Rosh Hashanah 5785
Loosen loosen baby.
You don’t have to carry
The weight of the world in your muscles and bones.
Let go, let go, let go.
– Aly Halpert
How did that feel? How did it feel to sing that? That you don’t have to carry all of it all the time?
Maybe it was a relief and now you have a little more breath. Or maybe you felt resistance, because some part of you said, I do need to carry this. I need to carry all of this.
I feel myself reacting both ways – with relief and with resistance. Because it has been a terrible year, a year in which I have felt tangled up and exhausted. And add into the tangle the upcoming election and these past few days in the Middle East – and well, my body is on high alert. Even if there’s nothing I can do, part of me feels that I am obligated to remain in an active state of worry. I want to exhale, but I am knotted up and not yet feeling the freedom to “let go, let go, let go.”
This is a tangled time, people. Every time is a tangled time. But sometimes the tethers are more obvious or drawn tighter. I have felt the cords attach right to my heart and my nervous system. They have had me bound, full of fears, afraid to say too much and afraid to say too little.
This is why we chose the theme of “Untying our Tangles” as our kavanah for the holy days. We chose to lean into the Torah of tangles and the liturgy of loosening.
I will talk more tomorrow about the Torah of tangles as we read the story of the Binding of Isaac. But tonight I want to dwell a little on the liturgy of loosening, especially the Ana B’khoach prayer that we just sang together. This is a very old poem. It is not just a prayer, but a mnemonic for a 42-letter name of God. When you chant this prayer, you are, word by word, calling on the Divine by name.
It opens: Ana b’khoach g’dulat y’minkha tatir tz’rurah: “Please, with all your compassionate power, release our tangles!” Tatir tzerurah. That is the “Untie our tangles” phrase.
The word tzerurah comes from the Hebrew root tzarar – to bundle up or tie or tangle. This root pops up not infrequently in our tradition. Next week on Yom Kippur, in our vidui, the communal confession that begins ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu – when we get to the 18th line, you will hear tzararnu. “We have bound” or “we have entangled.” There is no explanation or description of the entanglement, but still we ask forgiveness for it. Our prayer-writers of old knew that entanglement was inevitable; that there isn’t a way to live on this planet without creating tangles that sometimes harm others or ourselves.
We find the tzarar root in other familiar places. In Psalm 23, where in English we say, “You have set a table for me in the presence of my enemies,” it is not the typical Hebrew word for “enemy” that’s used, but rather tzorer. One who binds, one who entangles. You can choose to read this line as something like “You nourish me despite all the things that entangle me.”
Tzorer also means “enemy” in the book of Esther, where the villain Haman is referred to four times as tzorer ha-yehudim – “the enemy of the Jews.” But even there, the energetic of entanglement hovers close. We notice in the text how entangled Haman is in his own hatred. Just as we notice in the world how enemies, especially traditional enemies, often seem so enmeshed with each other that they will ignore their own self-interest in order to continue to tangle.
So maybe the people we think of as our enemies are the people that we have gotten tangled up with and it is in the strain of trying to pull away that the knot gets tighter.
The Hebrew root tzarar is also connected to the word tzar meaning “narrow” as in min hametzar or mitzrayim – “the narrow place.” And it is also related to the word tzarot, meaning “troubles,” as you might know from Yiddish, “Oy do we have tzores.”
And oy indeed. What tzores we have.
In the Ana B’khoach prayer, we ask to be touched by the Divine quality of loosening, of untying, of release from the troubles, from the tangles, from the narrow places, from the knot that seems to keep getting tighter.
Having said all that, I also wonder if maybe not every tangle is one that we need to pull free of. There is a use of this Hebrew root tzarar that you have heard many times at Jewish burials and Yizkor services. In the El Malei Rachamim prayer, we sing utzror bitzror hachayim et nishmatah, “May her soul be bound up in the bonds of life.” In the tangle. We even turn that wish into a five-letter acronym – ת נ צ ב ה – that is commonly found on Jewish gravestones. “May her soul be tz’rurah, bound, tangled up, in tz’ror hachayim – the tangle of life.”
So for a people whose liturgy resists and asks for release from tangles, why are we blessing our beloved dead that they stay entangled? What is this tangle of life anyway?
In answer to that, I’m going to bring us on a little tangent and offer a story about Creation. You know that on Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world, I like to share something cosmological. So I will tell a story about life that I didn’t know until recently. It began in the spring when one of my Hebrew school students told me that our planet is currently the only place in the universe where we have ever observed the phenomenon of fire. And I said but wait, what about the sun? They said, no that’s not fire, that’s nuclear fusion (because I have Hebrew school students who can say smart things about nuclear fusion). I wondered about volcanic activity, but realized that while molten lava can set off fires it is not itself fire. Same with lightning – an electrical discharge can start a fire but is not itself fire.
So I went down an obsessive rabbit hole on this and what emerged was a story about the Creation of this planet that I had never understood before. Fire, unlike the other mythic elements of water, earth, and air, is not matter. It is a chemical reaction that requires two things. What are they? _______ Right, oxygen and fuel. And typically what is the fuel? That’s right. Plant or animal matter, which is the residue of life. And oxygen, which is also the residue of life. Fire is only possible because of life, it is a byproduct of life, it emerges from life. So here’s how I might retell a piece of the Creation story.
B’reishit, in the beginning, in the early days of our world, before it was formed as we know it, a dark carbon dioxide sky hovered over the water. Slowly life evolved in the great seas, life suited to the conditions. Then two or three billion years ago, bacterial life began exhaling oxygen, which floated to the surface of the water and made a home in the air. Oxygen went from being .02% of the atmosphere to 21% of it, and as that happened, the sky slowly turned blue.
In the oceans under the blue sky, algae evolved, and other plant life, eventually spreading onto dry land less than a billion years ago, with fire soon to follow. And the oxygen-rich atmosphere and the plant life made it possible for animals of all sorts to evolve — swimming, soaring, scuttling, stepping. And we, humanity, are latecomers to a world long unfolding.
This new understanding kind of blew my mind. I used to think the world came into existence perfectly ready for life such as ours. But no. This planet was terraformed by our ancient microbial ancestors. Life itself created the conditions for life. Life created fire, and blue skies, and a world ready for our bodies and thoughts and actions. And life ain’t done yet.
When I think of this still-living history, I think this must be tz’ror hachayim. The tangle of life. The tangle we want to remain part of. And that tz’ror hachayim doesn’t just exist in some planetary way over geological time. It lives in the now. Because we are, in this very moment, life, preparing the world for life.
We are life, preparing the world for life.
So what gifts do we want to offer to create the conditions for what happens next?
Maybe, like those ancient microbial ancestors, we want to offer our breath. Maybe like our grandmothers, we want to offer our love.
We have to imagine, dream up, what we want to see next, and then ask ourselves what are the seeds of that?
This is why I think it is important in all our responses to all of the challenges in this world, to balance our fight with our love. Balance our struggle with care. End each day of activism with a friend and a cup of tea.
I am willing to fight, to struggle, in the hopes of something better. But I don’t want my legacy to be fight. I don’t want my legacy to be struggle. So I must also plant seeds of love and kindness and care and patience.
This is why even in these intense times that demand our attention and our hard work, I also want to hold the principle of loosen loosen baby. I do not want us to neglect our joy out of a sense of loyalty to suffering.
In Pirkei Avot, Rabbi Tarfon famously says, “It is not up to you to finish the work; and you are not free to abstain from it.” Instead there is a balance of doing and laying back. When we live as if there is only the work, we impoverish the soil of the future. We must do the work, but we must also celebrate.
May we be released from tangles of harm. May we embrace the bonds of life. May we sow the field with seeds of a beautiful and kind future. May we plant seeds of wholeness and healing. May we help this tz’ror hachayim, this tangle of life, become what Song of Songs calls tz’ror hamor, a bundle of fragrant myrrh that hangs at the breast of the Divine, where we might, at the end of the day, lay our weary heads.
Loosen loosen baby.
You don’t have to carry
The weight of the world in your muscles and bones.
Let go, let go, let go.