First Parish Unitarian UniversalistBeginning Again in Love
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
October 5, 2003
In the Jewish tradition, these are the Days of Awe. The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the High Holy Days, constitute a time of serious self-reflection and then renewal. Among the images prevalent during this time when life and death hang in the balance before God’s judgment is the image of the Gates of Heaven, open and, then, closing. As the Jewish year ends, the Gates close on it and all that has gone on during it, never more to be re-opened. Whatever our successes, whatever our failures… it is all a matter of history, and can never be re-written.
But, and here is the good news, the Gates open again at the start of the new year and we have another chance to live up to our ideals, to keep our vows. They open again, for those who atone and seek to do better. They open again every year, until our last, when they close forever.
In Rabbi Irving Greenberg’s book The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays, he explains what goes on at Yom Kippur. Before I read it, I want to alert you to his use of the word “sin” and suggest that if it gets in the way of your understanding you might want to substitute for it “wrongdoing.” Greenberg writes,
“In a culture striving for permissiveness, the self-critical mood of Yom Kippur strikes a note of jarring counterpoint. The tradition’s answer is that guilt in its right time and place is healthy; it is crucial to conscience. Moral maturity lies in a willingness to recognize one’s own sins, not to lay upon oneself a universal or destructive guilt, a guilt that cripples all and focuses on nothing specific. Concrete acts can be corrected; bad patterns can be overcome.
Against the brokenness of guilt and the isolation of sin, Yom Kippur offers the wholeness of living, the oneness of community. To this end there is repeated confession of sins on Yom Kippur. The sins are [named] alphabetically to cover the range of human behavior and to jog memory. Compassionately enough, the confessions are in the plural form (we have sinned). Everyone confesses all the sins, and each individual applies the appropriate category to herself or himself.
The sins range from violence or cheating or slandering of others to arrogance or unfairness in word and deed. The range is staggering: There are sins you have committed, sins you would never think of doing, (even sins that sound so exciting you wish you had done them)…People dredge up their sins, but in a way they are glad to do so because the sins remembered and repented for, are all forgiven. In the case of sins against fellow humans, one must give [them] restitution and ask [their] forgiveness before God will forgive.
Thus, Yom Kippur is both a fierce jolt and a great relief. The theme that threads through the night and is repeated by day and especially in the closing prayer, is “the Lord sitting on the throne of mercy is preeminently gracious, loving and forgiving.” (p. 212).
I find myself wondering why this is the liturgy for Yom Kippur, which comes at the end of the ten Days of Awe, and not at the beginning, on Rosh Hashanah? Would it not be more sensible to name one’s sins at the beginning? Would it not take some time, many days, for a person to give restitution to, and receive forgiveness from, those fellow humans toward whom he or she has been unfair or arrogant, withdrawn, aggressive, submissive, harsh in criticism, lustful, fearful, prejudicial, dismissive… name your wrongdoing?
I’d rather have the ten days between the High Holy Days rather than the one day of Yom Kippur for making amends, specially since that day is mostly spent in the temple, leaving little time for difficult conversations!
Observant Jews know what’s coming, though. They know to use those ten days to good stead. They know to have the difficult conversations that can lead to asking for and receiving forgiveness before Yom Kippur arrives.
Observant Jews know what’s coming all year long, in fact. I find myself wondering, does knowing what’s coming, year after year, serve to enforce a healthy discipline of tending to problems before they become sins to remember, repent, and be forgiven for on Yom Kippur? Are observant Jews less likely to be conflict avoiders than the rest of us?
I want to return to that notion of “tending to problems,” but before I do, there are two really interesting subtleties in the liturgy and practices of Yom Kippur. One is the difference between forgiveness and atonement. And the other is the Kol Nidre.
In Hebrew, selichah is the word for forgiveness and it means, according to Rabbi Greenberg again, “wiping out sin, but not necessarily an inner change. For example,” he says, “greed leads to stealing, then one repents and makes restitution, and the theft is forgiven.”
But, he goes on to explain, “the word kippur derives from the Hebrew kapparah and is translated as atonement rather than forgiveness. Kapparah means that a person’s inner drives, previously acted out in sinful fashion, are redirected for good… The drive that once expressed itself in theft now expresses itself naturally in giving. The split between desire and conscience has been overcome, and the person has achieved at-one-ment.” (211).
That act of redirection of our desires and our energies, that turning toward being at one with ourselves, others and the world, is called teshuvah. It means “to turn.” “Turn back, turn back, forswear thy foolish ways,” we sang in our opening hymn. And in our closing hymn we will sing, “To turn, turn will be our delight, ‘til by turning, turning we come round right.” Teshuvah is what turns forgiveness into atonement. It’s what prevents recidivism, back-sliding, and repeat offenses!
Teshuvah is mainly an inner change, I think, and as such requires inner work on our part. There are powerful forces within and around us that proclaim that we cannot change, that others cannot change and, especially, that we cannot change the world we live in.
But, Yom Kippur teaches otherwise. Yom Kippur teaches otherwise that change is indeed possible and it tells us how. Yom Kippur tells us that change starts with naming, naming the sin or wrongdoing or, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “I admit that I have a problem.” Step one.
And, then comes change, which I want to represent by a simple arithmetical equation: selichah or forgiveness plus teshuvah or turning leads to kapparah or atonement. I believe there are truths in this for all of us, Jews or not.
Now, for the second subtlety of Yom Kippur before we return to the notion of “tending to problems.” It’s about the Kol Nidre. The words, from the Aramaic, mean “all vows.” It’s a prayer that will be chanted in many synagogues and temples tonight, on the evening that starts Yom Kippur. It’s not scriptural; it doesn’t go back to Biblical times. Its retention as part of the Yom Kippur liturgy has been controversial, demanded by the people and granted by the rabbis against their better judgment.
As you may have gathered from the contemporary Reading earlier and from the plaintive, evocative tone of the music itself, the Kol Nidre is a prayer that absolves vows that will be made by the individual. It refers only to vows which the person assumes for him or her self alone or makes with God, and in which only he or she is involved; it doesn’t refer to vows or contracts made with other people. And, it is not meant to suggest that the believer should make vows carelessly, knowing that on the eve of Yom Kippur they will be absolved.
Rather, as I understand it, the Kol Nidre releases the binding, constricting guilt we feel about our failures to keep the promises we make to ourselves (or to God, if by that name we worship). By it, our energies and hopes are restored and freed. As Rabbi Arthur Waskow says, “Kol Nidre cancels every guilt trip.” (Seasons of Our Joy, p. 38).
There’s something subtle going on here. I think we all realize that the work of inner change requires vows and resolutions, the kind we make to ourselves to help us “turn” ourselves from mere forgiveness to atonement. These vows are like our spiritual or interior “To Do” Lists. But, paradoxically, acting out of a sense of obligation because we’ve made a vow likely erases the possibility of teshuvah from the equation, and the change will be only temporary at best.
So, it’s as if the Kol Nidre says, yes, renew your intentions, but then annul the vows, so that you are free to do as you intend because it is “right and good so to do” and not just because you’ve vowed to do so. It’s like the difference between the letter and spirit of the law, or between a literal interpretation and one that takes into account context, knowledge, circumstances and other aspects of reality.
I think these subtleties in the Yom Kippur liturgy are useful for helping us engage in difficult conversations and tend to our interpersonal problems before they become something we’ll need to remember, repent, and ask for forgiveness for, in a hurry during the ten Days of Awe.
In the beautiful and evocative novel Crow Lake by Mary Lawson, a recent New York Times and Washington Post Book of the Year, a difficult conversation is postponed for more than a decade. When it finally takes place, it becomes clear that the protagonist has felt guilty, unnecessarily guilty, for so long that it’s like Kol Nidre will have to be chanted non-stop for night after night after night, to adequately cancel such a long guilt trip. As she observes, “It’s going to take a long time, I guess. If you’ve thought in a certain way for many years, if you’ve had a picture in your mind of how things are and that picture is suddenly shown to be faulty, well, it stands to reason that it will take a while to adjust…” (p. 290)
What she viewed as a tragedy in her older brother’s life for which she held her child-self responsible had been only a loss, not a tragedy, from which he had adequately recovered. He was indeed living an enjoyable life, except that her guilt created a chasm between them that he could not cross. The real tragedy had been the loss of their formerly close relationship, and what was needed was not for him to forgive her but for her to forgive herself.
Our lives are complex, even more so than in novels, though the best of them, like Crow Lake, describe a web of relationships the beauty and terror of which might match our own webs except we tend to catch only glimpses of our own. There are things that happen to us in childhood that set up dynamics within and around us that make certain conversations hard for us as adults. Lord knows, just go to the “self help” section of the bookstore and see all the titles designed to help us “get to yes” with others.
I’ve been reading one of them, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (by Stone, Patton and Heem of the Harvard Negotiation Project). It’s a great read for the High Holy Days. Its advice helps you interrupt an unsatisfactory pattern of communication in ways that, it seems to me, could enable teshuva, that inner change that brings about a sense of at-one-ment, regardless of whether the other person or persons change or not. Whether with colleagues, family members, friends or fellow parishioners, the idea is to create a conversation in which mutual learning takes place across the differences.
It starts with describing the problem or conflict in a detached way, as a third party would see it, and then inviting the person into a conversation the purpose of which is to understand their perspective, share your own, and decide together how to go forward. You can explore where each person’s perspective comes from, share the impact each has on the other; you can take responsibility for your contribution to the problem, and ask what the other person feels his or her contribution is or describe it yourself but not accusingly; you can describe your feelings and reflect on what “hooks” you about this conflict, and listen as the other person does the same.
In this kind of learning conversation, the one that will hopefully lead to a mutual decision as to how to move forward, there is no blaming, no assuming bad intentions, no I’m right and you are wrong.
In families and in religious communities especially, we often feel that there shouldn’t be conflict. Family members are supposed to love each other! This is supposed to be a spiritual community! So, the very existence of conflict causes an identity crisis, and in the resultant vulnerability it is even more difficult to engage the conflict in a healthy way.
But difficult conversations are a normal part of life, even in loving families and in spiritual communities. And, as the authors say, “No matter how good you get, difficult conversations will always challenge you…So it is best to keep your goals realistic. Eliminating fear and anxiety is an unrealistic goal. Reducing fear and anxiety and learning how to manage that which remains are more obtainable. Achieving perfect results with no risk will not happen. Getting better results in the face of tolerable odds might [happen]. And that,” they declare, “for most of us, is good enough. For if we are fragile, we are also remarkably resilient.” (xxi)
At its best, Yom Kippur honors this reality, our fragile resiliency as humans. We’re ever in need of making amends, seeking forgiveness, turning ourselves around and starting anew. We’re always hoping to change, but we need help. Once a year at the High Holy Days it’s good to be reminded to “begin again in love.”
Amen.