The holiday season is here. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah. Four holidays to celebrate. What a blessing it is to be able to share this sacred season with you. What a gift it is for Susan and I to observe these days with you. Together, we will have lots of opportunities to count our blessings. In our newly refreshed sanctuary, there will be plenty of time to reflect and consider who we are and how we want to live our days in the coming year.
If we truly understand the holy meaning of this these days, we will engage in teshuvah. We will try to repair damaged relationships. We will reach out to those we have hurt and try our best to make amends. And with renewed courage and strength we will come before God with humility and heartfelt contrition, as individuals and as a community, and ask for forgiveness.
Part of the beauty of the days we are about to enter is the gift of community. It is very easy to access worship services from different congregations all over the country, and to participate from afar, but for me there is something very special about attending in our own Temple. Side by side, we sit next to and with our extended family. With only the best of intentions, I encourage everyone to join us in-person. During the High Holy Days, let us setaside other obligations, whatever they might be, for a sacred purpose.
A few years ago, I found this story that I love to share, written for this season. There was once a king, who gave a man a treasure map. “The map,” said the king, is a map to the greatest treasure you can ever find. The man snatched the map and was off in search of the treasure. He looked at the map. It had a date and a location on it, a place far away. The date was close, and so he knew he had to set off immediately. He found himself at the top of a mountain, exactly the location where the map told him the treasure would be found.
He started to dig with his bare hands. He had forgotten a shovel. After a short while, a shadow loomed over the small hole he had made. It was a woman, holding a map in her hand, exactly like the one he was given. He asked where she got it. She told him the king gave it to her. The man suggested that they work together in unearthing the treasure and share whatever they found. They dug and they dug to no avail.
Before long a third person arrived with the same map, and as the man and the woman looked up, the entire kingdom, thousands of people were all walking towards the mountain. Eventually they all pooled their efforts, until there was virtually no mountain left. But they found no treasure. Despondent, every person went back home.
But a strange thing happened, at just about the same time the next year, people remembered they had a map with a date, and they realized that perhaps the date was for this year, and it was not for last year. Simultaneously, almost everyone set off for what was left of the mountain. They waited until the date arrived. They dug a little more into the ground, but quickly gave up because no treasure could be seen.
This went on for many years. When the date drew near, there was a frenzy of activity. There was a journey, a little digging, and disappointment. Eventually some of the initial treasure hunters died, but they had passed the map onto their children with the hope that their family might come to enjoy the treasure.
One day, a young girl went to see the king. “Your holiness,” she asked, “why did you give my family this map? Why did you give every family a map?” The king looked at her sadly, “because I had a treasure, I wanted you to share.” “But we’ve dug at the mountain so much that there cannot be any treasure there.”
“Did you look to see what was on top of my mountain?” Asked the king. “Just people,” replied the girl, “but no treasure.”
The king sighed, “I brought you together on one day so that you could see how much of a treasure you all are. But you were blinded by self-interest. You rushed into the journey year after year. You destroyed my mountain upon which I presented you with the greatest treasure of all, a community. You were so self-obsessed, scurrying about in the dirt, you did not bother to look around at each other.
The girl hung her head. “But why didn’t you just tell us this? Why did you make us go through all that trouble? How were we meant to know?”
The King smiled, “all that was needed was for you to ask. Now that you’ve asked, go back to everyone and tell them this. There is nothing more precious than community, who put their own self-interests aside to value each other. On the site of the mountain that you destroyed, on the date that I gave you, I want you to gather and build a little of the mountain back. And every year, on Rosh Hashanah, I would like the entire community to gather, and to learn that they are precious, but only when they appreciate each other, and when they build together and not tear down.
The girl smiled, and she went to tell the community all that she had learned and what had been said. And when the community came together on Rosh Hashanah the next year, they started rebuilding the mountain, and they left as one.
L’Shanah Tovah U’Metukah
With best wishes for a very happy and sweet new year.
Rabbi
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