Open Letter To My Students 67: A High Holy Day Message from Home

I do like to write about “home,” especially when Rosh Hashanah rolls round and people head home for the holidays. Never mind the reality: broken homes, dysfunctional families, aging parents, and the mystery of undying sibling rivalry. Charles Henry Parkhurst, the reforming Presbyterian pastor who brought down New York’s infamous Tammany Hall, got it right when he said, “Home is heaven for beginners.” 

At the new year we become beginners all over again. Out with the old; in with the new; new year’s resolutions, or, for Jews, t’shuvah, literally, “returning” to God, but also to our childhood selves, the innocence we left behind when we took the wrong turn toward mistakes and misdeeds. Our prayer book calls the holiday yom hazikaron, the day when God remembers us, a somewhat frightening possibility, except for the fact that God, we say, is merciful – like the parents we either have or wish we had; parents, that is, who welcome us back home no matter what we’ve done out there in the world. “Home,” says Robert Frost “is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Home is the name we give to the comfort and safety of belonging, while “not at home” means being always on guard against ever-looming disaster. So Rosh Hashanah emphasizes the positive: the guarantee that however much we may have strayed into a world where anything can happen, Rosh Hashanah brings us home to safety. 

But then comes Yom Kippur. If Rosh Hashanah is the guarantee of being back home again, Yom Kippur is a study in potential exile. Just a couple generations back, synagogue goers wept with shame over the misdeeds they might have done without even knowing it; they trembled from the fearful possibility that an obsessive accountant-God kept careful ledgers of it all.  Not that I am advocating that kind of guilt-ridden religion; we are well rid of it. But it did reflect the recognition of what a life poorly led might come to. To this day, we say over and over again on the High Holy Day supplication, Hashiveinu eilekha, “Bring us back to You,”  O God, which is to say, bring us home. An all merciful God must surely have inaugurated the open-door policy of letting us in long before Robert Frost wrote about it.

Even more poignantly, there is that Yom Kippur prayer Sh’ma Koleinu (“[God] hear our voice”) which we are supposed to say as if standing before the almighty Judge and passionately pleading our case. The central entreaty is this poignant line: “Do not throw me out” – the worst case scenario! We’ve completed a year of managing the world outside, a year of struggle, disappointment, and outright pain – which, God knows, this past year has been; and then we make it back home, only to have our parents throw us out. 

The High Holy Days are a frightening bungee jump from on high, where we almost land safely on firm ground, only to get yanked back up to the giddy state of free-fall: home for Rosh Hashanah; then thrown out on Yom Kippur. 

We can, if we like, avoid that roller-coaster nightmare: sit silently through services; give in to the boredom (which is easy to find); and then leave, unchallenged and unchanged. I can hardly blame people for doing that. The liturgy can be impenetrable; the verbiage endless; like getting lost in a Wagnerian opera because you do not understand the German and cannot relate to characters with names like Walktraute, Grimgerde, and Schwertkleite. Services should come with an accompanying program alerting you to the highlights, telling you what to look for, and informing you that prayer is not so much something you go to as it is something you must enter into. You should also be warned that if you mistake the prayers for prose instead of poetry, you will find the service alienating. Yes, “alienating,” itself an echo of exile, homelessness, home-sickness even.

The biggest mistake is focusing on a High Holy Day message of times past, seeing Yom Kippur, say, as a Jewish version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, just a misery-soaked diatribe on human unhappiness, sin, and guilt – which indeed, is what it was in medieval times (and still is, in many synagogues). Too many people leave too early, missing the final N’ilah service, where the day’s desolation gives way to the ecstatic discovery that we really do get to start again. Remade, reborn, and refreshed, we dare undertake another year of exploration “not at home.” Back to business; back to work; back to school; back to an uncertain future but with all the promise of youth at its best; back being young and eager, even if we are old and jaded.

The metaphor of returning home is overrated. In real life, our childhood home is something we grow out of — a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there again. The High Holy Day homecoming too is a temporary fix. It ends. We venture forth again to life. But we manufacture other homes along the way, informed, perhaps, by the High Holy Day drama in two acts: both Rosh Hashanah’s joys and Yom Kippur’s trials.

The adult homes we make must indeed be shelters from life’s storms, but they are never actual heavens, as Pastor Parkhurst wrongly imagined them to be, because as much as we emerge from the High Holy Days with the hope of new beginnings, we ourselves are no longer just beginners. Whether there is some kind of heaven where we eventually find an eternal home I do not know. But until I find out, I happily have recourse to what Sigmund Freud called the reality principle. Life is not a bowl of cherries, but it’s not just sour grapes either. It is a day-by-day grind; but day-by-day joy and satisfaction as well. We will spend next year commuting back and forth from the homes we make to the work we do; and pray that both will be surprisingly rewarding.