Neilah 5785
I spoke earlier today about cognitive dissonance and how we all use it to mange our lives. What I didn’t have time to share with you is the most dramatic example of cognitive dissonance I know. And I ant to use it to say just a few words to lead into our concluding service, Neilah.
There’s a photo taken in Eagle Creek, Oregon in 2017 by a photographer called Kristi McCluer – you can google it, she won a ‘photo of the year’ award for it - a photo in which there is a huge wall of flame dominating the whole of the horizon, devouring a forest, the trees creating an inferno, you can almost hear the roar of the flames, hear the cracking of the branches, feel the heat burning off the page as you look; and in the foreground there is a golf course, it can’t be more than 100 yards from the devastation happening in real time, and on the course three guys are lining up their putts as if nothing is happening. Now on the one hand this photo explains, portrays, cognitive dissonance far better than I can do with mere words.
And it is easy to read this photo as a powerful metaphor for indifference to a catastrophe waiting to engulf us – not just fire or floods or hurricanes or drought or any of the threats to the planet’s well being that are the backdrop to our lives. It is that, and in a way it is astonishing that more people are not crying out and screaming about the looming disaster – although some brave souls, here, around the word, are doing that and taking whatever actions they can to protest this suicidal journey humanity is on. But as Neilah approaches my thoughts turn in another direction in relation to that scene. And how it might apply to us. It’s a generous reading, interpretation, but I hope you can bear with me as I try and open it up.
In our own lives we all need opportunities – in spite of what is going on around us – just to focus on ourselves: we need to find how life can offer us pleasures, satisfactions, whether it is from companionship with others, from art, or music or poetry or meditation, tapestry making or marathon running, theatre, gardening, swimming, activities we pursue on or own or with others, yes even playing golf, or watching sport, ways of engaging with life in all its unfolding splendour. We have reflected today a lot on our failures, our disappointments and avoidances, our weaknesses, this can be painful to do, and painful to glimpse the enormity of the work of transformation that we need to make as a people. Of course we don’t know what this next year will bring.
We might be entering it with some trepidation at the larger picture – I never mentioned antisemitism once this Yom Kippur and I know that for some folk that is what worries you most. But today has been a day when we have focused on ourselves, as individuals, and as a community, Klal Yisrael, and how we live and what choices we make, and as our new year really begins now as we move into Neilah and through the gates of life at the end of the service, we can remember that life is precious, it contains real opportunities for an intense engagement with others, opportunities for an intensity of being, being together, sharing, laughing together and yes sometimes crying together, but moments of intensity when we know that we are really and truly alive and we wouldn’t have life any other way, it has its losses and sadnesses but it also has jewels of experience that we come across, or create. Those moments of intensity can be with others or just private moments by oneself. I think Kafka got this right, as he got so much right with his finely tuned intuition to what matters:
“You do not have to leave the room, remain standing at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you, to be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll/writhe in ecstasy at your feet.”
This is the spirituality of a so-called secularist who understood, though TB was corrupting his lungs as he wrote, understood that the divine was present at every moment. “Be quite still”, he says, what is available in the world has no choice but to offer itself to you, here and now. “We declare with gratitude…” we say at the heart of the Amidah,”…the signs of Your presence that are with us every day. At every moment, at evening, morning and noon, we experience your wonders and Your goodness.” This is what Kafka is alluding to. Divine goodness is present, present in the wonders. Can we stay tuned to the wonders amidst the turbulence of our lives? Neilah gives us hope that we can. We will have done our work, our failures are forgiven, we can return to life again. May you have a year full of new life, a year filled with the blessings life can bestow.
