5770 Kol Nidre Sermon
by Rabbi Jan Salzman
Good evening. And so we begin the deepest moment of our annual cycle, the time when we journey through the worlds of our souls, leaving our bodies behind until tomorrow evening, when we will burst through the gates of heaven, and come back into our bodies with food and song led by the bright light of the havdala candle. It’s as if we spend the next bit of time in a world that is ethereal, unbounded by the needs of our bodies, and clocks, and the rest of our daily lives…a time of the deepest Shabbat, and a time of the deepest kind of soul-searching and a yearning to be reconnected to our higher selves. And it is a time to consider forgiveness: by whom, for what, and so what?
I want to tell you a true story that happened within our family a year or so back. I was washing up some cucumbers from our garden in the sink (a five gallon bucket full, for pickles) and the phone rang. Our then-17 year old son, Toby, answered and his friend, Dylan, was on the line, wanting to speak to my husband, Loredo (who is sitting here with us, and can confirm that I’m telling this story correctly!). Now, this was a kid who we’ve known since the boys were in diapers…we’re talking soul-brother here…that summer, when Loredo and I were out of town for a few days, the boys got into some mischief at the house, and when we got home, Loredo banished those boys (there were others involved) from our house. He was really angry. He was so angry that he didn’t even want to see those kids around, and that there was no way, at that moment, to move past this emotional place of outrage. This was a breach, a transgression, which was irreparable. It wasn’t that the kids did anything illegal (tho they probably had!) But rather a sense of violation, of boundaries being crossed, of such a deep lack of respect and integrity that the bonds between the kids and us had been severed. And, the angry father was drawing upon his authority to cast the young men out.
From whence this authority? Why would a bunch of teen-age boys care? You should know that Loredo, still to this day, is for these boys the strong male voice in their lives. The one to whom they bring their eagerness and playfulness, (and he plays so deeply with them...it’s such a joy to be in that energy)…and he’s steady and consistent with them, repeating over and over again the values and standards by which he expects them to act, by which he himself lives. No rules, just expectations. And so these kids know that when they’ve crossed the line, it literally brings them pain to have failed. To have failed Loredo. I’m not kidding about this, you should see the way that they bring their whole selves to him, and how devastating it is when that force-field is disrupted.
Well, anyway, Dylan calls Loredo on the day that he is leaving for school…it’s two months since the infraction, and he had not yet come forward to clear things up. You get this? a boy who would otherwise be practically living at our house. Gone, for 2 months. And so he calls, and lets Loredo know that he couldn’t go off to school with this hanging in the air…that he knew that there had been a disruption to the force, and that none of kids had acted in a worthy fashion. They were on the phone for about half an hour, and, afterwards, as Loredo walked by my office, I stopped him and confirmed my suspicion: that Dylan had called to put the separation between them to rest. He couldn’t leave for school without Loredo’s forgiveness…and Loredo had forgiven him, after listening to this young man’s teshuva: his remorse, and his desire to mend the broken places…it was a sweet moment.
So what process was going on here? I like to pull myself out of the particulars of this incident, and ask, What’s the archetype here? What is being acted out? Transgression, angry father, banishment, the son who is cast out from the palace, straightening up behavior, apologizing, and reconnecting…all within a context of love, consistency, trust, I think that you can see in this story the parallel to the Yom Kippur journey: transgression, angry god, repentant yearnings, confession, forgiveness, restoration of relationship, an intent to change and act differently in the future. And all in the context of a well-established and valued relationship, grounded in love and concern for the other… the transgressor calling out: adonai adonai el rachim v’chanoon, o god of mercy and grace…I can’t take it if I am abandoned, and You can’t stand it to have me gone. And, so, poof, the YK archetype in a nutshell.
But something is troubling here. And this is what I want to talk with you about tonight. Is forgiveness really possible? are relationships that have been polluted with disappointment, dismay, broken trust, tears and fears, really repairable? The little piece of sand that gets in your sock, the smallest grain, that becomes a major irritant, yes? So that if even one speck of regret or of blame remains, the forgiveness is not complete…and who can really forget? We seek forgiveness that is restorative and healing, not vengeful and bitter. Yet how does this actually work? Let us turn back for a moment for a look again at what we began back during Rosh Hashannah, the process of Teshuvah.
So much of the force of these holy days is the yearning to understand ourselves and our place in the world: how do I act? How do my actions ripple out into the world, so that the proverbial wiggle of a butterfly’s wings is felt around the planet. It is so easy to beat ourselves up about this, to enter the realm of pessimism, of devaluing our worth. The vidui, that endless list of transgressions, seem to pave a road of hopelessness. All those transgressions, piled high. So what do we hang onto, so that we feel worthy? So that the process of confession is worth anything? So that there’s any hope whatsoever of a restoration and repair of the broken relationship?
We are not the only ones to think about this. The rabbis, being just like we are today, were aware that it is so very uncomfortable to live fully when we have fallen out of relationship with those who we love. And so they constructed our services and our High Holiday liturgy to carry us on a journey from remorse to reconciliation. We will spend this evening and tomorrow in the contemplation of those places where our arrow did not make its target, all the way through to the Neilah prayers with which we will conclude YK tomorrow evening. And the point of spending all this time is to find the seed of reconciliation with ourselves and with God. How do we do that? By looking at all the possible ways that we can be out of whack with each other. For it is in how we treat each other, that we can find the core of how we are within ourselves.
We find meaning in our lives when we are connected to others. For it is within a valued and sacred relationship that we find meaning. To feel part of something, whether that is between lovers, in a family, a synagogue or a community, the planet or a business endeavor, or a listserve: this is what gives human beings a sense of meaning in their lives, a sense of purpose. And when an action, or even a thought, is disruptive, we experience a categorical imperative to mend the tear. Like our young friend, Dylan, we can’t stand to have things out of whack; it burns a hole in our hearts, and sometimes our stomachs, to be cast out in anger. You know what I’m talking about. And so we seek and hope for compassion and forgiveness.
Part of our tradition understands that within everything there is a nikkuda, a point, of goodness, of holiness, of God. Even in the depths of the worst, there is a point of light. It is upon this belief that Teshuvah is possible, and makes it possible to retrieve the jewel out of the coal bin, for how else would we be able to move out of the darkness and into the light? On one level, having sinned raises our awareness of sin, and that itself, that increase in awareness, is counted as Teshuvah. But that awareness only goes so far. Our tradition now takes a radical stand: that the sin itself becomes a merit, a change from something negative into something that is positive. Our whole perspective switches, like turning a glove inside out, so that a right handed glove now works for your left hand. And we know this to be true: when I have screwed up, and have seen how my behavior has hurt someone, I become viscerally sensitive to the memory of that transgression, which, ideally, elevates me to a heretofore elevated level of compassion for those whom I have hurt. And that memory, that awareness, helps me to strive to not hurt that person again. But it’s more than that, to just not repeat the same mess that I did...the tradition demands an awareness to the harder level, that I unravel the reason that I acted in that way in the first place, not just in that once instance, but at anytime…to untangle the knots which are keeping our compassion bound and unavailable. And so my behavior changes, or, in the words of the High Holidays, my character has been transformed and true repentance has been achieved.
In other words, for Teshuvah to really, deeply take place, an individual’s judgment system has to get re-booted, so that the changes shake through, and it becomes impossible for the individual to tear himself away from the fabric of life again through disruptive, rude behavior.
How do we do this? Is it in an atmosphere of fear? Like, I better clean up the house so that mom doesn’t get mad again? This method works for us when we’re kids, that desire to ‘make it all better, like it was before’…but that doesn’t work for us old and wise ones, who know that it can never be like it was before. My parents cannot re-parent me. I cannot re-parent my sons. So now what?
Out of the depths of our hearts, arises the need and desire to repair. It’s not the vase that fell to the floor that I wish I hadn’t busted cuz I was playing ball, again, in the living room, but the relationship itself. With my mom. Who loved that vase. To repair it from the depth of our hearts means, that you’d work to repair the tear even if there was nobody compelling you to do so, with a great love, not a love that had limits or conditions or potential benefits. Just the repair, in and of itself. So you could sleep at night. So that the Other can sleep at night.
So our Rabbis teach that tshuva is carried out with the same energy as was the sin. As much as we desired to do the wrong thing, so much now that we desire to do the right thing. And it is here that I can return to our story with Loredo and Dylan, and answer my question: is forgiveness possible?
A quick visit to the phrase, ‘forgive and forget’. I have always been bothered by this, because I know, and you know, that, in fact, we don’t forget. I see a person who has harmed me, and no matter how much time has passed, no matter what is our current relationship, I cannot help it that the memory of that hurt arises in my awareness. It’s there, and so the question is, what do I do with that memory, so that the past does not continue to dictate the present, so that I can move onward. We spoke during Rosh Hashannah, of the scene in the Torah, when the Hebrews have come through the Sea of Reeds, and they’re on the other side. Done with slavery. On their way to Sinai, and yet the Torah gives us a very powerful image. They look back and see the corpses of the Egyptians piled on the banks of the water.
One of my teachers taught, that we don’t really leave anything behind. The Israelites cast one more look back onto their oppressors, as if to preserve the memory of what happened to them, and only then can they move onward. They can lessen the grip that the past has on them, but they must take it with them. To not let the past dictate the future, but to take the experience of the past and inform the future. Otherwise, they’re always caught back in their hurt. Forgive and remember. So the first part of forgiveness IS the NOT forgetting, but in fact the opposite: remember, and then lessen the grip of that memory by laying down new tracks of thought and attitude toward that which hurt us. To find the nikkuda, the points of light embedded in the darkness, and do the radical transformation of the hurting, so that the experience becomes a building block for wholeness and repair. And this, truly, is moment for revelation: letting the light of meaning and relationship shine down through the muddy waters of past hurts. Out of this moment, when anger is turned into compassion, grows real forgiveness.
I want to leave you with one final question, which I expect bothers us all: How do we know that our prayers are being answered? How do I know that forgiveness if possible? how do I hear the voice of God, especially of a God of whose presence I’m not always aware, who is presented in a complexity and abundance of metaphor, to which I often cannot relate? How do I know that this stuff works?
The high holidays are a time when our tradition moves into the realm of poetry, in order to try and capture the elusive nature of our task. They are called piyyut, and many of them were written when we were introduced to the poetic form by the Arab world many centuries ago. Another teacher of mine shared this piyyut, this prayer-poem, by the mystic Sufi poet, Rumi, who wrote almost a thousand years ago. Listen to what he has to say:
Love Dogs
One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!
His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
"So! I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten any response?"
The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls, in a thick, green foliage.
"Why did you stop praising?"
"Because I've never heard anything back."
(ahh…pause)
"This longing
you express is the return message."
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.
Your pure sadness
that wants help
is the secret cup.
Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection.
There are love dogs
no one knows the names of.
Give your life
to be one of them.
Whew…The whining is the connection; the calling out is the healing; the feeling of the emptiness in our hearts is the way that we know how much we yearn to fill them. if your stomach didn’t growl, how would you know that it was time to eat?
In the nee’lah service tomorrow night, we say “You (God) extend a welcoming hand to transgressors (ata notayn yad l’posheem). What is the n’teeat yad that God gives? We do not say ‘atah natata’, you gave us. We say atah notayn, you give right now in the present.
Through our whining, through our yearning for that connection, to repair that which has been broken; that is the act of forgiveness. To notice is to do half the heavy lifting of repentance.
We spend this time being continually flooding our relationships with our attention and our deeds, so that we can sustain, gain sustenance: that is the forgiveness.
Forgiveness benefits the forgiver as well as the forgivee , because neither party can bear to be so separate, so alone, so abandoned. God is in search of us as much as we are in search of God. Who does the forgivenss? We do, God and us together. It’s never a one-way valve.
May our prayers during Yom Kippur be flooded with the abject yearning of this desire: for wholeness, for the flow of love that feeds our material and our spirit worlds to be unimpeded once more, for another chance to try our hand at being humanly holy one more year. May we have an easy fast, and may we now sink into the beautiful sound of the flute, letting our hearts and minds drift, noticing whatever might come up for us, and knowing that whatever we’ve done, and whoever we are, that we are ‘tzelem elohim’ made in the image of God.
The Neila prayer says, “You have set man aside from the very beginning, permitting him to stand before You”. So on the one hand, we struggle to find meaning; on the other we are reminded that we have a special relationship between us and God.
“Yom Kippur helps us to accomplish one of the most important steps in achieving mental health: mitigating feelings of guilt that often plague us when we have done wrong” (Reuvan Hammer, p. 34). We try to make amends; our ancient rituals of laying our sins on the head of the wandering goat attempts to rid us of our burdens. And through this, we come to terms with our imperfect humanity.
Our tradition teaches that there are two kinds of love: ahavah rabbah and ahavat olam; the former is the love of the worldly level of creation, and it is manifested in how we take care of our material world. Ahavah rabba (we sing this right before the sh’ma, right?) is Great Love; ‘it is the soul’s striving for the essence of God that transcends creation’ (steinsaltz, p. 193) This is what it means in the shema, love god with all your might, which can mean that the soul yearns to dissolve itself into the essence of Gd, to rejoin, repair, reduce the barriers that keep us from being part of the essence of God. Melmale kol almin, God’s pervasiveness in the material realm, that first kind of love,, and, sovev kol ol amim: the second kind, Gd’s transcendence of the world. Oy, how we desire to be so joined with the object of our love! |
