Choosing Life in a Pandemic (Erev Rosh Hashanah)

It feels like a decade since last High Holidays, when we gathered in the ballroom to weave our voices together in song. We grieve the waves upon waves of losses we’ve had over the past year. As we recount our personal and communal losses, we add to them the loss of our ability to join together as a community during this tender time of year. 

Over the past many months, many of us have understandably become numb in the face of overwhelming cruelty, injustice, and death we have faced personally, or read about in the news: the lack of national leadership to care for and protect us during COVID19; the police killings of George Floyd, and countless other Black and brown people; the destruction of life-giving natural resources like our water and air, and the apocalyptic scenes from California and beyond where wildfires continue to rage.

Writer Brene Brown points out, moments like this, when our hearts close, they don’t just close to the bad stuff — but also to the good stuff. As we armored our hearts against the horror of the past year, we may have found we became less able to fully receive positive experiences: the love of friends and family, the taste of good food, the beauty of the natural world around us. 

Rosh Hashanah, yom harat haolam is not a time to judge ourselves for this: rather, it’s an invitation to wake up to how we are choosing to live. It’s an opportunity to return, to start over, to renew ourselves; to use our awareness of life’s fragility to live with a bit more intention, to open our hearts once more so they can respond to the challenges we face, and fully receive life’s joys — so we can live and feel more fully.

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According to our sages, after humanity emerged in the final moments of the world’s birth, and just before we were expelled — in Rabbi Yitz Greenberg’s words, “from the garden of fate to the plane of free will” the Holy One gave us a choice, but also a responsibility — which our tradition reminds us of each year, on the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah:

See, I set before you this day life and good, death and evil (Deut 30:15).

 Through these words, we understand every good and godly action enhances life, and every evil action reduces life.

We have faced this very choice many times over the past year: confronted with life’s incredible fragility, we easily despair. In light of this, the Torah’s invitation to all of us who have faced this choice to b’charta b’chayyim / “choose life”…” may feel especially hard. It's not easy or always the obvious thing to do when we are grieving, or isolated or struggling, to seek purpose and connection.

But tonight, you have chosen life by gathering virtually for these days of awe. Tomorrow, and on Yom Kippur, my sermons will focus on how we might face life’s fragility -- and despite it, choose life.

May these talks, joined with our prayers and meditations, inspire us to bring attention this year to the small daily ways we can make this choice: perhaps eating in a way that brings life to ourselves and to the planet; speaking in ways that bring more love and justice to the world; spending our time doing what engages us with people and activities we truly care about.

Shanah tova umetukah — may we all be renewed and our days sweetened in the year ahead.