Welcoming the New Year—with Joy and Tears
Note: I’m posting the talk I gave on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It’s so late that it’s coinciding with ushering in a new secular calendar year! I gave this talk at the Shtibl, where I have been a member for many years. We are a small, informal, and homey congregation without a rabbi. So we all take turns giving talks and this Rosh Hashanah I took a turn. While this post is hardly my usual and is based on Jewish texts, I’ve tested it out on a couple of non-Jewish colleagues and it seems to work. The challenge I named at the time, embracing both joy and sadness in a time that can feel quite bleak, has only increased since I shared this.
When I first met my husband, Pinchas, he lived in Shkunat Ha’Bucharim, just next to Meah Sh’arim, the ultra-orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood. I spent one Rosh Hashanah there and as you might expect, finding a shul that worked for me was not so easy. I ended up in a Chassidic Shtibl with an ezrat nashim (women’s section) that was an adjacent room with a wall so thick that my focus turned to the women themselves—and the way they experienced the prayers of Rosh Hashanah—crying copiously at various points of the day.
This image popped into my head as I began to prepare this talk. I became curious about the crying I heard that day—and, more broadly, about the place of tears in this holiday. As I dug deeper, I learned that this was a richer and more complex topic than I had anticipated—with implications that extend well beyond these two days.
The book of Nehemiah recounts the first reading of the Torah after the return of the people from exile—on the first of Tishrei—Rosh Hashanah:
And Ezra the priest brought the Law before the congregation, both men and women, and all who could hear with understanding, on the first day of the seventh month.
We then hear that when the Torah reading begins, the people cry—and are instructed to stop their tears.
Nehemiah the Tirshatha, Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who were translating to the people said to all the people, “This day is holy to the LORD your God: you must not mourn or weep,” for all the people were weeping as they listened to the words of the Teaching.
The reason for the tears is not given—the commentary suggests that it is because the people realized how many mitzvot they had transgressed during the exile. Whatever the reason, the people are immediately told to cease their crying—and, in this next verse, they are instructed to celebrate:
He further said to them, “Go, eat choice food and drink sweet drinks and send portions to whoever has nothing prepared, for the day is holy to our Lord. Do not be sad, for your rejoicing in the LORD is the source of your strength.”
This day is described as a day of great joy—with language that evokes Purim and perhaps our secular New Year’s Eve more than what we think of as the tone of Rosh Hashanah. And, really, many of the symbols and practices of Rosh Hashanah—the apples and honey, the ways in which we greet one another, are designed to evoke joy and celebration. The nusach of our prayer is majestic and often upbeat.
At the same time, we just completed four readings that, while having arcs of redemption, are hard to call joyous. The most evocative images in three of these readings are of tears of anguish: Hagar alone in the desert prepared to watch Ishmael die, Hannah’s suffering as she is relentlessly abused by Pnina and then gives up the one son she does have, and the image of Rachel crying over her lost children. The only one of these texts that lacks actual tears is the Akedah. The Midrash fills in the blanks with stories in which Avraham is overwhelmed by tears and in which Sarah’s anguish is so great that the story concludes with her death.
And the invocation of tears goes beyond the texts we read. In Masechet Rosh Hashanah, the sound of the Shofar is described as a cry of anguish:
“It is a day of sounding the shofar for you” (Numbers 29:1), and we translate this verse in Aramaic targum or translation as “It is a day of yevava—crying or wailing to you.”
Yevava is defined through a verse written in Shoftim about the mother of Sisera: “Through the window, she looked forth and wailed [vateyabev], the mother of Sisera.” (Judges 5:28).
The shofar, rather than being a trumpet sound, is associated with the crying of another mother, distraught as her son is about to be killed.
The 16th-century kabbalist Rabbi Hayim Vital, writing about his teacher, the Ari, testifies that he had the practice of crying extensively during Rosh Hashanah. He goes further and teaches that:
The Arizal said that if a person does not cry on Rosh HaShanah, it is a sign that his soul is in need of rectification.
A more contemporary source, Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner, a 20th-century American Rosh Yeshiva, is quoted as saying "A machzor without tear stains is like a Pesach Haggadah with no wine marks - you can tell that it hasn't really been used." There are older mahzorim that include the instructions, in Yiddish, especially for women, apparently, indicating precisely when to cry.
Perhaps the women in that Chassidic Shtibl were following those instructions—their mahzorim, per Rabbi Hutner, were certainly well-used.
The central prayer of these days, the “U’nateneh Tokef” asks us to look directly at our mortality and the fact that our lives are fleeting and impermanent. It’s not surprising that people would respond with tears—with or without explicit instruction.
The juxtaposition of Ezra’s admonition against tears and the celebratory themes of these days with the texts and prayers themselves, unsurprisingly, led to contemporary Halachic questions—do we cry or do we refrain from crying? Is this a time of joy or tears?
I would suggest that the texts and practices themselves offer us the answer—it’s a time for both. We are asked to both celebrate and experience joy and are invited to bring our tears with the accompanying sorrow and even anguish.
We enter this holiday at a time when things can feel so bleak—when the global, national, and even local challenges are so big as to often feel overwhelming—when so very much feels wrong and the stakes so high. The question of holding both joy and anguish feels especially relevant at this moment. And Rosh Hashanah offers us a space to practice doing just that.
One of my favorite organizational thinkers, Margaret Wheatley wrote a book called “Who do we choose to be” several years ago. This book reflected a profound shift in Wheatley’s assessment of our historical moment. She has come to see little possibility of our world righting itself. Yet, what is most important about this book, and her work, is that she moves beyond what seems like a position of despair and offers a view that creates—demands—a space for joy. She writes:
Joy is a sensation of your entire being, difficult to describe in words but similarly known by anyone who’s experienced it. The experience of joy often feels the same as sadness.
In my own experience, joy and sadness are the same—my being feels embraced and alive. I am present with energy beyond what my physical body can contain, and yet it does. I am laughing. I am crying. It doesn’t matter which.
I know joy to be the experience of connection, communion, presence, grace, as it is.
How can joy be available in moments of great suffering? All around you lives are threatened, unstoppable destructive forces are at work, everyone is stretched beyond physical limits to help, rescue, save. For the rest of their lives, people will recall the intensity and horror. And the joy.
In the worst conditions, our most noble human qualities are right there, offering us the capacity to help, to strengthen, to love, to console.
In other words, inside of our suffering, we can find joy—and the path to that joy is through the ways that we engage with others—through service, kindness, and generosity of spirit.
She closes this passage by quoting the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, who says:
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
As I was preparing this talk, I stumbled upon a sermon by Rabbi Joshua Fixler, who also explores the tears in the readings of these two days and offers a perspective that opens a door for experiencing and transforming that pain—that builds on Wheatley’s understanding. He writes:
…even as each of the mothers in our holiday readings was situated in a larger context, each one’s pain was real. Ironically, it’s easier to talk about the big picture than to listen to the stories of people in pain. … It always surprises me that the Torah and Haftarah we read on Rosh Hashanah are not about the big picture, about the rhetoric of the day. Today is the birthday of the world, we could read Genesis 1, the story of creation… instead we spend these days reading deeply powerful stories of personal petition and divine intercession. We don’t read about the creation of the cosmos or the need for repentance, we read about the wailing of mothers.
He then specifically speaks about yesterday’s Haftarah (the origin story of Samuel, at the start of the Book of Samuel), of the moment when Eli becomes angry with Hannah, not seeing that she is distraught and thinking that she is defiling the temple with her drunkenness:
Eli cannot see Hannah. He sees her only in the context of the temple, for which he is responsible. It’s sacrilege to be drunk in this sacred space! …He sits at the doorway of the shrine, literally, he is outside, looking at the whole. He only sees Hannah as a small piece inside this larger puzzle. His concern for the integrity of this institution blinds him to the woman who sits before him in tears…When he acknowledges her pain, she is no longer just an “other,” now he sees her as a mother, calling out for a son.
It’s not that Eli should not be concerned with his shrine. It is his job to sit at the gate. But until his concern for the bigger picture is balanced against empathy for the individual, he lacks the ability to hear Hannah’s story. We must all be like Eli, who balances a concern for the shrine with compassion for the people who sit within it. Why do we read about so many wailing mothers on Rosh Hashanah? To remind us that these next ten days are not just about ideas like the birthday of the world, the nature of the universe, the power of repentance and forgiveness. Rather these stories of wailing mothers remind us that these ten days are about people. Sarah and Hagar, Hannah and Rachel are crying out, begging us to remember them. And not just them, but the real people in our lives.
If we consider these words alongside what Margaret Wheatley offers, it seems that the way that we hold joy and pain is by attending to others, seeing the people in front of us, and taking actions where we can genuinely make a difference. And not spending our time worrying that these actions are futile. When we focus on what is in front of us, where we can make a difference, we can hold the tension between joy and sorrow. We can live lives of purpose and meaning—and through that, lives suffused with joy--even if we can’t change the larger context.
I’ll close with a passage in Margaret Wheatley’s book that I return to often—one that inspires me and I hope does the same for you.
We cannot push aside the real world or would we want to. The work that needs doing is rich in meaning and purpose.
But we have to amend the definition of meaningful.
If it’s not creating change at the large scale… if it doesn’t stop the disintegration, then what does it mean to make a difference? …The simple answer is found in all philosophies and spiritual traditions: Focus on serving others. Serve individuals; serve small groups; serve an entire community or organization. No matter what is going on around us, we can attend to the people in front of us, to the issues confronting us and there, we offer what we can. We can offer insight and compassion. We can be present. We can stay and not flee. We can be exemplars of the best human qualities. That is a life well lived, even if we didn’t save the world.
In this time of rising insanity and brutality, work that engages our better human qualities is a gift we can offer to others…How wonderful to have the chance to engage together in doing good work, no matter what is going on around us. We are richly blessed.
Wishing all of us a year of peace.