Yes, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are serious days. They require us to place God at the center of our lives, repent, and ask forgiveness for our misdeeds.
But let’s be honest. Many of us know that, however much we try, true repentance probably will not happen. We will fall back into our old ways.
The effort involved in surviving this, year after year, without becoming depressed is nearly brutal. The fact that we keep trying is an enormous human accomplishment. After all, what is the point of going through the motions, only to discover that we are back where we started?
How does one survive this?
Strangely enough, humor does the trick.
We are all romantics. We are not prepared to be content with our physical and spiritual lives. There must be more to life than what we experience, and our goal is somehow to reach it.
There is always a gap between what we want our life to be and what it actually is. Sooner or later, however, a rapprochement develops between the two. Our dissatisfaction gives way to the reality forced upon us.
It begins when we enter school. At first we are completely “authentic,” but slowly we conform and lose something of our real selves. Puberty may interrupt the process with some adolescent rebellion, but by the time we enter higher education, marry, and become absorbed in “the facts of life,” reality becomes a suit of armor we can no longer escape.
The result can be tragic. It is like painters who think they have completed a painting, only to realize at the last moment that something essential is missing. They know they have more or less achieved their objective, yet somehow overlooked “the real thing.” But by then the armor is too thick to let them discover what it is.
The great Dutch author Willem Bilderdijk once compared this to an opera singer who is given a lavatory as a practice room. It suffocates him.
Most people, however, learn to live quite happily in the bathroom while wearing their armor.
Only great souls become aware of this predicament and, often with enormous effort, throw off the armor and venture outside. They clash with society and are misunderstood, but they are also the people who move society forward. They are prisoners who have looked through the bars, seen the garden of their lives, bent the bars, and walked out.
But to do so requires humor.
Humor is training for the game of life
Humor is what keeps us laughing despite everything. Humor is conquered sadness. It is the melancholy through which we pierce and from which we somehow profit. It is the affirmation of our superiority over everything that goes wrong.
It is also the awareness that we live amid continuous absurdity. However soberly we try to live – using logic, common sense, discipline, and joy – we still end up staring at the mystery of a life we do not understand and never will, no matter how convinced we are that we have things “under control.”
Humor tells us that there may be meaning behind the absurdity, even when we cannot decipher that meaning. A Dutch proverb says it well: Humor is training for the game of life.
This is not merely a pleasant psychological trick. Even under the most horrific circumstances, some Holocaust victims were able to use a dark, wry humor about their situation. That did not make the horror less horrifying. It was a way of refusing to let the horror have the last word. To find humor there was an extraordinary human achievement.
Rosh Hashanah, then, is a day of infinite humor because it confronts us with the absurdity and foolishness of so many of our ambitions: honor, money, possessions, status. Yet these very ambitions shape our lives, and perhaps their purpose is finally to make us laugh about them in the presence of God.
It is through the everyday, the trivial, and the absurdity of human existence that God wants to meet us. Nothing could be more serious, more humorous, or more odd.
Life is a kind of funfair, except that the merry-go-round sometimes becomes badly dislocated and people get hurt.
But that is not all.
Rosh Hashanah asks us to re-crown God and place Him at the center of our lives. It is a festival of uncompromising monotheism: all that exists is His handiwork, and He is everywhere. He is transcendent, immanent, omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal. There is no “Other” but God.
This means that we are trying to crown a Being about Whom we do not have the slightest clue.
We do not know Who He is, what He is, or why He does what He does. Much of what happens in His world makes no sense to us and can seem utterly unacceptable. God is the great Unknown, to Whom even the words “exists” and “is” barely apply.
This is the pinnacle of absurdity. How do you crown a Being when you have no comprehension of who He is – and sometimes even wonder whether He is? It is almost pathetic.
Yet this paradox lies at the center of Rosh Hashanah. We are asked to accomplish something that is, by definition, impossible. We crown a Being who is not a Whom, a What, or an It, but only Ein Sof, the Infinite. It sounds like a bad joke played on us on one of the most serious days of the Jewish year.
And here, again, is the humor.
Rosh Hashanah takes us back to childhood, before our armor was forged. We are asked not to comply with our maturity, but to become romantics again: to feel dissatisfied with what we have become, and to recover the gap between what we are and what we once sensed life could be.
Which stories do children love most? Fairy tales. And which fairy tales are the best? The impossible ones: flying animals, houses on clouds, princes turning into frogs, lions that speak, witches traveling on brooms. All definitions, logic, and common sense are violated.
Nothing delights a child more. Why? Because in a fairy tale, the child enters a world without limits. Omnipotence and transcendence are obvious because no armor blocks them. The child possesses an almost unlimited capacity to believe in what is impossible and therefore, in the realm of eternity, perhaps true.
But fairy tales are not really about fulfillment. They are about yearning.
The prince must defeat seven dragons and perhaps spend seven years as a frog before he can marry the princess. This is narrated in glorious detail. But once the wedding takes place, the fairy tale ends. We are simply told that they “lived happily ever after.”
And rightly so. Real life begins where the fairy tale ends. The fairy tale is concerned with the engagement. Life deals with the much more difficult marriage between two people, one of whom may have been a frog for seven years and the other asleep for a century.
The fairy tale tells us about the journey, not the arrival.
Paradoxically, so does life.
We think we have arrived. Then, later in life, we discover that we never left the fairy tale. Until the final day, we are still on the journey, and we do not even know what “arrival” would mean.
Perhaps that is what keeps life exciting. Longing keeps us alive. The moment we convince ourselves that we have finally arrived, boredom appears like another dragon.
Religious life knows this very well.
People sing sacred songs with great devotion while having only the faintest idea of what they mean. Jewish men and women recite chapters of Psalms without always understanding the Hebrew. Children sing “An’im Zemirot,” one of the most difficult mystical poems in the liturgy, while the adults answer them verse by verse – and many of them understand hardly more than the children.
Yet this does not necessarily diminish the spiritual power of the moment. It may even increase it. They are on a journey toward something they cannot fully grasp. Their mature armor has, for a moment, fallen away.
The same thing happens in churches where people sing Latin hymns without knowing Latin. They sing because they are convinced that something enormous is at stake.
This is not a plea for incomprehensible religion. It is a reminder that some religious language matters precisely because it confronts us with what language cannot contain. It restores us to our rightful place. It turns us into children again – which, underneath all our sophistication, we always remain.
There is, as it were, a wisdom “out there” being transmitted on a wavelength outside the range of our spiritual transistor. We turn on the radio, but hear only strange noises and static. The transmission is real, but we cannot tune in.
Rosh Hashanah forces us to admit this.
When we proclaim that God was King, is King, and will forever be King, we enter a realm in which our words exceed our intellectual capacity. We do not really know what we are saying. It is holy absurdity and, precisely for that reason, deeply significant.
Our prayers therefore contain an extraordinary tension. We praise God with words, calling Him King, and then become aware that every word is inadequate. Language fails.
The shofar expresses what words can not
So what do children do when they cannot find the words? They make sounds.
Sometimes they whistle. Sometimes they blow into something. They produce strange noises that belong less to grammar than to fairy tales.
This is the purpose of the shofar.
When words are no longer effective, we resort to sound. We blow a primitive cry that tries to pierce all heavenly levels and somehow reach the One who is totally unknown.
And then, remarkably, Judaism tells us to celebrate.
What should we do when confronted by our absurdity and inadequacy? We could become depressed. Instead, Judaism turns the tables. It asks us to dress like kings and queens, eat festive meals, sing optimistic songs, and make Rosh Hashanah into a holy celebration.
It is a cavalcade of our lives and therefore very serious.
“To live is like to love – all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it,” said Samuel Butler.
Divine humor asks us to live with the absurdity rather than flee from it, and holy wit asks us to live with laughter. We are asked to enjoy the journey and accept that there may be no arrival.
Then the shofar sounds.
And perhaps, for a moment, the impossible becomes possible.■
The writer is the author of many books, such as the bestseller Jewish Law as Rebellion. Find his weekly essays at www.cardozoacademy.org