Rosh Hashanah and the Moral Imagination
SCHULWEIS, HAROLD
ROSH HASHANAH AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION HAROLD SCHULWEIS There is something puzzling about the traditional choice of Biblical readings for Rosh Hashanah. If you and I were assigned the task of...
...Nor is it a cross, an intersection of verticle and horizontal lines that took place and must now only be believed in order to save...
...For Judaism, God reveals Himself not in cosmic time but in historical time...
...For Judaism, history is a serious affair...
...ROSH HASHANAH AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION HAROLD SCHULWEIS There is something puzzling about the traditional choice of Biblical readings for Rosh Hashanah...
...They are challenged to transform events, not to imitate nature...
...I do not even intend to accuse the accusers...
...If the world is like a circle, tomorrow like yesterday, and yesterday like the day after, there are no surprises...
...Tomorrow's catastrophe has already occurred...
...Could it be that their abhorrence of the pagan counsel to imitate nature led them to draw attention away from the story of creation...
...What is required is not a pious imagination, which looks back to a mythic, primordial moment, but a moral imagination, which looks forward to a moment yet to be accomplished...
...The world is not already lived, requiring only the mystique of memory to recapitulate...
...Could it be that the deletion of the cosmic creation was deliberate in order to instruct us, the children of Abraham and Sarah, to pay attention to the newness of the world and to our capacity to effect real changes in the world and in ourselves through our families and through our people...
...For Judaism, the world is hot a wheel, a rotation of re-births...
...One has only to accept fate with love...
...There is something to be done with that imperfection that never was done before...
...Why the rabbinic deflection away from the story of divine creation...
...Could it be that rabbinic wisdom sought to disentangle Judaism from pagan traditions by riveting our attention to the struggles of Abraham with sibling claims and with contradictory voices from heaven...
...Accordingly, it is not the metaphysics of creation but the ethics of creativity that are the central concern of Rosh Hasha-nah...
...We assume that the omission of the creation story is designed...
...For Judaism, there is something new under the sun...
...they were elaborated in India and Greece as well...
...That which was once, and only once, is not lost...
...The created universe and everything within it are incomplete, unfinished...
...The world is not a circle, a serpent holding a tail in its mouth...
...Every dimension of time—past, present and future—is real...
...Nietzsche) Against all of this, the rabbinic tradition drew attention to the reality of historic time...
...To this day, the Biblical readings for the two days of Rosh Hashanah have nothing to do with the cosmic events of creation...
...Perhaps we can find some clues to this curious puzzle by examining how the other religions of antiquity celebrated their new year...
...It has a beginning and an end...
...One has but to accept the circle without breaks or ruptures and to cling to its constant repetition...
...Sacred time does not swallow up profane time...
...It is not the case that what was will be, or that what will be already was...
...I intend to fight no more against the ugly...
...We would, I suspect, first consider the major theme of the holy days: the creation of the universe and of the first human beings, Adam and Eve...
...For Judaism, real time is irreversible...
...Only in Judaism is the idea of cyclical time broken...
...If you and I were assigned the task of selecting texts from the whole of the Bible appropriate for the two days of the New Year, how would we choose...
...Eliade tells us that this notion of the reversibility of time and the eternal return of sacred time are common to archaic religions...
...Further on in the Talmudic discussion (Megillah 31a) the Rabbis cite an alternative reading: "And the Lord remembered Sarah" (Genesis 21), which refers to the birth of Isaac in Abraham's old age (not to mention Sarah's advanced years...
...Here we enter a realm of fascinating speculation...
...The victory of the gods in creating cosmos out of chaos was commemorated by a choreography of repetition...
...Instead, they deal with the painful banishment of Abraham's concubine wife, Hagar, and their son Ishmael, and with the awesome near-sacrifice of Abraham and Sarah's son Isaac...
...That which was can be again...
...Yet, turning to the Mishnah Megillah, which deals with the ancient rabbinic selection of Biblical readings, we are informed that on Rosh Hashanah we are to read that section from Leviticus that declares a day of solemn rest and a memorial proclaimed with a blast of horns...
...Profane time is suspended and true time, at least for the duration of the festival, is born again...
...Abraham and Sarah have to do with children of blood and flesh, with survival and promise, with a covenant...
...Nowadays that we keep two days," the Talmud continues, we read "And God tried Abraham" (Genesis 22) on the second day...
...The liturgical time of the pagan festival redeems, restores, recovers the real time of the sacred moment...
...That assumption is bolstered by the fact that in the Rosh Hashanah machzor (the anthology of prayers for the New Year), none of the multiple Biblical verses sustaining the prayers of the Malchiot-Zichronot-Shofrot trilogy are taken from the Book of Genesis...
...Eternal return offers a precarious consolation...
...Amor fati—may that be my love from now on...
...It cannot be turned back through ritual drama...
...What more natural choice than the first two chapters of Genesis...
...Is the focus on the Abraham episode accidental or intended...
...to teach us to direct our energies not to the heavens beyond us but to the word that is in our hearts and in our mouths, that we may do it...
...For the pagan archaic religions, which surrounded Israel, the sacred time of the creation was triumphantly recaptured through a ritual return to that original moment...
...Harold Schulweis, a contributing editor of this magazine, is rabbi of Temple Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California...
...No, for Judaism the world is an arrow targeted towards an open future...
...It is the testing of faith rather than the passive contemplation of the origin of things the rabbis instruct us to ponder...
...Let 'looking away' be my only negation...
...His "Celebrating Mordecai Kaplan" appeared in the July-August 1981 issue of MOMENT...
...Mircea Eliade, the scholar of comparative religion, observes that the ritual and liturgy of the Babylonian twelve-day New Year was centered around reliving the primordial moment of the creation...
...I believe the rabbis chose their texts wisely...
...It is not the God who created the universe with no help from man, but the Lord of the Exodus from Egypt, in which people took an active role, whom we praise on Rosh Hashanah...
Vol. 6 • September 1981 • No. 8
