I have a favorite prayer found in the Silent Meditation section of our prayerbook. It ends with the petition to God to enable me to come to the end of each day with the feeling that “I have used its gifts wisely and faced its trials courageously.”

This Rosh Hashanah morning, I want to focus on the second of these pleas. How well do we come to the end of each day with the conviction that we have confronted its trials bravely? How soundly and effectively do we deal the tribulations and traumas of life?

A midrash tells us that Abraham underwent ten trials during his lifetime. The saga of the last and most severe we read in our Torah portion assigned for Rosh Hashanah. Abraham is told to take his son, Isaac, to Mt. Moriah, and to offer him there as a sacrifice. Abraham reacted like an obedient and compliant servant of God. He presented no objections and slavishly followed orders.

We have no record of the conflicting emotions Abraham must have felt, after God commanded him to destroy Isaac, his son, who was to continue the Jewish tradition. The narratives of the Torah just report the observable facts, not the inner world of Abraham, Isaac, and the other participants.

We do know that this episode must have upset Sarah, Isaac's mother, because the next chapter of Genesis reports that she died. The rabbis speculate that the shock of learning about the near-death of her son might have hastened her own death.

We also discover that after this tenth and most traumatizing episode, Abraham does not allow it to interfere with his future. Isaac survives and Abraham then ensures that Isaac will find a wife from within his tribe so that the tradition can be perpetuated.

Abraham then remarries. His new wife is named Keturah, and together they produce six children. Let's keep in mind that his marriage took place, after this gruesome trial, when he was at least 137. Instead of dreading a possible 11th trial and withdrawing, Abraham adopts a life-affirming stance. I wonder how many of us would have dealt with such a predicament.

Some years ago, the novelist Rosellen Brown wrote a work title: Before and After. The novel's central characters are Ben and Carolyn Reiser, who are a baby boomer couple. They live an ordinary, placid middle-class existence in New Hampshire. Carolyn is a physician and Ben is a sculptor. They have two children, Judith and Jacob.

One night, Carolyn is working in the emergency room. A brutally beaten corpse of a teenage girl lies before her. She immediately recognizes her. It's the girl friend of her son Jacob. What she doesn't yet realize is that it was Jacob who bludgeoned this girl to death with a car jack. This tragedy would radically transform their lives.

Ben and Carolyn respond in diametrically opposite ways to this tragedy. Yet, both are bitter and angry. Ben unconditionally supports his son. He goes so far as to destroy evidence and to lie to the police, the courts and even his own lawyer.

Carolyn does the opposite. She learns that their son, Jacob, not only committed the crime. She also discovers that he is a borderline psychopath who once molested their daughter, Judith, his own sister.

Carolyn isn't able to deal with her own guilt. She isn't willing to let her son get away with murder and so she sides with the prosecution. Ben's and Carolyn's conflicting responses create fierce tension between them, threatening the fabric of their marriage.

As we ponder this scenario, we wonder how each of us would respond if, God forbid, something as devastating as Ben and Carolyn confronted would strike us. How would we handle this experience? What would be our reaction?

There are at least three ways I have seen people respond to such unsettling episodes in their lives. First, some fight back with destructive unfocused anger, like Ben and Carolyn. They are mad at their friends. They are mad at their spouses. They are mad at their children. They are even mad at God. They become so enraged at their situation that they often direct that hostility toward an innocent target.

There is a second response, which is equally unhealthy. Unlike Ben and Carol, there are those who don't act out. Instead, they turn that anger against themselves and become self-loathing. Often depression is the result. It comes from directing that anger inward. If the despair becomes profound enough, suicide can be the result.

A variant of this self-hating behavior is withdrawal. Such was the case with Irving Berlin, the renowned American Jewish composer. Berlin wrote scores of favorite national melodies, including “God Bless America” and even “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade.”

Several years ago, I noted in the Bulletin of Temple Emanu-El of New York a congratulatory message to Irving Berlin, a member of the congregation, on his 100th birthday. I am sure that, to many, this Bulletin announcement came as a double surprise.

First of all, few knew that Berlin was a practicing Jew. Even more surprising is that fact that he belonged to a synagogue. Furthermore, it was not generally known that Irving Berlin was still alive. For over 25 years, Berlin had fled from the public eye. In 1962, his last Broadway musical, “Mr. President,” flopped after a six-month run. Since then, he became a recluse. He guarded his privacy zealously.

When the weather was warm, he took a short walk around his apartment building. Otherwise, he was never seen. He continued to communicate by telephone to a small circle of friends. He granted no interviews to the media.

He did not even appear at his gala centennial birthday tribute at Carnegie Hall. Berlin was so filled with shame over the failure of his Broadway production that though he lived more than 100 years, his life actually stopped at age 74. Though physically alive, his embarrassment in 1962 robbed him of his vitality.

There is yet a third and most beneficial response. Not all people react with misguided anger, like Ben and Carolyn, or with reclusive behavior, like Irving Berlin. Some deal with life's slings and arrows more positively. They put on a smile. They hold their head and shoulders high. They don't transform this catastrophe into a permanent disability.

Abraham modeled this third kind of exemplary behavior for us. Even in the face of near calamity, he continued to live a full life. He refused to be defeated. I also learned that, 4,000 years later, there was a higher birth rate among Holocaust survivors who settled in America than the national average. How amazing it is that they wanted to bring children into a world which had been so cruel and barbaric to them! What a defiant act of faith!

Many of us here this Rosh Hashanah morning have carried our own burdens since last Rosh Hashanah. During this formidable economic crisis, we might have lost a well-paying job or seen our retirement fund evaporate. Our business ventures might have failed.

We might have made a serious professional blunder. Our children might have gravely disappointed us with their life's choices. We or one of our loved ones might have been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. Those closest to us might have died.

This Rosh Hashanah I am not speaking about this subject theoretically, but out of a profoundly personal destabilizing experience. In August of 2008, Alisa, our younger daughter, gave birth to a gorgeous infant daughter, Sabrina. Seven weeks later, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Two days after this terrible news, our older daughter, Heather, gave birth to a third child, Liliana Beth. Indeed, life constantly plays tricks on us, and there is no logic to any pattern of events.

After Alisa's physicians presented various strategies for dealing with her breast cancer, she elected to undergo a double mastectomy. The goal was to remove the cancerous tumor from one breast and to prevent cancer from infiltrating the other. Lynn, Marco, who is Alisa's marvelous husband, and I sat anxiously throughout her 6-1/2-hour surgery.

Finally, the principal surgeon finished the operation and reported that we wouldn't know if the cancer had invaded the lymph nodes for several days. However, she did hint that her cancer might have spread. After several nervous days, we were profoundly relieved to learn, on Yom Kippur afternoon, that her cancer was Stage I and that her lymph nodes were clean.

Our hearts broke, however, when we saw that Alisa was physically unable to get out of bed after surgery without help. Ten days before, she came bouncing down the street after a session of Ashtanga yoga and now she was practically immobilized. Furthermore, she has now elected to undergo reconstructive surgery, which will involve a 12-hour procedure, and may result in undesirable side effects.

Before Alisa's diagnosis, I would have been able to present this third option this morning cavalierly with the advice to accept the inevitable and move on. This is the ideal, but it is far from easy. There are setbacks and retrogressions. Lynn and I learned that we need to stop bemoaning the past and not get stressed about the future. Rather we should focus on the present moment.

This experience has greatly heightened our sensitivity to other parents whose children are faced with overwhelming personal challenges. Some of us have an easier time than others in dealing with them. We are all wired differently. Nonetheless, Alisa's brush with mortality has permanently changed our perspective.

We have come to understand that it does not benefit us to remain stuck in our hurt and pain. To do so is spiritually debilitating. It is important for us, like Abraham, to struggle to move on in our lives and in our relationships. We need to work through these negative feelings and hopefully arrive at a sense of equanimity and acceptance. Each person accomplishes this at his or her own pace, so we can't impose a fixed time table.

We also should not try to present ourselves to others as problem-free. The only people whose lives have been perfect are those we don't know very well. Always trying to paint a rosy portrait of ourselves is dishonest. It robs us of our own psychic energy and distances us from other people.

Some years ago, James Agee, in his novel, A Death in the Family, describes a heart rending incident, as father attempts to console his daughter, Mary, after her husband had been killed in an auto accident. This father is not worldly or sophisticated. Yet he demonstrates profound insight into the human condition.

He tells Mary that there is really little that anyone can do to help her. She has to work out her problem alone. Then he goes on to say that “nobody that ever lives is especially privileged. The axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without warning…”

He then admonishes Mary, “You've got to keep your mind off pitying your own rotten luck and setting up any kind of howl about it. It's kind of a test, Mary, and it's the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens, then you have your choice. You start to really be alive or you start to die. That's all.” What Mary's father tells her is that adversity is the kind of test that can doom us or it can spur us on to more effective living.

I hope that all of us and our loved ones will experience the best of life's circumstances in the New Year. Yet if the road should become rough, I pray that we will find the soundest way to pass this test of adversity with the highest honors! Amen.

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