1. From the highest heights to the deepest depths
"By authority of the heavenly court and by authority of the earthly court, with the consent of the Omnipresent and with the consent of this holy congregation, we permit ourselves to pray with the transgressors."
Not long ago, I found myself standing in a remote spot somewhere in Europe. It was midnight, and there were almost no lights. I sensed the presence of something immense around me. Then I raised my head, and above me thousands upon thousands of stars shone in a sky unlike any I had seen in many years.
Across the middle of the heavens stretched a broad, elongated patch of white: the Milky Way, the galaxy in which we live.
I was overcome with emotion. It was a feeling of awe, of standing before the sublime, mysterium tremendum, the terrifying mystery. I stood below, with that immense concentration of stars above me: the earthly court and the heavenly court, the Lord God of Hosts, the host of heaven, coming to sit with human beings in the temporary court they had convened in their synagogues.
What do we know of the will of the Omnipresent, blessed be He? Nothing. And yet we are His people, and together we have traveled a long and complicated road through history's "valley of the shadow of death" (Ps. 23:4), until we learned to join our own judgment to His, even when His will remains hidden and concealed from us.
The goal is lofty and sublime: to pray with the transgressors.
Our sages taught that the Hebrew word tzibbur, "community," is an acronym formed from the words tzaddikim, beinonim, resha'im: the righteous, the middling and the wicked. It is a profound declaration, one that reaches to the very foundations of our existence. We cannot enter this unique day and seek forgiveness and atonement as individuals. We need the people in its entirety, in all its shades, including the transgressors.
Hasidim once asked their rebbe about this dispensation, and he replied that anyone who believes the righteous do not need the transgressors, that he, righteous in his own eyes, has no need of another person whom he regards as wicked, is himself the one who needs permission to pray with everyone else.
"Nidrana la nidrei" (our vows are not vows)... "va-haramana la haramei" (our bans are not bans). Jewish law does not regard excommunication as a permanent instrument but as a "weapon of last resort," and even that must be annulled before we approach the Day of Judgment. All the more so before Israel's upcoming Election Day.
"The whole Israelite community and the stranger residing among them shall be forgiven, for it happened to the entire people through error" (Num. 15:26).
2. A national Mikveh of purification
"For on this day atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you of all your sins; you shall be clean before the Lord." (Lev. 16:30)
This is Yom Kippur's key verse, and it is no accident that it runs like a thread through the day's prayers. It can be punctuated and divided in several ways, but its essence is the purification of the individual and his atonement before his God.
Notice that the verse speaks in the plural. The individual's atonement comes through being part of the community. The individual immerses himself in the great sea of the many. As one wise rabbi once put it: Everyone wants to be an individual drop, bearing a private and personal imprint, but think about what happens to such distinctive drops when they represent also a great sea.
It is in this spirit that Tractate Yoma, whose Aramaic name means simply "the Day," Yom Kippur, concludes with this Mishna:
"Rabbi Akiva said: Fortunate are you, Israel. Before whom are you purified, and who purifies you? Your Father in Heaven. As it is stated, 'I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean.' (Ezek. 36:25) And it says: 'O Lord, the hope [mikveh] of Israel.' (Jer. 17:13) Just as a mikveh purifies the impure, so the Holy One, blessed be He, purifies Israel."
A mikveh resembles a womb. We immerse ourselves within it and emerge clean and pure, like newborn babies. The physical image is easy enough to understand. But on Yom Kippur, what purifies us is not a mikveh but a special span of time. We enter it as evening falls and emerge the following day different from the people we were before.
We as a people have a special relationship with time. We sanctify it, distinguish one time from another and walk along its paths. The first commandment we received as a people, while still in Egypt, was the sanctification of the new month (See: Exodos 12:2).
Those who sanctify time master it; time does not consume them. We are an eternal people, and our present is measured against the perspective of eternity.
And what is eternity, if not victory over time?
3. Between potential and fulfillment
"My God, before I was formed I was unworthy, and now that I have been formed it is as though I had not been formed. I am dust in my lifetime, all the more so in my death. Behold, I stand before You, Lord my God and God of my fathers, like a vessel filled with shame and disgrace..."
This was the personal prayer of Rava, an Amora who was active in Babylonia during the first half of the fourth century. The prayer entered the Yom Kippur prayer book at the end of the Amidah prayers, following the confession. Every year, these heartbreaking words pierce the emotions anew.
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook understood Rava's words as an accounting of the soul over the gap between the human potential to act in the world and make a contribution, and the limitations of our existence, which mean that we do not always succeed in realizing that potential during our lifetimes.
In the unlimited time before our creation, "there was nothing in the world that required me," because had I been needed "for some purpose and completion, I would have been created!"
The fact that I had not yet been created meant that I was not yet needed. Now that I have been created, however, it means "the time has come when I must do something for the completion of reality."
On Yom Kippur, we ask ourselves: Have I succeeded in doing the thing for which I was created, or did I lose my way in a thicket of fleeting desires?
The self-negation of "I am unworthy" is a confrontation with pride, with the ego, and a prayer that when this great day ends, we might open a fresh page and return to the path on which we can fulfill our purpose.
4. Agnon in the Synagogue
This is how writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon, in his book Days of Awe, described the synagogue in his hometown when he was 4 years old; and for us, there is no difference between that synagogue in late 19th-century Galicia and any other synagogue across the generations—this is how Jews felt everywhere:
"The house of prayer was filled with men wrapped in prayer shawls, silver crowns upon their heads, dressed in white and holding prayer books. Many candles stood in long boxes filled with sand, and a wondrous light and a sweet fragrance emanated from them. An old man stood bent before the lectern, his prayer shawl hanging down below his heart, and sweet, melodious voices seemed to emerge from his shawl.
"And I stood at the window of the house of prayer, trembling and astonished by those sweet voices, by the silver crowns, by the wondrous light and by the smell of honey that came from the candles, the wax candles. And it seemed to me that the earth on which I had walked, and the streets through which I had passed, and the entire world itself, were nothing but a corridor leading to this house..."
5. Holiness at the end of longing
Poet Yitzhak Laor was once asked about his religiousness. He replied:
"I had an Eastern European mother who, like a great many Jews from Eastern Europe who at some point left their homes and came to Israel, apparently never forgave herself when it came to secular life. She was like that too... Yet there was absolute kashrut, and Shabbat candles, and Yizkor on the holidays, and fasting on Yom Kippur, and all of us with her... That's one layer of religiousness, and for me, at least, you cannot separate it from talking about belief in God."
"And on another level, there is also the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayer book, which contains sublime poetry. I love reading it, but those texts are bound up with the Days of Awe. And here too, if we're talking about holiness, you cannot separate the texts from God and from the institution of prayer."
"I don't pray... because I'm not religious... I eat on Yom Kippur, so Kol Nidre, even though I desperately want to go every year, even though it burns inside me every year, and I love so much that line about 'from this Yom Kippur until the next Yom Kippur,' and I spend the whole evening longing for that sacred night; on the other hand, it seems simply unbearable to me to go to Kol Nidre and then carry on eating and drinking afterward."
"After all, what we're talking about is a kind of longing. Holiness lies at the end of longing, not 'the ends of the roads,' but a great space beyond our capacity to comprehend [...] The collective doesn't interest me. Holiness interests me, a holiness that is indeed bound up with ritual, religion and the institution of religion."
Laor was referring to the conclusion of Nathan Alterman's poem "To the Elephants":
"And there is no end to this rising road;
The ends of the roads are only longing."
Well, at the end of longing lies holiness. That is what he longs for.Political radicalism is a reflection of radicalism in general, including religious radicalism. Laor says candidly that for him it is all or nothing.
But his mother could embrace both. So can the great multitude of Jews, some of them far removed from religious observance, who come to synagogue for Kol Nidre and Ne'ilah even if, between the beginning of the day and its end, they do not observe every last detail of tradition.
Ultimately, one's relationship with the collective does matter, because for us the holiness bound up with ritual and institution derives its validity from being the holiness of a community, which is to say, of a people.
And even if someone is far from God, he/she remains part of His people and takes part in its rituals and prayers.
6. Can the call be heard?
In the midst of the day, during the afternoon service, we read at the haftarah the story of the Prophet Jonah, who is commanded to go to Nineveh and proclaim its destruction, "for their wickedness has come before Me." (Jonah 1:2)
He does not want the burden of prophecy and flees to Jaffa, where he boards a ship bound for Tarshish. But one cannot flee from God, which is, after all, one of the themes of the day's prayers, and the sea grows stormy, threatening to sink the ship.
Jonah tells the passengers, "For I know that this terrible storm came upon you on my account" (Jonah 1:12), and persuades them to throw him into the sea. They first try to steady the ship, to no avail. Finally, they cast him overboard and the storm subsides.
Jonah is swallowed by a great fish. Three days later, in the fish's belly, he prays from the depths of his soul:
"In my trouble I called to the Lord, and He answered me; from the belly of Sheol I cried out, and You heard my voice." (Jonah 2:3)
He accepts his mission and goes to Nineveh, where he proclaims through its streets:
"Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!" (Jonah 3:4)
His cry makes an impression on both the masses and the city's rulers. Instead of blaming others, they accept personal and collective responsibility in an effort to save the city.
A royal decree is issued:
"They shall be covered with sackcloth, man and beast, and shall cry mightily to God. Let everyone turn back from his evil ways and from the injustice of which he is guilty. Who knows but that God may turn and relent? He may turn back from His wrath, so that we do not perish." (Jonah 3:8-9)
And indeed, Nineveh is saved. This angers Jonah, but that is another subject.
The story, then, is about the possibility of repair. Even when a sword rests upon a person's neck, he must not despair, because there is still hope.
Jonah's prayer in the belly of the fish, followed by his being spewed onto dry land, like a person emerging from his mother's womb, also resembles the process we undergo on Yom Kippur, through prayer and fasting, and through purifying time that functions like a mikveh.
In the 1880s, the Florence-born Italian writer Carlo Collodi published the story of Pinocchio, the wooden puppet made by the childless carpenter Geppetto. Like Jonah fleeing from his Father in Heaven, Pinocchio flees from the father who created him. Both refuse to follow the path laid out by the father, and so both stumble and fall repeatedly.
The swindlers Pinocchio meets along the way can be seen as allegories for the temptations a person encounters in life, temptations that divert him from the proper path: the hope of making easy money by planting gold coins in the Field of Miracles, laziness and the flight from hard work, and, of course, the Land of Toys, an illusion whose inhabitants ultimately turn into donkeys.
For both Jonah and Pinocchio, the climactic moment comes at sea. Both are swallowed by a great fish, and only there, in the depths of distress and despair, do they encounter once again the father from whom they have become estranged.
Jonah prays with emotion and returns to his God, who delivers him from the belly of the fish. Pinocchio is overwhelmed to discover his carpenter father inside the great fish, and rescues him, perhaps teaching us that sometimes God needs human beings to rescue His name from concealment and bring it into revelation.
On the shore, Jonah is reborn as a prophet, while Pinocchio becomes a flesh-and-blood boy.
Read the story of Jonah alongside the story of Pinocchio. Children are promised an hour of delight; adults will find fascinating material for thought, study and existential discussion about life, about the inner calls we have missed and those that continue knocking at the threshold of our souls, awaiting an answer.
7. At Ne'ilah there are no gates, everything is open
"God of awesome deeds, grant us forgiveness at the hour of Ne'ilah" (Moses ibn Ezra, Spain, c. 1055-1140)
During Ne'ilah, a disciple once saw the Seer of Lublin, Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak Halevi Horowitz (1745-1815), his face burning as he gazed heavenward.
"Rebbe, what is happening in heaven now?" he whispered.
The Seer replied: "At Ne'ilah there are no gates. All year long we ask for the gates to be opened, but at Ne'ilah the Holy One, blessed be He, says: There are no gates at all. Come to Me."
The Hasid trembled.
"Rebbe, and what if a person feels very far away?"
The Seer replied: "That is precisely when he enters first, because whoever feels far away is already standing before God."
At that, the disciple burst into tears. And the Seer caressed him with his words:
"Do not weep from afar, my son. Weep from up close."
