Post by Rabbi Neil on Sept 15, 2021 17:19:08 GMT
There’s a fascinating section of Talmud in which the Schools of Hillel and Shammai disagree about whether or not it is good that humanity exists. By the end of their two-year exploration of the topic, they agree that it would have been better had humanity never been created, but since we have been, we should scrutinize our actions to ensure that we do not fall into sin. They essentially regret humanity existing but accept that since we human beings do exist, we have a responsibility. Their acceptance of reality does not deny that which is negative but lives with it and tried to make something positive out of it. Acceptance of negativity and the ability to form a positive response to it is the fifth and final stage of the Kübler-Ross Cycle of Grief, and is, in my opinion, the fifth and final stage of teshuvah, of atonement. We have been on an emotional journey through four other stages. For grief, we denied that there was ever really a loss, then we became angry as the reality of the loss became evident, then we tried to bargain to mitigate against the loss, before experiencing depression as we truly started to live with the loss. For atonement, we denied that we ever needed to change, then we got angry at others so that we could deflect the need to look at ourselves, then we tried to bargain with God to be written into the Book of Life through the bribe of more repentance, prayer and charity, before finally coming to terms with the darkness within us and starting to reach out from that darkness. Now we come to the stage of acceptance at the end of the journey. As we read in our Yizkor service later, “Blessed is the path to acceptance – very near and sometimes distant as the horizon.” A few pages later, we read, “Blessed is the pilgrimage from grief to gratitude; precious are the sights along the way.” Would we rather not experience loss? Would we rather not have to atone? Almost certainly, but the reality is that we do and probably always will, so coming to terms with the journeys of loss and atonement, accepting them as realities, appreciating their journey and growing from them, that is the place we try to reach today on Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur means the Day of Atonement, but the word Kippur is very interesting. The root of the word Kippur shows that our sins are not wiped away, they are merely covered over. The darkness within us, the bad deeds we have done, cannot be erased because they are in the past and nothing changes the past, but we can cover them over and make something better of ourselves. But do we want to cover them over, to pretend like they never happened? Instead of covering over, Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild compares t’shuvah to the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, which is the art of repairing broken pottery using metallic powder to make the lacquer in the cracks more beautiful. The faults are not hidden, they are left exposed to show where there was once a fault but is no longer. Similarly, in Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem, he repeats the lyric that “there is a crack, a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.” We live with our limitations, with the cracks and faults of the past, and we use them to grow. The Dubner Maggid tells us a story to prove this point -
A king once owned a large, beautiful, pure diamond of which he was justly proud, for it had no equal anywhere. One day, the diamond accidentally sustained a deep scratch. The king called in the most skilled diamond cutters and offered them a great reward if they could remove the imperfection from his treasured jewel. But none could repair the blemish. The king was sorely distressed. After some time, a gifted jeweler came to the king and promised to make the rare diamond even more beautiful than it had been before the mishap. The king was impressed by his confidence and entrusted his precious stone to his care. And the man kept his word. With superb artistry he engraved a lovely rosebud around the imperfection and he used the scratch to make the stem.
In this story, the king is God and the diamond is the soul of the Jew. When our soul is scratched, when we sin, we initially become depressed like the king. But t’shuvah helps us turn that negative scratch into something more beautiful. This is why Maimonides says that it is better for a person to have sinned and atoned then never to have sinned at all. Similarly in Talmud, Resh Lakish expounds on Ezekiel 33:19 and says “Great is repentance, as one’s intentional sins are counted for that person as merits.” So, acceptance on Yom Kippur should not mean covering over our sins, our faults, it should mean covering over the effects of them, letting go of the pain of them and rebuilding from them. It means accepting the past and the present, and looking forward to the future.
It’s very easy for us on Yom Kippur to focus on our sins, though. The liturgy rather doesn’t let up with that, to be honest, with the repetition of the confessions of Ashamnu and Al Chet throughout the day. But today, when we list our sins, perhaps instead of berating ourselves for what we did, we can specifically focus on the grammatical tense of the confession – that we did certain negative things in the past. Acceptance means letting things in the past go so that they no longer cause us pain but instead help teach us. We have sinned – we have, in the past, it’s true and that’s a shame, but we are no longer that person if we have atoned. That radical change in perspective on the liturgy can move us into the final stage of acceptance and into real t’shuvah. T’shuvah is not constantly reminding ourselves that we are sinners, it’s moving from a place of brokenness – whether with the self or in relationship to other people or God – to a place of healing. We stumbled, we fell, we scraped our knee, and now as a result we learn to pay more attention to where we’re going in the future. If our t’shuvah is to be real, we must not short-change ourselves in this fifth and final stage. The world is as it has been up until now, and we are who we have been up until now. But the future world does not have to be the same as it was, and neither do we. We accept reality in order to live life anew. We accept reality so that we might transform reality, limp forward into a new way of being. We leave behind the paralyzing denial, anger, bargaining and depression, but we are still thankful that we experienced them so that we could most fully transform.
The Mishnah tells us that Yom Kippur is a day of joy, but why would that be the case? Not just because we believe that God has forgiven our sins, but because we have learned to forgive ourselves and to grow from our mistakes, and because we have let go of past pain caused by others if they have truly atoned for it. The burden of the pain of the past is no longer with us so long as we commit ourselves to never return to those actions. We live with the past, we accept that it happened, but we cover over its negative effects as we move into the future.
From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, we have compared the journey of grief to the journey of t’shuvah. We have removed our denial about the state of the world around us and about the effects of our actions. We have challenged our anger into a constructive force to bring about change. We have gone beyond bargaining to try to bribe the universe to give us back what was once ours. We have even journeyed through the depressing realization of what is. Now, on Yom Kippur, we come through the other side. We see the scratch on our soul, and we turn it into the stem of a beautiful rose. We have been through the painful journey of t’shuvah and come through it accepting the past and striding into the future. May God support our steps from here on, and let us say, Amen.
Yom Kippur means the Day of Atonement, but the word Kippur is very interesting. The root of the word Kippur shows that our sins are not wiped away, they are merely covered over. The darkness within us, the bad deeds we have done, cannot be erased because they are in the past and nothing changes the past, but we can cover them over and make something better of ourselves. But do we want to cover them over, to pretend like they never happened? Instead of covering over, Rabbi Sylvia Rothschild compares t’shuvah to the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, which is the art of repairing broken pottery using metallic powder to make the lacquer in the cracks more beautiful. The faults are not hidden, they are left exposed to show where there was once a fault but is no longer. Similarly, in Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem, he repeats the lyric that “there is a crack, a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.” We live with our limitations, with the cracks and faults of the past, and we use them to grow. The Dubner Maggid tells us a story to prove this point -
A king once owned a large, beautiful, pure diamond of which he was justly proud, for it had no equal anywhere. One day, the diamond accidentally sustained a deep scratch. The king called in the most skilled diamond cutters and offered them a great reward if they could remove the imperfection from his treasured jewel. But none could repair the blemish. The king was sorely distressed. After some time, a gifted jeweler came to the king and promised to make the rare diamond even more beautiful than it had been before the mishap. The king was impressed by his confidence and entrusted his precious stone to his care. And the man kept his word. With superb artistry he engraved a lovely rosebud around the imperfection and he used the scratch to make the stem.
In this story, the king is God and the diamond is the soul of the Jew. When our soul is scratched, when we sin, we initially become depressed like the king. But t’shuvah helps us turn that negative scratch into something more beautiful. This is why Maimonides says that it is better for a person to have sinned and atoned then never to have sinned at all. Similarly in Talmud, Resh Lakish expounds on Ezekiel 33:19 and says “Great is repentance, as one’s intentional sins are counted for that person as merits.” So, acceptance on Yom Kippur should not mean covering over our sins, our faults, it should mean covering over the effects of them, letting go of the pain of them and rebuilding from them. It means accepting the past and the present, and looking forward to the future.
It’s very easy for us on Yom Kippur to focus on our sins, though. The liturgy rather doesn’t let up with that, to be honest, with the repetition of the confessions of Ashamnu and Al Chet throughout the day. But today, when we list our sins, perhaps instead of berating ourselves for what we did, we can specifically focus on the grammatical tense of the confession – that we did certain negative things in the past. Acceptance means letting things in the past go so that they no longer cause us pain but instead help teach us. We have sinned – we have, in the past, it’s true and that’s a shame, but we are no longer that person if we have atoned. That radical change in perspective on the liturgy can move us into the final stage of acceptance and into real t’shuvah. T’shuvah is not constantly reminding ourselves that we are sinners, it’s moving from a place of brokenness – whether with the self or in relationship to other people or God – to a place of healing. We stumbled, we fell, we scraped our knee, and now as a result we learn to pay more attention to where we’re going in the future. If our t’shuvah is to be real, we must not short-change ourselves in this fifth and final stage. The world is as it has been up until now, and we are who we have been up until now. But the future world does not have to be the same as it was, and neither do we. We accept reality in order to live life anew. We accept reality so that we might transform reality, limp forward into a new way of being. We leave behind the paralyzing denial, anger, bargaining and depression, but we are still thankful that we experienced them so that we could most fully transform.
The Mishnah tells us that Yom Kippur is a day of joy, but why would that be the case? Not just because we believe that God has forgiven our sins, but because we have learned to forgive ourselves and to grow from our mistakes, and because we have let go of past pain caused by others if they have truly atoned for it. The burden of the pain of the past is no longer with us so long as we commit ourselves to never return to those actions. We live with the past, we accept that it happened, but we cover over its negative effects as we move into the future.
From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, we have compared the journey of grief to the journey of t’shuvah. We have removed our denial about the state of the world around us and about the effects of our actions. We have challenged our anger into a constructive force to bring about change. We have gone beyond bargaining to try to bribe the universe to give us back what was once ours. We have even journeyed through the depressing realization of what is. Now, on Yom Kippur, we come through the other side. We see the scratch on our soul, and we turn it into the stem of a beautiful rose. We have been through the painful journey of t’shuvah and come through it accepting the past and striding into the future. May God support our steps from here on, and let us say, Amen.