I’m not a rabbi, but with my beard I’m often mistaken for one. Especially for one particular rabbi, who lives in my town and who everybody thinks looks just like me. (He and I happened to be in a checkout line together a few weeks ago, and they asked if we were brothers. We aren’t.)
I’m not even a very observant Jew. My faith is probably closest to Unitarian Universalism, although I worship at a Unity church on Sunday mornings. I’m not at all sure I believe in God, though in my daily life I find it useful to think and act as if I do. I am sure that, if God exists, He–no, “It”–doesn’t remotely resemble any mental image we can possibly have.
I do, however, believe in the Bible.
To put the matter a bit crudely: it didn’t become the Bible for nothing. It’s Holy Scripture because its subtext, which may have been unconscious even to the people who wrote it, calls out powerfully and unforgettably to our own unconscious. Adam and Eve never existed; neither did the garden from which they were, heartbreakingly, ejected. (As they were from their innocent nudity, which may be the same thing.) Yet they’ll always be an authentic part of us, because at bottom they are us.
A few years ago, at about this time of year, another rabbi for whom I’m never mistaken encountered me in a bagel shop, and she asked jokingly if I’d be willing to preach her sermon for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. (The New Year that’s now about to begin, the 5779th from the world’s creation, will be celebrated this coming Monday and Tuesday.)
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
For some reason, she never took me up on my offer. So here’s what I might have used as a New Year’s message. For everyone, Jewish or not, because there isn’t one of us who can’t use the fresh start that a new year brings.
My text: the 126th Psalm, in its entirety:
When the Lord brought back those that returned to Zion,
We were like unto them that dream.
Then was our mouth filled with laughter,
And our tongue with singing;
Then said they among the nations:
“The Lord hath done great things with these.”
The Lord hath done great things with us;
We are rejoiced.
Turn our captivity, O Lord,
As the streams in the dry land.
They that sow in tears
Shall reap in joy.
Though he goeth on his way weeping that beareth his measure of seed,
He shall come home with joy, bearing his sheaves.
(Trans. Jewish Publication Society, 1917)
“We were like unto them that dream.” The whole psalm has a dreamlike quality, brilliantly conveyed in the eerie, haunting rendition of the Hebrew by Israeli singer Yehoram Gaon, the fourth track of his album Neshama. And this quality is enhanced by its seeming contradiction.
My old friend Jack Leiss emailed me a few days ago to ask: if “those that returned to Zion” are the Jews from Babylonia, allowed back to their Palestinian homeland after decades of exile in the sixth century BCE–as it seems almost certain that they are–then what’s the “captivity” mentioned in the second half of the psalm? “Turn our captivity, O Lord”–but hadn’t He already done that?
But the Hebrew phrase shav sh’vit, “turn the captivity,” can be used in a figurative as well as a literal sense. In Job 42:10, “the Lord turned the captivity of Job,” as the King James Bible translates it; meaning, He restored Job’s fortunes, turned them from ill to good. The Jewish exiles came back to a Palestine that was barren, desolate, hungry. They’d come home again, but they weren’t really home–“home” being understood as a place where you’re nurtured and cared for. Where life feels the way it ought to be.
Speaking through their unnamed poet, they longed for this “turning,” like the sudden flooding of a dry desert wadi after a rainstorm. Like the welcome burden of rich harvests, of which they could only dream.
They’d have understood the character in S.Y. Agnon’s Zionist novel, Only Yesterday, who laments that the journey to the Land of Israel is more beautiful than actually being in the Land of Israel. During the journey, you’re still in the dream. Get there, and you slam up against the reality of a hard land where human connection and the very necessities of life must be struggled for.
They’d have understood Homer’s Odysseus. Many years ago, when a young girl asked me what the Odyssey was about, I told her: it was about a man who wanted badly to go home but could never quite manage it. (Until at last he did, and found that his home had become a nightmare.) The theme that runs through it is nostos, the Greek word for “homecoming.” Combine that with algos, the Greek for “pain, sorrow, grief, distress,” and you get nostalgia–the “pain” of yearning for a “homecoming.” The yearning is painful because it can never been fulfilled, because the home you want no longer exists and probably never existed except in nostalgic fantasy.
“Returning from exile” isn’t just geographic. It’s also temporal: going back to the way things once were. Which is impossible, because unlike the road from Palestine to Babylonia, the road from past to present is strictly one-way. We see that in our bodies every time we look in the mirror.
I imagine things slowly improved for the returning exiles. I imagine that sooner or later they had harvests from which they could fill their bellies at least once in a while. I also imagine that they didn’t stop singing the 126th psalm, didn’t stop aching for that “turning” of their “captivity” that remained always in the future. Even after the original returnees had died, and it was their children’s children who kept on singing of it.
(Just as Jews still conclude the Passover Seder with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem!” and as a kid I always wondered: why don’t we just get on a plane and go there? And it was only when I grew up that I understood: “Jerusalem” isn’t really Jerusalem but a vanished past that never existed, and there aren’t any airlines that fly to it.)
The exiles’ descendants kept on praying for the “turning” because they were human beings as we are, who can’t help seeing each New Year as the “turning” that will bring us and our lives to where we want them to be.
And so I will offer these wishes for New Year 5779, for you and for me:
May we sow–hopefully not in tears, but if tears must fall, let them not keep us from the necessary business of sowing.
May we reap in joy–if not the crop we were looking for, then something else that will nourish us just as well.
And whatever happens, may our mouths be filled with laughter and our tongues with singing.
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
Connect to Journal of a UFO Investigator on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator
and Find David Halperin on Google+
Read about my book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO–coming in 2020 from Stanford University Press.
Don’t have time to keep checking my blog? Sign up for my monthly email newsletter, with summaries and links to the past month’s posts, plus oldies-but-goodies from the archive.
