Kol Nidrei night

On the second day of Rosh Hashanah I concluded my lesson with a short prayer we may utter on the “day of Judgement”: “We are the ones you created with the Spark of the Divine - we are humanity. With all our failings, deficiencies, imperfections, inadequacies and weaknesses, God, have pity on us! God, save us for the sake of Your glory. Grant us a year of peace. Amen.” This evening we come back to the synagogue after seven days of awe and search, wishing to mitigate the measure of our shortcoming with the character of God’s famous forbearance and forgiving nature. As twilight gives way to darkness and God’s nature settles in to rest in the dark of night, we stand in synagogue, bedecked in white, to turn away the night. We fast, to deny our very nature that insists on sustenance to keep our physical being going. We rise to the level of our spirituality and assume a life of the spirit. We ascend from mere living to the life of the soul, a celebration of the spark of the divine, the image of God in which we have been created.

Our sages taught us that there are three books before God. The Book of the Good, of the tzadikim, is a short and precious book that God cherishes. He opens it often, caressing the pages containing the names of the righteous of all the ages. He takes pride in them, for they are truly “His children.” Then there is the book of the bad. It is a much thicker book – not because it contains many more names than the first, but because its pages damp from the tears God sheds when he looks through it, which he only does once a year, on Rosh Hashanah. The names in this book are written in indelible ink, and only God’s tears can erase a name, if only the one who bears it changes his ways. God takes special pleasure to see a name come off this book. Then there is the third book, a huge, thick book. It is the Book of the Potential. The names inscribed in it could be good, or they could be bad. Every day God opens it, and awaits the names to come out, by strength of our deeds, to migrate to the Book of Good, or God forbid, to move into the other book...

Just before we chanted the Kol Nidrei, we said a short prayer, “Biyshiva shel ma’ala uviyshiva shel mata... By authority from above and by the authority here below, Al da’at hamakom ve’al da’at hakahal... In front of God and in front of the congregation, Anu matirin lehitpalel im ha’abaryanim, we permit the guilty to pray with the innocent.” We wish to see the sinners return to God, to allow His tears to wash their names from the Book of the Bad, to become a little better, on their way to being good. Goodness, like the common cold, is highly infectious. May we all catch it, and may God in His grace love us all and forgive our sins. May our transgressions be forgotten, and may the next year see our names emblazoned in His favorite book. “And let the pleasantness of the Lord our God be upon us; and establish the work of our hands upon us; O prosper it, the work of our hands.” [Psalms 90:17]

Amen

Yom Kippur

Look around you – to your right and to your left, in front of you and behind you. Just look at us, and contemplate the fact that in the United States of America, in the midst of the greatest prosperity in the history of civilization, in the Tournament Players’ Club, not exactly your typical “soup kitchen” establishment to help the destitute – there are tens of hungry people, who have gone without breakfast or lunch, whose heads are abuzz with slight dehydration and hunger. Seems hard to believe, and yet it is precisely what is taking place. We are here to afflict our souls, to atone for our sins.

We live in a world unlike any that ever existed. We are the heirs of the people who stood at Sinai, and our heritage is respected and even revered by most of Western civilization. However, we live in the age of the individual, when civilization is fractioned and society is undergoing many changes that may mean a total refashioning of how people behave and interact. We have gone from being hoards of people, teeming masses of humanity, to being one by himself/herself – truly a most lonely crowd. We live behind tall walls and great gates and tick doors and locked windows. We don’t even let the fresh air come in. Many now conduct their business from their homes, study for college degrees from home, and home-school their children to avoid exposure to dreaded diseases and even more dreaded ideals and precepts that we do not understand, agree with or wish to subscribe to.

Our every action is directed and controlled by the laws of the land and the codes of the international community. We subscribe naturally to the universal declaration of human rights, we own up to the Civil Rights laws of the last half of this century, the rights of women and minorities, of gays and lesbians, laws protecting children from abuse, real and/or perceived, and even laws of fair and humane treatment of animals. We cannot show favor to our own kin or our ‘most favored’ people in the work-place, and we must be constantly on guard from acting in a manner that might be perceived as sexual harassment. We can’t even go to the aid of a person in distress without considering that we may (1) be sued for doing harm, or (2) be sued for not allowing nature to take its course, which is the same as allowing harm to happen.

And yet... And yet we come to synagogue, and our neighbors go to church – and we all want to be on God’s “right side.” We want to have a relationship with our creator that will not involve sin. What is sin, we ask, in this age of permissiveness. Surely, a God of creation does not judge us by the food we eat, or by the day we spend at the ball park rather than at His house. What kind of a God will ask us to give up some of the rewards of our hard labor supporting an institution, bricks and mortar, and functionaries. Who needs that? As long as we have love for Him in our hearts... What more can God ask of us?

Well, let me tell you. The church of our neighbors and the synagogue for the Jews are necessary for us, mortal, not for God. The building gives us a focus on our need to connect with Him, the One and only creator, and the experience of thousands of years has shown that where there is no such dedicated place – we do not commune, and we do not communicate. As for sin, it is very real, and it waits for us at the door to our innermost being. God warned the first “hothead,” Cain, “Why are you angry? and why is your countenance fallen? If you do well, shall you not be accepted? and if you do not well, sin lies at the door. And to you shall be his desire, and yet you may rule over him. ” [Gen. 4:6,7] We know well, within our heart, what is right and what is wrong. We also know that there is no short cut to doing something right. If we wish to be rewarded, we need to put in the value of what we do. If we cut short – the chance is that we shall come up short, and we shall have no one to blame but ourselves.