Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation

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What is Evil

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Yom Kippur Sermon 2022, Rabbi Debra Rappaport

One of my teachers in rabbinical school used to say that all rabbis have basically one sermon that they continue to give in different forms throughout their rabbinate. Of course that made me really curious about what the essence of my one sermon might be. Sometimes I think it’s some variation on “be kind” and/or “be conscious;” it’s certainly about the importance and potential of community. I also believe what Richard Bach wrote: “we teach best what we most need to learn’’ – lest you think I come in with all this figured out. I share these perspectives on my sermon writing because I do tend toward practices for wellbeing and cultivating positive traits in ourselves for the sake of the highest good for our communities and world. 

But on Yom Kippur, I find the dark side compelling. Maybe it’s the scapegoat story we just read, prodding at my psyche, wanting to know – what are those sins and what does it mean to confess them onto a goat to sacrifice to God and onto another goat to send into the wilderness? The story raises the aspect of the numinous, the aspects of forces of wickedness or evil that perhaps defy neat categories of sin and confession and the possibility of teshuvah. The trends of the past several years have also forced me to do some rethinking of my theology, that godliness is in every one of us and we just have to make good choices. Because so many humans are making bad choices – ranging from unkind to harmful to cruel. Hate-based speech and actions are on the rise; violent gun attacks on crowds and schools are on the rise; Putin’s heartless war on Ukraine is the most Euro-centric example we’ve had of stunning, inhumane cruelty inflicted on fellow human beings. There are so many more ordinary instances of human evil, including domestic violence, limiting access to voting, banning books and curriculum topics. It’s harder to be in a state of mind in which I believe these are simply differences of opinion and I believe everyone wants the highest good. 

I don’t use the word “evil” much. It seems to evoke the demonic, like there is some force, the devil out there that might get us – which I don’t really believe. Yet our tradition uses the word “evil” rasha frequently, including in today’s liturgy and Haftarah. 

Here’s my question: According to Jewish sources, is evil a force in its own right, that we can annually send away on a goat to Azazel? Or is it in each one of us, something to reckon with and integrate? What, if anything, do our sources offer to help us combat the forces of wickedness, of cruelty? It doesn’t feel like my place to tell you which places of wrongdoing or the evil of collective negligence need your attention. There are so many to choose from. But it does feel like my place to offer up Jewish sources in the hope that they can inspire you to do your part. We’ll start with some of what we encounter directly on Yom Kippur, then I’ll offer a brief survey of Jewish teachings – which have a lot to say about it! 

Specific to the High Holiday liturgy, the Unetaneh Tokef poetic prayer talks about all the ways we could die, then offers: u’teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah (repentance, prayer, and doing justice) ma’avirin et ro’at-ha’gezerah, lessen the evil of the decree. I think this use of evil refers to our human vulnerability, or the fact of death, more than to human wickedness. Bad things just happen in the world. This is the sort of “evil” in which children develop cancer, families die in car or plane crashes, a pandemic takes millions of lives. In these instances, our clear obligation is to respond, to call upon our spiritual and material resources toward healing, loving, resilience and choosing life. Asking “why” in these moments, while a natural place for our minds to want to go, is not fruitful because we can’t know. 

In the Haftarah we just read, Isaiah 58:6-7 “No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness – rasha, And untie the cords of the yoke To let the oppressed go free; To break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, And to take the wretched poor into your home; When you see the naked, to clothe him..” Here, rasha wickedness is equated with heartlessness toward the suffering of others. 

The Biblical story that involves human evil begins with the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. When Eve and Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, childhood innocence ended. Humans were now in a world of consequences, and even more importantly a world of self-consciousness, having to take responsibility for our actions. We have access to knowledge of good and evil, to a conscience. 

Satan, or HaSatan appears in the Hebrew bible not as a devil or evil incarnation, but as an adversary. The word’s root means to obstruct or oppose. In Job, HaSatan (the Satan, not a proper name) is translated as the prosecutor. In all cases, haSatan is one of God’s servants or angels. The notion of opposition is clear, he’s more like your partner “playing devil’s advocate” than the devil himself. Facing an adversary, we are then called to recognize that that too is God, and to bring our most exemplary selves. 

The rabbis following the Torah developed the idea of wickedness within each and every one of us. They called it the yetzer-ha-ra, the evil inclination, which we can imagine sitting on one’s left shoulder arguing with the yetzer ha-tov, the good inclination on our right shoulder, like in the Capra movie. Our job is to keep the yetzer ha-ra, our wild impulses, under the yoke of the laws of Torah. 

Medieval philosopher Maimonides understood both God and God’s Created world as essentially good. He understood evil as the privation or absence of God. “Evil in comparison with good is like darkness in comparison with light. It is not the contrast between one being and another being, but between a being and its absence. …For Maimonides, to speak of good and evil as two independent entities would have been as if we offered a child a partnership: come, let us bake a bagel: you supply the flour and water and I supply the hole. This example would face us with the absurdity of comparing a void and an entity, evil and good. The hole is not something which exists in its own right. It is merely the result, and accompanying symptom, of a certain structure of the universe, which is itself good.” (Shalom Rosenberg, p. 29) In Maimonides’ worldview, human evil is the consequence of stupidity, ignorance, blindness, and irrationality – all related to the lack of knowing God. Human evil stems from distortion of our subjective lens. Unlike God, we can never see the full picture. So in this model, because evil does not exist as an independent force or power but as the absence of God, humans have the obligation to learn about the way of the world and thereby choose good. 

Some early Kabbalistic theology actually saw sitra achra – the dark side – as a force independent of God. This dualism didn’t last. The dominant theology of the mystics emerged in a story of creation in which longing for companionship inspired God to create. Only Adam Kadmon, the original creation, could not contain God’s brightness – so sparks of God scattered throughout the world, encased in klippot, shards or shells which appear to contain evil but actually contain sparks of redemption. Our work is to free the sparks of holiness from their klippot through teshuvah, and bring more holiness into the world and thus to heaven too. In other words, in every negative encounter, every place that’s difficult or where suffering is experienced, there is a spark of holiness somewhere within that, and our job is to find and free that spark. 

Zooming forward a millennium, I want to share philosopher Hannah Arendt’s observations after covering the Eichmann trial in 1961. After living through the Holocaust, arguably the most radical evil in human history, and hearing the testimony of one of its most horrific perpetrators, she came away with the understanding of evil as banal – NOT trivial, she spent the rest of her life clarifying. What she meant by describing evil as banal is that it is not deep. Here I quote her: 

“It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical’, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the 

surface. It is ‘thought-defying’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality’. Only the good has depth and can be radical.” (The Jewish Writings, p. 471) 

“Precisely because these criminals were not driven by the evil and murderous motives we’re familiar with – they murdered not to murder but simply as a part of their career – it seemed only too obvious to us all that we needed to demonize the catastrophe in order to find some historical meaning in it. And I admit, it is easier to bear the thought that the victim is the victim of the devil in human disguise – or as the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial put it, of a historical principle stretching from Pharoah to Haman – the victim of a metaphysical principle, rather than the victim of some average man on the street who is not even crazy or particularly evil.” (p. 487-88) 

This is chilling. The worst human evil is perpetrated when people are being shallow, unwilling or unable to connect with the depth of our interbeing. It’s happening in our world. We can blame the explosion of social media, making everything about image and ratings. We can blame reducing communications and relationships to Twitter. We can blame late stage capitalism. But all the energy we might spend blaming is wasted. 

What Hannah Arendt said most succinctly, and all of our tradition teaches, rings true to me. Evil is simply not a force that we can sacrifice to God or send away with the scapegoat, as our Torah reading described. Rather, the story invites us to think about what wiping the slate clean might entail. We need to put our energy toward responding, and each of our sources points in a direction that supports a balancing and healing response. 

Adam and Eve brought us conscious awareness. Let’s not hide from it or bury it in business. 

Isaiah reminds us to tend to the suffering of others, now! 

Interpersonally, when we’re faced with wickedness or simple frustration, we have the choice to look for and lift up the presence God or of good, the holy sparks in husks of wickedness. I recently heard a story of a cab driver whose ride didn’t come out right away. It was a poor neighborhood, and he knew his fellow drivers would have waited the obligatory two minutes and left. But he decided to give the person the benefit of the doubt. He rang the doorbell; inside was a frail elderly woman; and all the furniture was covered as if no one lived there. He helped her out to the car. She shared that she was on her way to hospice care, and didn’t have any living relatives. He ended up taking her around to the various places that had mattered in her life; and he refused to charge her anything. That is lifting up the sparks. The driver himself was nourished, by having responded with love in such a tender moment. 

Maimonides taught that we should each consider ourselves as well as all the world half meritorious and half culpable all year long. And we should believe that if we were to commit just one sin, we would incline ourselves and the entire world toward guilt and bring about destruction; and, contrarily, that if we were to fulfill just one mitzvah we would incline ourselves and the entire world toward merit and bring about salvation and redemption. Every choice, every action can have that impact. I walked in Nichols Arboretum yesterday. I witnessed the difference made by a few people’s attention to the natural environment, generations ago. The biodiversity in there was remarkable. 

The Musar movement gives tools for practicing responding well in each moment, through cultivating middot, values. Musar acknowledges that all worthwhile values exist on a continuum. In the mussar worldview, “evil” and wickedness come from an extreme at either end of a virtue continuum. For example, at one end of a continuum of humility would be excessive pride, and at the other end, excessive self-effacement. Neither extreme is in service of the highest good; evil applies when one is off-the-charts in one direction or the other – megalomania on one end, or at the other end the kind of invisibility that leads to despair or violence. Musar, while not focused on evil, understands wickedness and harm as coming out of the extremes of good qualities each one of us has. It is our soul’s work to practice moderation where we tend to the extremes. Each one of us must find our own soul curriculum within the context of each value, like humility, patience, giving the benefit of the doubt, kindness, and so on.1 

Hannah Arendt offered this: “We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things, by stopping ourselves and beginning to think.” she adds, “the more superficial someone is, the more likely he will be to yield to evil. An indication of such superficiality is the use of clichés, and Eichmann, God knows, was a perfect example. Each time he was tempted to think for himself, he said: Who am I to judge if all around me – that is, the atmosphere in which we unthinkingly live – think it is right to murder innocent people?” (479-80) Again, a chilling example of what can unfold if we don’t stop some of the trends happening in the public square. 

Yom Kippur is the time to reflect on what we are mindlessly doing or colluding with. What are you willing to see and respond to you that you weren’t last year? What are you willing to speak out about? Where are you willing to put your time and other resources? As we progress through this season, may we be mindful of all the little choices that make the entire world tilt toward merit. As we are called by God, let’s Choose Life! 

L’shanah tova u’metukah! 

Fasting and Nourishment

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R’ Debra Rappaport, AARC, Kol Nidre 5783 / 2022 

I’ve been wanting to write this sermon for a very long time. It’s called “Fasting & Nourishment.” I’ve always been curious about why so many Jewish people, especially those who don’t observe the letter of the Jewish law throughout the year, take the Yom Kippur fast so earnestly. Tonight I’m going to reflect on the layers of significance of a 25 hour fast on the holiest day of the year. 

In full disclosure, I don’t observe a halakhic, pure fast of abstention from all food and water; and I understand the appeal, and it’s complicated. At its best, fasting on Yom Kippur gives us the opportunity to bring increased awareness to the true nourishment we receive from all we consume, food and otherwise. I believe that bringing conscious awareness to all of what we take in is an important aspect of honoring the godliness in each one of us, created b’tzelem elohim, in God’s image. When we honor our own bodies and souls, we are able to show up for others at our best, and do our piece of tikkun olam. So here are some teachings from our tradition and some reflections for today. 

Why fast on Yom Kippur? 

Where does the custom of fasting on Yom Kippur originate? The Torah commands that all the Israelites on this day are to practice self-denial, bring a holy offering, and not do our ordinary work. (Lev. 16:29 and Lev 23:27-32) The Hebrew for self-denial is: נּוּ֣ע ַתְּ 

כםֶ֗תיֵשׁ ֽ ֹפ ְנַאת־ ֶThe root, ayin-nun-heh, became a word for fasting. Literally, though, t-annu et nafshotechem translates to “afflict or humble your body-soul.” While the Torah does not define what is meant by affliction, it makes clear that if you don’t observe the command, you are to be cut off from the community. Karet, being sent away by your community, was the worst possible punishment for our forebears: one could not live without community. The threat was significant; people would observe. 

In the rabbinic era, the early centuries of the common era, the Mishna – also known as Oral Torah – elaborates on what the Torah means by self-affliction, saying: “On Yom Kippur, the day on which there is a mitzvah by Torah law to afflict oneself, it is prohibited to engage in eating and in drinking, and in bathing, and in smearing oil on one’s body, and in wearing shoes, and in conjugal relations.” (Yoma 73b) 

But, lest we think that simply following the laws of the written and oral Torah suffice, the prophet Isaiah, in our Haftarah we’ll read tomorrow, emphatically adds a moral layer to our fast: (Isaiah 58:3-7) Isaiah rejects the idea of our fast as some self-wallowing thing we do just to appease God. God says, I will be appeased when you not only feed the hungry and share your home with those experiencing homelessness, and make sure people have clothing. God says, I will celebrate your fast when you “unlock the fetters of wickedness… and free the oppressed” According to Isaiah, our fast must be accompanied by acts of justice to be meaningful. 

Our tradition also has other examples of fasting. Some fasts are the physical demonstration of atonement, of teshuvah. Tomorrow’s afternoon Haftarah, the story of Jonah, tells of the people of Nineveh’s fast of atonement. Another biblical type of fast is in supplication, a way of showing God you’re serious and humble about your prayers; Our Purim heroine Esther demonstrates this type of fast for three days before approaching King Ahashueros on behalf of the Jewish people. 

The fast of Yom Kippur evokes all these and more. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg describes Yom Kippur’s fasting from all bodily functions as a way to come face to face with our mortality. By denying all our physical needs, we enact a death within life, in order to embrace life all the more passionately. Writer Penina Adelman articulated the beauty of the Yom Kippur fast in these words: “Praying when fasting feels the way I imagine it to be when one who is facing death prays. Priorities become as clear as a finely tuned radio. Feelings are sharp and at times as overwhelming as a tidal wave. The senses are more vivid and vibrant. I am inside the birdsong, the flower’s scent, the fallen leaf’s changing colors. How ironic that on a day when we are denying our physicality, we may experience the physical world more strongly than ever.” 

To recap so far, Jews fast on Yom Kippur because it’s commanded, and we fast to remember all those among us who don’t have enough to eat and who are afflicted by those in power taking advantage of those with less power; to speak out, to identify with the afflicted and to take action to support them. We fast to to physically enact our teshuvah, to encounter our mortality, to focus so deeply on our prayers, as these all speak to waking up from our sleepwalking through life and really embrace what we’re here for. And we fast in solidarity. 

Complicating factors/Other Aspects 

All of these traditional reasons we fast on YK are powerful, and perhaps even more relevant today. Yet there are complicating factors. 

Some of us have a medical condition in which fasting makes you sick or does harm to our bodies or our mental health. Some of us have eating disorders, in which case an association of fasting with holiness can truly be life-threatening, not life-affirming. 

Fasting is a striking act of asserting agency over our bodies. It’s a powerful spiritual practice when having agency over our eating and our bodies in general is the norm, but it has often not been the norm – for women, for people who are enslaved, for people who live in poverty. Today is a day to appreciate that our fast is a choice. 

Moreover, as a society, we are less than healthy in our eating habits and in our relationships with our bodies. While some among us have serious eating disorders, most of us have some level of disordered eating. With endless access to food, we eat when we’re bored, we eat when we’re anxious, we eat when we’re sad – often our eating is not connected with our metabolism. We eat without paying attention, while we’re driving, or at our computers. Families give mixed messages about when to eat and when not to eat: you should eat if it’s dinner time even if you’re not hungry, you shouldn’t snack even if you are hungry and so on. 

In this room, I imagine everyone has ultimate agency over your own food consumption, and yet we are all impacted and distorted by our culture and our inheritance. If we are descendents of survivors of Nazi camps or other severe trauma from deprivation, that trauma is literally in our cells, perhaps triggered by fasting. And possibly healed by leaning into our actual agency today. 

Further complicating our relationship with food, we can’t help but psychically consume messages from our consumer culture about body image, how we’re supposed to look, what we should eat, what we shouldn’t eat. Commercials entice us with foods and beverages that would make our doctors cringe. And then we add gendered layers of the messages around eating. Women’s relationships with our bodies, I believe, have suffered more than men’s for all who are alive today. Even as there are now a lot of body-positive messages that counter the thin and fit (and let’s not forget white and blond) expectations of the dominant culture, more and more men and certainly non-binary folks are suffering from body image expectations completely disconnected from their embodied experience. Feminism has taught us to honor our lived experiences, and sometimes prioritize them over the dominant culture’s dictates. 

So where does all this leave us with regard to fasting? 

My intention is to raise awareness and thus intentionality about our choices around what we consume. I feel like this fast – whether you’re literally fasting from food or practicing humility and self-denial in other ways – can focus our attention on all the little choices that contribute toward more sickness OR more wellbeing for our world. Our individual choices are like stones dropping into a lake – the ripples reach far and wide. I offer a spiritual take on our personal relationship with our bodies, and then a bit of reflection on the ripple effects. 

A couple weeks ago, I learned a Hasidic text from my teacher R’ Jonathan Slater, from Likutei Morohan, a collection of teachings from Rebbe Nachman of Bretslav, the great-grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, founder of Hasidism. “Each of us must have great compassion for our physical body, to show it every illumination and each insight that the soul attains, so that the body might know, as well, of that insight.” R’ Nachman actually uses a passage from the Yom Kippur Haftarah to support this teaching. In our passage from Isaiah, which we usually read as “don’t ignore your kinfolk’s need” The Hebrew is לּםָֽע ַת ְת ִאֹל֖￾ ֥רְשׂ ָבּ ְמ ִוּ “‘do not ignore your own flesh’ (Is. 58:7). Precisely ‘your own flesh’! Do not turn away from having compassion for your own flesh, i.e., your own body. We must have great compassion for the body, to make it transparent, so that we can inform it of all the illuminations and insights that the soul attains.” When the body attains this state of good health and feeling cared for, “it is good for the soul, as she sometimes falls from her high estate. When the body is bright and shining, the soul can raise itself up and return to her state through the body. That is, through the delight of the body the soul can remember and return to her own delights.” This interdependence of our bodies and souls rings so true for me. What I like about the teaching is that Reb Nachman suggests that we need to tend to the health of both body and soul. And when we do that, either one can return us to balance with the other. Sometimes my mind gets so caught up in ideas that I lose my connection with what is really present in the moment. Then it’s my body, a physical experience, that re-integrates my body-soul. Fasting can bring us back to connecting with our physical selves. When your stomach is literally rumbling or your head aching, it is much harder to ignore. A reminder that, not only is my body here, but my body needs attention and care. This is about recognizing that tending to our bodies is also tending to the godliness within us. 

There are so very many implications of each of our food choices – on biodiversity, on global food distribution, on waste and greenhouse gasses, on local sustainability vs corporate profits, on animal welfare, organic vs cheap, and so much more. Jonathan Safran Foer, in We Are the Weather, intimates all these implications when he writes, “We do not simply feed our bellies, and we do not simply modify our appetites in response to principles. We eat to satisfy primitive cravings, to forge and express ourselves, to realize community. We eat with our mouths and stomachs, but also with our minds and hearts. All my different identities – father, son, American New Yorker, progressive, Jew, writer, environmentalist, traveler, hedonist – are present when I eat, and so is my history.” If you’re like me, you infer various food choices from each of these markers of identity. Each of us has our own identities and communities; and each circle establishes norms of appropriate eating. Which means that each choice we make influences others’ choices. 

Foer also speaks of the even wider ripple effect of our personal food choices: “Our food choices are social contagions, always influencing others around us – supermarkets track each item sold, restaurants adjust their menus to demand, food services look at what gets thrown away, and we order ‘what she’s having.’ We eat as families, communities, generations, nations, and increasingly as a globe. Individual consumer choices can activate collective action that is generative, not paralyzing. … We couldn’t stop our eating from radiating influence even if we wanted to.” (p. 201) 

What does this day’s fast mean to you? Are there other fasts you might contemplate, like taking the day off of your device? Or off of certain apps? The day is an opportunity to bring mindfulness to all of our choices. Does this nourish? Or does it make you sick? 

My prayer in the year ahead is that we grow in compassion for our embodied selves, and for the wellbeing of our neighbors. May this Day of Atonement increase all of our awareness of what and how we consume. May we discern what is actually nourishing for our bodies in real time as living organisms. May our choices have meaningful positive impact on the healing of our earth. I won’t wish you an easy fast. Wishing you a meaningful one. May you be inscribed for good in the book of life. 

For Further Study and Action: 

● AJWS From the Sources: Texts on Social Justice; Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: Bounty and Scarcity 

● Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger ● Hazon’s Jewish discussion guide to Jonathan Safran Foer’s book We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

Rosh Hashanah Morning D’var Torah

by

Rabbi Debra Rappaport, AARC, 5783/2022

Introduction to the Torah Service

As we move into the Torah service, I want to give you a bit of context for what we’re about to read. The Rabbis of the Talmud designated two different – both poignant and challenging – stories for the two days of Rosh Hashanah that were to be observed in diaspora. As an interesting aside, Rosh Hashanah is the only holiday for which the second day is still observed in modern Israel. Most of the time, when congregations observe one day of Rosh Hashanah, we read one or the other of these stories. This year, Deb and I thought it would be meaningful to read the eventful parts of both stories, and no, it’s not a longer Torah service, it’s the same number of aliyot you usually do. 

Why do we read these particular stories? 

The rabbis of the Talmud first linked Rosh Hashanah with the birth of Isaac, thus connecting the new year with new life in fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham and his descendants. The Talmud also linguistically links Biblical verses about remembering to sound the shofar on Rosh Hashanah with God remembering Sarah in our Torah reading, and Hannah in our Haftarah reading. God remembered them, and their children were conceived on Rosh Hashanah (BT Rosh Hashanah 11a). This is our traditional first day reading, where we’ll start.

The subsequent chapter of Torah, Akeidat-Yitzhak, the binding of Isaac, connects the story of Abraham’s trial – being told by God to sacrifice his son – with aspects of the shofar service. According to a rabbinic legend, Abraham bargained with God at the end of the trial, insisting that, because he had done his part by not withholding Isaac, God must now protect Isaac’s descendents by remembering on their behalf this act of sacrifice every Rosh Hashanah, the annual Day of Judgment. God agrees to this demand and tells Abraham that, in order to remind God of this agreement, Isaac’s descendents should blow a ram’s horn on Rosh Hashanah in remembrance of the ram that was sacrificed instead of Isaac (Midrash Tanhuma, Vayera, 23).

After the Torah service, we’ll share some reflections. So I invite you to follow along in whichever language you understand, and ask yourself, what can we learn for our lives and our world by looking at the stories together?

[Aliyot from Genesis 21 and Genesis 22]

After Hagbah and Galilah

These stories, read together, wow. Each year, they certainly invoke God-wrestling! And reckoning with our own judgmental natures. 

20th century Israeli poet Haim Guri, in a poem called Inheritance, ended his version of the binding of Isaac with these words: 

The child, freed of his bonds

Saw his father’s back.

Yitzhak, it is said, was not sacrificed.

He lived a very long time,

Seeing the good, until the light of his eyes dimmed.

But that hour 

he bequeathed to his descendants

still to be born

a knife

in the heart.

What we’ve inherited is heavy. Many poets, including Yehudah Amichai, Chana Block, Alicia Ostriker, and more have captured the paradoxes of these stories in their words, helpful somehow in integrating them. Sometimes I’m grateful for annual opportunities to wrestle with our patriarchal stories; sometimes I want to say to my fellow Jews: team, it’s time for some new foundational stories, stories of collaboration.

But these are our stories, our people’s stories. The rabbinic endeavor has always been to redeem them, to find the good. Here’s what I offer in that lineage: these are stories of human trauma. We tell them to learn from them, not to emulate our ancestors’ behaviors. 

I offer three teachings I’m receiving from the two stories taken together.

  1. The first is that our job of teshuvah, making amends and turning into our best selves, needs to include empathy. Marsha Pravder Mirkin teaches in depth about this in Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion to the Holidays. Mirkin explores the interpersonal backdrop of these stories, looking at moments of empathy (like Abraham arguing with God on behalf of the righteous citizens of Sodom) and many moments prior to these stories in which Abraham shows an extraordinary lack of empathy toward his wife. She picks up on the wording of God’s response to Abraham, regarding Sarah’s complaint. God tells Abraham, “shema b’kola” (21:12) – listen or hearken to Sara’s voice – and then God promises to make nations of both his sons. Mirkin writes, “Traditional interpretation takes these verses to imply that God meant Abraham to obey Sarah and expel Ishmael. Such traditional interpretations often hear language through a patriarchal sensibility. However, a feminist understanding of this language creates a world of difference between “listening to her voice” and “obeying.” Sarah was distraught, she was lonely, she was frightened. She needed Abraham to empathize with her feelings, to listen to her feelings. She did not need him to take action, nor do we need to hear God’s words as a request that Abraham take action.” The message here is that in several pivotal moments, our protagonists were not able to see or hear what was really before them, and that teshuvah requires cultivating empathy for ourselves and others, and an intentional effort to give people the benefit of the doubt.
  2. A second learning also comes from noticing what was absent for our patriarchs and matriarchs. Avram had been told by God to leave his land and his people to go somewhere new. He and Sarah did not have any community. Sarah didn’t have friends to vent her insecurities to. Abraham didn’t have friends who might have said, “are you sure that’s what God told you?! – what are you thinking? Maybe you should wait…” This past week I learned that my dear friend’s son and his wife are splitting up, even though they still love each other a lot. In the year and a half they’ve been married, this couple has lived in three places, during the pandemic. They had no opportunity to build community. It’s too much pressure on any one family to figure out challenges by ourselves.
  3. Last but not least, I want to share where I find inspiration in these stories: In the darkest, most severe life-or-death moments, a third way opens up. In both cases, the protagonist hears a call from God or an angel, alerting them to change course. Then they both see with new eyes. Hagar, at the moment she is wailing her son’s immanent death, “God opened her eyes,” and she saw a well of water. Similarly, Abraham heard a call to not sacrifice Isaac, and then vayisa Avraham et eynav vayar’a – Abraham lifted up his eyes and he saw – and check it out, there’s a ram! The learning is not only about finding another way when we feel trapped, but in coming back to our physical senses, hearing, seeing, knowing through more than our minds, knowing through integrated experience what is true. And aligning ourselves with that.
    My personal version of this involves some combination of being in nature, moving my body, and prayer, which when things feel really dark will eventually bring me to a big cleansing cry. Somehow the world then moves from grey tones back to full color, and choices seem to soften around the edges. Unfortunately I can never think my way out of those sorts of binds, so something feels powerful and true about sensory interventions. 

These Torah stories place the struggles of our own lives in the context of human nature, and remind us just how difficult life can be. In closing these reflections, I offer a quote from Jewish Buddhist master teacher Joseph Goldstein: 

Seeing the suffering in the world around us and in our own bodies and minds, we begin to understand suffering not only as an individual problem, but as a universal experience. It is one of the aspects of being alive. The question that then comes to mind is: if compassion arises from the awareness of suffering, why isn’t the world a more compassionate place? The problem is that often our hearts are not open to feel the pain. We move away from it, close off, and become defended. By closing ourselves off from suffering, however, we also close ourselves to our own wellspring of compassion. We don’t need to be particularly saintly in order to be compassionate. Compassion is the natural response of an open heart, but that wellspring of compassion remains capped as long as we turn away from or deny or resist the truth of what is there. When we deny our experience of suffering, we move away from what is genuine to what is fabricated, deceptive and confusing. (from Seeking the Heart of Wisdom)

May we all learn from what Sarah and Abraham were tragically unable to grasp. May this holy season help our hearts open so that we may return, shuv, to presence with our essential compassion and essential inter-connectedness with all life.

Entering the High Holy Days Together

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Rabbi Debra Rappaport for AARC, Erev Rosh Hashanah 5783

Why are you here? I invite you to please check in with yourself in this moment with
the question: why are you here tonight? If you’d be willing, please raise your hand for
as many of these are true for you:

I am here…
Because this is what Jews do on Rosh Hashanah
Because someone invited me
Because I love singing with other people
Because I love seeing my community, and this is when we gather
Because my soul needs this
Because my heart aches and I’m hoping for solace
Because it’s commanded in the Torah
Because my heart aches and this is a place I can sit with my feelings
Because this is where I talk with God or my higher power
What else? [because this is what our parents and grandparents and those
before them did]
All of the above?

There’s a story from early modernity, when Jews started having a choice about
whether to go to synagogue or not. Someone who was not so sure about whether
she wanted to go asked a couple friends: “Shmulik, why do you go to synagogue?”
Shmulek answered, “Nu, to talk to God!” Hmmm, she thought, not so sure about that
God thing, can’t be proved through modern science. “Moishie, why do you go to
synagogue?” she asked. “Nu? To talk to Shmulek!” he answered! So many reasons
bring us together for Rosh Hashanah! Jews have been gathering for this day since
the Torah (Lev 23 and Num 29), when God told Moses to proclaim to the Israelites:
בַּחֹ֨דֶשׁ הַשְּׁבִיעִ֜י בְּאֶחָ֣ד לַחֹ֗דֶשׁ יִהְיֶ֤ה לָכֶם֙ שַׁבָּת֔וֹן זִכְר֥וֹן תְּרוּעָ֖ה מִקְרָא־קֹֽדֶשׁ׃ In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe complete rest, a sacred occasion
commemorated with loud blasts. You shall not work at your occupations; and you
shall bring an offering by fire to יהוה.

The biblical commands for Rosh Hashanah are to remember (and/to) hear, to listen
to the shofar, and to not go to work.

So what’s the significance of the shofar, and what is this about remembering? The
sound of the shofar says “wake up! This is your life, this is it!” Rosh Hashanah is also
called Yom ha Zikaron – the day of remembering. “Remember who you are!
Remember what matters!” it says; “remember, you have choices! Wake up,
remember, you can change!” It’s also Yom haDin, a day of judgment, which calls us
to the work of teshuvah – to reflection, repentance and change – so that our behavior
aligns with our values.


Over the next 10 days, we’ll spend time immersed in rituals and imagery intended to
wake us up: “This is your life,” says the shofar, “this is it!” Some of our prayer
language praises the wondrousness of Creation, some bewails our lowly state; in
some we take responsibility; in some we ask for help. We will hear members’
reflections on big questions of life. We hope that by the end of Yom Kippur (or
Sukkot and Simchat Torah) we’ve been spiritually cleansed and renewed,
reconnected with our truest selves, and can move into winter with renewed joy and
resilience.


Tonight, I want to begin with our setting, in this congregation, in the turning from
5782 to 5783. I’ll start with a little bit of my own reflection on this moment for all of us
as citizens of the planet and of this country; mostly I’ll talk about community and why
we need to do the holy work of living together.


Though we’re just meeting, and it’s my first time in Ann Arbor, we share some
context. Most of us are still figuring out how and when to come out of pandemic-
induced isolation. Isolation continues to take a concerning toll on mental as well as
physical health; our children lost the normalcy of school for too long. Loved ones
have died since this community was last together in physical space. Some of us
have had major life changes, some for the good, and some not of our choosing.
We humans are all in new terrain. With escalating disasters of flood, fire and draught
that would have been unimaginable a generation ago, not to mention all the ways
humans are violently dehumanizing one another, we need to CHOOSE LIFE like we
never have before. Not by doing ever more and faster. But by taking opportunities
like these High Holy Days to wake up to our actual connectedness and interbeing
with all humans and all life on earth.


I believe every one of us is already doing the best we can manage toward healing
and justice, and simple kindness. And, we’re confronted every day with relentless
heartbreaking news around the world, in our country, and for the earth herself. I
name some of these “headlines” as a way of naming the wider discourse from which
we arrive here, for our holy days. Many of us ache with a longing to make things
better, and at the very least to make meaning of what’s going on. Each one of us
holds part of that call, and we hold the questions together.


Very few of us, I imagine, are arriving already in a contemplative state of being. Our
lives are busy, fast-paced, governed by our fast-paced minds. It takes time to settle
into heart-space. If I invite you to hold in your mind’s eye a four-strand braided
challah perfectly roasted with golden sesame seeds on it – your mind is right there
with me, right? Our minds can see it and maybe even smell it instantly. But if I invite
you to feel the joys and the vulnerability of being human, can anyone get there
instantaneously? So we give ourselves this time, and many modalities, and many
different voices, including the shofar, to enter into this deep reflection.


Most of us are steeped in the waters of this country, the values of independence and
self-determination. We think, “Okay, I can wake up, remember, reflect and turn on
my own, or maybe even more thoroughly with some close friends and maybe a
therapist.” But can you? Will you? Why would you do that when you don’t have to?
Contemplating and taking responsibility for our lives in a real and deep way – waking
up, turning and returning – is the most important thing for our lives and our world.
And it’s terrifying. Sometimes life’s circumstances force that reckoning upon us. The
High Holy Days give us a chance to practice, to prepare, to build our support
systems – in the context of community.


The very act of questioning why Jews pray as a community goes back more than a
thousand years. Jewish philosopher Yehuda HaLevi’s The Kuzari (written in 11 th
century Spain in the Arabic language) presents a dialog, in which the king of the
Khazars (an Asian tribe that converted to Judaism in the eighth century), interviews
representatives of each of the three major religions, so he can discern which is the
true religion.


The Khazar king asks the rabbi: If everyone read their prayers for themselves,
would not their soul be purer and their mind less abstracted?

The Rabbi responds:
Common prayer has many advantages. In the first instance a community will
never pray for something which is hurtful for the individual, while an individual
sometimes prays for something that is to another’s disadvantage.
One of the conditions of prayer, craving to be heard, is that its object be
beneficial to the world, and not harmful in any way.
Another is that an individual rarely accomplishes their prayer without slips and
errors. It has been laid down, therefore, that the individual recite the prayers of
a community, and if possible in a community of not less than ten persons, so
that one makes up for the forgetfulness or error of the other. In this way a
complete prayer is gained, and its blessing rests on every person. For the


Divine Influence is as the rain which waters an area, sharing its general
abundance…

I wanted to share that complete quote, because of the authors absolute certainty that
prayer is essentially meaningful and serves to bring functional benefit to the pray’ers
and their community.

Yet there’s something deeper that calls us to community: our utter vulnerability as we
wake up to the human condition. Alan Lew says it best in This is Real and You are
Completely Unprepared.

“The first thing we do during the High Holidays is come together; we stand
together before God as a single spiritual unit. We do this out of a very deep
instinct… We need each other deeply. Here in the full flush of the reality of the
life-and-death nature of this ritual, here in the full flush of our impotence as
individuals to meet this most urgent emergency, our need for each other is
immense. We heal one another by being together. We give each other hope.
Now we know for sure – by ourselves, ain banu ma’asim, there is nothing we
can do. But gathered together as a single indivisible entity, we sense that we
do have efficacy as a larger, transcendent spiritual unit, one that has been
expressing meaning and continuity for three thousand years, one that includes
everyone who is here, and everyone who is not here, all those who came
before us, and all those who are yet to come, all those who are joined in that
great stream of spiritual consciousness from which we have been struggling to
know God for thousands of years. We now stand in that stream, and that is
first thing we do.”

Lew’s brilliance is in naming how impossible it is for anyone to feel competent in the
face of life’s reckoning AND that together as discrete communities of Jews, we’ve got
this.

Specifically, here we are as the Ann Arbor Reconstructionist Congregation. This
community is in its own tender time of transition. You said goodbye to your beloved
rabbi, Rabbi Ora, just a few months ago. “Who is this person, this rabbi, in front of us
now?” and “Who are we as a community?” might be questions you’re sitting with. I
can’t imagine the range of the questions you’re holding. But I do know that each one
of you holds an essential piece of this community’s waking up, remembering, and
returning to the essence of who you will be going forward. Singing, praying, sharing
kavanot together during our services provides a shared foundation for what will
unfold in the year ahead. I don’t want to suggest that our shared experience in
synagogue is enough to weave the fabric of real community. That requires shared
endeavors, and responsibilities toward one another, time, goodwill, and much more.
You are already a community. And from what I’ve seen over the past few months(especially with the Davening Team), you are in really good hands with your lay
leadership and engaged members.

So where are we? Each of us is here tonight for different reasons. Together, we have
entered an energetic flow of prayer and of peoplehood that extends geographically
around the world, back and forward in time. Our actions of waking up, remembering,
and turning are held and supported in the archetypal energy of holy space and time.
Facing the profound limitations and finitude of our human condition is terrifying – and
yet the process actually functions to free us up from the habits of mind and heart and
our habitual actions that hinder us from living deeply, fully, joyfully. There is deep
purpose in all this: The Torah says: “Today I place before you life and goodness, or
death and wickedness. For I command you this day to Love YHVH and walk in God’s
ways…” (Deut 30:15-16), Choose life, the Torah implores, not just going through the
motions. Be awake for it!


We begin the year with gratitude, celebration, and song. When we start with love and
connection, appreciating even the smallest good in ourselves and others, we can
create space where it is safe to feel what we need to feel – the whole range, laughter
and joy, tears and mourning. And space to know what we need to know. To make
amends where we need to make amends.


May we soften to what’s real and wake up to an ever deeper more authentic knowing
of connection and love. Shana tova.


We continue with the Aleynu, originally written for Rosh Hashanah: It is up to us to
offer praises to the Source of all, to declare the greatness of the author of Creation,
who gave to us teachings of truth and planted eternal life within us. V’Ain Od, there is
nothing else, none Other, on page 1202/1204, please rise.

Letter from Rabbi Debra to The AARC Community

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Dear AARC,

Just a week ago today I returned home (to Minneapolis) from two amazing holidays with you in Ann Arbor. It was an honor and pleasure to accompany you through Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur this year, and a treat to work so closely with Deb Kraus (as well as Gillian and Etta!) in all the planning. 

I’m remembering so many powerful moments of community: the gorgeous harmonies of the davening team, beginning with Hashkiveinu on Erev Rosh Hashanah and ending with Karov at the end of Yom Kippur; deep, soulful reflections (kavanot) from nine community members; engaging conversation about our reluctant prophet Jonah and how we are/aren’t like him; moving stories of deceased loved-ones; members who could be present stepping in last-minute for those who couldn’t (especially Molly on our final shofar!); music and Haftarah from our teens; and more. And outside the services, so many of you helped with communications beforehand, with setting up and cleaning up for services, and preparing the break-fast! The genuine sharing of community was truly manifest during these High Holy Days; you held these core Jewish activities together and I hope you feel really good about it.

More than ever this year, I’ve been appreciating the brilliance of our Holy Days cycle, with Sukkot pairing with the holidays we celebrated together. During Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, along with the time leading up to RH and the 10 Days of Awe in between, we have space and rituals for deep reflection on our mortality, on our past year(s) and on how we want to live going forward. While we enact this process in community, the inner work is about how we show up individually to our relationships and communities. There is a severity of tone as we ask ourselves, How can I do better?  

Sukkot, which begins four days after Yom Kippur, sends us back into the physical world, to be together, to rejoice in our shared fragility and the abundance of our lot. It is predominantly social, and agricultural, celebrating cycles of the earth rather than the linear trajectory of our lives. R’ Yitz Greenberg points out the fallacy of considering the fast of Yom Kippur to be more holy than the feast of Sukkot. As humans, we are meant to experience the full range of the human experience. Sukkot is known as z’man simchateinu, the Season of our Joy! The biblical command is to be joyful – in the sense of fully embracing all of what life has to offer, and in the sense of sharing our abundance with those less fortunate. 

My hope is that you have had or will have the opportunity to relax in a sukkah with loved ones. My prayer is that you, together, gain clarity of vision for your next phase as a community, while continuing to show up profoundly and sustainably with and for one another and the wider community.

Thank you for the opportunity to be with you this season.

L’vracha, with blessings, 

Rabbi Debra Rappaport

debrarappaport@gmail.com

Thoughts on Elul By Rabbi Debra

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Rabbi Debra Rappaport will be leading this year’s High Holidays services

Greetings! As I write to you, we are at the beginning of the new moon of Elul, the month that precedes the new moon of Tishrei – also known as Rosh Hashanah. ELUL is known as an acronym for the phrase Ani L’dod v’Dodi Li – I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. Who or what is the Beloved to whom we need to return this season? 

The work of this season is called cheshbon ha-nefesh – taking stock of our own souls and our relationships. Where have my actions not been true to my values? Where do I need to make amends and/or change course? Teshuvah – making amends where appropriate and returning to our best selves, to the ineffable Beloved, is the other part of our season’s work.

Though we are new to one another, we may share some of the same sentiments… for example, wondering as the season approaches, How have I changed? What difference did all of last year’s resolve make? Or, What more can I do to stem the destruction and injustices I see around me?

Believing that we can change, and that repairs can be made, matters. It forms how we choose to show up to every moment. The Talmud (Pesachim 54a) describes teshuvah as a possibility created even before the world itself was created! The possibility of choice and change exists in our very essence. Not just regarding the big things but in every moment. Not just as individuals but collectively. Think of how a tiny course correction on an ocean liner leads a ship to a different landing place. Likewise, tiny moments of showing up differently in our own behavior can change our life’s trajectory – and hopefully our country’s and our planet’s – for the better.

MyJewishLearning.com offers some ideas for practice for the month of Elul.  If you’d like to do some learning and reflecting together, please do join one of the High Holy Days workshops starting September 18.  Sign up here!

In any event, I am truly looking forward to meeting you in person, and making the journey of the holy days together. In the meantime, may all have a nourishing Elul.

L’shalom,

Rabbi Debra Rappaport    

How Do YOU Do Jewish? Teach Us on Shavuot!

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By Rabbi Ora Nitkin Kaner

You’ve probably heard the saying ‘two Jews, three opinions.’ It contains a kernel of truth: the idea that Jews thrive on arguing and sharing our opinions and beliefs with one another! But the phrase also reflects the diversity of perspectives, histories, cultures, and experiences present in Jewish communities; for as much as we might have in common (attending High Holiday services, or observing Shabbat in some fashion), we also have a lot of differences (what kashrut means to us, or what kind of God we believe in, or what our favorite Jewish food is).

This Shavuot, we have the opportunity to learn about and from our differences! The theme of this year’s Tikkun Leil Shavuot is ‘How Do YOU Do Jewish’? The evening’s learning will focus on the practical side of doing and being Jewish, and offer a window into how different community members express themselves Jewishly. 

Members have the opportunity to teach (for 5, 10, or 15 minute time slots) on “How I Do Jewish.” This can be interpreted very broadly, and could range from “How I Bake My Favorite Cheesecake” to “My Most Meaningful Prayer Experience” and anywhere in between. Rabbi Ora will offer an hour-long class focused on the ‘doing’ aspect of ‘Doing Jewish’: “How To Create and Lead a Meaningful Shabbat Service.”

Do you, does your family, or did your ancestors ‘Do Jewish’ in a particular way? We want to learn about it! If you’re willing to present, please email Rabbi Ora with your topic and how long you’d like to teach for. We look forward to learning from you!

Shavuot will be held at the JCC of Ann Arbor on June 4th, 7pm-10pm. We will participate in an evening of learning and then go outside for an al fresco dairy desert potluck. Please RSVP here.

Schedule of Events:

Shavuot 2022: How Do You Do Jewish?

7:00-8:15 pm: How To Create and Lead a Meaningful Shabbat Service with Rabbi Ora

Have you ever wanted to lead a Shabbat service for AARC but haven’t known where to start? Or are you looking to level up your skills? In this interactive, creative, and practical session, you’ll think about how to choose a theme, create flow, craft a dvar Torah, and make the most of your creative and musical skills!

8:20-8:35 pm: Seeing, Finding, Showing My Jewish Self in Games with Hannah Davis

It’s natural to want to see ourselves in the stories we consume. I play video and tabletop games a lot, and I look for Jewish content and themes in them. And if there isn’t much to find, I start making my own! Here are some Jewish stories I’ve found – or made – in games.

8:40-8:55 pm: Teaching Religion Responsibly with Lauren Zinn

9:00-9:25 pm: Edot of Ruth: On ‘Doing Jewish’ and Doing the Heavy Work of the Divine with Marcy Epstein

After a brief drash about mitzvot (Jewish doing; מִצְוֹתַי) in the Book of Ruth, we shall study a connection to edot (testament) to the chukim (divine decrees) at Sinai. We’ll then discuss the reconstruction of edot as “difficult witnessing” in the here and now. There’s a hands-on challenge to this session: while we talk, participants may explore sketching a small edot (by way of emblem or picturing the witness/witnessing) in charcoal on paper, something to bring home as a minhag mitzvah of decorating our Jewish homes for this holy day. Supplies provided!

9:30-10:00 pm: Outdoor Shmoozing, Cheesecake, and Havdallah!

Carrying Our Imperfections Gently In Our Hearts

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By Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner

Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner

Kol Nidrei 5782/September 15, 2021

“I regret any offence that may have been caused.”

“I’m sorry you had your feelings hurt.”

“If there’s been a mistake, I do apologize. But you must know it was never my intention to cause anyone any pain.”

“Look, I’m sorry I snapped at you, but to be fair, you were being really annoying.”

How often have you heard these sorts of terrible apologies? Saying sorry is one of the most important speech acts we have as human beings. But on average, bad apologies, also known as ‘fauxpologies,’ happen way more often than good ones.  

There are so many fauxpologies out there that two social scientists created a website to keep track of them back in 2012. This website, called Sorrywatch.com, analyzes current and historical public apologies made by celebrities, politicians, and CEOs.

If you read just one of the hundreds of terrible apologies compiled on Sorrywatch, you might come away thinking, ‘wow, that person is a jerk.’ If you read another, you might think, ‘oh, that person is a jerk too.’ But the more fauxpologies you read, the more you’d realize: This isn’t just a couple of jerks. This is widespread problem, and people really need help figuring out how to apologize better.

The founders of Sorrywatch agreed. So a few years ago, they published a list on their website: ‘The Six Steps to a Good Apology.’

According to Sorrywatch, these are the six steps to a full apology:

  1. Use the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize.” “Regret” is not apology! Regret is how you feel. Apology is about how the other person feels.
  2. Say specifically what you’re sorry for.
  3. Show you understand why the thing you said or did was bad.
  4. Be very careful if you want to provide explanation; don’t let it shade into excuse. This could mean just erring on the side of listening.
  5. Explain the actions you’re taking to ensure this won’t happen again.
  6. If you can make reparations, make reparations.

Although SorryWatch feels like a distinctly 21st century phenomenon, its founders – one of whom is Jewish – were partly inspired by Jewish wisdom from 900 years ago: the writings of Maimonides, also known as Rambam. Rambam’s Mishneh Torah devotes 10 chapters to the art of repentance, and includes the original ‘how to apologize’ list. Rambam also engages with broad range of related questions, including whether you should bother apologizing if you’ll probably commit the same sin again (hot tip: it’s the moral equivalent of dunking in a mikvah while holding a lizard carcass – very not kosher!).

If we took all the medieval wisdom of the Mishneh Torah and all the contemporary wisdom of Sorrywatch and boiled it down to one sentence, it’s this: saying sorry is hard. 

And it’s not because some people are jerks. It’s not because we don’t always have the wisdom of Sorrywatch or Rambam at our fingertips. It’s because saying sorry can be painful—to the person saying sorry! It can hurt the person who’s apologizing. Or at least it can feel that way. 

This is because at its heart, an apology is an acknowledgment of imperfection. 

It can be hard for many of us to admit that we’re not perfect. So instead of saying ‘I see how I hurt you,’ our apologies become complex verbal pretzels to help us avoid looking in a moral mirror, to wrap our ego in layers of self-defense, to widen the gap between what we did and how we want to think of ourselves. We want to avoid the pain of seeing ourselves as the villain in someone else’s story.

But it’s a fact; a fact that’s true regardless of how often we’re the hero or the villain in someone else’s story. The fact is: I am not perfect. You are not perfect. We, collectively, are not perfect.

I’m going to say that again. I am not perfect. You are not perfect. We are not perfect.

Our adult minds know what do with this statement. We say to ourselves heartily, ‘Of course I’m not perfect!’ Intellectually, we know perfection is impossible. But under that vigorous acknowledgement of reality and that cool adult rationality, there’s often still a voice that whispers frantically, ‘But I have to be perfect! That’s the only option!’

The little voice that tells us we have to be perfect—where does it come from? For some of us, it’s the voice of our parents and caregivers from when we were children, socializing us, teaching us to be good, and maybe also injuring us a little in the process. For some of us, it’s our history as a people. For centuries, Jews have strived for goodness and success, partly because we imagined that if we were without flaw, we would be less hated by the world. Perfection became our hope for mitigating or avoiding anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic violence. 

If that’s where the little voice comes from, what makes it louder? Well, our tradition, for one. For some of us, compulsory perfection can feel like it’s commanded by our High Holy Days. The fasting, the beating on our chests, the communal reciting of sins can all combine to make us feel like we’re failing some ideal. These holidays can highlight the gap between who we are and who we think we should be.

What happens when the voice that whispers ‘I have to be perfect!’ runs us? We are harsh with ourselves, criticizing our bodies, our accomplishments, our career paths, our relationships. And often, when we cannot hold our own perceived imperfections with lightness or acceptance, we push away weakness and vulnerability and failure in others. When we cannot sit with our own imperfections, it’s harder to sit with others in theirs.

Why does this matter so much? Of course, it’s damaging to empathy and compassion, and those are fundamental to a good life. But I wanted to talk with you about perfection on Kol Nidrei because perfection is the opposite of change. And change is what the High Holy Days are all about. 

When we prayed, on Rosh HaShanah, to be written in the Book of Life—when we pray, tonight and tomorrow, to be sealed in the Book of Life—it’s not a negotiation with God-as-Santa Claus, checking a list of naughty and nice to see whether we’ll get the present of life in the new year. It’s not a simple equation of if we’ve been good, we’ll live, and if we’ve been bad, we’ll die. Being written into the Book of Life simply means that we’ll have the chance to keep making mistakes in the coming year. 

For life to exist, there needs to be imperfection. If something is perfect, that means it can’t change. And the essence of life—the only condition that makes life possible—is change. 

We understand this implicitly when we look at the natural world, but it takes a little more time for it to sink in when it comes to us. If we were perfect, it would mean we wouldn’t—couldn’t—change. 

And our tradition knows this. This is one of the foundations of our faith: That the world was not created as perfect, and that we were not created to be perfect. There’s a midrash I love that speaks to this. In the Talmud (Pesachim), we read that before creating our world, before anything else was created, God created teshuvah. Repentance existed before anything else. Back when there was nothing, the possibility of moving towards healing and repair was set into the foundations of our world. And then God created our fallible world, and us within it, with the acceptance that we could never be anything but beautifully imperfect.

How do we repair our relationships with others? We can start by releasing our expectations that they will be perfect. How do we repair our relationship with ourselves? We can start by understanding that imperfection is our nature and our heritage, our past and our future. When we let in the truth that we were never created to be perfect, we start to quiet the little voice with its fearsome whisper. 

If imperfection is our nature, and teshuvah is our sacred heritage, the work of our hearts is to hold all this vulnerability tenderly. To hold our past and present, full of missteps, with as much warmth as we welcome our futures. Because our failures and our missteps, our selfishnesses and our egos, our heartbreaks and our dark moments of despair—we’re not meant to ignore them or throw them away. They are part of who we are. They give us knowledge of ourselves. And if we are lucky, and we put in the work, they can become signposts on the path forward.

I want to share one final midrash, one final bit of Torah to carry us into our soul-work, this Yom Kippur:

In Exodus, we learn that Moshe ascended Mount Sinai to receive the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. When he came down the mountain, he found the Israelites worshipping an idol, a calf made of gold. Enraged, Moshe smashed the tablets. And eventually, he had to go back up the mountain to receive a new set from God.

What happened to the stone tablets, the unbroken set, and the broken ones? The Talmud (Berachot) teaches that when the Israelites built the mishkan, the traveling tabernacle for God, they placed both sets of tablets, the broken and the unbroken, side by side into the holy of holies. They placed what was broken and unbroken at the heart of their community. That was where God dwelled.

We are meant to treat what was broken with as much reverence as what is still whole. To embrace the rough with the smooth, the past with the present, the losses and the failures with the joys and successes of our lives. We cannot cast anything away. We must carry our imperfections gently in our hearts, nestled alongside our highest hopes for ourselves, our communities, our world. Only in that way can we achieve wholeness. When we carry both in our hearts.

I’ll close with the priestly blessing—a blessing of shalom, peace, and shlemut, wholeness, for us all:

May the Source bless you and keep you;

May the One turn towards you with light and grace;

May the Eternal face toward you with uplift, and grant you peace.

Amen.

Leaving Behind the Idol Shop; Or, Enthroning An Orientation Towards Love

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By: Rabbi Ora Nitkin Kaner

Rosh HaShanah 5782/September 7 2021

Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner

I want to start with a story—maybe one you’ve heard before. It’s a story about Abraham, back when he was known as Avram, and his father, Terach, and how Abraham smashed the idols. The story goes like this: 

Abraham’s father Terach sold idols for a living. Occasionally, he would go out of town, and when he did, he’d leave young Abraham in charge of the idol shop. 

One day, when Abraham was minding the shop, a woman came in with a plateful of food and said to Abraham, “I want to give this food to the idols.” As soon as the woman left, Abraham took a large stick and smashed all the idols except the largest one, and then placed the stick in its hands. When Terach returned, he was shocked to find the contents of his shop smashed to smithereens. 

“What happened here?” he demanded of his son. 

“Well,” said young Abraham, “a woman came with an offering for the idols. One idol announced, ‘I must eat first,’ but then another insisted, ‘No, I must eat first.’ Then the largest idol rose up, took that stick, and broke them all.” 

“Don’t be absurd!” said Terach angrily. “Idols can’t move or speak!” 

“Did you hear what you just said!?” Abraham asked. “If they can’t move or speak, how much power can they really have? How could we worship them?”

Then Terach, silenced and enraged, sent his son away.

This story—from Bereshit Rabbah—is an origin story of the first Jew; how Abraham started on his journey toward the idea of one God. The story makes it clear that even as a youngster, Abraham could see that believing in idols was silly; and we, from our 21st century vantage point, agree. So naturally we think of Abraham as the hero of this story, and Terach as the misguided villain. But lately, I’ve been less curious about Abraham’s iconoclasm and more curious about his father’s experience: how it must have felt for Terach to come home and find his livelihood and his faith shattered by his own son.

I’ve been thinking about Terach lately because I believe we’re living through a time of our own idols being smashed. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think anyone in this kahal actually has figurines of Baal or Asherah in their homes. But I do believe that as a society, we’re experiencing what it’s like to believe in something, to invest emotionally in that thing, to consider it sacred, and then have it shattered.

What am I talking about? 

I’m talking about the delight we took in Bill Cosby, America’s most loveable dad, and then finding out he sexually assaulted dozens if not hundreds of people throughout his long career. I’m talking about Andrew Cuomo, and Louis CK, and Michael Douglas, and Kevin Spacey, and Junot Diaz, and Sherman Alexie, and on and on.

I’m talking about growing up trusting police, and then watching George Floyd be murdered while calling out for his mother, and hearing about how Breonna Taylor was killed in a raid of her home. I’m talking about memorizing Tamir Rice’s 12-year-old grin, his wide cheekbones and his mischievous eyes, from his obituary photo.

I’m talking about growing up with the idea of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, or the Israeli Defense Forces as the ‘most moral army in the world.’ And then coming to learn that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were deliberately displaced in the founding of the Jewish state, or that Israel is a flawed country like any other. I’m talking about living through May of this year as Israeli rockets killed 67 children in Gaza.

I’m talking about learning to feel pride in America as a democratic ideal, with trust in the basic decency of our government leaders—and then witnessing endless wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. I’m talking about half the country electing an abhorrent abuser in 2016. I’m talking about living through January of this year, watching his mob break into the Capitol, wearing t-shirts that said ‘6 million wasn’t enough.’ I’m talking about this past week’s abortion ban in Texas.

I’m talking about growing up with a basic sense of trust in one’s fellow citizens, and then seeing people refuse to wear masks, refuse to do the minimum to keep one another safe during a pandemic.

I’m talking about faith, and the loss of faith; I’m talking about trust, and the loss of trust; I’m talking about belief, and the loss of belief.

It’s human nature to believe in goodness. It’s human nature to believe in the goodness and stability of the systems we create and the people we put in charge of those systems. So what happens when those systems are revealed to be fundamentally damaged or damaging? What happens when we find ourselves surrounded by the shattered remnants of the idols we once believed in?

Or, to ask this question differently: What have you been feeling these last weeks, months, years? Anxiety, sorrow, despair? Outrage, disgust? Alienation, mistrust? Bitterness, confusion, shame?

These are these emotions that accompany the psychological state of ‘moral injury.’ 

Moral injury is a reaction to a traumatic experience—a traumatic experience that violates our sense of how the world should work. It happens when our meaning systems confront something chaotic or disastrous; when we witness events that shatter our deeply held values. But moral injury doesn’t only occur when we are witnesses. It also happens when we come to understand that we are the perpetrators or perpetuators of an unjust system; it happens when we find ourselves complicit in things that we don’t want to be complicit in. Like as Jews, when we find ourselves defending some of the more immoral decisions of the Israeli government. Like as people with white privilege, when we come to understand how we benefit from systemic racism. Like as Americans, when we see how our taxes feed the American war machine. And how helpless we feel to change any of these realities. 

What’s wounded in moral injury is our sense of the world, and our place in it. 

We have a fundamental need to engage with the world in a moral way. When we feel like we’ve lost our ability to do that, it’s disorienting. It’s painful. And it’s also isolating. Moral injury messes with our ability to connect to other people. Or, to put a Jewish spin on it: it leaves us in a state of alienation from goodness—which is what we call sin. 

In Judaism, sin is the opposite of a mitzvah. The word ‘mitzvah,’ or ‘commandment,’ comes from the Aramaic root ‘tzavta,’ meaning ‘to bind together, to connect.’ If a mitzvah is something that connects us—to God, to our past, to family and community, to others in need, to our own deepest values—then sin is something that leads to a disruption of these connections.

Judaism teaches that idol worship is perhaps the greatest possible sin, from our second commandment (not to create idols or worship them) to the rabbinic saying: “Whoever endorses idolatry, rejects the entire Torah.” (Sifre Deuteronomy 28)

Why is idol worship such a focus of our tradition? Why is it such a sin, to guard against? Coming back to the smashing of idols and how painfully disorienting it is to live through such devastation: maybe we were taught that idol worship is a sin not because God is a jealous God, but because our tradition contains deep wisdom: the wisdom that it is hard to live when we place our faith in fallible things. Because inevitably, our idols will be smashed, and that will be devastating to us. 

We need our gods to be immutable. We need our gods to be eternal. This is the deep truth of our tradition. 

Only an hour ago, as part of the Rosh HaShana morning liturgy, we read a kavanah for ‘HaMelech,’ the liturgical moment of divine enthronement. The kavanah stated: “We have a need to re-enthrone meaning in the face of the chaos of our lives” (Kol HaNeshama Machzor, 269). We do. Perhaps never more so than today. Because we cannot survive as modern-day Terachs. We cannot abandon ourselves and one another to this present-day idol shop, surrounded by smithereens and turning the stick on one another and on ourselves. We need an act of re-enthronement. We need a God that cannot break, a world that will not keep shattering.

With so many of our idols destroyed at this point, how do we trust again? How do we figure out what to believe in?

Recovering a sense of trust, in our world, in our leaders, in one another, isn’t easy. We’ve lost a lot. And losses create suffering. And fear. And doubt that we actually know how to do this, that we’ll know how to make the right choices this time around.

But we do know how to do this. This power of discernment is deep in our ancestral DNA. We inherited it from Abraham, from the very first Jew: the ability to differentiate between what is eternal and what is temporary; between what is sacred and what is not. And to enthrone what is eternal, what is fundamental, and what is the deepest truth of life. Which is: Love.

What’s the first thing we know when we come into the world? Love. We are created out of love, and it is what sustains us, literally keeps us alive when we are infants. Love creates life. Love sustains life. 

And love is embedded in the heart of our tradition. What’s the most important prayer in Judaism? The Shma. The Shma is at the core of Jewish belief. On the surface, the Shma seems like a simple declaration of monotheism: Listen, Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One. But if God is One, if God is Oneness, if we all contain that sacred, unified wholeness, then the only possible imperative is to love: Ve’Ahavta. When we really integrate the awareness that we are one, then we have nothing else to do but love one another by receiving, resting in, and transmitting abundant love. Our God becomes a God of love, and our life’s work simplifies into seeing love, receiving love, integrating love, and extending love outwards.

Ve’Ahavta: And we will love. On this first day of a new year, we have the chance to acknowledge our old idols, even honor what they gave us. We can gather up the broken pieces, bury them with care, and enthrone an eternal truth—Ve’Ahavta—a truth that will not break, no matter the challenges of the year to come. 

Committing to a new enthronement in the face of chaos is an invitation to believe again. But in this process, how do we make sure that we’re not just setting new idols on the throne?

The way to do this is actually relatively simple. We ask ourselves one question: Is this oriented towards love? This is the question we have to ask ourselves, in every relationship, inside every belief: ‘Does this idea, this person, this leader, this system, orient towards love? Does this maintain and promote a field of care?’ And if the answer is no, then it may well turn out to be another idol. Which means it’s not right for us, and for our tender, yearning hearts. 

Just think of what is possible for us, if we enter the new year holding up the banner of this question for ourselves: Is this oriented towards love? This email I’m about to send my coworker: Is it oriented towards love? This text I’m about to send my friend: Is it oriented towards love? This politician’s platform: Is it oriented towards love? This non-profit I’m donating to: Is it oriented towards love? This community I’m joining: Is it oriented towards love?

We are deserving of a world that doesn’t shatter, and break our hearts along with it. We are deserving of, worthy of, capable of building a world that merits our trust. We are deserving of a world built on love.

Get Inspired For the High Holidays By Reading Rabbi Ora’s Sermons!

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Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner

Those of you who have recently attended High Holidays services at AARC know that one of the highlights are Rabbi Ora’s sermons. Each year, Rabbi Ora conjures up mind-blowing topics that gives everyone food for thought for the year to come. As a teaser for this year, I thought I’d collect some sermon highlights to look back at some of the incredible teachings of the last few years. Whether you will be at our services this year in person or online, you’re guaranteed richly meaningful learning. Just make sure you register to attend as soon as possible!

We look forward to seeing everyone over the chagim. As always, please let us know if you have any questions.