A Jewish girl goes to
synagogue with her father for the first time on Yom Kippur. She’s eight or nine years old, and takes it
all in with great curiosity. Much of it
moves her. She’s enthralled by the white
vestments, the large, elegantly-dressed crowd, the haunting music. And mostly she loves being there with her
father, sitting by his side, his soft tallit draped over her shoulder.
Then the congregation crises
for vidui, the communal confession of
their past year’s failings. They rap on
their chests and chant the litany: Ashamnu. Bagadnu.
Dibarnu dofi. . . . Al cheyt, al cheyt, al cheyt. . . We are arrogant,
bigoted, cynical. We’re robbed, lied,
cheated, and stolen. . . on and on and on.
The girl is shocked. With a deeply worried look, she turns to her
father and cries, “Daddy, we’d better get out of here. Everyone around us has done a lot of really bad stuff!”
The father smiles and
reassures her: “My love, they’re not all guilty of everything they’re
admitting. This is just something we do together
on Yom Kippur.”
“But why?” she persists, as
only an eight year old can. “Why do we
beat ourselves up over mean things we didn’t even do?”
**********
It’s a good question, and not
just for children. Conservative Rabbi
Mark Greenspan composed a meditation on the subject that opens:
I have a problem
with the Vidui,
the
confessional prayer that we recite
several
times during Yom Kippur.
It
seems to me that for a confession to be honest
It
has to be sincere, heartfelt, and personal.
I
can’t sincerely confess someone else’s sins
Nor
can I simply read a generic list of sins.
Yet
this is what we seem to do in the Yom Kippur liturgy.
My
transgressions may or may not appear on that list
And
there is something disingenuous about confessing
Sins
that I did not commit, just because
They
are “on the list” and written in the plural. . .
Why do we read this list of confessions?
Why, indeed? Why do we still recite that litany of
transgressions, from aleph to tav,
from “A” to “Z”, repeatedly
over the course of this long and solemn day?
This morning I’d like to
offer three answers, three approaches I have learned from diverse and
unexpected sources: a non-Jewish journalist from Connecticut, a local Christian
clergy colleague, and a deceased longtime CABI member who I find myself missing
a great deal this season.
**********
I’ll start with the Colin
McEnroe, columnist for the Hartford
Courant and host of a daily public
radio show. I heard him on one of my
favorite Jewish podcasts, “Unorthodox”, where he appeared as the
tongue-in-cheek “Gentile of the Week.”
After schmoozing about a variety of topics, the moderator, Mark
Oppenheimer, asked Mr. McEnroe for his take on Donald Trump’s rise to political
stardom. McEnroe replied:
His persona was sculpted in the world of reality
television—and reality TV is completely based on the idea of getting rid of
somebody. At the end, whether it’s “American Idol”
or “Survivor” or “The
Apprentice”—what happens at the end is
you get rid of somebody. And that’s a
kind of tempting view, because in life, you can almost never get rid of
anybody, right? The people in your
life—they’re not going anywhere. The
folks in your workplace, the people you like the least—they’re just not going
anywhere. They will be there tomorrow
when you come to work. The folks who
most get on your nerves—they’re here to stay. So that’s why these shows are
incredibly popular, because there’s this incredible fantasy—you can actually
get rid of someone who’s a pain in the butt.
That’s the world that Trump comes out of, this fantasy world, in which
he’s the guy who can make this happen
This
illusion perpetuated by reality television is, of course, the antithesis of
Jewish tradition. We are inextricably bound
in covenantal community with friends and foes and everything in between. As Yom Kippur begins, before we chant Kol
Nidre, we ask God for permission to pray with the Avaryanim—the sinners—which is to say, all of us. If you can’t tolerate being in the presence
of those who irritate you, you won’t thrive in the Jewish world. As one of Boise’s former student rabbis,
Mordecai Finley wrote in an insightful article:
One must start any conflict resolution with the commitment to the
community, to emphasize the many benefits one receives and not focus on winning
the conflict. Conflicts and tensions are
inevitable and even productive aspects of communities. Conflicts mean that the participants are
active, dedicated and have a stake; and the willingness to be reasonably
unhappy means that one takes a more expansive view of these things.
If you’re Jewish—or really, as Colin McEnroe notes, if
you’re human—you don’t always get your way, because in our communal lives,
we’re not getting rid of anyone. When we
confess publicly, we remind ourselves of our obligation to learn to live
together.
My favorite teaching on this topic comes from Rabbi
Harold Kushner’s marvelous book, When All
You’ve Wanted Isn’t Enough. Kushner
recounts how, just before Yom Kippur, he runs into an unaffiliated Jew who insists
on sharing why he won’t be coming to services: “I tried to get involved in your
synagogue but I found it to be full of hypocrites.”
To which Rabbi Kushner is tempted to respond:
“True. But there’s always room for one
more.”
Instead, he notes: “A synagogue that only admitted
saints would be like a hospital that admitted only healthy people. It would be
a lot easier to run, and a more pleasant place to be, but I’m not sure we’d be
doing job we’re here to do.”
Jointly confessing our transgressions reminds us that
there’s always room for one more—that, like it or not, we’re not getting rid of
anyone, that we’re in it for the long haul, together.
**********
It also encourages us to open
our hearts to one another. My colleague,
Rev. Andrew Kukla, senior pastor at Boise’s First Presbyterian Church, shared
this in a post to my Facebook page. He
wrote:
I think the current state of political and social
discourse affirms why public and communal confession is so important. It’s owning that none of us has “arrived”;
that we are all struggling to find the “better angels of our nature”. Such communal ownership has the power to make
the discourse less about
finger-pointing at them and more about looking at
ourselves.
A unified prayer of confession is our mutual task of
accountability and responsibility, and yes—of mercy and forgiveness. Because somehow and some way, we have to make
it okay for people to be less than perfect, so we can stop investing so much
energy in armor.
How might we take the energy
we waste on emotional armor, pitting ourselves against the world, and, instead,
invest it in our common humanity? Rev. Kukla suggests we start by acknowledging
our shared vulnerability. Communally
confessing our shortcomings is a step in that direction—even if, at first,
we’re merely following a formulaic script without much real feeling. As our Sages noted centuries ago, Lo lishma ba lishma—If we practice doing the
right thing, even if our initial motivation is insincere, eventually we will do
it with proper intention. Even a rote public confession can help us
start to stretch our atrophied “forgiveness muscles.” The Yom Kippur vidui may, over time, inspire us to examine our own choices, take
responsibility for our failings, and make amends to those we’ve hurt.
It can also nurture
gratitude. I’ve already quoted Rabbi
Mark Greenspan’s challenge to the notion of communal confession but he
ultimately affirms the practice as a path to gratefulness. He reminds us:
We do not
shrink from taking advantage of rewards for the efforts of others. The same
person who sits in a building he did not build, cooled by air conditioning he
neither created nor paid for, reading words he did not write, will protest
indignantly at discomforts visited upon him by someone else's mistake. We see
our blessings as birthrights and our troubles as undeserved.
Perhaps we
confess in the plural to bring home to us that interconnectedness is true in
all ways: in sin, in punishment--and in virtue and reward. We seek to be good
not only for our own soul, but to help those around us. You may beat your own
chest, but the vibrations echo through the breast of everyone whom you know,
and many whom you will never meet. Swift and sure are the currents that tie us
to one another.
**********
Swift
and sure are the currents that tie us to one another.
This
affirmation of our interconnectedness is at the heart of my third and final
argument in defense of our Yom Kippur vidui. It involves a scientific breakthrough I
learned about in detail this past summer in the podcast Radiolab—but which I first encountered in its infancy through my
dear friend Bob Parenti.
Many
of you were lucky enough to know Bob, may his memory be for a blessing. He was a stalwart CABI member, a past
president, and original chairperson of the rabbinic search committee that hired
me. He was also an eminent botanist who
did trailblazing work in the field of plant communication. To walk in the woods with Bob—to see the
world through his eyes—was to enter into a beloved secret kingdom. He patiently taught me, in layman’s language,
what he’d learned through rigorous scientific research: that plants communicate
with one another. Bob showed me that
what we see is, as it were, the tip of the iceberg—a tiny fraction of an intricate,
interconnected ecosystem. When he began his
academic career, this hypothesis was mostly met with scorn. Plants talking? Nonsense. But by the time he retired, the scientific
community had begun to come around.
Bob
would have reveled in the findings documented in the Radiolab episode. It features
the work of Professors Suzanne Simard and Teresa Ryan at the University of
British Columbia. They have mapped out
the mechanics of what Bob intuited, a forest beneath the forest, in which
plants converse in the language of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and water. Simard and Ryan discovered the medium for this
communication: a web of tiny white tubes, barely visible to the eye, called
mycorrhizal networks—essentially, mini-mushrooms.
When
they plug their roots into these networks, trees become capable of amazing range
of behaviors that stun even the most cynical biologists. When life is good, and trees have extra
sugar, they store it in these fungal cells.
When times are hard, the mycelium release this sugar to the trees so
they have food amidst the famine. If rising
temperatures are stressing certain trees, they will send a warning signal
through this web. Dying trees dump their
carbon into fungi in order to redistribute it to their healthier
neighbors. The nutrients don’t just get
reapportioned, as one might expect, to the offspring of the dying tree, or even
to other members of the same species.
Instead, they go to the forest’s strongest young trees of all varieties,
which have a better chance of surviving global warming.
Rabbi
Adam Lavitt views this new botanical model through the lens of Jewish
tradition. He writes:
Torah teaches:
“The human being is a tree of the field.”
As we learn more about them, the trees of the field invite us to
cultivate aware participation in the web of interconnectedness in which we are
naturally embedded. All of our actions
have consequences. We, too, can plug
into the micro-universe, the web of intricate connections, both out in the
world and within our own lives.
**********
And
so we gather here, bound by the brit, by
covenantal community, on this sacred Day of At-one-ment. We confess our failings together, because it
is our holy obligation to learn to live with one another in all our
imperfection, to stop investing so much energy in armor, to recognize that our
interconnection echoes the sometimes hidden oneness underlying all of God’s
creation.
We
recite the vidui, the lengthy list of
shortcomings, large and small, because our choice to acknowledge our mutual
responsibility determines the difference between heaven and hell.
**********
The story is told of an old
woman who wished, more than anything, to see for herself the difference between
heaven and hell. All her life she prayed for this, until God finally agreed and
sent a messenger to grant her request. The angel put a blindfold around her
eyes, and said, "First you shall see hell."
When the blindfold was removed,
the old woman was standing at the entrance to a great dining hall. The room was
full of round tables, each piled high with the most delicious foods — main
dishes, vegetables, fruits, breads, and desserts of all kinds! The smells that
reached her nose were wonderful.
The old woman noticed that, in
hell, there were people seated around those round tables. She saw that their
bodies were thin, and their gaunt faces creased with frustration. Each person had
an enormous, three foot-long spoon strapped to his or her arm. As a result, the
people in hell could reach the food on those platters, but they could not get it
into their mouths. As the old woman watched, she heard their desperate, hungry moaning. "I've seen
enough," she cried. "Please let me see heaven."
And so the angel reapplied the
blindfold and declared, "Now you shall see heaven." When the
blindfold was removed, the old woman was confused. For there she stood again,
at the entrance to a great dining hall, with countless round tables piled high
with the same lavish feast. And again, she saw that the people sitting just out
of arm's reach of the food with those three-foot long spoons.
But as the old woman looked
closer, she noticed that the people in heaven were beautifully healthy, with smiling,
happy faces. As she watched, a joyous sound of laughter filled the air.
And soon the old woman was
laughing too, for now she understood the difference between heaven and hell: the
people in heaven were using those long spoons to feed one another.
**********
The
choice is ours. Confess together—live
with one another, as the frail, flawed, and deeply vulnerable creatures that we
are—or wither away, spiritually-dead, isolated and alone.
This
morning God tells us: I set before you this day life and death, the blessing
and the curse.
Let
us choose community, which despite—and even because of—our endless
imperfections, is the only path toward life.
Heaven
awaits.
