Re-Covenanting with Ourselves: A Rosh Hashanah Tradition

Rev. Amy Russell - 2008-10-05

The Hebrew word “tshoovah” means repentence but it also means, returning home or reuniting with God. The Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are about returning to ourselves, going back to the source of what made us and re-becoming who we want to be.

Rosh Hashanah was celebrated starting on September 29th this year and Yom Kippur is celebrated ten days later, on October 9th. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, followed by Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The holy days between are called the “Days of Awe” in which the people are to examine themselves, how they have failed themselves and others and undergo a process of inner change or transformation. On Yom Kippur, some Jews pray ceaselessly all day for forgiveness for these failings that they have uncovered. There is an emphasis on using this occasion as a religious person for taking stock of your life and re-dedicating yourself to those things which you see as good in your life. You try to understand all the habits to which you have become accustomed, and you decide to break those habits which are weighing you down or have led your life into the wrong direction. In other words, you make new covenants with yourself, in fact, New Year’s Resolutions that will shape your life in the days to come. You are making new commitments with yourself, and releasing yourself from others.

Harold Kushner, the rabbi who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People, also writes about the elements of guilt and forgiveness in his book, How Good Do We Have to Be?. As an inevitable part of this process of re-examination that occurs during these holidays, people may begin to feel weighed down by the guilt associated with not being perfect. He writes, “The liturgy will speak repeatedly of our failings, our neglect of our duties, our hard-heartedness toward others. The people in synagogue have not come to be told that they have done things that were wrong. They know that all too well. They have come to be assured that their misdeeds have not separated them from the love of God… There seems to be something in the human soul that causes us to think less of ourselves every time we do something wrong.”

He describes our guilty feelings perhaps being the result of parents who expected too much, or of teachers who only focused on our mistakes, instead of our successes. But this feeling of not being good enough leads us to set unrealistically high expectations for ourselves and for people around us.

Many of us grew up in religions where we felt that the message of guilt was overly emphasized. I can remember going to my minister as a teenager puzzled at the words of a standard Episcopalian prayer. It said, “We are not worthy, O Lord, to gather the crumbs from under your table.” I remember saying to my minister, “If God made us, why are we not worthy? Wouldn’t God make a worthy creature?” I don’t remember the answer, but obviously the answer didn’t keep me in that church.

As a Buddhist, the message I received was not one of guilt but of responsibility. That is a very different message. Your “karma” is the result of all the causes you made in your life, both in this life and previous ones. So Buddhism tells us if you’ve made causes to be unhappy, then you will experience unhappiness. That doesn’t mean you have to feel “guilt” about that. Taking responsibility for your life simply means starting to take actions that will produce the kind of life that you want, not feeling guilty because it hasn’t happened yet.

The Broadway play, “J.B” written by Archibald MacLeish is based on the story of Job, from the O.T., but shows a modern interpretation. In the play, a Christian, a Marxist, and a psychiatrist approach J.B., the play’s main character who has lost everything of meaning in his life and try to absolve him of his guilt over allowing this to happen. The Christian says, “It’s not your fault. You are the victim of original sin.” This is a kind of different slant on original sin than most of us are used to.

Then the Marxist says to J.B., “It’s not your fault. You are the victim of economic determinism.” This is sort of the standard liberal line.

Then the psychiatrist says, “It’s not your fault. You are the victim of unconscious drives you can’t control.” This is the Freudian approach.

J.B. does not see the merit in any of these approaches to his situation. He takes a much more humanist point of view. He says, “No, I want to be responsible. I want it to be my fault. Because that’s what it means to be a human being. It means to say: ‘I have the power to choose the moral content of my life.’”

Harold Kushner would agree with this message of MacLeish’s. He says that this is what makes humans stand apart from the animal world.

The message of the Bible, Kushner says, has been misunderstood by many scholars, rabbis, and priests. He wants to re-interpret the story of Adam and Eve which so much of Western religion has interpreted as the story of man’s choosing sin or disobedience from God, and therefore dooming man to be forever guilty of wrongdoing and sin.

Kushner sees the story of the Garden of Paradise as a story about the first human beings realizing their differences from the world of the animal kingdom around them. It is a story about the complexity of human nature in coming to understand that we have moral decisions to make, not just decisions for survival. The story tells of Adam and Eve being presented with choices and choosing the Tree of Knowledge, because that is the way we wanted to live, with knowledge of what’s right and wrong, with knowledge that each decision we make has consequences for others. This story is not a story about the inevitable disobedience of humanity but of the complexity of the life we are presented with as human beings.
Rabbi Kushner reminds us that the message of religion tries to set standards for people, not to make them feel guilty, but to encourage them to reach for higher standards. He says that these religious messages are “words of encouragement, not condemnation”.
Being imperfect in an imperfect world but also in a world in which we have created tremendously complicated life situations becomes more and more a heavy burden to those who spend time examining their lives

The holiday of Rosh Hashanah was traditionally a time when Jews who had been living in exile, for instance in Babylon or in Egypt, who had been forced into declaring their allegiance to a foreign god, were allowed by the priests to re-commit themselves to their own God. That is when this time of re-covenanting began. It became a time to examine one’s commitments in life and decide to which of these commitments one truly wanted to dedicate oneself.

The high holy day of Yom Kippur which is about ten days later, is the time when the Angel of Life was supposed to write into the Book of Life all those things that we had done that we had not re-examined, those sins that we had not repented. That was the importance of the time of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – the time to re-think how we have lived our lives up to that point and change it to become the intentional life that we should be leading.

When we take time to sit down and think about the commitments we have made in our lives, and the difficulty we have with living up to those commitments, it seems almost impossible to be able to live that kind of life we’d like to lead.

We make commitments to our children – we’ll be there when they need us, we’ll listen to them, we’ll support them financially even try to buy them those extra special treats that they constantly ask for, we’ll be patient with them, etc. etc.

We make commitments to our spouses and partners – we’ll listen to their tales of woe at the end of the day, we’ll be unfailingly supportive even when they are driving us crazy, we’ll do the dishes when they’re too tired to, we’ll go visit their mother with them and be patient and loving to their mother, etc. etc.

We make commitments at our places of work – we’ll be on time, we’ll do our best to meet unrealistic deadlines, we’ll fly to Detroit on a moments’ notice to do that sales presentation that no one else wanted to make, and so on.

We make commitments to our extended families – we’ll come for Christmas, we’ll come to the family reunion, we’ll visit Aunt Betsy in the hospital when she has her heart operation.

And of course, we make commitments to our church. These are also very important commitments.

So at end of all these commitments – what happens? Do you think we are able to meet all those commitments? What happens when they conflict? What happens when Aunt Betsy’s operation ends up on the same day when your daughter is in a play at school, but you already promised that you’d be at both? What happens when you’re too tired to listen to your husband’s long tale of woe? What happens when we just aren’t perfect enough to be able to meet all these commitments? Does that make us bad people? Or unloveable people?

Kushner is telling us that we’re not sinful, bad people. We just lead complicated, difficult lives. We are not unloveable just because we aren’t perfect. The decisions we have to make on a daily basis – decisions about our work, our families, our relationships, our own desires and needs, as well as moral decisions about what we think is right and wrong – that these decisions are what make us human, what make us the full, rich, creative people we are. Kushner says, “I read the story of the garden not as an account of Eve imposing Sin and Death on her descendants, but as an account of her giving us humanity, with all of its pain and all of its richness”. …Eve has given her descendants more than existence; she has given us Life.”

But how do we know we are leading “good” lives? How can we know how to judge what is the “right” decision about our lives?

Okay, so as good Unitarian-Universalists we have thrown away a lot of the religious law that we may have been taught in our Sunday schools. We may have given up many of the traditions that we practiced growing up. We may have given up the “thou shalt not’s” and replaced them with the “I shall’s”. We may have given up the lighting of the menorrah and replaced it with the lighting of the chalice. But when it comes down to how we feel about who we are, what do we measure it against? How do we know that we’re playing in this difficult complicated game of life and we’re winning?

How do you change your self to become the kind of self that you want it to be? I think you start with that responsibility that we were talking about, that J.B. in the play talks about. Taking responsibility for what kind of life you lead. Not blaming your unhappiness on others. And then, I think, you picture in your mind who you want to be. You create in your mind an image of the kind of person you’d like to be and then you start to work on the kind of commitments you need to make in your life to become that person. That’s where the covenanting comes in. You make a covenant with yourself that you will do your best in certain commitments in your life and then you go for it.

In these covenants we make with ourselves, we begin to create the image of the life we want. We begin to mold the clay that becomes the shape we want our lives to take. When you watch a potter throwing a pot, you watch this formless lump begin to take the shape of a bowl. Then the potter moves his fingers slightly and the bowl has a lip. One more move and the bowl has a base. This is like what we do with our lives. But we can do it consciously, one slight move at a time, until we have it like we want it. Sometimes, what we do instead is to unconsciously put a stab here and a stab there that puts the clay off center. And then we have to pull our fingers together to smooth out the line of our lives again.

Some pots turn out with interesting imperfections in them. That’s what makes them unique and original. Likewise, we need to forgive ourselves for not being perfect. Because none of us are.

The shofar blows three times. That’s the ram’s horn that is traditionally blown during the Rosh Hashanah service to call all sinners together to review and repent of their sins. We come and we sit down. We review those commitments we’ve made in our life, the ones that will get us to that picture of ourselves that we’ve made, and the ones that probably aren’t going to get us there. And we begin to make choices in our lives about those commitments, those habits, those covenants. And we begin to re-commit to life, even knowing our imperfections. And we begin again. Because that’s what Rosh Hashanah is all about. Re-covenanting with ourselves and beginning again.