Kol Nidre Sermon 2021 - Just a Little Thing

 Yom Kippur Evening 2021-5782

Gut Yontif,

So, how are you all feeling?

On this holy evening we step out of our daily lives for reflection and prayer. According to tradition, if we are healthy, we neither eat nor drink, don’t do work of any sort and refrain from wearing leather. All of this is to help us focus on matters of the heart and soul - or as some teach, ideally to be more like the angels, who don’t need to eat, drink, wear shoes or work to stay alive. That’s why it is also traditional to wear white on Yom Kippur. Today, we shed our pretensions and look at ourselves as we really are. 

So, let’s take a breath, let out a big sigh, and say: Hineini! Here I am, here I am, God. A year older, and a little more battered. Exhausted. Maybe depressed. Maybe melancholy. Can’t put my finger on it, but something is just off with me. My friends and colleagues talk about it too.

It’s a feeling filling the world, and people are trying to name it:

Psychologist Adam Grant shared the word: Languishing. That’s what so many of us are doing. Not fully depressed but not what you’d call “thriving,” either. Languishing feels like looking at life through a foggy windshield on a rainy day, in a stop-and-go traffic jam: You’re on the slow road to who-knows-where, can’t see very far ahead and are not looking forward to stepping out of the car when the ride is over. 

That’s languishing. And there’s a pandemic of languishing going on in the world today. Our challenge is to work through it, one way or another, and to help others do the same.

Now, for Jews, such challenges are nothing new. We carry our history and our worries within our souls, psyches, and bodies. So, in addition to everything else going on in the world, we are feeling the impact of rising antisemitism in all of its familiar forms, and in some new ones. We hate that we have to have a police detail outside - wondering if we too will soon be like synagogues in France, with bars on the windows and armed guards. Worried about our kids and grandkids. And now, for months and months, we’ve had layers upon layers of stress, with no end in sight.

(Pause, deep breath)

So, how are you? Your neshama? Your soul? Your being? Your Jewish self?

Languishing?

What lies beneath this grim, stagnant mood? Is languishing a symptom of something? If so, what?

Last year on this day, I spoke about Jewish resilience. Now here I am again. This close proximity to loss, trauma and uncertainty has taken its toll on us, individually, as a community and as a society. So let’s draw on the ancient source of our resilience, -- Torah -- and look back at the beginning, at the accounts of the first Jewish family in Genesis.

They were actually pretty dysfunctional mishpuchah and in a sense our identity begins with a very traumatic event in their lives. And it is no accident that we always read about this event on Rosh Hashanah.

The Torah describes the birth of Isaac to the elderly Abraham and Sara. And then it tells this tale:

One day, Abraham and Isaac get up early, saddle their donkeys, and off they go to Mt. Moriah where Abraham binds his son upon the altar of sacrifice.

Abraham raises his knife to slaughter Isaac and even though I’ve read it a thousand times and know what happens, something always stirs in me when I reach this part of the story. 

I always want to shout: 

“Abraham, what are you doing!? Sarah, for God’s sake, where are you - stop your crazy husband!"

 And then, just in the nick of time, an angel stops Abraham and provides a ram for him to sacrifice instead of his child.

Phew! That was way too close. A lot of folks like to end the story here and pretend that everything went back to normal.

But that’s not what the Torah teaches. For starters, Sarah dies almost immediately after this event. We aren’t told how, or why. But a thousand years ago, our great sage, Rashi, wrote that Sarah knew that Isaac didn’t die.  Nonetheless, the idea that Abraham could take their precious son away with every intention of killing him; and that Isaac would forever carry with him the sensation of being bound for sacrifice by his own father’s hands -- all of this was far too much for a mother’s heart to bear.

Some five-hundred years after Rashi, the Maharal of Prague -- the rabbi who, according to legend, created a golem to protect the Jews of his city -- added this: “It seems that because [Sarah] heard that [Isaac] was almost slaughtered-- [and] that just a small thing (devar muat) kept him from being slaughtered--for this reason she was shocked [nivhala]. This is the way of humanity: to be shocked upon hearing that only a small thing kept one alive.”

The Maharal’s word for Sara’s crisis - nivhala - is well chosen. It is a word for our time. It’s usually translated as “shock” but Aviva Zomberg writes that it means something much deeper. “Nivhal is something like dizziness, even a kind of nausea, a [sort of spiritual] vertigo.” It’s a shock so deep, the world becomes unfamiliar, and the person in it, disoriented and confused. What is the meaning of a life that hangs by such a tiny thread, a life that can be ended at any moment by a mere devar muat?

Surely, the Unetana Tokef prayer we will say tomorrow has been inspiring this sort of feeling in Jews for centuries:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed . . . 

who will live and who will die; 

who by water and who by fire, 

who by sword, who by beast, 

who by famine, who by thirst, 

who by storm, who by plague.

It’s as if the voices of our ancestors are warning us:  Wake up! This is all really real. Death is real. Nu? How do you want to live?

How resonant is this message in the age of covid? Who among us hasn’t wondered: 

Why did that person have to die of covid and that one live?

Why them and not me?!

Why? 

Some little thing, a devar muat, kept me alive instead of them.

This is a nivhal experience, and we are living with it every day, for months on end. And it is by no means over.

But at least we have a name for our experience: Existential vertigo. Theological nausea. If we are languishing, it’s for good reason.

How do we go forward when so much has changed, so much has been shaken. Is there medicine for existential fear and malaise?

Let’s turn again to our tradition and our history as told in a midrash in the Talmud.

In the year 70 CE came the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, its great seven-branched menorah and other treasures pillaged and paraded in the streets of Rome as spoils of war. This was the beginning of our exile, one of the greatest calamities in the history of our people.

Everything by which our ancestors lived had been taken from them: their homeland, their way of life -- everything. And it was up to the ancient rabbis to figure out how the Jewish people could survive. They had to create a post-Temple Judaism. But what would that mean?

Well, the Talmud tells us,

    When the Temple was destroyed for the second time, large                 numbers [of people in] Israel became ascetics [perushim],                 [refusing] to eat meat or to drink wine. Rabbi Joshua came to             them and said: My sons, why do you not eat meat nor drink wine?

    They replied: Shall we eat flesh which used to be brought as an         offering on the altar, now that this altar [destroyed]? Shall we             drink wine which used to be poured as a libation on the altar             [that] no longer [exists]?

     Rabbi Joshua challenged them: If that is so, we should not eat             bread either, because the meal offerings have ceased.

    They said: [That is so, and] we can manage with fruit.

    [But Rabbi Joshua replied}: We should not eat fruit either, because     there is no longer an offering of first fruits.

    [Well, they said, their conviction beginning to waver: [Perhaps]we     can manage with other fruits . . .

    But, [Rabbi Joshua replied],:we should not drink water, because        there is no longer any ceremony for the pouring of water upon the     altar.

    To this they could find no answer.

     So Rabbi Joshua said to them: My sons, come and listen to me.         The blow has fallen and it would be impossible not to mourn at         all. But to mourn overmuch is also impossible, because we do not     impose on the community a hardship which the majority cannot         endure.

And so, our ancestors picked themselves up and rebuilt their lives and learned to sing their God’s songs in many strange lands. They never stopped feeling loss of exile; but they did it in ways that would not interfere with their responsibility to live as fruitfully as they could.

For Rabbi Joshua and other sages of his time decreed, when a Jew builds a house, they are required to leave a little -- d’var muat -- unfinished to mourn the loss of the temple.

A Jewish woman may wear jewelry, but she cannot wear it all -- she must always leave some (devar muat) at home, to mourn the loss of the temple.

At a feast a devar muat, a little thing, is left off the menu.

A tradition for those who bake challah is to remove a small piece of the dough to burn, to remember the lost temple.

And even in the happiest moment, when a wedding service is concluded, the groom breaks a glass to remember the destruction of our temple.

All of these traditions are designed to transform “devar muat” - that little hairsbreadth between life and death - into a way of life; a devar muat, a little thing left off, remembering, honoring, holding loss.

In times of great loss, we must live in the world, not in the ashes of destruction. We must pay homage to the loss, and, indeed, to the universal experience of living on borrowed time -- but we must still live.

We move forward imperfectly. We adapt. We remember. We honor. And yet we also live life.  We say l’chaim.

But that doesn’t mean that everything “goes back to normal.” Does it?

As much as we think we’d like to go back to “normal,” we never can and never will.  Covid, this organism so tiny, you can’t even see it, this devar muat, has altered us permanently.

It has taught us much and we must carry its lessons forward as we move on. Because covid, as horrible as it has been, is merely a microcosm of the far greater planetary challenges that lie before us, as a people and as a species.

The lives we used to live were lives of complacency.

As I said at Rosh Hashana, environmental disaster is upon us; there is no reasonable doubt of this now, none!  

Much of the world is accustomed to living on the edge of survival -- they’ve always known that a fatal disease or a natural disaster or a war, or other circumstances over which they have no control, can destroy them, their families, their communities.

Now we are all living on the edge and we must have the courage to face up to the dizzying existential sensation of nivhal. This will not be pleasant. But we can do as our ancestors did when the second temple was destroyed. We must not sit in the ashes and give up; we must recognize our situation and start the hard work of repairing and rejuvenating ourselves, each other, and our planet.    

That is our task this year, to not just go back to how things were, but to support each other in this time of nivhal; to embrace reality, and change, while still drawing on our traditions that have sustained us.

I don’t know all the details of how the philosophy of devar muat will manifest in our time. Little things to remind us of what was lost and destroyed, so that we can create something new, better even. More sustainable, based in community, gratitude, relationships, compassion, recognizing that we are all connected and dependent upon one another to not merely survive, but to thrive. 

May this holy day bring you clarity and may we be strengthened to know that we are all in this together.

Gemar hatimah tovah, may you all be sealed for goodness and blessing in the new year.