Reflections
Joshua Ostroff
Rosh Hashanah Family Service
September 7 2002
At Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year,
I naturally think about life’s journey and life’s cycles. This is
a time for reflection, renewal, reassessment and rediscovery.
Just recently I had the opportunity to
spend a week rafting a whitewater river in the Oregon wilderness with 20
friends, camping under moonlit nights, and floating under sunny skies in
a deep, beautiful, complex canyon carved a million years ago, where the
water cascades down mountain creeks, crashes around boulders and down ledges,
and forms cool eddies where you can float in peace and solitude until the
next funnel of foam brings all your nerves alive, and you shout with delight
and fear as the waves crash and spray.
A river is a beautiful place to spend some
time. I think it’s often a shame to just drive across a river on
a bridge I much prefer to dwell on the river and consider how it
nourishes life. To briefly make a floating family on the river is
a special gift. It’s especially wonderful to share a community in
the canyon, to play and rest and experience a different rhythm.
There are a few ways to row a raft.
You can get the most power by rowing backwards, pulling the oars through
the water to move your raft faster than the current. You get the
most control by rowing forwards, where of course you can position your
craft to meet the rapids and the riffles, which are gently ruffled descents
that just glide by. On calm water, it’s fun to pull your oars in
opposite directions, so that you rotate and see both shores as you drift,
where you might catch a view of a bird, a bear, a turtle or an otter.
And what about you? do you like to
walk backwards? do you like to stroll carefully, step by step, so that
you can see where you have been? do you reach your hands behind your
back so that you can touch before you bump into anything?
When you walk backwards, you of course
have a better view of where you've been than of where you are going.
That's good if you like the view of the recent past more than the view
of the immediate future. It's sometimes a problem if you never want
to bump into walls or furniture.
A more interesting way to walk is to spin
slowly around as you go. This is absolutely more fun than the backwards
stroll, but it can make you dizzy. It is certainly the best view.
I recommend going slowly if you try the spin walk.
One reason I am talking about walking is
that on this day, I think about my own journey through life, and how while
I am moving through time, just as are you, I also try to get a perspective
- to see as far as I can in every direction. To see how the world
is changing, how my family and friends are changing, to see how I am changing.
On this day in particular I like to look
back at the past year and reflect on the world and my place in it.
What happened to me? What did I help to make happen? What did I do
that was right, or wrong, or different than what I might have done?
Why did I make the choices I made, and what can I learn from my actions?
Some people may tell you that you can't
change the past, but you can change the future. Well, of course that's
true - if you think that time only moves in one direction if you
think you can only float downstream.
One thing that I have learned for myself,
however, is that time may only go in one direction, but I can go in different
directions. I can go back and think of what I saw and learned and
did, and what I could have done differently and why. I can take more
responsibility for myself when I think more carefully about what I have
done.
Or I can skip ahead and imagine what will
happen and consider what I will do - what the right choice might be when
I have to make an important decision.
For that matter, it's possible to go sideways
in time, and consider what it is like to walk in the shoes of your friends,
your parents, your children. To feel empathy for those around us
helps us see better, and know our friends and family better. We grow
straight and tall by reaching out in all directions.
For that matter, if you get really good
at time travel, you can go back in time as one of your friends. Learn
and think about where your friends have been, and what they have done.
Explore their pasts. Meet their great- great-grandparents, even!
That's if you know them really well, if they don't mind, and if you promise
not to mess anything up in the past.
But speaking about traveling through time,
I'd like to tell you about a little boy I brought to life. When our
son was about 5 years old, I used to entertain him with bedtime tales of
another 5 year old boy named Leon.
Now Leon was not your ordinary 5-year old.
Not that there is such a thing as an ordinary 5 year old. Every person
is different. But Leon was extraordinary.
The biggest thing that made Leon different
was his traveling ability. Most 5-year olds need permission to cross
the street. Not Leon. He not only traveled on airplanes, boats,
space ships - he actually could drive them. He was a great friend
to Jonah.... at least in the stories I would tell, where he would stop
by our house and pick up Jonah, and they would pilot a plane around the
world, or sail the seas, or engineer a train, or climb a mountain, or even
pack a picnic lunch, hop aboard a time machine, and go back to when the
dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Leon was the kid who could go anywhere
and do anything. He opened the eyes of the children who accompanied
him on his journeys, and taught them that they could go wherever their
hearts led them. His voice was the voice of experience, but with
the exuberance of youth. His love of the world was matched by his
desire to share the world with other children. His gift, to our son
and to the rest of his posse, was the world.
I’ll let Leon rest for now until I need
him again. But feel free to invite him to your next excursion.
As you celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the birthday
of the world, remember to get a good look at where you have been, where
you are going, and consider how you want to row on your own river.
And I’ll leave off with a few words that came to me as I contemplated a
stretch of water whose energy has stayed with me.
I wish for you to see that river through
my eyes: a system of chaos and rhythm, by turns crashing and calming.
And always inspiring me to live
blooms break the surface and slide downriver,
crowned with gliding wisps of white that
weave and fade
these unbroken and unbound cycles of life
reassembled in fractions of time
in this fracture of space
linked by this powerful ribbon
fluid energy
that drains the mountains and feeds the
sea
that fuels the soul and dawns on me.
