Drasha for pre-Neilah/post Yizkor YK
2016.
The gates of judgement are closing…
Neilah – the locking of the gate is nearly upon us. For many, the message of
Yom Kippur can sometimes seem to be one of fear-inducement for the sake of
piety. We call this day, a day of judgement. We induce the fear of one being
called to a mighty court. Just in case we weren’t scared enough by the summons,
over and over the text of the mahzor finds every possible way to talk about
Death. Were the editors of the mahzor trying to scare us into being good, when
they included the terrifying U’netana Tokef piut from the middle ages which ask
who will die by fire and who by water? I believe not. Of course those who
shaped and designed the Yom Kippur experience over the millennia have wanted
us, the pray-ers to think about fear – but not because they wish to scare us to
piety, but because they wish to alert us to the perils of giving in to such
fear.
This morning, Libby chanted so beautifully
from the Torah:
הַעִדֹתִי
בָכֶם הַיּוֹם, אֶת-הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֶת-הָאָרֶץ--הַחַיִּים וְהַמָּוֶת נָתַתִּי
לְפָנֶיךָ, הַבְּרָכָה וְהַקְּלָלָה; וּבָחַרְתָּ, בַּחַיִּים--לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה,
אַתָּה וְזַרְעֶךָ
I have brought to witness upon you
today the heavens and the earth, and I have places before you Life and Death,
Blessing and Curse. Choose life! So you and your children may live.
Yes – this is judgement day – yes, we
are asked to face our fears. But we are being judged on the decisions we make
today – whether or not we are going to give into our fears.
Each of the central texts that we
read throughout the High Holidays has a fearful climax. On the first day of
Rosh Hashannah, we read the story of Hagar and Ishmael being sent into the
wilderness – can we imagine that kind of fear? The fear of the unknown – of
leaving behind all you have, of being forced to set out on a journey where the
end is out of sight, where death may easily take you. In our day, some of the
descendants of Ishmael are making those journeys of fear as we speak – fleeing home,
towards the unknown.
On second Day Rosh Hashannah, we read
the story of Yitzhak. It starts off as a nice family camping trip, with
everyone checking they have brought bug spray and enough water. It ends with
Yitzhak on the barbecue, about to become the entrée for a campfire meal. Can we
begin to comprehend that fear?
On Yom Kippur, we read the story of Yonah,
thrown overboard to wallow in the depths of the sea – once again, it is hard
for me not to think of those drowning in the seas of the Mediterranean, who
leave their homes because getting into a rickety wooden boat to travel across
the sea is LESS scary than what’s happening at home. But Jonah, of course does
not drown, rather he is swallowed by a great fish.
And none of these stories end with
death – not by the scorching fire of the sun, nor by the water, nor by the
sword, but with redemption. They don’t point us to the fear of death but rather
they ask of us – how do we overcome the fear that resides within us? How do we choose
life? How do we choose NOT to fear?
In our own day and age, it seems like
we are all too ready to give in to fear. Many of you will have read of the current
wave of attacks by people dressed as clowns. This is a real crime wave
started from a hoax playing on people’s fears. The people behind these so called
pranks are weaponising fear. And they are not the only ones. It almost seems we
live in the age of terror. Wherever we look we seem to be trapped between those
using violence to stoke fear and those stoking fear with violent results.
The politics of fear of today stand
in complete contradiction to the message of Yom Kippur and to all that the
Jewish tradition has had to say about how politics should be used. Jewish
political thought, in its modern guise of Zionism taught us that we must come
home in order to take charge of own affairs – to become a normal functioning
people with a state. There was no place for historical bogeymen, no eternal
Amalek’s, no enmity based on superstitions and religion. The Zionist ethos was
a hopeful one – in which Israel would be able to determine its own future,
create peace with its neighbours based on rational negotiation of tachles,
real-world, economic and political issues.
This was the Zionism of the greatest
proponent of hope our country has known in its recent history. I talk of course
of President Shimon Peres. He knew that fear paralyzes. It does not
allow us to go forward, through the gates of opportunity. Only hope can allow
us to do that.
Yom Kippur is a Shimon Peres kinda
day. It is a day, in which one of the central messages, delivered in our
Haftarah from Shaharit, chanted seamlessly by Emily, is (to paraphrase
Yeshiyahu):
Religion Shmeligion, Fasting,
Shmasting. Get on with making a better society.
This is a day in which we name our
fears – not to scare us – but make us aware of their pernicious effect on us.
We need to talk about dying by fire, by water, by sword, not because we wish to
be afraid of them, but the exact opposite, so we can put our fears out into the
world, so they do not torment us from within. So we can overcome them. We use
the imagery of death not to scare ourselves, but to remind ourselves that IN
LIFE - we have the option of conquering our fears – taking our destiny into our
own hands. In many eulogies, President Peres was quoted as saying:
“Optimists and Pessimists die the
same way. They just live differently. I prefer to live as an Optimist.”
Yom Kippur is the opposite of the
politics of fear. Rather than asking us to act out of fear, it is asking us to
look into ourselves, recognize our fears and rise above them. Rise above the
basest elements of our humanity, to reach those parts of us that our closest to
divinity.
In discussing the process of
reflection on Yom Kippur, the Midrash in Pesikta Rabbati relates that R. Levi
said:
“God
appears to Israel like a mirror in which many faces can be reflected; a
thousand people look at it, it looks at each of them.”
And
this may seem to be a very lonely experience, even a vain one – just each of us
and a mirror - but there should be no such thing as a lonely Jew. Like nearly
all Jewish rituals, Yom Kippur can only be done together, as a community. For
this reason, our Kol Nidrei service reminded us, right at the beginning of this day:
אנו מתירין להתפלל עם העבריינים
We permit ourselves to pray with the
sinners
If we all say it together – I may
think he’s the sinner – but he thinks I am: We are all in this together.
As we look into the mirror of Yom
Kippur, we see our fears deep inside of us, and only we see what is inside of
us, but we stand surrounded by our community – transient though it may be for
many of us. Their fears we do not see – but their faces, their humanity – that
we see. When we try digging ourselves out of our individual holes, we are urged
to look to our community – to continue to be hopeful, optimistic, to continue
to believe in the goodness and potential of humanity in order to help us on our
way out. If we give in to fear, allow ourselves to be ruled by negativity, we
will never escape death to truly live.
If one prefers a different metaphor
from the mirror, the Mishnah in Masechet Yoma (8:9) uses the metaphor of the
Mikveh. Yom Kippur is the mikveh, through which we pass to purify ourselves to
enter the new year. From the waters of the mikveh, we emerge re-born, full of
hope to face a new year of life.
When this country chose a national
anthem to signify what it meant for this nation to be reborn, brought back to
life, it chose HaTikvah. At the end of our services we will sing that song of
hope – not as a piece of nationalistic pride, but as a reminder that only Hope
allows great things to be achieved, or as our teacher, our Nasi, our Shimon
said:
“For me, dreaming is simply being pragmatic.”
May we all merit a year of hope. A
year of dreams. A year where we will conquer fear. A year of choosing life.
Shana tova.
