The 12 Days of Rosh Hashanah

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I was recently asked to moderate a panel of two novelists who have written books about saints. One is my friend Valerie Martin. Knopf published her nonfiction study of St. Francis, "Salvation: Scenes From the Life of St. Francis." The other is Mary Gordon; last spring Penguin published her biography "Joan of Arc."

At first I thought, what's a nice Jewish boy doing "moderating" a talk about Catholic saints?

I suppose, without thinking hard on it, most consider saints to be pretty much Catholic territory. I admire the tradition of naming children after the saint's day on which they were born, and I think many of the saints are terrific, especially St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes. Here in New Orleans, our football team is called the Saints, and "The Saints Go Marching In" is our classic theme song. But other traditions also have saints: Sufis, Buddhists, Hindus--and yes, also Jews.

The word for saint in Hebrew is hasid, and in its original usage, a hasid was someone who followed a more rigorous spiritual path, a holy path. (That is, for instance, how Maimonides uses the term.) The analogy to Catholic saints isn't perfect--there's no official category in Judaism, for instance--but the subject of Jewish saints is fascinating in its own right.

But how are Jewish saints remembered? Here are some practices connected with Jewish saints I've learned from my teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, something of a patron saint himself of the Jewish Renewal movement.

Reb Zalman teaches that the Jewish calendar is our catechism. Along with all the holidays and celebrations of the Jewish year, he also includes the yahrzeits of those rebbes and teachers from the past that are most important to him. (A yahrzeit is the anniversary of a death.) Their yahrzeit date becomes the occasion for a consultation with them, a communion or meditation on their teachings and the significance of their lives. By remembering their teachings on the day of his or her death, the Jewish saint continues to live.

It so happens that the 18th of the month of Elul is a very special triple-play saint day. The number 18 written in Hebrew letters spells Chai--life--and so "Chai Elul" serves as a meditative marker that helps us prepare for the Jewish New Year.

First of all, Chai Elul is the yahrzeit of one great teacher, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, also known as the Maharal, who died on Chai Elul in the Jewish year 5369 (1609). For many, he's best known in legend as the creator of the Golem of Prague, the mythical creature still a fixture in Czech culture; in the world of Jewish scholarship, he is one of the great educational reformers of Judaism. To those involved in Chabad-Lubavitch, he is one of the ancestors of the founder of Chabad, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady, known to his followers as the "Alte Rebbe"--the author of the great Hasidic treatise the Tanya and the founder of the Chabad lineage.

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