Rabbi Ackerman's Blog
09/27/2009 - Kol Nidre Sermon 5770
Kol Nidre 5770-2009 – Rabbi David M Ackerman – Beth Am Israel"The entrance is low, and Grandfather has to stoop to enter. I follow…The prayers are almost silent. Grandfather prays with his eyes closed and the candlelight flickers on his forehead. All those praying are absorbed in their prayer. Not me."
The author, then a boy of six or seven, begins to daydream. His description continues:
"Grandfather breaks into my imaginings. He bends down and shows me the prayer book, the yellow pages with the large black letters leaping out from within it.
All the movements here are careful and secretive. I don’t understand anything. For a moment it seems to me that the lions that are above the Holy Ark are about to stir and leap down. The prayers are conducted in whispers. Sometimes a louder voice rises on the swell, dragging the whisperers after it.
This is the home of God, and people come here in order to sense His presence. Only I don’t know how to talk to Him. If I knew how to read the prayer book, I would also be able to see the wonders and the secrets, but for right now I have to hide myself away so that God won’t see my ignorance."
These are Aharon Appelfeld’s words, but they could easily be mine. Words like, “not me,” and “I don’t understand anything,” and, especially, “only I don’t know how to talk to God.”
I also share the delicate web of emotions – the uneasy alliance of shame and longing – with Appelfeld. If only I knew how to talk to God, I would have access to “the wonders and the secrets.” If only. And unlike our author, I know how to read the prayer book and am among the whisperers and those who know the careful and secretive movements.
I am able to comprehend the powerful, poetic, high minded language of the Mahzor, the many pages of ancient lines that trace and give substance to the weighty themes of the day: repentance, forgiveness, atonement, remembrance. I can follow the literary sources of the prayers, read and even write the footnotes and the commentaries that fill ancient and modern prayer books.
I take some comfort in knowing that my grandparents, and their grandparents, and their grandparents chanted the same phrases that echo across the ages, that they too pleaded with God to hear us, to cast us not away, to accept our prayers, to answer us. I see the beauty in the carefully scripted and elegantly presented religious sentiments that shape the experience of Yom Kippur. I know and value the ways in which the rituals and prayers of Yom Kippur serve to envelope us with the power and glory and beauty of tradition.
I am an insider and each year surrounded by the ceremony and pomp of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, I wonder: how can I talk, really talk with God? Do I even know how to begin? And what if the words are unfamiliar, the music strange, the grandeur overwhelming and perhaps even overbearing? For non-insiders how much more mystifying and off-putting the experience of Yom Kippur must be.
Aharon Appelfeld speaks for all of us, insiders or outsiders, his shame and his longing, his embarrassment and his desire. Many of us, me very much included, really do not know how to pray.
Before Abraham Joshua Heschel became a famed Jewish thinker and noted social activist he wrote poetry. At the tender age of 26, Heschel published a collection of Yiddish poetry, a small volume whose themes foreshadow much of his mature work and ideas.
Petition –
God, answer us – we long for You!
Overcome Your silence, Lord of all words!
The downcast of a thousand years beg you: - reveal Yourself!
Spare us word-plays on enigmas.
Show us goodness, not craft; joy not magic.
Why do you tease our trust in You?
Mock our pride in You?
Truly, you hide from our craving for You. Oh, see:
Our lustful passions disguise our need for You,
Our sins – a desperate thirst for You,
And Your silence – gehinnom, hell on earth.
I feel Your ear near to my beseeching lips,
and know that Your strict rule
is kinder than my pity.
But at times bile spurts from horror, and screams
through a thousand mouths: God Himself is our prosecutor!
And then I cannot speak my wordless words to anyone.
Deeper than my faith is the world’s despair,
so that I’d give away all Your gifts to me and all my talents,
for simply a light bright word given from You.
Listen to Heschel’s stirring words which I wish I could share with you in the original Yiddish: “Our lustful passions disguise our need for You, Our sins – a desperate thirst for You,” and, ”Spare us word-plays on enigmas. Show us goodness, not craft; joy not magic.” Show us “simply a light bright word given from You.”
Despite his abiding faith in the everyday and eternal intertwining of the divine and human realms, of heaven and earth, Heschel finds it painfully difficult to connect, even to feel that he has gotten through. I’ve used the wifi analogy before, because I believe it fits. Heschel here describes not just ‘limited connectivity,’ but rather a case of ‘no available networks.’ And unlike the young Aharon Appelfeld, Heschel speaks the language! How then can we, for whom the words are difficult, begin that dialogue? If only we knew how to talk to God. If only.
A very high percentage of Americans pray regularly and with frequency; many pray daily. 81% percent of American pray at least once a month outside of attending a religious service, and close to 60% pray daily according to the current Pew Forum’s annual survey of the religious landscape in the United States. Here’s an even more interesting finding. If you take Jews and Buddhists out of the mix, the numbers are even higher. And before you get too excited about our behaving more like Buddhists than Evangelical Christians or Muslims, twice as many Buddhists pray daily as do Jews. Clearly I’m not the only American Jew who doesn’t know how to talk to God. And I’m part of the minority that tries it most days.
In last week’s New York Times Magazine, Zev Chafetz assesses the state of prayer in contemporary America. In the course of his travels he visits with Rabbi Marc Gellman, who offers this analysis: “when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers, Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!” “Wow! are prayers of praise and wonder at the creation. Oops! is asking for forgiveness. Gimme! is a request or a petition. Thanks! is expressing gratitude.” While a little too cutesy for my taste, I think Gellman’s taxonomy is basically right. These are the things I yearn to talk to and with God about. I have requests; we all do. Good health, well being for ourselves and those we love. And I have a very long list of things for which I am profoundly grateful; I hope we all do.
Oops! and Wow! however, go to the heart of Yom Kippur.
There are myriad ways in which I fall short just about every day and I need to acknowledge those shortcomings in a meaningful way. I seek forgiveness, from myself, from those whom I have harmed, and, I think, from the God who created us all. In a short meditation about Yom Kippur, Heschel writes: “We are all failures. At least one day a year we should recognize it. I have failed so often; I am sure those present here have also failed. We have much to be contrite about; we have missed opportunities. The sense of inadequacy ought to be at the very center of the day.”
And then there’s the Wow! category. It’s what Heschel calls “radical amazement,” an abiding sense of wonder and mystery, an insight derived from bearing witness to the extraordinary planet and universe that we inhabit. It’s what you sense when you take in the view at the top of mountain or at the lip of the canyon or at the foot of the waterfall. Wow!
I invite you to ask yourself which of those prayers you wish to recite this Yom Kippur. What’s on your Gimme! Thanks!, and especially, your Oops! & Wow! list for 5770?
At the very same moment that Aharon Appelfeld was learning the ropes of Israeli society as a child survivor of the Holocaust, another great Hebrew writer to be, Amos Oz, was beginning his education in a two room schoolhouse in Jerusalem. There he encountered his “first love, an unmarried woman in her thirties, Teacher Zelda, Miss Schneersohn.”
"I loved the way Teacher Zelda placed one word next to another. Sometimes she would put an ordinary, everyday word next to another word that was also quite ordinary, and all of a sudden, simply because they were next to each other, two ordinary words that did not normally stand next to each other, a sort of electric spark jumped between them and took my breath away."
Teacher Zelda was none other than the famed Hebrew poet Zelda, who finds a way to talk to, and with, God by standing ordinary words next to each other in unusual combinations.
Yom Kippur Eve –
On the eve of Yom Kippur,
we sailed
from experiences ended to experiences begun.
The eve of Yom Kippur was for us
the beginning of time
in the silence of an island
whose candles lit the sea.
There you held me to your sorrowing heart
in the presence of the Almighty,
before you went to pray with all the rest,
before you became one of the flock
in the chapel,
one of the trees
in the forest.
Life itself, its loves and its longings, leads to prayer. That, I think, is Zelda’s lesson in this gem of a poem.
It’s also the lesson of Yom Kippur. Our tradition divides our lives, our transgressions, and our quest for atonement into two broad categories – beyn adam l’haveiro & beyn adam la’makom – our human relationships & our connection to God. The sequence and structure of Yom Kippur follow to the letter the pattern set out in Zelda’s ‘Yom Kippur Eve.’ Before turning to God in search of atonement, we are obligated to face one another, to speak truthfully about our hurt, to seek forgiveness, and, hopefully, to forgive. Only once we’ve done that can we turn to God.
Zelda’s poem makes it clear that the tradition’s pattern of behavior for Yom Kippur is not just a matter of sequence. The way we turn to God, to be successful, has to mirror the way we turn toward one another. When we talk to one another honestly, directly, longingly, lovingly, clearly, from our experience, we’re much more likely to receive and to grant forgiveness, and we’re much more likely to connect with one another. That, teaches Zelda, is also how to talk to God.
A small and little known prayer completes the cycle this Kol Nidre night. It is a prayer with a story.
Ribono shel Olam!
Lord of the universe!
It is apparent and known unto you,
that if you had cattle and gave them to me to tend,
though I take wages for tending from all others,
from you I would take nothing,
because I love you.
Preserved in a medieval book of spiritual practices known as Sefer Hasidim, this is the prayer of a shepherd, a simple man who “did not know how to pray.” In an effort, I guess, to civilize our simple shepherd, a learned man sought to teach him “the usual prayers, but Heaven interfered.” The story concludes: “The Merciful One desires the heart only.”
Or as Rav Nahman of Bratslav counsels: focus your energy on the words that you speak before God, just as you would when speaking with a friend. Plain, direct, clear, from the heart. Rav Nahman and our medieval shepherd, Teacher Zelda, Rabbi Gellman and Poet Heschel offer unified advice. The way to talk to God, the way to pray, is to speak simply and sincerely, and directly from our own experience. It’s not so mysterious after all.
Tonight we have begun the annual journey known as Yom Kippur. This Yom Kippur let us each find the courage and the wisdom to search deep within and to bring up to our lips the prayers of our hearts. We need to pray, and so let us open our hearts before we open our mouths in order to express our prayers openly, firmly, forcefully. And let us hope that the Creator of us all truly hears the words of our beseeching lips and answers us.
As the special Psalm for this season puts it: Sh’ma adonai – Hear, O God, koli ekra – my voice calls out to You, v’khoneini va’aneini – be gracious to me and answer me.
So may it be. Ken y’hi ratzon. And let us all say, AMEN.
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