Ben Anderson-Nathe Yom Kipppur Drash 5770
October 5, 2009
I am not a person of great faith. In spite of this, I served as a Chaplain for a liberal arts college in the upper Midwest. I wear my head covered when I set foot in public. I keep kosher. New students entering my classes at Portland State University see my kippah and automatically label me as a person of faith – for some, it is an invitation, a point of potential alliance. For others, it’s a point of contention. I teach some of the young people here today in our own Havurah High School program. But I am not a person of great faith, and at times this makes me feel like a bit of a fraud.
Being a religious person without great faith leaves me in all kinds of quandaries, particularly when it comes to observance, and specifically to many holidays. At its most basic, I struggle with the notion of a supernatural G0d. The image of a personified G0d who actively intercedes in human affairs, and in whom one can have faith, is one that doesn’t resonate well with me. I am drawn into davening, into tradition, and am captivated by our liturgy … but I often wonder to whom I am praying. I observe mitzvot, but not because “G0d says.” Instead, for me it is because Jews have observed these mitzvot for millennia and in my observance of them, I find meaning. Of course, in good Reconstructionist tradition, Kaplan would call that meaning-making an encounter with G0d … but we’ll leave that alone for now.
Most of the time, my meaning-making comes fairly easily. I do what I do, it is meaningful for me, and I feel Jewishly connected, grounded, and content. But Yom Kippur introduces new complications every year. First, let me say that of all the Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur strikes the deepest chord in me. It is, without question, the most transcendent. The melodies, the symbolism and imagery, and most significantly, the vidui (the recitations of sins, including the ashamnu and al chet), all leave me breathless. But why?
I’ve just said that I struggle with the notion of a personified G0d who intercedes in human affairs. That image doesn’t work for me. But it is, unavoidably, central to this day. After all, how can I observe a day of atonement if I don’t know to what higher authority I am atoning? How can I ask forgiveness if I lack clear faith in a forgiver? How can I feel the way I feel when I recite the “al chet” litany, when I think of my own t’shuvah, returning, without having a clear sense of who’s listening to my petitions? I struggle. And yet, this holiday holds a significance for me that is unmatched.
This year, in particular, I have struggled my way through these questions. And this drash has been the hardest I’ve ever written. After several fits and starts down several different paths – each time receiving different feedback about why not to pursue this or that direction – I finally decided to write this commentary as an invitation. What follows is my process of discernment around my engagement with this day. As Jews, and as Reconstructionists, we all have both the opportunity and the obligation to offer commentary – to make our traditions, our observance, and our theology meaningful. This drash represents my attempt to do just that, for myself and hopefully for any of you who struggle similarly.
It is no accident that Yom Kippur follows the New Year so closely. In the great imagery of the yamim nora’im, the days of awe, on Rosh Hashanah we near the gates of heaven, and for the days between the New Year and Yom Kippur, we stand before them, and before the presence of the Judge within. The imaginations of the rabbis and our liturgy tell us that the gates are now closing, slowly but certainly, and by tonight, they will be shut for another year. We stand assembled before the gate of heaven, beating our chests and reciting the vidui, the litany of our wrongdoing. It is, for me, the hallmark of the day, echoing throughout the room and across years of tradition. Ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu…Penitent, almost desperate, we recount our transgressions over and over again, in the hope of averting the doom that will be sealed when the gates close.
So we stand before them, watching them close, awesome and ominous. I find that imagery poetic, powerful, beautiful even as it is frightening. But I also find something missing from it; I don’t know that I believe in the literalism of the unetaneh tokef, partner of the confessional, the recognition of our fate in G0d’s hands and our efforts to atone and make right. It rests on the notion that behind those gates is a G0d who decides today who lives and dies, and how, for the coming year, as well as an understandin that when the gates close, we humans are left again somehow distant from the presence of that G0d.
I am conflicted about this image, about what it says about G0d (and by extension, about us). And yet, I cannot abandon the image. Without such a concept of G0d as judge, as forgiver, as near-but-distant redeemer, how does repentance, t’shuvah, seeking-out-and-returning-to, make sense? What purpose does the vidui, this confession, serve, if not to appeal to this supernatural G0d?
Trying to answer these questions in Reconstructionist fashion, I turned to text. I sought the wisdom of the rabbis. And what I found didn’t entirely work for me. Of course, there is powerful commentary from our sages. There is no end to the midrash surrounding our liturgy today, the connection and symbolism of Yom Kippur, of atonement, of righteousness and of sin, to the beginning of the new year, or the covenantal relationship between humans and the Divine. But I found little in the commentary to answer my question: how can I, someone who does not resonate with a supernatural G0d concept, make meaning of the significance I feel on this day, and specifically during the litanies of transgression? The rabbis and their commentary take the presence of such a G0d as a given.
I turned to more modern Jewish scholarship. Soloveichik writes about interpretations of t’shuvah in the context of a psychology of repentance. Useful? Certainly. Sufficient? Not yet. Martin Buber was next, with his call for us to seek authentic I-thou relationships with one another. Yom Kippur, and specifically communal accountability, may be a vehicle to move us toward such relationships. Again: Useful? Definitely. Enough? Not quite. There were others, each helpful but not complete.
Finally, as a somewhat-dorky mid-30s American Jew in 2009, I turned to pop culture. Specifically, to science fiction. I figured, if Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, and text messaging have all made it into high holiday commentaries in recent years, a little sci-fi could, too.
There are some books I see more often than others. They show up on the bookshelves of friends, colleagues, and neighbors. I see them on endcaps as I walk through Powells, with “recommended reading” notes attached. When I notice one such book too many times to ignore, I figure I need to read it. Over the summer, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead spoke to me in this way.
In Speaker for the Dead, Card introduces the reader to a world more than 3,000 years in our future. It is a world in which many of our contemporary religions remain, and in which a new pseudo-religious tradition has emerged: speaking for the dead. In this tradition, mourners invite a speaker to preside over the telling of their deceased-loved-one’s life story, honestly and without apology. This speaking contradicts the tradition of the eulogy, in which the dead are remembered only for their kindness, love, and positive attributes. In contrast, Speakers for the Dead speak the entire truth of the deceased, of the community – exposing secrets and demanding accountability. The underlying assumption is that in order to move forward and celebrate a life, that life must be understood truthfully – even when the truth is unpleasant.
Of one such Speaking, Card writes: “The Speaker had done a monstrous thing, to lay these secrets before the whole community. They should have been spoken in the confessional. Yet [those present] had felt the power of it, the way the whole community was forced to discover these people that they thought they knew, and then discover them again, and then again; and each revision of the story forced them all to reconceive themselves as well, for they had been part of this story, too, had been touched by all the people a hundred, a thousand times, never understanding until now who it was they touched. It was a painful, fearful thing to go through, but in the end it had a curiously calming effect.”
On Yom Kippur, every year, I look around and see a community. This is my community. We are part of one another. We are invested in one another. I want to see you, and I want you to see me. But, if I’m being completely honest, I do not want to see your failings, your wrongdoings. I certainly don’t want you to see mine.
But that’s precisely what the vidui is – our communal recitation of that which must be said, in order for the community to move forward to the coming year, all of us together, those who will live and those who will die, those who will be sick and those who will be healed, those who do wrong and those who will be wronged. The symbolism cannot be lost; Card talks about a Speaker for the Dead. Today we all become speakers for the dead, but in our case, we speak for the living who live as though dead on Yom Kippur. We speak for ourselves and for one another, purging that which must be purged, in the safety of this day, so that when we return to life (to bathing, to eating, to drinking) after sunset, we do so with no unopened baggage, no unexamined secrets. We answer to each other as much as to G0d.
To heal together, we must encounter, boldly face, and then declare these failings to one another, on behalf of one another, and with one another. This is our moving forward. It works for me – theologically, practically, maybe even spiritually.
Let’s revisit the ominous image of those massive gates, gradually closing. When I picture it in my head, I have always seen the community before the gates, some kind of light streaming out from the not-quite-seen inside, that light gradually narrowing to a crack and then disappearing for another year, leaving the community standing outside, back in the mundane.
But what if we take up our space as modern commentators ourselves and revise this image? What if, instead of being outside looking in on the light, we see instead that over the past ten days, these yamim nora’im, Days of Awe, we have been walking through the gates, beneath their massive arms. During the days since Rosh Hashanah, we have not been gradually closed out, but instead, closed in – into the new year. Walking through the gates together, as a community, we look to one another, we account to one another, in Orson Scott Card’s terms, we speak the deaths of one another – the vidui represents this speaking. It is not the privacy of the confessional precisely because our accounting is both communal, not personal, and publicly accountable rather than merely individually cleansing. We recite together the transgressions any of us individually may have committed, knowing that in spite of our desire to be seen favorably by one another, today calls us to be seen truthfully, which requires the speaking of our wrongdoing.
This may be the answer I have been seeking. For some, t’shuvah means returning to G0d, facing G0d, and atoning before G0d. But for me, for this year, t’shuvah speaks to turning not only to G0d, but to one another, facing one another and facing the year that has passed, seeking to encounter G0d in each other. After all, as Kaplan suggests: holiness – G0dliness – is the quality people embody when they help one another become fully human. Turning to one another, speaking that which we don’t want to admit, helps us become fully human. We’re saying that which needs to be said but which we are otherwise, on other days, afraid to say. It’s not the privacy, the protection, of the confessional. It’s the publicity of a declaration. And in its communal publicity, it unites us with one another.
So today we walk through the gates together, as a community, and we look forward to a new year free from, wiser than, the last. We seal our own names in the book. We now stand on the other side of the gate. The light remains, and as it fades with the end of this Day of Atonement, we see that it is not simply the light of something we cannot attain, the light of heaven closing. It is the light of the journey of these past ten days. It is the light of something toward which we now begin walking, together as a community whose lives – rather than deaths – have been spoken by each of its members. Yes, the gates are closing, but they are closing behind us, not before us. We are not cut off from a remote G0d to whom we must petition again next year; we stand together with G0d, in G0dliness, because of our humanity. We speak our own and one another’s wrongdoings today so that we can walk forward from these gates toward those we will encounter next year, together.
May your fast be tolerable, your turning be complete, and may we join together in speaking our community’s wrongs today, that we can move forward together, healed, tomorrow.
L’shanah tovah.
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