Neilah 5784
There’s something about this time of the day on Yom Kippur. The emotion of Yizkor and our awareness of the preciousness of life, the feelings of love, the complicated feelings, the fragility of it all. It’s all sitting here in the room with us, tired, a bit hungry, aware of the dimming light, the sense that the day is fading, and we become more and more aware of how raw this can all be. A room full of people, wrapped in tallitot, their stripes creating this geometric pattern around the room as they pass by and intersect with each other. I guess a bit like lives lived in community. Moments shared, moments experienced in parallel, moments where our stripes reach out and don’t find another waiting to join them. The togetherness and the aloneness.
The day strips us back layer by layer, until we arrive here waiting at the gates of Neilah, the gates of repentance, waiting for them to swing shut for another year, wondering if we have done enough to find ourselves on the right side.
Was this all real? Did we lean into the psychodrama of the day, did we allow ourselves to let the words of the liturgy in and to feel their stirring call? Are we here, here but also not here, walls up, words bouncing off, present but not here. One more chance awaits, one more confession, one more run through that now so familiar liturgy. What else are you going to do? There’s only just over an hour left what else is there to do than listen to the rabbis say stuff, maybe have a bit of a schluf, stand and sit on command, get to the end.
It’s all hanging in the balance.
We’re in this perpetual morning. We put our tallitot on last night, we’ve kept them on all day. Time is shaped differently on Yom Kippur. Looking out at the sea of tallitot I’m reminded of childhood moments sat in shul playing hide and seek with my dad’s tallit, braiding its strands as the choir sang in the background. I cant tell you the year, but I can see the stripes, feel the tzitzit, long before I knew the phrase was used in this way, I knew the feeling of being wrapped in a big tallit like being wrapped under the wings of the divine presence.
I’m reminded of a poem by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
Whoever put on a tallis when he was young will never forget:
taking it out of the soft velvet bag, opening the folded shawl,
spreading it out, kissing the length of the neckband (embroidered
or trimmed in gold). Then swinging it in a great swoop overhead
like a sky, a wedding canopy, a parachute. And then winding it
around his head as in Hide-and-Seek, wrapping
his whole body in it, close and slow, snuggling into it like the cocoon
of a butterfly, then opening would-be wings to fly.
And why is the tallis striped and not checkered black and white
like a chessboard? Because squares are finite and hopeless.
Stripes come from infinity and to infinity they go
like airport runways where angels land and take off
Those stripes again, only limited because they’ve not yet been joined to another. Airport runways. A whole room of tallitot, a whole room of runways, of butterfly wings, angels taking off and landing. Perhaps not angels, perhaps aspirations, perhaps us. Perhaps that’s where we all are, in this long room, with our long stripes, waiting at the gate, waiting to take off. Waiting to take flight into the year ahead. Allowing all that has past to come into land, and hoping to take off, refueled, with a new flight plan, the pilot is rested and ready for a new trip.
Or maybe that’s too fantastical, we’re humans, we don’t have wings, we’ll walk back out of here into a world unchanged, and if we’re feeling cynical we might say as people unchanged too.
Cantor Zoe sings first part of Ben Adam
Human being, rise up, rise up
Says the voice of Rav Kook
You have strength within you
You have wings of spirit,
Wings of powerful eagles.
Al t’kacheish bam- don’t deny them
Pen y’chachashu l’cha- lest they deny you
Seek them out, and you will find them
Pick whatever metaphor you want, wings of eagles, angels and runways, butterfly wings, wings of spirit, the wings of the divine presence. They’re all here in the room with us, as is Rav Kook’s caution- there there, but its up to us to make use of them. If we deny them, then perhaps they might deny us.
It’s on us in this moment to try, to seek out what we need in order to be able to take flight into the new year, to take that leap of faith that says maybe, maybe nothing will change, the only guarantee that nothing will change is our own inaction. Al t’kacheish bam- don’t deny them- Pen y’chachashu l’cha- lest they deny you. The only sure thing that shuts us off from change is us shutting it down ourselves.
We wait at the gates, the boarding announcement is heard over the tannoy system. El nora alilla, El nora alila, hamtzeh lanu m’chilah b’sha’at ha’neilah. God of awe, God of might, God of awe, God of might, Grant us pardon in this hour, As Your gates are closed this night.
The gate is closing, the passengers are on board, how we take off, whether we take off, and where we take off to, it’s in our hands.
Cantor Zoe sings Ben Adam
