Rav Eliyahu Baruch Shulman
Every child had their favorite Yom Tov –
For some, Pesach, with the afikomen, and the excitement of seder…
For others, Succos, for others Chanuka etc.
But I don’t think there’s a child who would express a preference for Rosh Hashanah, and much less for Yom Kippur.
But as we mature, we come more and more to appreciate the special quality of these days , their majesty and sublimity. The familiar chords of the tefillah stir us more and more deeply, the sense of being lifted far above the level of everyday life becomes more real, and the sound of the shofar evokes the memories of a lifetime of new years past.
Rosh Hashanah is יום הזכרון, and the idea of memory and remembrance is central to it. Most obviously because הקב"ה remembers us in judgment, each one being called to the bar to give accounting of ourselves. And at the same time it is a time for us to remember Him, and to remember our own actions this past year, and whether we have lived up to what we expect of ourselves, and what He expects of us.
I would like to suggest, though, that there is a particular kind of memory, with a particular poignancy, that plays a role on Rosh Hashanah, and that is nostalgia.
Nostalgia, as you know, is the kind of memory that evokes a yearning for the past. It is that bittersweet feeling we have when we look at pictures from our childhood, when we visit places that were important to us at some earlier time in our lives, or when we remember old friends.
The word nostalgia is a combination of two words – nostos, which means to return home, and algos, which means pain (as in analgesic).
Of the 10 psukim of זכרונות, there is one that is clearly an evocation of nostalgia:
הבן יקיר לי אפרים אם ילד שעשועים כי מדי דברי בו זכור אזכרנו עוד על כן המו מעי לי רחם ארחמנו נאום ה'
Ephraim is a precious son to me, a child of delight, for when I speak of him, I remember him still; therefore I am stirred within, and I shall surely have mercy on him.
The Midrash elaborates and describes how both the רבש"ע and כנס"י remember the love and the glory of the past: נשאתני במדבר על כנפי נשרים, הולכתני בעמוד הענין יום ועמוד אש ליל, נתתי לי תורה ...
On Rosh Hashanah the רבש"ע remembers, and we remember, not only this past year, but an entire lifetime, and the lifetime of our entire people. And those memories stir us, המו מעי. We remember the ideals of our youth, we remember our dreams of great accomplishment, we remember the hopes we had for ourselves, and for our children. And we are filled with nostalgia, with that that aching desire for nostos, for returning home.
תשובה, too, is a yearning to return home. The word תשובה itself means to return; and תשובה really is a special kind of nostos, of homecoming.
Teshuvah means a return to the innocence in which we are all born; it is a return to the aspirations and the idealism which are the birthright of youth; and ultimately it is the return to the glories of our national past of which the Midrash spoke.
That is why these days of memory are experienced more and more intensely with each passing year. To truly feel the power of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, of these special days of teshuvah, one has to be able to feel that the strongest emotion of all is that yearning to return home.
The power of the idea of teshuvah is that one can take that ache of nostalgia and direct it towards the future. We can indeed remember what we felt when we first built our shuls, and our homes, and our lives – the dreams we had, the ideals we had, the resolve that we had. And we can use that memory to
make our shuls, and our homes, and our lives, better this coming year.
That is the power of teshuvah, to which the shofar calls us. The shofar is the voice of the past – the שופר of the עקידה, of הר סני, and at the same time the voice of the future, of תקע בשופר גדול לחירותנו. It is memory which looks forward, it is the recollection of our first and finest self, and the challenge of realizing some part of that self in our future.
The sound of the shofar reverberates out of our very distant past, out of the earliest days of our people. It evokes in us too memories of our past, of standing in shul with our parents and hearing the shofar being sounded in some shul far away. But it carries us into the future, too, summoning us to move our lives forward towards that day when והיה ביום ההוא יתקע בשופר גדול, when the great שופר of redemption will be sounded, and all the glories of the past will be made even more glorious, כיה"ר
