafka’s intent, and forget the reality (leopards in India have recently killed scores of people, but only where we encroach on their habitat; left alone, they rarely pose real danger). But now: the leopard is our metaphor for change – change that’s at once exciting, and scary.
Rav Kook, teaching “what is old shall be made new,” didn’t just mean “change,” he meant renew: lovingly conserve the best of what was, and eliminate what no longer works, in service of what will be.
Making the old new is neither a conservative nor a progressive endeavor, it necessarily means figuring out where to progress, and what to conserve. “Change” is big beyond American politics: a couple Israeli cycles ago, Shinui (‘change’) was the upstart centrist party that held the balance of power. But shinui wasn’t enough for the Israeli electorate, just as “change” isn’t specific enough here. Today the controlling center party is Kadima – “forward.”
To know which way is kadima, forward, you must know where you came from – and what from there you want to keep, and what you wish to leave behind. Your gorgeous ornamented hundred-year-old building no longer meets today’s needs? – gut it; keep the façade as part of a larger, more energy-efficient, new structure. Be creative. Reconstruct.
We fear leopards, instinctively, rightly. “Change is good?!” – not always. Some seemingly attractive changes actually threaten covenantal commitments and relationships, our morality and values, our deep sense of self. Remember, the grass may seem greener across the fence, but not be so. Before chucking the old, do your best to make the old new. “Renew our days as of old, chadesh yameinu k’kedem,” follows “Hashiveinu Adonai – cause us to shuv, to return, O God.”
Yes, this whole ‘change’ theme is tshuvah – turning and returning, reflecting and committing, changing and bettering. Tshuvah involves cheshbon, accounting or reckoning, looking back over recent history, to identify ‘areas for improvement’ going forward. Where have we been too quick to change? And where too slow?
*
There are leopards we should
avoid. There are times to call in the authorities – not just
external ‘animal control,’ but the internal authorities of our conscience,
our will, our “still small voice.”
But: how often have we wanted to make important, positive changes in our lives, but been trapped by fear? What is it about change – that stalking leopard – that’s so frightening?
My wife once had a dream: an apartment complex was invaded by lions. One lion -- frighteningly realistic, yet spoke like Mel Brooks -- took a liking to her. She somehow figured out she could protect the other residents by feeding that lion strawberries. I never have dreams that good! She never ‘got’ what the lion represented, but notes: in her dream, if she’d simply run for cover, she wouldn’t have found how to protect her neighbors -- how she could be of particular use.
How many big cats, changes, lie caged in the corners of our psyches, because we once perceived their potential but got scared?! How enslaved are we to the status quo in each aspect of our lives? How free could we be if unfettered from habit, expectation, appearances? How great would it be to shake things up, stir the pot, “make it new, keep it fresh,” whatever “it” is?!
Shaking it up – that’s our New Year’s challenge, and opportunity. It applies everywhere: Will you be bold enough at work to suggest something new, huge, risky, and awesome? Can you prevent ‘routine’ from eating away at the growthful, playful, almost feline essence of core relationships? Can we shake our community up enough to keep it flowing, moving, expanding, getting ever richer? Will we shake up (and shape up!) our society, our nation, enough to deserve to reclaim the mantle of world leadership?
Too often, at every level, we close ourselves up -- unwittingly ensconced in “this is how we DO it,” which really means “this is how we DID it.” But what might’ve once worked well, won’t work anymore: not until we open it up, open ourselves up -- free the leopard, expose ourselves to the danger of questioning assumptions, risk that “new revolution” that Thomas Jefferson said “every generation needs”.
That is: we must “do tshuvah,” in its literal sense of turning, revolving, renewing – turning ourselves around, turning our beliefs around, turning our priorities around -- turning it around, whatever “it” is. “Turn it and turn it, hafoch ba hafoch ba,” tradition says of Torah (“d’kula ba, for all is within it”). You *are* Torah, so, turn *yourself* around: that’s what it’s all about! (;-))
Which brings us back to compost (that which Seth nurtured earlier). Unturned, static, a pile of rotting vegetables and yard trimmings stinks to high heavens. But “hafoch ba hafoch ba, turn it and turn it” – rotate your compost heap, give it oxygen -- see it from different sides, let its constituent pieces break apart and then come back together again, ground it (so to speak) with sprinkles of earth, air it out, shake it up – and you quickly (almost odorlessly) have brilliant new fertilizing soil.
When the old just sits there, it smells. When you turn the old around and around, you make it new. Turn it and turn it, whatever “it” is: get in there, play with it, own it, change it, “do tshuvah” with it by turning and returning, shake it up. And do it now, today, the first of our Aseret Y’mei HaTshuvah, ten days of this focused forward change.
The two great themes of Rosh HaShanah are ‘starting fresh,’ a new year, and kicking off this intentional time of ‘tshuvah.’ And that’s the point of this Rosh HaShanah reflection: Change -- when truly “reflective,” as in looking back to see our way forward -- is good – it’s great – it’s holy. So let’s do it. Let’s shake ourselves up, shake up each other, shake up our nation and our world, through tshuvah.
*
It’s daunting, this tshuvah, change, renewal, reconstruction, reforming. We must strive for humility, while striving to be effective agents of change. There’s a lot to grapple with, if we’re to do it right. Grappling is in many ways at the heart of our Reconstructionist Jewish endeavor – we’re the movement that says neither “you have to do this,” nor “you’re exempt”; we say “you have to grapple with this” – whatever the “this” is: Shabbat, tithing to charity, kashrut and ethical consumption, holiday observance, you name it. Grapple. Another way to say grapple is wrestle. And to wrestle with ultimacy, to yisar with El, to wrestle with God, is to be Yisrael.
We, Israel, are God-grapplers, meaning-grapplers. And God, Yod-Hay-Vav-Hey, stands for action, change, for old becoming new. The three letters in the Great Name also comprise WAS, IS, and WILL BE – haya (hey yod hey); hoveh (hey vav vav hey); yihyeh (yod hey yod hey). Our God is the Power that Makes for Transformation, as Kaplan called Her, because God IS transformation. Adonai IS the Process that enables us to Become, because He IS becoming. God IS past-present-AND-FUTURE. God, in our tradition, just IS. And we, Israel, are IS-wrestlers, Verb-wrestlers, Change-grapplers.
Leopard-keepers, if you will.
So this Rosh Hashanah, these Ten Days of Tshuvah, grapple. Take some risks. Plan for and commit to and make some real changes. Shake up habits and assumptions, ways of doing and being. Let the liturgy and ritual of these Awesome Days be your guide, but not your goal; bring your kavannah to the tradition’s kevah. Let the leopard leap off the page.
And don’t turn from your internal leopards – engage them. Cage or banish the really dangerous ones; welcome those that will enrich your life, and that of others.
That’s the gift of this New Year, this reflective penitential season: the possibility of, and impetus for, real change.
And in so doing, be holy. Full circle
with Rav Kook, whose entire pitgam (expression) was: “ha’yashan
yitchadesh, the old shall be made new, v’he’chadash yitkadesh,
and the new shall be made holy.” May we all renew the best
of the old, sanctify the best of the new, and bring the best of ourselves
to this new year of 5769. Shanah Tovah.