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Yom Kippur Drash 2004
It
used to be, and probably still is, in some places, that the rabbi's drash on YK
was long and stern, filled with fire and brimstone, designed to bring the
congregation to its knees, eliciting shame for one's sinfulness and fear of
punishment. But this is a rabbi who doesn't believe in an angry, vindictive
God, nor do I believe that shame and fear produce anything worthwhile. So I'm
afraid I am going to have to disappoint you tonight. Sorry!
Really, the Kol Nidre service speaks for
itself and all I want to add tonight are three images. They are from Kabbalah,
and I offer them as a way to give form to what it is we are doing on YK, and
what it is we are striving for, on the spiritual path, in general. Depending
upon where you are in your life process, I hope that one or more might speak to
you on your Yom Kippur journey and beyond.
The first image is
that of a vessel. In Kabbalah we call sacred vessels: kelim. Much is said about the mystical origin of the
universe involving vessels, but for now... simply Imagine a beautiful bowl,
lovingly crafted to be pleasing to the eye, as well as useful. This bowl is
meant to serve. If you are more technologically inclined, you might want to
imagine this vessel in terms of a satellite dish, not so beautiful perhaps, but
brilliantly constructed to receive and transmit high-power signals in a
flawless manner. Both the bowl and the satellite dish are kelim.
And Kelim are us. Each one of us is lovingly, uniquely crafted by
God to hold the radiant gift of love and serve it up; William Blake said: We are put in the world for but a little
while to learn to bear the beams of love. A kabbalist would agree: we come into
the world, to receive the full magnitude of God's beauty and healing power and, like a satellite dish,
to transmit it faithfully back into the world to heal and restore it. Either way, being human means being a
sacred vessel, designed to receive and experience the breathtaking divinity of
creation and, as Reb Zalman might say, "to pass on the goodies."
But It happens that
over time, even the most beautiful bowl, even the most finely tuned satellite
dish get mucky. We get coated, as it were, with our own personal history, fears
and beliefs, especially negative ones.
Our personal stories, our opinions about things, our staunch positions,
also serve to coat over the message we are here to transmit. All of this is totally normal, but,
ultimately our personal overlay can occlude our purpose, and then, as Abraham
Joshua Heschel said, we become messengers who have forgotten their message.
What we are doing
onYK? You might say, it's
something like taking our kelim
in for a servicing, a deep cleaning of the sacred urn; a re-calibrating of that
satellite dish, so that we can once again receive the highest frequencies and
transmit them impeccably.
But sometimes life
doesn't wait for YK. Sometimes life "services us" before we get to
the service...we get worked over, cleaned out, without being asked, and this
can feel quite brutal. In the blink of an eye, life changes: our health fails,
or there is an accident or a loss of someone precious, and these unavoidable
life occurrences cause us as kelim great suffering.
This
brings us to our second image, known as shvirat hakelim, or the breaking
of the vessels. Painful but almost always transformational, a shvirat
hakelim experience is
something we would never, ever pray for. In fact, we pray to be spared from it,
yet it is the thing that accelerates our soul's growth more than any other life
event. Here is an outrageous teaching about shvirat hakelim:
At
the end of the Torah when Moses' greatness is being extolled, the rabbis sat
around and asked each other: Of all the miracles and wonders Moshe performed,
which was the greatest? Parting of the Red Sea, turning the water of the Nile
River into blood ? meeting God on the mountaintop for 40 days and 40 nights to
bring down the Torah? Tolerating the people's kvetching for 40 years?
Moshe's greatest
act? decided the rabbis: She-shiber et haLuchot. That he broke the tablets when he came down from
Mount Sinai, and found the people dancing around a golden calf. The Holy
Slonomer Rebbe asks: What? Are you kidding? The greatest feat of this avatar's
life was the smashing of the tablets? Why was that the greatest?
Then he answers his own
question in a surprising way:
"Because in breaking
the tablets,
he broke the heart of
everyone standing there.
From small to great, every
person was broken."
At first blush, his words
sound ruthless. How could it e good to break the hearts of people? But herein
lies the clue to the deepest meaning of YK:
We have just learned
that we are all vessels. Now the rabbis are telling us that true greatness
comes not from being a perfect vessel but, rather, a broken one; not from being
an untarnished heart but a ravaged one.
Moses' spreme act of courage, the Slonomer declares, was paradoxically
not the giving but the shattering of the perfect revelation, and with it, the
shattering of the people's comfortable illusions. You see, in 40 days, the
people's connection to the Living God had already gone amuck. Instead of
keeping their hearts open and empty, they had become filled with their own
needs, their own agenda, their own self-satisfaction. Moses knew that comfort was not what he had brought us out
of Egypt for. He knew that only through our breaking, would we ever find
wholeness.
Midrash Raba tells us: God loves broken
vessels,. "So long as the vessel is whole, God does not wish to see it,
broken he wishes it." And God's favorite vessel? The human heart. What an amazing teaching. The rabbis,
are reminding us what history has so deeply inculcated in us over centuries:
that God is most alive in us, not when we are full and satisfied and securely
clutching that which is ours, but when we are empty, cracked open, when we are
brokenhearted. Moses, they say, was our most brilliant leader because he knew
that even that which we deem most precious, even Torah, even our hearts, must
be broken again and again throughout our lives, in order for the God of Life to
reach us. This is Shvirat HaKelim.
So
we have vessels (kelim) and
we have the breaking of vessels (shvirat hakelim) But there is a third, far less ruthless, way to
relate to the path, and one that is deeply embedded in our mystical tradition
and in Yom Kippur. This is known as bittul hayesh, which I am translating tonight simply as radical
letting go. So away from broken crockery, let's go out into the night sky. Here the image is of pure light,
and the teaching comes by way of a
personal story. Something that happened to me and which I tried to
repress because it is somewhat embarrassing, as you will understand shortly.
It happened years
ago when I was camping out by myself near the Sangre de Christos, on 40 acres
of wild property called the Wild Web. Now my beloved husband will testify that
I am not known for my sense of direction. (Am known for my lack of it.) Somehow
I found myself trying to find my way back to my tent after nightfall with
nothing but a lit candle. So I wouldnt qualify for a good boy scout either.
Fortunately, it was a warm and still summer night. So my little flame did not waver, but it didnt help me see
much either.
After stumbling
around in circles for some time, I realized I was hopelessly lost and I gave up
trying to find my way in the dark. I sat down on the ground, feeling pretty
nervous and clutching my candle, and took what comfort I could in staring into the flame, not letting my eyes veer
from the tiny orb of light it cast in that big night. I stayed that way for a
long time, clutching and staring and praying that I would be ok.
I am not sure what
came over me, probably the realization that the candle was going to go out
soon. In a moment of sheer unreason, I blew it out. At that moment, light gave
way to Light, and I almost fell over backwards to see the entire heavens and
millions of stars exploding into view all around me...so luminous, so vast, so
happy to have my attention. The stars were definitely laughing at me that
night, winking and twinkling away,
laughing at me and the
brave sacrifice I had made, exchanging the safety of my little candle for all
of them. OK I got it.
Bittul HaYesh:
letting go of what is, surrendering our small view, so that we can glimpse the
Mystery. That night I spent on my back, in a kind of rapture, watching the
stars revolve around the heavens, feeling small, feeling cosmic, feeling a part
of it, not apart from it. At dawn, it became clear that I had been only a
couple hundred feet away from my tent the whole time. OK it was a little hard
on the ego but so worth it.
This
is Bittul Hayesh. blowing
out our own small candle, so to speak, so that we can see a much bigger Light.
And this kind of letting go is so
Jewish...Throughout the
Torah, we are commanded, to let go of what we think is ours, to die in small
ways in order to inherit something of eternal value; We are taught to make
Sabbath even when the world tells us to keep on going; And on Yom Kippur, we
are taught to forgive even when it is not logical, to dissolve our vows even
when we really meant them. To let go of our food and comfort, our grievances
and our judgments, so that we might experience something Vaster than ourselves.
Our three images--the vessels, the
breaking of vessels and blowing out our little candle--give us an idea of the
paradoxical, often discomfiting journey we are on together: In the end, they
say, we are vessels that serve best when we are broken. We are hearts that beat
with the world's pulse only when we are cracking. And we are candles that put
out the most light when they are blown out. Go figure.
This Yom Kippur, we
dont need fire and brimstone, or the fear of punishment to move us to meaning.
We have everything we need to step into eternity:
We
have our hearts and we have each other, this amazing community, with whom to do the holy work of letting go:
of our fears, our grievances, our small holdings, community in which to blow
out the candle of our small selves so that we might glimpse together, and more
than glimpse, that we might LIVE together in the Mystery and in a far vaster vision of our lives.
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