Yom Kippur Morning 5784
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
At night, it prowled the streets of Prague, defending the people of the ghetto from attack. The golem of Prague, a creature made from the clay of the Vltava river, animated by the Hebrew letters written on its forehead, a mythical creature of great stature and, depending on which story you read, either gently retired to the synagogue attic after nearly breaking Shabbat, or banished there after a jealous and murderous rampage.
Golems are one of the archetypal characters of Jewish legend, they emerged into our collective imagination in the mediaeval period bringing to life a Talmudic idea that the righteous can create life. They’re made from clay or earth, mirroring the creation story in the second chapter of Genesis, and brought to life through the combination of Hebrew letters, often the word emet- truth, written on their foreheads or suspended round their necks. They’re inactivated by removing a letter from the word turning אמת emet, truth- into מת met, death.
Golems wonder through Jewish folklore, from Chelm to Prague, to Vilna- posing questions about what life is and what kinds of creative or destructive powers we have. They’re potent, but bumbling, capable of crude emotion, but lacking in discernment. They have many of the qualities of their human creators, but they lack moral intelligence which means they fall short of being classed as people.
The Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges wrote about Golems. He called his poem 'el otro, el mismo'- the other, the same, playing on the question of how different people really are from these crude creatures. At the end of his poem he imagines the Rabbi in Prague gazing with a mix of sorrow and pity at his creation. And in a mirror of this act, he imagines God doing the same. He asks, as he watches the rabbi watching the golem, what does God think, looking Gods own creations?
What do we imagine a creator might make of us? The state we live in, the state of our planet? The state of our society? The God of the Hebrew bible who swept away the generation of the flood, who banished a generation from entering the land. What would that God, or the people who crafted these stories for us to learn from and grow from, make of the fact that generations upon generations later, we identify readily with their stories because we and our societies remain as prone to the mistakes, flaws, and foibles they speak of as ever- just with some extra technology to expedite the potency and scale of our impacts. Love? Pity? Awe? Disappointment? Regret?
Midrash suggests that perhaps God knew exactly what the world was in for with the creation of humanity.
In one version found in Genesis Rabbah the rabbis imagine God arguing with the court of ministering angels about whether to create humankind. On one side are the angels of chesed- loving kindness and the angel of tzedek, justice. On the other the angel of emet, truth, and shalom, peace.
Chesed argues ‘create, for man will do acts of kindness’. Emet, argues back ‘don’t do it, they will all be liars’. Tzedek, counters, ‘create man for he will act justly’, and Shalom, says ‘don’t do it, they will live in constant discord’.
The midrash continues that in that moment God took the angel of truth and hurled it to the ground. The angels were aghast, because Truth, emet, is God’s seal. How could God throw truth to the ground. Truth is the most firm, established, and important element. And yet the angels continued arguing, and while they were distracted and truth was buried, God created man.
Abraham Joshua Heschel says of this text that ‘The parable openly declares once and for all that man’s very existence is founded upon the tomb in which Truth is imprisoned. Man prevails only because Truth lies buried’.
Emet- truth, that same seal that was needed to animate the golem is buried so that man can be created.
With truth buried, Tzedek and Chesed outnumber Shalom. Justice and loving-kindness advocate for humanity’s existence, and the midrash suggests we consider that there is something more than truth we need to think of.
Yes, yes it’s true, yes its true that people are all kinds of things that are not exactly wonderful.
In another version of the story in the Talmud, God shows the angels human history, and the angels see it and they tell God not to create mankind, and so God destroys them. God makes new angels, and asks them the same question, they respond in the same way, and again God destroys them. It happens a third time and the angels relent and tell God to do as God wishes. When the generation of the flood arises, the angels turn to God and say ‘we told you so’, and God quotes Isaiah 'Even to old age I will not change, and even to grey hair, I will still be patient.'
I think these textual traditions hint at something important, something that is perhaps embodied in the spirit of this Yom Kippur day, but also something that runs deeper in our religious tradition. It’s perhaps something that you could call a kind of dissonance, but actually I think its much more powerful than that. It’s about paradoxical commitments, its about knowing one thing, about being aware of a certain truth, and at the same time being able to throw that truth to the ground, and be part of creating something different.
Yes, says the voice of these stories, people are all these things, and yes, let’s create them anyway- because they can also be all these other things. Because if you accept the truth of that particular moment and that particular reality, then no other counter truth can ever emerge.
In the 1960s a student named Kent Keith gave voice to a text that became known as ‘The Paradoxical Commandments’. Sometimes it's attributed to Mother Theresa because a version of this text was displayed in one of her children's homes.
They read:
People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.
If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.
If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.
The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.
I think these statements speak in a similar voice to the midrashic tradition, they name one reality, and they also invest in a different one. It’s also what we do as Jews. It’s the davka response, its the part of us that is committed to the slightly irrational. It’s the voice of a tradition that knows there are a litany of reasons to feel beaten into a corner by our awareness of human flaws and limitations, and by our terrifying destructive power, and that urges us to choose life and to annually seek to rise above what we’ve known and been before. It’s the still small voice after the loud blast of the shofar, the voice of a generation who rebuilt Jewish society after a time of destruction, it's the knowledge of if not us who, and if not now, when.
There are, laid out in our books before us, so many reasons for us to despair at the potential of the human condition. Laid out on our phones and TV screens a panoply of reasons to fear, to know that we live in difficult times and that difficult times are ahead.
We’ve got our own chorus of angels, of reasons to question the value of humanity, but none of that changes anything. Because we’re here. It’s a bit too late for us to join the side of the argument that says the world would be better off without humankind. Instead we’re left with the voices of the angels of tzedek and chesed, of justice and loving-kindness, who remind us that they always knew the bad stuff, but they were in our corner from the start anyway.
In a third rabbinic telling of the question, the Rabbis of the house of Hillel and Shammai argue for two and a half years over whether it would have been better for people to have been created or not. Shammai said it would have been better that man had not been created, and Hillel that it would have been better for man to be created than not created. In the end they concluded that it would probably have been better for humans to not have been created, but since we have been, we should examine our actions and seek not to sin. This matter of fact conclusion speaks a pragmatic truth, that the question before us is one of responding to reality as it exists in front of us. We can lament aspects of our nature, but not surrender to them.
Unlike the golems of legends, there’s no intervening creator to turn us off, inactivate us or turn us to dust when we become too destructive, there’s just us. We can read rabbinic fantasies of God debating our value, as we too might look and lament our own nature. But there’s no emet on our foreheads to rub away; that angel is buried in the ground while God waits for us to allow a different truth to rise up from the earth. The texts become an exercise in learning to live in a paradox, to look the worst of our nature in the eye, and choose a different path.
Sometimes naming something makes that task easier, it allows us to own the act of choice, to not feel like we are naive to the reality of where we stand. We’re not innocent, or under any illusions, its because of what we know that we make the choices we do.
As we continue our work of teshuva today, may we find in ourselves the courage to look on the worst of ourselves, and commit to the best of ourselves, to be humbled by what we are, and not lose faith in what we might become. May our failings spur us on, may our limitations annoy us into action, and may we enter 5784 firmly embracing the paradox that is human life, and be sealed for a year of goodness.
