Don't Go Back That Way Again
Rosh HaShanah: September 22, 2006
Rabbi Jeffrey Summit

In her reflections on the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Portia Nelson writes a poem she calls, "Autobiography in five chapters."

ONE: I walk down the street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.

I fall in. I am lost...I am hopeless.

It isn't my fault.

It takes forever to find a way out.

TWO: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it. I fall in again. I can't believe I'm in the same place. But it isn't my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

THREE: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in...it's a habit. My eyes are open; I know where I am; it is my fault. I get out immediately.

FOUR: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

FIVE: I walk down another street.

The whole point of Rosh Hashana, these ten special days that will lead us to Yom Kippur season, is to get into a mindset where everything focuses our attention on Teshuvah, on turning, on the unsettling and wondrous possibility of change in our lives. God -- wouldn’t it be wonderful to change some of the things we so want to do differently in our lives? The times we talk before we think. The times we’re thoughtless or hurtful or selfish. The time we waste. The bad habits that we fall back into. A new year begins and I just don’t want to fall into those old holes. I don’t want to do those things again.

So, at the end of the summer, I was studying a section of the book of Devarim, Deuteronomy. That’s the kind of thing that rabbis do. (It was great.) And I was reading this passage about choosing a king and I thought: this is totally about Rosh Hashanah. I’ve got to share this with people when the holidays come, and here we are and I’m so happy to see you here, and I’m happy to be here myself. So here it goes. The center of this passage is one verse that jumped out at me with immediacy. The verse is: “Lo tosifun lashuv baderech hazeh ode.” “Don’t go back that way again.” (Deut. 17:16)

Now, in this section this phrase has a context and that context has to do with the selection of a king. The Torah teaches, when you choose a king, don’t choose someone who likes to go on an armament buying spree, sending down to Egypt to buy more horses to bolster his cavalry. Don’t, the Torah warns, go back that way again. And as long as we’re discussing increasing troop strength, the Torah tells us to remember that the best rulers don’t invest their energy in arming themselves to the teeth. So the text stresses that a king shouldn’t keep many horses, which in simpler times were the engines of war. If you choose a king, the text continues, choose a king from your own people. Don’t choose a foreigner to rule over you. And while we’re at it, thinking about the character of our rulers, the text instructs us not to choose a king who will have so many wives that he gets all caught up in the affairs of the heart rather than the needs of the people and the affairs of state. Finally, this short section (Devarim 17:14-20) teaches that a king shouldn’t amass silver and gold in excess -- wealth should be used for the good of the kingdom, not to swell the treasuries of the king.

Now, all of this is clearly good advice and this passage’s contemporary relevance is so clear that I feel no need to belabor it. But when I read this section, my thoughts kept going not to the pshat – the simple meaning of the text -- and not even on the drash, which is the next level of interpretation. I kept thinking about the level of interpretation that in Hebrew is called remez, the deeper hint of meaning that comes from these words. When I read these verses, I kept thinking about their meaning for Rosh Hashanah as the new year begins and our own efforts for personal change and growth intensify. How do we move from the nine little words that ruled my younger days (It seemed like a good idea at the time…”) to the teaching in this section: “Lo tosifun lashuv baderech hazeh ode.” “Don’t go back that way again,”?

Now I stress: I’m not suggesting that my interpretations of this passage about choosing a king provide the true meaning of these verses. But I do believe that the Torah is not just a document written about what happened to the Jewish people three thousand years ago. We can read and interpret it in a way that gives meaning to our lives right now. So, let’s start at the end of this section and work backwards. Don’t amass silver and gold to excess. Maybe we’ve failed at this already; after all, we’re the people who go to Tufts. We’re privileged up the wazoo. Whether your family is paying full tuition or whether you’re working and on a big scholarship, whether we alumni, faculty and staff love our jobs and are rolling in the dough or hoping for a raise, we’re still incredibly privileged. I’m just freshly back from Africa last month, where I started a new ethnomusicology research project in Uganda. I know from experience that for a couple more weeks I’ll be finely attuned to the difference between Mbale and the Tufts campus. I'll be deeply conscious of just how much stuff we have amassed and how our “gold and silver,” our education, tend to insulate us from the needs of the human beings around us. Maybe you’ve experienced this too, if you’ve traveled in Mexico, Central America, India or parts of Boston or Medford. While I’m feeling this intensely now, soon I’ll just fall back into my busy, cushy, privileged life. But I don’t want to go back that way again.

When I was with the Abayudaya last month, the Jewish community in Uganda, I was doing some teaching on Shabbat afternoon. These folks are subsistence farmers and one older woman asked me a question I had never been asked before. This was her question: She said, “When I harvest my fields, I make sure to leave the corners unharvested so that the poor can glean. But my poor neighbors aren’t Jewish and they don’t know they should come and take the posha, the millet, I’ve left for them. What should I do?” Her example, and her question, stay with me. As Rosh Hashanah begins and I think about the gold and silver I’ve amassed, I think I need to consider how I’m actively and personally involved in redistributing that wealth, in sharing the blessings that I have in such abundance. How do I make sure that I continue to work for economic justice in my community? How do I use my education to speak intelligently, knowledgably, passionately about the needs of people who don’t have enough to eat in Medford and Somerville, not to mention Africa and so many other places where the need is so great? How do I fully understand that we are all essentially connected and my happy New Year can’t start until I figure out how to contribute to others and make sure they have the opportunity for renewal and new beginnings in their lives?

Moving on, I don’t really want to go too deeply into the verse “Don’t have many wives lest your heart go astray.” In that same “Ask the rabbi” session in Uganda, one woman posed the question, in a theoretical way, what should a woman do if her husband wasn’t paying her enough attention? I took a breath and tried to give some helpful advice speaking about marriage as kedushin, a holy, unique commitment. Then I punted the question to Rabbi Gershom, one of their community leaders who was sitting next to me, hoping that he would pick up on any subtle cultural issues that I was missing. A bit later in this session, one of the men in the group asked why Judaism doesn't allow polygamy, when our patriarchs clearly had more than one wife. One of my Ugandan friends leaned over and told me: “The man who asked that question is the husband of woman who complained that her husband didn’t pay her enough attention…” Now, I’m not naïve enough to think that we can aspire to love relationships and marriages completely without conflicts. At some point in my rabbinic counseling I stopped asking couples if they were fighting. Now I just ask them, “What are you fighting about?” It seems that a love relationship is like a shark in the water; it has to keep moving or else it dies. If you want a relationship to stay alive you have to do your best to move forward, not to go back that way again, back to the same old fights, rehashing the same litanies, repeating old arguments. As the New Year begins, we should aspire to new, interesting, creative disagreements, working to build relationships that are alive with possibilities, where recognizing and addressing conflict becomes a way to move closer together, instead of repeating old patterns and retreating further apart.

Still, we need to remember that being too ready and eager for conflict, or as the text says, keeping too many horses, is no way to build loving relationships. And even more, when we’re too defensive, too primed for a fight, we’re not really positioned to change or be open to the self-criticism that’s essential for teshuvah, for personal growth.

Yet of all of these pasukim surrounding “Lo tosifun lashuv baderech hazeh ode,” (“Don’t go back that way again,”) the verse that speaks to me most strongly is the first one: “If you set a king over yourself, make sure it’s one of your own. Don’t be ruled by someone, by something foreign.” This aspiration, to be ruled by ourselves, to have our actions guided by our values, not to be ruled by impulses or pressures that feel alien and foreign, to combine who we are and how we act into a seamless whole, to live in accord with our true self, that seems to me to be the essence of what we’re trying to achieve on Rosh Hashanah.

Ultimately, the struggle for teshuvah is less complicated than we think. It’s difficult but it’s not that complicated. When we’re confronted by a choice, we need to pause and ask: is this who I am and how I want to be known? Oh, we say we don’t know who we are and even people my age say we’re still trying to figure out what we want to do when we grow up -- but in truth, when we stop and think carefully, we know a lot about ourselves already. We have a sense of what’s important to us, when things feel right, the things we want more of, and less of, in our lives. Rosh Hashanah an opportunity to focus on those core issues and to do the essential work of connecting them to action in our lives.

So we begin the New Year with questions. You have to figure out your own questions but here are some of mine: Am I present in a good, helpful way for my family and my friends? Am I using my capabilities to make a contribution to my community, to my country, to the Jewish people? Am I open to criticism or am I mostly a really insightful criticizer? Have I mastered the yes that is really yes, the no that is really no? Do I want to be known for my selfishness or for my generosity? Are I continuing to fall into the same holes and blaming others when things go wrong?

One of the most important lessons of Rosh Hashanah is that it’s hard to change who we are, but it’s always possible to change what we do. Change doesn’t happen all at once. Each real change is a hard won victory. But our tradition teaches that with teshuvah, change is always possible in our lives. And by changing what we do, we are able to change who we are. To be human is to make mistakes, but Rosh Hashanah teaches that if we choose, we don’t have to go back that way again -- not with our eyes looking toward the future, not with a fresh, new year about to begin.

Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah!

(Adapted from Shoftim Minyan Drosh 8/26/2006)

If, after you have entered the land that the Lord your God has assigned to you, and taken possession of it and settled in it, you decide “I will set a king over me, as do all the nations about me.” You shall be free to set a king over yourself, one chosen by the Lord your God. Be sure to set as king over yourself one of your own people: you must not set a foreigner over you, one who is not your kinsman. Moreover, he shall not keep many horses or send people back to Egypt to add to his horses, since the Lord has warned you, “ You must not go back that way again.” And he shall not have many wives, lest his heart go astray; nor shall he amass silver and gold to excess.”