Laura Goldman, Yom Kippur 5786

Shana Tova, Everyone.

I’m guessing that when I say the High Holidays feel different this year, you will all know what I mean. You may hold the particular colors and textures that are uniquely yours, your positions, your experiences, your history, your very own nervous system, and yet we all probably share some sense of what it’s like to enter Yom Kippur today. More urgent, fraught, even perhaps with a touch of panic or dread. Closer to the edge. It feels as if the world and our tradition are sounding an alarm whose voice gets louder by the day.  And yet, isn’t it true that every year at this time the shofar sounds an alarm – both mournful and urgent – to wake up, to refine our course, to step more fully into the truth of our life? And isn’t it true that way back in 2003, when the late Alan Lew entitled his masterpiece of a book This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, that it was this very sense of urgency to which he referred. It’s always been so and still, this year feels different. I feel closer to the precipice. I’m guessing you might feel the same.

I don’t think I need to enumerate the 8,000 really good reasons why we feel the world is coming apart and the ground is shaking under our feet. Most of us don’t enjoy earthquakes or feeling close to the precipice. Most of us react with fear or anger, or some combination of both, with a side of grief. And when we watch our sisters and cousins and neighbors and strangers being dragged over the precipice, our fear and anger and heartbreak intensify. And maybe we also feel a sense of impotence or despair. There is no side-stepping or whitewashing the sense that the world is teetering on the edge of a volcano.

Right then is when I hear the words of the late poet, Andrea Gibson as she says:
“Remind me that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.”

Friends, we find ourselves under an erupting volcano, on the edge of a precipice and there is no escaping the political, ecological, and moral dangers we face. But I want to remind us this morning that right beside the dangers is the fertile ground, the potential for vast life-sustaining change: what the late Joanna Macy referred to as “The Great Turning.” The latent green shoots of new growth and repair lying just below the ground of destruction, and Oh what a challenge it is to give our attention to both: the horrors of war and hatred and greed, right beside the waves of love, compassion, and generosity. 

If we look around we find example after example of deep structural change that was born, individually or collectively, out of crisis, out of loss, out of the erupting volcano.  I bet you can think of a handful in your own life and in history. It is not that there is a direct causal relationship between extreme suffering and deep change, but rather, the right combination of circumstance, grace, and grit sometimes creates a tipping point that propels us into necessary change. When change and growth become imperative, we find a way to grow and change. Necessity, as Frank Zappa reminded us, is the mother of invention, and we are nothing if not an inventive people. When we look through this lens a pattern emerges, a pattern we see in nature, in the human psyche, and in history: there is death, there is birth, death, birth, death, birth: a cycle over and over. Often in this life something has to die in order for something new to be born. Or out of the crucible of adversity and suffering lies the possibility of new solutions, new visions, new life.  We might recoil at this pattern, we might wish it were not so, yet we collide with it repeatedly and we would do well to acknowledge it in humility and self-compassion because it is a painful pattern and true. Our sages knew this, and our most central Jewish narrative, the Exodus story, prominently features this pattern to drive the action of the story forward.  First, in Egypt the excruciating workload imposed on the enslaved Israelites becomes so unbearable that remaining is no longer an option. Extreme suffering, with the aid of divine intervention, becomes the driving force toward liberation. And later in the story, wandering in the wilderness on the way to The Promised Land, the generation born in Egypt and forged in slave mentality has to die out in order for a new people with a new mentality to enter the land. Loss in the service of New Life. Did you know that Jewish tradition holds that the Messiah will be born on Tisha b’Av, the day we mourn the worst tragedies that have befallen our people over the ages.  In this way we assert that out of the ashes of loss, destruction, and what the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr calls necessary disillusionment, arises the potential for redemption, for rebirth. I think many of us do not have to dig very deep to unearth lists of institutions and people toward whom we feel profoundly disillusioned. And this disillusionment fuels the strength and courage it takes to help carry forward the birth of something new, something better.

This rebirth, this Great Turning, brings us to the central gesture of Yom Kippur: Teshuvah, turning and returning. You can hear the echoes of repeating cycles in the language we use to describe a universal process of contraction followed by expansion followed by contraction followed by expansion. It is the way the heart pumps blood through the body, it’s the way of the seasonal cycles in nature, it’s the driving action of giving birth to new life. Of course we tend to prefer one side of this cycle to the other, but Life and our tradition encourage us to keep our hearts open in both. This is the Life Force. This is what we celebrate as we dance through The Hallelu, as we sing in the joy of being connected in community, as we gather to mark a loss, to mourn, to grieve, to bury, and then to reopen in the love and support we offer each other. Contraction, expansion, over and over. And here is where Judaism, and really every faith tradition brings in its own idiomatic yet universal wisdom. We are enjoined to be a force for directing the trajectory of that cyclical pattern toward healing and wholeness. And we simply cannot do that effectively with closed hearts. 

So, on this holy Yom Kippur morning, before the gates of transformation have closed, I put to you this question: Is there a way that we can hold in our bodies and souls the awareness that we are at once sitting underneath an active volcano and also living through the very natural cycles of death and rebirth that constitute human and all life on planet earth? Is there a way that we can be both devastated by the daily onslaught of horrifying news, while remaining openhearted in our faith in the redemptive and generative cycles of life? 

If we only notice the volcano, the precipice, we are overwhelmed, perhaps immobilized, and run the very real risk of contributing to a world ruled by fear and tribalism. Our efforts to protect ourselves from overwhelm can easily lead us to become fatalistic, cynical, or numb, complacent, or manic, overly analytic, or simply and exclusively enraged.

If we only notice the progress and potential, we block off the deeply feeling parts of our heart, the seat of love, compassion, care and yes, heartbreak. Either option alone distances us from our souls, from our essence, from each other, and from our connection to God. And after all, returning to those connections is the very job description for the work of Yom Kippur.

So again, my question to you: How can we hold both? How can we hold that we are in grave trouble and that, indeed, this is life – as it is and always has been? Or perhaps a better question might be How do we prepare our hearts to be openly present to the blessings and curses that are ubiquitous in Life without fixing our attention on one to the exclusion of the other? How can we walk through this pain-riddled and breathtakingly miraculous world, allowing ourselves to be clear-sighted and penetrated by both?

I invite you on Yom Kippur and the days ahead to live with these questions, to return to them again and again with curiosity and tenderness. When we live into the questions, as Rilke suggests, they may set down roots and drop seeds of insight and wisdom inaccessible to us when we’re burdened by certainty. Over time and even on the precipice, Life itself enchants us, instructs us, batters us, and ultimately encourages us to be openhearted in a world on fire. 

I leave you with a poem by Nayyirah Waheed whose words, I think, capture what it is to maintain our humanity in perilous times.

                  Keep the Rage Tender

The hard season will split you through.
Do not worry.
You will bleed water.
Do not worry.
This is grief.
Your face will fall out and down your skin
And there will be scorching.
But do not worry.
Keep speaking the years from their hiding places.
Keep coughing up smoke from all the deaths you have died.
Keep the rage tender.
Because the soft season will come.
It will come.
Loud.
Ready.
Gulping.
Both hands in your chest.
Up all night. Up all of the nights
To drink all damage into love.

Shana Tova.