Yom Kippur /
10 Tishrei, 5777 / October 11-12, 2016
Gut
Yontif, everyone. It’s great to see
everyone back in synagogue for the holiday and I want to wish everyone a tzom
kal—an easy fast.
So
far this New Year, we have yet to play around with the Hebrew letters composing
the year 5777—Tav, shin, ayin, zayin.
And the reason for this is when we take all these letters and try to
read them as a Hebrew word, they come out as total gibberish. On the other hand, were we Kabbalists, we
would drop the 5000, play only with the number 777, and look for a phrase
itself whose letters add up to 777. That
phrase I have for you, one with which you are certainly familiar. It is from the first paragraph of the Shema:
They shall
be for a reminder / frontlets above your eyes
The challenge of this phrase is the difficulty in
translating the word “totafot.” It’s a
word that appears only twice in the Bible, both times in the Torah, and it is
unclear what it means. The notion that
it refers to the tefillin of the head is an interpretation of the word, but not
a translation. If the word means “reminder,” as our mahzor indicates, then one
must wonder how effective a reminder placing a post-it above your eyes would be. How can something you don’t see remind you of
anything? If a better translation is
“frontlet,” you might ask yourself what exactly is a frontlet. Just out of curiosity, I went to Amazon.com
to see if I could order a “frontlet” and indeed I can. I can purchase an item with the catchy title
“Korean Style Wedding Bridal Crystal Flower Draped Rhinestone Tiara Frontlet,”
for $17 plus shipping. I’m going to
stick with my tefillin, but it’s comforting to know that frontlets are alive
and well in the marketplace. I like to
think of the totafot, the whatever that goes above our eyes as something akin
to a third eye. The third eye in certain
mystical traditions is the eye that allows for greater insight, vision beyond the
obvious. We don those totafot in order
to see deeper into reality—whether ourselves or the world around us—and we do
so by placing the words of Torah, which is what the tefillin contain, close to
our eyes.
Anyway, we do not wear
tefillin on Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah or any other Jewish holiday, the
holidays themselves being vehicles of enhanced insight. Each of the holidays present us with their
own charms, and certainly that is true of Yom Kippur. For many years now, I have been asking the
B’nei Mitzvah students what their favorite holiday is and as one might well
imagine, Yom Kippur does not make the grade.
Yom Kippur does not even make it into the Top Ten list of most popular
holidays. In fact, I can recall only one
instance of a student actually telling me that Yom Kippur was his favorite
holiday. It is odd that a holiday which
routinely fills the synagogue to overflowing each year should be so unpopular,
even among kids. On the one hand, it is
a Day of Self-Affliction, and who really would rate that sort of spiritual
exercise over a Hanukkah, or a Purim, or a Simhat Torah? On the other hand, there is a Mishnah
(Ta’anit 4:8) which states that the revered rabbi, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel
stated that there were no better days in Israel than the Fifteenth of Av and
the Day of Atonement…” Both these days
were days when young people sought each other out for romantic reasons and
creating family. Those are reasons based
on hope and optimism. One might think
them out of place on a day like Yom Kippur when our apprehension about the
future would theoretically be most intense.
And yet—the reality of how the Hakhamim, the Sages, viewed this sacred
day is just the opposite of what one might assume. I think we need our totafot, our Third Eye,
to examine this paradox deeper.
Yom
Kippur is a day heavy with prohibitions.
It incorporates all the prohibitions of Shabbat and adds six more—we are
prohibited from eating, drinking, bathing, wearing leather shoes, anointing
(which probably means the use of colognes or perfumes), and sexual
intimacy. This cluster of Shabbat and
Yom Kippur No-Nos encompass most of what it is that makes us alive and
human. What do people do? We eat, we drink, we cook, we bake, we buy,
we sell, we love, we vacation, and all these activities would be asur, forbidden
on Yom Kippur. There are at least two
ways of looking at this corpus of constraint.
The first is to see it as playing dead, for the dead also do not/cannot
engage in any of these things.
The
encounter with our own mortality is an aspect of Yom Kippur observance that is
virtually undeniable. This is a day of
deliberately diminishing physical pleasure as a way of reminding ourselves that
life is finite. We all have a beginning
and an end. At the end, people tend to think
a lot of what has gone on in their lives since the beginning. Judaism has this great idea. Why wait?
Why wait until there’s little or no time left to correct the
deficiencies, or the missteps, or the indiscretions, or the pettiness? All these prohibitions may be a way that we
transform today into our last day, in order to motivate ourselves to make the
necessary changes before—and God-willing—way before it’s too late. But we needn’t think of this day as a day of
death, for there is a second way of looking at all these prohibitions. We might also think of it as a day of eternal
life, living as it were like the eternal angels of Heaven above, because they,
too, live daily without food or water or leather shoes and so forth.
Now before we go too far
down this metaphorical path, a word on angels.
Do we believe in angels? In
answer to that question, I give you a definitive ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ Typically, any statement that begins—Jews
believe in...—is almost always going to be off-base. We are a curious, open-minded, respectful,
rebellious, provocative, faithful, feisty collection of people, and we hold
many contradictory opinions. Some of us
believe in angels and some of us don’t. What there is no denying is the role angels
play as characters in both our biblical and rabbinic literatures and as such,
there were Jews whose belief in angels was as strong as their belief in
God. Angels, in this case, were God’s
helpers. They were messengers that acted
as liaison between God and humanity.
They could assume physical shape as did the three messengers who brought
news to Abraham and Sarah that they would soon become parents. They could be athletic as the angel who
wrestled Jacob. Some were thought to
have wings as those fashioned over the Ark of the Covenant that held the Ten
Commandments in the wilderness. Or they
could be wielding swords of fire as the angels assigned to block reentry into
the Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve’s eviction.
For those of us who may
have difficulty in believing in angels, think of angels like this—idealized,
theoretical human beings who are completely moral and righteous, impervious to
decay, and capable of flight without need for TSA pat-downs or surcharges on
baggage. Angels are very cool. That the architects of Yom Kippur thought us
capable of becoming angelic is not so far-fetched. In Psalms we read:
[God], You have made us just shy of divine
creatures (Psalm 8:6)
And so the biblical author’s conception of who we
are: AA’s, Almost Angels. Today, we remove ourselves from human
pleasures not because we are dead, but because we are more than alive. All those pleasures mentioned earlier—eating,
drinking, bathing and so forth—they are unnecessary and unessential. For a 25-hour period, we are able to see our
lives and the lives of those around us with the broadest of all perspectives,
as if we were in heaven itself looking over our selves, our families, our
communities, our nation and seeing our lives in a way that we have never seen
our lives before.
I
want to tell you about an affair, a wedding—not an unusual happening by any
stretch of the imagination—but nonetheless an affair, a wedding, that helps us
see such a common event as extraordinary.
Do you remember in the film Schindler’s List, there was a wedding
depicted in the Plaszow Concentration Camp?
That wedding was not Hollywood fantasy but the recreation of the wedding
between Joseph Bau and Rebecca Tennenbaum that really took place in the camp. It was a wedding that took place in secret,
as it was illegal, but it was a wedding that took place because Joseph and
Rebecca were determined to do something human in spite of the landscape of
death in which they found themselves.
And besides that, they were very much in love. Joseph Bau was a very interesting man. He was an artist and in his youth, he learned
German Gothic lettering which allowed him to create, in essence forge, German
passports and identification certificates granting many Jews escape from
Europe. When asked why he did not create
such documentation for himself, he said, “If I make documents for myself, who
would help the others?” Joseph and
Rebecca were separated, she sent to Auschwitz, but after the war, they
reunited, made aliyah, and Joseph took up his artistic ventures there. He was actually the one who created
documentation for both the Israeli spy Eli Cohen who did masterful espionage
work in Syria before his execution, and also for the Israeli team that captured
Adolph Eichmann in Argentina. Today in
Tel Aviv, there is the Joseph Bau Museum which features an exhibition of his
work. A couple years ago, the curators
of the museum, Joseph and Rebecca’s daughters, decided to celebrate the 70th
anniversary of that Concentration Camp wedding at Nahalat Yitzhak Cemetery,
near Tel Aviv, where their parents are buried.
Now people celebrate anniversaries all the time, and in securing the
proper venue for the celebration, a cemetery is not what typically gets
chosen. But that is where the
celebration took place. Here is what
their daughters, Klilah and Hadassah said:
“According
to Jewish tradition, in times of deep desperation, a wedding ceremony would be
held in the cemetery, symbolically linking the living and the dead,” Clila Bau
told JNS.org. “The bride and groom,
who had to be orphans, would stand among the dead to ask for rachmanut (mercy)
from God, both for themselves and their community. They sought a promise from
God, the ultimate matchmaker, for continued life.”
“Our parents were
that bride and groom,” said Hadasa Bau. “We [created] this symbolic wedding so
that Israel, our country, will always have love.”
When is a wedding a miracle? The wedding of Joseph and Rebecca Bau was a
miracle taking place as it did in a prison where both weddings love and even a
kiss were forbidden. But here is an
equally compelling question. When is a
wedding not a miracle? When is the
decision of two people to devote themselves to each other and to sanctify that
union within a gathering of friends and family not a miracle in a world like
ours, wounded by corruption and bleeding from terrorism? In a world that daily assaults our faith in
the future, when is a wedding not a miracle?
And this question—When is it not a miracle?—is a question that can be
asked of so many moments in our lives whether big life cycle situations like a
Brit Milah or Bar/t Mitzvah, or the smaller mundane activities like mobility
from one space to the next, communication between two parties, education or the
growth that comes from learning new things.
Humans may not see readily the divine in all we do, but the angels view
the world with much different eyes.
Many of the Birkot
Hoda’ah, Blessings of Appreciation, are blessings that have to do with seeing. These blessings are our tools that help us
focus on those points in time when insight and appreciation intersect to create
what is essentially a WOW moment. Every
blessing begins as one might expect—Barukh atah Adonai, we bless you God; eloheinu
melekh ha’olam, the One who guides us through this universe, and then there is
the hatimah, the conclusion to the berakhah. The conclusion changes to fit the WOW moment.
The blessing for seeing
beautiful trees or fields: shekakha lo
ba’olamo—so it is in God’s world.
The blessing for seeing a
great Torah scholar: shehalak meihokhmato lirei’av—for God has
transferred wisdom to those who revere the sacred within the world.
The blessing for seeing a
great secular scholar: shenatan
meihokhmato l’vasar vadam—for God has granted wisdom to all humankind.
There is even a blessing
for coming to a place of a personal miracle: she’asah neis li bamakom hazeh—for
having made a miracle for me in this place.
There is something extraordinary in this blessing, the blessing that acknowledges
some encounter with God in an otherwise common place.
Where is the place of
your personal miracle? Again, we needn’t
think of a miracle as a supernatural event, we need think of it only as a
moment in our lives when the unanticipated materializes before our eyes. Is your personal miracle at a hospital where
you had surgery? An intersection where you were in an accident? An office building where you were given your
first job? Is it a grave where lays
buried one who gave you an identity like no one else could have? Is it, perhaps, not a place but a time like
an anniversary? The birthday of a
child? A day of retirement? You may never have thought of these moments
in time or these places in your history as moments or places of miracle, but
now imagine you are looking at them with an angel’s eyes, on this day when we
live as angels, on this day when we reconsider just how much we have to be
grateful for.
There is a blessing we
say upon seeing 600,000 Jews. The blessing
is not Oy Vey! Someone once asked
me—when are you ever in the presence of 600,000 Jews. I told him, “You apparently have never flown
El Al to Israel. In that one Boeing 747…” It’s the blessing you say when you are in the
presence of many Jews. Perhaps, like
right now: Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu
melekh ha’olam, hakham harazim: We bless
you God who walks us through an incredible universe who is the One who knows
all of our secrets. With this one
blessing we can never treat a large group of people as an anonymous crowd, but
rather know that each individual here is a person in her or his own right and
there is a Knowing within the universe, with a capital ‘K’, that understands
each and everyone one of us, our weaknesses and our strengths, our shortcomings
and talents, our dreams and our nightmares, and that Knowing is God.
How many times have you
had a conversation with someone and afterwards you walked away saying, “I never
knew that…”? I never knew she was in an
abusive relationship. I never knew he’s
been out of work for the past six months. I never knew she lost a child. I never knew she had breast cancer last
year. There’s lots of things we don’t
know. We may pretend to be angels on
this day, but we are neither angels nor God.
We need to walk this world with a
greater sense of humility for what we rarely or cannot see far exceeds that
which we can see. Knowing how little we
can see, is an important insight. And
so we pray:
[God], Deal with us justly and lovingly…
Cut us a little slack God because all too often we
operate as if we see much more than we do and we also miss so much of what
ought to be apparent—namely, the presence of God in our lives. We apologize for our myopia, for our
inability to see the miracle in our lives, the lives of our children and our
grandchildren. Cut us a little slack God
and we promise to cut everyone in our lives a little more slack as well.
So
I ask this kid: Yom Kippur, that’s your
favorite holiday? How is that? And he said, “I was born on Yom Kippur; it’s
my Jewish birthday.”
If
Yom Kippur were your birthday, you’d love it too. But here’s the thing. On this Yom HaDin, this Day of Judgement, this
Yom Kippur, it should be everyone’s birth day—perhaps our Re-birthday. This should be the day when we begin to see
the world with our totafot, our third eye, securely above our eyes, judging less,
loving more, and always searching deeper into our lives and our own humanity
for the presence of God, the energy of insight and kindness, love and optimism,
the force of spirit that resides with us always.
Tzom
Kal—an easy fast everyone.
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