The song The World Is a Circle was written for the 1973 remake of a film first made in the 1930s called Lost Horizon. Based on a novel by the British author James Hilton, the plot tells of a Tibetan utopia he named Shangri-La. The song that Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote was presumably intended to evoke something of the spirituality of Eastern religions. Its opening lines read: “The world is a circle without a beginning/ And nobody knows where it really ends/ Everything depends on where you/ Are in the circle that never begins/ Nobody knows where the circle ends.”
It is not impossible that Hal David, the lyricist, was aware that he was referencing the Babylonian Talmud. In Tractate Shabbat 151b we learn that “there is a wheel that turns in the world”.
The context of the talmudic discussion is material and not other-worldly. It teaches that one should always pay attention to the needs of the very poor, if not for the sake of abstract moral interests, then out of enlightened self-interest. We are never more than a couple of generations away from poverty ourselves, teaches the Talmud, because the world is a wheel, and if we are up at one moment, we can predict that we or those who come after us will be down.
This notion may not strike some readers as particularly Jewish. After all, the call of many of our great prophets is to break out of circular thinking and fatalism and to act in a way that can change the course of history – personal and global.
In his remarkable work Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, the Romanian intellectual Mircea Eliade posited that before the Hebrew Bible, most worldviews were characterised by circular thinking. We live within a predestined loop, doomed to be extras in an endless rerun. In contrast, the prophets suggest that we have the responsibility and the agency to make a difference in the world.
Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, is where the circular and linear principles meet. We are reminded of all the inexorable cycles that define our lives – the rhythms of the day, the month, the seasons of the year, the cycle of youth and maturity and old age, the sweep of history. And we are also challenged to consider how each of us may act within these circles to make a difference.
In a remarkable reading of the Binding of Isaac, an episode read on Rosh Hashanah, Michael Lerner mentions rabbinic traditions according to which Abraham was himself exposed to great violence as a child. He is now faced with the commandment to inflict suffering on his own son, and thus to continue to the vicious cycle. Then the voice of the angel calls out a second time, and the cycle of violence is discontinued. Lerner reads the words “do not stretch out your hand, nor do him any harm” as a message from God: “You can break the pattern of passing on to the next generation the pain and cruelty that you have suffered.”
This year the wheels of geopolitics and environmental change seem to be whizzing with particular ferocity. It is tempting to throw up our hands, to bury our heads, to give ourselves up to inexorable cycles and unbreakable behaviours. Rosh Hashanah insists that we ask where we are in this circle and how we might behave to make a difference.
“Nobody knows where the circle ends”. But Rosh Hashanah is a reminder of where our responsibility begins.
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