Rabbi Donald Tam’s Rosh Hashanah Message of 2022

I am relieved that we can, once more, share thoughts face-to-face in the flesh, because the face in person, is the way to the heart.

My granduncle Chaim, like all my mother’s aunts and uncles, was a Yiddish speaker, steeped in the atmosphere of a Jewish Eastern Europe, now gone. He hailed from a little town in Rumania, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, called “Focshan.” He was a free thinker an “Apikores,” in the words of the rabbis an atheist.

Whenever we visited Toronto, I would go with him, to what we called the “Rumainishe Shul.” Uncle Chaim always attended Shabbat services. Finally, I asked him, “Uncle Chaim, you say you are a free thinker, but you go to Shul every Shabbos? “Ah, Duvid,” he answered, “Where else should a Jew be on Shabbos, but in Shul.” If God Himself could not hold him, apparently the covenant of Israel with God, still did?

In the Torah portion read the week before Rosh Hashanah, the Israelites are poised ready to enter the land of Israel. “That you should enter into the covenant of the Lord your God, and into His oath, which the Lord your God makes with you this day,” Deut. 29:11.

What need is there for “another” covenant just before our people entered the land of Israel? The first Lubavitcher Rebbe wrote, “When two friends make a covenant, it is not for the present, but for the future, because sometimes, as time passes, their feeling of closeness dissolves. Thus, the covenant is meant to have them maintain their closeness, even after those factors which brought it about no longer exist.”

Even though there would be times when all would be dark, and we would be tossed about the world, we as Jews would still maintain the love of God within ourselves.

Remember us for good, Holy One of Israel. Even during those times when you remain so distant, we hold to the covenant we made with You. We do not forget You. We do not break our covenant with You. We hold onto it, out of love, hope and dream. Do not forget us, Holy One, as my uncle Chaim, no matter what he said to others, did not forget You.

Rabbi Donald Tam is rabbi emeritus of Temple Beth Tikvah in Roswell.