So we work, but one day in seven we also rest and spend more time than usual with family and friends. In shul we reestablish our links with the community. Through the festivals we relive the history of our people, and cure ourselves of the narrow sense of living for the moment. On Rosh Hashanah we ask, “Why am I here?” On Yom Kippur we try to make amends for the wrongs we have done, and rededicate ourselves to the things we hold holy.
Does a purely secular lifestyle offer a greater chance of happiness? One of the most extraordinary scientific findings of all is that in the space of two generations, as people in the West have grown more affluent, so have they grown less happy. Depression and stress-related syndromes have all risen between 300 and 1,000 percent. The phenomenon has a name: affluenza. The consumer society is built on making us want what we do not yet have. Judaism is predicated on celebrating what we do have.
No one’s last thought was, “I wish I had spent more time in the office.” Almost no one’s obituary praises him or her for the car they drove, the clothes they wore, the homes they built, or the holidays they took. These things are not unimportant, but they are externalities. They are about what we own, not who we are. They give us short-term pleasure, not long-term fulfillment.
That is what Maimonides was talking about when he spoke about the shofar of Rosh Hashanah. It is G-d’s call to us: Where are you? What are you doing with your life? Do you care about the things that have value but not a price? Do you spend your time on the important, or only on the urgent?
Judaism is full of details. As the great architect, Mies van der Rohe, said, “G-d is in the details.” But the details are brushstrokes in a magnificent painting that we can only appreciate if we step back and look at it as a whole.
Judaism turns life into a work of art. It consecrates the love between husbands and wives, and parents and children. It sanctifies our most physical acts, through the laws of kashrut and family purity. It engages our hearts in prayer, our minds in study. It asks us, through the laws of tzedakah, to look on our possessions as things G-d has entrusted into our safekeeping, with the condition that we share some of what we have with those who have less.
Chesed – the love that is kindness – binds our communities into networks of support for people experiencing crisis, illness or bereavement. Jewish faith, which suffuses all our acts but especially the act of prayer, tells us that we are not alone in the universe, that at the heart of being is One who created us in love, hears our prayers, and believes in us more than we believe in ourselves.
Judaism helps us hear the music beneath the noise, the theme beyond the episodes, the meaning that links our days and years into a story of a life well lived because it has been lived in the light of high ideals. We will always fall short; everyone does. But we stand as tall as the values that inspire us, and those of Judaism are the highest ever asked of a people. So as you hear the shofar, think of what, in the year to come, you will live for. And may G-d write you, your family, and all Israel in the Book of Life.
Shanah tovah.