Yom Kippur: On Tears, Brokenness, Repair

I remember around 20 years ago reading about an American rabbi who was also a member of the Society of American Magicians. It’s a ‘kosher’ organization – founded in 1902 by Harry Houdini, the Budapest-born illusionist and escapologist, son of a rabbi as it happens, who found fame and fortune in America (once he’d changed his name from Erik Weisz).

And what interested me about this rabbi – I think he was Reform, not that it matters – was his sermons, which would always be accompanied by stage magic, tricks he’d learnt: I suppose he did them to keep the congregation entertained – or at least awake. So if he was speaking about Moses and the burning bush, he’d suddenly create a fire on the bimah, spontaneous combustion, I am sure it was very dramatic; or if he was talking about the 10 plagues he’d go round the congregation and get frogs to appear from out of people’s pockets – you get the idea.

So, why’s this been on my mind? Well, I’ve got a lot of competition now in the congregation in which I work. The High Holy Day services and events this year have been real multi-media extravaganzas: there’s been big-screen drive-in services, beautiful videos on Zoom, amazing music (live and pre-recorded), we’ve had ongoing interactive participation during services through Zoom’s ‘Chat’ facility, the Finchley Reform Synagogue building was turned into a walk-through site for Yom Kippur contemplation and immersive experience. So what’s been created is multi-dimensional and filled with innovative ways for people to engage with what’s going on. This kind of creativity speaks to head and heart, body and soul. It’s been pretty amazing for people, far exceeding any expectations about what might be possible in these reduced times.

And then the traditional sermon slot arrives, and what had I got to offer? No magic, no tricks - just words. That’s all I ever have – words. And sometimes words feel like the poor relative, a bit down-at-heel compared to all the multi-media stuff. I wondered how words alone could reach into where people were in their own lives? So many lives, so many faces and people on screens, rows and rows of them – apparently, over 1000 people joined the services remotely, from the UK and all round the world - so many souls waiting to be touched, to be spoken to; and all I have, amidst all the razzamatazz, is words.

But words do have a power – or they can have a power. That renowned and complex American Jewish novelist Norman Mailer once said that as a writer, “the real task was to enter your times and write your heart out and never settle for having the correct opinions.” As a Jew he was the inheritor of a tradition that took words very seriously and knew that words had power; and I take inspiration from that, along with his commitment to use words to reach in to where we are in our times, in our historical moment. I once asked him about being a Jewish writer and he was very diffident about acknowledging that - but that’s another story, for another time.

He knew, ‘Reb’ Norman, that words can stimulate the imagination – or send you to sleep. Words can provoke, they can inspire, they can soothe you, words can make you laugh – or make you cry, bring out the tears deep inside. Words can speak to the hurt we carry - that we all carry to a greater or lesser extent - and on Yom Kippur one of the themes of the day (although it’s never quite expressed in our liturgy like this) is: what are we to do with all the hurts and scars inside us, the pain we have had to endure in our lives, that we still live with? The personal upsets and broiguses and disappointments and losses, and sometimes despair, that sit nestled away in the crevices of our souls, hidden from sight; or sometimes visible on the surface for all to see.

I have seen quite a few tears on the screen of my laptop, over these High Holy Days, and before: and sometimes showing tears is okay for people, though sometimes I know people feel embarrassed  - as if it’s not okay to cry, or be seen to cry. Which is a bizarre idea when you think about it, because tears are an essential aspect of our humanity, our humaneness (only psychopaths can’t cry, don’t cry).

In reality our tears span a huge spectrum of emotions – we have tears of sadness of course, but also tears of rage, tears of laughter and tears of relief, tears of triumph or tears of regret; we can be moved to tears by something we see on a screen, whether it is a romantic comedy on TV, a dance routine, a piece of music, an old film; we can be moved to tears by a memory of something long gone from our pasts, or when experiencing an injustice in the present, or being part of an occasion that matters to us more than we realised, like a religious service; we can cry at other people’s tears, we can cry and we don’t know why we are crying, or what kind of tears they are, hot tears, icy tears, we just cry. To cry is have unmediated access to our inner lives. It is a wondrous part of what it means to be alive.

Too often people have been told, growing up, or in adult life, “Don’t cry”, “You mustn’t cry”, and maybe sometimes we worry that others might judge us critically - as if crying is a character flaw, a weakness, rather than a gift and a resource. And yes, sometimes other people see your tears and feel concerned for you or worried about you - but that’s okay: inevitably tears evoke a lot in the one who cries, and the one who witnesses the crying. Our vulnerability is part of our shared humanity.

But on Yom Kippur I wanted to focus on feelings (and maybe tears) of upset and hurt - because even if we don’t show it or share it, no life is without its suffering, its distress, its failures – in love, or work, or with our plans, or our relationships (or our failures in relationships); and Yom Kippur exposes us and our sadness like no other time of the year. Part of the catharsis of the 10 days between the New Year and the Day of Atonement is that it offers a time to reflect on our lives: yes, with all the joys and the successes, but also with our disappointments and mistakes and our hurt.

These 10 days are called, traditionally, the Days of Awe – and while our first association with ‘awe’ is maybe with majesty and power, and experiences that are ‘awesome’ (which often contain reminders of how small we are in the scheme of things), the word awe in Hebrew - Yirah - combines, as it does in English, ‘awesome’ and ‘awful’.

And sometimes things for us are awful – events in the past we carry for years, decades; or events in the present that bear down on us, drag us down; we can carry a sense of guilt, or dread, or loneliness, or fearfulness – particularly in our current Covid times with all the limitations we face, and the losses (not just people who have gone but a life that has gone), and the worries about the future, maybe cut off from family members, or having to let go of hopes we had; or maybe we lose a sense of purpose. We can and do feel ‘awful’ sometimes, and how is Yom Kippur supposed to help us with that? Don’t we have to just grin and bear it – alone -our grief and sadness and hurt? Yes, we might reveal it on the screen, but who really knows, who can look into our hearts and know us as we need or want to be known? 

Well, the mystery of Yom Kippur – maybe I should say the magic of Yom Kippur, or the trick of it – is that if we are honest with ourselves, with our true feeling life – and that means everything from our loving feelings to our hateful and aggressive feelings; our gratitude at life along with our upset feelings (for example with those who have hurt us and we want to forgive, but can’t forgive, and then feel bad that we can’t); if we are honest with ourselves on Yom Kippur about who we are with all our limitations and failures (they used to be called ‘sins’ and still are in the liturgy, but we don’t need to get hung up with that word), if we are able to face those feelings in ourselves and feel regret for our inability to overcome our pettiness and jealousies and narrowmindedness and grudges, if we are true to what lies unsettled inside us, (including our lies, our lies to others and our lies to ourselves), if we have the courage to be vulnerable and own up to our failures, if we have the honesty to do this inner work, inside ourselves - which is psychological and spiritual and mental, and is the heart of the religious journey of Yom Kippur - if we can do this (and nobody else can do it for us and nobody else can see us doing it), then the promise of Yom Kippur, the mystery of Yom Kippur, the trick, the magic, is that we end the day forgiven, vayomer Adonai: s’lachti kidvarecha: ‘that which is Eternal  enables us to feel forgiven and understood’, and we end the day inscribed in the ‘Book of Life’, so called.

Through our honest self-assessment and self-judgment we will have written ourselves into the fabric of Life itself. Our own ‘Book of Life’ may be filled with tear-stained pages that nobody else can read - and nobody else need to read - but it is our route, through our work this day, to something new happening in ourselves. When at the end of the day we go through the gates of Neilah, into Life, we go forgiven: forgiven for what we have done - and what we have failed to be able to do.

Maybe during the day of Yom Kippur we do come to see our limitations about what can change and we say: I can’t do it, I can’t forgive, I haven’t the strength, the hurt is too much. In the end it’s the honesty with ourselves that counts, that helps transform guilt into forgiveness and acceptance - and a new lightness of being. But it can be a hard journey.

Yet the promise of Yom Kippur is that our failures, our fractures, our brokenness – sometimes we can feel in pieces – all of this is being held within something greater than ourselves. The jagged, disjointed pieces of our lives, the fragments, when honestly laid out inside us, allows something new to happen, even if we feel underserving: so we emerge more whole than we started.  And it is a mystery, and it is like magic, but it’s not an illusion: it has a reality beyond our understanding.

And what I want to compare this journey of Yom Kippur to, is something from a different tradition, a different process of repairing. It’s the Japanese practice of kintsugi, which is the craft of repairing pottery and ceramics. 

Let’s look at some examples:

When a piece of pottery breaks, the kintsugi artists put powdered gold into each crack, so they don’t hide the cracks, they do they opposite, they emphasise where the breaks occurred. You can see that the fractures are exposed rather than concealed, the fault-lines are laid bare, the repair occupies a central place in what the object has become.

It is made whole, and more beautiful,  and actually more valuable, because the damage is made visible. Made visible and integrated into the whole. 

"Kintsugi art courtesy of Morty Bachar www.lakesidepottery.com" 

 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/110ojuepKmUXvyGQBpEnJXlC8MGVlEQENKmr2H81efbA/edit

There is an extraordinary line repeated in our Yom Kippur liturgy where we ask God to “pierce / cut into our hearts, so that we can feel love…then we shall return to You with a new sense of our truth and with a lev shalem – a repaired heart, a whole heart, a heart at peace” . That’s our Jewish equivalent of the art of kintsugi: we pierce our pretensions, we face up to our brokenness, we raise it to the surface: we make it visible, our heartache, the hurts, the fissures, the  cracks in our being, our woundedness, our psychological scars, all we have failed to do, all that we can’t fix, all that we can’t get right, all the falsity and disappointments, the times we were disappointed and times we disappointed others . On Yom Kippur we expose it all and we let the language and music of the day act like the gold powder and do its work on our broken-heartedness; and the mystery, the magic of the day, as we reach the end of the day, and emerge from Neilah, is that we do return to our lives with a lev shalem. A more whole heart.

That’s the work of Yom Kippur, and we do it alone, inside ourselves; and we do it with each other, in community, in solidarity with each other. Each of us is like a fractured vessel and we need delicate handling. We need to be kind to ourselves as we undertake this spiritual journey, and we need to be kind to each other. We are sureties for each other.

And we do this work in endangered times. And I didn’t speak about that at all during the day of Yom Kippur. I just reminded people that they already knew about these times we are living in, and struggling through, and sometimes barely surviving. On the day of Yom Kippur itself the focus is on something else. We are trying to save our own souls, because to save the soul of the world we have to start with, and in, our own souls. 

We know what threatens us – our lack of national solidarity and any commitment to the value of transnational community; we know the precarious nature of modern life – yes, with Covid, but also larger than Covid, we know about the hollowing out and selling off of essential services, the costs of globalization, the pollution  in the air and on social media, we know all this, along with the poverty, the injustices, the inequalities, we are complicit with all this, whatever our politics, and on Yom Kippur we need the honesty to say that the whole system we are held in is creaking, groaning, breaking up; some of it has already broken and gone forever, but there’s such a lot left still, and we can play our part in repairing it. And making something new out of it. But we can only play our part in tikkun, the bigger repair, by starting inside ourselves to repair who we are, each of us, precious; each of us, loveable; each of us with the capacity for compassion and kindness. Each of us. 

We can change ourselves and we can change how things are. We can choose empathy over anger, we can choose to be humane and caring rather than callous and tribal. Through brokenness to wholeness, through hurt to healing, we can escape – Houdini-like – from what might seem a lost cause, weighed down by anxieties and helplessness and fearfulness, we can – through the work of Yom Kippur and what comes after it - create something new from the wrecked hopes within us and around us. We can turn our disjointedness into wholeness. We can discover our lev shalem:  our hearts don’t have to stay broken, they can become whole again.

[based on a Yom Kippur sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, September 28th, 2020]

"I told you life is uncertain" - 3 Rs for the Jewish New Year

 I’ve been thinking a lot over this last week about the English comedian Spike Milligan (1918-2002) – who else would you think about at the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah? He chose his own epitaph, to be written on his tombstone after he died. It reads : “I told you I was ill”.

Maybe this is just how my mind works, making this connection, but it feels like every time I speak during this period of the Jewish year - the ten days  between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement - there’s one theme I return to each year, a touchstone for what’s at the heart of this seasonal pilgrimage, this voyage of reflection and return and hopefulness for new beginnings.

And that touchstone of mine doesn’t read “I told you I was ill” but “I told you life is uncertain”. Because what we learn each day of our lives - but this annual period of reflection gives us the opportunity to think about in a concentrated way - is just how much uncertainty is built into the fabric of life: we have so little control over our futures, which rarely unfold as we would like them to – ill-health arrives, relationships fail, we suffer job losses, financial worries, our children don’t do what we want them to (or our parents, or our partners), those we love die on us; also our bodies are vulnerable, our minds too, our emotions can oscillate wildly, as if we are on a roller-coaster.

And the transience of life can feel unbearable. “Like a cup so easily broken, like grass that withers, like flowers that fade… like a dream that fades away”. Our liturgy offers us these words each year - and we glimpse into the reality of this as we say it, and then we forget it; we embrace it - and then we shut it away until next year. It’s hard to keep this in consciousness: human beings are fragile creatures; and everything can change, or end, in the twinkling of an eye.

So: “I told you life is uncertain.” And that’s all before reflecting on what it means to be bound up in a larger world in which the dramas of history, and societal discontents and environmental crises and, yes, pandemics, force us to recognise how little we are in control of our destinies, our fate – and how desperately we want to be in control. How much we wish we could stem the tide of uncertainty - which is life. And yet our only certainty is uncertainty – and what kind of consolation is that?

As the old Jewish year fades away and a New Year begins, there’s both so much to say about where we find ourselves right now and what these last six months have been like – but also I feel how little new there might be to say. Because we know we aren’t leaving the old behind and starting something fresh – for everything is overshadowed by the ongoing drama we are living through. And because we are in the midst of it, we really have no perspective to look at what is happening, what transformations are under way, what the shape of our society, our community,  our family, our own lives, will look like in a year’s time.

We’ve had to struggle this past six months, and the struggle is not over. We know this: the struggle is emotional, mental,  psychological, spiritual – maybe financial and practical too – and it’s an ongoing struggle with what Philip Roth once described as the “relentless unforeseen”. And it’s the reality of how that ‘relentless unforeseen’ – otherwise know as ‘life’ - has played out this past year that leaves us holding so much inside ourselves and with so much to talk about - and yet maybe with nothing to say. I do find myself tongue-tied and hesitant, struggling to make sense of what is going on. There’s so much we don’t know, and can’t know, about what our futures – personal, communal, national – are going to look like.

Maybe all we know is what our questions are – our tongue-tied and hesitant questions - as this New Year begins: How do we keep going? How do we maintain continuity in our lives? How do we keep connected with people? How do we make plans? How do we stay optimistic? How do we keep our sense of humour? How do we keep hope alive? How do we keep our dreams alive of a better future?

We are being tested - perhaps, for many of us, as never before. So how do we face this New Year, with its limitations (how will we manage another year of ‘glass life’? how will we face another year of masks, of constraints, of fears?); but also how do we face this new year with its possibilities? How might new avenues, new opportunities, open up for us from out of the chaos? What new paths through the wasteland will open up? What streams will bubble up amidst the barrenness of life? How should we prepare for this new year and its tests?  

Well, for once, I’m not just going to pose the questions - although I do think that questions can be more useful sometimes than answers. Because questions open things out for us, let our imaginations breathe, while so often answers can shut things down, can blunt the spirit and dull the mind. But having given voice to the questions I’m going to offer a route-map (of sorts) to suggest how we are going to get through this next period, how we are going to survive, maybe even thrive, how we’re going to keep our hopefulness alive as this New Year opens before us. 

We are going to do it, I would suggest, by sticking to the ‘3 Rs’. I’m not referring (obviously) to that old English joke-mantra ‘Reading, Riting and ’Rithmatic’ – they have their place, but that’s not what I’m talking about. My 3 Rs, our 3 Rs, are something else.

First is Resourcefulness: we individually, and we in the Jewish community, are going to be resourceful. You just have to look at what’s happened during this last six months to see that the community of which I am part, here in Finchley, are already A* students in that. New ideas have emerged, new ways of connecting, new possibilities for helping each other and supporting each other. New programmes and schemes and ideas have blossomed - and yes, Zoom has been crucial to a lot of this, and what would I have given to have bought shares in the company back in January. This is Resourcefulness and we have seen it writ large and it’s the first R we need, and we have it already within us, and it will see us through this crisis, this communal and national trauma we are living through. The human spirit, our spirits, are adaptable and inventive – what a Resource they are, what a Resource we have within us for creativity and imagination and adaptability.  

And that takes me to my second R: from Resourcefulness to Resilience. Yes, we are fragile, yes we are vulnerable, yes we can sometimes feel anxious or troubled or even defeated – but I have witnessed in many I have talked to and worked with, much Resilience, which is an inner quality that is universal. But I suppose Jews know something about this from a collective perspective: we have possessed Resilience for millennia, and have needed it for millennia, Resilience to persevere when life is difficult, when the odds seem stacked against us - and , heaven knows, the odds have so often been stacked against us as a people, but our collective resilience has carried us through.

We are the great survivors, defiant in our resilience - and it’s a mental quality, an imaginative quality, a spiritual quality, that we draw on now and it is rooted not just in our history and the deep knowledge that we have survived far worse that this pandemic, but that through our tradition, through our liturgy and our poetry, through Torah and storytelling, through our music, and humour, through our staying attuned to our Jewish vision in spite of adversity, we have Resilience built into our psyches; Resilience is in our psychic DNA. 

And that Resilience can be nurtured in countless way – though appreciating our gardens, through nurturing our friendships and connectedness (even remotely); through art and music and literature, through appreciating the natural world around us, through our faith traditions - through all these ways, and countless more (and you will each have your own anthology of what nurtures you) we have nurtured our Resilience and it will help us through this next period, with all the uncertainties. Our personal resilience is an unquenchable spirit within and we will work on it and support each other with it as this year goes on, into the winter darkness and out the other end into spring again. What a Resource we have, this Resilience, incarnated within us, within our souls. So, that’s the second R.

And the third R? What’s going to see us through this destabilising period alongside Resourcefulness and Resilience is – and I hesitate to say it, it’s disappointingly old-fashioned, it’s almost quaint, it’s not cutting edge, it’s definitely not new – it’s Righteousness. It’s what we already know: that to be a Jew means to be engaged in a life containing acts of Righteousness. It’s a difficult word to talk about because it’s often confused with self-righteousness, the smugness of thinking we are good people without having to actually back it up in relation to any other human being. Maybe I should use the Hebrew word – chesed – “acts of kindness motivated by love”. (Maybe that sounds better. But it doesn’t begin with R).

Perhaps though saying that Righteousness is the third R that we need, in order to see us through this next year, may be more radical than it at first sounds. Maybe I should double down on this third R – or double up – and call it Radical Righteousness: gratuitous acts of kindness, generosity, compassion, caring, love…no doubt it’s what you already do, or aspire to do. But a year is opening up in which I would suggest that Righteousness enacted in everyday life is transformative: it matters more than we know - to others who are recipients of what we give and do. And it matters to us - our souls are enriched and enlivened by the Righteousness we share.

I am not talking about being grandiose about this. When all around us in the culture there are endless examples of scepticism, cynicism, selfishness, bombast, contempt, fearfulness, injustice, discrimination, then a personal  commitment to being accountable for our moral and ethical choices, large and small, as best we can, can give us hope - because we know that this makes the world a better place. Who else is going to build an interpersonal world that is worth living in? We start with ourselves.

As Jews it doesn’t matter what your theology is, it never has, we don’t burn heretics – indeed progressive Jews assimilate them into our prayer books, the iconoclasts and atheists and doubters, whether Kafka or Phillip Roth, Nelly Sacks or Natalia Ginsburg, if they have something to say that helps us live well, and stay true to our vision then they have a place in our liturgy. If they help us towards chesed, righteous living, then that’s what matters, not their religious beliefs, or lack of them. And us too. It’s not through belief, but through action, through the good we do – that’s how we bring a blessing to each other and our communities and our society. Radical Righteousness.

OK, that’s it. Our 3 Rs, our basic rubric for the year: Resourcefulness, Resilience, Righteousness. We are already doing it. Let this be a year when we keep on doing the basics – because when we do them with heart and soul they won’t just help us survive, they’ll help us thrive. Because when we bring them together  - Resourcefulness, Resilience, Righteousness - they aren’t any longer just basic, mundane, ordinary, they aren’t just perpetuating the status quo, when we bring them together in ourselves and enact them, they are not only transformative, they are actually Revolutionary. 

In a previous, more confident, era I might finish here with a rousing (even if somewhat tongue-in-cheek) ‘Viva La Revolucion’ – but in an era when some of us have learnt not to put too much faith in ideological conviction, I’ll just stick with a more down-to-earth Shana Tova : wishing you a good year…

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, on the evening of the New Year, Friday, September 18^th, 2020]