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Let's get one thing straight. I'm not a Rabbi. I don't give sermons. Hey, I hardly even take sermons.
Relax, I'm just going to share a few stories about this time of year. Take what you like and leave the rest.
Rosh Hashanah is nigh upon us. (Sorry for going archaic on you. It just felt right to use an old-style phrase when talking about something lofty.) An old Yiddish proverb says before Judaism's Judgement Day (Often reduced to merely "Jewish New Year's"), even the fish in the ocean tremble. Once or more upon a time, there were people who felt it.
My brother Rabbi Nota Schiller, zt"l (d. 2025), had a rabbinic mentor in Yeshiva of Eastern Parkway named Rabbi Ben-Tzion Leitner, zt"l. Rabbi Leitner was an old-school Novardoker — a group that turned mussar into an art form. They were an elite force in the movement.
Near the end of his life, in the early 1950s, Rabbi Ben-Zion lay in a coma. A doctor came into the room and saw his Rebbetzin (life-partner) speaking to him.
The doctor said, "You're wasting your time talking to someone in a coma. He can't hear you."
The Rebbetzin didn't answer. Instead, she leaned over and whispered in her husband's ear. Suddenly, tears started rolling down his cheeks.
The doctor flipped out and yelled, "What did you say to him?!"
"I told him 'Haynt iz Elul (Today is Elul)'."
The twist in the title refers to more than just earlier generations. It's easy to confuse calendars and colanders. And I don't mean just the spelling.
It's all too easy to let the days drain right through the holes. Time too easily drips away.
It says in Genesis (24:1), "Abraham was old, well on in years, and the Divine had blessed Abraham with everything." The expression "well on in years" in Hebrew is "ba bayamim — he came with days." Our sages say that Abraham came with all his days. Not a day was wasted.
The Jewish calendar is more than a simple linear table of days. Dates are actual places in time that we come back to every year. My brother put it in a visual image.
(I think it comes from the Maharal [d. 1609]. If you know the source, help me out.)
He described it as a spiral staircase. We keep coming back to the same place horizontally, but it's at a higher level vertically. Between you and me, I have a hard time with spiral staircases. I have acrophobia. Looking down from one gives me verti-don't-go-there. So let me put it a different way.
I live on the fifth floor of a co-op building. The apartments below me face the same direction. But I have a different view because of the height of my floor. It's an entirely different story.
In another story, part of the Passover Haggadah (seder text), it says, "In every generation, a person is obligated to see himself as if he were leaving Egypt, as it says ‘And you shall tell your son on that day.'"
Different year. Same place. It's not merely remembered, it's relived.
One of the central themes of Rosh Hashanah, and the days leading up to it, is the concept of Malchus — majesty.
Sadly, there's a price we pay for the blessings of democracy. We have lost the appreciation for a King. In a lecture before Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Nachman Bulman, zt"l (d. 2002), taught how the central idea of Rosh Hashanah is to reestablish the Kingdom of G od. But, he said, we have a problem appreciating kingdom today.
To illustrate, Rabbi Bulman told about Haile Selassie, the formidable Emperor of Ethiopia. Once, while the Emperor was abroad, rebels attempted a coup. All he had to do to crush the revolution was to return to Ethiopia.
Finally, in 1974, a revolution did bring an end to Haile Selassie's reign. Still, when a rebel came into the palace and confronted the Emperor, the young man involuntarily saluted and said, "Your Highness, I have come to inform you that you are deposed."
On Rosh Hashanah, we strive to bring back the sense of the Kingdom, and the rule of the King of Kings. Sometimes words alone are not enough to evoke that feeling. They have to be sung.
Rabbi Bulman, a man of fire and passion in his speech, also had the Divine gift of song. And when he led the services, he combined both. One year, before Rosh Hashanah, a student at Jerusalem's Ohr Somayach told Rabbi Bulman that he had some issues of faith. Rabbi Bulman, who was preparing to lead the Mussaf services, asked the student to please come over to him after the prayers.
After Mussaf, the boy came and said, "Good Yom Tov."
Rabbi Bulman said, "You wanted to ask me something ?"
The student shook his head and said, "No. I don't have any more questions. You already answered them for me."
Let me finish with a timely story. If you heard it, just enjoy it again.
Maybe 30 years ago, I called the Amshinover Rebbe, shlita, a few days before Rosh Hashanah and wished him a good year. I could almost hear him smile when he answered, "This year can also be good!"
I later told the story to, lbl"c, the Bostoner Rebbe of Ramat Beit Shemesh, zt"l, and he said, "Absolutely!" Then he added that even in afternoon prayers on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the last few seconds of the old year, we still say "Barech aleinu es hashanah hazos — Bless us this year…"
There is still time in those last few seconds to set everything right for the entire year.
So, here's to the best of times, this year and next.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Mordechai Schiller is an award-winning columnist and headline writer at Hamodia, the Daily Newspaper of Torah Jewry, where this first appeared. His column has won two awards -- so far -- from the American Jewish Press Association.
Previously:
• Why I dropped off the radar
• From sly slurnalism to the big lie
• Are Jews really hardwired to be miserable?
• The Time Machine
• One big happy dysfunctional family
• Why Pay Less If You Can Pay More?
• Are We Having Font Yet?
• Why Smart People Do Dumb Things
• There is nothing so sad as a stupid Jew
• Asking For It