Yom Kippur - 5785/2024 Rabbi Lewis

Yom Kippur 5785/2024
Rabbi Leah Lewis
Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Los Angeles

 

 

When I was living in Jerusalem during my junior year in college, I recall walking down the street on a hot summer Friday. Now, I’m not talking Los Angeles hot, I am talking about the relentless heat of the Judean desert. Appropriately, as an act of survival, I carried a large water bottle and donned my baseball cap, shorts and tank top. Just outside of the shuk, the outdoor market, I stood at a produce stall waiting to pay for my cucumbers and I could not take my eyes off of a young Israeli couple that had apparently not been trained in the same desert summer survival skills as I. Just looking at them, my own sweat began flowing faster! Long skirt, long sleeves, heavy wig, black suit, white button down long-sleeved shirt, black wool hat, beard… we exchanged glances and then, with the kindest looks on their faces, they asked if I had somewhere to go for Shabbat dinner.  

“Have you ever thought about becoming religious?” She asked. 

“I’m good,” I replied. “I am religious. And also, thank you for the Shabbat dinner invitation, but I already have plans.”  

The look on their faces was memorable – not what they were expecting to hear, and also not the eye opening encounter I had expected as I strolled through the stalls of the shuk that day. In that moment, I realized that despite the memes of religious Jews donning stereotypical black hats and long beards, there are, in fact,  countless ways to be a religious Jew. 

To me, being ‘religious’ was never a matter of rules about keeping kosher or keeping Shabbat, or even about how often I would show up at the synagogue, though those things have always had  their place in my Jewish life.

To the twenty-year-old, shorts and tank top wearing me, being a religious Jew meant that I inherited a tradition that wanted me to learn and experience the richness of what Jewish life has to offer, and ultimately to use it to find meaning and do good in this world. That evening, it would find its expression over cucumbers at a makeshift Shabbat dinner table in the dorm rooms of the Hebrew University.

To the no-longer-twenty-year-old, now white robe wearing me, the question of what it means to be a religious Jew still encompasses all of that. But after the unprecedented devastation that the Jewish people faced during the year that drew to a close last week, and recognizing that this new year is already taking shape with more war, bloodshed, anxiety, anguish and a collective struggle to find hope, my definition of what it means to be a religious Jew is evolving once again. Today I can see that being a religious Jew is having the ability to envision the world not as it is, but as it ought to be.

When I met Rachel Goldberg and Jon Polin in a hotel ballroom in Jerusalem last November, they showed me a new way of understanding what it means to be a religious Jew. It had been 50 days since their son, Hersh, had been stolen into captivity in the tunnels of Gaza by Hamas, after having his dominant arm blown off by a grenade outside the Nova Music Festival. Sitting with a group of rabbis on a mission of solidarity, it felt impossible to fathom how either of these parents had the strength to tell what they knew of Hersh’s story from that fateful day, and I was stunned when, in reflecting on what their own living hell had been like to that point, Rachel challenged us.

She looked around the circle and without as much as a note of hesitation, she declared, “Hope is mandatory.” If you want to wake up each day, there simply is no alternative.

That was then. For nearly 300 more days, the world heard her steadfast voice sharing that same daunting challenge: Hope is mandatory.

Regardless of how many times we heard her say it, for many of us throughout the past year, trying to hold on to hope has been like a roller coaster. At times, it was impossible to muster. We were numb, at best. In other moments, it was so palpable that it felt as if there was actually light at the end of this very long and dark tunnel. And then we looped around again, and again. Each of us on our own track, but all of us on the ride. 

To Hersh’s ‘mama,’ as she introduced herself to the world, embracing hope is a survival mechanism deeply rooted in her religious identity as a Jew. 

Tikvah, hope, has always and will always sustain us. Like HaTikvah, Israel’s national anthem, makes clear, the ability to embrace hope, even when it is obscured by unspeakable tragedy, has (and I quote) “not been lost for two thousand years.” In fact, the etymology of the word, tikvah, in Hebrew, describes a cord reaching with strength into the future. As my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Tamara Eskenazi, offers, ‘Even when the cord trails off to places that are beyond our grasp and out of our sight, the fact that it reaches at all is itself hope.’

Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when all of the symbolism and prayers and theology are designed to remind us of just how fragile life is and how little control we actually have. Every year, this day comes to humble us. But this year, the fact that so much of life exists beyond our grasp somehow feels harder to accept. And yet, hope is mandatory.

B’Rosh Hashanah yikatavun u’v’Yom tzom Kippur yeichatamun.’ We just heard it. ‘On Rosh HaShanah it is written and on this day, Yom Kippur, it is sealed.’ Those haunting words of Unetane Tokef. ‘Who shall live and who shall die, and how. Who will rest and who will wander. Who will be calm, and who will be tormented.’ Signed and sealed. Out of our hands.

Nobody knows for sure what the origins of Unetane Tokef are, but legend teaches that Rav Amnon of Mainz, in Germany, suffered under antisemitic persecution. The Archbishop threatened Rav Amnon that if he didn’t convert to Christianity, he would be killed. His response? “Give me three days to think about it.” Afterward, he was so ashamed of even considering turning his back on his Judaism that he asked for his tongue to be cut off. Instead, says the legend, the Archbishop took a sword and cut off his limbs, one at a time. While he was bleeding to death, he wrote Unetane Tokef. So much remains out of our control, he teaches. But holding on to hope is not one of those things.

After Unetane Tokef’s litany of ways that our destinies are sealed beyond our control, the final line comes to tell us that with all that, we are not completely powerless. U’teshuvah u’tefillah u’tzedakah ma’avirin et ro’a ha-gezeira. Teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah - turning in repentance, prayer and giving to those in need are three different actions that, according to the machzor, will temper the decree. So too will they remind us that through our actions, we do have the ability to make a difference.

Teshuvah, repairing relationships and tzedakah, helping those in need - there is a straight and self-explanatory line between doing this sort of work and helping to make this world what it ought to be. And then there is the one in the middle - tefillah, prayer. The line that connects prayer and making an actual, tangible difference when our world is pleading for us to do so is not so straight at all. 

We all know people who love to criticize religion as being out of touch with the reality of our world. They claim that spirituality has no practical purpose. I can’t tell you how many tops of heads I have become acquainted with over the years, while people look down at their laps when it comes time for the MiShebeirach, the prayer for healing. “It doesn’t do anything,” they say. How many open palms have I seen when people who are involved with the synagogue put their hands up to tell me that prayer is just not their thing. “What’s the point?” They ask. And we can all relate to the experience of showing up for services on Shabbat or a holiday - or for the High Holy Days - simply because it’s what we do, never giving a moment’s thought to the prayer that happens during those services.

Today, I offer that whether you understand ‘being religious’ like that very warm couple I met in the shuk all those years ago, or, more likely, as a form of spiritual engagement, tefillah, prayer, and ultimately, being a religious Jew, is a tool for holding on to hope - hope that the world can be better than it is now, even when the vision of what that looks like trails off to places that are out of our grasp and beyond what we can see.

Toward the end of the Book of Genesis, when our patriarch Jacob is preparing for his own death, we witness his emotionally charged reunion with his beloved son Joseph, who for years, he had mourned, believing him to have died. 

Jacob, the one who had been renamed Israel, had eyes that had grown dim with old age. He could no longer see. So [Joseph] brought [his sons] close to his father’s face, and he kissed them and embraced them. To his son Joseph, Israel declared, “Lo filalti - I never conceived that I could possibly see you again, and here God has let me see your children as well.” Then, before he died, Israel blessed his grandsons.

Israel’s eyes may have been dim from old age, but in his final moments, his mind and his heart had been opened to a reality better than he could have possibly imagined. For more than two decades, our patriarch had believed that his favorite son had died. That entire time, hope was not even on the radar. And only in his final moments, a new kind of clarity. ‘Filalti,’ the Hebrew word the Torah uses to express Israel’s ability to conceive of a reality better than the one he was already living. Israel had hope. Filalti. It is the same word as tefillah, prayer. 

To our ancestor Israel and to an Israeli mother who demanded hope and to us, the people of Israel who cannot afford to lose it, prayer is a religious expression that allows us to conceive of a better reality, even when it feels so painfully out of reach. 

This may all sound ‘pollyannaish,’ but it most definitely is not. Jewish law actually forbids us to pray in a room without windows. Why? Because the rabbis teach that it is only when what happens in here is in direct relationship with what is happening in the world out there, that the religious part of being a Jew can authentically affirm that hope and reality are not mutually exclusive.   

While Hersh was still in captivity, Rachel, his ‘mama,’ was asked how she managed to wake up every day and carry on. She responded that each morning, she would get up, grab a black Sharpie to inscribe on a piece of masking tape the number of days that the nightmare had been going on; she would put the masking tape on her shirt, and then she would pray. Hope is mandatory, and it is there for all of us to embrace - this day, and every day. 

Now, if you are still feeling like Pollyanna is sitting in this sanctuary, you might be interested to know that this is not just wishful thinking. There is science behind it, as well. Dr. Lisa Miller, who founded the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia, is not a rabbi and not a priest. She is a psychologist who spent years studying the human brain with a specific focus on wellbeing. Among other things, she and her team asked participants to indicate how personally important religion and spirituality are to them. Using MRI technology, they then scanned participants’ brains. Through the black and white and red images, there was no mistaking that “the high spiritual brain,” as she called it, was measurably healthier and stronger than “the low spiritual brain.” 

The reasoning is clear. “When we awaken, [to hope, to spirituality],” wrote Dr. Miller, “we feel more fulfilled and at home in the world. We move from loneliness and isolation to connection; from competition and division to compassion and altruism; from an entrenched focus on our wounds, problems, and losses to a fascination with the journey of life... each of us is endowed with a natural capacity to perceive a greater reality.” 

To the world of science, awakening our brains to what can be is a proven approach to help people live lives that are more fulfilled, more connected, more compassionate and more resilient. To the Jewish world, awakening to hope has been baked into the fabric of religious life since the original Israel came face to face with the legacy he had never dared to dream. 

Whether you call it being religious, being spiritual or simply having hope, unlike that Israel, let us not wait until our final moments to awaken to its promise. Like Rachel, Hersh’s “mama,” let us wake up each day and reach for it. It is good for us. It will sustain us. It is, afterall, mandatory.