(Dear Friends: I would like to share with you the personal reflection that I wrote last week. I wish you blessings for your own journeys, as we all make our way through life. R Brian)
I am turning fifty today, and for the first time I can remember, my birthday falls on the first day of Shavuot—the fiftieth day after the Exodus. By prescribing the Omer period, during which we count every day between the moment of liberation on Passover and the moment of receiving the Law on Shavuot, our tradition links the birth of the nation with the birth of the nation’s covenantal relationship with God. The main idea is that freedom means nothing unless it is freedom circumscribed by service, by avodat ha-Shem.
I spent many of my first fifty years in a desperate pursuit of freedom—desperate, because my appetite was insatiable. I wanted the freedom to do as I pleased, with whomever I pleased, without responsibility, without consequences. Like the Israelites before they reached Sinai, I soon discovered that freedom without responsibility led to emptiness and despair. The first covenantal relationship I entered was my lifelong commitment to Joe, my life partner; the second was my commitment to the Rabbinate, another marriage of sorts. Both have afforded me a freedom I never thought possible.
There is another fundamental example of fifty within our tradition—the Jubilee. Every fiftieth year of the Jubilee, all debts were cancelled and all landed property reverted back to its original ownership. No matter how much material wealth or liability an individual accumulated, the Jubilee came along to level society, to wipe the slate clean, to return conditions to their original state. The Jubilee is based upon the idea that ultimately, we are all temporary sojourners upon the Earth, and nothing that we acquire in life really belongs to us. We come into the world with nothing, and we leave with nothing; only our actions, the good deeds that we perform while we are alive, possess permanent value and meaning. It is a lesson I want to take to heart as I enter the second Jubilee cycle of my life, an opportunity that was by no means guaranteed.
Both the Jubilee and Shavuot mark not the culmination of the old era, but the inauguration of a brand new one. The Jubilee takes place in the year after the completion of the seventh cycle of seven years; likewise, Shavuot takes place on the next day after the completion of the counting off of seven weeks. They both signal rebirth. But in what sense are we reborn? Does the clock turn back to the time of our infancy? Is it as if the intervening period never took place?
It is striking that the Jubilee is closely associated with Yom Kippur. “You shall count off seven times seven years… Then shall you sound the Shofar loud; in the seventh month, on the 10th day of the month—yom ha-kippurim, the Day of Atonement—you shall sound the shofar throughout the land, and you shall sanctify the fiftieth year.” (Lev. 25:8-9) The Day of Atonement—and, by extension, the fiftieth year—arrive to absolve us of our past misdeeds so that we may begin again, but they do not arrive so that we may forget them. To the contrary, not only must we make restitution, but we cannot achieve full repentance, says Maimonides, until we find ourselves in the position to commit the same transgression as before, but this time we choose a different course of action. Implicitly, we must remember everything that has ever happened, so that we can learn from it.
In his great poem cycle “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” William Blake delineates three stages in the course of human life: innocence, experience, and then back to innocence. When an infant is born, everything he does is new, exciting, and joyful. Sooner or later, however, he will come to experience pain and suffering—they are the inevitable consequences of human existence. Many never emerge from this second stage and fill out the rest of their lives in bitterness and disillusionment. But there are some especially sensitive, motivated, spiritually aware individuals, says Blake, who are lucky enough to reenter a stage of innocence, in which they can recapture the gratitude and wonder of childhood. At the same time, this is not the original innocence, ignorant of experience; it is a new innocence informed by experience, tempered by experience, incorporating experience. It is the freedom given to us on Shavuot—not the original, irresponsible freedom of the Exodus, but a new freedom to commit ourselves to deeds of lasting value and meaning. It is the rebirth afforded us on the Jubilee—not shutting the door on all the past, but growing from the past. It is the object of my prayer today, on my fiftieth birthday, as I enter this next phase in my life: may I merit, and may God grant me, the new innocence of experience.
R Brian
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