The changes in Jewish life over the past 20 years have been astounding. Rosh Hashanah is a good time to look back.
When I was growing up, my favorite Rosh Hashanah ritual was the purchase of a new suit. Despite the threat of Indian summer heat, year after year I’d be in shul, sweltering in wool, dripping with sweat and pride, duped by seasonal change again. I live in laid-back Los Angeles now, where new clothing merely means a black-cotton T-shirt. But even Eastern arbiters of tradition — like my mother — are more willing today to dress for comfort and introspection in synagogue, rather than to impress.
Still, as the years go by, I recognize the hard work involved in personal transformation, the arduous work of tshuvah. These days of awe inspire ongoing spiritual adjustments, and I find my longing for a new suit increases. Many of my best intentions fail me. Change is harder than I once thought. That’s why fashion is so appealing. If I can’t easily change my habits, drives, ambitions and motivations, at least I can change my hemline. Buy new and I’ll become new, the prospects of a suit purchase promised. Oh, how perfect I could be if only my suit was right.
When I was growing up, we all believed in sin. I loved my sins and nursed them down to the very last sound of the shofar. I relished the idea that during the High Holy Days I was undergoing a spiritual accounting, kind of like a moral tax return. (I had neither experience nor money in those days.) The whole process of evaluating, exaggerating and atoning for them was thrilling.
How grave and important atonement seemed, like entering a Carson McCullers’s novel, and having Atticus Finch to answer to.
Four times that year I had cursed my parents under my breath.
Three times I had left my mother to wash the dishes, claiming the next day a history or math test.
Two times I stayed out after curfew, kissing my boyfriend in the drive-in movie (not really a sin, I was convinced, because God appreciated true love). How earnestly I worked to wipe the slate clean.
Today of course, sin is gone. We soft-pedal the guilt, calling it, instead, “missing the mark.” Missing the mark is like being bad at archery; there’s always another quiver for your bow.
Still, I can’t find the benefit in this semantic marshmallowing. My behavior is still pretty awful. I still find making amends to God easier than saying “I’m sorry” to a friend. Sin may be out of most of the liturgy, but most everyone I know still looks forward to singing the “Al Cheyt,” the dramatic litany of transgressions, both of commission and omission which are the hallmark of the High Holy Day service. We are a kinder, gentler people these days, less prone to self-flagellation, but (spoken here as the mother of a young adult) a good old-fashioned communal guilt-trip sometimes does the trick.
The big change in Rosh Hashanah comes from the altered metaphors by which we imagine was once Judgment Day. Gone are the Michelangelo-inspired old white men with beards, wielding a quill pen over a leather-bound Book of Life. Gone is the symbolic trial, with our soul in peril.
When I was a child, I knew for sure that judgment was being passed. This was the real thing, the final exam. Worse, my last name started with an A. In an alphabetical docket, I’d be at the top of the list. Though my sins of omission and commission hadn’t been egregious on any rational scale, God’s focus group of comparison would be small by the time God got to me. Couldn’t God return after hearing from, say, the saucy Oringer sisters or my daredevil buddy Maxine?
None of that peril now. Today the image of our spiritual court is a kind of cyber-traffic school: Fill out the form and judge yourself. Our prayerbooks go to great lengths to stress that the harsh decree of Yom Kippur can always be overturned by tshuvah and by my own decision — however last minute — to be different and change my ways. The sage of the moment, widely quoted in spiritual circles, is the early late 19th century Sefat Emet, the Chassidic Rabbi Yehuda Leib Alter of Warsaw, whose writings have been translated by Rabbi Arthur Green. “The Book of Life is in you!” Green quotes the sage. “Your task is to keep those inner tablets free.” But if every verdict is within me, aren’t I alone?
Finally comes the most dramatic change in Jewish life, from skepticism to belief. When I was growing up, there was always room in the synagogue for the doubter, the cynic or agnostic, the one who didn’t feel quite at home in the rituals, but who participated anyway, just in case. Often, that doubter was me. Today in the Rosh Hashanah of Joseph Lieberman, more Jews than ever are confessing to a truer faith, and to a desire for belonging. All well and good. But the doubter and the cynic, like the new suit of clothes and a healthy appreciation of sin, is a part of our tradition. They keep us earnest, hopeful and free.