Sermons: High Holy Days

When I was eleven years old, my family and I went hiking through an evergreen forest in Washington State.  My grandmother was with us.  But she bolted ahead, rushing past the wonders that captivated our attention.  An insect with shiny metallic blue wings.  A huge rotting tree trunk with young saplings taking root inside.  A small creek with a miniature waterfall spilling into a moss-framed fairy pond. 

My grandmother’s image grew smaller and smaller until she disappeared around a bend.   Through the trees I saw Mount Rainier, its glaciers gleaming against the deep blue sky.  But my grandmother was gone. She left us behind in her rush towards the mountains that reminded her of home. 

My grandmother Josephine was born in Konstanz, Germany, near the border of Switzerland.  When Josephine was nine years old, her mother sent her far away from her home. The family was poor.  When Josephine’s father died, her mother did not know how she would support four children. So Josephine’s mother sent her oldest child, my grandmother, across the ocean to live an uncle and aunt.  Josephine had never met them before.

She had a miserable childhood. Other school children teased her.  Her English was poor so it was difficult to keep up in school.  Her teacher said she was stupid. 

Homesick and miserable, Josephine was never the same. She left home as a nine-year-old child and did not return to her mother and her siblings until she was herself a grandmother, forty years after she was uprooted from her home. 

Forced to leave home: This theme is echoed in the traditional Torah reading for the first day of Rosh Hashanah. In it we read the story of another broken family.   Sarah demands that Abraham send his first born son, Ishmael into the wilderness, so that “the son of a slave woman” would not inherit with her own son, Isaac. 

In the Torah story, Abraham does not want to listen to Sarah. But God tells Abraham he has to, so Abraham has no choice.  He sends Ishmael and his mother Hagar off into the wilderness, with Hagar carrying a water skin and her son on her shoulder.

When their water runs out, Hagar places her son in the shade of a bush, certain that he will soon die.  Unable to bear the sight of her son’s death, Hagar moves away from him and begins to weep.  It is a scene of utter misery.

But God hears Ishmael’s cries and sends an angel to intervene. “Fear not,” the angel tells her.  “Lift up the boy and take him by the hand.”  Then God “opens Hagar’s eyes” and she sees a well of water.  Hagar fills the water skin and gives it to Ishmael to drink. 

 The Torah does not tell us much about Ishmael’s life after that, only to say that he and Isaac reunite to bury their father Abraham, many decades after Ishmael was uprooted from his home. 

We are part of a people who know what it is to be uprooted.  Our history is one of expulsions and migrations and yearning for home.  Our people have endured trauma that can reverberate throughout the generations. 

This trauma is not confined to the past, nor is it limited to leaving a physical place we call home. We often use the expression “feel at home.”  Home is a matter of the heart as much as it is a matter of location. 

It has been hard to feel at home in this time of the pandemic. This is ironic because many of us have spent more time at home than ever.  Yet we have been uprooted from a comfortable place. We live with the reality that our routines can be upended by an invisible virus. We live with moments of uncertainty, frustration, and grief.  We see the limits of our power to control what will happen.  We will never be the same. 

Many of us have been traumatized by this pandemic. When people are traumatized, the past intrudes on the present. Consider the soldier traumatized by battle, years later frightened by the sound of fireworks in which he hears gunfire and missiles.  Or the person physically beaten as a child, who reacts with a flinch to an unexpected touch. Or my grandmother, rushing along the mountain path, propelled away from us by her longing for home. 

So many of us hear a thrum of anxiety that underscores even the most beautiful moments.  We are on high alert, scanning for danger around us, watching for people without masks, checking the daily coronavirus case numbers, wondering if we will end up among the grief-stricken.

Like my grandmother, we long to return to a place we have lost. Our longing may blind us to the tiny wonders and the sweeping views along the mountain path.  We may feel like Hagar, whose fear blinded her to the well of water that was the source of her salvation. 

This is the season of teshuva, often translated as “return.”  We might think that to return means to “go back.”  This past year-and-a-half has taught us that it is impossible to return to the past.  The past as we knew it no longer exists. 
Teshuva also means “direction.”  We can change the direction of our lives.  We can turn ourselves around.  We can return to a path that leads us to a fuller life.

We have everything we need right here, right where we are. We need only stop and notice.  Notice the warmth in the eyes of a loving friend.  Feel the perfect, small hand of a child resting in our own.  Hear the voice that calls to us in our moments of misery and despair, the voice that reassures us “fear not.” 

Notice just one thing.  The poet Mary Oliver wrote, “if you notice anything, it leads you to notice more and more.” 

This new year, more than any other, invites us to live with an open heart.  To love deeply and fully. To connect to one another with compassion and empathy. To move forward along our path, pausing to notice the insect with the blue metallic wings, the fairy pond and its waterfall, and the tree stump that nourishes new life.   This is our prayer as the new year begins.   This is the hope that will sustain us.