Editor’s Note: Rabbi Greenstein originally gave this sermon at the Kol Nidrei service 5777 (October 2016).
Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – has begun.
Like the world itself, each day begins with darkness. First there was darkness over the face of the Deep. Then God said “Let there be light!” Just so, Shabbat begins on Friday night, and Yom Kippur has begun this evening. First the dark; then, the light.
This is not the way most of us experience time. We arise each morning to greet – or to confront – a new day, and we reach the end of our strength as the sun sets and the day wanes. For our bodies, the day is bound up with sunlight. Our own energies flourish under the rays of the sun’s energy, and with darkness comes fatigue and time for much-needed sleep. Thus it has been since the beginnings of human living. Historically, humans have engaged in a long, drawn-out struggle with darkness and the night. First we tried to manage the night. But with the relatively recent triumph of modern technologies, we have seemingly conquered the darkness and have gradually brought about the demolition of our biologically based sense of time.
But this is not the rhythm established by our tradition. Our heritage plays accompaniment to our primally set biological clocks, creating a counterpoint to our physical sense of time. The beginning of our day is keyed precisely to the waning of our energies, the sapping of our strength. In the traditional definition of a day, it turns out that we begin the day tired and vulnerable. Yet our tradition tells us that this is not the end, but the beginning.
The night descends upon us as a dark question. Will we be safe? Will we survive? We begin the day by confronting the night, and confronting the night demands that we confront our fears and sense of powerlessness. Again, our tradition tells us that accepting our fears is just the beginning. With our strength depleted, we begin our day with a relinquishing of human pretense.
What, then, is left to us? How can we begin a new day if we are exhausted and afraid? Where can we turn? “`Al mishkavi ba-leilot biqashti et she-ahavah nafshi – On my bed, in the evenings, I seek the One Whom I love.” (Song 3:1) On our bed, at night, we recite the Sh’ma – we turn to God, the One we love. “B’yadkha af’qid ruhi – I place my spirit in Your hands, Merciful One.” And then we can let our defenses down and drift into unguarded sleep.
So the stages of the day, thus far, have been: the acceptance of our own finitude, the entrusting of our lives to God, both in words and in sleep, and then, and then – we dream.
All this takes time. If we are following along the flow of the day, we see that it is only about half-way through the day that the light starts to shine forth. The day is already half-over when we awaken and rise to action. We thank God for restoring our souls and we dedicate our hands to worthwhile actions – we do this by pouring clean water upon our hands and making the blessing – “`al n’tilat yadayim – You have sanctified us with your commandments and charged us to take hold of our hands.” It is only after these stages that we “start our day.” Now we marshal our strength and we try to do something, something meaningful, before the day ends.
This is the rhythm of our days. We start empty and bereft. We are completely dependent of God’s Compassion. We ask God – we need God – to fill us up – with life, with spirit, with dreams. Then we can walk forward firmly, in the words of our morning blessings: “’ozer Yisra’el big’vurah; `oter Yisra’el b’tif’arah – girded with courage and strength, crowned with splendor.”
By reframing how we define time’s categories, be defining the day in this way, our tradition accepts our physical selves, but then fits our biological reality into a new context. When the tradition decided that the day begins with nightfall, it did not then demand of our bodies that we not feel tired or that we not fall asleep. When the tradition defined the day such that the morning is half-way through it, it did not demand that we wake up tired. The ebb and flow of our physical states remains the same, but the narrative given to that flow has changed. Our bodies and their psycho-somatic realities are recognized, but they are repositioned so as to take them beyond themselves and to give them Divine purpose. Fatigue is not merely the end result of the expense of our energy, but is the pre-condition – the new day’s beginning state – for accepting God’s compassion. To wake up in the morning is not simply to begin fresh, but to redeem that Divine investment of life and love that was poured into us overnight.
The Jewish determination of the start of the day is just one way our tradition devotes much time, energy and wisdom to teaching us how we can wed body and spirit together, so that we may become the uniquely complex creatures that God desired. Because God finds our bodies to be precious vessels of soulful potential, the Jewish path is not just believed in our hearts or thought about in our heads. It is walked; it is acted out; it is embodied. And we do not only direct our body to do or refrain from doing this or that action. We also frame our natural bodily acts in spiritual terms. Ours is a tradition that so radically accepts our physical selves that we bless our ability to go to the bathroom as a moment of wonder.
Yom Kippur is the one day in which we are commanded to “afflict our souls.” (Lev. 23:27) Our souls! How do we afflict our souls? By depriving our bodies of the pleasures of food, pampering and sexual relations. When our souls see us deprive our bodies, our souls are pained, afflicted. Because our souls and bodies are bound together as one.
Thus, our tradition instructs us that tomorrow afternoon, as the day draws to a close, we must acknowledge that our bodies may sometimes try to run away with themselves. In the name of not depriving our bodies, we are capable of betraying that delicate relationship of body and soul. On this holiest of days we acknowledge that we are sexual beings, body and soul. And when we don’t do our best to respect their interconnectedness, we damage not only ourselves, but others. So, on this holiest of days, as the day draws to a close, in the Afternoon prayer, we read a list of forbidden sexual relations.
That Torah reading is not a comforting choice for Yom Kippur. Many of us would feel a lot better hearing words that tell us how marvelous and holy we are. But that is not the choice originally made by the tradition. This Torah reading is meant to be challenging, to afflict our souls.
But it is also a challenging reading because it can be read in a way that does not help us work to unite our bodies with our souls. It can be read in a way that can negate our physical selves and destroy our souls. One verse, in particular, has been understood in that way – has been used to do just that – to demonize and curse the sexuality of one segment of God’s creation. This is the verse that has been read for too long as condemning homosexuality.
That is not the way we read this verse on behalf of the Shomrei community. Over the years I have paused right before that Torah reading and explained that for us, the same holy words of the Torah text are to be heard – accurately, but in a very different way – not as a rejection of a particular kind of sexuality, but as a command addressed to the overwhelming majority of humankind, who are heterosexual, to never dare to abuse another person in order to shore up our own fragile sense of self. Whether it concerns the way we relate to another human being, or whether it concerns how we relate to our sacred texts – God forbid that we should use our sexuality as bullies who exploit a weaker person to make ourselves feel powerful. Our day begins in accepting our powerlessness and in the call to a God of Compassion.
I hope that many of you know that our community has taken a bold step this year toward advancing this message. After serious deliberation, the Ritual Committee, and then the Board of Trustees, voted to make this understanding our official statement, codified in an official document of our kehillah, our congregation. Please take your machzor and turn to the back inside cover. In every Bible and in every High Holy Day prayerbook that we offer a worshipper, we have inserted, in black and white, the new targum – the new translation of these verses – so that the Torah herself shall not serve to destroy the human being, and thereby destroy her own best efforts to teach us how to embrace ourselves honestly and fully as beings created in God’s Image.
I want to salute and thank every person who has supported this effort – Geoff Sadow and the Ritual Committee, and Nick Levitin and the Board of Trustees for showing such commitment and leadership. To all those with whom I discussed this issue and who helped me formulate the text of our statement, to the office staff for producing the pages, to every person who has volunteered to order the plastic sleeves, to fold the pages, to lovingly prepare each book – I thank you with all my heart. I hope the entire congregation will find an opportunity to thank you and appreciate what we have done here.
When we undertook this commitment we understood that it entailed more than printing a paper and placing it in a book. We designed a program of multiple meetings to explore the various aspects of this decision. At Saturday morning Torah Study we analyzed the Torah text itself. An excellent report was then offered in Shomrei Week (See Reflections on Targum Torah Study, 5/12/16). In May, at Shabbat services, when we read the first of the two verses in question, I spoke about the meaning of the translation for our community. The following Shabbat we held a Lunch and Learn program and I presented some traditional teachings about the possibility of human interpretation of the Torah that is both faithful and also creative.
Just a couple of Sundays ago we invited a guest speaker from Keshet, the national Jewish organization for LGBTQ inclusion. We heard from him and from a college student, enrolled in the joint program of Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Those who attended all agreed that the session taught us all – I include myself – so much about living compassionately and respectfully in a complicated, changing and bewildering world. You will be able to find a summary of this session in Shomrei Week, also (See Words Matter: Modifying Our Language to Promote Inclusion, 10/6/2016).
This sermon was singled out by the Ritual Committee as another moment to be spent on our communal journey, to speak about what we have done, what we believe in, and what we still need to do, before the assembled members of our community.
On Rosh Ha-Shanah I said that I hoped that our community would grow as a community dedicated to teaching, supporting and living a Torah of compassion. The adoption of this targum, this interpretive translation, is one small step on that path. But it is only a step. Our teachers remind us – “Ha-yom qatzar, v’ha-m’lakhah m’rubah –the day – no matter when it starts – is short, and there is so much work to do.” (Avot 2:15)
The sun has set and the day has only just begun. We start the day by humbly accepting our powerlessness. Surrounded by darkness, we affirm that we depend on God’s care and compassion. Worn and weary, we allow ourselves to rest and we hope that we will dream. But then – we must wake up, arise and use our every limb to bring the day to completion.
Shanah Tovah u-M’tuqah! A Sweet and Good New Year!
Rabbi Greenstein
Image(s): “Cross the Line” © Edgaras Vaicikevicius used with permission via Creative Commons License
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