Comments (0)Rosh Hashanah
Parshat Erev
September 18, 2009Rabbi Avram Israel Reisner
Special to the Jewish Times
“Spend one day a year getting a complete health exam
Or the next 364 wishing you had.”
“Treat your body like your life depends upon it …
It goes way beyond your average check-up,
And it’s only at Mount Sinai.”
The text is an ad for Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and its Executive Health Program. It appeared on page 5 of the New York Times Magazine of Sept. 6, 2009.
I don’t know for sure that it was drafted with Rosh Hashanah in mind, but I sure think so.
The check-up we engage in on Rosh Hashanah is not of body but of soul, not of our soma but of our spirit. It is consequently more complicated, because those are less easily accessible than even the deepest recesses of our person. Blood draws, X-rays, probes in every orifice yield for the physician of the body concrete results that can be charted and measured, tested and perused; but there is no physician of the soul and no agreed-upon assessment of its wounds and weaknesses.
So on Rosh Hashanah the assessments are idiosyncratic. We craft the instruments with which to probe our own beliefs and actions; the prayers, the sermons, the sounds of the shofar can only serve as guides and goads to help us do what we sorely need to do. For our life does indeed depend on it. Not our physical life but the texture of our social life; the peace of our mental life; the stability of our emotional life. We needn’t attend to it this day, but we’re certain to regret it if we do not.
Not our physical life? Does not the Netaneh Tokef prayer, which stands at the heart of the Musaf service, make precisely the claim that it is our physical life that is at stake? “Who shall live and who shall die?” Surely it does, and that is part of what lends it its unusual poignancy. For we know that life is not assured and is not predictable, and there are always those who will not see the end of the coming year. And we know, exquisitely, now, that there are those who will be enriched and those who will be impoverished in this coming year; and that there appears little rhyme or reason for those things to occur as they do. And we know that Rosh Hashanah is the Day of Judgment and as surely as we judge ourselves on this day, so forces greater than us might well be judging us, too.
Netaneh Tokef is composed as a proem, an introduction to the Kedushah; the Kedushah, which represents at every service of every day the possibility of closeness to God. When in our nation’s history have we attained that proximity to heaven? “It’s only at Mount Sinai.” And when in the course of our own lives? When we approach God in our prayers. When we mimic the angels in Kedushah. But we don’t take that moment as seriously as we should on any one of the 52 Tuesdays that the year brings, nor even on the Shabbatot and Chagim that march along. Maybe, maybe, we are awakened by the aura of the Days of Awe, the drama of the Day of Judgment. If everything is not subject to change in that moment of touching the divine, then we have not reached high enough; we have not gotten there; we have not been transformed.
“Another day,” the ad continues, “another breakthrough.” May that be our prayer for this Rosh Hashanah.
L’shanah Tovah Tikatevu v’techatemu.
Rabbi Avram Israel Reisner serves Chevrei Tzedek Congregation.