## Rabbi Sacks on Rosh HaShana Mahzor, Second Day, Reading of the Torah

###### Rabbi Sacks on Rosh HaShana Mahzor, Second Day, Reading of the Torah 1
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אֵין־כָּמֽוֹךָ בָאֱלֹהִים *There is none like You among the heavenly powers.* A collection of verses and phrases from the book of Psalms.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Rosh HaShana Mahzor, Second Day, Reading of the Torah 3
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וַיְהִי בִּנְסֹֽעַ *Whenever the Ark set out.* A description of the Ark during the journeys of the Israelites in the wilderness. The parallel verse, “When it came to rest,” is recited when the Torah is returned to the Ark. Thus the taking of the *Sefer Torah* from the Ark and its return, recall the Ark of the Covenant which accompanied the Israelites in the days of Moses.
כִּי מִצִּיּוֹן תֵּצֵא תוֹרָה *For the Torah shall come forth from Zion.* Part of Isaiah’s famous vision (2:2–4) of the end of days.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Rosh HaShana Mahzor, Second Day, Reading of the Torah 6
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רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם *Master of the Universe.* The festivals are heightened times of holiness, and the Opening of the Ark a moment when we most intensely feel the transformative energy of the Divine Presence. Thus, when these two sacred moments coincide, we say a personal prayer for God’s blessing in our lives and the lives of our family. The version of the prayer on Rosh HaShana emphasizes the idea that at this time the fate of the coming year is under review. The prayer is preceded by the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, invoked by Moses when praying for mercy and forgiveness, and taught to him, according the Talmud, by God Himself.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Rosh HaShana Mahzor, Second Day, Reading of the Torah 9
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בְּרִיךְ שְׁמֵהּ *Blessed is the name.* This passage, from the mystical text, the *Zohar*, is prefaced in its original context with the words: “Rabbi Shimon said: When the scroll of the Torah is taken out to be read in public, the Gates of Compassion are opened, and love is aroused on high. Therefore one should say [at this time]…” The words “Blessed is the name” then follow. The custom of reciting it has its origins in the circle of mystics in Safed associated with Rabbi Isaac Luria.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Rosh HaShana Mahzor, Second Day, Reading of the Torah 30
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בָּרוּךְ יהוה *Bless the Lord.* An invitation to the congregation to join in blessing God, similar to the one that precedes communal prayer in the morning and evening services.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Rosh HaShana Mahzor, Second Day, Reading of the Torah 32
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אֲשֶׁר בָּֽחַר בָּֽנוּ מִכָּל הָעַמִּים *Who has chosen us from all peoples.* This ancient blessing, to be said before Torah study as well as before the public reading of the Torah, makes it clear that chosenness is not a right but a responsibility.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Rosh HaShana Mahzor, Second Day, Reading of the Torah 34
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אֲשֶׁר נָֽתַן לָֽנוּ תּוֹרַת אֱמֶת *Who has given us the Torah of truth.* An act of affirmation following the reading. The blessing, simply but beautifully, expresses the thought that in reading, studying and observing the word of the Eternal, we touch eternity.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Rosh HaShana Mahzor, Second Day, Reading of the Torah 46
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TORAH READING – SECOND DAY: THE BINDING OF ISAAC
There is a mystery at the heart of Jewish existence, and it is written into the first syllables of our recorded time.
The first words of God to Abraham were, “Leave your land, your birthplace and your father’s house… And I will make you a great nation” (Gen. 12:1–2). Then Abraham receives another promise, “I will make your children like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust of the earth, then could your offspring be counted” (Gen. 13:16).
There is yet another promise: “God took him outside and said, ‘Look up at the heavens and count the stars – if indeed you can count them.’ Then He said to him, ‘So shall your children be’” (Gen. 15:5). Three escalating promises: a great nation, as many children as the dust of the earth, as the stars of the sky.
What though was the reality? Early on in the story, after his brief stay in Egypt, we read that Abraham was “very wealthy in livestock and silver and gold” (Gen. 13:2). He had everything except one thing: a child. His first words to God were, “O Lord God, what will You give me if I remain childless?” (Gen. 15:2). *The first recorded words of man to God in the history of the covenant are a plea for there to be future generations.* The first Jew feared he would be the last.
Then Abraham has a child, Ishmael, born to Sarah’s handmaid Hagar. But God tells him: he is not the one. He will be blessed but he will not continue the covenant. Abraham has to part company with him. Another son is promised, and Sarah will bear him. This is a biological impossibility. Sarah is already post-menopausal. Yet, against possibility, Isaac is born. We read of Sarah’s joy. The story seems to have a happy ending.
Then, in words that over the centuries have not lost their power to shock, we hear God’s call to Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. Abraham takes the child, travels for three days, climbs the mountain, prepares the wood, ties his son, takes the knife and raises his hand. Then a voice is heard from heaven: “Do not reach out your hand against the boy.” The trial is over. Isaac lives.
The enigma is almost overpowering. On the one hand the promises, on the other, the years of childlessness – then the child who was sent away, then the child who could not be born, then the trial countermanded at the last moment. What is the Torah telling us, not for that time but for all time?
The story of Jewish continuity is a mystery. According to the Torah, had nature taken its course, Sarah would not have had a child and there would be no Jewish people. If Abraham had had his way and been content with Ishmael, there would have been no Jewish people. If Isaac had been born but the word from heaven telling Abraham to stay his hand had been delayed, there would have been no Jewish people. On such slender avoidance of the probable does Jewish continuity rest.
It is as if from the beginning a message was woven into our being. To move from one generation to the next requires a series of miracles. At every stage in the transition from Abraham and Sarah to Isaac, continuity seemed impossible. Nature was against it. Prediction ruled otherwise. At times even Heaven itself seemed to decree against it. We are Jews today by virtue of miracles. How then do we survive?
We cherish what we most risk losing. Might it be that our nation was born in slavery so that we would cherish freedom? That we were condemned to live most of our history in exile so that love of the Promised Land and Jerusalem the holy city would be engraved on our hearts? That we were forced so often to walk through the valley of the shadow of death so that we would never forget the sanctity of life? That, like Jonah and the gourd, we learn to cherish what must be cherished by having it taken away from us?
The story of Abraham and Sarah and their longing for a child, the promises, the delay, the hope, the despair, the torments and trials, could have no other effect than to create, at the very beginning of Jewish time, a focus bordering on an obsession with Jewish children.
No people have cared more for their children, invested more energy in them and shaped the whole of their religious life in order to hand on to them what they find precious. *Abraham and Sarah had a child because they so nearly did not have a child.* Other cultures take children for granted. Judaism has never taken its children for granted, because Jews have known what it is like to be an Abraham or Sarah.
So often were we in danger of losing our children, through persecution or assimilation, that they became our driving concern. Do not lose your children through carelessness, neglect, ambivalence, false values, dominance, indifference, too much intrusion or too little, mixed messages or a desire to integrate into values not your own: that was God’s message to Abraham and Sarah’s descendants. It is His message to us.
We have lost too many Jewish children. What meaning will our lives or the lives of our ancestors have if they are not lent immortality by our continuity? If we would only remember the many miracles it took to bring us to this hour, we would willingly do our duty to ensure that the next generation stays Jewish, and the generation after that. Jewish continuity is the greatest gift we can bring to the future and the past.


###### Rabbi Sacks on Rosh HaShana Mahzor, Second Day, Reading of the Torah 74
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HAFTARA – SECOND DAY: RACHEL’S TEARS, JEREMIAH’S PROMISE
Jeremiah, the prophet who warned of national catastrophe and became known as the voice of warning and grief, was also a supreme prophet of hope. Convinced that the Babylonian conquest and exile were only temporary and that the people would return, he delivered in this passage a majestic vision of the people’s return to their land, a vision reenacted in our time.
Jews did indeed return from Babylon, yet they were later to endure a further exile that lasted longer than any other people has known and yet survived. During the dark centuries, voices of those like Jeremiah sustained the unshakable conviction on the part of successive generations of Jews that they or their children or their children’s children would return. The Jewish people kept hope alive. Hope kept the Jewish people alive.
The echoes between the Haftara and Rosh HaShana are many. There is the verse that plays a prominent part in the Musaf Amida, “Is Ephraim not a treasured son to Me?” There is an evocation of the sound of the shofar as weeping, in the idea of Rachel “weeping for her children.” Rachel is the one matriarch who is buried on the people’s route to Babylon, and thus has come to symbolize the spirit of the Jewish people lamenting its exile. There is also an echo of another kind of shofar sound, the great shofar that will accompany the ingathering of exiles, as Jeremiah paints a vivid picture of the people coming back to their land – some blind, some limping, some pregnant, some carrying young children – a scene enacted many times in the course of the twentieth century.
No religion in history has been as closely tied to a land as has Judaism. That connection goes back four thousand years, from the first words of God to Abraham: “Leave your country, your birthplace and your father’s house and go to the land I will show you.” No sooner had he arrived than God said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” Seven times God promised the land to Abraham, and promised it again to Isaac and Jacob.
The word *teshuva*, often translated as “repentance,” literally means “homecoming” in a double sense: spiritually to God, and physically to the land of Israel. For Israel is the Jewish people’s place of destiny: a tiny land for a tiny people, yet one whose role in religious history is vast. It is the land to which Moses and the Israelites traveled across the desert, the land from which they were exiled twice, the land to which our ancestors journeyed whenever they could and which they never voluntarily left, never relinquished. Jewish history is the story of the longing for a land.
The Holy Land remains the place where Jews were summoned to create a society of justice and compassion under the sovereignty of God. And though it was subsequently held holy by Christianity and Islam, it was so only in a derivative sense – because it was the land promised to Abraham, from whom first Christians, then Muslims, claimed to be descended. The centers of these other faiths were elsewhere: for Western Christians, Rome; for Eastern Christians, Constantinople; for Muslims, Mecca and Medina. Israel remains the only place on earth where Jews are a majority, where they enjoy self-rule, and where they are able to build a society and shape a culture as Jews.
If anyone doubts the power of faith to shape history, they might ask whether the return to Zion could ever have happened without the hope incubated in visions like that of Jeremiah seeing God comforting Rachel, telling her to restrain her voice from weeping and assuring her of a future in which her children would return to their own land.