Calendar
Our Rabbi's Message
January 2005
Beginnings
By Rabbi Aaron Kriegel
People love beginnings. New shoes, new phones, new video games, we love them all. We love the opportunity to begin again when things seem to be going wrong. Have you ever watched youngsters playing a game? One team might lose by a landslide in the first game, but they always want a second and a third believing that new opportunities at victory will erase the lack of talent and bad coaching that was the cause of all the earlier blowouts. People who fail out of college often will try again blaming their failure on bad luck and hoping beyond hope that lady luck will do her magic and create a Phi Beta Kappa Scholar out of the person who was at best a probation champ.
Beginnings seem to imply that no matter how unequal the playing field was, a new chance will make it equal. Of course life does not happen according to the rules of ‘fair,’ and the playing field usually is not equal for all players. New chances, come as they may, will never erase the inequalities of life, no matter what the world believes.
Beginnings give us pause to analyze what we did wrong and time to correct those errors at a second go around. In other words, beginnings are not and never were based upon chance or luck. Their foundation is the opportunity to rethink our actions and correct them. That is all. They allow us to see the old in a new perspective. They allow us to recognize that the old is inextricably bound to the new.
Therefore with regard to the coming New Year, 2005 will not change the errors of 2004. 2005 will not make the illnesses of 2004 go away. 2005 will not make the poor grades of 2004 magically become ‘A’s’. The triumph or tragedy of 2004 will remain in 2005. The calendar does not erase emotions of the heart. And the resolutions of 2005 will remain as meaningless as the resolutions of 2004 unless we accept New Years as part of the continuum of life.
The only way to accept the New Year is to see it as the outgrowth of the old. It is a human device to review what we did in a specific period of time and to correct behavior that otherwise will be repeated in the future. It is a device to recognize what time really is. It is time to recognize that time itself is not a device.
New phones, new cars, new computers become old rather fast. They lose their charm and set us on a course for newer phones and newer cars and newer computers. Within days or months we are ready to chuck the new for the newer. We cannot do that with the New Year. We are forced to live every second of every minute of every hour of every day. New years cannot be tossed into the trashcan of life. We have to live them even after the resolutions fade from memory and are long forgotten.
However the New Year is an opportunity to review and to recognize that time does not go away, that time cannot be tossed away; time to realize that moments have infinite values and unlike the ‘things’ of this word cannot be exchanged for the new.
Every moment is new and every moment is old. The New Year celebrates both what we did and what we can do, where we failed and where we can succeed. When you back upon the year you find that the minutes and hours and days have disappeared into memories. When you look forward to the New Year there are no minutes and hours and days, just hopes.
In other words the New Year is not a measured time, but a time to measure how we live.
If you are counting days and looking for the new, you’ve got it all wrong.
Sarah, Tamir, Elan, Liat and I wish all of you a New Year filled with memories and hopes.
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Rabbi Aaron Kriegel |
Cantor Marsha Schreier |
President Marc Wurgaft |
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© 2004 Congregation Beth Ahm of West Essex |
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