Rabbi Nicole Roberts 2024 RH sermon
Rabbi Nicole Roberts
North Shore Temple Emanuel
Last night, we ushered in Rosh Hashanah with the lighting of the candles and the blessing ending: l’hadlik ner shel Yom Tov – “Blessed are You, God, who commands us to kindle the lights of Yom Tov”—the words Yom Tov meaning, literally, “a good day.”
Paradoxically, this Yom Tov—this good day of Rosh Hashanah—is also one of the Yamim Nora’im, which, in modern Hebrew, means the “awful days”! How can a day be both good and awful at the same time? Well, when referring to this season, Yamim Nora’im means not awful days, but Days of Awe. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and the days of repentance in between them are meant to be days of fear and trembling before an awe-some God who is the ultimate Judge of how we’ve been living—whose verdict of whether we merit another year of life hangs in the balance. On Rosh Hashanah, the Mishnah teaches, “every creature passes before God” in the heavenly court.[i] The Talmud elaborates that those who are entirely good are written immediately into the book of life, to enjoy another year of life, but most of us—our fate is suspended until Yom Kippur, hinging on how we conduct ourselves these next days, through repentance, prayer, and tzedakah.[ii] By its proximity to Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah has become the Day of Judgment, and so, a day of awe, fear and trembling.
So what’s so good about it?
Why do we still call Rosh Hashanah a ‘Yom Tov’—a good day?
Well, a Yom Tov—in Yiddish, yontif—is a holy day—a day God declared as a sacred occasion and prohibited working. So Rosh Hashanah isn’t “good” just because it’s a day we get to eat apples and honey and take off from school. Here “good” bears a more weighty significance—the Divine impress. When we wish someone a shana tova on Rosh Hashanah—a “good year”—says one contemporary rabbi, it’s not like wishing them a “happy new year,” which “evoke[s] images of revellers drinking champagne, laughing, and dancing—a party atmosphere. What comes to mind when we ask for…a ‘good’ year [is] an image of sobriety and concern. What might make this a good year? Our attention is drawn to more fundamental concerns—health, family life, education…professional development…”[iii] Rosh Hashanah is a good day in this sense—a day on which we come face to face with the question of how to live better. So when we say the blessing over the ner shel yom tov—the yom tov lights—we are blessing the enlightenment that comes from asking ourselves: What might make this a “good” day? What can I do to make this a good year? What would make this life a good life? How can I live better?
Ironically, the Days of Awe inspire these questions by making us imagine what is arguably the worstday of our life: our dying day. Yom Kippur has been called “a dress rehearsal for our death.” We dress in white, like the traditional shrouds we’ll be buried in. We recite the vidui (a confession), and at N’ilah we say the Sh’ma, like we’re meant to do on our deathbed. Our pulse slows as the fast wears on. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are confronted with a litany of possible ends: who will perish by water, and who by fire? Who by sword and who by beast? Who by famine and who by thirst? Imagine it! demands our liturgy on these Days of Awe, because if we imagine our days are limited, we may begin to spend each of our days more wisely. To help us make our remaining days “good,” the Days of Awe confront us with our mortality.
So, if you’re having trouble following, Rosh Hashanah is a day that’s called good but isn’t really good, kicking off the days called bad that aren’t really bad, which inspire us to live the best days of our life by reminding us of the worst day of our life, the day of our death. Counterintuitive, to be sure, yet the wisdom here is profound. Because left to our own devices, most of us avoid contemplating our own finitude, and without the time pressure—the “deadline,” as it were—we put off the question of how to live our remaining days better. Author Susan Lieberman writes, “Most…adults understand that we are going to die, but about 80% of us aren’t sure it will happen in our lifetimes.”[iv] We live (and age) in denial, buying serums and creams to hide wrinkles and age spots, dyes to colour greying hair. The majority of Australians do not have a written will. None of us like to think about the end. Yet once a year, our tradition insists that we do.
Whatever the state of our health and stage of our life, there’s wisdom in a tradition that brings us face to face each year with our mortality. As someone once said, life is a fatal condition; we’ll all be there one day. We should give the occasion some thought. Yet unfortunately, in our modern era, the imaginedencounter with death at this season may not bear the impact it once did. In a time of rapidly advancing medical science—trial drugs, feeding tubes, and new technologies—our final day just seems more and more remote. Even those faced with a terminal diagnosis or actual end of life decisions often pour all their resources and energy into the battle for more time instead of better time, prioritising extension of life over quality of life. Surgeon and bestselling author Atul Gawande laments how many of his dying patients will try anything to lengthen their days on this earth, though all too often the treatment that entails can make those days a living hell. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease, and doesn’t even end up curing. We overlook the possibility, Gawande says, that “doing too much could be no less devastating to a person’s life,”[v] and “the fact that we may be…worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register.”[vi] Gawande calls this “a modern tragedy.”[vii] But it doesn’t have to be. There’s a way, he says, that all of us can make our encounter with mortality—whether real or imagined—a blessing for the days we have left and the loved ones we’ll leave behind. We can do this, he says, by asking a stunningly simple question: “What would a good day look like?”
In his book, called Being Mortal, Gawande tells how this simple question—like the one we contemplate when standing before the Yom Tov candles—has transformed his practice of medicine, the lives of his patients, and his own personal life. It all started some years ago, when a patient who lay dying told him, “One thing I want to make sure I’m able to do is take my grandchildren to Disney World.” That was her dream for her remaining days, and it was something Gawande says he and his medical team could have made possible for her, had they known just a month earlier that this was so important to her. As it was, Gawande recounts with regret, “she was telling that to me in the hospital, emaciated, on her last days. She would die 48 hours later.” In the relentless battle to prolong her life through debilitating treatment, the patient’s family and medical team had gotten caught up in the fight for more time, instead of tailoring her care to make possible her vision of a good day—a day worth fighting for. A day at Disney with her grandchildren. “We had missed that,” Gawande says. “We had failed. We had never asked her, to know that might have mattered to her.”
Ever since, Gawande’s been asking all his terminally ill patients and others: “What would a good day look like for you?” One said it was simply to enjoy some quiet time with a book[viii]—something that can be difficult in a hospital setting with its beeping machines and frequent intrusions to check vital signs. Another said it was eating chocolate ice cream while watching the football on television,[ix] something that might not be possible on a restricted diet. For one, a good day was any day he had the dexterity to type, because e-mail was how he connected with family and friends all over the world.[x] For Gawande’s own father, as he faced growing paralysis, his idea of a good day was “being at the family dinner table…enjoy[ing] some food and conversation and a connection,”[xi] instead of being too nauseous and highly medicated to enjoy the company of family and friends.
Once their own answer to the question became clear, each patient decided with their physician and care team what trade offs they were willing to make to have more of their remaining days be good days. Sometimes making that day possible meant turning sooner to palliative care. Other times, it meant stopping medical treatment, drugs, and surgeries aimed at prolonging life. Every time, it started with that simple question: What would a good day look like?
Gawande and others have found that gaining clarity around a patient’s idea of “a good day” also helps their families accept their end of life choices with greater understanding. When we put off thinking about our final days, we postpone conversations about wishes, values, goals, dreams, and trade-offs—conversations that have the power to improve not only our own satisfaction—our sense of agency, control, and fulfilment—but also our family’s peace of mind.[xii] And sometimes the impact extends even beyond our own family to the world at large. Gawande tells the story of his teenage daughter’s piano teacher, Peggy, who had a debilitating cancer. Her treatments proving ineffective, she suffered fevers every day, repeated hospitalisations, indignities, and growing misery.[xiii] “And then,” Gawande says, a “hospice nurse had that conversation: ‘What does a good day look like?’” They worked on making that one good day happen, and Peggy’s spirits quickly lifted. She went from despondence to deciding “she wanted to teach piano again.”[xiv] Gawande’s daughter had four more weeks of piano lessons, culminating in a poignant recital by all of Peggy’s students—current and former. At the end, “Peggy took each child to the side and…told them each, one by one, ‘You’re special.’” She gave them each a gift; his daughter’s was a music book. The experience shaped his daughter’s life; she recently entered the Berklee College of Music. “And that was the legacy Peggy wanted to leave.” he says. Making those last four weeks and that recital day possible required significant medical expertise, but also the decision to apply that expertise toward making a good day. Once they focused on quality of days, rather than quantity of days, the impact was beyond measure—for everyone involved.
They say the final lesson we teach our loved ones is how to die.[xv] But Rosh Hashanah is concerned with how we live. What makes a day “good” is for each of us to discern and discuss. So start the conversation. Ask each other, over these next days before Yom Kippur, the dress rehearsal for our death: What does a good day look like for you? If time becomes short, what’s most important to you? What kinds of trade-offs are you willing to make? How do you want to spend your time if your health worsens? What makes life worth living to you?[xvi] We needn’t be facing our own death nor the death of a loved one to raise these questions; we need only to stand in the enlightened glow of the Yom Tov candles and open ourselves to this season’s annual stretch of the spiritual imagination. As Krista Tippett concludes in her interview with Gawande: “standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive.”[xvii] That’s the power this good day holds.
So gut yontif, and shana tova.
[i] Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:2
[ii] Talmud Bavli Rosh Hashanah 16b
[iii] Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, in Rosh Hashanah Readings: Inspiration, Information and Contemplation, Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins ed., Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2006.
[iv] Susan Abel Lieberman, in the Country of Old: Nine reflections from a new immigrant to the Country of Old, Independently published, 2023, Loc 311.
[v] Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, New York: Metropolitan Books 2014, 220.
[vi] ibid. 174
[vii] ibid. 173
[viii] On Being with Krista Tippett podcast: “Atul Gawande on Mortality and Meaning” at https://onbeing.org/programs/atul-gawande-on-mortality-and-meaning/
[ix] ibid.
[x] Gawande, 227
[xi] On Being
[xii] ibid.
[xiii] ibid.
[xiv] ibid.
[xv] Best Life Best Death podcast; Episode #146, June 20, 2024, at https://bestlifebestdeath.com/podcast-146-vsed-part-2-understanding-voluntarily-stopping-eating-and-drinking-nancy-simmers-bsn-rn-death-doula/
[xvi] Gawande, 182, 145
[xvii] On Being