Editor’s Note: Rabbi Greenstein originally gave this sermon on Yom Kippur morning 5777 (October 2016).
Barukh she-amar v’hayah ha-olam – Blessed be the Eternal, Who spoke and the world came to be.
Our Torah begins by telling us about the creative potential of words. It was through words that God built the world. As I have explained throughout our years together, Yom Kippur is a day that seeks to sensitize us to the power of our words, beginning with the Kol Nidrei declaration of last night, through the multiple times that we fall flat on our faces when God’s awesome Name is pronounced, and throughout this long day of soul-searching prayer.
But, at present, the constructive power of words is being severely put to the test. Our times are hard times, difficult times. We are inundated with upsetting news and cacophonous, conflicting voices. Even in the relative comfort of our own community, we heard this Rosh Ha-Shanah a startling sound, more startling even than the sound of a shofar blast in the midst of our silent prayers. We said on Rosh Ha-Shanah – “mi lo nifqad ka’ha-yom hazeh – no one is spared these days.”
It is difficult to find a way to talk about our situation. We are so vehemently divided that it seems like we are reliving the moment after the collapse of the Tower of Babel – everyone is talking a language all their own. The words, sentences and concepts are only privately meaningful, incapable of being shared with the next person, who is also talking a completely different language.
Can we speak to one another? What can we say? How can we speak with the hope of communicating to another person, instead of merely hearing our own voices?
I do not presume to have the answer to these questions. I grapple with them all the time. These are the rules I strive to follow:
I try to speak honestly and with respect to the complexity of the topics I address.
Most of the time I highlight what I believe are the basic values at stake in a controversy and I hope to place them in the forefront of our consideration.
I try to recognize the serious concerns of those with whom I disagree even as I explain why I nevertheless disagree.
I try to ground my views and my teachings in my study of the Torah and I attempt to present the words of the Torah in a constructive manner.
Our one-page Targum document that we have placed into our sacred books, that I spoke about last night, and that we will return to later today, is a product of my attempt to teach Torah constructively, as a Torat hesed – a Torah of Lovingkindness.
I know that none of this guarantees that I will be heard, let alone understood. But that is not something any side of a conversation can guarantee. One can only hope that one may uphold one’s own end of the conversation in good faith – not always easy to do – and pray that the effort will be made by others as well.
Moreover, as I mentioned before, the question is not only what to say, but how to say it. This includes questions of tone of voice and vocabulary, to be sure. But it also includes questions of form.
Let me explain what I mean by “form.” I do not refer to body language, hair styles, or whether someone sweats or smiles while they talk or listen. We may bemoan that our national conversations have been taken over by such questions of form rather than substance, but I am referring to forms of speech that do convey substance. Sometimes there is substance that is accessible to us through one form of speaking that is not accessible through other forms.
The two forms I am thinking about are called in our tradition, Halakhah and Aggadah. “Halakhah” means “walking.” As forms of speech, discourses of halakhah are meant to clarify and codify how we should “walk the walk,” how we should live – what is right and what is wrong.
“Aggadah” means “telling.” Aggadah is the telling of stories that describe and ponder, not how we should live, but how we really do live.
To clean up the mess of life in the name of justice – this is halakhah, or law – and I would even take the dangerous chance of bringing in the loaded phrase – please be understanding of my use of it – law and order – for our tradition insists that law and order are meaningful insofar as they make space for justice and insofar as they make justice live.
But halakhah, itself, must always be brought into balance by our equally necessary challenge to do justice to the messiness of life – which is aggadah, storytelling.
Without halakhah we would each pounce upon the other. No one would ever be able to tell their story because they would be shouted down or spoken over, or, God forbid, silenced forever. In the words of our Sages, we would eat each other alive.
But without aggadah, without telling our stories, we would not know what the halakhah should be; we would forget who the halakhah is made to serve. Aggadah is a reality check for halakhah, even as halakhah is the check on the reality claimed by any one person or group, in the name of what is good and just for all.
In the world imagined and worked for by our tradition, halakhah and aggadah are meant to work together. In the Talmud they are not separated but intertwined. They are brought into dialogue with each other so that we may balance our continuing efforts to clean up the mess of life in the name of justice, with the equally valuable imperative to do justice to the messiness of life. But in times when the very possibility of conversation is under stress, the dialogue between halakhah and aggadah is hard to sustain.
Our sages taught us that, in good times, people are ready and able to hear detailed arguments and analyses, halakhah. But, say the Sages, in bad times, when people struggle economically or have a feeling of being oppressed or treated unfairly, then people have no patience for halakhah. Then they seek to be consoled and supported by hearing stories – Aggadah. (Shir Ha-Shirim Rabbah 2:5:1)
In these difficult times, I wonder whether we can really hear halakhah, reasoned arguments for what we should do or not do? Or – do we thirst for the reaffirming embrace of aggadah? When so many of us feel constantly besieged, should we be expected to have the strength and the patience to work through the rigors of complicated arguments, or, as the Rabbis predicted, will we prefer to tell – and to hear – stories, narratives of our lives, whether they are surprising or familiar, inspiring or shameful, hilarious or heartbreaking?
Perhaps, then, in this challenging time, when each of us, for reasons of our own, suspects the voices of halakhah, perhaps we can benefit by putting our efforts into aggadah – into telling – and listening to – stories.
Ah, but which stories shall be told? We all have favorite stories and favorite types of stories. And if the point of Aggadah would simply be entertainment, then we would all do well to stick to what we like, and tell and listen to the stories we choose. That is the dream of a separate cable network for every single person.
But what if we are turning to Aggadah not only for entertainment, for temporary relief? What if we are turning to stories because we are in trouble?
Then it gets more complicated. The question is not only which stories we choose, but, also – Whose stories do we want to hear?
Whose stories shall be told or listened to? – We need to know our stories and be able to tell them to others. But if we tell our own stories only in order to drown out the stories of others, or if we remain rooted in listening to our own stories, exclusively, we will only be reinforcing and perpetuating our divisions and our suffering.
But what if we turn to Aggadah because we hope it will help us get past this mess? If that is our hope, then the only hope for our hope lies in expanding the numbers and types and sources of stories we listen to and tell. Our hope lies in broadening our world of Aggadah.
So – we need to hear more stories.
But there are no stories without storytellers.
Who gets to tell the many stories we need to hear? I think the halakhah of storytelling in this regard would tell us that each of us should be the ones to tell our own stories first. And no one should be able to tell someone else – “I will tell your story. I know better than you what your story is.” However, this is not a rule that can guide us all the time, because we do not only have separate, personally unique stories. We also share our lives and participate in shared stories.
So I struggled with what story or stories I would share with you today. Shall I be the one to tell the story of the unemployed coal miner? Shall I be the one to tell the story of the mother who lost her child in a senseless act of violence? Shall I be the one to tell the story of a CEO of a large corporation? Or the story of a homeless veteran?
All those stories, and more, deserve to be told. But, may God forgive me if I have decided wrongly, I do not believe that this is the right moment for me to be the person to tell or retell their stories.
Nevertheless, I still want to take a step, if only a tiny one, toward what I hope will be a concerted effort by all of us to embrace an expanded Aggadah.
So let us begin with a story that is ours and that is familiar. Let’s start with a Yom Kippur story, one that we will tell this afternoon, a story of ours that has become beloved around the world, far and wide, by young and old – the story of Jonah and the whale.
Once upon a time there was a man name Yonah – Jonah. He was named after the yonah – the dove of peace and hope from another well-known story, the story of Noah’s Ark. Yonah was the son of Amittai, whose name means Truth.
So the Dove of Peace and Love, son of Truth, is called by God to perform a prophetic mission. “The people of Nineveh are so wicked! Go to them and admonish them!”
But Yonah fled from God rather than do what God wanted him to do. He ran and hopped on a boat going in the other direction. His defiant refusal nearly cost the lives of everyone on the ship. They all prayed to their own gods to be saved, but Yonah wasn’t interested in their fate. He just wanted the whole story to be over. He went to sleep while the rest of the crowd were screaming for their lives. Finally he told the people on the boat to throw him overboard. He knew that God was angry at him. But he would rather die than go on God’s errand.
Yet God gave Yonah another chance, and sent a big fish to save his life. From the bowels of the whale Yonah had a change of heart. He prayed to be saved and he promised to be faithful to God.
The miraculous whale spit him onto the shore, and God renewed the command to go to Nineveh as God’s messenger. This time Yonah went and he called out to the city – “Beware, you are doomed!”
But another, greater miracle happened! The people of Nineveh – so evil that God had sentenced them to destruction – these hopeless sinners and criminals repented. And God spared the city.
Ironically, this reluctant prophet, Yonah, is, with the possible exception of Elijah, our only successful prophet in all of Jewish history. Unlike all the other prophets, he actually got people to change, to repent.
And – ironically – his success is not with the Jews, but with their sworn enemies, the people of Nineveh, the very people guilty of destroying our Temple and exiling our people.
So on Yom Kippur the halakhah tells us to tell our story – but it is a story that tells us that our enemies have sometimes been more fully human than we have been.
And, ironically, again – our hero, Yonah, doesn’t get it. He is really outraged and resentful that God has shown compassion to these evil people. How dare God be compassionate! And in his honesty – and don’t we all admire people with strong convictions? – he declares: “I would rather die that live in a world of God’s compassion!”
But God does not give up on Yonah, and God speaks gently to him and says, “Is it really good for you to be so full of resentment and so angry?”
If you or I would be creating this story, at this point we would probably have Yonah turn sheepishly to God and admit that maybe God’s compassion is better that vindictive spite. But, that is not our Yom Kippur story. Yonah will not give an inch. For him it is better to hold on to his rage than to soften and accept the humanity of his enemy.
The story of Yonah – our story to tell – ends softly and wistfully. We hear God’s voice, though we cannot know whether Yonah, himself, is still listening. And God asks us: “How can I not have compassion on the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 inhabitants who can’t tell their right from their left, and what about all their animals?”
This is our Yom Kippur story. It is a story told on our holiest day. It is our story, but it is a story that warns us about getting too focused on only our own story.
It is a story of warning, but also of respect and hope. It is a story that warns us about the dangers of self-righteousness and our own capacity for arrogance and hard-heartedness.
But it is also a story of respect for our ability to hear such a warning and take it to heart.
It is a story of hope in the potential of the Jewish people and of the human spirit to get past feelings of self-centered apathy, fear, anger, and resentment.
It believes in our possibility of repentence – of rethinking our ideas and convictions – for the sake of a more open, compassionate approach to living.
It is a story that sets the stage for us to make a choice to hear more stories, other stories, beyond those we love and know so well – from everyone.
We pray during the Days of Awe – v’yei`asu kulam agudah ahat la`asot r’tzonkha b’levav shalem – may all people make themselves into one bond, with a whole heart, in order to do the Will of God. Agudah ahat – one wholehearted bond – one agudah – one Aggadah – to bind us together to do God’s work.
Shanah Tovah!
Rabbi Greenstein
Image(s): “Whispers” © Kevin T. Quinn used with permission via Creative Commons License
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