One and oneEditorialThe distinctive blasts of the ram's horn sounding throughout the Jewish world on Sunday evening, Sept. 20, will be much more than a call to worship. The discordant tones are intended to tweak our consciences and unsettle our souls. They ask us to confront human frailty, while reminding of divine promise. They root us to this world while inspiring us to create a better one. They ask us to look within and without.We are urged to identify our own weaknesses and to focus on personal improvement. We are prodded to map out a course of self-correction, to right wrongs, to make amends. Such self- examination demands brutal honesty and introspection. And it ought not preclude looking beyond ourselves as individuals, to probe also how we have acted as a community. While worries about Jewish continuity and survival engage our scholars and leaders, we have become caught up in increasingly divisive behaviors. At a time when seeking common ground among Jews should be paramount, we have resorted to hair-splitting and name-calling. At a time when we should be celebrating our diversity for the wealth of opportunities it offers for Jewish expression and affiliation, we are looking at it as a liability. At a time when we should be striving for communal cohesion, we are falling into disarray, confusing unity with uniformity. Even as we accept and forgive ourselves our own individual failings, we judge each other by an arbitrary hierarchy of holiness that suggests that one Jew is better, or worse, than another. If there is anything the season of introspection should remind us all of, it is that each of us has erred, and that every one of us has the potential to do better. This Rosh Hashana, as the shofar calls us together to begin a new year, let us remember that each of us is part of the collective oneness of the Jewish people, equally holy and valued in God's eyes. |