Unearthing The Shards We Leave Behind

My Shanna Tova thoughts

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A Dig That Sparks Imagination

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In my first year of rabbinic school, I found myself at the bottom of a 30-foot hole digging in an archaeological ruin in Israel. My discoveries were hardly earth-shattering, although my partner and I did find a floor of the earliest Canaanite dwelling in Tel Don. And if you've ever read the book The Tell, the very first floor was the first settlement, and that's what we dug up. It was hardly exciting. After all, we didn't find any interesting jewelry or intact pots. But the very act of finding something left behind, or even the stone floor upon which people walked, gives rise to an active imagination. Who walked on these floors? What were their names? The questions we ask reflect our need to know everything, and our imaginations take us to the past to give clarity to our present. I think about the snippets of people's lives through the lens of archaeology, and of course, through memory. But I never really thought about the snippets of my life and what people would find after I was gone. But then I had something of an epiphany during the year of COVID, and I'm sure you'll all be able to relate to it. I think I spent 14 or 15 weeks hunkered down at home. There was nowhere

COVID Remnants Left On The Bimah

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to go. Remember, COVID closed down the world right after Purim, and I mean immediately after Purim. On the Bhima were the two Megilot that I had read from. There was a Purim mask, there was a Grogger, there was a copy of the Purim Spiel, and a Yartseit list from the last Shabbat we gathered, March the 6th. It was an eerie feeling seeing the remnants of my life that were now suddenly abandoned. And coming back to those suddenly abandoned things got me wondering about the other things that we abandon. And if we returned to ponder all those things, what would they tell others about us? As we begin these days of awe, that is a thought worth pondering. The Makzor, the prayer book for the days of awe, comes from the Hebrew word chazor, which means to return, to come back.

The Machzor As A Book Of Return

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The customary idea is that it is a guidebook to return us to a state of spiritual purity once enjoyed but now sullied by sin. But let's explore the Machzor as a book of return and let it guide us to return back in memory and recall all of the things that we left behind, like the McGillas on the Bima and the Yartseit list from the week before. We might be surprised at what we have left in our own wakes. I hope most of us would look back and feel pretty good about ourselves. And I think that would probably be pretty accurate. We are generally good people and truly want to make the world a better place. The law of kindness is on our lips, and we live out our years ethically and honorably. And yet, even though we are sure of everybody's basic decency, we still come together for these days of awe. There is something spiritual, some spiritual gravity that brings us closer to God and to the godlike which dwells in each of us. We may be good, we may think of ourselves as good, but we also know that we are in need of repair. We seek that forgiveness, and we all know we need. To revisit them, to pick them up carefully, examining their contours, help us to create a narrative of where we have been and presents us with a choice as to what kind of remnants we want to leave behind

Picking Up Shards To Choose Change

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in the next year. In the end, we use those shards and we once again examine and build a new life out of those building blocks. Our shards are our handiwork, but they are also pieces of what we were, not telling stones of what we can be. The still small voice, that divine voice, is reaching deep within our souls and giving us the chance to bend over and pick up a shard, examine it, and return it to our lives as a moment of joy or a moment of regret that we need to correct. The journey begins anew on Rosh Hashanah. The Machzor is open before us. The words to return to God beckon us. The phrases to return our shards and fragments

Rosh Hashanah Begins The New Journey

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summon us to a new place, a new us, and in doing so gives us the opportunity to leave moments of light and more worthy shards behind us. And so I wish you a shana tova, a year of blessing and goodness, as we begin our journey of replacing the shards of regret and sin with the shards of light and joy and blessing. Shana tova.