- 5786/2025
- Rabbi Lewis
Yom Kippur 5786/2025
Rabbi Leah Lewis
Wilshire Boulevard Temple, Los Angeles
Go On
We call it “Yom Kippur soup.” When I was growing up, some time between day seven and day eight of the ten Days of Awe, my mother would throw herself into making this soup that we had every year to break the fast, while I was busy measuring the size of the book I’d sneak into the sanctuary, making sure it would fit inside my prayer book for the High Holy Days. The ritual of the soup preparations has happened for at least four generations in my family. The ritual of the rogue reading preparations went on from the years of Amelia Bedelia to the Judy Blume years through the era of Sweet Valley High - all so I could sit among the grownups, long before I was ready to absorb the meanings of the prayers themselves.
The thing is, it was never the book or even the soup that kept drawing me back. It was the ritual itself: the rhythm, the predictability, the comfort of knowing what came next. Human beings are drawn to ritual for precisely this reason: it is ritual and in such, it is comfortable. As scholar Ronald Grimes teaches, “Rituals soothe because they are repeatable, reliable performances in a world of flux.”
When Yom Kippur would arrive, our ritual would continue. My family, like many of yours, always sat in the same seats — on the far side of the sanctuary, near the windows, just behind the sliding doors that had been opened for the holiday. And every year, we sat beside our dear friends, the Walls. We would shuffle in, find our spot, settle into our familiar row. I would open my book - and then my other book - and the ritual of the day itself would commence… the music, the Torah, the prayers - who will live and who will die.
Every year, just before this prayer, Mrs. Wall — sitting right beside us — made her own ritual of quietly rising from her seat and leaving the sanctuary. As a child, I didn’t understand why. I didn’t understand that U’netane Tokef was Judaism’s way of telling us that there will always be things - hugely life-altering things - for which we can never be prepared and over which we do not have ultimate control. I didn’t yet know that Mrs. Wall had survived the Holocaust as a young child, that she had endured cancer twice as an adult - the first time at age 41, just before her daughter became a Bat Mitzvah. I did not understand that for her, the words “who shall live and who shall die” were not poetic metaphor. They were unbearable because she knew - quite literally in her blood - that her world was in flux. She was a survivor through and through and if the decision about whether her cancer would return in that year had been sealed without her as an active agent, she did not want to hear it.
That was the 1980s. In 2025, “flux” doesn’t begin to describe the upheaval tearing through our city, our country, our Israel, our world. Nor does it capture the unrest that has lodged itself deep within our souls. We keep hearing that these are “unprecedented times,” but when do we finally wake into a world that is ‘precedented,’ familiar — a world where the rituals of our lives reassure us because they remind us that we know what comes next? Instead, we find ourselves agitated, unmoored, overwhelmed — frozen in our tracks. Every day, every moment, it seems, there is something else.
Case in point: last spring I was on the phone with a congregant whose home in the Palisades had burned in the January fires. He shared his sense of overwhelm as he tried to navigate the maze of government offices and private systems in hopes of piecing his family’s life back together. While we spoke, my Apple Watch tapped my wrist: first a news alert about ICE raids nearby, then another about violence erupting at a humanitarian aid center in Gaza. I hung up the phone to find an email about a member with a health crisis and another announcing a newborn. Just ten minutes.
Pick any other ten-minute slice of life and I am confident that you could name your own litany of shocks and upheavals — anything but routine, anything but ritual. As we step into this new year, that nagging unrest of the soul is formidable.
Psychologist Martin Seligman called this feeling learned helplessness — when we are bombarded by stressors so large and uncontrollable that we begin to shut down, convinced nothing we do will matter. When we learn helplessness, we convince ourselves that it’s not even worth trying.
That is exactly why we need this day. Yom Kippur does not deny our overwhelm. It names it and it challenges us to confront it. The story of the book that is sitting in our hands is one that we think we would rather avoid - that life and death themselves lie beyond our grasp. And in the same breath, it hands us back the agency we do have; not just the ability to put one foot in front of the other, but the sacred responsibility to do so.
U’teshuvah, u’tefilah u’tzedakah - that little line tucked away at the end of Unetane Tokef. On Rosh HaShanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed - who will live and who will die. But these three things over which we always have agency, can temper the decree:
Teshuvah, turning back to our true selves, unmitigated by learned helplessness.
Tefilah, prayer that humbles us and reminds us that we are part of something so much bigger than ourselves.
Tzedakah, the Jewish obligation to look beyond our own worries, to help someone else who is in need.
After surviving four different concentration camps during the Holocaust, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl published Man’s Search for Meaning, his now famous book that explained the approach he used to survive the psychological torture of the camps. He offered it as a way of living when everything is out of control:
“We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread,” he wrote, “They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Every one of us has the power to choose our own way. Even when life feels completely in flux and out of control, we are not powerless. Human beings created in the image of God, we have a divine capacity to live by our highest values and do something that matters. We may not be able to end all suffering or still every storm, but we can offer a morsel of bread, a word of comfort, a hug.
In 2013, after a decade of training at the highest level, Paul Kalanithi was on the verge of completing his education as a neurological surgeon and a neuroscientist, when he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. In case you are wondering, no, he never smoked. He was faced with a choice that he was totally unprepared to make, despite the fact that he had spent a significant portion of his young career presenting a version of this same choice to hundreds of patients: How would he continue to live with meaning, even in the face of an inevitable death that was beyond his control?
The year after his diagnosis, he chose to complete his residency. The year after that he and his wife had a child. Kalanithi left behind a young family and a not-quite-complete book about what makes life worth living, even when its finitude is out of our grasp. His book, When Breath Becomes Air, was published after his death. In it, he shared seven words from the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett that he claims were playing on repeat in his head after his diagnosis: “‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’”
This doctor turned patient, this man who had the brightest of futures turn dark in an instant, came to live inside the paradox that is shining right into all of our eyes on this holy day - we fast, we stand, we admit our fragility, and still, we go on.
The book ends with a letter that he had written to his infant daughter before his death. It is a sort of instruction manual for her and, by extension, I offer it for us:
When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”
Kalanithi’s story, a powerful testament to the human ability to overcome the overwhelm and return to the things that actually matter, has been a fixture on various bestseller lists for nearly a decade. If the themes sound familiar, it may be because they appear in the story of another exemplar of carrying on with meaning and purpose in the face of a reality that is beyond his control. This one was a bestseller for thousands of years before bestseller lists were even kept.
In the Torah, Moses was keenly aware that his life was finite and that the reality of his impending death was inevitable. He would soon die in the wilderness, never able to cross over the Jordan, into the Promised Land that he had spent forty years of wilderness hardship leading the people to. The book of Deuteronomy is his instruction manual to the generation that he would leave behind, as they steeled themselves for what they all knew would be fierce battles ahead. Already, they were exhausted, weary from seemingly endless wandering in the chaos of the wilderness. He knew that the threat of the people throwing their hands up in despair was real.
Moses’ instruction manual was never directed solely at the wilderness generation. Torah tzivah lanu Moshe, we sing when we take the Torah from the ark, it was given for us, as well. Us, who are exhausted and overwhelmed by the enormity of all that is in flux. Us, who teeter on the edge of the defeat of ‘I can’t go on’ because we don’t know how to operate in this chaos. Us, who are desperate for the reminder that indeed, ‘we can go on.’ That is why we read his words today, when we come face to face with all that is beyond our control.
It is not in the heavens, it is not beyond the sea… it is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you can do it.
The command is clear: do not shut down. Shutting down has never been the Jewish way. Even when it feels like having the ability to put one foot in front of the other is out of reach - in the heavens or beyond the sea, we are, in fact, not helpless. Moses was clear: It is right there, inside of you. You can go on.
Moses was our teacher in his words and in his actions. Of course he was overwhelmed and exhausted, but he kept putting one foot in front of another and one word in front of another, to live his life with purpose.
U’teshuvah - even in his final days, he consciously returned to his essence - a humble, compassionate man who had heard the cries of those who were suffering and then heard God’s call to lead with compassion. Inspired by Moses, I ask you: How, in this new year, can you lead with compassion?
U’tefilah - refusing to succumb to helplessness, he maintained his faith and found comfort in knowing that regardless of how lonely his overwhelm made him feel, he was not alone. And so I ask: How, in this new year, can you remind someone that they are not alone?
U’tzedakah - Moses knew as well as anyone that helping others was not optional, and so he did. One final question on this Yom Kippur day: What can you do, in this new year, to help someone who needs what you have to offer?
It is as if he was sharing the lesson that he had learned the hard way. ‘There are things - big things - that will happen. They will be beyond your control, and you will have a choice to make. It will feel like you can’t go on. GO ON.
Just a couple of days after my ordination in 2002, Mrs. Wall died. Hers was the first funeral I ever officiated. To this day, every year on Yom Kippur, part of my ritual is to think about her. Inevitably, the image of her walking out of the sanctuary when she knew it was too much, replays in my mind. So does the image of her walking back into the sanctuary and sitting herself down between her husband and her daughter to finish the service. And so does the image of her then walking through the world with the smile of a woman who had managed to come to terms with the things she could not control - and to hold on to those that she could.
You can go on. We can go on. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.
Kain y’hi ratzon, may it be God’s will.