Message from Rabbi Ethan Linden
For Rosh Hashanah 5785

ethan-linden

 

Chevre,

I am particularly devoted to a concept in our tradition called makom kvuah: a fixed place for prayer or study. The idea is to find a place in a synagogue or Beit Midrash and establish that as your seat for any time you are there. Part of the beauty of ritual is that it allows us to mark our personal change against a stationary object, in much the same way that a lighthouse can allow ships at sea in the night or in foul weather to set their bearings against something they know does not move.  Makom kvuah acts as an enhancement to our ritual by fixing a place for our prayers and our efforts to better our actions and our intentions.

But as I return to my makom kvuah this holiday season, I find that I am thinking of an exception to this rule of fixedness: the idea that after the loss of a loved one, in the time that we are in mourning, we change our makom kvuah. We sit in a different place for our daily or weekly or annual encounter with prayer. The Jewish tradition is replete with repeated rituals, and indeed revels in them. The open paragraphs of the legal code, the Shulchan Aruch, goes so far as to legislate which shoe one should put on first every morning. And yet all that sameness, all that return again and again to the same words, actions and places, serves to highlight the moments when the tradition reminds us, even insists upon us, that we cannot always return to the places we have been, to the people we have been. In mourning, we abandon our makom kvuah, our established place, and at the end our mourning period, even as we return to the place that is familiar to us, we find that we are not the same.

We will return in this season to the expected tunes and blasts of the shofar. We will return to our mekomot kvu’im, our familiar paces, as we celebrate our festivals and sing our songs. But since October 7th, we have spent a year in a place of mourning, and we should not expect to be the same upon our return. The return is important of course, because we need the sameness and the ritual and the familiar to mark our war along the journey. But as we return to the prayers and places we have long known, may it be that we are changed by the view we had from the seat of our collective mourning, and may we remember that which we have lost in the time since last we joined together in this season of holidays.

The Vaad and I together wish everyone a Shana Tova U' Metukah. May we all be inscribed for a year of peace.

Rabbi Ethan Linden