Erev Yom Kippur 5785 Sermon
Menachem Mirski
First, let me start with a little introduction. We live in times of war, terrible war. Our brothers and sisters in our homeland, Israel, experience it and are scared everyday. I will think of them and pray for them today, which I encourage or don’t actually need to encourage you. But the topic of this drasha won’t be related to the situation in Israel. Yom Kippur is a holiday of introspection. We look inside us, to do the final analysis of our transgressions, our wrongdoings, our moral condition and generally the time of self-assessment. It’s not about what’s going on in the world, it’s about what’s going on inside us. For this exact reason we fast – we don’t eat, we don’t drink, we don’t have marital relations, we don’t even wash (except for health and some rabbinic authorities allow – for hygienic reasons). It is all meant to strengthen our spiritual, internal self against our physical self, to weaken the physical self, which is often stronger than the spiritual one (and the whole goal of spirituality as such is to build a spiritual self that will reign, not always suppress, but reign over our lower selves – the psychological, emotional and biological one. It all changes with age as we know but that’s an extensive topic). We do all that to DETACH ourselves from reality that surrounds us. We stand today before the Holy One, Blessed be He, and that’s what’s the most important. Bad and good things happen everyday and this is the time to separate us from the ‘external world’. We are not in danger as our brothers and sisters are in Israel, and it is, in a way, a privilege given to us. If it’s given, it’s for a reason and we need to use this privilege wisely.
Yom Kippur separates us, to some extent, from each other – we don’t dine together, we focus on our relationships in a more abstract way. I did talk about the covenant a few weeks ago, defining it as a three-way relationship: between the Jewish People and God and at the same time between every Jewish individual and God. This Chag emphasizes the relationship of each individual with God, assuming that the work to obtain forgiveness from others has already been done.
Yom Kippur marks the end (although not the final end) of our teshuva, our individual teshuvot. We have been reflecting on our wrongdoings for the last 10 days, some of us for the entire month of Elul and that’s the culmination. That’s what our tradition instructs us to do. Although, as Nechama Leibovitz, a wonderful Israeli Bible scholar, put it once: “While it is important to act properly between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it is perhaps more important to act properly between Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah” this is THE time of intensified introspection.
Teshuvah. What is teshuvah? Here I’m going to give you a short outline of what our rabbis taught about the Teshuvah. Let me summarize some aspects of it in a few bullet points:
- Repentance, teshuva done out of love for God, Torah and Judaism is better than the repentance done out of fear of punishment. The latter one is not bad, it’s legitimate but the one done out of love, out of a positive vision of ourselves as better people, as those to do good and good only, is more precious.
- The teshuva is an entire process: it starts with realization of the wrongdoing, regret about this wrongdoing, appeasing the person that was hurt by it – but that’s not the end! – taking all kinds of steps to make sure it won’t happen again. We may obtain forgiveness from another person and God but this forgiveness will be temporary and will mean NOTHING if we continue to do what we did and this actually often THE MOST difficult work! It requires us to change our patterns of behavior. If we continue to do what we promised not to, it may make things WAY worse than they were before the teshuvah.
- Teshuva applies to the matters of observance as well. This, at its core, is about patterns of behavior, they need to be changed if they are wrong.
- How do we change our ways of behavior? In many ways, first, by separating yourself from the objects that cause our transgressions or from the situations we know that led to them. There are many ways and strategies to do that but I’m not going to get into all these details here.
- One of the greatest Jewish philosophers mentions something that may seem extreme: it is praiseworthy to confess in public and to make his sins known to others, revealing the transgressions he committed against his colleagues. Of course it’s not about revealing sins of others to the public, just your own and only those that affected other people. Those committed between Bein adam laMakom, between a person and God, shall never be made public; it’s a sign of arrogance to do it.
The last point, point number 7:
Repentance, as many other things in Judaism, is about relationships, between us and God but actually more profoundly, about relationships we have with each other. In order to do a full, complete teshuvah you need to have: well functioning conscience (which for us means an internalized ethics of the Torah) and empathy. You need to be able to feel, to imagine how the person you hurt feels like. You need to be able to “walk in someone else’s shoes”, as Hillel put it, to do teshuva because it requires us to judge. Although from the plain meaning of the law it may seem so, teshuva is not a ritual task assigned to get done at some period of the year. That kind of teshuva will be rejected by God, as our prophets say, so clearly and directly, without mincing words. It’s better to not do teshuva at all than to commit that kind of a fake lip-service, really.
The sign that you have had a genuine teshuva will be your emotional reaction to the wrong doing you committed. Actually, we can say that it is an essential element: every true teshuva will have such an emotional component, although it needs to be proportional. For example, you’re not gonna cry to God and tear your clothes if you forgot about the birthday of your friend or family member. It’s not good to forget about it, you will feel guilty, you’ll say I’m sorry, but you don’t make it into a drama. There are proportions in everything and they need to be kept.
Don’t lie to yourself but at the same time be kind to yourself as well. To paraphrase the words of Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan: if your today’s self hates the self you were yesterday, you are not in a good place. Try not to hate yourself for what you did; we have enough self-hating Jews in the world, we don’t need more. Loving your neighbor starts with loving yourself.
G’mar chatimah tovah,
Shabbat shalom
Rabbi Mirski
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