Rosh Ha-Shanah is a wall-eyed day.  It looks this way and that. It has us contemplate two core themes simultaneously. Today is a day of beginnings and it is also a day of returning.

These themes of beginning and of returning pull in different directions –  One theme – beginning – is forward-looking. The other theme – returning – has us turning around and looking back.

Today is a day of beginnings,  for it is the beginning of a new year. The synagogue is bedecked in white, symbol of a clean, fresh start.

And it is a day of returning, for it is the season of teshuvah – of Repentance. We are called to re-think, to review our lives, our actions, our beliefs and goals. The white kittel is like a death shroud, a reminder of our mortality, meant to get us to rethink our life choices and values.

But, while these foci pull in opposite directions, they actually end up launching us into an elliptical orbit powered by their complementary forces. As we spin around these two themes, each one pulls us towards itself and then back to the other.

Today is a day of beginning – of beginning to return; today is a day of returning – of returning to our beginnings.

Today is the beginning of our return, for it is the first of the Ten Days of Returning. On this day, when we inaugurate the Holy Blessed One as Sovereign of the universe,  that coronation is equally meant to inaugurate a process of thought and emotion that we must continue to cultivate and deepen in the coming days, until we reach atonement. We cannot expect ourselves to return in an instant. But we cannot simply abandon the steps of t’shuvah. Today is the beginning.

And today we return to our beginnings, for we turn back in time to recall the beginning of the world. It is the anniversary of the beginning of Creation, as well as the beginnings of our story as a people. How can we begin anew without a compass to guide us? But returning to our beginnings helps us gain our bearings.

We encapsulate this elliptical consciousness when we recite these words in the Machzor –

 זה היום תחילת מעשיך – זכרון ליום ראשון

This day is the very beginning of Your work; it is a remembrance of the first day.

Well, if it is the very beginning, then there is nothing to remember yet. And if we are remembering the beginning, then it must be long gone.

But the idea is that, while we acknowledge how distant and long-ago our beginnings were, our spirit is able to reconnect with that past, here, in the present. How wondrous it is that we can retrieve that past anew!

On Rosh Ha-Shanah we are bidden to retrieve our past. We are bidden to journey backwards, to grasp the past and then to draw it forward, returning it into our own present so as to imagine it anew.

So let us imagine Abram and Sarai, our ancestors, who were also bidden to embark on a journey. They were called to leave behind their familiar surroundings, their familial homes and to go forward, to an unknown destination. Tomorrow we will read that Abraham is called to embark on a journey again – to another unknown place, “to a mountiantop, that I will tell you.” That trip is the famous Last Trial, the Aqedah – the Binding of Isaac. After he and Isaac go forth and they pass the test, Abraham returns home to Beersheba. But Sarah is not there. The next we hear, she has passed away in Hebron and Abraham must go there to bury her and mourn for her.

What happened to Sarah? We do not know. The Torah is silent. So the midrashim tried to fill the gap. They gave various answers, all of them working from the idea that Sarah had some sort of reaction to hearing about the drama that overtook her only husband and her only son.

But I would suggest that, in this age, when we have been blessed to rediscover the Torah of our Imahot – our Matriarchs – a Torah so long neglected and subdued, that perhaps it is possible to give the beginnings of a new answer to this age-old question. The Torah tells us the story of the test of Abrahm and Isaac, who walked on together to their Divinely mandated, but unknown, destination and destiny. Why does the Torah tell us this story if not because it is not only Abraham and Isaac’s story? Surley it is because it has meaning for others? Is it not so that we might, in some way, imagine others, including ourselves, in that same situation?

Let us, then, heed the Torah’s call, and let us imagine that Abraham was not the only one to be called and tested by God, and that Sarah, herself, had her own, personal trial. Perhaps, just perhaps, she was not in Beersheba because she had also been called to embark on a new journey of testing and discovery. Perhaps, just as Abraham heard God’s voice, so did she –

קחי נא את בינתך, את יחידתך, את אהבתך

והטמיני אותן באחת המערות אשר אומר אליך

Take your mother-wit, your solitary self, your love,

and bury them in one of the caves that I will tell you.

Just as with Abraham, hers was also a test of faith and hope and a new journey of discovery. Even at her advanced age, Sarah was ready for a new beginning. We can imagine that she, too, must have answered, “Hineni – Here I am.” And she went out early in the morning on her solitary journey – without Abraham, and without her son, Isaac, and without the servants. Alone.

Abraham, who, as we read in today’s Torah reading, was willing to let go of his son Ishmael, was called to bind himself to his remaining son, Isaac. Sarah, who clung to her only son, Isaac, so closely that, as we read in today’s Torah reading,  she would permit no one else to grow up in his presence, was called to leave her son behind and to seek God on her own.

In the wake of these painful family upheavals, she came to Hebron, returning to the place where she and Abram had gone to live right after the first time their family suffered a rupture, after they separated from their  nephew Lot, with whom they had begun to quarrel. (Gen. 13:18) After that painful separation they pitched their tent at Hebron and served God there. Now, years later, after another time of family breakup, Sarah set out at God’s behest and she came again to Hebron – the place of חבור, of bonding together, the place of חברים – the place of Friendship.

Thus, her journey was not only a new beginning. It was also a journey of returning. She had returned to the beginning. For this was also the place where tradition recalled that Adam and Eve were buried.

What happened to her there? What Divine vision was she given at the end of her journey of t’shuvah – return? We are not told. Only that Abraham had to go to Efron – the “man of dust” –

כי עפר אתה ואל עפר תשוב

For dust is what you are; and you shall return to dust.

(Gen. 3:19)

He went to the man of dust to take a burial place for his wife, and he laid Sarah to rest in that Double Cave, with Adam and Eve. She returned to dust, to the beginning.

This elliptical rhythm of beginning and return interlocks for us with still other orbital circuits that are formed and powered by double focal points. Both the ancient story of Abraham and Isaac, as well as my new midrash of Sarah’s trial, equally spin around the centers of time and place. To go back in time or to initiate a new beginning required a journey to another location, a location in which the burdens of time-past as well as its future promise are stablized and fixed. And both revolve around the twin foci of intimate, private struggles of identity  – who am I? Can I meet this test? – alongside the test of bonding to collective, transpersonal destinies – what is my obligation to others? What is my place in the history of my community? What stories do I recall and what shall I pass on to the next generation?

Indeed, we are, each of us, spinning along so many different orbital paths, pulled and flung along by so many varieties of dual and duelling centers of focus, that we are, each of us, a miniature cosmos, made up of veritable galaxies of interlocking orbital spheres.

How do we adjust them so that they do not collide and shatter us to pieces?

Rosh Ha-Shanah tries to help us, to inspire us, to reassure us – so that we will more fully embrace our micro-cosmic complexity. Rosh Ha-Shanah tells us that life is characterized by increased energy, not by its diminishment and limitation. The more we will invest in our multiple orbital paths, the more brilliantly will our constellations shine forth.

This synagogue means to be part of our pulsating energy fields. Here is a place for us to begin again. Here is a place for us to return again.

Everything that we do here, all that we try to do – in the religious and spiritual orbits, in the social sphere of community, of consolation or celebration, in just plain fun or in our serious  educational efforts for all ages, and in our  acts on behalf of compassion and justice for everyone – all that we call upon you to help us achieve –  is meant to put this lesson of Rosh Ha-Shanah into practice.

I want to call to your attention only two of the many projects we have planned for this coming year.

This year Shomrei Emunah will be a center for the Florence Melton Mini-School of Adult Jewish Learning. You can read more about this program in our newly returned bulletin, Kol Emunah. Every Wednesday morning you will be able to study and grapple with traditional and modern issues and questions in the midst of a wonderful and supportive group of fellow seekers. As I wrote in Kol Emunah –

This is a great way to spend the time you have between dropping your kids off for Pre-School and then picking them up again. It’s a great opportunity to fill in the blanks in one’s education. It can serve as an excellent preparation for an Adult Bat/Bar Mitzvah experience, one which we look forward to promoting at Shomrei. It’s a day-time study course – so it’s happening while you are still awake and thinking!

We’ll be having a “Taste of Melton” at our community-wide Sukkah Sababa on Sunday, September 26^th. Please consider this program.

I am proud that Shomrei is offering more and more opportunities to connect with Torah study in formal and informal ways. Our new Teen program – STOM – Shomrei Teens of Montclair – is another means by which we seek to fulfill the message of Rosh Ha-Shanah.

And there is another project that I must bring to your attention – our Israel Trip. This year we have begun to enjoy the fruits of an enlarged and exuberant Israel Engagement Committee. And planning for a trip to Israel at the end of next summer and realizing those plans is an endeavor of major importance for our community. Shomrei had a very successful trip a couple of years ago and it is time to return again.

Israel is a place of both beginning and returning. Our trip will serve those who will be going to Israel for the first time as well as for those returning. Israel is very old and very young. Our trip is for everyone, young and old. During these days of honest soul-searching, I wish to also say that Israel is wonderful and amazing, but it has many serious problems and faults. It is not perfect. And neither are we. We will see Israel, our ancient homeland, with fresh eyes so that we may develop a relationship that is mature and deep, and enriching to our brothers and sisters there, as well as to ourselves, as individuals, as families and as a community.

Israel and the Diaspora make for another set of double foci that creates a special orbital pathway in our Jewish cosmos. In the comfort of Montclair, and with the uncomfortable realities we continually hear and see about Israel,  it is much too tempting to ignore the essential place that Israel must hold in our own lives. Israel is the place where we can return to our beginnings and where we can begin our returning. It is a central focal point, essential for keeping us spinning on an even path, in dynamic equilibrium through time and space. Without Israel as a second center, we run the risk of being merely self-centered. If we relinquish the focal point that is Israel, we invite the collapse of all the orbital rings that comprise the exquisite complexity of our personal and communal constellations. We will spin around ourselves ever more furiously until we implode and our bright light will die away.

Or, we can orient ourselves around both these focal points, and, in the words of the psalmist –

סובו ציון והקיפוה

Spin around Zion and go around and around her.

(Ps. 48:13)

In that way we enter the orbit of eternity –

למען תספרו לדור אחרון

כי זה א-להים א-להינו עולם ועד

הוא ינהגנו על-מות

So that you may tell the last generation:

This is, indeed, the Almighty, our Almighty, for ever and ever;

He shall be our Guide to overcome death.

(Ps. 48:15)

Come with us to the land which we will show you. Or, to paraphrase our concluding prayer of Yom Kippur –

לשנה טובה תכתבו!

לשנה הזאת בירושלים!

May we be inscribed for goodness this year! This year –  in Jerusalem!