Doing The Best I Can: Yom Kippur Morning

Friends: below you'll find my second sermon for Yom Kippur.

Who am I? I am me.
Where am I? I am here.
When is it? It is now.
What am I doing? I’m doing the best I can. 

The time has come. The gates of prayer and repentance are open; they have been open for ten days. Today is the last day. Soon, too soon, as the sun descends, as we ourselves grow exhausted physically and emotionally and spiritually, the gates will begin to close. We have had a whole year to make amends, to correct our wrongs, to look deeply within ourselves and do the hard work of turning toward the right path, the path we know is right. Now we have had a week-and-a-half sprint to the finish line, an intensive. The year is new—will we be new, or bogged down by the same old same old, the same rag and bone shop of the heart that weighs us down year after year, the same old hurts, the same old grudges, the same old patterns of behavior? Or will we seek to change our ways, to change ourselves, to realign our expectations within and without? Will this be a new year, or same stuff, different day? 

Who am I? I wish I could say I was new and renewed, but I am not. I try, I strive, I work against my nature. Perhaps this year I can tweak at the corners some little habit or tic; but I am me. And I don’t want to accept me for who I am. I don’t want to own it. I want the idealized me, the platonic me, the me I want other people to see. But what would it mean, instead, for me to accept myself? Not accept what’s wrong in order to change it, but be totally aware and pay attention to who I really am, what my needs are, where my soul lives, rather than focus so much on what I think other people need to see? Would I be happier? Would I be more at peace? Instead of fighting against my nature, would I then give myself the opportunity to do real transformation? We read in Torah this morning—God’s expectations are not in heaven, nor across the sea. They aren’t baffling or beyond our reach—my reach. God’s expectations are in my heart, in my mouth. If God’s expectations are within, why do I continually look outside? Nachman of Bratzlav wrote: the day you were born is the day God decided the world couldn’t exist without you. If God needs me in the world, me, why can’t I accept that—why won’t I accept me? What am I afraid of? So we pray with all our hearts for things to be different. We hope that prayer, repentance and charity will change our lives, change ourselves. But as Alan Lew writes: “The liturgy, however, makes a very different claim, namely that prayer, righteousness, and Teshuvah will not change what happens to us; rather, they will change us. We will understand what happens differently… Spiritual practice won’t change what happens. Rather, it will help us to experience what happens not as evil, but simply as what happens.” And I would add: spiritual practice doesn’t change me; it helps me see and accept the real me. 

Where am I? This year I treated myself to a new tallit, a new prayer shawl. And rather than the beracha on the Atarah, rather than the blessing, I had my favorite words of Torah embroidered: Achein yesh Adonai b’makom Hazeh v’anochi lo yadati—surely God is in this place, and I didn’t know it, the words Jacob says when he awakens from his dream. They are the words I live by, they are my maxim, the realest truth that I know. God is here, in this place, in EVERY PLACE, and we, to quote Chaim Stern, walk sightless among miracles. We are caught up in our daily habits and routines and are blind to each others’ true selves and the spark of the divine each of us brings forward. Or, perhaps, we stifle that spark, afraid that others will not understand or appreciate it, or fear it. We are surrounded by God in every moment, for we are surrounded by each other, and we know that God is present only through us. But we tune God out. As that great rabbi Yoda says, we are always somewhere else, always thinking about the future, and never where we are, and what we are doing. 

When is it? Who can tell? We fill up our schedules, and our children’s schedules, to make sure we appear busy, to make sure we are busy, for if we rest but one moment we might reflect on how we are squandering the holiness of our lives. We are blind to the day of the week; every day is the same, filled to the brim, and each one ends the same, with our collapsing from exhaustion. We bring our work with us on vacation, our phones are at our sides constantly, our laptops ready to go. We miss what is in front of us because we are afraid that if we looked and saw and took a snapshot of the moment, it might be too late. We think time is linear; that our lives are straight lines that shoot out toward the horizon. But they are not. Yeats had it right: the years are gyres, spinning us again and again back to the same moments. There is no perfect time; it is never too late. There is always now. Every moment is Sinai. We stand this day, not only us but all those who ever were and all those who ever will be. That is what our Torah teaches. We need merely to be fully present in that moment. 

What am I doing? A story by Alan Lew: Every year before the Days of Awe, the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, held a competition to see who would blow the shofar for him on Rosh Hashanah. Now if you wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba’al Shem Tov, not only did you have to blow the shofar like a virtuoso, but you also had to learn an elaborate system of kavanot—secret prayers that were said just before you blew the shofar to direct the shofar blasts and to see that they had the proper effect in the supernal realms. All the prospective shofar blowers practiced these kavanot for months. They were difficult and complex. There was one fellow who wanted to blow the shofar for the Ba’al Shem Tov so badly that he had been practicing these kavanot for years. But when his time came to audition before the Ba’al Shem, he realized that nothing he had done had prepared him adequately for the experience of standing before this great and holy man... He choked. His mind froze completely. He couldn’t remember one of the kavanot he had practiced for all those years. He couldn’t even remember what he was supposed to be doing at all. He just stood before the Ba’al Shem in utter silence, and then, when he realized how egregiously—how utterly—he had failed this great test, his heart just broke in two and he began to weep, sobbing loudly, his shoulders heaving and his whole body wracking as he wept. All right, you’re hired, the Ba’al Shem said. But I don’t understand, the man said. I failed the test completely. I couldn’t even remember one kavanah. So the Ba’al Shem explained with the following parable: In the palace of the King, there are many secret chambers, and there are secret keys for each chamber, but one key unlocks them all, and that key is the ax. The King is the Lord of the Universe, the Ba’al Shem explained. The palace is the House of God. The secret chambers are the sefirot, the ascending spiritual realms that bring us closer and closer to God when we perform commandments such as blowing the shofar with the proper intention, and the secret keys are the kavanot. And the ax—the key that opens every chamber and brings us directly into the presence of the King, wherever he may be—the ax is the broken heart, for as it says in the Psalms, “God is close to the brokenhearted.” 

I want to have all the answers. I want to change the pain other people feel. I want to be God’s partner in every way. Yehuda Amichai sat looking at his children sleeping and whispered to himself, “I am not God, I am not God.” Nor am I. Nor are any of us. I am going to fail, but in my failure I pray that I find the key. 

The time has come. We are here in this place, in this moment, unabashedly and truly ourselves. We stand—sometimes in our own ways, making our tshuvah, our returning, harder for ourselves.  We are brokenhearted. Good. That means we have the ax in our hands. “The heart is always breaking, the gates are always clanging shut. It is always the last minute.” Now is the last minute, the last minute as the gates are open to pray and be with all our hearts. So I ask you to join me in meditation and prayer, the prayer I recited at the beginning:
 Who am I? I am me.
Where am I? I am here.
When is it? It is now.
What am I doing? I’m doing the best I can.