Dear friends,
Welcome to High Holidays 5787 at the Jewish Community of Amherst!
In keeping with the spirit of the holidays, I'll start with a confession. In early August, having been frustrated by my family schedule–and once by the poor sound quality at my first attempt to see it–I finally decided to play hooky from work, and attend an early morning screening of the movie everyone's been talking about this summer, when they haven't been talking about the heat or politics: Christopher Nolan's adaption of The Odyssey. (Between the half hour of ads and coming attractions, and the runtime of the film itself, it was well after noon before I made it back to the office, so I owe you a few hours.)
I was excited, and a little nervous, when I went in. I know a thing or two about the Odyssey, as a graduate of Columbia College's core curriculum, where it was the second book (after the Iliad) on the first year syllabus, and as a longtime student of James Joyce's Ulysses, a reimagining of the Homeric poem on the streets of modern Dublin. The buffeting and resourcefulness of the clever and long-suffering hero, trying to make his way back home along the monstrous edges of the known world, after years of brutal warfare, is one of the resonant archetypes of my imagination.
I'll spare you my assessment (though it should be out soon as an online extra from the Jewish Review of Books.) Suffice it to say, and this is another funny thing for a rabbi to admit, I found it a little too moralizing. The buoyancy of Odysseus, the organic expansiveness of a character in which cunning is not the opposite of kindness, nor desire of fidelity, was reduced to a flat (sorry Matt Damon, I loved you in Rounders) and melancholy remorse, coupled with a pop psychology version of spiritual rebirth. Let's call it Oppenheimer meets the Prince of Tides.
So much for sparing you my assessment!
It's not that I don't think the morals at the root of this moralizing are significant. How we come to terms with the role we have played in bloodshed, or the violation of civility, are real considerations, as is the challenge of "coming home" after experiences that have altered our understanding of what home is. These holidays themselves are all about tshuva–returning–making the arduous journey back to the place where we think we come from.
Still, I sometimes think it is the high-minded idealism itself that can put people off this journey, thinking it's all about standing in judgment before some grandiloquent inscription of right and wrong–whether "Zeus's Law" or the Ten Commandments–rather than riding the waves as best we can, drawing on the myriad of inner resources we possess to confront the monsters along the way, and acknowledging that, despite being neither all good nor all bad, we are still deserving of a homecoming.
That's the kind of adventure I prefer–whether in a summer blockbuster or the Days of Awe. And this time around, I won't be playing hooky.
L'shana tova,
RBW
