L'Chaim and Shana Tova from Rabbi Rachel
Tonight at sunset, we will simultaneously move into Shabbat – the final day of the week – and into Rosh Hashanah. I’m excited for all the potential that this New Year of 5784 holds for the Kavana community.
After a few years of pandemic-related disruptions and a solid year of working to strengthen Kavana’s organizational capacity, we are now ready to return our focus to the people and programs that have made this community sparkle in all the ways that it does. We enter this new year keenly aware of all the brokenness that needs fixing in the world around us. Coming together in community to celebrate both Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah will help us re-center ourselves individually, forge meaningful connections with one another, and together find the strength we need to do this work of repair. In this, Kavana’s 18th year of existence, we will embrace life together with renewed energy and brightness!
Over this Rosh Hashanah at Kavana, across all of our different programs and services, we will be drawing on the (second) Creation story of Genesis for inspiration. This story – of the first humans in the Garden of Eden – holds so many rich lessons about what it means to be human, to exercise responsibility, find companionship, make mistakes, and more.
At the beginning of Genesis chapter 2 – the chapter we’re going to be playing with the most over this holiday – we find the “vayechulu” text which is also recited liturgically as the prologue to Kiddush on Shabbat. This is the passage in which God concludes the work of creation and then rests and is restored on the seventh day: “shavat vayinafash.” Like God, during these High Holidays – not only Shabbat itself, but really the whole window of time from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur – we aspire to make metaphorical contact with the Garden of Eden, to rest through prayer and reflection during time away from our daily routines, and to reinvigorate our lives through this soul-work.
In halakhah (Jewish law), there’s a famous question about what to do when Shabbat and a holiday coincide on the calendar. The ancient rabbis wonder: which observance takes precedence? For them, this is a practical question; for example, when we recite kiddush tonight over a cup of wine, do we bless God who has sanctified Shabbat and then the holiday of Rosh Hashanah, or Rosh Hashanah and then Shabbat? On a more abstract level, they are also asking about relative importance and how we should prioritize our holy time and our lives.
The rabbinic principle that emerges in answer to this question is: “Tadir v’she’eino tadir, tadir kodem” - “[In the case of] a more frequent and less frequent event, the more frequent takes precedence.”
This is a surprising answer. Instinctively in our society, we often give great prominence to special or less usual occurences: life cycle events, birthdays, vacations, and the like. Without a doubt, these peak moments are important in adding joy to our lives, and particularly memorable. The rabbinic principle, though, reminds us that our focus on the special cannot be at the expense of the everyday. We should strive to put more emphasis on the regular patterns of our days and weeks, to consider the minutiae of our lives as we re-set our course, to think most about how we spend most of our time. This year, as Shabbat and Rosh Hashanah coincide, we get a helpful reminder: that these High Holy Days are only valuable insofar as they help us reflect on and make commitments about how we want to live – in ways both big and small – throughout the whole year.
Tonight, as we enter both Shabbat and the New Year simultaneously, I will recite the words of Kiddush, praising the Holy One who sanctifies Shabbat, the Jewish people, and also Yom HaZikaron (“the holiday of remembrance” aka Rosh Hashanah). May we all find the pathways we need in this season to rest, reflect, and renew our lives. May these holy days prepare us to embrace the next year of life with gusto.
L’chaim (to life!) and shana tova,
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum
