Yom Kippur Sermon 5767

This day’s supreme challenge is to emerge 24 hours from now as better versions of ourselves.  Rosh Hashannah’s message was all about empowerment, charting our own course, thereby altering our destiny.  Tonight I am bringing an opposite, even contradictory message.  This reminds me of a colleague who likes to say that his congregation can’t afford to bring in all kinds of outside speakers.  So he gets the same effect, by changing his positions from week to week. 

Tonight is about coping with what we cannot change or control in our relationships with others. I’ve spoken in past years about forgiveness in the form of letting go – which is so hard to do.  But tonight I want to ask us to do something even harder – to remain aware of the redeeming qualities of people who have hurt us or disappointed us.  Indeed, keeping sight of the good in people who have been bad to us, is one of the most challenging things we’re ever called upon to do in life.

It is harder than letting go for two reasons.  In letting go, our task is to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of a wound inflicted on us by someone who may no longer be in our lives.  But redeeming the good may require accepting the vices of people still very much in our lives today.

Some of you may recall my telling you how many years ago following the sermon I gave on forgiveness, a divorced woman appeared at my office the next day.  Having had to work two jobs and tell her kids they couldn’t go to movies or buy new clothes for ten years while her ex-husband had selfishly run off with a younger woman, she was not at all interested in letting go. ‘You want me to forgive that scoundrel?!’ she exclaimed.  I said ‘Yes, because what he did was so reprehensible that just has he no longer deserves the right to live in your house, he no longer deserves the right to go on living in your head.’ But in that story, he’s long gone, completely out of her life for ten years now.  But when it comes to our colleagues, parents, children, mates, and friends who drive us crazy with their quirks and maddening traits, being able to find the good in those who are still in our lives can be a lot harder that letting go of those who no longer are.

The other reason why what I am asking us to do tonight is so much harder, is because our grievance is not with ‘something they did,’ but with ‘who they are’ at their unchanging core.

There are two Hebrew words ‘selichah’ and ‘mechila’ that are often seen as interchangeable words meaning ‘forgiveness’.  But they are actually quite different.  ‘Selichah’ is akin to letting go, meaning to excuse, to offer an exit visa to a grievance.  But ‘Mechila’ is to set aside, to forgo the bad in the name of not forsaking the good.  With ‘Mechila’ nothing bad is sent away, it sticks around.  It is coped with in a new way that enables us to redeem the good concealed behind it.

Doing something as hard as remaining close to the good in the people who have been bad to us can only be accomplished by working simultaneously on two projects: 1) accepting the bad, and 2) redeeming the good and this requires the mighty work of ‘Mechilah.’  Two biblical figures, Moses and Judah, help us by showing us the way.  First, let’s examine how Moses models coexisting with the bad.

You will recall that Moses as a young man, ventures forth from Pharaoh’s palace to witness an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew slave.  Moses intervenes striking down the Egyptian and burying him in the sand.  The Torah emphasizes that Moses made sure nobody was watching.  The very next day, Moses again intervenes, this time in a fight between two Hebrews.  And the aggressor responds, “Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?”  When Moses realizes that the matter is known, he flees into the wilderness – and you know the rest of the story. Rabbi Harold Kushner in his new book, Overcoming Life’s Disappointments, poses an excellent question. If the Torah goes out of its way to stress that nobody was watching Moses smote and bury the Egyptian a day earlier except for the Hebrew man being beaten, how did the fact become known barely a day later? One commentator suggests that the Hebrew who challenged Moses on the second day, was the same man he had saved from beating the day before.  Who else would have been in a position to know about it? Moses has learned his first lesson – one which will come back to him many times throughout his career - about the ingratitude of people he has set out to help. 

How often does it happen that we go out of our way to be considerate to a colleague, only to get ingratitude in return – times when we are try to be exceedingly sensitive at our own inconvenience to the needs of a friend, only to get indifference in return – occasions when, at considerable personal cost in time, money, even reputation, we go out on a limb to help a neighbor out of a tight spot and then, not only don’t we get thanked, but we get kicked in the gut when we hear second hand that the person we’ve helped is spreading false rumors about us.   

This is not about settling, about letting responsible people off the hook.  This is not about letting them dance through life oblivious to their flaws that have caused us deep hurt and raw pain.  They must be held accountable is some real way for the damage they perpetrate.  But this doesn’t mean we have to play judge, jury, and prison warden – doing all three fulltime jobs alone is outrageously unfair to us.   

If we genuinely believe there is nothing good there for us, that they have no decent qualities whatsoever, we may be right.  But then why would they have ever meant anything to us if there were nothing at all redeeming about them?  And even if, as they say, ‘you don’t pick your relatives’, you do determine how close you want to be to them.

Psychiatrist George Vaillant published a volume a few years ago called Aging Well, in which he identifies two traits as keys to contentment late in life.  One is having a growing circle of friendships, what Erik Erikson called “a widening social radius,” instead of a shrinking number of people in one’s life.  He would urge us to make a deliberate effort to cultivate new friendships as old friends move out of our lives due to death or relocation.  The second key is nurturing our ability to forgive slights and injuries.

There are perhaps no sadder people than the men and women who have a grievance against the world because of something that happened years ago and have let that memory sour their view of life ever since.  They resent young people for their liveliness and the possibilities still open to them.  They assume, usually wrongly, that everyone is out to cheat them.  Life has disappointed them and they spend their last years complaining about it.

Divesting ourselves of the vices of other people in our lives can become more achievable when we invest in their redeeming virtues.  This is where Judah becomes our biblical hero, showing us how. 

The last third of the book of Genesis tells the story of Joseph and his brothers which teaches us that lesson in a powerful narrative of family dynamics.  The patriarch Jacob shows overwhelming favoritism toward Joseph, incurring bitter jealousy and hatred from his brothers.  Judah, a brother with strong leadership qualities, persuades the brothers not to kill Joseph but to sell him to a passing caravan on its way to Egypt and then Judah orchestrates that they deceive their father, saying that Joseph has been killed by a wild animal. 

When I spoke some years ago about letting go, I told the story of how Joseph who had dreamed of getting even with his brothers, had them pleading for their lives, groveling and bowing down to him in Egypt, before realizing that revenge didn’t taste as good in reality as he dreamt it might – so he breaks down, cries, and reunites with them. This was ‘Selichah’.

Tonight, I want to focus on another aspect of this story.  I want to read it not from Joseph’s standpoint of ‘selichah’ letting go of life-long grievances with his brothers, but rather from the vantage point of ‘mechilah’ Judah’s forgiving his father for his reprehensible parenting qualities by redeeming the good in Jacob.  At the dramatic pre-reconciliation scene between Joseph and his brothers, it is Judah who steps forward to move Joseph to tears causing him to reveal his true identity. Judah speaks of the pain it would cause their elderly father if Benjamin were not able to return with them.  Judah uses the word ‘father’ 14 times in 16 verses, speaking of his father’s past losses, his tenuous hold on life, and of how losing yet another child might even cause his death from further grief. 

What has transformed Judah from a son who wanted to sell his brother into slavery to a son who is desperate to avoid causing his father any more grief?  The years, and some painful experiences along the way, have brought him a substantial measure of wisdom and compassion.  Having himself felt the pain of the loss of two of his own children, husbands of Tamar, he understand the pain his actions 20 years ago caused his father.  He knows that his father still plays favorites.  He knows that his father still loves Benjamin more than he loves him or any of the other children.  But that knowledge no longer provokes rage or the wish to hurt his father.  Judah understands that he will never change his father.  He only has power over his own actions and reactions.  He has to choose between accepting and loving his father as he is, with all his maddening faults, or estranging himself from his father at great emotional cost to them both.  He chooses to forgive his father for his favoritism, for being a flawed, imperfect father.  Judah is now capable of loving his father, in order to spare his father any further anguish.  This is the Judah whom Jacob on his death bed will bless as the future leader of the clan.

I find the story of Jacob and Judah a useful one to tell to members of our community who complain about over-controlling parents and to those who complain about neglectful children.  I would tell this story to friends who have suffered a serious setback.  Sometimes, by loving them rather than judging them, we can inspire them to grow and change in the directions we hope for.  But even if they don’t, we can still love them just the same. We can do our best to try and change people, to summon them to be whom they are capable of being, but ultimately the only people we will always have the power to change will be ourselves. 

A colleague tells of counseling a young woman who had had a falling out with her parents, not having spoken to them for many years.  He asked her, “If you were to get a phonecall today that they had died, would you go to their funeral?” After thinking a few minutes she said, “Yes, I suppose I would.”  “Why” continued to the rabbi.  “Because I guess I owe them that.  They are my parents.  And I am afraid that I might feel guilty for the rest of my life if I didn’t, and I don’t want that. I would go because I would want that sense of closure.” “Good answer,” continued to the rabbi “so why are you waiting for a funeral? Why not go to them now when you could both have that sense of closure?”  They woman began to cry, realizing as Judah did, that there was a part of her that didn’t want to go on being angry with her parents. She went home and later that day made the call.

The real reason why it is so critical for us to divest ourselves of their festering vices and invest in what’s good in them, is to liberate ourselves to invest in emotions that nourish our souls - remaining true to our better nature – dissipating our bitter nature.  When we continue to permit the relationships that still matter to us to render us as angry and sullen, we prevent ourselves from being true to our authentic best. 

Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate, suggests that Johnson suffered from stress related illness not when he was working hard but when he was working deceitfully, telling one person one thing and telling another the opposite so that both would think he was on their side.  Of course some times, we take ill because we sit too close to someone with a cold.  And I am not advocating the repressing of feelings of anger and frustration that come from predictably annoying habits of friends or family.  But when we lie, act selfishly or vindictively, we feel estranged from our true selves.

At the beginning of tonight’s Kol Nidre service, we pray for forgiveness “for all of us and for the stranger, the alien in our midst.”  I always thought this referred to guests or visitors who dropped in for the service – that all are welcome.  But I recently came across a commentator who offers a deeper understanding of the phrase.  He suggests that every one of us has a stranger, an alien identity, in our midst, an inauthentic self that keeps trying to persuade us to do things that are not truly us.  On the day of atonement, we need to be cleansed of that alien, but all too real, inauthentic soul.   

I remember reading about a man who would visit his wife in a nursing home every day.  The woman suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and could not recognize him.  People asked him, “Why do you keep on going when she doesn’t even know who you are?” He would answer, “Because I know who I am.”  We know who we are. We are at our best when we are honest and helpful.  There is an integrity about us that we seek to reclaim on this holiest of days, and the good news is that we neither alone in this effort, nor the first to ever struggle to do so. 

So how do we do ‘mechilah’?   What worked for Judah, works for Judaism.  At a certain point, Judah decides that the prospect of causing his father further anguish has a cost that is too high for him to continue to bear.  ‘Living well may be the best revenge,’ but there is are more important things in life than being best at revenge. He elects to forgo ongoing anger with his father’s faults, for his own and his father’s good.  I would call that bold and incredibly challenging moment of decision by the biblical name ‘sacrifice.’

In baseball, a sacrifice refers to a player giving himself up to help the team.  It’s an admirable act, but not a particularly painful one. It doesn’t even count against the player’s batting average.  But in the Bible and in real life, sacrifice means a lot more than giving something up.  It means giving up something important to you in an effort to draw close to God.  Thus the Torah forbids bringing lame animals or unripe or inedible fruit as offerings, since they don’t represent a giving up of anything meaningful.  A sacrifice is not a bribe to ingratiate ourselves to God.  The Bible tells us repeatedly that God neither needs offerings, nor is impressed by any flattery that may accompany them.  The purpose of the sacrifice is for us to divest ourselves of things that we think we need in an effort to let our true selves emerge.  The person who gives generously to a cause discovers that she does not really need the money given away as much as she needs the sense of having made the world a more compassionate place.  The person who devotes his time to a worthy cause finds himself no less capable of getting necessary work done.  If anything, he feels enriched by the discovery of how much he can do without. 

And the person who can face the fact that he or she will never change the bad parts of someone in their life, the person courageous enough to forgo ever hearing what they rightfully deserve to hear ‘I am sorry for all the anguish my impatience and intolerance causes you’ or ‘I feel really bad about how hard my negativity is on our marriage’ or ‘I wish I didn’t jump to conclusions assuming the worst in people as I do’ – this is what it means to bring a sacrifice, an offering that is willing to accept what is deserved but must be forgone, for your sake and for theirs.  Again, it is not about surrender.  To the contrary, it is about reclaiming our dignity in the process of finding a way to prevent their faults, blemishes, and vices, from blinding us to the goodness and meaning they can add to our lives. 

Notice that Judah retains his dignity.  In fact, he elevates it.  He not only becomes the leader of the clan, he becomes our people’s namesake.  As Jews, we are named after Judah. True, we are also named Yisrael, for Jacob’s having wrestled with God. We are called Yisrael in our rapport with God, and called Jews in our rapport with other people and with history. We are named after both Jacob and Judah. And it is worth noting that we spend most of this day asking God to do exactly what I am urging us to do for each other – on virtually every page of this prayerbook we are asking God to see the good in us, and look past the bad.  And God does so.    

 And Judah emerges as the single Torah personality capable of doing teshuva, indeed a very special brand of teshuva in that he doesn’t only change himself, he changes the way he relates to others.

As I said at the outset, this kind of change is the hardest we are called upon to do.  And it would be a colossal mistake to believe we could achieve it in the next 24 hours.  Mark Twain once put it “A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.” We have to prioritize this challenge and promise ourselves to actually follow through on it.

I once heard a story about a priest who was interviewing a couple at whose wedding he would be officiating.  He would say to them “Is there anything you’re going to be doing after you get married that maybe you ought to start practicing now so that you’ll get good at it?”  They couple would usually blush and the prospective bridegroom would typically say, “I don’t know what you’re thinking of Father, but if it’s what I’m thinking of, we’re pretty good at it already.” The Priest would reply, “I don’t know what you’re thinking of.  I was talking about keeping promises.”  Keeping promises to yourself is the challenge of this season. 

Let us promise ourselves tonight to rise to the challenge of ‘mechilah’, courageously employing sacrifice as Moses and Judah taught us, to forgo the bad and redeem the good.  Let us promise ourselves that we’ll emerge at the end of this 24 hours lighter, not because we’ll have fasted, but because we’ll have committed to forsake bitterness for the sake of betterness.  And by divesting ourselves ‘for good’ of that which is toxic in the name of remaining loyal to that which is nourishing, may we emerge as better versions of ourselves in the year we have just begun.