Kol Nidrei 5785
I want to start with a simple proposition. (Nothing is ever simple but you will get what I mean). Can we ever know how someone else experiences the world. We can know a person for a lifetime yet we can’t know what the felt experience is of someone else. We can listen as they describe it, we can be empathetic, we can imagine other people’s experiences sitting next to us now, or across the world from us, we can read novels which get inside characters, but in some fundamental way we can’t know another person’s inner world. (Of course we may not know much about our own inner world, but that’s another story) . Our felt inner world, our deep subjectivity, is, in essence, known by no-one. Not even our therapists.
And yet there lives in us, I think, a deep wish to be known. As well as a deep fear. The wish to be known is I think a wish to be appreciated, understood, accepted, wanted. And maybe at root it’s a wish to be loved. Loved unconditionally. But, we worry, if everything about us is known, would we still be loveable? So the wish to be known is in tension with the fear, the fear that there is, or might be, something in us that stops this happening, that there exists in us aspects of the self that someone else would not be able to accept, or be able to love, parts of our inner world, parts of us, they would not be able to embrace unconditionally.
So: we contain the wish to be known. And the fear of being known. And although there is a wish to be known, we can spend a lifetime developing the art of putting up barriers to being known, truly known in all our complex and multifaceted humanity; it’s strange that the thing we think we want so much, we also spend such a lot of time, consciously and unconsciously, protecting ourselves from. Along with all the time we spend cultivating a persona, a false self, that we think might be more desirable, more acceptable, more loveable, than our real selves in all their quirky and turbulent splendour.
So if this is how it is, and this is who we are, what happens when we come together on Yom Kippur and are faced with this: “What can we say before You…”, we ask, “and what can we tell You?” Here’s the traditional picture of a God figure, so far away, so distant, so remote, absent almost to the point of non-existence. “And yet…”, we continue to read, disconcertingly, opening up a religious paradox, “And yet You know everything, hidden and revealed. You know the mysteries of the universe and the intimate secrets of everyone alive…” So: here we are, looking into the mirror of our wish and our fear. “You see into the heart and mind. Nothing escapes You, nothing is hidden from your gaze”.
Again, the traditional picture of a God figure, but this time so close to us as to know us through and through, know us maybe better than we know ourselves, know us as no-one and nothing else can know us. All our idiosyncrasies and vulnerabilities, our foibles and peccadillos, our ugliness and our generosity, our cruelty and our kindness, our capacity for love and our capacity for hate. It’s all known – none of it is hidden, and none of it needs to be hidden. Whether this so-called “gaze” feels threatening or a welcome relief will say much about us and our feelings about intimacy and being known.
We repeat this poetic text in each service through the day – it is at the spiritual heart of the Yom Kippur liturgy: the encouragement one day in the year, for a few brief hours, or minutes, to be open with ourselves about who we are, to admit our frailties and failings, to survey the landscape of our souls and make an account of what we have done and what we have failed to do, to admit how awful we might have been, how inhumane and callous – but also to recognise the ways in which we have managed to remain humane and caring, this too we bring to mind; and Yom Kippur suggests that all this heart searching and soul reckoning can be done with a kind of confidence. Maybe no other person in the world can know us as we want to be known and fear being known - and yet by rendering an honest account of our intimate selves, our hidden selves, something in us will change. It will be as if we are truly known. The liturgy says: today you can, finally, be truly known – and the experience will be transformative.
Laying ourselves open in this way – offering ourselves as best we can without being persecutory towards ourselves – will be like receiving a gift, a precious sense of being judged with unconditional love. We will come through Yom Kippur and out the other side mysteriously changed – the liturgy calls it ‘cleansed’ – we will know that we are accepted, us poor humble flawed folk, we will feel that by reckoning with our guilt, our failures and foibles and falsehood, by looking honestly at ourselves, the verdict at the trial we are attending will be ‘not guilty’, you are loved, more than you know, more than you imagine. Maybe more than you strictly deserve.
This is what Yom Kippur offers us and it has a mystery at its heart because even if you have no sense of, or belief in, the God figure of the liturgy, a merciful and compassionate divine presence, rachum v’chanun, even if you are a religious sceptic, if you harbour doubts, or you’re an honest disbeliever in the literal or metaphorical language of our tradition, even if you struggle with or can’t subscribe to the pieties of old - that is all strangely beside the point. Because the point is that by engaging with the psychodrama of the day, by spending the time reflecting on your life, you will experience some shift by the end of Neilah. You may not feel more loving by the end of the day – you will still have your irritabilities – but there will be a shift in your soul’s engagement with life. There will be more life within you, more sense of the possibilities that life can offer, more hope that your life has got a meaning, or that you can make meaning out of it. And although you might not think about this shift using the language of love, or – heaven forbid - the language of ‘God’, what matters is that something real will happen within you: you will glimpse what it means to be loved, valued and wanted.
You can be loved because you have opened your heart to the truths about yourself. You can be loved because there is an indefinable goodness encoded within you. You can be loved because of your unique capacity for accessing the humanity within you, even if it gets battered and bruised by life, which it does; even if it goes into eclipse, which it does; even if your heart gets corroded by shame or guilt or anger or hatred, which it does. At heart you are infinitely precious, and loveable.
Why am I talking so much about love tonight? Love and being loved? Well, a couple of reasons. The first is to do with my grandson. He happened to be born on Yom Kippur. And, co-incidentally, was named Jonah. Although as Isaac Bashevis Singer once said: ”Coincidence is not a kosher word”. Be that as it may, and forgive the personal anecdote, I have been carrying around in my mind for the last 18 months or so something Jonah said to his dad one day - he must have been four and a half then, I suppose - and from somewhere in him he came out with this: “The only thing that will always be true and never end is love”.
And it struck me, when I heard about this, that not only was he giving voice to his experience of being loved, but he was voicing a deep and universal human wish, for that’s what it is: a wish that “The only thing that will always be true and never end is love”. But it’s a wish that is threaded through all of Jewish liturgy, which over and over again talks about God’s eternal love of the Jewish people, a love which survives the vicissitudes of history, a love that endures from generation to generation, despite Israel’s failures and stiff-neckedness and betrayals.
Now you might call those words, that sentiment, that philosophy, about love always being true and never ending, you might call it naïve – that life just isn’t like that. But maybe ‘naïve’ is the jaundiced judgement of an adult world that has lost touch with the sense of undimmed wonder that children can have. Adults whose lives become enmeshed in all the shabbiness and sickness of soul that surrounds us become cynical, and maybe envious of a child’s uncorrupted vision. Maybe we had that innocence once, but it was knocked out of us by the cruelties of the world and the cruel-hearted we encountered. Maybe we secretly long to believe it is true, not just a hope.
But I found myself wanting to speak tonight about love because I am very aware of the fragility of love in a time of hate. Hatred right now is all around us, everywhere we look, and it is exhausting, it corrodes our well-being, eats into our minds and hearts. It’s spiritually exhausting being exposed to all the hatred: all that rhetoric of retaliation and revenge, and the wave after wave of racism and neo-fascism and bigotry in so many countries, in Putin and Trump, in India, the list goes on and on, no nation is free of it, and all the denigration we hear of the Other, whether women or immigrants or trans, all the animosity within religious groups, and between religious groups, so much invective, so much intolerance, so much anger. All the polarisation and lack of nuance and being unable to tolerate ambivalence – it’s exhausting, and it’s tragic. These endless varieties and manifestations of hate.
I don’t do social media at all because I don’t want to be exposed to even more hatred than I already encounter in the daily news on TV or in the newspapers. But when I hear from clergy colleagues about being bullied online, even by people from this community, I realise just what a mess we are in. People don’t like it sometimes when I use the word hatred, they deny it is within them: ‘oh I just get a bit irritated’, or maybe they admit to being ‘annoyed’ or even ‘quite angry’ - but hatred, it’s a strong word, and we shirk from it. But it needs to be spoken about because it conveys an aspect of all our inner lives. And one denies it at one’s peril. I won’t begin to catalogue here the long list of my hatreds. That’s part of the secrets of my heart. But hateful feelings arise out of disappointments, and all the gaps between what we want or need, and the capacity of the world and the people around us to give us what we need. So if we speak of love we need also to speak of hate because they go together within the human psyche.
Life will always let us down sometimes – and how then do we mange our frustration, our aggression, our rage? Our disappointments can tip into despair, or hopelessness, or depression. Our anger can be turned against those we love, but whom we feel never love us enough. Or it can be turned against ourselves, our bodies, or our minds. Or it can get projected out so we always feel under siege and threatened rather than seeing how threatening we can be. (This is a particular Jewish problem). Or it can be acted out so that we rage against those who don’t think like us, or look like us, or act like us.
Yom Kippur is not only about being loved and our capacity for love. It is also about our hatred, and rage and aggression - and what we do with it. Personally and collectively. It is the problem of our age. Hatred and its ramifications. The defining problem of our times. To say that our very lives depend upon finding ways of thinking about our hatred is not an exaggeration. Our planet itself is loved and treasured – a source of wonder and delight; and it is hated and abused, plundered and laid waste to. Will our love or hate have the final say?
The Jewish vision on Yom Kippur is a refined form of chutzpa: it is grandiose and, in its way, arrogant. It says that we Jews belong to a people who have a responsibility to think about how to live. And this thinking about how to live is not just about ourselves as individuals and our own personal wellbeing; and it’s not just for us as a collective, Klal Yisrael, and the fate of our people; but it’s a global responsibility – to work out how to be ‘a blessing for all humanity’ and the fragile planet we inhabit. Our task is to think about how to live, how to live well, how to help others live well. It’s an impossible task - but someone has to do it. On Yom Kippur we embrace that task and in embracing that task we will of necessity encounter the core human dilemma, the psychological and spiritual and existential question I have tried to sketch out today: how are we to express our love, and what do we do with our hate?
