Shanah tovah. Thanks for being around to hear my words, and thanks to Adath Israel for the privilege of speaking this Rosh Hashanah. We are almost the end of the service, and almost at the end of Rosh Hashanah as we know it. We will do tashlich afterwards, because yesterday was Shabbat, but in a few hours we will say goodbye to the beginning of the year.
Now, why are beginnings important? Why should we even mark them?
It is in part because of the idea that the end of any thing is really inside its beginning. Our tradition holds: like a flame is bound to the coal, the end is bound to the beginning.
So look with me at the very beginning of our service this morning – and actually, every morning. Look on page 35 of our machzor, and you’ll find quite an astonishing intention for the beginning of every morning: “Behold, I accept upon myself the mitzvah of the Creator: love your neighbor as yourself.”
Wait… accept upon myself… what? This early in the morning? God, how can You want anything from me before my first cup of coffee?
Now those words don’t get into the prayerbook by accident. They are put there in the 16th century, by the followers of the Arizal, one of the great kabbalists of all times. This is such a central teaching of his that you find these words etched on his grave – by his students.
The Ari instructed them that no one should begin to pray, not even a single word, until they had first taken this one thing upon themselves: to love their community. Before we open our mouths to God at all, we are to say: “Behold, I take upon myself the mitzvah: love your fellow as yourself.” This instruction is quite radical: you don’t get to talk to God until you’ve made your peace with talking to each other. Why would he insist on that? Because in the vision of the Ari, no prayer ever rises alone.
In the Ari’s vision of creation of the universe, which is what we celebrate today, God’s light was poured into vessels in the beginning, but the light was so great that the vessels could not hold it, and the vessels shattered. And the sparks of that light scattered and fell in every corner of the world, trapped in the shards, hidden.
And the whole purpose of a human life, the whole work we were put here to do, is tikkun, fixing this broken world: to find those scattered sparks and lift them home, gathering together what was split apart.
Now hold that image next to another one the Ari taught: that every Jewish soul is a spark of one great soul. We are, all of us, limbs of a single body, threads of a single fabric. Pull on one thread and the whole cloth moves.
So when we love another Jew, we are not just being nice. We are doing tikkun. We are gathering sparks. We are un-shattering, just a little, the broken vessel of the world. And when we turn on each other, when we judge, dismiss, write each other off — we are doing the very opposite. We are shattering. We are breaking the vessels again.
That is why the Ari would not let you pray until you accepted this mitzvah first. Because your prayer and my prayer do not ascend in separate elevators. They rayse braided together, or they do not rayse at all. Ahavat Yisrael, love of your fellow Jew, is not the reward at the end of the spiritual life.
Loving those in your community is the price of admission. But what about the others, those not in our community?
Our tradition had this very argument. Rabbi Akiva took our verse — v’ahavta l’reacha kamocha, love your neighbor as yourself and called it the great principle of the whole Torah. And Ben Azzai said: nah, there is one greater: Zeh sefer toldot adam — this is the book of the generations of humankind, on the day God created the human being, in the likeness of God they were made. Ben Azzai was afraid that the word reacha, “your neighbor,” might be read too small: just my kind, just my people, only my side. So he reached all the way back to Adam, to the first human, to remind us that every face we will ever meet is a face stamped with the image of God.
But before we go on — look again at where those sparks fell. Not into Jewish homes alone. Into every corner of the world, the Ari says: into every corner, into every person, into places we would never think to look. And if the sparks are everywhere, then the work of lifting them cannot end at the border of our own people.
The circle the Ari draws does not end at the edge of our people.
It begins there, with the Jew beside you in the pew, and then it keeps widening, because the sparks kept falling, and because the image of God is pressed into every single person who will ever pass before that same Judge. To love our fellow is tikkun. To love the stranger is tikkun. Every spark we lift, wherever it fell, is one more shard gathered back toward the light.
Now Rosh Hashanah has a second name: Yom HaDin. The Day of Judgment. Today, our tradition says, as we just read in the machzor: כָּל בָּאֵי עוֹלָם עוֹבְרִין לְפָנֶיךָ כִּבְנֵי מָרוֹן — every living being passes before God one by one, like sheep beneath the shepherd’s staff. Today the King sits on the throne of judgment. We even change the words of the Amidah for these days, for the next week entire, actually: HaMelech HaMishpat, the King of Judgment. Everything about today whispers the same thing: you are being judged.
But here is a strange and beautiful thing: on the one day of the year when we feel most judged, the Ari’s words are waiting for us at the door, and what they say is: accept upon yourself love.
On the day of judgment, the very first thing we take upon ourselves is not judgment. It is the decision to lessen our judgment of one another. Because here is a truth we manage to forget for eleven and three-quarters of a month during the year, and we get to remember, if we are lucky today: the judging is God’s job. Not ours.
My friends, today is your lucky day: you get to remember that.
There is a bracha we say — I wish we said it less, but life being what it is, we say it fairly often: when someone dies, when disaster strikes, when dreadful news arrive, we say four words: Baruch Dayan HaEmet. Blessed is the True Judge.
Not “the judge.” The true Judge. Dayan ha’emet. And that one word emet, true, implies something about every other judge in the universe: any person judging only sees part of the truth. There is only one Judge who sees the whole picture and knows the whole story. Not me, not you, not any other person in any part of the world.
Think honestly about how we judge each other. We see a sliver. We see the man who cut us off in the parking lot, but we do not see the phone call he got from the doctor an hour ago. We see the friend who didn’t visit at the hospital but we do not see the shame she is drowning in. We see the cousin whose politics make our blood pressure spike but we do not see the fear underneath it, or the love underneath, or the sleepless nights underneath. We judge the surface, because the surface is all we see. God judges the truth, because God sees all the way down. That is what Dayan Ha’emet means. Only God has the whole file. The rest of us are always, always working from a single torn page, and sometimes, from a piece torn from a torn page.
Our sages knew this. Hillel said: do not judge your fellow until you have stood in his place. And I want to add: since you will never truly stand in another person’s place, you never carry their exact griefs, never wake inside their exact fears, their feeling of being cursed in this life, the implication is: perhaps hold off on judging altogether. Leave it to the One who was standing there the whole time.
But we know our minds, we jump to judging at the snap of fingers, we even have a word for it: snap judgment. And yet – our tradition hands us the flip side of snap judgment as a positive command: הֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת — judge every person toward the side of merit. Give people the benefit of the doubt.
When the story could be told two ways, choose the generous version. Not because you’re naïve, but because you are honest about how little you actually know.
Now, if this were only a lovely piece of ethical advice (be kind, assume the best) that would be plenty for any ordinary day. But today is not an ordinary day. Today is Yom HaDin. And on the Day of Judgment, this stops being a nicety and becomes something much closer to a survival strategy.
Listen, please, to what the Talmud promises: bemidah sheadam moded, modedim lo — the way a person judges others, that’s how that person is judged. The very ruler you take to measure other people; that’s the ruler used by Heaven when it is your turn.
Do you hear what that means on this particular morning?
Every harsh judgment we have carried around this year, every grudge, every “I can’t believe she,” every “he should have known better”… we are, right now, handing God the ruler. We are showing the Judge exactly how we would like to be measured. If we have spent the year judging everyone strictly, to the letter, accepting no excuses, listening to no explanations, then that is precisely the standard we have invited down onto us today.
AND the reverse is also true, and it is the best news I can bring you from this bimah this morning. If we judge generously, because we all know it is impossible not to judge, the question is simply how will you judge – if we can look at the people who have hurt us and, even for one moment, imagine the page we cannot see — then we teach Heaven to look at us that way, too. Our sages pictured God doing exactly this today: rising from kise hadin, the throne of strict judgment, and crossing over to kise harachamim, the throne of mercy. And what moves the King from one throne to the other? We do. By how we treat one another out in the parking lot, in the grocery store, in the doctor’s office, at school, at the mail office – you name it.
This is the secret folded inside the Ari’s etched words. Behold, I accept upon myself. Before we ask God to judge us gently, we practice judging each other gently. Before we beg for mercy, we go ahead and hand it out. That is the accepting. That is what we take upon ourselves before a single other prayer leaves our lips.
And I want to say something plainly, because I think we all feel it. I know how hard this is right now, we are living in times that are difficult for love and easy for snap judgments.
We are invited to judge harshly every thing and every one. We have become very, very good at judging one another. At sorting Jews into the ones who understand and the ones who don’t. At reading a person’s entire soul off a single post, a single sentence, a single choice. We have all become expert judges.
And we are exhausted. Because carrying that much judgment is exhausting. It is one of the heaviest things a human being can carry.
But the Ari, from that hillside in Tzfat, offers to lift it off our shoulders. He says: put it down. You were never appointed to that bench. There is One True Judge and, thank God, it isn’t you. What a relief that is, if you let it be one. You can love the cousin without agreeing with the cousin. You can keep the friend and drop the grudge. You can stand shoulder to shoulder with a Jew you do not understand and still look at them and think: behold, I accept upon myself the mitzvah to love you as myself — not because we have resolved everything between us, but because loving each other was never, for one moment, conditional on resolving everything between us.
We cannot control everything around us — God knows this year taught us that. But we can always, always choose what we take upon ourselves.
So let us add to the Ari’s sentence: behold, I accept upon myself love. And what else? I accept upon myself… To live this year with intention.
To love all others as myself — even those I argue with. Especially the ones I argue with.
To show up with a little more patience. A little more unity. A little more heart.
And to leave the judging — the real judging, the true judging — to the only One who ever knows the whole story. May our mercy, kindness and love be the measure we receive back.
And because the end of our year is in the beginning, may we all inscribe each other into the Book of Life together, with more loving and less judging, so we can all rise. All of us braided. Gathered. Rising as one.
Shanah tovah u’metukah.