Post by Rabbi Neil on Dec 29, 2017 23:50:16 GMT
New Year’s Resolutions Sermon
Rabbi Eliezer turns to his disciples and told them “repent one day before your death.” They replied, “Do a person know on which day they will die?” to which he replied, “Therefore, a person should repent today, for perhaps tomorrow they will die, so that in fact all their days they are repenting.” (Talmud: Shabbat 153a) I find this a particularly powerful narrative from Talmud at this time, as we approach the secular New Year. Why is it that so many people create New Year’s resolutions? If we hope for a change in our life, why do we wait for the secular New Year to do it? Why wait at all?
Even though we know that the marking of a New Year is a totally arbitrary human assignation of significance to yet another rotation of the Earth as it goes around the Sun, nonetheless the significance we assign seems to be important. As Reform Jews, I always find it interesting comparing the religious and the secular New Year because they seem to carry similar messages but in widely differing ways. Rosh Hashanah is, traditionally, the birthday of the world, or the birthday of humanity, although I think it’s fair to say that most Reform Jews don’t actually believe that is the case. Nonetheless, it’s a time for introspection and change. Yet only a few months later, December 31st turns into January 1st in the Gregorian calendar and once again we find ourselves engaging in introspection and change.
So, what is it about the change of a year that brings about introspection and commitment to being a different kind of person? Part of it, I think, is the awareness of our ever-closer mortality. Solomon Ibn Gabirol said that we should “plan for this world as if we expect to live forever, and plan for the afterlife as if we expect to die tomorrow.” Many people certainly live according to the first half of that maxim, and live as though we might just live forever. Then when a birthday or the New Year comes round, it gives us an artificial point in time to look back and, at the same time, to look forward. We realize that this isn’t the person we thought we might be at this point. We realize that we may not have much time left. We hope that we do – we hope we have many more years left – but we know that with every passing year our surviving years diminishes by one. Now, this may seem depressing, but it need not be so. Indeed, I think the very act of making New Year’s Resolutions, as so many people do, is an extremely positive response to this awareness because it implies a hopeful mindset, a change, an aspiration. The second part of Ibn Gabirol’s quotation is interesting. We should live our lives like we expect to die tomorrow. In other words, if this were our last day on Earth, did we use it to prepare ourselves for the hereafter? That’s not the same as saying, live every day as if it were your last. I actually think such a sentiment is totally unrealistic. If I were to live every day like it were my last, I’d probably quit my job and go touring round the world with my family. But I’m not going to because that’s not real. If you really lived every day like it was your last, you would quickly run out of money. But what Ibn Gabirol is saying is to prepare ourselves for the afterlife as if we might die tomorrow. In other words, make this day a good day, a day of mitzvot, a day of being the best person we can be. And this takes us back to the Rabbi Eliezer quotation I started with, in which he said that everyone should atone every single day. Remember that atonement in Judaism isn’t about beating our breast and moaning and saying we’re sorry. The Hebrew, teshuvah, means returning, usually understood as returning to God. It’s the same root used in the prayer Hashiveinu – bring us back to You, oh God – taken from right near the end of the Book of Lamentations.
I learn a lot from this. Returning can mean returning to our truer selves, to the person we know we should be but aren’t because we let other negative influences dominate. Perhaps we allowed ourselves to become addicted to certain forms of behaviour because they became routine or convenient or because they brought us joy quicker. Returning means being aware of the negative influences on our own being and returning to a more fundamental version of ourselves. But it also means not just blaming external influences and fully addressing our own selves. Why did anger or jealousy or despair or guilt or many other possible negative emotions take over our lives during particular moments? What was it within us and within our lives that allowed that to happen? I think most of the time, if not all of the time, it’s subconscious. We don’t even realize the person we’ve become because we live that person every day. One day blends into another and our behaviour doesn’t change because we don’t even realize who we’ve become. And perhaps this is why people often think about change at a New Year, whether it be religious or secular – because these artificial points of time hold up a mirror to ourselves. They force us out of our routine and make us have to confront who we’ve become.
It probably shouldn’t be necessary. At the beginning of every day, we should be able to stop and think about what kind of day we want to have and what kind of person we want to be. And at the end of every day, we should be able to stop and think about whether today was the day we wanted, and whether we were the person we wanted to be. That, for me, is prayer. The Hebrew l’hitpalel means to judge oneself. We should be a different person at the end of prayer. We should have returned a little to our truer selves, we should have committed a little to being a better me. But first, we have to imagine what a better me looks like.
Living a life of prayer and return means not having to make New Year’s Resolutions because that person is already making daily resolutions. But, if a person isn’t engaging in some kind of daily prayer or reflection, then at least we can say that making New Year’s Resolutions can be a profoundly Jewish exercise.
This week, then, let’s not wait until Monday morning to be a new person, to be the best person we can be. Instead, let’s use our time of prayer and introspection this evening as a time of reflection and change. On Shabbat we rest, but after that, we transform the world, and to do that, we must first transform ourselves. We pray for the strength to honestly assess ourselves and to bring about the profound changes that we think we might need, and let us say, amen.
Rabbi Eliezer turns to his disciples and told them “repent one day before your death.” They replied, “Do a person know on which day they will die?” to which he replied, “Therefore, a person should repent today, for perhaps tomorrow they will die, so that in fact all their days they are repenting.” (Talmud: Shabbat 153a) I find this a particularly powerful narrative from Talmud at this time, as we approach the secular New Year. Why is it that so many people create New Year’s resolutions? If we hope for a change in our life, why do we wait for the secular New Year to do it? Why wait at all?
Even though we know that the marking of a New Year is a totally arbitrary human assignation of significance to yet another rotation of the Earth as it goes around the Sun, nonetheless the significance we assign seems to be important. As Reform Jews, I always find it interesting comparing the religious and the secular New Year because they seem to carry similar messages but in widely differing ways. Rosh Hashanah is, traditionally, the birthday of the world, or the birthday of humanity, although I think it’s fair to say that most Reform Jews don’t actually believe that is the case. Nonetheless, it’s a time for introspection and change. Yet only a few months later, December 31st turns into January 1st in the Gregorian calendar and once again we find ourselves engaging in introspection and change.
So, what is it about the change of a year that brings about introspection and commitment to being a different kind of person? Part of it, I think, is the awareness of our ever-closer mortality. Solomon Ibn Gabirol said that we should “plan for this world as if we expect to live forever, and plan for the afterlife as if we expect to die tomorrow.” Many people certainly live according to the first half of that maxim, and live as though we might just live forever. Then when a birthday or the New Year comes round, it gives us an artificial point in time to look back and, at the same time, to look forward. We realize that this isn’t the person we thought we might be at this point. We realize that we may not have much time left. We hope that we do – we hope we have many more years left – but we know that with every passing year our surviving years diminishes by one. Now, this may seem depressing, but it need not be so. Indeed, I think the very act of making New Year’s Resolutions, as so many people do, is an extremely positive response to this awareness because it implies a hopeful mindset, a change, an aspiration. The second part of Ibn Gabirol’s quotation is interesting. We should live our lives like we expect to die tomorrow. In other words, if this were our last day on Earth, did we use it to prepare ourselves for the hereafter? That’s not the same as saying, live every day as if it were your last. I actually think such a sentiment is totally unrealistic. If I were to live every day like it were my last, I’d probably quit my job and go touring round the world with my family. But I’m not going to because that’s not real. If you really lived every day like it was your last, you would quickly run out of money. But what Ibn Gabirol is saying is to prepare ourselves for the afterlife as if we might die tomorrow. In other words, make this day a good day, a day of mitzvot, a day of being the best person we can be. And this takes us back to the Rabbi Eliezer quotation I started with, in which he said that everyone should atone every single day. Remember that atonement in Judaism isn’t about beating our breast and moaning and saying we’re sorry. The Hebrew, teshuvah, means returning, usually understood as returning to God. It’s the same root used in the prayer Hashiveinu – bring us back to You, oh God – taken from right near the end of the Book of Lamentations.
I learn a lot from this. Returning can mean returning to our truer selves, to the person we know we should be but aren’t because we let other negative influences dominate. Perhaps we allowed ourselves to become addicted to certain forms of behaviour because they became routine or convenient or because they brought us joy quicker. Returning means being aware of the negative influences on our own being and returning to a more fundamental version of ourselves. But it also means not just blaming external influences and fully addressing our own selves. Why did anger or jealousy or despair or guilt or many other possible negative emotions take over our lives during particular moments? What was it within us and within our lives that allowed that to happen? I think most of the time, if not all of the time, it’s subconscious. We don’t even realize the person we’ve become because we live that person every day. One day blends into another and our behaviour doesn’t change because we don’t even realize who we’ve become. And perhaps this is why people often think about change at a New Year, whether it be religious or secular – because these artificial points of time hold up a mirror to ourselves. They force us out of our routine and make us have to confront who we’ve become.
It probably shouldn’t be necessary. At the beginning of every day, we should be able to stop and think about what kind of day we want to have and what kind of person we want to be. And at the end of every day, we should be able to stop and think about whether today was the day we wanted, and whether we were the person we wanted to be. That, for me, is prayer. The Hebrew l’hitpalel means to judge oneself. We should be a different person at the end of prayer. We should have returned a little to our truer selves, we should have committed a little to being a better me. But first, we have to imagine what a better me looks like.
Living a life of prayer and return means not having to make New Year’s Resolutions because that person is already making daily resolutions. But, if a person isn’t engaging in some kind of daily prayer or reflection, then at least we can say that making New Year’s Resolutions can be a profoundly Jewish exercise.
This week, then, let’s not wait until Monday morning to be a new person, to be the best person we can be. Instead, let’s use our time of prayer and introspection this evening as a time of reflection and change. On Shabbat we rest, but after that, we transform the world, and to do that, we must first transform ourselves. We pray for the strength to honestly assess ourselves and to bring about the profound changes that we think we might need, and let us say, amen.
