Yom Kippur
Sermon by Rabbi Jennifer Hartman
2019/5780
It is never quite clear what brings us into the sanctuary on Yom Kippur. For some of us, it is our commitment to Jewish observance; for others it is our commitment to family; for still others it is about tradition. But, underlying all of this, there is a feeling in our kishkes about the true awesomeness of this day. It is the imagery of the gates closing and our fate being decided that pulls many of us in. Even those of us who do not believe in God, or are not so sure about this whole book of life and death thing, still decide to hedge our bets and show up. We walk into the synagogue, we are moved by the prayers chanted by the cantor, we are inspired by the power of this day.
Yom Kippur forces us to face our mortality, and allows us to enter the year renewed. The symbols of Yom Kippur, from fasting to wearing white, to staring into an empty ark during “Kol Nidre,” simulate our death in order to shock us into fully living our lives every day. It gives us time to engage in t’shuva, repentance, and cheshbon hanefesh, the cleansing of our souls. It allows us to evaluate our lives and enables us to confront the New Year with strength, resolve, and excited anticipation.
Rabbi Alan Lew writes a stunning description of Yom Kippur in his book This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation. He explains: “On Rosh HaShanah the Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and our name is written in one of them. But we don’t know which one. Then we come to Yom Kippur and for the next twenty-four hours we rehearse our own death. We wear a shroud and, like a dead person, we neither eat nor drink. We summon the desperate strength of life’s last moments . . . We utter a variation of the confessional that we will say on our deathbeds. Our fists beat against the wall of our hearts relentlessly, until we are brokenhearted and confess to our great crime. We are human beings, guilty of every crime imaginable . . . Then a chill grips us. The gate between heaven and earth suddenly begins to close . . . This is our last chance. Then the gate clangs shut and the great horn sounds one last time.”
The imagery described above shakes us to our core. It is meant to wake us up and ask us to take ourselves and our actions as seriously as they deserve. This is emphasized with the prayers of our machzor, those like the Unetaneh Tokef, whose words spell out all of the possible ways we could die. The prayer begins: “Let us proclaim the holiness of this day for it is awe-inspiring and fearsome” and continues by asking, “Who shall live and who shall die? Who by fire and who by water?” This could easily paralyze us. Yet, in our tradition’s brilliance, it does not allow us to remain in the fear. Instead, it lifts us up and out of it by giving us a way to counter God’s judgement. Embedded in the Unetaneh Tokef are directions for taking control of our future, the way that we can influence the judge’s verdict. Through repentance, prayer, and charity, we can avert God’s severe decree.
Every year, we come into this sanctuary to enact our own death and be restored to life with a new sense of hope and resolve. We come together for the courage to let go of our fears and our doubts. We come together to answer the call of Nitzavim, the Torah portion Cantor Kobilinsky just chanted so beautifully.
הַעִדֹתִי בָכֶם הַיּוֹם, אֶת-הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת-הָאָרֶץ--הַחַיִּים וְהַמָּוֶת נָתַתִּי לְפָנֶיךָ, הַבְּרָכָה וְהַקְּלָלָה.
“I call heaven and earth to witness this today: I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse — therefore choose life!”
Hope. The imagery is severe, but it never leaves us without hope, which can be one of the hardest emotions to conjure. Renowned writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel teaches that just as a person cannot live without dreams, he or she cannot live without hope: “It is hope that gives us the strength to fulfill our dreams; it is hope that allows us to take the next step forward even when all seems lost.” For Wiesel, it was hope that allowed him to survive the camps. He explains, “After experiencing the concentration camps, [he] had been a part of a universe where God, betrayed by humanity, covered God’s face in order not to see. Humanity, jewel of creation, succeeded in building an inverted Tower of Babel, reaching not toward heaven but toward an anti-heaven, there to create a parallel society, a new ‘creation’ with its own princes and gods, laws and principles, jailers and prisoners.” Even having experienced all of this, Wiesel still understood the integral role that hope plays in not only the Jewish story, but also that of humanity.
Hope, survival, continuing on, is ingrained in our souls even if it is not always accessible.Hope is the reason children are born in displaced person camps or refugee camps; it is the reason that people get on boats that very well might sink or walk for miles and miles with only the clothes on their backs for the potential to enter a new land. It is what motivates each of us to work to try to make the world better for the next generation – even when it is an uphill battle. Yes, hope is a part of the very fabric of being human, yet it often feels that we have lost the ability, or maybe the courage, to hope.
Therefore, maybe we can find inspiration in the stories of those who find hope in the face of uncertainty. A dear friend and mentor recently recommended that I read an essay by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi entitled “Toward a History of Jewish Hope,” in which the author reframes our past of exile and expulsion from one of sorrow and pain into one of resilience, confidence, and possibility. Yerushalmi understands that since the Holocaust, the Jewish community has organized its collective lives around that era of destruction and death. He embarks on the journey of finding hope in our collective history in order to reorient future generations from fear of extinction to hope for prosperity. He argues that “Memory of the past is incomplete without its natural complement – hope for the future.” And, he continues, from ancient times through today, this hope can be seen in our people’s willingness to resettle.
The urge to change our place in order to change our luck dates back to the Torah. There is a Hebrew saying that means just this – meshane makom, meshane mazal. From the birth of the Israelite nation where God tells Abraham and Sarah “Lech lecha – leave your homeland and go to a land that I will show you,” to the Israeli covert operation Solomon that brought Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the early 1990s: as a people, we have an expansive history of leaving one land with the faith and hope that we will be able to live rich Jewish lives in the next.
So many of us have these stories of parents or grandparents or even ourselves, picking up and moving to a foreign country. For some of us the reason is obvious – either we live or we die. The future may be unsure, but the alternative is dire. For others, the reasoning is less concrete. We want a better life, we think the new place will have more opportunities for us, we need a change!We engage in our own personal Yom Kippur; we have a reckoning with ourselves, our families, we see what life will be like if we continue on the path we are on, and we choose hope in the future. This hope, in the face of adversity, coupled with courage and ultimately action, can be transformative.
Two years ago I was selected as a member of a religious leadership cohort called the Collegeville Multi-faith Fellows Program. This program brought together 11 religious leaders from the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim communities several times over a two-year period to meet with leaders from various facets of society including government, business, education, criminal justice, and health care. The purpose of this cohort was two-fold: (1) to gain insights into the unique opportunities and challenges Minnesota residents are expected to encounter in the decades ahead from a worker shortage to a growing senior population; and (2) to establish interreligious relationships with like-minded leaders so we can partner in creating solutions. Rabbi Barry Cytron and Dr. Marty Stortz of Augsburg University co-directed the program.
As this cohort met, debated, and unpacked the insights and predictions of our speakers, I was struck by Marty’s quiet optimism about the future. About halfway through the fellowship, I came to understand how deeply this optimism had been tested. I learned that only a few years into her marriage to Professor William Spohn, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer. Through his illness and untimely death, Marty learned much about hope and the role that it plays in sustaining people during their darkest moments. In her writings, she reframes what it means, and how we come by hope. As Marty and her husband William faced the cancer, the treatments, the side effects, and ultimately his death, they found that they never lost hope – they just changed what they hoped for.
Marty and William were deeply religious and spiritual people, yet it was not beyond them to become angry at God. To shake their fists and scream and yell. In truth, they may have done this in the privacy of their own home, during their nightly recaps, as they learned their physical time together was coming to an end. But they also felt God’s presence strongly. They felt God was paying attention to them through the love of their friends and family.
In one particular article, Marty admits that she could not always imagine what to hope for, but a deep and abiding hope held her and William. All they had to do was fall into it, like a trapeze artist falling into a net. The trapeze star had missed the catch, but she dared everything, because she knew the net was there. Neither of them had fallen off God’s radar screen, for they were both surrounded by the love of family and friends. So she was hopeful—devastated, no doubt, but also hopeful.
For Marty, this was the kind of hope that did not look forward to possible outcomes, but reached back to what was real. And what was real? For them, it was the sturdiness of the relationships with family and friends, the solidity of work, the daily graces that swarmed them. It was the family who came for a visit and knew not to stay too long, the friends who brought food to nourish them. It was colleagues who allowed them respite from the ups and downs of treatment. This is what sustained them during the never-ending tests and appointments. This is also what gave Marty the hope, and the courage, to leave California when a wonderful opportunity opened up for her here at Augsburg.
Hope is at the center of the story of Aaron Rapport and his wife Joyce. Aaron graduated from the Blake School in 1999 and went on to receive a graduate degree at Northwestern before completing his doctoral program at the University of Minnesota. It was here in Minnesota that he met his wife. They both became professors, first teaching in Atlanta and then in Cambridge. As the two built their careers and their lives together, they also fought cancer together.
Joyce was diagnosed in 2010 and Aaron in 2015. Neither allowed their diagnosis to stop them. Joyce became the assistant director of the newly-established University of Cambridge Office of Scholarly Communication, eventually working on special projects for the department in order to encourage researchers to share their data.Aaron was a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge. He had already established a considerable international reputation, particularly following the publication of his book Waging War, Planning Peace in 2015.
It was their hope for the future that allowed them to move their lives to Cambridge, to build their careers, to continue to teach and work until the very end. Hope is what kept their marriage strong, even as they both went through their respective chemotherapies. For those who knew them, they will always be thought of as a perfectly-matched pair who never shied from sharing their philosophy of life with their students. During one conversation, Aaron’s student opined that “you only live once.” Aaron’s response? "You only die once; you live every day."Both Aaron and Joyce passed away this summer.
After sounding the alarm, the wake-up call that summons us on Yom Kippur, Rabbi Alan Lew looks further into our tradition and teaches us that at its core, Yom Kippur is a day of healing, a day of repair, a day that recognizes our fundamental brokenness and provides us with a remedy. Yom Kippur, in other words, is a day of hope, hope to carry us into and through the New Year. It is a day devoted to strengthening the hope we have and allowing us to renew hope that may be waning. It is a day when we pray not only to be sealed in the book of life, but also to have the courage for a life lived with hope. Ken Yahi Ratzon, May this be God’s will.