Erev Yom Kippur/Kol Nidre: Traditional Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2020/5781

There once was a rabbi who escaped disaster and fear from a small town in Russia. He escaped to find a safe haven in a small Hungarian town right outside Debrecen called Hoidenanash. This rabbi, when it was safe for him to return home, he left the family in this small town a gift. It was an ark covering, and he said to the family, “This parochet, this beautiful ark covering — I want you to have it to thank you for all that you have done for me. I want you to use this parochet as a chuppah for your family. The generations to come will be married under this parochet, and your family will have many descendants.”

Fast forward. 

The Holocaust came, and that parochet made it here to the United States safely. Frank and I were married under it 36 years ago. We stood under that parochet and felt the generations of our family—those who died in the Holocaust, and those surrounding us who lived. Out of the brokenness and disaster of that rabbi’s life in Russia, and of the Holocaust, was a new blessing — a blessing that began a long and beautiful journey.

My father-in-law, Dr. Stephen Hornstein, told that story at our wedding and we felt the power of both the brokenness and the blessing. 

Rebecca Solnit tells us that in disaster the world is changed and our view of it. She tells us that what we deem important shifts, and what is weak actually falls apart under the new weight of that disaster. What is strong endures, and what is hidden emerges. Mother Nature knows this for a fact. On the floor of the forest are pods that are held shut by resin. Inside, these pods are new seedlings, and these pods only open up when there is a forest fire. Through the fire and the brokenness these pods create new life in the forest. And with the horrific and tragic forest fires that are out west, we only pray these pods will remain and survive and open up. With its devastation it cannot replace, but there can be a new a growth emerging out of what was hidden.

Judaism understands this power, and we all know it. The stories we have heard throughout our lives. Eve in the Garden of Eden — it is said that Eve actually ate from the Tree of Knowledge knowing that the idea of the garden and paradise would not teach us, and so we got thrown out so we could become partners with G-d in healing this broken world.

Jacob who became Israel — that story is so well-known. He struggled and wrestled and he asked for a blessing, and received it. And when it was all over, Jacob was limping, was still broken.

And then we have Moses and Miriam. They are at the sea. Here they are, between water and the pharaoh’s army. And before they can truly see the water break, they have to go in with small steps in order for the dry land to emerge. What was hidden emerged, and our people came out on the other side free from slavery.

Yom Kippur is a time where we are supposed to bring our brokenness. We are invited into this holy space, saint and sinner alike the liturgy tells us. No matter how far one has strayed from our tradition, no matter what you have done we are coming together — at-one-ment — together  because Yom Kippur can heal us and make us one. 

Now, it is funny that every year after Yom Kippur somebody calls me and says, “Rabbi, I didn’t run to do sin, but that’s what it said in the Vidui.” “Rabbi, I didn’t take a bribe or give a bribe. Why do I have to say it?” 

And then there are the ones that we all know. Gossip. Irreverence. It is about this idea that all of us are together as one, and that we can be here for someone’s weakness to become another person’s strength. 

In ancient times the priests use to burn incense on Yom Kippur. It was called ketoret. And the ketoret were a variety of different spices, but there was always one spice that was foul smelling. You ask why. Because the idea that all of the spices together, when they burn together, it is as though the community comes together. All of us have something to ask forgiveness for. All of us have our weaknesses and all of us have our strengths. And when we come together as a community on Yom Kippur, on this Kol Nidre, we are told the power of being together, the power of this day to heal us, to make things better, to move us to acts of righteousness and hope and courage. 

Now we come as individuals, and that is a very interesting dilemma, isn’t it? We so often want to get rid of the things in our very personalities that we don’t like. Vulnerabilities and fears that we’d rather keep at bay. And what our tradition teaches us is actually that we have to bring all the different parts of us together, and that we have to give voice to even those things that we are afraid of or that we don’t like in ourselves. Sometimes we naturally want to take the best of all the other people that we know in our lives and put them in our being and get rid of the things we don’t like. Like we want to be as entrepreneurial as Steve Jobs, we want to be as beautiful as — you decide for yourself who that might be, or we want to be as smart as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. It’s been said that she’s a super hero; I’ve heard it many times. She does actually have an action figure, which is pretty cool. And she did so much for women throughout time, but we also know that we all are human no matter how big our lives have been. You and I and everybody, we sometimes feel competent and confident, like we can do it all, and are really smart. And then there are other times we feel like a complete imposter. It is the reality. We feel the both/and. That is what’s so important. 

Temperament and personality make the day. One of my favorite lines is, “You are perfect the way you are, and you need a lot of work.” You see, we can change greatly, but not fundamentally. We are brought into this world with so much and we need to bring out those vulnerable, scared aspects of ourselves that we will nurture and care about. Because when we nurture the inside reality, then it expresses itself as tolerance rather than judgement, of understanding rather than dismissal. 

When we disavow those parts that we don’t like in ourselves, it is said that they boomerang right back at us. They don’t go away, we just need to give them a microphone so that we can hear and we can transform the parts that need tempering in our personalities, one psychoanalyst said it beautifully.

You see, the internal work we have to do on this Yom Kippur — it’s not a construction project. It’s actually a renovation project. We might need to put a chair in the corner of the room, or rearrange the room so that some parts of ourselves can have a voice. And others that maybe have had too much of a voice can find some quiet. That is about coming together, of being human, of knowing the brokenness if each of us can become one and whole.

So what do we do in this year that feels so broken? A year of pandemic, a year of fires and hurricanes, a year of discontent. How are we going to find the hidden that must emerge? How do we find and, like Jacob who became Israel, understand that wrestling with the brokenness is what we need to do?  

Let me be clear: the brokenness is not the blessing. The blessing is in the ability of each of us to demand something different. To do the work internally and in our community. The blessing is Jacob. We might be limping afterwards, but we will be blessed.

There is a beautiful Midrash in Lamentations Rabbah (14:49). It is a midrash about a king. You can actually say most of the time a Midrash king equals G-d; queen equals G-d. The king built a chuppah for his son. His son was not very appreciative. Actually, the Midrash basically says the son was a brat. So the king destroys the chuppah, thinking that the son doesn’t deserve such a beautiful gift. But the son’s tutor, the son’s teacher, took one of the broken poles of the chuppah and made a flute. The tutor made music out of the brokenness. The tutor made music for G-d. 

Thirty-six years ago Frank and I stood under that parochet that became a chuppah; we felt blessed. Even though the chuppah had been through so much — the brokenness of destruction and oppression and hatred — in a remarkable way, that chuppah had more blessings than I can even articulate. We stood under that chuppah and felt those blessings all around us. And it’s interesting, at every wedding we end our service, the ceremony, with the breaking of the glass, don’t we? Out of the brokenness comes the blessing. Out of the brokenness comes the celebration. Out of the brokenness comes the work that we must do — that everybody must do — to help a community be at one. To help each individual to be at one. 

So what else to do today in this broken year, in this broken time, in the brokenness that we bring to the sanctuary via streaming, the brokenness of it all? Well, I’ll tell you. We’re going to break a glass, and then send you off to do the work Yom Kippur. 

Mazel Tov.

Erev Yom Kippur/Kol Nidre

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2019/5780

There’s a story about the Kotzker Rebbe. The Rebbe decides that he is going to spend Shabbat with a friend, and so he puts on regular street clothes for Shabbat. And because he is speaking at a nearby town, giving a very famous lecture, he has to board the plane as Shabbat is completed in order to arrive late at night. He doesn’t change his clothes into the clothes that a Rebbe wears.

He gets on the train and there are three students who are going to hear his lecture, but they don’t recognize the Rebbe. They begin to make fun of this old man who is feeble and moving too slowly. They laugh at him, they joke at his expense, and they even try to trip him as he walks slowly down the train car. They arrive at the town and they are excited to hear the Rebbe! And then, the reality hits them. Before the train has arrived, the Rebbe has changed his clothes and begins to exit to a big fanfare of the community waiting for him, and they realize that they have been making fun of the Rebbe himself. Shocked, they begin apologizing profusely. “Oh my goodness, Rebbe, we didn’t mean it. We feel so guilty! We are so sorry; we apologize.” The Rebbe lets this go on for some time until he finally turns to these three students and says, “You have apologized to the Rebbe, but now I want you to apologize to the old man on the train.”

Failed apologies seem to be all around us, don’t they? We have a lot of people who have done wrong in the world; hurt people. Really hurt people. And either have failed with an apology or haven’t apologized at all. Sackler family and the opioid epidemic, not taking responsibility . . . Madoff . . . We have Harvey Weinstein. We have Cosby. We have Louis C. K. . . . Over and over and over again, there are people in our midst who do not apologize, and I believe it puts our world out of balance and desperately in trouble. It is truly this idea that Aaron Lazare talks about, who was the chancellor of the University of Massachusetts medical school and has spent his entire career studying apologies. He wrote a book on apology. He says that you can apologize too soon, but actually, you can never apologize too late, meaning you should always apologize no matter how long ago the offense was. But too soon is a reality, Lazare says, because often when one apologizes too soon it’s to manipulate the situation. It’s to keep the anger of those offended at bay. And most of all, the offender has not done the work, the important internal reckoning, to understand what they have done. Without that point, really, your apology doesn’t stand. You can’t just quickly apologize for your behavior unless you really understand what has caused the offense. And that takes a lot of time. And guess what? That’s what Yom Kippur is all about. 

Do you know that Kol Nidre is the longest service in the year? Why? Because we’re doing that apology stuff to God. Takes a long time. 

I was listening to the radio and I couldn’t believe, as I was thinking about apology and all these averahs these sins that have been all around us, people who have offended and not had any apology – there was a whole conversation about how to bring offenders back into this community around the “Me Too” movement. Tarana Burke who coined “Me too,” understood in this interview that she is going to take care of the victims. We still need to hear the stories of the victims, we’re still hearing new stories of the victims. But she said that our community and our society has to also work on what it is to reconcile to where we can bring together these broken realities in our world. She says it really is not going to go away, sexual violence, until we understand why the wrong-doers did what they did. And in addition, for us, to acknowledge that giving them an entry back into society through the backdoor – through podcasts, through books – that isn’t going to help either. Forgiveness without an apology is cheap. We have to figure out how they are going to come back and do real t’shuvah, real atonement, do restitution because she believes that the people who are part of the problem are the exact people who have to be part of the solution. I loved that.

Burke understood that we as a community must reckon with the realities of reconstituting some understanding of how we treat one another. 

Lazare goes on to talk about the fact that not only can one apologize too soon, but we also have to understand the history of apology. It was actually after WWII that apologizing became a part of civilized society: not as a reflection of weakness, but actually seen as a strength, which I think is a wonderful thing. He also went on to say what happens when you have to take responsibility for something you didn’t do? That’s something we struggle with, isn’t it? He explains that it’s sort of like buying a house. You buy the house and you own the things that you love. But you also own the hot water heater that bursts the day after you sign the papers – you own that part of the house, too. He says we have to take responsibility. We feel very proud of being part of this country, but we also feel the shame of this country being built on the back of slaves. We have to own both parts. 

I’m very proud to be part of this community and this congregation and I feel honored to be the Senior Rabbi. And yet over this year you’ve received two letters about previous sexual misconduct from a youth leader in our community. And I feel ashamed of that. And I feel responsible for that. I have to take all of it. 

Abraham Joshua Heschel said about WWII that there were few who were guilty, but all were responsible. Few were guilty, all were responsible. I think that is very much what it means to be a part of this community and understand that apology is part of this wider world. In This American Life there was an amazing story – there was an apology that the victim actually tweeted – that was a master apology. It healed a wound that was deep. Dan Harmon who is a head television writer, was attracted to a young writer who was part of his team. He put her work first above all the other writers; he created a jealousy in the group and an uncomfortable situation. She kept telling him, “don’t show me favors – don’t do this.” And then he told her he loved her. She said you’re my boss; no. And then he decided to make her pay for his humiliation. He publicly humiliated her over and over again. Six years passed and Dan made a public apology. He said exactly what he did, word for word. He took responsibility. He said, “I had these feelings and I knew they were dangerous so I did what I coward does and didn’t deal with them. I made everyone else deal with them.” He said, “I didn’t respect women. Because I wouldn’t treat somebody like that if I did and I would never treat a man like that.” She, Megan Ganz is her name, heard it on this podcast and was touched and amazed. She felt that there was a reconciliation that she didn’t think was possible. She felt freed and liberated and said she didn’t realize, hearing from him – ironically, the very person she never would have asked – to tell her what happened was true; she needed that affirmation. She needed him to recognize that he had actually hurt the very core of what she loved about herself, which was her creativity. She told everyone to listen, and then Dan said something that I think was important. He said you know, I think the world’s going to be better because we (meaning men) won’t get away with it anymore, and I think that’s a good thing.

The idea that you can actually ask for an apology or forgiveness or give it, that we put somebody else’s concern and belief and hurt above our own, that is when we heal. There is the head of the Orthodox youth movement, David Bashevkin, and he wrote a book called Sin-a-gogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought. He talks about a Hasidic group who understands that when we sin and ask for forgiveness and do the apology that we’re actually elevated to a higher status than just enjoying life in the perfect world. He said that the idea of coming to terms with our faults is the way we create a repaired world, of tikkun olam. He says that the people who show a complicated family history to their children and grandchildren, not only talking about the successes but also about the time you failed – the time you lost the job, the time you made the wrong decision – the time your family history isn’t so great along with when it is great actually creates a stronger next generation and a strong family. Personally, it’s the same. When you can talk to your family about the things you did wrong, about the losses and gains, the failures and successes, those are the ways we actually learn to be human. The Hasidic group says don’t be in duress. Don’t sit and try. Do the work of asking for forgiveness, of apologizing, because it makes the world stronger because of it. 

We also are here to do the work. You can’t really do redemption or atonement without asking for forgiveness and an apology. I often hear people coming into sanctuaries every year saying, I don’t really like saying all those al chets – I haven’t done so many of them! I haven’t done this or that… and I think it’s so funny because I hope this year we lean into it. Instead of saying I don’t do this, let’s look at understanding it a bit differently. 

One of my favorites from the previous machzor is confusing love with lust. If we keep that sin to the Harvey Weinstein, Cosby, or Louis c. k., then we’re really not doing the work we should. If lust fundamentally is power, which it is – having power over somebody else – and love is seeing eye to eye with another, sacrificing for another, listening to the hurt you caused even when it makes you feel uncomfortable – that’s love. I think sometimes we confuse the two. When we want to be right in an argument and win, that’s lust. That’s being powerful over love. I hear many people who have been married 50 years say that the best thing they ever learned in a marriage is that it’s better to be happy than right.

This Yom Kippur, let us identify with those three students on the train. Let’s find the time that we have to return to the scene and apologize because we haven’t treated somebody well or right. Let us return, just as I hope they would return. When we apologize and do the hard work of introspection, when we go to another person and show our remorse, when we build reconciliation, the world is healed. The world is that much stronger. If each one of us did that, think of what a beautiful community this would be. It would be one of strength, one where our souls would soar. Where our hearts would beat, where our hands would hold. That’s the community and world I want to create and I want to be a part of. G’mar tov.

Kol Nidre: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2018/5779

I decided for this Yom Kippur to go back to the basics – feeling remorseful, forgiveness, reconciliation – and I wanted to begin this sermon with a personal kind of everyday experience. When I thought of all the examples, of which there are many, don’t get me wrong. Times I needed to feel remorseful or forgiven. I thought about my family and I thought, I’m not going to make public what happens in my home. I thought about people who are angry at me at Temple because I didn’t do something right; there are many. But I thought displaying that publically might not be in the best taste – I’d have to ask forgiveness, by the way. So I came into Temple this afternoon and I sat down and a Rabbi goes to somebody who is very close, right? My Executive Assistant, Diana. And I say, “Diana, can you give me an example of a time I did something that I needed to ask for your forgiveness? And she goes, ‘You mean like yesterday?’ And I’m like, yeah, what happened yesterday? ‘Well, Rabbi, you were in my space and you called it an archaeological dig. And then I had to go get something out of your car that you forgot and guess what? It was an archaeological dig.’ Sorry, Diana.  

So the idea of being remorseful is the centerpiece of Yom Kippur. There’s a story about God sending an angel down to Earth to find the most precious thing in the world. So the angel goes down and brings back a smile from parents looking at their newborn child. God says, “It’s precious, but it is not the most precious.”

The angel goes back down and brings the song of the nightingale. “No,” God says. “Go back.”

The angel brings back a young person walking an elderly person walking across a crowded street. “No,” says God.

The angel is searching and searching on this earth and all of a sudden hears the cry of an adult man. A man, crying. The angel steps aside to watch what’s happening and the man is crying because he said harsh words to his brother and feels so terrible.

So the angel takes one tear and brings it to God and God says, “Yes. The tear of remorse is the most precious thing on this earth.”
We know this; we just read it. We will read many more tomorrow. For the sin that I have committed against you, openly and in secret. The sin that I have committed against you inadvertently. The sin that I have committed against you under duress.

Judaism understands that impact is over intention. Judaism understands that intention can be used as a defense, actually, and not taking responsibility like, “I didn’t mean it. No, it wasn’t something that I really knew that I was doing. I’m sorry!” Judaism says you have to apologize anyway. You have to apologize for the things you didn’t mean or the things you thought you didn’t mean, which is a class on Freud, which I’m not giving today.

So here we are. Impact over intention. It’s a powerful lesson about forgiveness.

A man – Christian Picciolini – you heard him here; he spoke here. He’s an incredible human being. He used to be a leader in a Nazi skinhead cell outside of Chicago. He was homophobic, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, he was racist; he hated anyone and everyone who was not white because he believed he was the victim.

One day, he was beating up a young black man only because he was black. And he all of a sudden caught a glimpse where he locked into the fear in this young man’s eyes. And then it was all over in the best of ways. Christian got out of his extremist life and he actually created a non-profit called Life After Hate where he actively brings people out of extremist organizations in order to turn their life around as he turned his life around. You can google him; it is amazing.

Impact over intention. That is one of the major precepts of Judaism.

A second precept of Judaism is that reconciliation without repentance and repair is actually nothing at all. It doesn’t hold together, meaning somebody has to do a lot of hard work in order for reconciliation to happen. It’s not easy.

Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times last Sunday wrote a piece about the #MeToo movement. She wrote a very interesting perspective on it. She said, as she was speaking about a whole array of people, that the people who have been accused of harassment – not the most egregious people but others – that she feels sorry for them. They’ve gotten caught up, but she realizes that they don’t actually feel sorry for the women that they might have offended. They actually don’t even think much about the women that they might have offended. And that is, according to Michelle, why the #MeToo movement of reconciliation hasn’t really gone very far. Because these men actually aren’t building restitution or reconciliation, they just want to be absolved of what they are accused of.

We know this kind of world, don’t we? In the Torah, long ago, Jacob and Esau teaches us the need for repentance and repair before reconciliation. You remember the story – good old Jacob stole Esau’s birthright and stole his blessing. And Esau’s a little upset – okay, he wants to kill his brother – and so Jacob leaves for a long time and becomes a very wealthy man. He has a lot of wives and he has a lot of kids and he has a lot of animals. And he decides to return and he is going to meet his brother Esau again. Perfect. Life is going pretty well. I’m going to do it. God says, “No, no, Jacob. You don’t get to do that. No. You go over here on the other side of the river.” And there, an angel wrestles with him.

We often look at Esau, we often talk about wrestling as this wonderful thing that the Jewish people do, but I think actually God made Jacob wrestle because he understood in order to be reunited with his brother, Jacob had some work in growing up to do. He had to feel the pain of what it means to have done something wrong even if, in the end, it works out okay. He had to take responsibility and so he wrestles with the angel, with the man, and guess what happens? He comes back, limping. He’s limping for the rest of his life and got a new name – he went from Jacob to Yisra'el the One Who Wrestles.

So here we have a patriarch who needed to learn the lesson of what it means to truly repent and repair in order to reconcile. He and his brother come back together. There are many debates whether there was really reconciliation or not, but the bottom line is they didn’t kill each other and that’s a good thing.

Rabbi Jonathan sacks says it is not an exaggeration that forgiveness is the most powerful implementation of human freedom. Forgiveness equals human freedom.

Another precept in Judaism is this idea that we have the ability to transform the experiences, the hurdles, the realities that are in our lives through forgiveness. That we don’t have to be our circumstances; that somehow we, as human beings, can find a way around our circumstances. He actually says that when tragedy hits and there is no hope, forgiveness is the answer.

Jean Quam, who is the Dean of the School of Education, gave a sermon this summer and introduced us to a man she met whose name is Ray Hinton. He wrote this book, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row.

Ray, as he is known, spent 30 years imprisoned on death row. He was innocent, completely innocent. And after 30 years, defended by Bryan Stevenson, a very well-known writer and lawyer, he walked out of that jail as an innocent man. The evidence did not add up; it never did.

Ray actually found this incredible ability to find freedom. He used his humor, his imagination, his wisdom, and intelligence. He actually broke through the incredible boundaries where each man on death row lived in their own cell. Ray would begin talking to people – they couldn’t see each other, but they would talk and he would make them laugh and he would talk about the things that he did and his family and they would talk about the things that they cared about and they spoke to each other when they were in their cells, when they were so lonely and isolated. And he broke through these incredible barriers. After a few years he decided to let go of his hate; he had lived with so much hate for a just -- an injustice system, as far as he was concerned. And so he found a way to say they can imprison my body, they can imprison my future, but they cannot imprison my soul.

He made friends with a man, Henry. And he found out that Henry actually was a leader in the KKK and was involved in a lynching of a young black man. Henry changed his ways by becoming friends with Ray. He said, Ray, the hatred that I was taught by my parents was just wrong. And on one visiting day, Henry introduces Ray to his father and says this is my friend. An African American man is my friend.

It’s an incredible story of redemption.

And Ray tells his fellow inmates that he is going to write a book when he gets out and he is going to tell their stories and he’s going to tell his story and he did. And he wrote this story by saying the sun does shine even when we don’t see it.

We all have heard these stories from the Holocaust. I have told Anna Orenstein’s story many times of her finding an apple core for her birthday in Auschwitz, eating it, savoring it, loving it. And she too survived a horror, just like Ray. And she, at 90-plus years old, still eats the core of every apple she has because it reminds her of miracles.

We know the power of forgiveness when we sit around a table and remember our loved ones, never telling their résumés, never telling their successes, but always a tear when you tell this story of forgiveness of a loved one and an I’m sorry at the end of life is so life-giving.

That is the most precious thing on this earth.

Forgiveness is redemptive. We know it, we’ve heard it, we as a people know it in our kishkas and we bring it forth.

Forgiveness is redemptive, but not without a limp, not without a severing. And you know what? That limp, that weakness as some might look at, is actually the core of our strength. We are Yisra'el, we are wrestlers, and we are wrestlers who come out of the fight proud of the limp that we have for the rest of time.

Gmar Chatimah Tova.

Kol Nidre: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2017/5778

Written text of Rabbi Zimmerman's sermon is not available. Please enjoy the video of this Kol Nidre Sanctuary Service.