It’s been twenty nine years since I was an undergraduate, and more than nineteen years since I last had to take a final exam in Rabbinical School. But I still have the dream.
You know it, I am sure. The one where I show up to class, go to my seat, sit down, and then realize that I didn’t attend a single class all semester, didn’t bother to buy, much less read, any of the assigned books, and failed to withdraw before the add/drop deadline.
For some reason, it is always seems to be this time of year when I have dreams like that. Any ideas why that might be?
Rosh Hashanah is in a week, the beginning of our High Holidays. The High Holidays are kind of like a year long course. We cannot just show up on the High Holidays and expect to pass the final. There is homework, preparation.
For this exam, our tradition has us get ready for the entire month of Elul. There is a lot to do. Throughout this month, Jews are getting ready. We organize guest lists for holiday meals, shop for the special foods that will be served. We buy clothes for the new year.
Here at the synagogue, the office goes into high gear, preparing and sending out High Holiday packets and tickets, printing the Yizkor book and organizing all of the programs and services that are taking place.
As stressful as all this can be, there is an additional preparation that is far more difficult. We call it teshuvah. Teshuva, which literally means “returning,” is the process of working on our flaws, repenting for our sins, and fixing our relationships with other people and with God.
We have a number of practices, beginning at the start of Elul, to help us get ready. We recite Psalm 27 during morning and evening services. We blow the shofar every morning. Starting tonight, we recite Selichot, penitential prayers that kick the intensity up a notch, kind of like cramming during the final week before the exam.
It is not only we who are getting ready. Our tradition teaches that God is also preparing to receive our teshuvah. God is eager to grant us atonement, to wipe away our sins on Yom Kippur — but only if we have prepared. A lot of us feel a sense of holiness and mystery that we do not experience at any other time of year. This season gives us a unique opportunity to be close to God.
This idea, this opportunity really, to spend time every year taking stock of our lives, reviewing our priorities, examining our actions and working on our relationships, is truly one of Judaism’s most important. It acknowledges that we are all imperfect. We all make mistakes. And, we can all improve. So we force ourselves, or perhaps, allow ourselves, to spend time every year turning our lives around.
For such an important idea, it is strange that teshuvah is never explicitly mentioned in the Torah, and certainly not in connection with the High Holidays. Atonement for sin is dealt in the context of Yom Kippur. But through sacrifices and rituals performed exclusively by the High Priest in the Tabernacle, and later the Temple. Nowhere in the entire Tanakh is Rosh Hashanah connected to teshuvah or atonement. Or is it?
Every year, we read parashat Nitzavim on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah. This year, as in most years, it is combined with the following portion, Vayelekh. Moses assembles the entire nation together to reaffirm our covenant with God. He is deliberate in mentioning everyone: leaders, men, women, children, strangers, everyone “from woodchopper to water drawer.”
And us too. Moses specifies “I make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with those who are standing here with us this day before the Lord our God and with those who are not with us here this day.”
He goes on to describe what will happen when someone breaks the covenant. We will be kicked out of land, which will be laid desolate. Future generations will look at the destroyed land and know that it was because previous generations were unfaithful to God and the covenant. All of that leads up to the beginning of chapter 30.
The Sefat Emet, the leader of the Gerrer Chasidim in the second half of the nineteenth century, calls this ten-verse paragraph Parashat teshuvah, the section of return. Finding itself scattered and dispersed across the world in exile, Israel will experience an awakening. V’hasheivota el-levavecha. Literally – “you will return to your heart.”
V’hasheivota is from the same root as Teshuvah – return.
Moses describes a process, or a journey, in which Israel remembers the covenant and returns to God. God, meanwhile who has been waiting for Israel in love, welcomes them and brings them back, restoring them to the land. This paragraph includes the root lashuv, to return, 7 times. Seven being a highly significant number in our tradition. The Sefat Emet sees this section as one of reassurance. Even when it seems that everything has fallen apart, the Torah assures us that we will eventually do Teshuvah. And when we do, God will be waiting.
While Moses describes this journey of exile and return in national, collective terms, it pertains to each of us, individually. And so it is not a coincidence that we read this parashah every year on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, says the Sefat Emet. There is hope for all of us, even though the test is in one week.
There is a further connection that I would like to illustrate. This one is between Parshat Nitzavim and Psalm 27, which we have been reciting for the past three weeks in preparation for the HH. It is a linguistic connection.
Perhaps the key line, and the reason that we recite it to prepare for the High Holidays, comes in verse 4.
Achat sha’alti me’et adonai, otah avakesh: shivti b’veit adonai kol y’mei chayai, lachasot b’noam adonai ul’vaker b’heichalo. “One thing I ask from the Lord, only that do I seek: to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to frequent His temple.”
Shivti, meaning “to dwell.”
Shivti sounds and looks a lot like lashuv. But in fact, it is a different root entirely. It comes from the root yashav, or lashevet, which means “to sit” or “to dwell.” With its complicated rules of conjugation, it can often be difficult to tell these two Hebrew words apart.
In this Psalm, the poet describes being harrassed by enemies, abandoned by his mother and father. God’s face is hidden. The one thing that he begs for is to dwell in God’s house. But maybe what he wants is not lashevet, to dwell, but lashuv, to return to God’s house.
We are born into an imperfect world. A world in which there are forces, human and otherwise, arrayed against us. It is a constant struggle to overcome those forces, to strive to reach the next level. We strive for a perfection that will never come. We long for the completion of the journey marked by dwelling in the house of God, beholding the Divine all the days of our lives. We want to literally sit, lashevet, in God’s Presence.
On the other hand, maybe we have had glimpses of perfection. We have experienced moments when we felt complete, when we experienced God’s Presence. Times when we sat with God. And so it is to return, lashuv, to that wholeness that we seek. To return to the House of God.
This may sound kind of abstract. In more mundane terms, we sent out the High Holiday tickets a couple of weeks ago to all of our members and guests. You hopefully have received yours. These tickets assure each of us that we have a makom, a place to sit. Many of us seek out the same makom, the same seat every year. Some may like to mix it up, and experience the High Holidays from a different perspective.
This is a serious question: every year, when you come to shul for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, do you sit in your makom or do you return to your makom?
What is the difference? Sitting is passive. We just have to show up. When services are over, we leave. Returning is active. We have to plan for it. This implies a journey, and requires hard work.
It is not enough to show up with our tickets and sit down. We should be striving to return. The bad news is that the month of Elul is three fourths done. The good news is that we still have one week left to cram. In fact, there is a Chasidic teaching that this last Shabbat can count for the entire previous year. So let’s make it count, so that when we come to shul next week to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, we will be returning to our makom
Rebyehoshua 