Yom Kippur Challenges
There is for me a larger problem in the traditional theology of Yom Kippur as set out in our liturgy. It was brought home to me when I visited a congregant in the hospital before High Holidays.
She had a serious illness, though it was not yet life threatening. “Yet” is a big word in such a sentence. She asked me: How am I to deal with the High Holiday liturgy when the notion of life and death hanging in the balance is not an abstract concept but my very reality? How do I deal with a liturgy that seems to judge me, when anyone so judged would fail the test? How do I understand a liturgy that implies that my illness is my fault, a punishment for past misdeeds? Most of all, how do I recite a liturgy that suggests that if I am good right now, God will write me in the book of healing and life but if not, then at this season, my doom will be sealed? Is this all my fault?
The High Holiday liturgy reminds us that there exists something beyond us, larger than we are, over which we have no control, and that something is called God. We are asked to come to terms with something that is fundamentally true but which we most often deny, that we are human, with all the limitations that come from being human rather than divine. The situation of the person in the hospital makes this notion very real. A life threatening illness strips us of our illusion that death is some far-off experience. We are not in control of our lives or at least there are real limitations on our control. In this context Yom Kippur is not a Day of Judgment, Yom ha-Din, the way it is traditionally understood. In Kabbalah, din is the aspect of God that exists opposite to hesed, “lovingkindness,” limitless flow. Din is the vessel that contains the flow, the boundary set around love, giving the world structure. Yom ha-Din in this understanding is the day that reminds us of our limitations, that brings us face to face with our outer limit—with death. We are not all powerful; we are not masters of our destiny. We are human beings filled with foibles, frailty and finitude.
Yet, even as we see ever more clearly our limitations, we are called to change. I used to think the rabbinic tradition was hopelessly naïve about the possibility of change, of teshuvah. But I now understand what the rabbis had in mind. Their optimism was based on faith, a belief in the human spirit, a belief in fact in miracles--not miracles like the crossing of the Red Sea, but rather the miracle of reconciliation between two long estranged relatives or friends, communities or even nations.
The message of Yom Kippur is that the world is recreated anew each day. It is up to you to be fully alive and fully aware.
We, all of us, live under a sentence of death. Everyone dies and, given enough time, even our memory eventually passes away. This decree has never yet been averted. It is expressed in the prayer called unetaneh tokef ; which begins by reminding us how helpless we are in the face of fate and then lists all the ways we can die: “who by fire, who by water…” Yet, this otherwise depressing reminder climaxes with the words uteshuvah utefillah utzedakah ma’arvirin et roa ha-gezera, “repentance, prayer and tzedakah can avert the severity of the decree.” We cannot change the decree, but we can alter its severity through repentance, prayer and tzedakah. To use my congregant in the hospital as an example one last time: She was buoyed by the knowledge that many people were praying for her—on one level, it made a difference to her to know that people cared; on yet another, it actually made a physical difference to her. She came to understand that no matter how many people prayed for her recovery she could still die, but those prayers made a difference to how she lived.
