Last year on Yom Kippur, I discussed a topic that is a little taboo. Something that we often don’t speak about in polite company. Something that many of you might think is inappropriate to discuss in a synagogue. It’s a topic that might make you feel uncomfortable. And because Yom Kippur seems like a good time to make you uncomfortable, let’s make this a bit of a tradition: Tonight, once again, we’re going to talk about… God.

Some of you might be excited to talk about God. Some of you may want to get up and leave. You might be thinking, “Why does he have to go and ruin a beautiful prayer service by talking about God?” I hear you. 

If you’re like me, the God as portrayed in Jewish liturgy is often not very resonant – and the God of the High Holy Days is particularly distasteful: King, judge, auditor, punisher, executioner, domineering parent. As Rabbi Toba Spitzer writes, “Attending High Holy Days services is a bit like going to a play where you really don’t like the main character.” 

But given that we’re going to be sitting together in prayer for much of the next 24 hours, I think we have to ask ourselves: Who or what are we trying to connect to when we pray?

And since it’s the holiest night of the year, let’s wrestle with what I would say is the worst God-name of them all: Adonai. 

Adonai is often translated as Lord. Master. Ruler. To me, it represents the worst of the hierarchical, “old man in the sky” conception of God that feels frozen in the Middle Ages, from a time of feudal societies with Lords and Vassals. It conures images of domination and submission, power and control. Maybe you’re into that – that’s cool, no judgment. But I struggle with it.

What makes Adonai even worse is that it replaces one of the most beautiful God names: YHVH, the unpronounceable four letters that are an amalgamation of the Hebrew words for Is, Was, and Will Be – Hayah, Hoveh, Yehiyehe. YHVH poignantly captures the mystery of a God that cannot be described in words. YHVH reflects the ever-changing nature of the Divine across past, present, and future. And the breathy consonants of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey evoking the source of life that flows through every inhale, every exhale, of every living being. 

But because the Priests decreed that YHVH cannot be said out loud, they replaced it with Adonai – quite a different conception of God, to put it mildly – and making it now the most common God-name when we recite scripture and liturgy: We say it twice in the Shema – Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. We repeat it twice to introduce the list of 13 Divine attributes – Adonai, Adonai, El Rachum VeChanun. And it’s the third word of every blessing – Baruch Ata Adonai.It’s basically a constant reminder of the God I don’t relate to.

But it’s Yom Kippur, so we’re not giving up so easily. Tonight, we’re going to reclaim Adonai.

***

After much searching, I found a way in, courtesy of Rabbi Menachem Nochum Twersky. The Chernobyler Rebbe, as he was known, was an early leader in the Hassidic mystical revivalist movement in Eastern Europe in the 1700s. His most famous book, and his nickname, is the Me’or Einyaim, the Light of the Eyes.

The Chernobyler Rebbe offers a radical re-translation: He says that the word Adonai comes not from the word Adon, or Master, but rather from the Adanim, the sockets used to connect the walls in the Tabernacle. 

As we are told in Shemot, the Book of Exodus, the Israelites traveled 40 years in the Wilderness with a mobile sanctuary at the center of the camp. Its walls were built of wooden planks, and the planks were held up and connected by silver sockets called Adanim. 

The Chernobyler Rebbe argues that God – this lofty intangible concept, this infinite mystery – descends from the heavenly realm and appears to us in this concrete form of the Adanim: 

שהוא אלוהותו יתברך שיורד למטה במדריגות תחתונים וגשמיים

And so if we humans want to connect to the Divine, this is the form we need to connect with:

וצריך לייחד זה עם המקור אשר ממנו יצאו 

So God is… a piece of construction material? Like all names of God, Adonai is a metaphor. The Meor Einyaim refers to Adonai as one of God’s many “levushin”, Divine garments that give us a sense of the contours of God since God is inherently indescribable, the infinite mystery. God-metaphors are meant to evoke a certain emotion in us – and that emotion is a way for us to viscerally connect with an aspect of the Divine. It’s an imperfect approach, but meets us where our human minds and hearts work. 

***

So if we leave behind the Adonai of Lord and Master, and accept the Meor Einayim’s invitation, let’s consider: What does it mean that God is a socket? 

Well, what is a socket, at its core? It’s a receptacle, a container, a receiver.

You can guess where the Jewish mystics take this one – basically every God image for them is a metaphor for sex. We’re not going to go there, because this is a family place, so we’ll keep it PG. But the reason that metaphor is omnipresent for them is because it evokes a potent feeling of intimacy – when you’re so close to someone that your bodies feel like one. 

I was on a meditation retreat recently with my teacher Sylvia Boorstein, the author of That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist. She told us about snuggling with her newborn granddaughter, and that magical ability a baby has to mold into any crevice in your body – no matter how they lay on you, they’re like a fleshy ball of clay, filling that space between your arm and your chest, or in the folds of your neck. That also made me think about walking down the street with my son when he was younger, and the way we held hands, he would stick his little index finger into my fist. Maybe those are more PG versions of Adonai. 

The Adonai face of the God invites us to consider: What does it feel like to be held by someone? To surrender into someone’s arms and totally let go? To trust someone so deeply that you’re willing to show them your most intimate parts, to be seen in all your complexity, and know that they’ll still be there for you? Do you have someone in your life who holds you like that? Or has held you like that in the past? Or perhaps you yearn to be held that way? 

The Torah tells us that the Adanim are made of kesef, which means silver in Hebrew, but it comes from the root kosef, which means  “love”. It also shares the same root as nichsaf, which means “yearning”. So the Torah is essentially telling us: God is made out of love and yearning. It’s in those experiences of being held – or in that yearning – where you can encounter the Adonai face of the Divine.

A few years ago I was on a different week-long silent meditation retreat, this time at Spirit Rock in Marin, where they often pair you with a random person as your roommate – which can be a bit awkward, since you’re sharing a room together, sleeping right next to each other, but since it’s a silent retreat, you don’t know anything about this person. Each day, we went about our routines side by side, but without making any eye contact or conversation. Turns out we both like to exercise, so we’d wake up each morning before sunrise with the first bell, and silently do 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups right next to each other in the space between our beds. It was cute.

When you’re on silent retreat, with no access to screens or books, your mind often fixates on whatever inputs are around you. Like, you read your shampoo bottle multiple times a day. So, I’ll be honest, my mind became a little obsessed with this guy. It didn’t hurt that he was pretty good looking. I noticed his t-shirts, his toenails, his brand of deodorant. And most of all, his tattoos. He had a lot of them. And one in particular grabbed my attention: an intricately detailed drawing of a toothbrush. Why would anyone get a tattoo of that? 

So of course, after a week of low-key stalking this guy, I immediately started to look for him at the end of the retreat when we were allowed to talk again. I found him bee-lining right toward me, and he blurted out, “Dude, I’ve been dying to talk to you this week. Who are you?” We spent the next hour talking over lunch, and as we parted ways, I had to ask him, “What’s with that toothbrush tattoo?”

So he told me that he had a best first friend since elementary school. They did everything together, told each other everything, supported each other through times of deep vulnerability and pain, cared deeply for each other. They even brushed each other’s teeth. His friend died suddenly a few years ago, so he got the toothbrush tattoo in his memory.

There’s something about that story that just gets to me. There’s something just so weirdly intimate about that image. What it might be like to imagine you and God brushing each other’s teeth? Is that Adonai?

***

While the Adanim are holders, they are also connectors. They bind together the wooden planks, the kerashim, that comprise the walls and support structure of the traveling Mishkan sanctuary. So perhaps Adonai is the aspect of divinity that we experience when we connect with others. The Adanim in the Mishkan always come in pairs, to teach us that our relationships are places for sacred encounter. 

In the same Torah portion that we learn about the Adanim, we also learn about the holy Ark, atop which are two golden Keruvim, cherubs facing each other. Tomorrow, we will accompany the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, as he conducts the Yom Kippur temple service, the one time a year he enters the Holy of Holies, the Kodesh HaKedoshim, where the Ark is housed. Clouded in incense, he approaches the Ark, and hears the voice of the Divine emanating from between the two cherubs. Yom Kippur is the day we are reminded that the voice of the Divine emanates from the space between two people. The word for cherubs in Hebrew, Kruvim, means “those who are close with, those who are intimate with.” The Divine speaks to us from that experience of intimacy with another.

The Adamim are not just connectors – they are joints. They are the point where two entities meet. And not always at parallel lines – sometimes the point of intersection is perpendicular. As our country and our culture gets more polarized, as we head into a brutal election, the Adanim teach us that Divinity can be found in the spaces where we can connect with others, especially those that disagree with us. 

The past year in particular has provided us many opportunities for this sacred practice as we’ve grappled with the atrocities of Israel-Palestine and what it means to be a Jew in the world today. In that place of challenge and stretching and growing, that is where we can experience Adonai. The space between two people feels like a particularly important place to encounter the Divine these days.  

The Adanim are also fasteners – the binds that hold our relationships together. When things get rocky, when our triggers get activated, when things feel shaky or tense or precarious – the Adanim are that source of strength that inspires us to hold on, to keep trying, to stay in it even when every cell in our body is telling us to detach. 

Earlier this year, I was in a relationship where the other person did something that really hurt me. They violated my trust and really made me feel deeply disrespected. My initial reaction was: I’m outta here. Done. And to make matters even worse, this person didn’t really know how to repair the damage they had done. They wanted to repair, and they understood that they did something wrong, but they just kept talking about the reasons why they did what they did – when all I wanted to hear was an acknowledgement of the harm they caused me, in a way that made me confident they really understood it, so I could trust that they wouldn’t do it again. 

I told them that they really needed to take the lead in driving the repair work between us, that I wanted it to come from them. But I kept getting text messages that felt tone deaf, totally missing the mark for what I needed. So I had a choice: I could leave. Or I could jump in with them. I could speak out my needs, I could painstakingly hand-hold this person through the repair process I was wanting, I could be patient when it wasn’t perfect, and keep walking beside them until I felt my body start to relax into trust again. 

And that’s what I chose to do – and to be honest, it’s an ongoing process with this person, but I continue doing the work, because beneath the anger and the sadness and the fear was a foundation of connection that was important to me. That willingness to fight, to risk, for love – is core to the Yom Kippur practice of teshuva, and where we can encounter God in our lives.

Of course some relationships need to be left, need to collapse or decompose. The Adanim are not sealed together – they can detach when needed, as the Mishkan was assembled and disassembled at each of the Israelites 42 stops along their wilderness journey. Strong yet supple. Firm yet flexible. The Adanim is the face of the Divine we encounter in this sacred struggle, consciously testing the ties that bind us to others.

***

I like to imagine the wooden planks of the Mishkan, lined up side by side, attached one to the other by the Adanim. It almost looks like a paper-chain of people, encircling the Sanctuary. But it all feels a little… conceptual. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to invite you to experience the Adanim as a pathway to connecting with the Divine, right now.

If you’re willing, I invite you to hold your hands vertically to your right and your left, and line up your hands with the person sitting on either side of you. If you’re comfortable with it, it would be great if you could touch hands. And if you prefer not to touch someone else, you can just hold your hands an inch or two apart from each other – but see if you can forge an energetic connection between them. 

Once you have both your hands lined up with people next to you, I invite you to close your eyes and take a breath. What does it feel like to be connected with every person in this room? In actuality, the chain of connection that goes around this room extends far beyond the four walls of this building. There is a lifeforce that connects all of us, like an invisible mycelium network, extending out through all living beings. It connects us to our ancestors and all who have come before us, and to all our future descendents. Nobody is left out, nobody is excluded, nobody is separate, nobody is ever really alone.  

In his teaching on the Adanim, the Me’or Einayim quotes a verse from the Torah – perhaps the verse most quoted by the Jewish mystics throughout our history: Melo Kol Ha’aretz B’kvodo. The whole world is filled with the Divine presence. All beings are Divine. God is the sum total of all of us – the invisible mysterious bond that connects us all. 

***

So why does all this matter? How is this relevant to our Yom Kippur services and our spiritual practice for the rest of the year? My goal tonight is to invite you to try stepping out of the paradigm that God is someone or something we pray to, but rather a feeling we connect with or an energy we consciously plug into – and the experience of doing that is the source of blessing. The word for prayer in Hebrew is “l’hitpalel” – its reflexive, meaning something we do to ourselves. We don’t pray to someone; we pray to evoke something in ourselves – and that feeling is part of the fulfillment of the prayer.

I hope I’ve been able to change your associations when you encounter the name Adonai – or at least add another layer. When we chant “Adonai Adonai” to open the 13 Divine Attributes later tonight, when we close our service afterward with Kaveh El Adonai, when we proclaim “Adonai Hu HaElohim” seven times at the end of Neilah tomorrow night or dance to “Adonai Eloheichem Emet” – or any time you come across Adonai in your prayers this year and beyond, I hope you’ll no longer just think of Lord or Master. I hope you’ll try connecting with the experience of being held in intimate embrace, or being connected to every person in the room, or God brushing your teeth. 

And perhaps more importantly, when you’re doing the work of being in relationship with others – and particularly when it’s difficult – I hope you will remember the Adanim, and that this messy, exhausting work is a form of prayer, it’s a spiritual practice, and according to the Me’or Einayim, it’s the most accessible way for us to connect with the Divine. 

***  

There’s one more facet of the Adanim that I want to share with you tonight, as a closing thought. They are sockets, joints, and fasteners. But they are also hinges. And it is that image that inspired this poem by Rabbi Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt:

God is the doorman,
the one you don’t notice

holding the heavy panel
so you can go through.

God is the hinge
that swings the door,

the joint and socket
that make opening possible.

God is the door
through which you walk

from one chapter
to the next,

adorned with words
that remind you

who you are becoming,
who you really are.

Every year, Dr. Danny Matt, the world’s leading authority on the Zohar, who many of you know from our community here in Berkeley – every year, he searches the Torah to find verses that when you add up the numerological value of their letters, they equal the number of the Jewish year. So for 5785, this new Jewish year, here is one of the verses he found:

(וְאֶל־מֹשֶׁ֨ה אָמַ֜ר עֲלֵ֣ה אֶל־יְקֹוָ֗ק  (שמות כד, א  

To Moses He said, “Go up to Adonai”  (Exodus 24:1)

This is the year to go up to Adonai. To lean into connection, to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to open yourself to love. 

MiShebereach Avoteinu V’Imoteinu, may the sacred Oneness that blessed our ancestors bless us with the Divine embrace of Adonai. As we enter the new Jewish year, this portal of transformation, knowing that Adonai is holding the door open for us, cheering our journey, holding our hands as we cross the transom, may we emerge on the other side one step closer to the people we are meant to be.