A Time for Penitence and Spiritual Renewal

In solemn ceremonies from Southern California to Jerusalem, Jews throughout the world ushered in the Jewish New Year--Rosh Hashanah--Friday night by reflecting on the meaning of their lives in a world shaken by political tumult and personal insecurity.

But even in the face of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and private disappointments of the past year, rabbis plan to use their sermons to remind their congregants this weekend that Judaism seeks to bring balance to life.

“We return to this place to renew ourselves for life,” Rabbi Harvey J. Fields planned to tell worshipers at Rosh Hashanah services at his Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

The sacred observances Friday night and today of the beginning of the year 5757 on the Jewish calendar mark the outset of the High Holy Days, a 10-day period of penitence and spiritual renewal that culminates at sundown Sept. 22 with Yom Kippur--the Day of Atonement, the most holy day of the Jewish year. Translated literally, Rosh ha-Shanah means “head of the year.”

Jewish tradition recounts that on Rosh Hashanah God inscribes each person’s fortune for the coming year based on conduct in the year past. Thus it is a time to reflect on one’s life and seek forgiveness of God and others before God seals the Book of Life on Yom Kippur.

There are an estimated 5 million to 6 million Jews in the United States, including an estimated 600,000 in Southern California.

Worship services are an important part of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur observances, and rabbis interviewed by The Times this week expressed a common theme that will characterize their sermons:

Judaism seeks to bring balance to life and encourages individuals to make choices that will enhance life, the rabbis said, and they used examples as varied as the Rabin assassination, fears of growing old, and worries about relationships, jobs or health care to make that point from the pulpit.

“We are afraid of not living,” Fields told his congregants. “We fear coming to the end of our days--however many are lavished upon us--with the dread sense that we have never really lived, that our souls have never known enduring happiness, that we have never figured out what our lives are meant to be.

“Living means jumping into life. It means getting your hands dirty, sometimes means falling on your face. It means engaging all our talents and senses,” Fields said. People everywhere are facing insecurities, said Rabbi Joel Rembaum of Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles.

“I have a sense that people are feeling very insecure at this moment in history,” Rembaum told The Times.

He recalled a recent television newscast that opened with accounts of a murder, a kidnapping and the birth of a baby with two heads.

“This is no joke. . . . It does not lend itself to a feeling of security,” Rembaum said. “The answer is we need to develop an outlook that lends itself to seeking security in other moments of life, internally within ourselves and our relationships and within the world we can create and control.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, an international watchdog group that tracks anti-Semitism, said Judaism teaches that life is more than celebration.

“Life is not a game and living on Earth is not about pretending,” he said in remarks prepared for delivery next week in New York. “We cannot closet ourselves away in a rhapsody of pleasing symphonies without acknowledging the fact that sometimes the voices we hear in the real world are harsh, evil, and inconsiderate and we must be prepared to deal with those voices as well.”

The Talmud, he said in an interview, reminds Jews that the original broken tablets containing the Ten Commandments were carried in the ark with a second unbroken set of the tablets.

“That is really the Jewish approach to the concept of life and of memory,” he said. “Life is not only about the whole, but also about the broken, the painful, the sorrowful, the disgraceful, the horrible. People who think life is only utopic . . . I would say that those people buy a half ticket to life.”

In La Mirada, Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark of Temple Beth Ohr said Jews cannot help in this season of reflection but to look at the dark side. The most important event during the past year, he said, was Rabin’s assassination.

“I want to deal with the question that a Jewish person, an Orthodox Jew in this case, took the Bible as his source for murdering a fellow Jew,” he said. Such an unthinkable act, claiming justification in Scripture, demands a response by all Jews, said Goldmark, the president elect of the Southern California Board of Rabbis.

“The [Biblical] text should have prevented him from murdering Yitzhak Rabin,” Goldmark said. “Genesis says that God created man in his own image and thus a man who murders another man, it is as though he has killed God.”