"After The Holidays...."

"After the Holidays..."

Rabbi Michael L. Feshbach

Temple Beth Am, Williamsville, New York

Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.  There is a Spanish term for this attitude of mellow postponement, of confirmed procrastination. The attitude is summed up in the word “Mañana”/Tomorrow.”

There is, however, a Jewish equivalent, a deferment of dealing with difficult issues even more effective than that of a single day. It is the Hebrew term "acharei hechagim." "After the holidays..." Of course, just as there is always a tomorrow, there is always another holiday coming up.

Having said that, however, we know that we now have reached one of the biggest gaps (read "breathing space") of the Jewish year.  By the time you read this Sukkot and Simchat Torah will both be behind us, and we will enter a period of over a month with no holidays on the Jewish calendar.  Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, with their chilling themes and haunting reminders of the randomness, the sheer unpredictability of life, fade into yesterday's memories.  Having been doused with our annual portion of perspective, our lives now return to routine. "Last year's confessions came easily to the lips..."

Personally , however, for me, this year, the themes of the holidays will not fade quite so fast  This year, as I look ahead to November, it is filled not only with thoughts of turkey , but also trepidation, anticipation, and excitement

We are expecting our second child sometime around the end of November. But "expecting" is a bizarre term for an event in which the unexpected is precisely the norm.

Julie is an attorney.  She specializes in the field of human resources, which is known as "labor law."  She was, in fact, in labor negotiations with the Teamsters when she went into labor last time unexpectedly. Three weeks early. She had just picked up a beeper for me, but not yet delivered it (the beeper, that is). We were planning on packing our emergency bag for the hospital the next day. But the best laid plans...

And so our lives are now filled with personal questions of the same nature as the spiritual questions which occupied our attention last month. Not that I take the words quite as literally as they seem, but "on Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed. How many shall come to be... who during the day , and who in the middle of the night.  Who with a smile and who with a scream Who will sleep, and who will cry " and repentance, prayer and charity might not affect the outcome of this kind of question.

We learn from particle physics that as we try to observe the spin and speed, charge, and location of an electron, we can know two of these three things, but we cannot know all three at once.  If I remember correctly this is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, popularized on the rest room walls of college science buildings as “Heisenberg May Have Slept Here”. We can know some things.   But we cannot know everything that we want to know, all at once.

The Boy Scouts say: "Be prepared." But for what? And when?  Monty Python said something like “expect the unexpected “which is, of course, paradoxically impossible.

So I am, for now, hovering in time, floating in amniotic suspense between one peak moment and the next but my prayers are heart-felt and real. And the resonance of holidays past stays with me this year, just a little bit longer than usual. But to move from the Jewish calendar to the American one may we all have a great deal to be thankful for... this coming Thanksgiving. And I will have news for you... after the holiday.