Warm Wishes for Rosh Hashanah
Posted by Danielle Borrin
Read translations of the President’s Remarks here. Languages include Arabic, French, Hebrew, Persian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish.

At sundown this Friday night, the Jewish community here in the United States and all over the world will celebrate the start of the new year. Rosh Hashanah, literally “head of the year,” marks not only a time of prayer and self-reflection, but also a time of celebration, rejuvenation and hopefulness for the days and year to come.

For many, the sounds of the shofar serve as an emotional high point during the period leading up to and during the High Holy Days. The sounds emanating from the ram’s horn awaken our spirits and compel the listener to repentance and to action. In the first Presidential video message for the High Holy Days, President Obama describes how:

The following is what they quote from the President.

“[T]his sacred time provides not just an opportunity for individual renewal and reconciliation, but for families, communities and even nations to heal old divisions, seek new understandings, and come together to build a better world for our children and grandchildren.

“At the dawn of this New Year, let us rededicate ourselves to that work. Let us reject the impulse to harden ourselves to others’ suffering, and instead make a habit of empathy – of recognizing ourselves in each other and extending our compassion to those in need.

“Let us resist prejudice, intolerance, and indifference in whatever forms they may take — let us stand up strongly to the scourge of anti-Semitism, which is still prevalent in far too many corners of our world.

“Let us work to extend the rights and freedoms so many of us enjoy to all the world’s citizens – to speak and worship freely; to live free from violence and oppression; to make of our lives what we will.”

This next paragraph appears to be the bloggers comment again as the quote ended.

As the new year begins, let each of us respond to the call of those who are important to us, of our children, our communities, our nation, our conscience. From the White House, we hope everyone has a happy, healthy, peaceful and sweet New Year.

Meryl Yourish at yourish.com snips into the Rosh Hashanah message and provides an intelligent and informed analysis. She would keep its first and last three paragraphs, which she likes, and which deal with “tikkun olam,” or repairing the world, but the “rest of this speech is arrogant, overreaching, preachy, wrongheaded, and, well, annoying. And there’s the problem he has with the transposition of responsibility.

“But other than that, hey, the hectorer-in-chief did a great job.”

Likely, a Jew on Obama’s staff who is further likely only nominally Jewish by faith, if that, wrote the message and the secular prophet approved it. Or perhaps he thought it too important for staff to write it. It comes across as a secular sermon, an admonition to the people of Israel, with insinuations that they should be more concerned about the sufferings of the Palestinians. It had a certain lawyerly cleverness with words that may work with many audiences, but one wonders how the people of Israel will receive it.