Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 29, 2019 19:00:10 GMT
Tonight, somewhere around 40-50,000 people will flock to watch Zozobra burn. When we moved here, some people were very excited and said that we should definitely take the kids to watch a giant effigy howl and it burned. We watched it online and decided to never again watch it or to take the kids until they were old enough to vote or marry or something far into the future! To me, it’s really interesting that Zozobra happens around the start of Elul, the month that starts on Sunday that really sets into motion that High Holiday season. It allows me to compare the two – a Hebrew month where we reflect on the negative things we have done, and the burning of an effigy to remove the negativity in our lives.
Will Schuster’s inspiration for Zozobra came from the Holy Week celebrations of the Yaqui Indians of Mexico; an effigy of Judas, filled with firecrackers, was led around the village on a donkey and later burned. Shuster and E. Dana Johnson, a newspaper editor and good friend of Shuster's came up with the name Zozobra, which was defined as "anguish, anxiety, gloom," in Spanish, "the gloomy one." I have to mention, and then I will move on from, the fact that Zozobra is based on an effigy of Judas, the Jew who betrays Jesus in the Christian Bible and who became the symbol of Jewish betrayal of Jesus throughout the ages, in other words, it’s a custom that originally came from an artistic representation of Jew-burning. But I know that saying things like that make me a bit of a killjoy so let’s focus on the other aspect of Zozobra, the idea that you can burn away your gloom. It’s an interesting idea. On Rosh Hashanah, we take our sins and throw them away in a ritual known as tashlich. The two rituals seem very similar, so are they, or is there a profound difference between them?
Actually, I think there is a difference, and that’s to do with personal responsibility. With Zozobra, you turn up, watch your gloom being burned and then can go on enjoy fiesta with your troubles evaporated. With Tashlich, though, you have to do a lot of preparatory work. You can only throw away sins once you’ve apologized for them and atoned for them. You have to actually have human contact and some kind of resolution of the negativity. Not so with Zozobra – you can just show up and have your troubles burned away. The preparation for Tashlich takes a month. A MONTH! That’s a lot of time reflecting and repenting.
But it’s a very necessary and helpful month. Instead of one day, we have four weeks to go and apologize to those whom we have wronged. Do we really need that much time? We do if we’re doing it properly! First, we have to spend time working out what we’ve done wrong. That involves conversations with people, honest conversations, not accusatory ones. Then we need to work out why we’ve acted in such negative ways? Is there a pattern which needs to be broken? If so, how? Just assessing that takes work. And only once we’ve realised why and how we’ve done negative things can we go to the individual or group that we have harmed and sincerely apologise to them for our behaviour.
Why? Can’t we just go and apologise? Can’t we just throw away our sins? Well, there’s a reason that the Rabbis originally hated the custom of tashlich. They thought it was superstitious nonsense. You can’t actually throw away your sins. Everyone knows that when Micah talks (7:19) of casting your sins into the depth of the sea, he’s talking metaphorically. If he weren’t, and if he were being literal, then the idea of casting seas into a river, or even the sea’s edge, if you’re lucky enough to be near a beach, is nonsensical. So, if it’s a metaphor, why do we need a ritual about it at all? I think the answer is that people need rituals in their life. Rituals bring us comfort and they make our values physically real. They’re physical representations of metaphors that underlie our lives. They’re the best physical representations of our moral thoughts.
So, then, isn’t Zozobra a ritual? Of course it is. That said, it was originally created as a tourist spectacle, not as a religious ritual. At the same time, though, it cleverly became infused with the ritualistic aspect of burning away our troubles. In other words, whether it’s a tourist spectacle, the start of Fiesta or just a community event, I acknowledge that for most people it’s an opportunity to shed negativity in a public way. While its origins may be troubling, who am I, a British Jew who’s never even actually witnessed this ritual live, to criticize it? So, as much as I dislike it personally in terms of burning an effigy, I have to admit that my position on Zozobra is softening somewhat. Maybe not everyone is ready for a whole month of introspection. Maybe some people just need to feel like the bad things in their lives have gone away. They don’t need teshuvah, repentance, and all the work it involves. They just need someone to say, or perhaps groan loudly, “It’s okay.” Because the two rituals do share something in common – the fact that the past only controls us if we let it, the fact that we need to make a conscious decision to let go of the negativity of the past. Because we all know that you can’t actually burn away your troubles. We all know you can’t flush your troubles away on a piece of bread in a river. We all know that. But we also know that acting it out physically inspires us to mentally make a change.
So, what we have are two rituals around the same time of year that allow us to separate ourselves from the negativity of the past. One ritual involves lots of people coming together and burning a giant statue of a man who groans and wails as he burns. The other involves a community of people coming together after an extended period of introspection and apology and casting bread into some water. They both attempt the same thing, but in very different ways. And I certainly prefer one ritual over another, which is why I’m here and not there. I prefer the Jewish ritual because it involves dialogue. The Zozobra ritual is personal, not communal. Teshuvah, repentance and atonement, is communal. Zozobra focuses on the negativity that has come into our lives, whereas teshuvah during Elul includes not just that but also the negativity that we have brought into the lives of other people. It’s more all-encompassing, which means it’s more difficult.
This year, then, whichever ritual we prefer – the simpler one that allows us to let go of negativity or the more complex one that ensures that we work to undo the negativity we have brought into the lives of others - let’s use this time as a period of introspection, a period of letting go of the past, and a period of drawing closer together. May this be the season of our release of negativity, and let us say, Amen.
Will Schuster’s inspiration for Zozobra came from the Holy Week celebrations of the Yaqui Indians of Mexico; an effigy of Judas, filled with firecrackers, was led around the village on a donkey and later burned. Shuster and E. Dana Johnson, a newspaper editor and good friend of Shuster's came up with the name Zozobra, which was defined as "anguish, anxiety, gloom," in Spanish, "the gloomy one." I have to mention, and then I will move on from, the fact that Zozobra is based on an effigy of Judas, the Jew who betrays Jesus in the Christian Bible and who became the symbol of Jewish betrayal of Jesus throughout the ages, in other words, it’s a custom that originally came from an artistic representation of Jew-burning. But I know that saying things like that make me a bit of a killjoy so let’s focus on the other aspect of Zozobra, the idea that you can burn away your gloom. It’s an interesting idea. On Rosh Hashanah, we take our sins and throw them away in a ritual known as tashlich. The two rituals seem very similar, so are they, or is there a profound difference between them?
Actually, I think there is a difference, and that’s to do with personal responsibility. With Zozobra, you turn up, watch your gloom being burned and then can go on enjoy fiesta with your troubles evaporated. With Tashlich, though, you have to do a lot of preparatory work. You can only throw away sins once you’ve apologized for them and atoned for them. You have to actually have human contact and some kind of resolution of the negativity. Not so with Zozobra – you can just show up and have your troubles burned away. The preparation for Tashlich takes a month. A MONTH! That’s a lot of time reflecting and repenting.
But it’s a very necessary and helpful month. Instead of one day, we have four weeks to go and apologize to those whom we have wronged. Do we really need that much time? We do if we’re doing it properly! First, we have to spend time working out what we’ve done wrong. That involves conversations with people, honest conversations, not accusatory ones. Then we need to work out why we’ve acted in such negative ways? Is there a pattern which needs to be broken? If so, how? Just assessing that takes work. And only once we’ve realised why and how we’ve done negative things can we go to the individual or group that we have harmed and sincerely apologise to them for our behaviour.
Why? Can’t we just go and apologise? Can’t we just throw away our sins? Well, there’s a reason that the Rabbis originally hated the custom of tashlich. They thought it was superstitious nonsense. You can’t actually throw away your sins. Everyone knows that when Micah talks (7:19) of casting your sins into the depth of the sea, he’s talking metaphorically. If he weren’t, and if he were being literal, then the idea of casting seas into a river, or even the sea’s edge, if you’re lucky enough to be near a beach, is nonsensical. So, if it’s a metaphor, why do we need a ritual about it at all? I think the answer is that people need rituals in their life. Rituals bring us comfort and they make our values physically real. They’re physical representations of metaphors that underlie our lives. They’re the best physical representations of our moral thoughts.
So, then, isn’t Zozobra a ritual? Of course it is. That said, it was originally created as a tourist spectacle, not as a religious ritual. At the same time, though, it cleverly became infused with the ritualistic aspect of burning away our troubles. In other words, whether it’s a tourist spectacle, the start of Fiesta or just a community event, I acknowledge that for most people it’s an opportunity to shed negativity in a public way. While its origins may be troubling, who am I, a British Jew who’s never even actually witnessed this ritual live, to criticize it? So, as much as I dislike it personally in terms of burning an effigy, I have to admit that my position on Zozobra is softening somewhat. Maybe not everyone is ready for a whole month of introspection. Maybe some people just need to feel like the bad things in their lives have gone away. They don’t need teshuvah, repentance, and all the work it involves. They just need someone to say, or perhaps groan loudly, “It’s okay.” Because the two rituals do share something in common – the fact that the past only controls us if we let it, the fact that we need to make a conscious decision to let go of the negativity of the past. Because we all know that you can’t actually burn away your troubles. We all know you can’t flush your troubles away on a piece of bread in a river. We all know that. But we also know that acting it out physically inspires us to mentally make a change.
So, what we have are two rituals around the same time of year that allow us to separate ourselves from the negativity of the past. One ritual involves lots of people coming together and burning a giant statue of a man who groans and wails as he burns. The other involves a community of people coming together after an extended period of introspection and apology and casting bread into some water. They both attempt the same thing, but in very different ways. And I certainly prefer one ritual over another, which is why I’m here and not there. I prefer the Jewish ritual because it involves dialogue. The Zozobra ritual is personal, not communal. Teshuvah, repentance and atonement, is communal. Zozobra focuses on the negativity that has come into our lives, whereas teshuvah during Elul includes not just that but also the negativity that we have brought into the lives of other people. It’s more all-encompassing, which means it’s more difficult.
This year, then, whichever ritual we prefer – the simpler one that allows us to let go of negativity or the more complex one that ensures that we work to undo the negativity we have brought into the lives of others - let’s use this time as a period of introspection, a period of letting go of the past, and a period of drawing closer together. May this be the season of our release of negativity, and let us say, Amen.