Kol Nidre 5783
You can listen to Rabbi Miriam's sermon here or read it below.
Sat at the side of the hospice bed there is a quiet tranquillity. There is an inevitability, a certainty that is painful and yet reassuring. We know what to do and how to behave when given absolutes of how things will definitely play out. The certainty allows people to relax into their roles. To me the sound of the bed mechanism is an interruption, to the relative at the bedside, she hears the sounds of the womb. Truly this is a space during which we wait to return from where we came. A warmth, a love, a cocoon created by a lifetime of relationships holding us. Relationships, support and cheshbon hanefesh, the accounting of the soul. What are we? What is our life? What is our love? What is our success? What is our endurance? And outside the window the world continues to spin. Children being educated, adults working, wars being fought, and weddings celebrated. Illness and healing, poverty and riches, failure and success.
Kol Nidre creates this moment for the living. A cocoon, a space where time only ticks on outside of these walls, surrounded by a sea of relationships and with the support of liturgy, music, choreography and Jewish practice, to do exactly that same cheshbon hanefesh, to ask ourselves those difficult questions but with the hope of it stirring something inside of us.
But why?
Because the world keeps turning and time continues to march on whatever grief is being expressed, whatever regrets are being held. It’s easy to hold on to the problems of the world and the global disasters but this space allows us to see it as a snap-shot in time and ask ourselves what is the individual and what is the collective? What is in our control and what is beyond our ability to change? How can we break down the collective and find the individual?
It’s easy to see Yom Kippur as a time of Divine chastisement or personal self-flagellation but what good does it do if the world keeps turning regardless and our behaviour seems to make no difference? Perhaps it’s the words of Mary Oliver that help us give this moment meaning.
Mary Oliver – Wild Geese
You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
It’s the lives that we can change, the relationships that we forge and the choices we make that are truly the difference between a cataclysmic future of doom and the opportunities the same issues spark. It’s not personal penance that brings about a better world but the imaginative spark of self-interest, our ability to listen out and hear our calling, that which announces our role, our ability to see ourselves as a small part of the big picture and rather than be overwhelmed by the difficulties we can be enthused by the possibilities.
Nick Cave teaches that “To understand the point of life we must first understand what it is to be human. The common agent,” he teaches “that which binds us all together is loss, and so the point in life must be measured in relation to that loss.”
If it is loss that binds us together, then this year is surely one where we experience our connectivity most deeply.
Cave explains, “Our individual losses can be small or large. They can be accumulations of losses barely registered on a singular level, or full-scale cataclysms... These losses are many-faceted and chronic, both monstrous and trivial. They are losses of dignity, losses of agency, losses of trust, losses of spirit, losses of direction or faith, and, of course, losses of the ones we love. They are daily, convulsive disappointments or great historical injuries that cast their shadows across the human predicament, reminding us of the stunning potential of our own loss of humanity. We are capable of the greatest atrocities and the deepest sufferings, all culminating in a vast, collective grief. This is our shared condition.”
When I think of how the community changes from year to year, how the people in them have been changed since we last sat here as a community on Kol Nidre in 2019, I understand what it means to articulate those losses. Loss of dignity, agency, trust, spirit, faith and of course so many of our loved ones.
And yet the world continues to spin and we get up each day. Without the certainty of what is to follow but with the humanity which urges us forward. Its easy to give into despair, to allow ourselves to feel overwhelmed. If we are powerless to bring about complete change, if we cannot be in the present, the person we thought we would be in history do we still have a purpose? What is the point?
Cave explains it this way: “Happiness and joy continue to burst through this mutual condition. Life, it seems, is full of an insistent, systemic and irrepressible beauty. But these moments of happiness are not experienced alone, rather they are almost entirely relational and are dependent on a connection to the Other – be it people, or nature, or art, or God. This is where meaning establishes itself, within the connectedness, nested in our shared suffering.”
Our role becomes one of being in relationship and the possibility that brings for being part of the irrepressible positivity and hope that is part of our mutual condition.
As we say as part of our prayer for healing, we quote Hillel’s words “do not separate yourself from the community”. It is by pulling tighter together to be in relationship more fully and with more people that we can make sense of the shared suffering and make meaning in our lives. It’s when we are in relationship that we hear the imaginative call to find our purpose. We can see though the harshness and into the excitement of what we might do to bring beauty and light into the darkness.
What is the role of the synagogue in dark times? To create, both on nights like this the hospice-type moment of cheshbon hanefesh as well as the place of relationship building in order not to feel the punishing, judgemental God, but the One who opens our hearts to hear our call to action. People write them off as “nothing”, “it was the least I could do”; in the general scheme of things, they think of them as Cave calls them “inconsequential acts of kindness, but the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman calls ‘petty thoughtless kindness’, or ‘unwitnessed kindness’ bind together to create a subterranean and vanquishing good that counterbalances the forces of evil and prevents suffering from overwhelming the world. We reach out and find each other in the common darkness. By doing so we triumph over our collective and personal loss. Through kindness we slant, shockingly and miraculously, toward meaning. We discover, in that smallest gesture of goodwill laid at the feet of our mutual and monumental loss, the point”.
This year I have heard so much of the curt, the sharpness, the impatience which I know to be a result of so many losses. The chronic and the trivial. It isn’t surprising when they are multifaceted and appear to multiply. When the trivial mount up they become as heavy as the chronic without perhaps the same level of support or understanding of others.
May this be the year where our cheshbon hanefesh, our accounting of the soul, neither leaves us despairing of our difficult hand nor overwhelmed by our individual or collective grief but rather with a commitment to allow the happiness and joy to continue to burst through this mutual condition by being even kinder, even more patient, even more willing to reach out and be in relationship with others. To look out for and listen to how you can be part of turning a world that feels harsh and unkind into a place of support and warmth for someone else.
May this Yom Kippur call to you like the wild geese,
in a world that is harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place.
You belong in this place and you can both hold others and be held.
As Rabbi David Wolpe prays:
“May we endow our suffering with significance
May we find a mission that motivates us and outlasts us
May the heat of anger which causes division turn to the spark of love which draws us close.”
