| Dropping the Ball on Yesteryear |
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| Written by Jayme Herschkopf | |||||
| Thursday, 27 October 2005 | |||||
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Emblems of First Days and Lasts I spent the first eighteen years of my life ten minutes away from Times Square. The location was an advantageous one, not least on New Year’s Eve, when all the world’s eyes turn to 42nd Street to watch the Waterford crystal ball fall. I usually watched along with them from the warmth of my living room, but every few years—1999 for example—I made the trek over to crane my neck with the hundreds of thousands of other pilgrims to the site. A ball dropping seems an odd choice as the symbol for the New Year. It stresses a finale rather than a beginning, the proverbial limping old Father Time rather than the sparkling Baby New Year. Similarly, Auld Lang Syne, the melody that accompanies the kisses and champagne, is a song of yearning for the past rather than hope for the future. This strange emphasis on the past finds its way into the Jewish New Year as well. Despite the apples and honey to usher in a sweet new year, the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is more devoted to the past year than the future one. Kol Nidre, perhaps the best attended service of the whole year, concerns the renunciation of vows already made, devoting only a parenthetical optional phrase regarding the year to come. In 1854, American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (of “The Song of Hiawatha” fame) wrote a poem about his impressions in the Jewish cemetery of Newport, Rhode Island. He laments the passing of Jewish life in the town, but muses that the present has long stopped carrying meaning for the Jews. Instead, they eye the past as a harbinger of the eventual world to come, “Spelling it backward, like a Hebrew book, / Till life became a Legend of the Dead.” In today’s Christian dominated society, it’s easy to see Jews as has-beens. We had our moment of glory two thousand years ago, and now (rumors of quests for world domination aside), whatever strange rituals we still practice seem like odd attempts to salvage a past already long gone. Jewish past even holds weight for the gentile world at large. Look at Kabbalah. Here is a book written almost a millennium ago that’s suddenly become trendy. For all we know, next year Cameron Diaz could be spouting the teachings of Maimonides, or tzitzit could show up on the runway. The poet Emma Lazarus, famous primarily for “The New Colossus,” (the ode to the Statue of Liberty which begins, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”), took issue with Longfellow’s Newport poem. She composed a poem in response, “In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport.” In it, she argues that the experience of Diaspora has developed into a heritage in and of itself, and contains a sacredness of its own. The past imbues the presence and future with meaning—a meaning with unspeakable potential. By focusing on the past, the Jewish New Year does the same. It erases the blame of our past errors and mistakes, but not the wisdom gained from those experiences. We stand clean, knowledgeable, and ready to tackle a new year with limitless possibilities. At five minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve, everyone knows where the Times Square ball is going to go: straight down. But what happens afterwards? It can stay there. It can be put into storage. It can even travel the world making appearances and signing autographs (well, maybe not signing autographs). No one knows what to expect of it, just as no one knows what to expect of the upcoming year. All we can do is leave our options open.
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