The imposter called the impossible

Our tradition teaches that the Torah was not given to the ministering angels; it was given to us and for us. One important implication is that nothing in the Torah lies beyond our reach. The Torah makes heavy demands, yet it rests on a promise that nothing it asks of us will ever be too much.

That means that when the feeling arrives that a mitzvah or a change of heart is more than we can manage, it does not come from Torah but from within us. That whisper, the one that says we cannot do it, that there is no point trying because we are bound to fail, is the authentic voice of the yetzer harah, the evil inclination trying to discourage us. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we are asked to replace that naysayer with the sound of optimism and confidence.

That is one of the messages of the shofar, whose blast is a sound of victory telling us that we can and we will overcome. Rosh Hashanah is the moment to walk into the new year with our head up, knowing there is no limit to the spiritual heights we can reach.

We all have a spiritual life. Many of us quietly yearn to grow, to perform more mitzvot, to pray more deeply, to learn more Torah. Yet many feel they lack the capacity to make it possible. To all of that the Torah answers ‘lo bashamayim hi’, it is not in heaven. Nothing is beyond us, neither the choice nor the power to act on it.

We shouldn’t call a thing impossible when in truth it is only very, very hard. The temptation to declare something is impossible is so potent because it releases us from all responsibility to try. In halachic terms we think we are patur, discharged of our obligation, the moment we decide we are doomed to fail. The concept of the impossible is the enemy of the difficult but worthwhile, and we cannot let it win.

History is pushed forward by people who refused to accept that anything was impossible: the men and women who built a Jewish community here in Australia, so far from the old centres of Jewish life; the survivors of the Shoah who rebuilt their lives and raised new families; the Zionists who turned a longing into a state; the individuals who recovered from bereavement, abuse, addiction and trauma and turned their lives around. The heroes who today are rebuilding family and community after Bondi.

These examples teach that such things are possible, but they require two things: will, and the belief that our will can be realised. But our will, our confidence, must come first.

That is the lesson in the pairing of the first day’s Torah reading and the Haftarah. From the Torah we read that God granted Abraham and Sarah a son in their old age, long after they had made peace with a life without children. Sarah conceived because God wanted us to know that anything is possible. The Haftarah turns that lesson into a duty. Hannah, who could not conceive, knew the story of Sarah and Isaac, that knowledge gave her belief, and belief gave her will. Her husband urged her to accept her situation, and Eli the High Priest wrongly accused her of drunkenness, but she was not dissuaded. She prayed, and she too had a son, the prophet Samuel.

There is no shortage of problems we are tempted to label impossible when they are merely very hard. We each carry them in our personal lives, and I wish us all the resolve to face them afresh.

We face profound challenges in Australia and there are challenges in and for Israel, yet we must believe that with wise communal leadership, a safe Jewish community here, and a secure Israel and a peaceful region are achievable.

In a world where technology astonishes us daily, only a pessimist concludes that a problem exists which we cannot overcome.

This Rosh Hashanah, let us reject the imposter known as the impossible. In our personal, family, communal and national lives, let us have the courage to see that even the worst before us is not the impossible but the very, very hard, and we can overcome it.

Rabbi Dr Benjamin Elton is chief minister of The Great Synagogue, Sydney.