Selichot 5782.
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
Everyone’s got their favourite bit of our new building. Mine, and I know I’m not alone in this, is upstairs in our kindergarten. There, every time the children go to wash their hands after messy play, they’re greeted by a buffet of taps. Our kindergarten team wanted to make sure every aspect of the space was educational, and so when they wash their hands they can choose from several different mixer taps, and the fiendishly confounding thing apparently found in very few countries other than our own- the separate hot and cold tap situation.
The problem with separate taps is one of those things that I’m increasingly sure we’ve kept as part of our public life purely so that people can bond over complaining about it. There’s nothing we get from separate taps that a mixer tap can’t solve. And such is the solution of the mixed tap that it’s possible even to argue that it’s a religiously suggested solution.
In Bereshit Rabbah, midrash on the book of Genesis, the rabbis comment on the creation of heaven and earth. They say, to what can this be compared,and answer- to a king who had empty glasses. The king said "if I put hot water in them, then they will expand and break, and if I put cold water in them, they will contract and shatter. What did the king do? He mixed hot water with the cold water and put them in the glasses.” A 3rd century solution to a problem we still face?
The Midrash continues- because the hot and cold water are metaphors here for something further- “So too the Holy One of Blessing said: if I create the world with the attribute of compassion alone, no one would be concerned with the consequences of their actions. With the attribute of judgement alone, how could the world stand? Rather, behold I create it with both the attribute of judgement and the attribute of compassion, and hopefully it will stand.
Hot and cold. Justice and mercy. There are moments in time that require an excess of one or the other, but, suggests our tradition, it’s the art of mixing that makes things work.
Mixing, you might argue, works when the two attributes are of the same substance- hot and cold water for instance. But the process of tempering our feelings and instincts is more complicated- can we really say that justice and mercy are poles of the same continuum, different manifestations of the same matter?
Whereas justice and mercy are big theoretical concepts, what they allude to are emotional responses. The impulse to be merciful - showing rachmanus, compassion. Rachamim has its root in the word rechem meaning womb, it’s often connected conceptually to uncompromising love, something that just is but doesn’t need to be earnt or deserved. It’s the purest kind of energy someone can feel towards another.
And the partnered concept? In the realm of theological conversation- mercy’s partner is justice. But when the Rabbis imagine God at prayer, it’s not justice that God is trying to balance against mercy and compassion, for justice is a lofty notion. Not justice, but anger. If rachamin is the cold water, then that which runs hot in opposition is rage.
In the talmud in tractate brachot the rabbis try to imagine what it is that God prays, and they answer with these words in the name of Rav, ‘May it be My will that My mercy will overcome My anger’.
Of course, none of us really know what God prays, but the rabbis teaching here indicates something they’re particularly worried about, in fact they spent a lot of time worrying about the impact of anger on people.
They say things like- as we heard in the text quoted from rabbi jonathan sacks earlier in our service- “The life of those who can’t control their anger is not a life,” they said. (Pesachim 113b) and “When a person becomes angry, if he is a sage his wisdom departs from him; if he is a prophet his prophecy departs from him.” (Pesachim 66b) and some teachers even compare anger to idolatry.
Anger, upset, frustration, they’re all part of how we respond to the world around us, and particularly they’re part of how people express care and show distress. This evening service has been focused on some of the different aspects of the way we experience life, and how we might reframe our relationship with them, and the Jewish discourse around anger is one of the places where there’s a huge amount of anxiety in our tradition about where this powerful feeling will lead.
Perhaps the worst response to someone in the throws of anger is to tell them to calm down. It’s often more enraging when that anger relates to personal pain, and the harm inflicted upon one person by another. Why? Because it’s often the case that anger comes from the same place that rachmanus does- it comes from the closest and most intimate parts of a person. I realised a while ago, that when I sit and talk with people about public life, about the world we are in, more than sadness, more than fear, the phrase comes up in conversation is ‘it makes me angry’. I guess I’m thinking about it particularly because the burden that this season of forgiveness can put on those who are still working though feelings of hurt, feelings of anger. Recognising both that a release from that anger is often a freeing experience, and that to force that moment before the person is ready can feel like a violation.
In our high holy day liturgy we describe God as erech apayim, slow to anger, but in the rabbinic imagination there’s another way of quantifying anger- not as a measure of speed but instead as a measure of time. Right before the moment of Torah, our second torah reading on ….. Where we hear the description of God as slow to anger, Rabbi Yochanan imagines that God says to Moses that Moses has to wait until God has finished being angry before he can see God’s face. Quoting psalsm he teaches that ‘God is furious every day’. The secret? How long God allows anger to dominate for. ‘How much time does His anger last? God’s anger lasts a moment. And how long is a moment? One fifty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eighth of an hour, that is a moment’
It’s not that rage isn’t an appropriate response, a real feeling, something that it’s ok to feel, it’s how long that rage flows untempered by the other parts of our capacity to relate to others. To take away someone’s right to speak from a place of anger often feels like a dismissal of their experience, don’t feel this, feel this instead. What the rabbinic imagination offers us is the language to say that when our anger is strong, when the world around us produces these strong feelings, that it’s appropriate and ok for them to be a part of our lives- Judaism does not advocate for a kind of spiritual bypassing that invites us to pretend that hot red feelings don’t exist. Instead what we’ve got is this image of a mixer tap, nurturing other attributes and cultivating other aspects of ourselves so that the heat doesn’t burn or break us as the vessels that contain it.
These high holy days, and their emphasis on forgiveness and repentance are not here to take away from the reality of what people are feeling, to shame or denigrate valid reactions in particular to the harms that humans do to one another. If you’re coming into these chaggim with feelings of hurt wearing heavily on you, the process of teshuva isn’t here to shrink your experience. The framework of teshuva, of return, is a framework of empowerment, like I imagine the rabbis saw God’s prayer. What it offers is a language for preventing a moment in time from defining the moments in life that follow. Not taking away a feeling or experience, but creating space to consider where healing is possible, where we want a different feeling to be driving our presence in the world. To ask what we need for ourselves and from others to get there; where we’d like our own balance of attributes to sit differently.
As we rise together for our first avinu malkeinu of the season, the collective confession our liturgy offers is a stepping stone and an invitation towards teshuva, and the preservation of each of us in this room as the vessels of God’s light, hoping to balance the hot and the cold in a way that sustains us all into the new year.
