How Rosh Hashanah Can Teach us to Overcome Life’s Challenges
Rosh Hashanah, 5769
Shmuel Herzfeld
A couple of weeks ago I received an unusual call. It was an invitation to say an invocation at a memorial service for those who fell in the Bataan Death March.
After a US led armed forces division of 75,000 men surrendered to the Japanese in 1942 the US troops were led on a brutal death march known as the Bataan Death March. These POW’s were marched without food or drink for four straight days. If anyone fell or walked out of line, they were immediately shot. Many were capriciously shot anyway. And this was just the beginning of their ordeal. Thousands died on this march and those who survived were held as POW’s in horrific conditions by the Japanese. During the ensuing three years they were routinely tortured and killed, often at the whimsical fancies of their captors. I felt it would be a great honor to say a prayer in memory of these holy people.
On a side note, I was told that there was a very strict Navy protocol for what I could say at this service and I was instructed to call a person for instructions. I called up this person and asked, “What is the protocol?” He said, “I wish I knew! This is my first day here!”
In the end it was a very moving memorial service. I will never forget the words of one speaker: “They beat us until we fell, and then beat us for falling. They beat us until we bled, and the beat us for bleeding.”
The leader of the reunion was a man named Lester Tenney. When he was captured he told them his name was Tenney, even though it was really Tennenberg! I asked him if he knew a member of our congregation named, Bert Friedman, who also survived the March. Lester immediately said, “Friedman, number 313.” My mouth dropped open and I said: “You haven’t seen or heard from him since September, 1945. How do you remember?” He said, “I will never forget the day. The Japanese number ‘ten’ is ‘ju.’ One day a Japanese soldier said to him, “Are you “ju”? And a guy from the South shouted out, ‘Yeah, he is a Jew?’ They then took him and nearly beat him to death because he was a Jew. So you see, I never told them I was Jewish.”
Lester gave me his biography titled, “My Hitch in Hell,” which I immediately read. After being tortured, beaten, and starved, he came home to discover that the woman he had been married to had in turn married someone else. Thankfully, Lester was able to find the strength to move on and build a successful life and build his own loving family. But the story of his struggle to survive was a great, great challenge.
The most amazing and inspiring stories we learn about are those in which ordinary people overcome great challenges and somehow manage to do extraordinary feats. In my rabbinate I am so blessed to constantly meet people who fit this description. Lester is one of those people.
Since I met Lester hardly a day goes by where we don’t communicate. I asked Lester if he ever had a Bar Mitzvah and he said, “no.” But he said he really, really wants one. So this year on Shabbat November 8, (right before Veterans Day), Lester will come to the Torah in The National Synagogue as a Bar Mitzvah boy at the tender age of 89.
In reading Lester’s story, I want to share with you three lessons that I believe helped him overcome his extreme challenges.
One of the great gifts of religion is that it helps us overcome challenges. The teachings of our Torah and of our rabbis offer us tremendous strength in times of darkness. We can frame these three steps to overcoming challenges within the context of Rosh Hashanah, and more specifically the Mussaf service of Rosh Hashanah.
The Mussaf service of Rosh Hashanah is an entirely unique service. In modern times, we have no other service like it. It contains three special blessings, malchiot (Kingship), zichronot (Remembrance), and shofarot (all about the Shofar).
In each of these three blessings we recite ten verses from the Bible on the theme of each blessing. There is another requirement for a verse to be included in the blessing. The Talmud in tractate Rosh Hashana (32a) says: ein mazkirin puraniyot, we do not pick verses for this blessing that contain references to fear or punishment. These verses are not intended to scare us, but to inspire us. The purpose of this prayer is to teach us how to overcome the great challenges that will inevitably confront us in life.
The first section is Malchiot, Kingship. This is a reminder that when we struggle in this world we can deal with our struggles by reminding ourselves that God is the King of the world. When I heard Lester speak at the memorial, he declared that all he had when he was starving was God to shelter him. The Japanese soldiers tried to dehumanize him. They would give him dog feces as food. They would capriciously shoot prisoners. But the true believer in God can not be dehumanized. The true believer in God can not have his nobility stripped.
We say in Malchiot, “Mi zeh melekh ha-kavod? Who is King? Hashem izuz ve-gibor.” Only God is truly strong. God is our King and our Redeemer.
This is what we remind ourselves of over and over again on Rosh Hashanah. No matter what challenge we face in this world we only answer to God. God is our King and not a Japanese torturer. God is our King, and not our debt collector. God, and only God, is our King. If we truly realize that God is our King, then we will have the strength to overcome even the greatest of challenges.
In Malchiot, no matter what test we are facing, Hashem tells us “Ani Hashem, I am God. Your challenge does not rule you, only I rule you.”
Lester said it a little differently, but it is the same message. He said to me: “No matter what happened, I never lost faith in my God.”
This leads us to the blessing of Zichronot (Remembrance). In Zichronot we call upon God to remember us when we were innocent, before we became jaded by the world. Remember us when we were pure.
We shout out: “Haven Yakir li Efraim, Is Efraim not my most precious child and delightful youngster?” And also, “Zacharti lakh chesed neuriach, I remember you for the sake of your kindness of your youth, the love of your bridal days, how you followed me through the wilderness in an unsown land.”
This year Lester taught me another meaning behind the blessing of remembrances. At the end of his memoir, after he discovers that his wife had married another man, he asks himself how he was able to survive for four years in such conditions. He writes that from the day he surrendered he kept saying to himself: “You can’t have a dream come true if you don’t have a dream to start with.” And so everyday he would remind himself what he was dreaming for and why he wanted to be free. Ironically, he carried a picture of his wife through his struggles.
This is the second lesson that Rosh Hashanah teaches us. Zichronot is reminding us to remember ourselves when we were younger; to remind ourselves what our real goals are; and to force ourselves to look beyond our immediate challenge and instead focus on the essential goal.
It is so easy to get caught up in the trees and lose the forest. But Zichronot says, “Vayizkor Elokim et brito, Hashem remembered His covenant.” Every day we must remember that we too, have a covenant and this will force us to focus and overcome our challenges. It will force us to remember ourselves when we were young and reclaim our idealism and strength. It will remind us that we must have a dream to start with.
And now we turn to a third lesson which appears in the blessing known as Shofarot. The Talmud tells us (Rosh Hashanah 34b) that the purpose of Shofarot is to bind together the lessons of Malchiot and Zichronot.
There are so many deep lessons in the symbolism of the Shofar, but on a very basic level to understand the shofar we must turn to the very first place that the shofar appears in the Torah.
The Talmud teaches that a shofar should come from the horn of a ram in order to remind God of the merit of Abraham. When Abraham was about to slaughter Isaac an angel from heaven called out and stopped him and so Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw a ram caught in the thicket by its horns, neechaz basvach be-karnav. Abraham slaughtered a ram instead of slaughtering Isaac. For that reason we blow a ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah.
That is the shofar, neechaz basvach be-karnav--caught in the thicket by its horns. A shofar comes from something caught in thorns. It symbolizes the challenges we have in life. We are caught. We are stuck in bramble. But the shofar gives us the strength to overcome the thorns and the challenges.
We don’t know for sure how it will end. But we blow the shofar anyway. In fact on Rosh Hashanah we blow deliberately in the darkness, tiku bachodesh shofar ba-kesah le yom chagenu! All other holidays occur in the middle of the month when the moon is brightest. This is the only holiday when there is no moon at all. No matter how dark it is we recognize that God is the King and we must follow His direction. We blow the shofar to give us the strength to overcome anything.
And we believe that if we blow it enough and remind ourselves that we only answer to the true King and stay true to our mission then, in the end, we will hear the final shofar, the truly long blast of the messianic shofar. Bayom hahu yitakah beshofar Gadol. On that day He will blast the Great Shofar.
Those are the three lessons of the Rosh Hashanah Mussaf: Remember that God alone is King; remember to remember our dreams and idealism; and gain strength from the symbolism and promise of our Shofar, a beautiful ritual which we believe is looked upon with merit by God.
I called up Bert Friedman to tell him Lester Tenney’s story. Bert mostly lives in Florida, but soon after I met Lester, Bert spent a week here in DC sitting shiva for his wife, Bessie. Two years ago, Bert and his brother Leonard gave us one of their family heirlooms, a Shofar which is hundreds of years old that we blow every year on Yom Kippur after Neilah to end our fast.
I said to Bert: “Were you number 313 in camp 17.” He shouted: “That’s right! I was Sun yako ju son, 313.” I asked him to tell me about his experiences and this is what he told me, “Let me tell you how it ended. I remember waking up one day and all the Japanese were gone. Just like that. I just wanted to get out of there. I jumped on a train and took the train south and found an American airfield. From there I hitched a ride to Okinawa and from there I hitched a ride to Manilla. I wanted to get to Manilla because before Bataan I had left my tallis and tefillin in the synagogue in Manilla. When I got off the plane at Manilla, I immediately asked the driver to take me to the synagogue so I could find my tallis and tefillin. The driver told me that the synagogue had burnt down. Later on I was miraculously able to find my tallis and tefillin. The driver said, ‘The synagogue has burnt down, but a lot of Jews are gathering in Rizal Stadium today.’ I asked him to take me there. In the stadium there were four thousand Jews. When I walked in they were at the end of the Neilah service of Yom Kippur. I came just in time for the shofar blowing! Right after the Neilah service, I went to the bimah to daven Maariv. Immediately after that I was approached by everyone asking about the fate of our friends. Some I knew had died and some I had no idea. We were all crying. We just embraced, overwhelmed by our mixed emotions.”
Can you imagine? Bert went straight from the depths of a POW camp into the Neilah service of Yom Kippur. At the end of Neilah every year a shofar is sounded. This year we will sound Bert’s shofar. It is the sound of someone who was caught in the thorns but then redeemed by God. He was redeemed as a man because he never forgot who was the One True King and he never forgot who he himself really was. The sound of his shofar is the sound of someone who not only overcame a challenge but also inspired others as well. It is the sound of a holy man who along with Lester Tenney is a leader of our congregation.
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