Blasting Our Way Out of Time

Rosh Hashanah Morning Sermon

Temple B’nai Tikvah, Calgary, Alberta 2016/5777

For many centuries, we Jews have ushered in the New Year on Rosh Hashanah with the blowing of a horn. The shofar. [Show shofar]. And as you know, we Canadians, along with people in other countries, usher in the January first New Year with the blowing of horns as well. [Show party horn.]

I could end my sermon here, but don’t worry, I won’t.

Both are odd customs, if you think about it. The New Year begins, and we start blowing. And in the case of Judaism, we blow for ten days. Why do we do this? What do horns have to do with the New Year?

As for New Year’s Eve, historians believe that the custom of blowing horns dates back to ancient and medieval superstitions teaching that loud noises scare away evil spirits.

But why do we sound the shofar? Well, what the historians said about horn-sounds scaring off the evil spirits may have had some influence over Rosh Hashanah customs, too. But the rabbis identified at least ten more reasons for blowing the shofar on the Jewish New Year. Now don’t worry, I won’t list them all, but I do want to highlight a few.

For starters, the rabbis said that the shofar reminds us of the day when God became Ruler of the World – way back a long time ago. The very first day of creation.

The rabbis also said that the shofar reminds us of several other events in the Jewish past, such as the revelation of Torah at Mt. Sinai and the destruction of the Temples, each of which occurred with shofar accompaniment.

Also, the call of the shofar also marks the passage from one time period to another. These days, when high-school students hear the beep over the loudspeaker, they know it’s time to go to the next class; when traders hear the bell, they know that the market has just closed, and when we Jews hear the shofar, we know that the new year has begun, and that it’s time to buckle down and get to work on our teshuvah – our repentance.

And just as the shofar reminds us of both the past and our transition out of the past, the rabbis said that it also gives us an acoustic taste – a sound bite – of what’s going to happen in the future when the Messiah comes and rebuilds the Temple. When the Messiah comes and the Temple is rebuilt, our tradition suggests, then too we’ll hear the blasts of the shofar.

Creation and other huge events in the Jewish past; the passage of time from that which has already happened to that which is about to happen; and a preview of the Messiah. As I review these reasons for tooting our Jewish horns at this time of year, it occurs to me that they all really come down to one fundamental point. Our tradition insists that we hear the sound of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah (and on Yom Kippur) to pull us out of the present and to see ourselves not in the here and now so much as in the vast span of historical time. In Judaism, the sound of the horn invites us to look to the past – centuries, millennia back – to the very first moments of creation…and to the time when our people stood at a mountain in the wilderness and received the Torah…and to the moments of utter destruction that our ancestors faced in the ancient land of Israel when the first and second Temples were destroyed. It also invites us to look ahead to a better time – to the messianic world, a time of kindness and compassion and joy and light. In other words, the sound of the shofar is supposed to open a window into the past, and also allow us to glimpse the world of our dreams of the future. Today, the shofar calls us out of the now, and into eternity

When we hear the blast of that shofar, we might think that we’re in the present, but if we do it right, we’re elsewhere. And more important, we’re not only elsewhere – in a different place – but we’re also else when, in a different time. When we hear that blast, we’re in Eden, and at Sinai, and in Jerusalem mourning the destruction. And we’re also in the glorious future that will happen when things become right once again. And it all happens with one blast of a shofar.

This, my friends, is far more than mere symbolism. We do exist in more than the present. In fact, we can’t help it – our present existence is nothing but a meeting place of past and future. Eastern religions call upon their adherents to live solely in the present. And, North American life, I’m sure you’ll agree, often teaches us to live just in the here and now, as well. Should you be worried about your health in the future, and be grateful for the God-given gift of your miraculous body? Or, should you just go ahead and live in the moment and eat that deep-fried Twinkie, instead? YOLO, we say, you only live once. Forget past and future – just live for the now. You’ve heard the saying, “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift; that’s why they call it the present.” Could you get any more North American than that?

Judaism says “No!” This kind of fluff – YOLO and “live in the present” and all the rest – is no more than mere hedonism. To Judaism, the present hardly exists. In our religion, the present is nothing but the very narrow, infinitesimally thin line separating past from future.

Did you know that, technically, Hebrew has no present tense? There’s a past, and a future, but in order to speak in the present, Hebrew has to resort to nouns – instead of saying “I am writing,” for example, we say “I am a writer.” And although there are ways to say, “I was” and “I will be,” there’s no way to say “I am” in Hebrew. In the Jewish world-view, the present is so infinitesimally brief as to be all-but-nonexistent. It is simply a line that we can’t help but straddle, with one foot in the past, and the other in the future.

You live that reality every moment. You are, for example, very much your past. Think about it: Each of you (biologically speaking) has two parents, and you have four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and 32 great-great-great grandparents. What that means is that 150 years ago, or so, there were 32 people in the world, many of whom may not have known one-another, who would all play a part in creating you. In fact, there were more than 32 people who played a part in creating you, because many of your ancestors met their partners through a yenta somewhere, so the yentas also played a part in your being here. And many of your ancestors moved to the towns where they met their spouses because someone gave them or their relatives a job opportunity. And those “someones” also get a share of the credit for creating you. Other ancestors may have met at a social club or a political rally, or while visiting distant relatives. And this list grows exponentially. If you think about it, there were probably thousands of people a century and a half ago who knowingly or unknowingly had a hand in creating you.

And that’s only in the past five generations. The math here quickly becomes astounding. If you go back ten generations, you’ll find that, on a single level of your family tree, there were 1,024 people whose destinies would one day converge…in you. And ten generations before that, there were 1,048,576 of them! I’ll say that again: 1,048,576 people. Imagine if they all could gather together one day and surprise you – spontaneously – with a nice greeting or a song or a dance. It would be the flash-mob of a lifetime!

But in a certain sense, each of us is that flash mob – we are each the fantastic, unpredictable, awesome result of what happens when millions of people gather together, with each playing their own role in the grand project called You.

And that’s just the biological part of it! There are forces from the past that act upon you in other ways, too. How did you end up here?

Maybe your ancestors were among the millions who fled antisemitism in Russia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, opting instead for the golden possibilities they hoped to realize here in Canada.

Or maybe you came from Eastern Europe a century later, as an immigrant from the former Soviet Union. Or maybe you’re from a place such as Argentina, whose Jews came here in search of the security and safety that Canada could provide. Or perhaps you’re a Jew-by-Choice, who became part of our people in the context of a host of social, religious and political forces, many of which hardly existed a century ago. Thank God you’re here. Or maybe you’re the non-Jewish spouse or partner of a Jew, whose way here was paved not only by the love and commitment you and your partner share, but also by other awesome and until recently unthinkable forces of history that allowed Jews and non-Jews to marry. Thank God you’re here, too…and thank God you were able to get that Jewish partner of yours to come along with you today!

The forces that brought you here are massive ones, and even those are only the ones that got you to this country or into our religious tradition. What brought you to Alberta? Jews started coming here in the late 1800s as fur traders and merchants. Fleeing persecution, they were drawn this way by offers of homestead land and the support of Jewish immigrant aid societies eager to help them out. By 1891 there were almost 800 Jewish living in the Prairie Provinces, and within 20 years there were almost 1500 living in Alberta alone. Early immigrants worked as farmers and merchants and in other small businesses, and since then the immigration has continued, even at times when Jews faced social exclusion here. The pace of immigration picked up in the 1930s with the rise of Nazism in Europe, especially since by then the growing Jewish community here was able to provide homes for their friends and family fleeing persecution and seeking safety. Some Jews came here for economic opportunity, others to rejoin family members from abroad, and still others simply because they had nowhere else to go. Which were the forces that brought you to this part of the world?

And let’s go even further. What brought you here to this synagogue today? Many of you came because a friend once invited you to B’nai Tikvah and you liked what you found. Or maybe you ended up here because you were looking for a Reform Jewish community in Calgary. Or maybe you came to B’nai Tikvah because your family goes here, or because it was the synagogue that most resembled the one in which you grew up. Or maybe you come simply because it’s the nearest synagogue to your home – the local shul – or because you like the singing, or because of the dashing new rabbi that you heard has just gotten to town.

Whatever it was that brought you, my friends, the fact that you are here – the mere reality of your presence here and the fact that you are sitting in this room, in Calgary, Alberta, in the nation of Canada right now – is the result of a great and epic drama that has thundered through the centuries and put you right in the chair where you sit at this moment. With all of us. Sharing this instant in time. Millions of people have participated in the drama, and you’ve only had the opportunity to meet a few of them in person.

And it doesn’t stop here. No, not at all. In fact, if we look ahead, we’ll see the world of our children and grandchildren. What role will we play in building that world? If we look way ahead…say, 23 generations from now, we can imagine a Jewish child coming into the world who will grow up and someday look back into her past: two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents…. She’ll realize that back in the early 21st century there were more than eight million people who would one day become her ancestors. Eight million of them! Today, in 2016 – 5777 – there are fewer than a half million Jews in all of Canada. All of us, therefore, directly or indirectly, are going to have a role in creating that child. (What do you think we should name her?)

We spend our lives worrying about important things – How will our kids turn out? What will our retirement will be like? What will our lasting legacy will be. Yes, to us, our lives seem big. But if you step back for a moment, you’ll see that they’re even bigger.

The call of the shofar, then – the sound reminding us that our lives are only one important scene in a vast and timeless drama, and that the present moment is nothing but the thundering meeting point of past and future – this is a call that we need to hear, and it’s a call that demands our response. The shofar calls upon us to live in both past and future.

Living in both the past and the future is far more than just an intellectual exercise. It means looking at your story – your big story, your multigenerational story, the story of the many forces that brought you to where you are in your life now – and asking what that story means for your future. Many of your ancestors came here as refugees; what does that reality demand of you today? More fundamentally, you’re Jewish; how is the epic story of your past – replete with both suffering and majestic glory – going to influence your life today. And, more specifically, you’re part of a congregation that began as a little group of Reform Jews meeting in Ron and Judy Bing’s basement – a group committed to creating a Reform Jewish presence here in Calgary. What does being part of that story mean to you, and what part are you going to play in the ongoing and developing history of this community?

You only live your life fully as a Jew when you let that past speak to the kind of future you’re going to have. As children of refugees, it is our Jewish – not to mention our human – obligation to work on behalf of displaced people everywhere, and these days there are a lot of them. As children of Israel, it is our job to work on behalf of the people and state of Israel, and to make real the great values of our heritage in every way we can. And as members of this 37-year-old congregational community, it’s our job to ensure its continued strength and wellbeing however possible.

Look at your epic story. Listen to its call. What does it teach you? Where is it leading you? What is it calling you to do? Don’t ignore it; instead, let it push you to fulfill your great destiny as a Jew and as a human being.

You see, to the extent that we are stuck in the present, we are mortal, limited, small. But to the extent that we transcend the present, our lives and our actions become infinite.

The blast of the shofar, then, calls us to eternity – to Eden, to Sinai, to Calgary at its greatest, and to a fantastic world in the future. We hear it every year – Tekiah! – and as we do, millions beckon us from both past and future. We owe it to them to respond to that call, and to make this New Year – 5777 – the best one ever for us and for the fragile world that God has given us.

Shanah Tovah.