As we conclude this year of tragedy, loss, and destruction – truly “a year with its curses” and pray for the new year to bring blessing, peace, renewal to a broken world, we prepare to gather in the Temple for Rosh Hashanah. In preparation, last Saturday evening, we offered the traditional prayers of Selichot, seeking forgiveness. Our practice here has been to take an hour or so prior to the Selichot liturgy to read and discuss a story from the collected works of the celebrated Israel Nobel laureate, Shmuel Yosef (Shai) Agnon.
This year we picked a story entitled “Gilui Eliyahu” “The Revelation of Elijah.” In our tradition, picking up on a verse in the concluding chapter of Malachi, which speaks of God sending the prophet Elijah before the coming of the “great and terrible day of the Lord,” Elijah becomes a symbol of the ultimate redemption of the world. In Jewish lore, Elijah was taken alive in a fiery chariot into heaven and continues to make appearances when one least expects him. We welcome him to our Passover seder each year. A chair is set aside for him at every briss. We sing of him at the conclusion of Havdalah each week.
In the Agnon story, we encounter Elijah twice. First as an old man warming himself at the fire in the study hall of the Baal Shem Tov, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the 18th century founder of Hasidism. Later he shows up as a villager at the conclusion of shabbat bearing a knapsack and walking stick in apparent disregard for the laws of Shabbat. In both cases, the students of the Baal Shem who so wish to greet Elijah fail to recognize him. But the Baal Shem Tov asserts that he does see him and he speaks to him.
I was particularly struck by the concluding section of the story where the Baal Shem Tov seats this villager next to him and says, “I see that your soul presses upon you with sadness. Have sorrows befallen you?” The villager replies with a sigh, “It’s not good, Rabbi Israel…we are in great trouble.” The Baal Shem urges him to explain further and so we are told, “We have a great craftsman in our village. He made us a workshop and filled it with fine, lovely vessels, and prepared for us everything we needed. We lacked nothing from him. It was our responsibility to maintain the vessels. But we neither watched over them nor maintained them.” As he continues, he notes that the vessels have become rusty and despite warnings from the craftsman, they have become damaged beyond repair. We could stop this, he notes, but we did nothing to stop the deterioration.
He concludes, “All the vessels were ruined and became useless.” He tells him that the dimensions of the workshop diminished to the size of a small tavern and nothing is left but one vessel to store liquor. Now even that vessel has sprung a leak. “it is not good, Rabbi Israel, not good.”
The Baal Shem Tov suggests that the vessel might still be repaired with whatever they still have among them. Told that all they have is some bread and some copper coins, he tells the villager, “Take a slice of bread, stop up the leak and press a coin onto the bread. You will find that the vessel will hold whatever the craftsman pours into it.”
After the villager leaves to proclaim this advice, the puzzled students ask the Baal Shem to explain. He tells them that the villager was indeed Elijah and explains the parable. The craftsman, of course is God, the workshop is the world which we have failed to maintain. Even the commandments which we might continue to practice seem to be done by rote and are insincere. His recommendation for mending the leaking vessel with bread and a copper coin, pointed to the importance of the mitzvot of sharing our bread and wealth to assist those in need.
What was particularly powerful in the story was the lesson the students derived from these unlikely appearances of Elijah They and we learn that the prophet sees fit to take every Jew, I’d say everyone of us, to “be worn like a garment” to carry the message of our personal responsibility to repair this world. When we speak of Elijah being sent before the great and terrible day of the Lord, we realize that each of us potentially contains a bit of the spirit of Elijah and each of us bears responsibility for repairing the world
We can pray for a good year, a sweet year, a year of blessing, but then we need to so inspire ourselves perhaps through our prayers to accept upon ourselves our role in making that happen. We need to work to remove hatred and bigotry, to eliminate poverty and hunger, sickness and despair. Together we need to undertake whatever efforts we can to bring peace and harmony to the world. We need to open our eyes to the wondrous vessels that are found in God’s workshop, the marvels of this world around us, and do all we can to preserve them, to repair them, to maintain them, and to take steps to undo the harm we’ve wrought wherever possible and to preserve life.
On a new year, well aware of so much pain and suffering from the year concluding, we choose to look ahead to the coming months and to work to transform curses into blessings. We cling to hope and we recall the words of the powerful 13th century poem that appears in the Sephardic liturgy and has been adopted by Ashkenazic machzorim as well, “Achot ketanah,” Little Sister. Five stanzas conclude with the words, “May the old year depart with its curses,” while the final stanzas ends: “And may the new year begin with its blessings.” We’ve seen that hopes and prayers are insufficient and that each of us needs to find a way to actually live the words we pray.
Blessings to all for a Shanah Tovah uMetukah, a good and sweet year. Let us all work to make it so.
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