It has been a hard year. So hard, it can feel like all our rituals are wrong.
It’s nearly impossible to enter the High Holidays this year with a full heart. It’s nearly impossible to believe that the year ahead might be sweet or that the sins of this past year might be forgiven. To really engage in ritual this year would require a suspension of disbelief, or maybe a willingness to believe in the impossible.
But sometimes that is precisely what ritual is for. I collect definitions of ritual, and here is the one I think we need most this year, from historian Jonathan Z. Smith: “Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are.” Rituals don’t represent life as we experience it. They offer us an opportunity to step into a different world from the one we normally inhabit and to feel the tension between the two.
Rituals offer us permission to do and say things that would be dishonest otherwise. When we recite Psalm 121 and ask from where our help comes, the answer is always: “It comes.” Even though we know in the real world help does not always come. When we insist in the High Holiday liturgy that repentance, prayer and charity can save us, we know that in reality, they often can’t. When the world is too sad, too hard, too confusing or chaotic, ritual can be an alternative, offering permissions that the real world doesn’t allow.
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I have come to realize this is what I want this year: Permission.
I want permission to cry. I want permission to feel utterly and completely devastated without finding any silver lining. I want permission to feel scared.
I want permission to worry about my friends and colleagues in Israel. And to worry about the Israelis I don’t know. I want permission to worry about every single soldier and every single child who will someday become a soldier. And every single person who is or will be the parent of a soldier.
I want permission to feel scared for us in America too — to feel scared as a Jew and scared as a woman. I want permission to feel scared for all vulnerable Americans even when we have nothing in common and will never meet.
I want permission to be angry at the enemy for their brutality and I want permission to be angry at Israel’s army, which is not the perfect army I was promised it was. And I want permission to be angry at myself for having believed that a perfect army is possible.
I want permission to pray for the destruction of the enemy. And I want permission to not pray for the destruction of the enemy. I want permission to weep for the death and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, to express empathy with their mothers and not feel I have to apologize for it. And I want permission to not always empathize with Palestinian suffering, because sometimes it is just too hard and too complicated to hold all that pain.
I want permission to spend some time this holiday season thinking about my own life — my failures and goals, and how I might change and grow this year, even when my struggles feel small compared to the things I could be praying about. I want permission to sometimes forget about those bigger things and focus only on my own small life. And I want permission to not focus on myself this year. I want permission to say that teshuvah might be too small a framework for the challenges of this moment.
I want permission to think about the big picture of history, to feel comfort in its long arc and in the power of the universal. And I want permission to feel completely particular, to feel safe in the company of other Jews on our new year.
I want permission for so much, but more than anything else, perhaps more than anything else ever, I want permission to pray for peace. And by peace, I mean two things.
First, I want permission to pray for peace between nations, between peoples, between countries. I want permission to believe that prayers for peace are worth praying, that such a peace can exist and will exist. Permission to pray for peace is not merely something I want, it is something I need. If I cannot pray for peace, I cannot pray.
As impossible as this kind of peace feels right now, I believe we need to constantly remind ourselves that peace is the goal. As we learn in Deuteronomy, a desire for peace is not something we suspend during wartime. As the text tells us: “When you approach a city to make war against it, call out to it in peace.”
The Midrash tells us that this is something Moses taught to God. When God instructed Moses to attack, Moses instead sent messengers offering peace. This was a bad tactical move. This is not how wars are waged. But God learned from Moses and created a commandment that we must offer peace amidst war. How illogical. How impossible to imagine. And yet, this is the mandate of the Torah.
Second, I want permission to be at peace. Of everything on this long list, this is the one I find hardest to admit. I feel guilty even suggesting it when there is so much suffering all around me.
In his poem Wild Peace, the poet Yehudah Amichai writes:
A peace
Without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
Without words, without
The thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be light
floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds —
Jewish tradition teaches that during the Priestly Blessing, God looks out at us directly through the hands of the priests. As we close our eyes, for just a moment we get to bask in divine closeness, to feel held and seen. To feel at peace.
I want to offer that when we recite this blessing on the High Holidays this year, we experience it as a moment of permission to feel at peace.
May God bless you and keep you safe
May God shine upon you, with a beaming face, bestowing grace
May God lift up his face towards you
And just for this one moment, may God bring you complete, wild peace
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on October 12, 2024. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
