Kol Nidrei 5786
by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
As I stand here on Erev Yom Kippur, the eve of the Day of Atonement, I’m picturing us on the shore of a river. I don’t know why we’re here, but our task, I feel certain, is to reach the other side.
The current is rushing, and the river appears deep. There are riptides and whirlpools, eddies and flows. But fortunately I see, laid out before us, the river is dotted with stones peeking above the water, that may just traverse the breadth of the river. There is one giant arc of stones, boulders even, that makes it all the way across, though as I look closer, I see that those stones are too far from one another for us to be able to rely on them alone. As I look more closely, between each of those boulders are spirals of smaller rocks, which appear to navigate all the way from one giant stone to the next. As I get closer still, I see that these rocks, too, are too far apart from one another to traverse, but once again, there are spirals of yet smaller stones, navigating between the rocks, which navigate between the boulders, and it appears that they do just allow me to get from stone to rock to boulder, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll make it across.
I’ve been having an image lately in which the mitzvot, the sacred calls, the sacred ritual, ethical, and moral callings of Jewish tradition, are stones, touchstones, if you will, a series of stones that are present to help us traverse the rushing waters of life. It’s possible we might not need them; Lord knows, I’ve gotten myself pretty wet a time or two and eventually, I think, come out okay. But there they are: present to aid our journey, to help us traverse this river of life, keeping us steady as the current rushes around us.
To navigate this course of time, this course of a life, Judaism lays down three pathways, three arcs, three rhythms that intersect one another: the arc of life, the Jewish life cycle, from birth to death; the Jewish year cycle, from Tishrei to Elul and around again; and the Jewish daily cycle from evening to morning, again and again, day after day.
Each person on the planet experiences each of these cycles: we’re all born, and we all die; we all move with the earth as it orbits the sun over the course of the year; and we all spin on this earth, rotating with it, as we encounter the sun setting and rising, setting and rising, over the course of our lives.
It can sound dizzying — all this movement among the cosmos. In some respects, we’re really being taken for a ride, that current is really rushing. And yet, here comes Jewish life, its anchors, its touchstones, its pathways, to help us navigate our journey.
We can talk for a moment about what these cycles look like: when we’re born, in a Jewish context, our parents help us by securing us on that very first stone, by participating in that very first ritual act of Jewish life, by giving us a name. Or if we choose to be Jewish, if we convert, it’s a name we select for ourselves. Whether it’s a name of a loved one whose memory we carry, the name of a biblical figure who inspired our parents or us, or simply a name whose sounds are evocative, it’s a name that will carry great meaning for us, and by which we enter the brit, the covenant, of the Jewish people. The covenant which God made with our ancestors and which is a living covenant between God and each of us.
From there we begin to navigate all three of those cycles: the cycle of a life, the cycle of a year, the cycle of daily living.
The year cycle, most of us know: we move from this season, Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year, leaves crunching underfoot, the sound of the shofar ringing in our ears, into Yom Kippur. If the shofar has done its job, we have woken up to the need for t’shuvah, t’filah, and tzedakah, we’ve woken up to the need for renewal in our lives, through teshuvah, repentance and repair; tefilah, prayer and reflection; and tz’dakah, acts of justice and righteousness. On Yom Kippur, we acknowledge the ways we’ve deviated from what we know to be good and true; for one day, we commit the day to recentering, to realigning our path.
From there we move to Sukkot, out into our fragile shelters, reminding ourselves that we are but passing through life, as our ancestors passed through the wilderness, impermanently here, but grateful for, and joyous in, our blessings.
A couple of months later on Hanukkah, we kindle lights in the midst of darkness, reminding ourselves that against all odds, light can and does win out.
On Purim, we exhale with some revelry, reminding ourselves of the sacredness of the silly, the importance of irreverence.
Then we move into Passover, the celebration of our freedom, the reminder that we have experienced redemption before and will again.
We then count seven days of seven weeks of the Omer, those measurements of grain that are the blessings we savor, bringing them finally as an offering on Shavuot, that celebration not only of our freedom but of our responsibility. That when we broke free from narrowness and constriction and oppression, it wasn’t to a life of luxury and decadence; it was to one of purpose and commitment, whose code we encountered at Sinai.
That code reminds us of the remaining patterns of our lives: the months, the weeks, the days.
The months are how Jewish time has been marked for generations, the waxing and waning of the moon, its crescent growing to a full orb, and shrinking again, signifying when one month is ending, and a new month, a Rosh Hodesh, is beginning, a chance for renewal throughout our year.
And then of course there is the week. There is nothing astronomical, nothing directly pertaining to the celestial bodies, when it comes to the seven day week, culminating in Shabbat. The seven-day week, Shabbat, is part of the Jewish origin story, an intuition about the spiritual DNA coded into the universe, the rhythm we need for our lives, six days of work and creation, a seventh day of rest and rejuvenation. A reminder that we are not here only to produce, but sometimes just to be and just to live.
And then there is daily life, from one evening to the next — for that’s how Judaism understands the day to begin and end, vayehi erev vayehi boker, there was evening and then there was morning; a day, light, always follows darkness. The days are filled with countless moments, touchstones, opportunities, to participate in these structures of holiness: from the blessing we say at the setting of the sun, to the bedtime Sh’ma, the call to listen to divine oneness before we go to sleep, picking right back up where we left off the next morning, parallel prayers with the sun’s rising. Three times a day, our ancestors understood us to be called to bring an offering of prayer, a moment of inviting ourselves to feel close to God, to break down those inner walls between God and our souls. These times were modeled after our ancestors: Abraham who would get up to pray in the morning, Isaac went out to try talking to God in the field toward evening, and Jacob, the text says, would encounter God at nighttime. So we model ourselves accordingly, adding in a fourth opportunity for prayer, Musaf, on Shabbat and holidays, because of our special relationship to time on those days, the opportunities we have on those days to linger, and a fifth, on the Shabbat of Shabbats, today, Yom Kippur at Ne’ilah, the closing of the gates, one last chance to feel that special closeness before the gates close.
It’s a lot, but, in fact, there’s more. In fact, Rabbi Meir, when encountering the verse from Torah which says,” וְעַתָה יִשְׂרָאֵל And now, O Israel, מָה יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ שֹׁאֵל מֵעִמָךְ “what does the ETERNAL your God ask of of you?” What does God ask of each of us, observes that the numerical value of the word, mah, what, is 100, so that the answer to the question “what does the ETERNAL our God ask of us” is 100: 100 blessings, 100 moments, 100 touchstones: whether its brushing our hand across a mezuzah, to giving tzedakah, charity that helps right the scales of justice, or bringing a Jewish consciousness to our eating, or welcoming the stranger, the oppressed, through our borders and into our communities, or whisper a word of prayer, to express thoughts of yearning, of awe, of wonder — each of these can be touchstones, portals, cracks that penetrate the barrier between what is within and what is beyond.
Because these stones, these pathways, the rhythms of the life cycle, the year cycle, the daily cycle, life, are not just anchors to help us navigate our lives, though they are surely that; they are, tradition teaches, meeting points between us and God. They are portals to the other side, to dimensions, worlds beyond our own. At the end of the opening prayer service each morning, we say, Barukh atah adonai, blessed are you adonai, haboher b’shirei zimrah, you boher, you are drawn to the songs of our heart, melekh el hei ha’olamim. The sovergein god, hei ha’olamim. You give life to this world, and to all the worlds we can’t see, but through which our soul journeys if we would but let it.
These stones, these mitzvot, these sacred callings, can help us navigate this river of life, transporting us to unknown realms, weaving together the fabric of our lives with threads of holiness, turning the notes of our lives into a musical score.
Now, I recognize that we don’t all have the same relationship to religion and spirituality here in this room. I recognize that, as a rabbi, I may be a little more inclined than some to have a favorable and, dare I say, romantic relationship to the mitzvot, to the sacred pathways of Jewish tradition.
But I want to share that it has not always been this way.
I grew up in a household, at least for the early part of my childhood, where strict observance of Jewish law, halakhah, which literally translates as, “the way,” was the norm. No electricity on Shabbat, no Saturday morning cartoons. Shabbat was a day that, when I was young, I apparently called “boring day.” My father revered these laws and sought to see his children embrace this discipline — ironic, since he had grown up in a Jewish household with such an irreverent approach to religion that it had the custom of eating Chinese food not on Christmas, like most Jews, but on Yom Kippur.
His parents were first-generation Jewish immigrants who largely rejected religion, and he had a hard time forgiving what he perceived as their break from the past. “When my grandparents broke with the law,” he once wrote, “they broke with the traditions that were attached to those laws: melodies, stories, superstitions, names, memories.” For him, law as law was the essential part of Jewish life, binding us together, serving as the bedrock of preserving our traditions while also serving as the soil in which to grow new ones. And I was the inheritor of this journey that he was on to re-engage deeply with halakhah, I was the inheritor of his determination that halakhah be the guideposts for our lives.
Lucky six year old me. I struggled mightily with the way this religion felt forced on me, the strict boxes I was asked to fit in.
It wasn’t until I got to rabbinical school, something I chose to do in spite of, not because of, my relationship to Jewish law, that I began to form a healthy, dare I say, sacred relationship to these traditions.
In rabbinical school, at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, we study Judaism as “the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people.” In other words, we study the rich pathways of Jewish tradition as ones that have unfolded and developed over time as the Jewish people have forged new ways to encounter God, to create community, to form loving relationships to one another.
This approach recognizes the human hand in forging Jewish tradition, and anything that humanity touches, while capable of being beautiful, is also highly imperfect. If Jewish tradition is shaped by human hands as much as by God’s, then it means not every note will fit perfectly in our score; Reconstructionist Judaism says the past should have a vote but not a veto — that Jewish tradition should inform our lives but that we bring our own instincts, our own values, to that conversation.
This recognition gave me the freedom to see Jewish tradition not as a burden forced upon me, but as an invitation, calling me to participate in the work of forging these pathways, these touchstones.
Now, it’s possible to overlearn this lesson: to barely hear the voice of the past because we are so adamant that it doesn’t get to tell us what to do. I had a professor who exhorted us to be bold but to respect Torah’s strangeness. To recognize that if Judaism doesn’t push us out of our comfort zone from time to time, that if we find it to always be aligning with our personal and political preferences, that we might not be wrestling with Judaism as it is but rather as we wish it were.
Still, this gives the insight that religion is not as dissimilar from science as we might think — on the one hand, in both instances, we are deeply reliant on what has been passed down to us: we couldn’t reach outer space without the Wright brothers, who don’t get that rickety plane off the ground without Newton, who doesn’t discover gravity without Galileo, who doesn’t turn his telescope to the stars without Copernicus. (Or so I’ve been told; science was never my forte.)
Similarly, when it comes to nourishing our soul, to connecting with God, to finding rhythms and practices that are going to keep our feet grounded and our heart soaring in this crazy world, we need the humility to plant our roots in the soil our ancestors have tilled for us.
But in both science and religion, bold action is often required. We need to recognize the conditions we face today are different. Those fruits that thrived in one particular climate may need cultivation for them to thrive in another.
This sermon is essentially about how to try to do that, how to take seriously the traditions our ancestors have passed down to us, probably a lot more so than most of us are used to doing, without feeling that if we don’t observe them the exact way our ancestors did, that we are falling short. We are not. We are jumping from stone to stone, as the current allows; some are no longer accessible; some are needed now more than ever.
There were a couple final boulders we hadn’t mentioned in our journey across the river of life. We made it onto that first rock, the naming, we made it through the spiral of the year, the spiral of everyday life, but there remain three major boulders for us to make it to, before reaching the opposite shore.
First, becoming Bar or Bat Mitzvah, B’nei Mitzvah: B’nei Mitzvah means being in relationship to these mitzvot, having a relationship of sacredness to these Jewish traditions.
We often have the mistaken understanding that a Bar or Bat Mitzvah is like a baptism: that unless you have the ceremony, you are not a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Not so: A Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah ceremony beautifully celebrates and brings to life the experience of coming of age in Jewish tradition, but once we turn 13, we are all Bar or Bat Mitzvah; we all have a sacred relationship to these traditions. Someone who converts to Judaism who is aged 13 or over is immediately Bar or Bat Mitzvah: we all have the responsibility, the invitation, the calling, to form a sacred relationship to these mitzvot, these Jewish pathways, Jewish portals, Jewish touchstones, that make up life: the life cycle, the year cycle, and the 100 moments throughout a day where we experience that teleportation to another world. The Bar or Bat Mitzvah celebration is merely, albeit beautifully, a weigh station recognizing that we have crossed over this threshold into a new level of responsibility.
The next stop on our Jewish life cycle arc is often a wedding, but more important than the wedding itself is what it produces: a sacred relationship. We all have those, whether it’s a spouse, a partner, a parent, a friend.
Now, what’s important to note here is that relationships do not survive on the faith of one moment, one commitment alone. Yes, as we said on Rosh Hashanah, faith is faithfulness, to those moments where we glimpse the eternal. But to sustain that faith, we need ongoing commitment. Relationships require ongoing investment, bringing the fruits of connection to life, on a daily, yearly, lifelong basis.
John Gottman, perhaps the nation’s foremost expert in marriage and divorce, and, by the way, a Jew, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, has what he calls “the magic six hours” — six hours per week which he says most predict whether a couple’s relationship is likely to improve or whether it is going to founder on the shores of life. The six hours are made up of things like: partings — making sure that before you say goodbye in the morning, you’ve learned about one thing that is happening in your partner’s life that day; reunions — having at least a six second embrace upon reuniting for the day, followed at some point by a 20 minute conversation where you each get to unburden, just talking about how your day went and having the other person listen. Sprinkle in a couple minutes each day of expressing appreciation toward the other, a couple more minutes of physical affection, a weekly date, and a separate weekly state of the union conversation, where you talk about your relationship: what’s going right, what issues are arising, and see if you can solve any problems, and voila: six hours. After decades of observation, this researcher says regularly committing to something like these six hours is the best predictor of whether a relationship will succeed.
If our relationships with our loved ones need this, why wouldn’t our relationships with ourselves, with our souls, with God? Why would we expect them to thrive without dedicated attention like this?
These three rhythms of Jewish life — the life cycle, the year cycle, our daily cycle —are Judaism’s version of the magic six hours.
Of course there is one final boulder on our journey, and that is of course our death: the Jewish life cycle, the Jewish life, like all life, at least on this plane of existence, ends in death. Still there’s that one final boulder ushering us forth to the other side, to olam haba, the world to come, all the mystery, all the richness, all the holiness that may bring, and that final boulder is the levayah, the Jewish funeral. In some respects, once we’ve died, we’ve made it through to the other side; that final boulder isn’t so much for us; it’s for our loved ones. Levaya literally means companionship, accompaniment; our loved ones accompany us to our final resting place on earth, as they are accompanied, surrounded by love and support, from extended family and community.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t prepare for this moment, for that final stone that gets across the river. In fact, we are doing so right now: Erev Yom Kippur, the eve of Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is the moment where with fullness of heart, as tenderly as we can, we prepare for our deaths, where we declare adam yesodo me’afar v’sofo me’afar, each person’s origin is dust, and each person will return to dust. It’s the moment where physical necessities, like eating, are not so relevant; it’s the moment where we dress in the traditional white funeral shroud; it’s the moment where we chant the vidui, the final confessional, which, Jewish tradition says, we also chant before die. Yom Kippur prepares us for our death, and, in so doing, invites us to consider — indeed can help bring into stark, clarifying relief — how we want to live. How we want to spend our precious time on earth. How do we want to live out our days?
In a sense, it gives us the chance to live out the cycle all over again: to have another year, another life, where all the rhythms of our lives, all the rhythms of Jewish tradition, all the stones are laid out before us. And it asks: how will we navigate them this year?
Wishing you strength as you navigate the river of life. G’mar hatimah tovah, may you be sealed in the Book of Life for good. Shanah tovah.
