It has been a year of shattered pieces, fragmented bodies and fractured hopes. Broken pieces, broken hearts, broken hopes. So much has been crushed and damaged for the Jewish people. It’s hard to let go of the dark images from Kibbutz Beeri, to unsee the soul-destroying scenes from the Nova music festival, to unhear the terror of the young children speaking from a cupboard while the bodies of their murdered parents lie just metres away. To unimagine the last moments of those six beautiful young hostages executed in that dark, dank tunnel, when rescue was so near…
It has also been a year of shattered innocence – or was it a blissful naivete – for those of us who believed that antisemitism had been banished to the dark corners of humanity, that we were living in a new age of tolerance, akin to Francis Fukuyama’s idyllic “end of history”. Then came October 7th. A day that will take its dishonourable place alongside the attempted Persian genocide in 475 BCE, the Alexandrian pogrom of 19 CE, the slaughter of the Jews of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the crusades, expulsions and countless pogroms in every century – and more recently, Hebron (1929), Auschwitz, Belzec and Babi Yar (1941-45).
The ferocity and pervasiveness of the new antisemitism has sent us spinning into a vortex of doxxing and cancelling, a cold and isolating space where rationality appears to have no place, fantasies and conspiracy theories about Jewish monstrosity have no number. It has been especially hard for the Jewish community in Australia where, for the first time in our long and noble history, many of us today are feeling deeply unsettled, unwelcome, misunderstood and unappreciated. Our proud and iconic Opera House rang with the repellent howls of Jew hatred, even as we were reeling in shock and trauma from the brutal and savage attacks on innocent compatriots in Israel.
According to Jewish wisdom, Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year (which this year falls on October 2nd and 3rd), reminds us that there are so many things you cannot change or undo. Shakespeare put it elegantly when he said “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may.”
The most haunting lines in our prayers during this season seem to accentuate this: ‘‘On Rosh Hashanah it is written… who shall live and who shall die, who in a good time and who by an untimely death…’’. We have no control over who will die by fire or fury, mowed down mid-dance or while huddling in a shelter…
For the entire Jewish people, that one day, October 7th, changed everything. What a difference a single day made to our sense of security, our assumptions about our identity, our survival and our place in the world.
Yet for all this, the High holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, are also potentially a life-transforming experience. They inform us that there is so very much you can do to make a difference, if not to the wider world, to yourself and your own world. We have the power to choose life and make the life of those around us gentler and better. Love, forgiveness, compassion and charity can reset the compass and realign the focus and direction of our fractured and trembling planet.
That frightening prayer of “who shall live” ends with an assurance that you can still change, or at least minimise, what is ostensibly decreed for you. This optimism amidst bleak realism has always been the secret of Jewish survival. Today, it is the secret weapon of that amazing and resilient country we call Israel.
We still believe in the Jewish capacity to change the bitter into better, to convert the acidic into the sweet, despair into destiny. Despite our pain, this Rosh Hashanah we will continue to dip our apples into honey in the hope of a sweet year – for we are a people who believe in the power of hope to transform evil into good, hatred and hubris into hopefulness and healing. We do however, perhaps audaciously, pray for the welfare of the world and not just for ourselves.
Shanah Tovah to you all. May the new year bring peace and help restore some harmony in our lives and the lives of those around us,
Rabbi Ralph
