Accelerating Inspired Change - Yom Kippur 5766

"Americans have had to acknowledge" writes NY Times columnist David Brooks in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's devastation, "dark realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the lurking ferocity of the environment, the limitations on what we can plan and know, the cumbersome reactions of bureaucracies, the uncertain progress good makes over evil."

A troubled member of our community sat me down over coffee a couple weeks ago with Brook's words.  "Look at what's happening to our world.  Leaving aside the spectacularly horrific - the tsunamis, the hurricanes, the earthquakes - look at how more than two billion people on our planet suffer from malnutrition, having to travel a day on foot just to access uncontaminated water.  We pray for peace and serenity, yet genocidal violence in Darfur continues with hardly a notice.  Wakeful to the 'uncertain progress good is making over evil' how am I supposed to approach the coming High Holiday season in a way that I can find personally credible?"

I didn't have an answer for him.  His question was too profound, too immense, too deserving of a thoughtful and thorough pause to be met instantaneously with some simplistic answer.  At the core of his despair in echoing Brook's lament of 'that uncertain progress good makes over evil' was a dejection over humanity's seeming inability to change for the better.  So many forces seem aligned against progress and hope. 

Before you start sensing déjà vu, that this is sounding a lot like my Rosh Hashanah message, it is indeed the case this High Holiday season that I want us to feel more capable and hopeful than we might otherwise feel.  But Rosh Hashanah's message sought to capture that capability in 'our acumen with response,' while this evening I will seek to offer a more empowering message - that we are more capable than we may think with 'our capacity for change.' Making a convincing case for our strengths at 'change' is far from simple. 

Consider our reaction a few years ago to September 11, 2001. Back then, everyone we knew resolved, with the most sincere and convincing commitments, that nothing would ever be the same.  Time with family, reorienting priorities, not passing on opportunities to say 'I love you' and to create enduring memories, we meant everything we oathed to ourselves.  Yet, within a matter of months, as if gravity itself were pulling us back, we had returned to our habits, our zone of comfort and custom and normalcy.

If change weren't hard enough against the backdrop of 'what's so in our world' the inescapable reality is that 'what's so' seems to be growing worse with a scope and speed that is hard to even calculate, let alone absorb.  It's hard to think of a continent spared today of crimes against humanity or sacred violence. In our personal lives, we know all too well how overwhelming expectations for change can be - to lose 50 lbs, to reconcile with former friends.

How, then, can a Yom Kippur experience with its law and lore, offer to this congregant, to you, and to myself, a uniquely helpful 'recipe for change' that is both credible and compelling? 

A member of our community who consults with non-profit organizations, recently shared an important insight with me about change.  She said three different forces impel change: Fear, Greed, and Inspiration.  After she finishes consulting for an organization, she assesses whether or not she has been successful by examining whether positive change has been sustained six months later.  She has found that while fear and greed, or guilt and selfishness do generate immediate change, it is never a change that is sustainable over the long haul.  It is only inspiration that produces enduring change.  This is because when people are inspired to call on their own inner gifts to be at their best, the likelihood that those personally indigenous strengths will remain with them over the long-term is much higher.

There is a story told of a painter whose latest work was being viewed by a gathering of critics.  One of them pointed out what he thought was a glaring omission.  "I notice that the door of the house in this painting has no handle." The artist responded, "The door is the human heart. And there's no handle on it because it can only be opened from within."

Fear can grip our hearts, greed can excite our hearts, but only inspiration - being moved by soul-stirring encounters and experiences can call us to our best - opening our hearts to liberate our signature strengths that we were made to unearth, refine, and claim as our own. 

Yom Kippur's dominant ritual - not the confessional prayer - but asking forgiveness from each other for anything we may have done to hurt each other - turns out to be an incredibly powerful mechanism for inspiring change.  It helps us manage change, by reframing grand efforts to change the world which feel destined to fail, into gradual, poignant, momentous encounters that add up. 

Indeed Yom Kippur's ritual itself has changed dramatically since biblical times. A close reading of the Torah's Yom Kippur ritual in the book of Leviticus, invested the High Priest with the fate of securing atonement each year.  The sage's dramatically shifted Yom Kippur empowerment to every individual and Yom Kippur preparation to interpersonal relationship repair. This revolution in Yom Kippur's ritual, can be glimpsed by observing an enormous shift in emphasis from the opening to the closing chapters of the Mishna on Yom Kippur, our earliest rabbinic source. In the opening chapters, the elaborate week-long preparation of the High Priest culminated the night before the Yom Kippur, with his pacing up and down on a marble floor to remain awake, being read the intricate laws of the next day's sacrificial atonement rite.  But by the final chapter of the Mishna, emphasis has shifted dramatically to interpersonal reconciliation, we read "Yom Kippur affects atonement for transgressions between us and God, but not for those committed against our fellow human beings.  Atonement for interpersonal transgressions can be achieved 'ad she'yiratze et havero' only after we have reconciled with our neighbor."

This change in Yom Kippur practice reflects an historic way Judaism has always differed from other religions.  Before Sinai, people assumed that the gods cared only about sacrifice and prayer. They assumed the gods had the same attitude as selfish human beings, caring only for what could be done for them. In ancient civilizations, from the Near East to the Greeks and Romans, human beings were playthings of the gods, to be used for their divine amusement.  Judaism's originality laid in insisting that God cared even more for how we treated other human beings than for how we acted toward God.  Relationship repair was an acknowledgment of the Divine in another human being.  This is the meaning of why center stage for Yom Kippur was no longer the space within the Holy of Holies with the High Priest on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, but rather the space in between us and our neighbors.

This dramatic redefinition of Yom Kippur's core activity - to seek out family, friends, neighbors, and even former friends - and to ask their forgiveness "for anything you may have done over the past year to hurt them" actually empowers change in two ways - by making it more achievable, and by unleashing its liberating power and colossal consequences.    

What do I mean when I say seeking reconciliation makes change more attainable? As difficult as it is to detect as change is, the one arena in our lives where change seems most evident is in our relationships with our neighbors, our friends, and our family members.  As hard as it is to detect significant change in our habits, our diets, and our ways, when it comes to the warming or chilling of a friendship, detecting change comes relatively easily.

Why is this so? Well, I guess you could say that when we're trying to change on our own, it can be like trying to uproot and replant a California Redwood.  But when there is another person working just as hard as we are on growing closer to us or distancing themselves from us, such intimacy or estrangement accelerates exponentially.  I used to think with two working together to intensify intimacy or alienation that change was accelerated by a factor of two.  But, on the one hundredth anniversary of Einstein's breakthrough theory of relativity, the reality is that intimacy energy, like the speed of light, actually accelerates considerably more.  Make the effort to drop in on a former friend with genuine interest and curiosity about how they've been, and that energy rush will be palpable.

When the sages ask us to prepare for Yom Kippur, not by  helping the High Priest stay awake the night before, but by reaching out to release tensions with others, they are encouraging a change-churning exercise. In transitioning from a vicarious, remote Temple Rite, to a personal, immediate forgiveness quest, the sages invite and encourage a recipe for accelerating change.

By far the hardest aspect of such reconciliation to implement, letting go, is something that I've argued that we do for ourselves.  What I never before noticed is that the bible's chosen words actually facilitate such a phenomenon.  God is described as 'nosei avon, va-peshah, v'chataa v'nakei' 'absolving iniquity, flagrant and accidental sin' - but 'nosei' really means to carry, to liberate aloft without disguarding or dismissing.  In other words, God doesn't forgive or forget our injury or our wrong, our immoral or selfish act, God simply lifts it away from the space that it occupies between us.    

The same can be true for us.  When someone hurts us in a flagrant and malicious manner, they don't deserve the right to define us as a victim forever.  Letting go of the fact that they'll never apologize is not a way of parting company with a world of right and wrong, any more than God's removal of our willful moment of weakness or poor judgment is.  Choosing happiness over righteousness doesn't mean dismissing the moral distinction between right and wrong.  It is rather a way of voting for a kinder, less burdensome path for our sake - with the wrong 'preserved' in a way that does not exact its cost on us.  We never forget their wrong, we simply move it to a place where it doesn't continue to harm us or limit us.  In so doing, we provide the space for happiness to re-enter our lives. 

I must tell you that I continue to find this to be true.  Your patience and understanding of me over the course of my first decade as your rabbi never ceases to inspire me.  Times I may disappoint you, not being there for you when you've needed me.  Other times I've made promises that I've been unable to keep.  And when I have come to you to ask your forgiveness, you have, time and again, taken my breathe away with your loving acceptance.  I continue to witness first hand how bestowing forgiveness actually furnishes us with a change-flourishing activity.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that Yom Kippur interpersonal reconciliations are only about 'letting go.' To be credible inspirations for change, they must also be about 'taking hold.  The Mishna's teaching "to reconcile with our neighbor" is not only a time for leaving unsaid and undone that which is unhelpful, but also a time for saying and doing the helpful things we've been reluctant to say and do in the past. Yom Kippur as a change-catalyst must be not only about subtraction, but about addition as well. Gestures needn't be monumental or historic, the simplest considerate act can reap enormous benefits. 

But how can I believe that my seemingly tiny act of generosity or sensitivity is going to make a difference in the face of the relentlessness and sheer magnitude of global tragedies and monstrous acts of evil?

Perhaps because the exponential power of positive kindnesses can be accelerated even more by the stories they evoke.  Claire Barker of blessed memory, a Holocaust survivor and life-long member of KI with her husband Joe of blessed memory, used to tell of the instance in Auschwitz where she and several women were forcibly marched one damp, chilly morning through a field without clothing.  One of the men working on the other side of the barbed wire fence, threw what looked like a small ball over the fences in her direction.  It turned out to be a tightly wrapped dress that Claire was able to unroll and wear - allowing her to see her humanity in the most dehumanizing circumstances imaginable - gently bestowing upon her a dignity that she never forgot.

Even today, daily doings hold immense power to reverberate with ripples of nobility and dignity in our world.  NY Times Editorialist Nicholas Kristoff has heroically challenged our pathetic passivity in the wake of twenty-first century's first documented genocide - having taken nearly a million lives in Darfur, Sudan.  Earlier this week, Kristoff elaborated on the growing collection of students and congregations that are taking action against this genocide.  Said a director of operations of one church who asked congregants to spend only half as much on Christmas presents last year and to donate the rest to the victims of Darfur, "We recognize that the amount collected is only a pittance in the face of the entire crisis in Darfur.  But if we can successfully engage other churches in the US in this call, the impact could truly be God-sized."  I would say it already is God-sized.

While small actions can have huge impact, the other side of that coin also holds true.  Unfortunately, taking no action at all also has its effects.  Failing to change in this way reinforces and sustains the status quo.  Inaction is also a form of action.  It too has tremendous power.  When we fail to repair, we're contributing to disrepair.

This is why Yom Kippur comes to teach us not only of the power of the deed, but also of the wisdom that it must be done in a timely fashion.  Our mishna's phrase "ad she-yeratze et havero" imposes a time-bound feature to change.  The fine-tuned sequence for Yom Kippur preparation - measuring precise moments when atonement is optimal, when the gates close at the hour of Neilah, all underscore the un-retrievable power of the present. 

Poet and activist Audre Lorde, pondered having been paralyzed by inaction throughout her life shortly after she learned that she would soon die from breast cancer.  She regretted most failing to speak up time and again, always waiting until the time felt just right.  "My silences had not protected me and your silence will not protect you.  While we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of our continued silence will choke us."  If we've got something to say or do, it will always be easier to do it or say it today than it will be tomorrow.  That final luxury of fearlessness never comes.

Over the past year I have been privileged to witness two men face and overcome, at least for now, a life threatening illness.  Each one, resolved that, with a new lease on life, he would dedicate himself to a cause, to founding an initiative, to traveling as a volunteer to a vulnerable region of the world, dedicating months of time and energy to making a difference for faceless, nameless others.

Surviving trauma and escaping danger is can be a potent motivator for change. Those who directly experienced the horrors of September 11, 2001 were indeed changed forever.  The sages understood the weakness of vicarious stories and vicarious rituals.  This too is why they localized Yom Kippur's reconciliations with God and with our neighbors in such a direct and immediate framework. 

Our tradition recognizes the merit in not merely promising "I'll resolve to do it someday" but in actually determining to "do it now" that we are true to the best in ourselves. As one sage put it simply, "He gives twice who gives promptly."  A rapid, eagerly written thank you note always feels more special than one which arrives two weeks later.   

As a rule, Judaism doesn't have a problem admitting some elements of fear and selfishness into our motivations for changing our ways.  Indeed, it fully accepts both fear and self-interest as among the most powerful motivational forces we can ever know.  But, when all is said and done, our tradition knows that the human heart can only be 'opened from within' by genuine inspiration.

A dramatic illustration of Holocaust heroism offers an illustration of how this can work.  Karl Plagge - who now enjoys a place along Yad VaShem's avenue of the righteous in Jerusalem - was a Nazi who saved Jews.  He was able to save hundreds of Jews from Vilna as a commander of a slave labor camp with acts of uncommon moral courage. For this he was exceptional, but not so rare.  What makes his story so unique was how he saw his deeds.  Following the war, not only did he humbly downplay the risks he took to save so many as "the only obvious duty of any feeling person toward his fellow human beings in distress," he did something even more remarkable when he was put on trial among the other Nazi war criminals.  He actually declined to place himself in the category of "not guilty" asking his attorney to identify him instead as a "fellow-traveler/hanger-on" which suggested a measure of culpability.  Any objective observer would have designated Plagge as 'not guilty' but because he felt he was entirely unexceptional, he instructed his lawyer to designate him in the category of "fellow travelers, hangers-on" among fellow Nazis.  Not only was Plagge NOT concerned about how he would be remembered, but following the war, he slipped into obscurity, nearly vanishing from history's view were it not for survivor testimony years later.  I find his story genuinely inspiring.  He is driven to save lives not for reward or repute, but simply by deep unvarnished decency.

This Kol Nidre night invites our hearts to become opened.  We appreciate the place of guilt and of greed in prying them open.  But in the end, Judaism affirms that only sublimely inspiring encounters and experiences can ease open our hearts from within.

Yom Kippur's message isn't designed to threaten or scare us into changing.  Nor is it designed to seduce or allure us into doing so.  It affirms instead that we become inspired to change by tapping and launching our signature strengths.  This is the case for the students collecting life-saving support for the victims in Darfur.  It is true for every one of in this room who seeks to know the cleansing feeling, the invigorating feeling, the exhilarating feeling  by 'letting go' and 'taking hold' not only in the year to come, but in the moments to come as well.  May you find your hearts open to the promise of friendships renewed.  And may the blessings you bestow cause ripples of goodness  to flow through the coming year, and across generations of a distant time.