Good Yontif.

One Yom Kippur day, maybe 16, 17 years ago, when Chochmat was doing High Holiday services in a different church, and it was the late afternoon: maybe the break before Yizkor, or before Nei’la. The sun was just beginning to go down and it was positioned absolutely perfectly behind the stained glass windows above the stage, so the colors of the glass shimmered and cast long columns of dusty pastel light across the stage,  and a woman was on stage softly playing some sort of ethereal flute, just playing quietly in the background during the break, and most people had left the sanctuary so the room was big and empty, with the music and the colors and the spaciousness. And I happened to be sitting toward the front, and I was almost a day into fasting and praying and singing and being surrounded by others doing the same, and I fell into this perfect constellation of internal and external conditions, some combination of beauty and soft openness and the majesty of the day, and I am no stranger to the Fear of Death, but I felt at that moment the most perfect peace such that I thought I could die right now and it wouldn’t be a problem. 

Inside of me, private until this very moment, I have thought of that experience as sacred. 

Somewhere around that same time, maybe a year before or after, I was with my daughter on Highway 5 driving north from L.A., we were in the left-most lane going with the flow of traffic, which was 80 miles an hour. Fast. And in one terrible moment, a moment that felt outside of time but was actually probably no more than 15 seconds, we lost control of the car, slid through the gravel on the shoulder, skidded across 4 lanes of highway, flipped over twice in the adjoining meadow, and landed upside down. There wasn’t time in those few seconds to process what was going on, but as you can imagine, the aftermath was distressing and painful.  I intermittently experienced severe Post Traumatic Stress associated with highway driving. On more than one occasion I had to pull over because my legs were trembling too much to work the foot pedals. 

I didn’t plan on either of those events. They came unexpectedly and unbidden. They did turn out to be touchstones, seminal events in my life that informed much of what came after. And though, in their own ways they were both dramatic, they were not unusual. Events like those, wondrous or painful, and all the unremarkable everyday events in between, are the content of a life. They are the material out of which a human life is formed.  Each of you, like me, has volumes of stories and experiences, histories, memories, journeys. And I bet that you, like me, have all kinds of judgements and opinions about such happenings. Some we want more of, some we go to great lengths to avoid. I call one of mine Sacred and the other Traumatic, one I walked away from in a blissful state of connection and peace, one landed me in the ICU for 3 days. 

But today is Yom Kippur, the most holy day in our calendar and a day – according to legend-  imbued with unique healing energy,  and the central task of today is Tshuvah, turning full on toward the Book of our Life, the collection of all those events and experiences and exchanges that are the story of you, the story of me. Coming right up close close close to your life, for the purpose of returning to what is essential and whole. For the purpose of returning to a body and a soul that can catch a glimpse of the infinite possibilities dwelling in The Mystery.  A body and soul that might even appreciate that all the uncertainty and vulnerability we navigate every single day is not only daunting, but also potentially the portal through which we might heal and find wholeness. Because that vulnerability and uncertainty is an opening – if we let it be, if we don’t armor up. I often think the very holiest moments in this day are those in which something – the music, the prayers, the hunger, the memories – something brings us right up against the full catastrophe of being alive; the momentous privilege and grave responsibility of having a life.  When I am awake to those holy moments, I am filled with  Awe and the Awe softens and tenderizes me and I find myself in an internal space of connection and compassion and receptivity and gratitude. In that place, though it’s not where I consistently hang out, it really does feel like I’ve returned to something innate, a place where there is room for the pain and the beauty and the commonplace. A space where there is room to be present to the whole of my life and to life beyond me.

One of the central-most actions and values in Judaism is finding the sacred in the everyday, redeeming the shards of holiness hidden throughout creation. The foundational assumption is  that every one of us is made of God, there is a spark of the Divine everywhere we look, and there is something to be learned, healed, redeemed in every one of those events that constitute a life. I know this can be a hard pill to swallow when we are grappling with the horrors of October 7 and the ensuing and increasing death and destruction in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and the rest of the Middle East. When we live in an accelerating Climate Crisis, an approaching election in which the very basis of democracy is on the line, and with the devastating racism, antisemitism, misogyny, and every other institutionalized  system that privileges the few and disadvantages the rest. Life is difficult and troubled, things are falling apart, you can feel the landslide in places where you might recently have thought the ground was solid. We feel unsafe, we feel disheartened. I hear from my friends with increasing frequency: I’m losing faith in our species; humankind has passed our expiration date, we are an unsustainable and irredeemable crew. We are a failed evolutionary experiment.

And maybe we are. But my friends, today is Yom Kippur and tomorrow we begin building the sukkah, the structure within which we will sit and gather all that we have harvested during these holidays, all that we have turned to and returned to, all that we have opened to and brought our presence to. I am paradoxically comforted by the way the late Alan Lew describes the trajectory from the work of The Days of Awe into Sukkot: he says during The Days of Awe he is stripped of all illusions, taken down to the bone, down to the Truth of his life. No more hiding or dodging or obfuscating. And now he sits in a sukkah, a structural representation of that stripped down internal state, a shelter that really offers no shelter, no protection from the wind or the rain. And this, it turns out, is the source of a very special Joy: the Joy of “…having acknowledged our brokenness, allowing ourselves to see what we don’t usually look at…”, bringing the typically averted reality of Death into our awareness, “…having nothing between our skin and the wind and the starlight, nothing between us and the world,” between us and Life.

And all this exposure, all this relinquishing of illusions of control, lands us (paradoxically) in the Sukkah of Joy. This is Rabbi Lew again:

“And when we speak of joy here, we are not speaking of fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and to reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of deep joy.”

This is so radically counter-intuitive and yet maybe, if you pause in openness, you might feel the truth of it. The wisdom in that trajectory of our tradition that takes us through this time of clear-eyed honesty and repair into the glad relief of being fully in our lives with all the messiness and ruptures, with all the breathtaking beauty and love. Having jettisoned, at least for the moment, the need to look like we have it all together, to look like we live protected from the uncertainty and vulnerability of being human.

This year I want to sit in a sukkah, and walk through my life, with enough room for every kind of experience, all of it. I want to believe there is something to be learned, healed, redeemed everywhere I look. I want the space that allows for sublime moments in a near-empty church on Yom Kippur, and for near-fatal car crashes outside Modesto. I want to stay close to the awareness that I have no idea who amongst my loved ones will be alive next Yom Kippur, or whether I will be here to give another drash. And I do not want to reinvest in the illusion that it is my job to keep things under control. Here is what the Buddhist teacher, Pema Chodron, says:

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.  We think the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved.  They come together and they fall apart.  Then they come together again and fall apart again.  It’s just like that.  The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen:  room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

May all of us grow in our capacity to live with vulnerability and paradox. May we grow in the strength that springs from embracing uncertainty, knowing that that is the space from which something new can arise. It is where seeming enemies can collaborate and where opposites overlap and realign. It is the place of vast possibility. It is the place of peace.

Shana Tova.