Drop Your Bags

There is a fascinating halacha that governs the reading of the Torah over the course of the year. Chazal did not leave the calendar of the parshiyos entirely to chance. Certain readings are pinned to certain seasons, and one of those fixed points is this: the curses of Ki Savo must be read before Rosh Hashana.

The Gemara in Megillah 31b:

In practice we do not read Ki Savo on the Shabbos immediately before Rosh Hashana. Nitzavim stands between them, and the poskim explain that we want buffer, so that the curses are not pressed right up against the new year. But the principle holds, and it is a striking one. The curses of Ki Savo are terrifying. Jewish history has unfortunately made its details legible to us in ways no commentary could. Chazal are telling us where that reading belongs. It belongs to the year that is closing. We seal it there, and we walk into Rosh Hashana with the curses behind us in a year that is over.

The First Piyut of the Year

Once you know that Gemara, something beautiful opens in the machzor.

In the Sefardic tradition, just before Maariv on the first night of Rosh Hashana, before the year has formally turned, the community recites a piyyut, or poetic prayer, called Achos Ketana, the Little Sister. The piyut was written by R’ Avraham Chazan Girondi, who lived in Girona in the early thirteenth century and belonged to the circle of kabbalists who made that city a center of Jewish thought. He built the poem around the Gemara. Every single stanza closes on the same refrain:

תִּכְלֶה שָׁנָה וְקִלְלוֹתֶיהָ

Nine stanzas, nine times the same plea. Let the year end, and its curses with it.

And the lines are scary. Here are a couple of them

Then the poem does something. On the final stanza, after nine repetitions have trained your ear to expect the refrain, R’ Avraham changes the phrase:

That is the hinge of the piyut, and I think it is the hinge of Rosh Hashana. There is a well known description of erev Rosh Hashana in Shpikov, where the Rebbe would come out of his room only three times a year to daven before the amud, and one of those times was this piyut. Every other shul in the town emptied out. People slept on floors and in doorways to be there. The Rebbe’s voice was weak and broken and the room was so still you could hear a fly, and he would sing a line and hundreds of chassidim would sing it back. Then he would reach tachel shana u’virchoseha, and everyone knew: Rosh Hashana had begun.

What we are actually asking

Think about the year we have just lived. Most of us can count real blessings in it. Yet at the same time, most of us have also carried real weight. Some of us have suffered loss. Some of us have watched suffering up close and been unable to do anything about it. There were painful moments. So we pray, let those things stay in the year where they happened. Let the year end, and let its curses end with it. And let the new year begin with its blessings.

But I want to take it one step further. Because there is a second category of baggage, and it is heavier.

The soldier who cannot move on

Israel is about to go to war. It is a tense moment. The officers have already sent home the newly marrieds and those who have just built houses. Then they stand up for one final announcement (Devarim 20:8)

The Mishna in Sotah 44a takes up that last exemption:

Rabbi Akiva reads it plainly. This is a man who cannot stand in the pressure of battle and look at a drawn sword. But Rabbi Yossi HaGlili reads it entirely differently. The fearful man is the one who is afraid of the sins in his hand. And the Gemara goes on to catalogue how small those aveiros can be, down to minor transgressions, before a man is turned away.

This is so strange. Isn’t this precisely the soldier you want? He is introspective. He takes his own spiritual account seriously. He knows he is not infallible. That is humility, and it is exactly the quality you would hope to find in a Jewish army. And practically speaking, if this is the bar, what size army are we fielding? Who among us has never transgressed even minor laws? We would not have a brigade, let alone a nation in arms.

The Kotzker Rebbe cuts through it. This man is not disqualified for having sinned, because everyone has sinned. Look at the wording: hamisyarei min ha’aveiros she’b’yado. He is afraid of the sins in his hand. He has already done teshuva for them. Yet, he still carries the guilt that needs resolving. He cannot forgive himself. He is held back by the past, paralyzed by decisions he already regretted and already repaired.

That is the disqualification. Not the sin, the paralysis. You cannot fight the wars of life while holding on to the baggage of earlier parts of life.

Drop your bags

A man hears about the gold rush out west. Get there fast enough, they tell him, and you will make your fortune. He buys a ticket, crosses the country, and spends months in the hills looking for gold. He is too late. No luck.

After much wasted time, he decides it is time to go home. He goes looking for a ticket, hesitates, and loses the one he found, and by the time he tries again the price has gone up. Finally he gets a last minute deal. The train leaves in an hour. But he gets caught in traffic, wagons and carts and horses jammed across the street, going nowhere. He abandons the wagon, grabs his bags, and runs.

He reaches the platform just as the whistle blows. The conductor waves, and the train begins to chug into motion. So he does the only thing he can think of. He gets down onto the tracks with both bags in his hands and he runs after it.

He is puffing and panting and the train is picking up speed and he is not gaining. The conductor leans out of the back and sees him and starts shouting encouragement, faster, faster. It isn’t working. The man is not going to make it.

And then the conductor changes what he is shouting. Drop your bags and jump!

The man keeps running, laboriously, still holding everything. DROP YOUR BAGS AND JUMP!

He looks up at the train. He looks down at his hands. He drops the bags, and he jumps.

We are all trying to get home

We too, sometime miss the first class ticket. We hesitate, we lose our chance, we pay more. And then we realize we need to get home, and we start running.

Here we are. Erev Rosh Hashana, the train pulling out, the new year begins to move. And we are running after it with both hands full.

Fights with family that everyone has stopped being able to explain. Bad blood with a neighbor. A sibling nobody calls anymore. The fellow who took my seat fifteen years ago and hasn’t been spoken to since. All the nonsense we somehow make into a life sentence. Every one of those is a bag in our hands.

If we want Hashem to let go of the challenges of last year, this is the moment for us to do it too. Let us let go of what we harbor about others. Let us forgive now, this week, before Maariv. Let us stop carrying pain, justified or not, into a year that could be light.

Drop the bags. Jump.

תִּכְלֶה שָׁנָה וְקִלְלוֹתֶיהָ

תָּחֵל שָׁנָה וּבִרְכוֹתֶיהָ