Rosh Hashanah 2017

In our tradition, Rosh Hashanah is revered not merely as the opening day of a new year, but as the anniversary of several different things.  First in that line, of course, would have to be the creation of the world! But Rabbi Eliezer, one of the talmudic greats, teaches that Rosh Hashanah was also the day on which Joseph was released from prison…and also the day both Sarah and Hannah, respectively the mothers of Isaac and the prophet Samuel, became pregnant after long years during which they were unable to conceive.  Together, the three of them—Joseph, Sarah, and Hannah—symbolize the struggle against forces that appear so mighty that it’s hard even to know where or how to confront them, yet all three found a way out—Joseph to freedom, and Sarah and Hannah to motherhood—through some combination of their will to find a way forward and God’s propensity to look with favor on the struggles of people bearing burdens not of their own making. 

That is a lesson we can all take to heart. Which of us doesn’t struggle against forces that appear so insurmountably arrayed against us that we can hardly imagine where, let alone how, to fight back. For some of us, these burdens appear to have to do with our innate natures, the parts of our personalities hard-wired into our DNA. For others of us, they feel related to events in the past that, absent the invention of time machines, cannot be altered at all, let alone tailored to suit some specific wish we may harbor that the past be different than it actually was. And for still others these burdens appear to be rooted in the circumstances of our lives as they have unrolled to date—details so tightly woven into the fabric of the families we have created or professions we have chosen to pursue that attempting even minor alterations, let alone massive adjustments, seems outside the realm of reasonable possibility.  We all feel that way, I think, about at least some parts of our lives, about some aspects of the men and women we have become.

The midrash teaches an alternate approach. Joseph lived in a world in which slaves were thrown into prison without the benefit of preliminary hearings, let alone actual jury trials, merely because their masters wished to see them incarcerated. Sarah and Hannah lived in a world in which there was only one way to become pregnant and therefore no alternate route forward if the traditional method didn’t seem to be working. All three put their faith in God, and particularly in God’s ability to alter the apparently unalterable and to effect change in the world where the possibility of meaningful change feels somewhere between unimaginable and impossible. And all three ended up where they needed to be: Joseph as Pharaoh’s trusted counsellor, and Sarah and Hannah as the happy mothers of children. All would have thought, at least in their darker moments, that their fates were sealed. But all would have been wrong!

And that is the thought I would like to offer to you all, and also to myself, as this new year dawns. With faith and trust in God, and with perseverance…all is possible, even travel down the least likely avenues of self-improvement. And Rabbi Eliezer teaches us that Rosh Hashanah is the specific day that the three poster children of that thought found redemption from their unhappy states and were thus made free to move forward into the new phases of their lives they so ardently desired.  May God grant us all that kind of trust in God and that kind of faith, and may God watch over us all as we move forward into a new year. May we all be freed from burdens we have grown so used bearing to that we hardly notice them…but which nonetheless hold us back and keep us from becoming the versions of ourselves we wish to become. Above all, may this be a year of peace for Israel and for our brethren of the House of Israel in all the lands of our dispersion. And may the coming year bring only success, prosperity, and contentment to us all.