Shana Tova: A Deeper Meaning

An online sermon by a wannabe rabbi...

Tomorrow night my wife and I are hosting a holiday dinner to celebrate Rosh Hashana. We host this holiday every year and my wife spends weeks planning for it. This year, we have many families with kids coming, so to host such an event requires a great deal of preparation—not just the volume of food, but also making sure that the house is as pleasant, enjoyable, and welcoming as possible.

One interesting feature of this year’s dinner is that one of the families attending we do not know—they are strangers to my wife and me but friends of our friends, and we were asked if we would host them somewhat last minute. Of course, we said yes, and I am quite thrilled for it: one of Judaism’s core and highest values is to welcome strangers into your home, and once done, to treat them with kindness and love:

When a stranger lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The stranger living with you must be treated as one of your native- born. Love him as yourself, for you were strangers in Egypt. I am the L‑rd your G‑d. ^{LEVITICUS 19:33-34}

In addition to God’s commandment impelling us to love strangers, culturally we hope to do even more—not merely to welcome them, but to lavish them with warmth and kindness.

As part of my preparation for Rosh Hashana dinner, each year I spend time thinking about Judaism, in general, and about the new year specifically. I imagine myself delivering inspirational words and benedictions to my guests. Perhaps this exercise is an extension of the secret longing to be a performer that will forever live within me, or my desire to make a positive impact on the lives of the people within my sphere of influence. More importantly, the exercise of thinking through such a message gives me an opportunity to analayze my beliefs and understanding of various Jewish and secular concepts in order to formulate whatever positive lessons I may have to offer to our guests.

Rosh Hashana means beginning of the year, and on this holiday Jews wish each other shana tova, or a good year. Sometimes, we add additional sentiments, like shana tova umetuka, which means a good and sweet year. This is similar to how we celebrate the beginning of a new year according to the Gregorian calendar: we commonly wish each other a happy new year. But there are subtle and important differences that are lost in the translation, because happy and good are not synonyms. A person can easily have a difficult and unhappy year that is nonetheless good. Conversely, a person can be happy and not be good at all, and in fact many people that are happy can behave in ways that are downright reprehensible. This is because the word happy means feeling positive emotions such as joy, amusement, elation, pleasure, and contentment etc, whereas the word good has moral undertones—such that being good requires behaving in particularly virtuos and righteous ways. When we behave in good ways, we receive the reward of goodness.

The new year is a time when we self-reflect and analyze our behaviors. We willingly acknowledge our sins, whether it is gossiping or coveting or treating our bodies poorly, or otherwise disconnecting from what is good (disconnecting from good means disconnecting from God, which is the definition of the word “sin”) —somehow, we all know what is good and what is not such that a harsh self-analysis is possible. And this is key—of course, we all grow incrementally every day just by living. But so do animals and plants. What makes the new year a uniquely human opportunity for growth is that it can be transformative with nothing more than an acknowledgement of the truth and a change of mindset; we can look at ourselves and find ways that we are, well, disappointed or even disgusted with ourselves, and resolve to change them. And this is the moment when we can truly grow, when we are honest with ourselves about the ways in which we are failing by our own standards. Each of us has a voice inside us that tells us which direction is up.

To listen to that voice, though, requires that we respond rather than react, and this requires practice and exericse. Somehow, through prayer/mindfulness or whatever exercise one does, we must practice to connect to The Good, another way of saying connect with God; it is the same thing. When a person practices this connection day in and day out, they are practicing something “religiously”, which means “with consistant and conscious regularity”. And this, indeed, is what religions are—the day in and day out methodological practice of connecting to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angles of our nature”. This is the teleological and metaphysical reality of the world’s great perrenial philosophies. Once understood, it’s easy to admire a person who sets out each day to deliberately practice a religion with the goal of consciously crafting a life and inner world, rather than merely letting whatever happens happen or giving energy to fleeting thoughts, emotions, and vagaries. And while every religion has its own way, as Rabbi Sachs said, “ze shelanu”, meaning “this is ours”.

So, with that, I want to wish you a happy new year, but even more, a good new year, one in which you further realize, in both senses of the word, all that you can be.