Post by Rabbi Neil on Sept 28, 2022 16:43:26 GMT
Talmud[N'darim 29b] teaches us that seven things were created before the Universe came into being. The first of those seven things is Torah, the next is Teshuvah. Teshuvah comes from the Hebrew shuv, meaning “return.” Teshuvah is repentance, but it’s more than just saying sorry. Teshuvah is returning to the right path, to the right relationship with God, with others and returning to our truest self. The fact that teshuvah was created before the universe came into being shows that, in Jewish thought, it is woven into the very fabric of the universe. We even learn [Bava M'tzia 59a] that the gates of prayer are sometimes open and sometimes closed but the gates of repentance are always open. Throughout the High Holy Day season, we sing “Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha v’nashuvah, chadesh yameinu k’kedem” – “Bring us back to you, Eternal God, and we shall return, renew our days as of old,” using the verbal form of this word not once but twice – hashiveinu and v’nashuvah. That Biblical verse, the penultimate verse from the Book of Lamentations [Lam. 5:21] is the basis for the High Holy Day sermons this year. “Bring us back to you, Eternal God, and we shall return, renew our days as of old,” But what are we returning to?
This evening, we’ll explore what it means to return to community, which seems appropriate as many of our members are returning to in-person prayer for the first time in three years. Tomorrow morning, we’ll explore the desire to return to the past, and whether that is possible, or even desirable. On Shabbat Shuvah, we will explore what it might mean to return to God. On Kol Nidre, we’ll explore returning to being called to act, and on Yom Kippur morning, we’ll explore what it means to return to the world. In the Yom Kippur Dialogues, we will round off the exploration by looking at what it means to return to our authentic selves. I believe that the personal journey of teshuvah involves returning to community, to renewing our days as of old, returning to God, to being called, to the world around us and to our truest selves. Taken together, then, my hope is that this theme over the High Holy Days can serve as a kind of roadmap to a more meaningful, more in-depth and long-lasting process of teshuvah.
We start with where we are today – in a communal limbo state. Some of us are able to return physically to community, while some are not. Some members of our community never contracted COVID, some contracted it and are healthy, some have had their lives totally overturned by it. Just as we exist spiritually in a limbo state between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, so on this Rosh Hashanah we also exist physically in a limbo state between gathering in-person and gathering online, even between being physically present and between being masked and therefore not fully present. Hillel said, al tifrosh min hatsibbur – do not separate yourself from the community [Avot 2:5] – but what if you have to in order to protect your health or the health of others? So how can I talk of a return to community when some of us cannot even return to the space that holds our community? We are in a precarious position – we are all here and not here. It feels good and also feels uncomfortable, it feels real and also not quite right, which means that it feels exactly as we should be feeling right now but for the wrong reasons. During this special period of atonement, our entire existence is tenuous – we experience fragility in the presence of Divine judgment, we review our last year’s actions and question everything that we thought was right and good in ourselves. We dismantle our certainty that we are good people and we stand spiritually naked and ashamed that we did not become the person we could have been. We stand together as a community, stripped of our pretensions that we have lived up to the values we espoused. Yet we know that as a collective group we have also done good things, we have held many people through difficult times. We stand in a moment of both identity and non-identity. We return to community, and also not.
During these High Holy Days, we subsume our individual identity into a communal identity. During the rest of the year, our prayers are a combination of singular and plural, but during this season they are almost totally plural – we have sinned, our Father, our Ruler, bring us back to You, O God, and we shall return. We learn in Talmud [Sh'vuot 39a, Sanhedrin 29b] that kol Yisrael arevin zeh lazeh – all Jewish people are responsible for each other – the ultimate expression of communal identity overriding individual identity, but how can that be true if we can’t even be in the same space? How can we be responsible for each other when we’ve spent two years being physically separated from each other, and when so many of us are still physically separated from the rest of the community?
But maybe that’s the point - maybe our liturgy points us to something quite extraordinary at this season. It’s not that our prayers are unrealistic because we have not been able to connect as much as we like – it’s the opposite - it’s that our prayers connect us in ways that transcend physical distance. When we return to community, we return not just to a physical community but to a metaphysical community, which is even greater, even more extraordinary. Through our liturgy, we don’t just return to the TBS community in this room, we return to the TBS community wherever they may be, and then we return to the community of Israel – to the entire Jewish people. We gather during the High Holy Days, during a time of personal uncertainty, of individual ambiguity, and we are steadied not just by those who share the room with us, but by all those around the world who share an identity with us. Through our uncertainty, we are steadied by k’lal yisra’el… by the entire community of Israel past, present and future. We return not to a space but to a way of viewing ourselves as we always used to be – as profoundly, irrevocably, and intimately connected, “not only … with those standing here with us today in the presence of God, but also with those who are not here with us, this day.” [Deut. 29:13-14]
The twentieth-century theologian and talmudist Rav Soloveitchik wrote [Pirke Avot and Jewish Ethics, From Sinai to the Men of the Great Assembly] that “the community in Judaism is not a functional-utilitarian, but an ontological one.” In other words, “The community is not just an assembly of people who work together for their mutual benefit, but a metaphysical entity, an individuality… a living whole….” “The Jewish community,” he says, “is not a conglomerate. It is [,rather,] an autonomous entity, endowed with a life of its own.” If he is right then our return to community can only occur if we stop viewing ourselves as a collection of separate individuals, but as essential parts of a larger whole. Soloveitchik continues by saying that the unity of the larger Jewish community is specifically because of the way that we complement each other existentially. “Each individual,” he says, “possesses something unique, rare, which is unknown to others; each individual has a unique message to communicate, a special color to add to the communal spectrum. Hence, when a person joins the community, they add a new dimension to the community awareness. They contribute something which no one else could have contributed. They enrich the community existentially; they are irreplaceable. Judaism has always looked upon the individual as if each person were a little world (microcosm); with the death of the individual, this little world comes to an end.”
What Soloveitchik is saying is extremely radical and supremely relevant for our time. The unity of community is not due to us all being in the same room, it’s due to the way that we as individuals in that community complement each other wherever we may be. What makes our community unique, alive, and one, is what each of us brings to it in our own uniqueness, aliveness and oneness. One line here particularly resonates for me – that every one of us in community are irreplaceable. You are irreplaceable. In the entire history of the universe, in 13.8 billion years, there has never, ever, been anyone like you, and there never will be again. Right now, you are an extraordinary moment in the universe, a unique point in all eternity. So, what are you going to do with that extraordinary cosmic event that is you? Teshuvah, returning to God, is about making ourselves the most extraordinary event of universal significance that we could possibly be. Engaging in teshuvah, in repentance, as a community across the world means transforming not just ourselves but an entire global event of the community of Israel that will never again be repeated.
The Book of Leviticus [Lev. 23:40] tells us that during Succot we should take four differing species – the palm, the myrtle, the willow and the etrog – and bind them together. Midrash [LevR30] explains why those four species are chosen – the etrog has taste and aroma, the palm has taste but no aroma, the myrtle has aroma but no taste, and the willow has neither taste nor aroma. The midrash relates that to differing kinds of Jews, where “aroma” is a metaphor for Torah or learning and “taste” is a metaphor for mitzvot, for engaging in our traditional commandments. The midrash reminds us that there are some Jews who study and engage in mitzvot, there are some Jews who just study, there are some Jews who just engage in mitzvot, and there are some Jews who do neither. We don’t try to turn everyone into the etrog with taste and aroma. We celebrate the etrog and the palm and the myrtle and the willow for their own unique being. And to show that we value them for what they are, we bind them all together to make the four species – we bring everyone together in community. Everyone, regardless of what kind of Jew they may be, is an essential, irreplaceable part of the community of Israel. And being bound together not only reminds us of how important we all are to each other, but the midrash adds another essential element for this time – God says of the people being bound together “Let them unite and thus they will atone for each other.” Only by binding ourselves mentally and spiritually to each other, only by placing our identity in the context of a larger communal identity, can we atone for each other.
There are other metaphors for us coming together. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes that “what we do as individuals is a trivial episode; what we attain as Israel causes us to grow into the infinite. Israel is the tree, we are the leaves. It is the clinging to the stem that keeps us alive.” [Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p.7] That makes sense as a Jewish metaphor – after all, “It is a tree of life to those who hold fast to it, and all of its supporters are happy.” [Prov. 3:18] The Ritva, a 13th century Spanish commentator, says [Commentary on RH29a] that “All Jews are guarantors of one another and they are all a single body.” Kulam k’guf, he says – like one body. That’s a mind-blowing statement. With that metaphor, we can perhaps imagine that we are all the blood vessels in the great, living community of the Jewish people. In that metaphor, perhaps every Temple becomes a limb, a bone, or a sinew of the larger body, growing as the community grows, moving as the community moves. We and our community are in a symbiotic living relationship, and we are an essential part of something immeasurably larger than ourselves. In this metaphor, we don’t all need to be in the same exact location as each other to be connected – in fact, it would be terrible for a body were all the blood vessels gathered in one place! We, in all of our differing locations, all give life and are all part of something that lives that is greater than ourselves.
In the past, the idea that all Jews are responsible for each other led to tochacha, rebuke. If I am responsible for you then if I see you misbehaving, I have a duty to rebuke you and help you behave better. We see this throughout Rabbinic literature. One commentator [Or HaChaim on Deut. 29:9] says that every Jew has to see to it that their fellow does not stumble and commit sins. Another [Sefer Chasidim 93:1] says that were we not responsible for each other, no one would reprimand their neighbor for their sins nor would they care to search out those who do evil to eliminate them, but we would only be concerned to make for ourselves safeguards and fences that we should not sin. But I think today that being responsible for each other cannot be about rebuke. How can any of us rebuke anyone else at a time like this? Midrash [LevR 4:6] says that in the book of Jeremiah when Israel are referred to as scattered sheep, that is because with a sheep when it is hurt on its head or another body part, all parts of the body feel it, and so it is with the Jewish community. Or at least, it should be – when one of us feels pain, we should all feel pain. The midrash continues that we are all essentially in the same boat and when one of us starts drilling under our seat it affects us all. But, as I saw on a flyer from the Skye Center, we may all be in the same storm but we are not all in the same boat. We have been separated, scattered like sheep by a pandemic and by social forces that have made us afraid or embarrassed to be part of something larger than ourselves. We’ve all been struggling for the last two years just to keep ourselves and our loved ones afloat.
With all this in mind, we can reflect on Hillel’s aphorism “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” [Avot 1:14] No-one should ever have to ask that question. The answer should be obvious – “All of us! We are all here for you.” But that feeling of isolation is how so many of our members not here with us today are feeling. I am sure that even some people who are physically here today feel isolated, especially perhaps our newest visitors who have never been here before. Back to Soloveitchik again who said that “Quite often a person finds themselves in a crowd among strangers. They feel lonely. No one knows them, no one cares for them, no one is concerned with them. It is again an existential experience. They begin to doubt their ontological worth. This leads to alienation from the crowd surrounding them. [But] Suddenly, someone taps them on the shoulder and says: "Aren't you So-and-So? I have heard so much about you." In a fraction of a second,” Soloveitchik explains, “their awareness changes. An alien being turns into a fellow member of an existential community… What brought about the change? The recognition by somebody, the word!” Solveitchik adds, “To recognize a person is not just to identify them physically. It is more than that: it is an act of identifying them existentially… to recognize a person means to affirm that they are irreplaceable…”
So, returning to community is not really about returning to a building, although that of course helps for many people. Perhaps the synagogue is the binding of the lulav that holds us all together. Returning to community is not about returning to being surrounded by hundreds of other people, although that can be extremely comforting. No, returning to community is about returning to seeing every single member of our community as a unique treasure, as an extraordinary event in time and space. Returning to community is about returning to seeing every guest, every new member, every long-standing member as being intimately bound together like the four species. It’s about us as a community all checking in with each other, taking care of each other, seeking out and seeing those who feel ignored and abandoned, of giving voice to those who have no voice. This year, as part of our teshuvah, as part of our return, we as a community need to move away from the last two years of being isolated individuals to being a community of truly interconnected people who give life to each other and, in so doing, give life to the entire Jewish community.
So, may we all reach out to those around us, and make a connection with someone who, even if masked or on Zoom, reveals in their very being part of the face of God. May this year be a year of returning to an even more integrated, loving, caring, supportive community in which all are valued, and all are celebrated for their wondrous uniqueness. May such be God’s will, and let us say, Amen.
In order to start our teshuvah, then, in order to start truly connecting with each other, before we continue with our liturgy, we need to see each other anew. For those physically here in our Sanctuary, I ask you in a moment to turn to someone near you who you don’t really know, or perhaps who you have not spoken to in a long time or maybe someone whose name you don’t remember, and I ask you to introduce yourself and to see the unique wonder that is the other person sitting near you. For those watching on our livestream, please know that we are thinking of you, and please let’s make sure that we spend some time together in the coming weeks. Before we continue in our liturgy then, we turn and recognize the face of God in those near us, so that we can start binding ourselves together as one community.