This upcoming Sunday, my wife and I will have been married for one thousand four hundred days, and all of us will enter a new year, 5783, in just a few short weeks.
Our wedding coincided with tragedy, and in 2020, I wrote this reflection about the experience.
As we approach this one thousand four hundred day marker and the upcoming High Holiday season, I want to draw on a wedding-related lesson I learned and how it has stuck with me.
Our lesson begins with the Talmud, in Ketubot:
תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: מַעֲבִירִין אֶת הַמֵּת מִלִּפְנֵי כַלָּה.
The Sages taught: One reroutes the funeral procession for burial of a corpse to yield before the wedding procession of a bride.
This piece of text was one half of a lesson that we learned.
It is a reminder of our choice to celebrate life and the future. When we are forced to choose, we are permitted, even encouraged to lean towards joy.
The other half was the lesson that joy and sorrow live together, not unlike the crossing of the two processions in the Talmud text. Combining these two lessons reminds us that life is not an either/or situation but a mixture of all we experience.
As we approach this High Holiday season, beginning with Elul this weekend and continuing through Simchat Torah, we experience a full range of emotions.
We might experience:
Excitement, trepidation, concern, joy, sadness, repentance, reflection, anger, hunger, exhaustion, safety, spaciousness, harried, and optimism, to name a few.
All of these emotions have a place in our lives. As we enter this holiday season, we should open ourselves up to experience everything that it can offer.
It is as if we are on a boat, riding the river of the Jewish holidays. We could focus only on the rapids and our fears about them, or we could focus only on the riverbank and our admiration of the trees as we pass them.
Allowing ourselves to be in awe of both is the gift of this season.
As we move through the High Holiday season, we will find ourselves engaging with ancient texts. And like the Talmud, these texts still have wisdom to offer us.
And as I told my Talmud class on Thursday, which you can watch here:
If we limit our understanding of the Talmud to that of a law book, we might read this text about processions as merely a halakhic example and move on with our lives.
Instead, we can engage with this material as source content for potential wisdom and actively try and make it applicable, we might find ourselves breathing Torah into our lives in new ways. It is not some dusty old book but full of potential insight if we permit ourselves to have it inhabit our existence and wrestle with it.
This is also true with the texts we encounter for the High Holidays.
The Talmud and our interpretive rabbinic enterprise invite us to look at the world from many perspectives often at the same time.
The Midrash teaches that there are seventy faces of interpretation.
And Menachot teaches us that there are a hundred blessings each day.
And my wife is my partner.
Together, that combines to be fourteen thousand. May our celebrations be a magnitude greater than we can imagine.
And on Sunday, we will enjoy those one thousand four hundred days of blessing, interpretation, joy, sorrow, and partnership.