Yom Kippur Shacharit 5783 - Bitachon
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
At some point in my journey to the rabbinate I learnt a secret- when rabbis are a bit dubious about the content of liturgy, they avoid reading the English. I learnt this the hard way, leading Hallel, our festival psalms for the first time.
I found myself confronted- without the hebrew confidence to tackle it- by a long column of text in-between two beautifully sung parts of a psalm.
When we’re in shul, it happens like this:
Cantor Zöe sings:
מִֽן־הַ֭מֵּצַר קָרָ֣אתִי יָּ֑הּ עָנָ֖נִי בַמֶּרְחָ֣ב יָֽהּ׃
יְהֹוָ֣ה לִ֭י לֹ֣א אִירָ֑א מַה־יַּעֲשֶׂ֖ה לִ֣י אָדָֽם׃
Then we stop singing, and the rabbi continues in Hebrew:
ט֗וֹב לַחֲס֥וֹת בַּיהֹוָ֑ה מִ֝בְּטֹ֗חַ בָּאָדָֽם׃ ט֗וֹב לַחֲס֥וֹת בַּיהֹוָ֑ה מִ֝בְּטֹ֗חַ בִּנְדִיבִֽים׃
Unless of course you’re a first year rabbinic student with hebrew stagefright in which case you read the following:
‘It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in people’... and start to wonder where the text is going. Then you continue, ‘it is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in the great’...
…so that’s why they told me to read it in Hebrew.
The psalms are texts of faith, and the psalmist is talking to God, but there’s something so utterly jarring for me about those two lines- because I think they speak of something that is reverberating around our world, and because saying it aloud feels a bit dismal, defeatist, depressing.
Is this really what we want to proclaim from our bimah? That it’s not good to trust in people?
In fairness to the psalmist, it’s possible he has just binged a heavy dose of this year’s streaming TV content which is full of stories of scammers and grifters- Netflix’s Inventing Anna and The Tinder Swindler, The Dropout on Disney, the BBC’s top podcast ‘the missing cryptoqueen’, the Wondery series Scamfluencers, the hit podcast ‘The Dream’ or the Amazon original ‘Lularich’.
I could go on, because the past year really has been the year of the scammer, confidence trickster and grifter, and this ‘can we trust them?’ suspicion blends seamlessly with the more conspiratorial parts of the internet.
Throw in a year or two of political crisis where truth was presented as very fluid entity and serious questions were asked about the integrity of those in public life and an economic crisis that flows from a complete loss of consumer and market confidence, and you might be forgiven for thinking that the psalmist is onto something; even if that something feels pretty unappetising.
The measure used internationally for understanding trust in society is the Edelman Trust Barometer. The headline of this year’s report reads, ‘We find a world ensnared in a vicious cycle of distrust, fueled by a growing lack of faith in media and government. Through disinformation and division, these two institutions are feeding the cycle and exploiting it for commercial and political gain.’
In countries such as Norway, Sweden and Finland, more than 60% of people say that people can be trusted, in the UK it’s well under 30% and slowly dropping. Loss of trust spreads, once our sense of stability and security is undermined on one axis, it makes it easier for the threads to unravel on another.
It is both true that there are plenty of reasons for breakdowns in social trust, and that it makes for a dismal observation. How can we live together, work together, if we don’t trust each other?
The closest translation in Hebrew of trust is the word bitachon- a word that in modern Hebrew also means security. Trust is secure and sustaining belief in someone or something. I think it helps as a translation to articulate the function of trust in society. When there is a high level of trust in a society, people feel secure. Secure in their business transactions, secure inviting neighbours over for dinner, secure that someone will not exploit them or hurt them. Trust is a fundamental part of cooperation, it’s social glue.
And it’s not the same as blind faith- trust is something that is quite demanding and complicated, hard to build and easy to break.
The problem with the psalmist’s language is, as Rabbi Tony Bayfield reminded us on Rosh Hashanah, God doesn’t get involved in our daily lives. We can trust in God all we like but without social bonds, social connections and mutual trust we can’t live in the world we all deserve to live in. The psalmist might imagine taking refuge in God, but we aren’t him, and sitting back and trusting in God is a bit like sitting back in a train whose driver has left the vehicle- it’s on us and the social relationships we build to find a way into the driving seat.
Whilst that works as a critique for only trusting in God, it doesn’t really do very much for our trust in other humans.
This year, life took a particularly challenging turn in February. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it wasn’t just a geopolitical crisis. In our household, as in many others around the world, news wasn’t coming from the BBC or sky news, it was coming in the form of phone calls, whatsapps and telegram messages from friends and family. Some of the most challenging exchanges involved those whose relatives refused to listen to or believe in what they were experiencing. Who, even when confronted with someone in their family on a video call from a convoy of cars, a bomb shelter or a refugee centre, didn’t believe what they were seeing. Breakdowns of trust within families, between neighbours, and complete despair in who those people had shown themselves to be in the hour of greatest need.
Nachman of Bratslav lived in what is now Ukraine, during a time of political turmoil, partition, and growing division within the Jewish community. He wrote books of advice as well as philosophy and theology. In Warsaw a few weeks after the war began, I picked up a source sheet in a JDC refugee shelter just outside the city where we had travelled to lead kabbalat shabbat services. On the source sheet was the following text by nachman of bratslav, it comes from his eitzot, his advice, on joy:
'עַל־יְדֵי מָרָה שְׁחֹרָה וְעַצְבוּת, הַמֹּחַ וְהַדַּעַת בְּגָלוּת וְקָשֶׁה לוֹ לְיַשֵּׁב דַּעְתּוֹ לָשׁוּב אֶל ה
“When a person despairs, their intellect and mind go into exile. This makes it very hard for them to concentrate their mind on teshuva, returning to God.”
And alongside it
:עַל־יְדֵי מָרָה שְׁחֹרָה וְעַצְבוּת אֵין יוֹדְעִין מִשְּׁמוֹ
“In the hands of bitterness, a person can forget their own name”
At first, I felt it was quite an enormous chutzpah to leave such a texts in such a place, I think maybe I still think that, but I also understood from the rabbi who took them there that some moments require chutzpah, and these texts came out of moments of breakdown not of moments of stability.
Despair is a complete loss or absence of hope- and what is hope?
The word tikvah meaning hope is connected to the root kavah. Kavah means a twisted strand of rope, something that confers strength and reassurance, something secure. Hope is the ability to believe substantively in the future- in archaic English the word hope is even synonymous with the word trust.
The ability to form deep, sustaining, trusting relationships is integral to the preservation of hope, to our sense of security. Despair is the friend of those who benefit when ties are broken, suspicion and mistrust reign, and it’s also the thief of those things we all deserve to feel. When people break others' trust, they sow a deep rot, chipping away another person’s ability to build the pro-social, supportive, and constructive connections that we need as individuals, societies, and economies. It’s exactly in those moments of despair, that we need that shofar call, or the still small voice that follows, nudging in our ear, calling us out of that space, resisting, insisting.
I’m not talking here about blind faith, that’s naive and pointless. I’m talking about trust, thick trust, substantial security that comes from being responded to with integrity, from someone else being accountable for their actions and their impact, from consistency and reliability, from generous and open hearted interactions with others.
I’m wondering this Yom Kippur, what it means to acknowledge that there are a multitude of reasons to feel deep suspicion, to tread tentatively in relationships, to lose faith in others, to lose trust in others, to feel despair that people are in things for the wrong reasons, and to say that that falling down that pit, feeling that rope unravel, is a moment for us to allow the voices of our tradition to speak back to us.
What do they say?
They say that it’s normal. That people can frustrate us, hurt us, not merit our trust, and that people- us, we- can strive to be better. They give us models for teshuva, true repentance, that allow us to be demanding of others. To articulate the harm they have caused, to remind us that we are not the cause of others’ sins; and help us detach our own view of ourselves, our own approach to our relationships, from the broken world view of others that leads them to cause harm. They encourage us to break the cycle, to stop the rot.
I want to acknowledge the part of me that is still sceptical, and bring her into dialogue with the part of me that understands that our traditions have a longer worldview than any of us. They don’t come out of a world with global alliances to prevent genocide, or any of the assurances of security we have come to rely on. They come from a world where people really had to figure out how to assert themselves against the prevailing winds, and to survive emotionally and spiritually in tough times.
They call us to nurture the middah, the attribute of bitachon; of the security that comes from trusting and rich connections, of mutual accountability and understanding. They remind us that we don’t need to accept the arguments made to us by the world. When they make us angry, they tell us that our values are structured differently, and invite us to respond, to show people what it means to be someone who others can invest in, feel held by, and to repair the fabric of the world around us one person at a time.
One thing the Edelman trust survey has observed is that the growth of social media has ‘shifted people’s trust from a top-down orientation to a horizontal one in favour of peers or experts’. While we express feelings of loss and disorientation when it comes to political leadership, the places we are able to derive and develop trust are the communities around us- we play a huge role in each others’ emotional wellbeing, in our faith in others, and in cultivating a particular worldview. Last night Rabbi Miriam helped us to see the ways that we can hold and support each other as sparks of light and goodness, of reasons to believe and be joyful. In this microcosm of the world as it might be we act to bring each other back from the edge of disillusionment, to focus on what can be done, and how we can behave, to remind each other that not everyone wears the worst face of human nature.
וַאֲנִ֤י ׀ בְּחַסְדְּךָ֣ בָטַחְתִּי֮ יָ֤גֵ֥ל לִבִּ֗י בִּֽישׁוּעָ֫תֶ֥ךָ אָשִׁ֥ירָה לַה' כִּ֖י גָמַ֣ל עָלָֽי׃
I trust in your goodness, my heart will exult in your deliverance. Says the psalmist in psalm 13. Like teshuva, trust is aspirational, it calls us beyond the now and to a world of better. As we allow these words to become ours, may they be a prayer for the year to come that we wrestle the emotional and spiritual exile of despair, starting with the work of teshuva in our lives, to bring security and comfort back into our lives and into the lives of all those we encounter.
וַאֲנִ֤י ׀ בְּחַסְדְּךָ֣ בָטַחְתִּי֮ יָ֤גֵ֥ל לִבִּ֗י בִּֽישׁוּעָ֫תֶ֥ךָ אָשִׁ֥ירָה לַה' כִּ֖י גָמַ֣ל עָלָֽי׃
