As a New Year Dawns

As a long year draws to a close and a new one begins, it strikes me that we do not allot our attention to both those facts with the same level of enthusiasm or interest. This Sunday, for example, is the last day of a year that brought us an exceptionally wide variety of things, some expected and others wholly unanticipated, some encouraging and others beyond calamitous. Then, the very next day, a new year will begin in which nothing at all has yet happened. It would be reasonable, therefore, to focus on the year we can discuss in detail and to wave away the year still to come as a blank slate, as a bag of possibilities, as a story as yet fully unwritten. Our tradition, in fact, encourages just that kind of ruminative introspection focused on our deeds and misdeeds in the past year. And yet, tradition or not, we mostly (at least in public) do precisely the opposite, preferring almost always to focus on wishing each other a happy new year replete with all God’s best blessings and taking some sort of strange pride in the degree to which we feel ready to move on from last year’s foibles, missteps, errors of judgment, ethical shortcomings, and instances of moral failure without suffering over them all unduly. In fact, now that I think of it, I don’t believe I have ever heard anyone greet another on Rosh Hashanah by congratulating him or her on having survived the year now concluded and leaving it at that!

A while ago, I noticed a similar phenomenon on the train. As riders of the Long Island Railroad will all know, the train’s cars usually feature seats facing forward (i.e., in the direction the train is moving) and seats facing backwards from which you can only see where the train has recently been. I myself always try to find a seat facing forward. Judging from what I see all around me, I think that that is what most people do: it somehow feels natural to face forward and see where the train is going. (That’s how the world looks when you’re out for a walk too, of course: you see where you’re going, not where you’ve been.) But life is just the opposite because, on the train of life, we can only clearly see where we’ve been and what we’ve done. What the future will yet bring us is at best a hope or a dream that none can see clearly. There can’t ever be any certainty about our vision of what yet may be: even prophets cannot know that God will not relent and specifically not make even a divinely-inspired prediction come to pass. (Jonah is surely the best known prophet to have had that specific rug pulled out from under him. But there were others too.) All that is true. But it still feels strange to sit in the backwards-facing seat, and that is so even despite the fact that where we’ve been is all we can see as we journey ahead on the aforementioned train of life.

Therefore, in addition to wishing you all a very good, happy, and healthy year to come, I would like to congratulate you all on surviving the year that now concludes. It has been, to say the very least, a roller coaster ride for Jewish Americans. This was the year of Pittsburgh and Poway. This was the year in which the House of Representatives proved unable, or at least unwilling, unequivocally to condemn anti-Semitism other than in the context of every conceivable other kind of prejudice or bigotry (including, as I’ve said several times from the bimah now, some so obscure that I hadn’t ever heard of them before). And this was the year in which we have had to deal not once or twice, but repeatedly, with elected members of the House of Representatives using well-worn anti-Semitic tropes to castigate American Jews for being firm supporters of the State of Israel who believe wholeheartedly and unambivalently in the democratic right of Israel’s people to elect their own leaders and then to be governed by them. And we have had also to endure members of the Congress openly questioning the loyalty or patriotism of Jewish Americans, a canard most of us felt certain had been laid to rest decades ago.

These are all events that I am happy to contemplate in the rear-view mirror even if I really do always prefer the forward-facing seats on the train. It has been a wild ride, this last year. But I face 5780 with courage born of confidence in our nation, in its national values, and in the innate fairness and reasonableness of its citizenry. As a new year dawns, I pray—and without the slightest trace of irony, cynicism, or ambivalence—that God bless America. And I pray also that God grant us all a happy, healthy, productive, and prosperous year. May it bring us all only good things! And may it be a year of peace for us all, both here, in all the lands of our dispersion, and in Israel itself.