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.