I want to take you back exactly 150 years ago. The year was 1861.
Specifically, tomorrow, September 29th. In 1861, September 29th – which is to say our Rosh Hashanah Day – was in that year the eve of Kol Nidre.
And late on that high and holy night in the White House in Washington, DC, while the Civil War, which was the most devastating war in U.S. history… while Civil War raged between the states, late that night in the President’s family’s private quarters, Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd wrote a letter to her cousin.
September 29th, 1861. Mary Todd Lincoln writes: “The weather is so beautiful. Why is it that we cannot feel well? If the country [were] only at peace… [if the country were only at peace]… All would be well.” i
Alas. As we stand on the cusp of a new year and as we look into the day ahead… For all the many ways in which our world is different than was the case 150 years ago, as we gather tonight to embark upon a new year, and as we look into our future – our country is once again far from peaceful, and the world is a frightening place. Mary Todd Lincoln’s question is our own. “Why is it that we cannot feel well?”
Everywhere the news seems bleak. We know well the statistics. Suffice for us to acknowledge that whereas the headlines on our weekly news magazines, herald the decline of Europe, question whether the United States is in free fall, and ask with no irony at all whether the middle-class can be saved…
What with our markets in turmoil, business treading water, unemployment stuck for more than two years at 9% or greater in absolute numbers, our political parties at one another’s throats, and families everywhere with less cash to spend…
We have entered, once again, what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. described as “a crisis of the old order,” by which he meant we are suffering not just from “a bad attack of economic pessimism,” but rather that we are experiencing a reality the scale of which is shaking not only markets, jobs and national growth prospects, but an entire way of thinking about how our world works.
In this case, the very assumption that life gets better and opportunities get richer for each successive generation has been shaken.
Now these challenges are not new… And the sense of frustration and angst and dread our current circumstance summons can be traced back further than the days of Lincloln.
Indeed the perspicacious sage advice that: “The budget should be balanced, the treasury refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered & controlled, [and that] people must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance, and assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest [the country] become bankrupt…”
This sage bit of wisdom was first offered by the Greek philosopher Cicero in 55 BCE.
To put that in perspective, the idea that “the budget be balanced, the treasury refilled, public debt reduced, and the arrogance of public officials should be tempered” ... these ideas were first offered publicly by Cicero more than 2000 years ago, which is to say, some 125 years before the Temple in Jerusalem was felled.
Ain Chadash Takhat Hashamayim
Truly there is nothing new under the sun.
And yet have we learned nothing?
Consider that today, exactly fifty years after construction began – in August 1961 – on the twenty-seven miles of concrete and barbed wire that came to divide East and West Berlin and the world came to know as the Berlin Wall….
No less than 50 years after that defining and chilling event of the 20th Century, here at home, we have chosen to erect an economic system that pits one economic strata of our citizenry against another and finds too many of us living behind walls, both those walls that define gated communities, as well as those we have erected between ourselves for no other reason than our having given up on the notion that we can learn to live with those who are in any way different from who we imagine ourselves to be.
And to the distance that exists between us economically add the gulf created by our current political divide and the fact that public discourse between parties and persons of good faith has grown so barbed and contemptuous, that we have reached the point that current reality causes all of us pain.
The weather is so beautiful. Why is it on the eve of a new year we cannot feel well?
A story…
Recently, at the request of one of our families, I went to Chas. Morris on Browns Hill Road to visit a long-time member, a multi-generational member of our congregation.
The woman and I had not met before. I had been told only that she was by now older, had not been to Temple in a number of years and yet, just the same, she’d appreciate, her family member assured me, a visit from the rabbi.
I arrived at Chas. Morris. I signed in, learned her room number, and proceeded to pay this congregant a visit. In the hallway just a few doors away from where I expected to find her, an elderly woman in a wheelchair sat forlornly in the hallway. She was alone, an afghan across her lap, her stare alternately vacant and penetrating. As I approached, her eyes tracked my movements. Could this be the woman I was here to meet, I wondered.
“Where!” she implored. I stopped and turned.
“Where!” she repeated.
“Where what,” I asked softly as I leaned in close.
“Where is my hope?!”
Though not the congregant I set out to find, this woman was, in fact, clearly the person I was there to meet.
Victor Frankl, famed death-camp psychologist has written:
“Today more than ever, the despair over the apparent meaninglessness of life has become an urgent topic and issue on a worldwide scale. Our society [attempts] to satisfy each and every need and even creates [new] needs in order to satisfy [them. Yet], the most important need, however, the basic [human] need for meaning remains.” What then is life all about? To what end the time we spend? Toward what purpose the years we are afforded?
This past August, James Wood, writing in the New Yorker put the matter succinctly:
“As one gets older… moments of terror and incomprehension seem more frequent and more piercing, and are as likely to arrive in the middle of the day as in the night…
“Why is life so short, why so inexplicable? These are the questions… The questions all of us want answered.” ii
On the eve of a new year, we look into the future embodied in the promise of tomorrow and ask ourselves questions of ultimate concern, employing words perhaps best captured in the Psalmist’s query as he cast his eyes to the mountains and implored…
Essa Eynai el Heharim, MayAyin Yavo Ezri.
“I look out from where I find myself … I cast my eyes upon the horizon, and to the heavens, and into the hearts and faces of those around me and ask… ‘Where shall I find the source of my hope?’”
When we peel away all the fancy words and we strip away all the syntax, it comes down to this single question.
It is the question unarticulated in the mouth of the young child preparing to step to the bimah for the first time on the day of her bat mitzvah…
And by anxious parents in the midst of their own personal, marital & professional challenges, struggling to raise their children through adolescence…
It is a question discerned in the glance of a soon-to-be-graduated high school senior making his way through the college application process…
And in the late night conversations over the kitchen table about how the family will manage to pay for college…
We hear it in the unease of the young professional whose career prospects seem few…
And in the pensive silence of the would-be retiree who wonders if long-saved finances will permit comfort in later years…
It is the question seen in the tired eyes of a partner caring for an aging, ailing spouse…
And in the quavering voice of the family member confronting life in the wake of a painful loss.
And yes, the question we came here tonight to ask is too the plaintive cry of the old woman, the afghan across her lap, lonely and afraid, to be sure.
For each of their questions is our query as well. For each of these person’s concerns and fears and existential longings is each of our truths tonight as well. For the world is a complicated place. And life is messy. And keeping an optimistic outlook is a challenge. And so with each of them, and altogether… On the eve of a new year, as once again we have returned to his sacred space, we ask …
“Where… Where is the source of our hope?”
The weather is so beautiful. Why can’t we feel well?
As together we embark upon the New Year, it is this question that we shall explore and attempt to answer in the course of these first ten days of 5772. The question of hope. In heaven and hearts: Whence is the source of my hope?!
Tomorrow we shall consider Judaism’s search for God. Which is to say, tomorrow we shall consider how our search for knowledge about ourselves and our world – the sum total of our life’s journey in the direction of hope and meaning – is given best expression in our people’s eternal, hopeful search for God.
On Yom Kippur, we shall consider how by reforming ourselves and our community we bring hope and courage into our lives and thereby improve ourselves & begin to repair and improve the world around us. In this way, do we bring hope to our world today.
And, finally, at our Yizkor Service, when we return to this Sanctuary in ten days time to recall those whose memories inspire us, we shall speak of how in honoring our memory of loved ones & who we were in their company, we secure our best hope for tomorrow.
Searching for God. Reforming ourselves. Remembering our past.
In each of these ways does Judaism teach we shall discover something significant and powerful about ourselves, we shall begin to improve ourselves and the world in which we live, and we shall succeed in imagining, establishing and securing a better, brighter, more hopeful tomorrow for ourselves and all who will follow us.
This, after all, is our challenge, our responsibility, our privilege: To remain eternally hopeful, even in the face of frustration and heartbreak, especially in the presence of suffering and the loss of dreams. For as Jews, it is ours to make the most of today, build for tomorrow, and ever be the world’s harbingers of hope.
From whence shall our hope come? This we shall explore together in coming days.
I wish each of you a blessed first evening of the New Year … and with hopeful heart, I pray that when we meet again come morning, we shall – in spite of the weather – each be able to say, “I feel well… and hopeful… and blessed to greet a new day.”
And so may it be so for all of us in all the days of the new year ahead. Shana Tova!
i
Smithsonian Magazine, September 2011, “On the March September 1861,” page 19.
ii
New Yorker, August 15-22, 2011, Critic at Large, James Wood, “Is that all there is?” page 87.
