A Jewish Calendar Painted in Red

We are just days away from the Jewish New Year, a time when many Jews who have sat out Judaism in its communal form for most of the year choose to show up at synagogue, to be in community.  Many, if not most, will show up again, a bit more than a week later for Yom Kippur, a day of fasting and communal pleading for inclusion in the Book of Life for another year.

These holidays are ones for which we are afforded multiple opportunities for spiritual preparation.  My email inbox has been flooded for weeks with reflections on various values related to the holidays, as interpreted by the rabbis of my congregation, and others.  There are manifold online and in-person chances to probe and to prepare for these upcoming Days of Awe.  We can choose to do a deep spiritual cleaning, as it were, or something less intense, saving ourselves for the shared experience of praying with others for another chance, for forgiveness.

Sandwiched right between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur this year is the blood-stained horror that is October 7th, a day whose trauma may linger for years, for generations, and perhaps forever.  That day approaches with 101 of 240 hostages taken from Israel still in Gaza, held in horrific conditions, many presumed dead, but some hopefully still alive.

What does it mean this year to celebrate a new year and mere days later, collide with a day that has no end for too many, a day that stopped time, that turned the word ‘celebrate’ into a torment for so many?  What does it mean to cross the calendar anniversary of a day that transformed and disfigured the joy of the NOVA festival attendees and the kibbutz families celebrating Simchat Torah into something excruciating, something so gruesome as to defy capturing in mere words?

How does a single human being, joined in prayer with others, acknowledge the joy of reaching yet another new year in the shadow of so much suffering and pain?  What do words of gratitude to God mean in this moment?  How is gratitude not displaced by rage, by despair, by accusation?  What answer can we expect, or even imagine, from a God that either bore witness to the horrors of October 7th and stood mute, or a God that turned God’s face aside, covering God’s eyes,  forcing only humans to see what can never be unseen?

The answer to these questions cannot, I think, be found in some learned treatise, though that is what we Jews turn to.  We seek answers to the hardest questions, and to the great credit of our tradition, the wisest of those answers don’t come easily.  And some questions remain without answer, open like the wounds for which they seek healing.

And yet.  We wrestle. We weep. We rage. We wonder. We despair. We hope. We imagine. We contemplate. We dream. We close our eyes and try to open our hearts. We breathe. We yearn. It is, I think, when we stop feeling any of these things, that we die.

I am not sure how I will approach the Days of Awe this year, but if the past is any guide, it will be with a mix of skepticism, disbelief, anger, sadness, hopefulness, and exhaustion, in no particular order.  I will recite prayers in which I only sometimes believe.  I will read words of gratitude to a God I’m not sure exists.  I will feel the hole of the missing and the mourned grow wider and deeper, because I am a link in that same chain, a child born of death, a child of a Holocaust survivor, whose very existence is owed to the worst calamity to befall the Jewish people.  Until October 7th.