Pulling Ourselves Together — Rosh Hashana

Do you feel together, integrated, and whole, or do you often feel scattered and frayed?
Are you standing on solid ground, or do you feel that the foundations are less sturdy than you might want them to be?
Do you sense that the world we’re living in is stable, or does it seem to be pulling apart at the seams?
You are not alone if you are experiencing a sense of fracture and division. The discord and friction of our societies is painfully obvious, and with a bit of introspection, most of us will admit a clear disconnect and dissidence within ourselves as well. We are pulled in a million directions at once, we are flooded with distraction and competing messaging, and it is easy to lose touch with who we truly are and what we truly want.
Rosh Hashana provides us a healing for this division within us and around us. It offers us a way to pull ourselves together and to be whole again even amidst our scrambled surroundings.
The Jewish New Year, as Rosh Hashana is known, is not simply the marking of a calendrical cycle or even the celebration of a new beginning. It is a process of profound introspection, and it affords us a program of self-growth that enables us to regroup and make the time ahead different from, and better than, the time before.
In the annual order of Torah readings, in which we read a portion every week and complete the book each year, on the sabbath before Rosh Hashana we read the portion called Nitzavim, which means “Standing.” This standing connotes a stillness and a wholeness that we are able to attain at this time.
“You are standing today all of you…” the verse begins, and then it lists ten classifications of people within the nation that traveled through the desert, “the heads of your tribes, your elders, your officers, etc.” The chassidic master, Rabbi Scnheur Zalman of Liadi, explains that the verse refers not only to various groups of people, but also to ten different levels or aspects within each person (known as the ten sefirot). “Today,” which refers to the day of Rosh Hashana Rabbi Schneur Zalman writes, “you are standing” with “all of you” — all of the various aspects of ourselves can stand united on this day. How can we accomplish this?
Teshuvah, commonly rendered as “repentance,” but more rightfully translated as “return,” can be understood as the process of gathering back together, returning, and reuniting all of the aspects of ourselves (and our world) that we have dispersed and disconnected. We have spread ourselves out, fragmented ourselves, made distinctions and delineations in ourselves and our lives. This part is holy, we determine, and this part is profane. On this day and in this place I will act in a holy way, but otherwise I will not. This aspect of my life belongs to God, to my family, my community, but these other aspects are solely mine. We carve up the world and apportion it as either my property or your property. We lose sight of any greater wholeness and unity within the UNIverse.
Even within ourselves we are divided and torn: this part of me is pure or good, and that part is base and irredeemable. Yes, perhaps I have a soul, but I also have my limitations, my animalistic nature which cannot be controlled or tamed. This division and plurality is the very nature of the exile in which we find ourselves. We are alienated from our essence, from the land, from the core of who we are and why we’re here.
Teshuvah is an in-gathering of the exiles. It is the bringing back together of all of the aspects of ourselves, and by extension of the universe as a whole, that have been scattered. It is the recognition that all of the divisions are only superficial, and that the truth is that they are all manifestations of the one true reality. The various hues that our eyes perceive are portions of the white light that is refracted through a prism. The various aspects of ourselves are all refractions of our one united essence. The various categories of people are jigsawed pieces of one enormous image.
Teshuvah is gathering all of these seeming fragments back together and restoring our consciousness to this unified reality. Rosh Hashana is the beginning of the “10 days of teshuvah,” the first 10 days of the new year which we have particularly committed to this task (and throughout which we are granted especial spiritual assistance to perform this task). The reading of Nitzavim begins by telling us that all 10 levels are united on “this day”, Rosh Hashana, because there are 10 aspects of our soul which we gather as one on this day. We then have 10 days to continue working on this process, and then on Yom Kippur, the day of At-one-ment, the project culminates with the complete reunification of our being.
Teshuvah is not only returning to God, not only returning to our essence, it is returning all of the infinite specks of star dust that have been scattered throughout the universe, sweeping them back in from the farthest reaches of the cosmos, and reuniting them into the complete unit that they ultimately comprise.
Throughout Rosh Hashana and the High Holidays, we have a special mechanism to assist us with this process, the shofar. The shofar is the ram’s horn that we blow on Rosh Hashana and then again on Yom Kippur. There are a variety of meanings ascribed to the blowing of the shofar, but in the context of the ideas we have been exploring, the shofar blast can be seen, and heard, as a signal that calls us back to our home. Lost in the wilderness, we hear the sound and follow it. It is our guide — we don’t know where to go, but we follow that sound.
In our weekday prayers, throughout the entire year, three times a day, we say “Tika b’shofar gadol l’cheiruseinu, V’kabtzeinu yachad me’arba kanfos haaretz l’artzeinu — blow the great shofar for our freedom, and gather us as one from the four corners of the world to our land.” We have wandered astray in every direction, but the shofar blast calls us back to our center, to our integrated self, to the wholeness that we all desire.
This progression can actually be heard in the order of the shofar blasts themselves. First we blow a tekiah, a single sustained note. Then we blow a shevarim, three shorter notes in a row. Next we blow a teruah, a quick series of short staccato blasts. And finally we blow a tekiah gedola, a single note again, this time sustained as long as our breath lasts.
The sounds indicate our process and our history. We begin whole like the tekiah. We are then fragmented like the teruah, and from here we become broken and scattered like the shevarim. Finally, however, we return and are unified with the tekiah. But it is not simply like the original singularity — we have now achieved a wholeness through being broken which is greater than the simplicity with which we started. The shofar has called us back together, and we are now not a unity that is vulnerable to being broken, but a oneness that is not liable to any otherness because it includes everything.
Atem Nitzavim — You are standing still. We have been running in all directions, buzzing, not knowing where to go or how to get back to where we were. We have scattered ourselves, and we have made divisions in our world. But now we have been called back to where we belong. We pull ourselves back together, we tear down the walls that we have built within ourselves and between each other. And here we can finally stand, still. We realize that there is no true plurality and no division. There is no true split in our nature — every aspect of us can be utilized in fulfilling our mission and raison d’etre, the revelation of the unity of creation. There is no limitation to our holiness, nothing that can hinder us in our holy task. We are finally at peace, relaxed. We are back home, and we are whole.