Palimpsest, Geniza, Book of Life
Rabbi Ariana’s sermon from October 2, 2024/1 Tishrei 5785.
Shanah tovah. Welcome to 5785, I can’t think of another place I’d rather be at the turning of the year than with you all. I’m flooded with flashes of the year we’ve had, I wonder if your brain works that way too? Flashes of baby namings, funerals, mikvaot for conversion. Flashes of protests, vigils, prayer circles, so much horror. Flashes of conversations getting each other hyped up to scheme and create, of painful teshuvah work calling one another in, having conflict, trying to find a way on the other side.
We arrive on the turning of a new year like a spinning ballerina, eyes focused on a fixed point to keep her balance. So much has whizzed past us, been created, discarded. But we return–even for the first time, we return to the head of the year, the cool quiet night where, if we’re quiet enough, can sense the plants unfurling for the first time in the Garden.
We pray that we will be written in the book of Life for good, for health, for another year of life.
I used to imagine this big, thick tome that the Holy One writes in every year–She loses it every Elul, has a panic right before sundown today, shouting to her ministering angels “Micha’el! Refa’el! Where did I put the Book of Life?!” She calls on Hagar, she was the first one who saw Gd, after all (“El Roi”), and is pretty good at finding things, like water in the desert. Hagar pages Miriam, also a great tracker of younger brothers and finder of wells, and the trio of them tear the Heavenly Realm apart. “I promised myself at the end of the holidays last year that I was going to put the Book of Life in a place where I wouldn’t lose it, this happens EVERY year.” By some grace of Her, the three searchers alight on the Book of Life (it was under a pile of shed leviathan skins) and they find it right before its time to watch the world start lighting candles (they like to watch it like we watch CNN on December 31, “ooh China just moved into the new year! Now India!”) She peels it open, turns to the next clean page, licks her quill, and gets to writing.
I’m not sure I have that image any more, though. Now I think about the Book of Life like a palimpsest. See, a palimpsest is a piece of material that has had the original writing on it erased or otherwise dullened so that new writing can be put over it. When paper is valuable, we get creative.
So the Book of Life is a palimpsest, where our sacred names are written each year (please, Gd) but the years before them shine through too. Even if we tried to erase what came before this moment, we could never do so completely.
Rabbi Jericho Vincent teaches:
The ancestors had great wisdom. The ancestors also made some terrible missteps. This is true in any lineage. In Judaism, each of our many Jewish lineages curates the ancestral idea that resonate as wisdom and tries to leave the ancestors missteps behind–either dismissively or by engaging seriously and trying to bring the ancestors to account for the harm they caused. (For those of us who believe that the ancestors live on forever in the Heavenly Academy, this latter work is always possible.) Every single Jewish community, no matter how fundamentalist, curates ancestral ideas, leaving what it perceives as the ancestors’ missteps behind. Not only is it possible to have a deep and loving connections while calling out their mistakes, this is the only way to have a deep and loving connection with the ancestors. The rabbis said: love without rebuke is not love. Judaism has no saints. The Torah makes it clear: we come from humans who messed up all the time. There is no shame in being clear about this. This is the Jewish way. To be human is to mess up. To be holy is to acknowledge when we miss the mark and do the work of repair.
You would not be who you are if you had not messed up in glorious, absurd, awful, cruel, misinformed ways. And you would not be who you are if the people who came before you hadn’t messed up in different (or the same…) ways. We pray that our names are written in dark ink. But the names of the people who came before us shine through. And the last years and our actions in every direction shine through.
We don’t have the luxury, opportunity, or tragedy of leaving what has happened in the last year in the last year. When paper–and life is valuable, we get creative about reuse. We carry it with us, for all its curses, imperfections, and abundant joys. It shines through into the new year, no matter what. The traces remain. We must build on what we learned from the last year, even in places where there has been teshuvah. The echoes of what has been repaired shines through.
Despite this mental image, there are very few palimpsests that have Jewish sacred writing on them. Our tradition understands that it is through speech that the world was created, the written and spoken word have inordinate power to create and destroy worlds. That is why we don’t erase or throw pieces out of writing with Gd’s sacred name on them, we use a geniza, a room where we collect those pages, before we bury the whole lot like we bury human beings. What this usually results in is a recurring day where communities bury bags and bags and bags of used prayerbooks, copies of the Torah, endless source sheets, legal documents, and more. Sometimes we will bury used books with our beloved dead (that’s what I want for my burial!)
But every once and a while, the whole lot of years and years of material is never buried, and instead of a sacred disposal system, becomes an archive. I’m thinking specifically in this case of the Cairo Geniza–a storage room discovered in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Egypt. There were around 400,000 Jewish documents and fragments discovered in the geniza, spanning Jewish life across the Middle-East, North Africa, and Andalusia from the 3rd to 19th century.
And while earlier editions of text, rabbinic discussions, incomplete manuscripts are there, so are business letters and account balances, ketubot and gittin documenting marriages and divorces, magical amulets, Arabic folktales, letters, community records, and my favorite–shopping lists. Shopping lists made it in most likely because they were on the back of something that had God’s holy name on it, which is a kind of blending of intimate life that is so tender and true.
Perhaps this is why Jewish trauma works like this–because we never throw anything out!!! What if we might need it? Need to prove something, or show Gd that we want to keep Their name around? How will we tell the story of who we are accurately to our descendants?
A geniza allows us to actually get rid of what no longer serves us, in a way that honors it. And that is what we are doing in this season. The parts of ourselves we have tended to long enough as we transform that we are ready to say goodbye to. The relationships that are ending or transforming that we must document. Jews do not tend to throw things out as we go–but rather need a chance to sit with centuries upon centuries of history and decide when we are ready for that release.
So tonight, this week, go through your geniza. Look on the back of love letters and find the Divine name. Put things back you are not ready to release, and get ready for a dignified farewell to what is ready to be buried.
I pray that our accounting, our archival research, is rigorous in the right places and gentle in the right places. And as we explore the geniza of our years, may we merit to have our name written in the book of Life for Good, with the merit of our actions and those of our ancestors shining through.
Shanah tovah.