Yom Kippur
Sermon by Rabbi Sim Glaser
2019/5780
The Torah portion read this morning by our children is said to have been written by Moses, the greatest prophet of Israel.
The action takes place at Mt. Sinai where the covenant is made between God and the people Israel. This covenant is binding on everyone, not just the powerful elite, not only the head honchos of the tribes, but every woman, man, and child. An agreement for all the generations to come, right down to the present day.
Also mentioned in the portion is that there is nothing God is asking of us that is impossible to do or understand. It should all make perfect sense. With this guidance, there is nothing we cannot do in the work of perfecting this world.
The Torah portion is traditionally followed by the Haftarah, which is a section taken from the Prophetic books. When most people think of prophets, they think of predictors of the future. But in Israelite tradition, the prophet is one who awakens their community to the harsh realities of the present day and our overall behavior.
Essentially, the three roles of the Israelite prophet are:
When the people have misbehaved the Prophet says: You have messed up and you’re gonna suffer!
When the suffering begins the Prophet says: You see, I told you so!
And finally, a message very important to this holiday of Yom Kippur:God is ready and willing to still deal kindly with you if and when you mend your ways.
There have been many kinds of prophetic types in Israelite history. Some of them are famous old friends.
Abraham, who brought the message of a one-and-only God who was an ethical commanding presence to the world. The rabbis teach that when he had his “aha” moment as a young man, he had to smash a shop full of idols to break with the past. Abraham was ridiculed for talking to and even bargaining with an invisible God.
Then there was Moses, who claimed no monopoly on the craft. No, he believed every single one of us is equipped with the bandwidth for prophecy. Moses was assailed by rebellious Israelites for thinking he was a big shot. He wound up having a desert meltdown.
Jonah, whose book we read this very Yom Kippur afternoon, gets the Divine Tweet and responds by running as far away from God as possible, because he didn’t believe in giving people second chances!
Jeremiah, who foretold the destruction of Jerusalem by fire, and who was known as the weeping prophet, admonishes the people and gets thrown into a pit.
And let’s not forget Noah, who receives the heavenly call to action, builds a boat and sails away without as much as a word of advice for his fellow earthly inhabitants. In the hundred years it took him to build the ark, Noah was teased and maligned every step of the way for his doomsday approach.
Three thousand years later, a young girl from Sweden gets on a rather different kind of boat, travelling via sun-powered watercraft across the Atlantic, and tells the world that we are the flood, and we are the ark. “I want you to act as if your house is on fire,” she says, “because it is! You say you love your children above all else, yet you are stealing their future in front of their eyes.”
If those words sound familiar to you, it is because either you saw Greta Thunberg addressing the United Nations, or you heard her prophetic call as the recitation of the Haftarah just moments ago.
In almost every instant, the prophet is mocked, challenged, and their warnings are diminished as nonsense. But Greta has the added disadvantage of being a teenager and not taken seriously by the generation that has allowed our world to be in the precarious state it is in.
Indeed, none of the prophets of Israel were children. But each of them experienced deep personal pain over what had befallen their people. And perhaps this is why the modern prophet needs to be a child. Because maybe the rest of us just aren’t hurting enough about a calamity that won’t reach its full strength until after we have departed this world!
I have had control of a public microphone for 31 years as a professional clergyman, and have too rarely addressed what now appears to be the issue of our lives because I thought it might ruffle political feathers.
So I consider myself complicit. But if I am unable to hurt enough about it to be prophetic, then I am going to listen to the next generation tell me what needs to be done. We may not have been so great leading out in front, but our children should know that we have their backs! We should support them, or, at the very least, get out of their way!
This year, during the hottest July ever recorded in human history, Iceland memorialized its first ever loss of a glacier to climate change. At a funeral for the Okjökull glacier, the Icelandic Prime Minister and the former UN Human Rights Commissioner dedicated a plaque at the former site of the glacier which bore the inscription “A letter to the future.” And it read simply:“In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”
I don’t want you to feel cheated out of your Haftarah today. By all means, read the Isaiah passage if you like. It is a beautiful piece of prophecy that calls us to see our fast as representative of hungry homeless people in our midst. It is as relevant today as it was 3,000 years ago when it was penned.
If it makes you feel any better, the Torah portion we read isn’t the original Yom Kippur passage either. Though we’ve become quite used to it, Reform Judaism exchanged an old parsha about an ancient atonement ritual sacrifice to a more effective Yom Tov message – that the solution to our problems is not somewhere out in heaven and unreachable by us!
This year we replaced Isaiah with a young modern prophet who is bringing the world a message it somehow doesn’t want to hear. And like the prophets, Greta has been called everything you could imagine.
Journalists and climate deniers and political figures all the way up to the top are maligning Greta and her prophecy, ridiculing her, calling her a petulant teenager, and diagnosing her mental capacity much in the way they badmouthed and critiqued the brave young Parkland survivors when they spoke out, finding every possible reason to reject the validity of their claims: that we have let the next generation down.
One critic labelled her a propaganda tool for leftist adults pushing their agenda. Others said, don’t listen to teenagers. They only repeat back what their elders have told them.
Really? Are you kidding? Have any of these people ever met a 16-year-old that does what grown-ups tell them to do?!
Nevertheless, millions of children worldwide took to the streets in response to Greta’s prophecy. They are sounding a shofar blast quite unlike any my generation has been able to muster. They are letting us know that their future is dependent on our present.
You know that Judaism believes in the power of our children. Perhaps our greatest display of confidence in their youthful character and ability to lead is that at the age of 13 we trot them out to read from the Torah and lead the congregation in worship, where they deliver a speech to us telling us what is important to them. They become part of our minyan – we not only count them, we count on them! Right here today we are counting on them to lead us in worship on this, the holiest day of the year!
So here we are in 5780, at the start of a new decade, and we are still involved in a covenant. The earliest biblical covenant was that of the rainbow and God’s promise never to destroy the earth. As one modern author puts it, a rainbow is a rope: it can be thrown to a drowning person, or it can be tied into a noose. No one who isn’t us is going to destroy Earth, and no one who isn’t us is going to save it. The most hopeless conditions can inspire the most hopeful actions. We are the flood, and we are the ark.
I think Moses was right when he said that each of us has the potential for receiving prophecy. We enact prophecy every time we name our children. We give them names like Gabriel, Gavriel – God is my strength, and Nathaniel – Natan-El – a gift of God, or Ezra – helper; Hannah – merciful.
We even give them the actual names of the Prophets, like Yonah and Noah and Yoel.
We bestow names that reveal our deep love of the physical world like Ilan – tree, Aviva Springtime; Devorah – honeybee; Yael – mountain goat. Greta – a Swedish form of Margaret (my granddaughter’s name), the Hebrew equivalent is Margalit – meaning Pearl… as in something choice… or precious… or as in: pearls of wisdom.
Every child’s name is an investment in the future. And now these children, with these prophetic names, are asking us to reconsider the world we are leaving them.
A beautiful Midrash we often employ at those naming ceremonies tells of God talking to the Israelite nation, asking, who will guarantee the future? The Israelites quickly respond that of course our great ancestors will guarantee the future! To which God says, “Oh that was so yesterday. Who will guarantee the future?” The people answer, saying the great Prophets of Israel will guarantee the future. God says that even the prophets of old are insufficient guarantors. Finally the Israelites get it right and say: “Our children will guarantee the future!”
“Now you’re talking,” says God. “The children are indeed fine guarantors. It is because of them that I give you the Torah.”
And it will be because of our children that we all will merit, God willing, an inhabitable world.