The Holidays are over and retrospectively, we can begin to see the place that they play in our lives. For most of us, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the High Holydays, mark the high point of the year’s religious experiences. They always bring a kind of memory with them. Memories of when we were younger – even as children. Memories of our lives as our families grew, and the bitter painful memories of those who are with us in spirit, but their presence is sorely missed. Such memories of the past brought upon us at the High Holydays, inevitably carry with them a painful element, but the pain is sometimes necessary to access our present state. Things do change, and responses to that change are required. It is the nature of the response, however, that should be viewed through the prism of the past. Events of the past were not always good, but having survived them, they give us some strength to see what is durable; what was worthwhile; and what is discardable.


I can’t speak to the issues of your particular family; of what it is that binds one generation to another, of what durable truths our pasts are founded upon, of the verities that grandparents give grandchildren, that will make the lives of the grandchildren richer in every way.


But I can speak a little bit about Jewish History, our people’s past, and its painful moments. Jewish History warns us against three failings that have always weakened the Jewish people. The first one is arrogance. We have this strange notion that the State of Israel exists because of the physical strength that we have created that permits us to withstand the onslaught of our enemies. There is an arrogance within our ruling elite that marks the behavior of Israel’s politicians, social leaders, its media figures and its intellectuals. All of us can stand a strong dose of humility. We are not a superpower; we cannot afford to alienate large sections of our own population (haredim, for example), nor can we disregard how the rest of the world sees us. Knowledge of our history will legitimately make us proud and humble. But pride is not arrogance; rather, it is self-worth and self-confidence.


The second failing that our collective memory highlights for us, is the danger of trying to be too relevant and current with the non-Jewish culture and value system that has always surrounded us. This is an enormous subject of its own, and I shall write about this in forthcoming Bulletins. But to be a Jew is to be different.


The last failing that our collective memory teaches us is the folly of internal warfare. There are great difficulties dividing the Jewish people today. The parties involved should not seek to needlessly provoke a confrontation with one another. We should certainly disdain violent words and deeds by Jews against Jews.


History has taught us that this open hostility among us is most dangerous, and we cannot afford to walk whistling past the graveyard of our memories indefinitely denying what social dysfunction has done to us.
The last Holyday we observed as a community was Sukkot. One of the rituals of the Holiday is the taking of the Lulav and Esrog. Almost all children know that the various elements of the Lulav and Esrog (palm branches, willows, myrtles and citron) represent different parts of the Jewish people. Yet, we are commanded to hold them together in order to recite the blessings. For we constitute a unity amidst all our differences. And we cannot make the blessing without acknowledging this truth.


As we enter the secular holiday of Thanksgiving, may we remind ourselves that there is more for which we are to be thankful than there is to make us unhappy. So we wish you a “Happy Thanksgiving.”