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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! 

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