Rosh Hashanah 5781

 King Sisyphus lives on in most people’s minds because of the punishment in Hell he was condemned endlessly to endure, but there’s also a back story worth considering. Sisyphus was king of Corinth (in his day called Ephyra), but he was not a very worthy regent. Stingy and dishonest, Homer features him incurring Zeus’s wrath particularly by inviting guests to his palace and then robbing and killing them. He also plotted to kill his own brother, which plot involved the seduction of his own niece. You get the picture. Not a nice guy! But the best part of the story, at least in my opinion, features Sisyphus in a hand-to-hand struggle with Death—personified in the myth as the god Thanatos—whom he actually vanquishes so completely that no one on earth can die for as long as Thanatos is under his control. For the Olympians, that is the last straw. And so we finally see Sisyphus sent by Zeus to Tartarus, the Greeks’ version of Hell, where he is condemned to spend all eternity rolling a huge bolder up a steep hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom just before he gets to the crest. Over and over. Forever. And not only never succeeding, but—in my opinion, far worse—knowing full well he won’t ever succeed. I’ll paste in a picture of Sisyphus and his rock from an ancient Greek urn to help you get the picture even more clearly.

And so King Sisyphus became famous as the patron saint of pointless endeavor, of interminable striving to achieve an unattainable goal, of unending, permanent frustration. I remember reading Albert Camus’ book, The Myth of Sisyphus, back in college—and finding the author’s suggestion that we are all Sisyphus as we spend the days of our lives trying, to speak in Camus’ own terms, trying to find a way around the absurdity that inheres in all human endeavor. I didn’t much like Camus’ book back then and I suspect I’d like it even less now. (I don’t think I’ve ever actually enjoyed anything of Camus’ that I’ve read, The Stranger and The Plague most definitely included.) But there is something about Sisyphus and his horrible fate that even to this day frames the way I think about the High Holidays and particularly Rosh Hashanah.

It would be easy to describe the work of the holiday season as essentially Sisyphean in nature. We live out our lives against the annual return of these penitential Days of Awe when we are bidden to seek God’s forgiveness for our moral missteps and ethical errors. We do our best, obviously. Yet we never get it quite right, never behave quite as we ourselves think decent and right. As a result, there’s something of Sisyphus’s fate in the way we approach the holiday season and its endless prayers for forgiveness from sin but without ever quite finding the inner strength to obviate the necessary to seek God’s mercy at all by comporting ourselves well in the first place. To speak in Sisyphean terms, we push and we push our personal boulders up to the top of our personal hills…but then Elul comes around the following year and we’re suddenly back at the bottom of the hill. With the boulder. I follow the logic in that line of thinking. But it’s never seemed that way to me.

Life is full of uncompleted and uncompletable tasks. We read the Torah in our synagogues according to an annual lectionary cycle that never ends: when we get to the end of Deuteronomy, we simple roll the scroll back to Genesis and start reading again. The liturgy we recite daily alters slightly as we make our way through the year, but not too dramatically or even all that noticeably; we say our prayers morning after morning and wrap up at the end of the book, but then we when we return to synagogue the morning after that and open the book to the same opening set of benedictions that opened the service the previous day. I remember someone once telling me that cleaning up the house before your kids move out is like shoveling the driveway while it’s still snowing: a pointless undertaking you’re going have to redo anyway and might as well not bother with until then anyway. But this isn’t like that at all, not really. Eventually, it does stop snowing. Eventually, your kids really do strike out on their own. But no matter how much energy you expend studying Torah, you don’t ever get to the end. You’re never done. You learn more and more, but all you really learn—presuming your own intellectual integrity—is how much more you have to learn and how very little you’ve actually accomplished. For some reason, though, that aspect of Torah study inspires me more than it depresses me. And so it is with these holidays now almost upon us. It would be simple to find it frustrating, bordering on pointless, to recite this year the same prayers for forgiveness and divine clemency we’ve recited for all the years of our lives, none of us having successfully obviated the need to bother with all that praying by actually living lives free of transgression, misstep, or sin.

I know how Sisyphus must have felt. And yet…I can’t quite bring myself to consider the High Holiday season as the Jewish version of Tartarus. Every time I open the Torah, even after all these years, I find new insights, new lessons I hadn’t noticed before, new puzzles I hadn’t noticed before and find myself eager to solve. Daily prayer makes me feel vigorous and refreshed, not bored or cynical. And coming to shul on Rosh Hashanah to begin the whole penitential season again does not make me feel failed or doomed, but alive with the possibility of growth, of insight, and of transformation. In other words, to describe our annual festivals as Sisyphean because we’re still pushing the same boulder up the same hill is to miss a crucial point here: that the specific experience of pushing our specific Jewish boulder up our specific Jewish hill is itself far more satisfying than frustrating. (To say the same thing in other words, these holidays are far more process- than goal-oriented.) For me personally, and I suspect for many others, the holiday season reminds us of our potential for growth, even late in life, as it invites us to contemplate the possibility of growing into a finer iteration of ourselves no matter how many holiday seasons we’ve all lived through.

No one would tell an athlete that it’s pointless to run around the same track day after day because the track will still be there the next day. Indeed, the point of exercise is not that the track be ran around or that the weights be lifted, but that the person running the laps or lifting the weights become stronger and healthier through the process. And that too is how I think of our holidays: as an opportunity to become morally and spiritually stronger through the set of ancient rituals about to be undertaken by Jewish people across the world, not as an endless series of tasks that never get done despite our best efforts.

So, the short answer is that, no, I don’t find our holiday labors Sisyphean, stultifying, or absurd. Just the opposite, actually: as a human being ever eager to grow intellectually, morally, spiritually, and ethically, I welcome the chance to push my boulder up to the top of the peak once again fully aware that the point is not that the boulder be moved through my efforts, but that I myself be moved…to a new place, to a new set of personal goals, to a new set of possibilities. Sisyphus lives on as the symbol of tedium; in my life, the High Holiday season lives on, year after year, as the embodiment of the possibility of growth. And I don’t find that tedious at all. Nor should anyone!