The Day After Yom Kippur
This is the sermon that I gave during morning services on Yom Kippur. Figuring out what people need to hear at that moment is the one of the biggest challenges that a rabbi faces over the course of the year. As time has passed, and the number of people who are seeing what we do at Der Nister increases, I feel more pressure all the time to get it right. This year’s Yom Kippur sermon starts slow, but it picks up speed along the way and gets there in the end. Shanah Tovah u’Metukah.
Yom Kippur is a Biblical holiday. We receive traditions about Yom Kippur in the books of Leviticus and Numbers. These center around the Temple and the sacrifices that are made by the Cohanim and the Cohen Gadol in particular. The High Priest was able to, with the cooperation of the people of Israel and the assistance of the other priests, effect Atonement for himself, his family and all of the people of Israel.
Atonement was accomplished by three things: through animal sacrifice, through the priest's confession (First through confession of his own sins, then confession of the sins of his family and finally through confessions of the sins of the whole of the people Israel), and lastly by taking all of those sins upon himself through those confessions and then placing them on the Goat for Azazel that was sent off into the wilderness. Sin had a kind of spiritual physicality.
Rabbinic Judaism, the Judaism that we practice, to whatever degree we practice Judaism, remembered Biblical Judaism. But it was forced by circumstance to reinvent the way the Biblical system worked into something that would be possible to do without the Temple or the leadership of the High Priest.
We have replaced the sacrifices with prayer. We pray aloud or in muttering prayers which are considered the equal to prayer said aloud. We learn this from the Haftorah about Hannah that we read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah. Hannah is one of two wives of one man. Children come easily to Peninah, the man’s other wife. Her husband speaks to her a feast for the pilgrimage holiday that had brought them to Jerusalem. He says “Hannah, why are you crying and why aren’t you eating? Why are you so sad? Am I not more devoted to you than ten sons?” but still she is not consoled. She goes to the Temple and prays, overcome with emotion in a voice that is barely comprehensible. One of the Cohanim sees her and upbraids for coming to the Temple drunk. She denies his accusation and he is made aware of the power of her prayer. And so, in her honor, when we pray our “silent” prayers we are considered as if we are saying them aloud.
This is important, because we are only bound, in the Jewish understanding, to our words, if they are said aloud. Our intentions, without the commitment of speaking them aloud, are like nothing. This is not to say that intentions are of no importance. The quality of the words we speak is not divorced from our intentions, but even if our intentions are less than praiseworthy, if we do a mitzvah, it is accounted to us that we have done a mitzvah.
The first service of Yom Kippur is Kol Nidre, named for the first words of that momentous prayer. In it we beg God to release us from all the vows that we have made, all the promises that we have made to God in our prayers and in our lives. As a rule it is difficult to be released from the vows that we make with words. The fulfillment of our vows is in fact a life or death issue. If God will not release us from our vows we have little hope of being judged well for a good year. This prayer that opens the order of prayer for Yom Kippur is already a cry of desperation. It is recited three times. The cantor recites it once by themselves and then the congregation joins in, the first time usually with some anxious hesitation and then with greater emotion during the second repetition. What is most important about this is that we draw the confidence to hope from the power of our common prayer. The cantor leads us into this common prayer. They help us to overcome the fear that we have to be exposed, as overly emotional or a little too guilty. The cantor doesn’t act like the high priest, doing it for us. The cantor merely leads us until we are able to gather our strength, and feeling, and express the urgency of our desires.
We reach a high point in the Ashamnu prayer well into the repetition of the Amidah. We rise and beat our breasts as we intone each of the categories of sins that we have committed. The “we” is important, because the list is long. Have we all been violent, and killed and robbed? Are all of the sins that we committed exactly the same as the sins that others among us committed? No, but we take responsibility for all of the sins that we have committed as a community. When we are standing before God we know that we can’t all save ourselves.
We can’t all save ourselves, but together we can help to save each other. We confess to the sins of the Ashamnu together because we are more worthy of God’s attention when we go beyond the desire we have to serve ourselves. In America we gather in mighty convocations and chant things like, “I built this,” when we know that there is nothing large that is ever built by one person alone. When we chant the Ashamnu we turn away from that vanity.
This is the importance of the assertion that Rabbi Aryeh Cohen makes in his book, “Justice in the City: An Argument from the Sources of Rabbinic Judaism.” He based his argument in part on a curious Biblical story. There is a case presented where the body of a murdered person is found in the unclaimed space between two towns. Who is responsible? The elders of the two closest towns measure the distance and the one that is found to be closest takes responsibility. The make a sacrifice and then they are supposed to say:
“Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. Absolve, יהוה, Your people Israel whom You redeemed, and do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people Israel.”
And then we learn:
“And they will be absolved of bloodguilt. Thus you will remove from your midst guilt for the blood of the innocent, for you will be doing what is right in the sight of יהוה.”
Having said that, they are still responsible for burying the body. We are to assume that they did not, in fact, kill the man. However, there is a suspicion that they did not do their duty to protect a stranger who passed through their town as well as they should have. This is where Rabbi Cohen makes his move. From this he derives the idea that we are obligated as cities, towns and communities to maintain a just environment. The key word here is “obligated.” We can be like Abraham who sat at the entrance of his tent looking for strangers to help, but we are not obligated to do so as individuals. But we are obligated as a community. And so we are obligated as individuals to act communally for the common good of those within our communities and those from outside of those communities who cross our communal path.
And so, we admit our faults communally. In the Ashmanu we admit our sins by type, but we don’t stop there. We go on and recite the Al Het prayer, also known as the longer confession. But this confession is different. Again, we confess communally to all manner of incidents, but we don’t name them. Rather, we confess to the many ways that we have gone about our parade of failures:
“We have sinned against You unwillingly and willingly,
and we have sinned against You through hardening our hearts.”
We go on, listing all of the ways that we act, in three long lists punctuated with the chorus, “For all these sins, forgiving God, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.”
It is in the nature of community that we hold our cultural norms. The way that the town might have failed the murdered man may have been rooted in the norms of that community. As we recite the list of the ways that we have sinned, we acknowledge that the problematic ways that we behave, in community, can be the source of our failure. We acknowledge that we, as individuals, need to act to protect ourselves and others by raising up the standards of the community. As it says in Pirke Avot, “we may not be able to complete the task, but neither are we exempt from it.”
We don’t just speak for ourselves. Our communal voice rises in fervency at the conclusion of the Avinu Malkenu until we break like a wave on the shore of our unworthiness, “Avinu Malkenu, have mercy on us, for our deeds are not enough, deal with us charitably and lovingly, and redeem us.”
In the final moments of the day we proclaim the three verses together. First the Shema, then the second line of the Shema, “Baruch Shem Kavod Le-Olam va-Ed.” We don’t usually say that verse aloud. It is the property of the angels, but they allow it to us on the one day when we try hardest to draw as close to God as they are. We say it three times. And we conclude with the words “Adonai Hu Ha-Elohim,” the simplest expression of faith. We repeat it seven times. We say these lines, which express the firmness in our belief in the God who anchors our religious understanding, with the purposefulness of a magician casting a spell. The room vibrates with the energy of our communal relief to have come to the end of the day and survived. We say the Havdalah together, to separate the Holy from the mundane that will follow, and then we rush off to end our fasts, and to allow ourselves to come down from the heights that we ascended to. At the end of the day when our physical strength fades most, it is the community of worship that we have built together is what keeps us going.
Yom Kippur builds up our spirit, but at the end of the day we go our separate ways. This is the weakness of the system. When we are together it works, but we don’t stay together. We allow ourselves to forget what we can be to each other when we are together. This is the reason that I have tried this year to discourage the sense that Teshuvah is a process that ends with the final shofar blast of Yom Kippur.
This is some, but not all of the system that has been built up to help us redirect our lives, to bring us back on course towards the good. It is unreasonable for a rabbi to stand in front of a congregation today and expect that all of this and more is intuitively understandable to all or even most of those gathered with them. I am where I am because I believe that this is a useful practice, not because I have a sentimental attachment to it, although I do, nor because I feel the need to be an ethnic partisan. I stand by this tradition because it has been tested and tried so many times that, I believe, it can really make a difference.
This system has God at its focal point. That you believe in God is perhaps something more that I should automatically expect, despite the fact that we are together at a worship service. There are different ideas about what God is, but if you can accept that there is something greater beyond yourself, and if you can accept that it is necessary, or at least worthwhile, to seek meaning in our lives, there is something here for you.
I have been reading this past week about various Rabbis who have spoken out about this and that vital fact. It was something that they felt that they needed to do. May it be for the good. I am happy to leave that to them. “Perhaps this is my only chance to speak to you.” This is what they are probably thinking, and they will be right, in part. This may be my only opportunity to speak to you. But what is most important for me to say to you is that you don’t have to be alone, that you don’t have to feel that you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders alone. If you have understood from Yom Kippur that it was you alone who bore the responsibility for your failings, and that the only help out there is from a God that you don’t believe in, or feel has been distant from you, it isn’t so. We are here for you. We, your fellow Jews, will take you in. If not this group in the room here today, another group is out there for you. The lesson of Yom Kippur, of the day and of the prayers of the day, is that we are in this together. Together we lift ourselves up when we truly seek the good.
Even now, you may be thinking about the Jews out there that you can’t stand, the Jews that fill you with rage, and you are struggling, or not, to resist the pull back to the place where you sit so often alone. Our world has enabled that, and if you don’t make an effort to resist that angry pull it will overtake you. I have not explained the rhythm of the day of Yom Kippur to you as some kind of remedial course on synagogue literacy. I wasn’t worried that you would be bored. I am worried that you might let what we do here today end here today.
On Yom Kippur we are supposed to live as if we were facing the same judgment that will come after we die. We don’t bathe, or eat, because it is as if we were already dead. Some of us wear robes, called kittels, that are reminiscent of burial shrouds. In traditional Judaism it has been the custom to buried in our kittels when we do die. Elsewhere, we are told that we should live every day as if it were our last. We should live life with that intensity and with that desire to set the world aright if it is the last thing that we will ever do.
On Yom Kippur we probably do some of our best work in that regard. We are attentive in a way that we rarely are otherwise. We just aren’t capable of living every moment of our lives at the peak of our abilities, and that is why we need the help of others, if only through their presence. And this is my wish for us, as a community here in the room, as a people, and as a part of the whole human race, that when we look beyond ourselves and see another person, any other person, we see a person who might help lift us up and a person that we might help to raise themselves. Others are our strength if we allow it. We really should. The fate of the world depends on it. May it be so, speedily and in our day.
Gamar Hatimah Tovah.
