One Shabbat morning in the summer of 1870, Duber Ginsberg, an immigrant from Mariampol Lithuania walked into his erstwhile shul while wearing a straw hat whereupon he was promptly thrown out for his impudence and irreverence. Not one to suffer indignity without a response, Duber Ginsberg promptly founded his own shul, soon to be called Ohave Sholom Mariompol. When this congregation merged with Anshe Kalvarier in 1892, the combined congregations adopted the name Anshe Sholom but everyone still referred to the shul, our shul, as “The Straw Hat Shul.” The rest is history.
Nearly one hundred and fifty years later, this very same “straw hat shul” continues to thrive as a flagship congregation of contemporary Urban Orthodoxy. Like so many of you, I was drawn to this congregation to find a shul where all are welcome and where nobody is judged, certainly not for his choice of a hat.
A short time later, as Anshe Sholom’s first great rabbi was teaching and guiding this congregation in Chicago, across the ocean, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib of Ger, rose to speak in 1904 on what would be the last Rosh Hashannah of his life. His words that Rosh Hashannah were published posthumously in his masterpiece published under the title, “Sefat Emet.”
.בני ישראל צריכין לשמוח בראש השנה שמתחדש העולם
The Children of Israel must rejoice on Rosh Hashanah for on Rosh Hashanah the world is renewed.
Really? צריכין לשמוח בראש השנה – we are obligated to rejoice on Rosh Hashanah?! The Sefat Emet wades into a complicated topic of Jewish law and Biblical interpretation with a confidence and forthrightness that belies the complexity of the issue. The holiday sacrificial meal, that exemplified holiday celebrations in the Torah, is absent on Rosh Hashanah. The Mishnah questions whether or not Rosh Hashanah cancels the observance of shivah for a recent mourner, and we omit the joyous Hallel prayers on Rosh Hashanah because, in the words of the Talmud, “the Books of Life and Death are open before God…this is no time for song.”
For the Sefat Emet, we rejoice on Rosh Hashanah because Rosh Hashanah is the day in which newness itself is renewed.
The laws of physics do not change and there is no freedom within the laws of physics. Presumably the laws of metaphysics work the same way and the spiritual consequences of our actions are as immutable and consistent as gravity or thermodynamics.
But God did not only create a world of order and regularity and a natural order filled with cycles. God created a world where renewal is possible. God created a world where human beings can change the course of our lives and we can undo the consequences of our past actions through teshuvah. This capacity for renewal is inherent in how God created the universe and it is this capacity for renewal itself that is renewed and reinforced on Rosh Hashanah.
In the words of the influential Kabbalistic work Sha’ar Ha’Kavanot, presumed to be one source for the Sefat Emet : “Since the world was created on Rosh Hashanah, each Rosh Hashanah is a return to how things were on the very first Rosh Hashanah.”
The very first Rosh Hashanah was a moment of potential and infinite possibility. And that possibility and potential return on Rosh Hashanah each year.
And that is a reason to rejoice. Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of creation, overturns nature, with its unending cycles and brute forces, and restores a world of freedom where human beings, can develop our own spiritual selves as God renews creation.
This is not, however, the only repercussion of the anniversary of creation. The Rosh Hashanah Machzor does not treat the anniversary of creation as an unambiguous source for joy:
.היום הרת עולם. היום יעמיד במשפט כל יצורי עולמים
“This day is the birth of the world,” we will recite later today as we absorb the sound of the shofar. “This day stands up all of the world’s creations in judgement.”
These ancient words, already found in the earliest collections of Jewish prayers present a very different understanding of what it means to commemorate the creation of the world. היום הרת עולם. היום יעמיד במשפט suggests that it is precisely the “birthday” aspect of this day that causes us to be judged. This anniversary of creation reestablishes God as our parent or as our king and establishes the power of God to judge creation.
Everyone agrees that Rosh Hashanah is a significant anniversary. Everyone agrees that God returns to human affairs in an intense way on this day because it is the anniversary of creation. For the editors of the machzor and the authors of many of our prayers, we are judged on the anniversary of creation and this is a source of some dread.
In contrast, the Sefat Emet teaches that we must rejoice on Rosh Hashanah because the anniversary of creation is the annual renewal of renewal itself and restores freedom to human beings who can choose the course of our lives separate from the repetitive and unthinking cycles of nature
The Sefat Emet is bold and audicious in his declaration צריכין לשמוח בראש השנה שמתחדש העולם we must rejoice on Rosh Hashanah for the world itself is renewed today. But we see evidence of this dynamism and renewal far earlier. In fact, the Torah itself is a record of constant renewal and movement from the moment we first accepted it at Sinai.
When I was in Israel this past summer I purchased a book that had been published only days earlier but whose publication I had been eagerly anticipating for months. This book, called “Gishat HaTemorot,” was published by Yeshivat Ma’aleh Gilboah, a small yeshiva in northern Israel, and contains a collection of essays written by their faculty that first explain a new approach to Torah study developed at the yeshiva and then provides examples of how that method, which they call “shitat he-temorot” the Method of Replacement, can enrich our understanding of the Torah.
For thousands of years, those who study the Torah carefully have noticed that details in one section seemingly contradict details in other sections of the Torah itself. Hazal, the rabbis of old, developed methods of Torah interpretation that reconcile these apparent contradictions and every chapter of every section of the Talmud demonstrates this midrashic work of the ancient rabbis.
In the past two hundred years, many academic Bible scholars, unfettered by the religious commitments of earlier generations, have studied contradictions within the Torah and then developed theories of the Torah’s history that are based on patterns and trends within those contradictions. This, in turn has inspired Torah scholars to formulate new explanations for why the Torah, time and time again, addresses the same topics of narrative or law, in two or more contradictory ways. Shitat HaTemorot, the Method of Replacement is the latest attempt to make sense of these contradictions.
According to this new approach, the Torah contradicts itself because the Torah is the product of forty years of Moshe’s guidance of the Israelites in the desert and as we learned things and experienced things and grew, God’s guidance and instructions and commands shifted to accommodate our changed perspectives. And so, for example, the description of the Korban Pesach, the paschal sacrifice, as described in the Book of Exodus is going to be different than how the Korban Pesach is described in Sefer Devarim. After forty years of Moshe’s leadership, we needed a different sort of mitzvah.
The theory will rise or fall based on whether or not it can generate convincing answers to the mysteries of the Torah, but I believe that it already has religious significance:
The Torah is not a snapshot in time of God’s will nor is it a fossilized preservation of the earliest stage of our religion. The Torah itself has direction and dynamism. There is movement and progress and spiritual maturation within the Torah itself. If the Torah itself preserves a dynamic record of progress, then we need renewal as well.
Rosh Hashanah, is not just a day to fear judgement, it is a day to rejoice in the power of renewal and the opportunity that God injects each year into the universe to take our lives in a new direction. This season can be a joyous season because, however frightening it can be to confront the missed opportunities and indiscretions of the past year, we can take hold of the possibilities that the new year affords us and be inspired by God’s annual renewal of the capacity to remake ourselves.
And everything that is true for each one of us as individuals is true for our collective identity as a shul community. God’s great blessing on this day is the chance for renewal. The Torah itself is a dynamic record of God’s law and guidance moving a community to mature and develop. Our task as members of this community is to think through how we need to renew our collective lives and to embrace the dynamism that can let our congregation mature and develop.
For the past 150 years this congregation has thrived as “the straw hat shul” where everyone is welcome and nobody is turned away. I cannot adequately put into words how much it meant to me to be able to invite friends and colleagues and family to join us in Lakeview for Noam’s bar mitzvah and for them to reflect back to us how much they enjoyed being in this shul. We invited a diverse group of relatives and friends, they come from very different communities than this one and very different communities from each other. And they felt embraced and welcomed by all of you.
Where do we go from here? I don’t think we turn to the left and I don’t think we turn to the right. I think we need to go forward. The Torah is a record of dynamic progress as God’s message percolates through a community through the generations. And Rosh Hashanah is a joyous day where we can decide how we want to use our power to renew our lives and our community.
What if we used the God-given gift of the power of renewal to recommit to our identity as an Urban Orthodox congregation?
Thousands of years ago, sometime between the end of the Biblical period and the dawn of the classical rabbinic period, most Jews moved off farms and into cities and towns. For the most part, we have not looked back. And yet, today in 5780, Urban Orthodox congregations such as our own are distinct when compared to our suburban brothers and sisters and much of that difference emerges from the ways that we embrace our neighborhood and our urban environment.
The diversity of Urban Orthodox congregations cannot be ignored or swept away. We think differently. We earn and spend differently. We love differently. We vote differently. Embracing and reinvigorating Urban Orthodoxy and acknowledging our differences is quite distinct from the benign neglect of unreflectively remaining only the straw hat shul. Every decision made by an Urban Orthodox congregation needs to be made with the cognizance that our words and actions and choices will resonate in dramatically different ways among the dramatically different people who populate this community.
Life in large cities is a demonstration of Tzelem Elokim, the Image of God that each human being represents, and embracing that Tzelem Elokim is the only thing that makes this neighborhood possible. To reinvigorate Urban Orthodoxy is to elevate the religious humanism, to center the commitment to celebrating the Tzelem Elokim of every human being, in our life as a community.
This is why communities like ours develop and spread a theology of Jewish distinctiveness which is the product of our embrace of Torah and mitzvot but never stoops to denigration of Gentiles and their spiritual potential. Only this sort of religious worldview is consistent with a foundation of religious humanism rooted in the Tzelem Elokim of every person.
This is why communities like ours are so persistent in opening the doors of the beit midrash and the corridors of Torah study to women as students and teachers of Torah of every form and at every level and in every venue. The Tzelem Elokim of every member of this community, male and female, requires us to provide every member of this community with the chance to connect to the Torah as a student and as a teacher.
And this is why Urban Orthodox congregations like this one invest time and energy in being good neighbors and good citizens. It is not enough to have open doors for neighbors to come into our building. We need to go out and contribute to the community that surrounds and hosts this one.
In many congregations – of all religions in America right now- a great sorting is taking place in which entire religious denominations are being classified by partisan affiliation. For those of us who find this trend alarming, the way out is to avoid being pulled to the left or to the right by instead moving forward.
Forward, to promote a vision of Urban Orthodoxy. Forward to respond to the Torah’s example of religious growth and maturation. Forward to take advantage of the joyous opportunity we have been given on this day when the capacity for renewal has been renewed.
Ultimately, the perspective of היום הרת עולם. היום יעמיד במשפט, that the anniversary of creation restores God’s role as judge, is not in contradiction with the Sefat Emet’s call to rejoice today as the capacity for renewal is renewed. These are two sides of the same coin. Creation injects freedom into a universe otherwise bound to the laws of physics. Freedom makes us accountable for our choices. But freedom should also excite us with the potential for our future and we can rejoice in God’s promise to endorse our efforts to renew ourselves and our community.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 