Rabbi Rebecca Gutterman
Yom Kippur / Parashat Nitzavim - 2006
God we stand in awe before your deeds… as the gates begin to close.
We’ll say these words later on today during Neilah, our concluding service. We’ll say them repeatedly, as a matter of fact. As the gates begin to close. There will be a gentle, almost hypnotic rhythm as we say the words. Our voices will be heavy with the fatigue of the day, and at the same time, will quicken at the realization that as the gates begin to close … the breaking of the fast begins to seem not all that far away!
When I was young I had a very specific image of these gates. I imagined that they looked exactly like the heavy, wrought iron gates of the park at the end of our street. Taller maybe, but other than that they had the same formidable feel. As they slowly creaked open, then closed again, they made the same slightly rusty sound. At dusk, the same chain would be used to loop through the slats and lock the gates tightly together, to keep the big kids from sneaking in after dark and playing on the swings. If you got to the park early in the morning (and much to my mother’s chagrin, that was often our preference), the early light of the day might filter through the trees and hit the gates at a certain angle – and somehow when you pushed them open you had the feeling you were entering into so much more than another day’s play.
On Yom Kippur, the last light of the day might filter through the synagogue windows at a certain angle; I would gaze up… and up… picturing those gates closing in slow motion, sure that now was the time. In these last moments, I knew I had to push every ounce of repentance, every shred of humility – in short, every deep thought – through those gates before they clanged closed. And stayed closed… until next Yom Kippur at least. At no other time during the year did I feel openness quite like that openness: standing there in those moments and saying those words: God we stand in awe before your deeds… as the gates begin to close.
For us in these moments now, all that is yet to unfold. We stand here with gates thrown open, walls thrown open: here, there and everywhere (gesture). If you’re not sure about that, just look behind you! Yom Kippur means to open those gates, to penetrate those walls, within and without… as we balance holding ourselves accountable for our actions, with forgiving others in a way that is thoughtful and authentic. Standing here means standing up to the work of accountability and self-scrutiny. On this day, we are like the gates themselves. For some of us, opening to the intensity of the season may come more naturally. For others of us – many others --we find we need to brace ourselves and push through our carefully erected barriers. Fortunately, the rewards of putting some muscle behind this process are immense.
Unfortunately, openness of self and spirit is some of the very hardest work we are called to do.
The words from the Torah portion Nitzavim, read each year on this day, call us back to a time when our people stood together with their entire future opened out before them. They also call us forward, for each year on this day, as we hear the words anew, we make them our own. For this covenant, we are told, is made not just with those present on that day, but also with those who are not there. That’s where we come in – each of us here not on that day, but here on this one. We are their descendants: inheritors and shapers of this extraordinary covenant for all time.
Or at least that’s the widely understood reading. … vacharta bachayyim/ l’ma’an t’hiyeh atah v’zaracha / … choose life: so that you and your descendants may live. I wonder each year though, if these words are hinting at something else as well. They evoke not only the generations of the future, but also those of the past: the ones who did not live to witness this moment. The ones who never made it out of Egypt. The ones who fell in battle, or perished during the years of wandering in the desert. And if that’s true, then nearly everyone standing there that day had lost someone. There they were, being addressed as a people unified and whole – being asked to be their strongest, most capable, most open selves. What a moment to suddenly be reminded of the absences in their midst, and in their hearts.
It is in that way, most of all, that they are just like us. We too stand here today all missing something. For some the loss was of one who was dear to us … and there it remains. For others… loss of livelihood or of health. We have experienced the painful dissolution of relationships, and in the void that follows, the question: where on earth to now? And how? Other losses are of the sort that are intertwined with blessings. I have a friend expecting her second child who in the midst of her excitement and joy, looks at her young daughter and aches at times, knowing that Tali’s days of being the sun around which the planets of parental attention revolve are numbered. And then there are the losses that are less concrete. The loss of a sense of predictability – of a sense of how things were supposed to happen, of how life was supposed to turn out. Loss of the ability to absorb news of the world we live in with even a modicum of optimism. The loss, even temporarily, of hope. I wish this weren’t true, but it is: there are years that take from us more than they give.
And so we stand here, each in our own ways wondering perhaps, how to open to another year, knowing all too well that, as this morning’s passage goes on to describe: both blessing and curse, life and death lie ahead. How might we step through the gates, knowing that the unknown awaiting us, is invigorating sometimes but downright terrifying the rest of the time? When life demonstrates, time and time again, that in the words of writer Anne Lamott: suffering is such a large part of what it means to be human, how do we open to more life?
How do we do it… particularly when we live in a culture that offers an endless array of ways to numb ourselves to that call to openness? Nearly every good thing can be taken to excess: food, drink, exercise, work. Nearly every technological means of staying entertained, staying in touch with each other and with the world can become frenetic and obsessive. Opportunities to respond to life with apathy or cynicism abound; and when we’ve been burned by openness one too many times, those responses begin to feel like they make sense.
So how do we do it?
To paraphrase Sholom Aleichem’s beloved character Tevye the Dairyman, “I’ll tell you. I don’t know.” I don’t know how it happens. Only that it happens. I wish you could see what we see, as we all stand here today. I wish you could see yourselves – a ongoing part of the community of Israel -- living proof that the call to open up to all of it – pain and fear and blessing and joy and loss – can still be heard above all the other sounds. It can still be heard, and it can still be heeded.
Now it’s possible that it’s instinct in part; like plants reaching toward the sun or bodies fighting off illness, ordinary life does fight for itself. It’s possible too that there’s a sense obligation to the ritual at play here. I know. But more than both of those things accounts for your standing here today. Without saying a word, your presence speaks volumes to the possibility that we still take our actions in this world seriously. The possibility that the courage to pause and face all we are, and all we are not, lives in us. The possibility that the willingness to contend with our hurts and our shortcomings and all we meant to do but didn’t over this past year rests not in the heavens or beyond the sea, but is so very near to us. The possibility that this Covenant is made and remade with us right where we stand, just as we are – with all our gifts and all our faults. With all we’ve lost, and all we have. And when part of what we have is the ability, however worn around the edges, to turn – to change – to allow ourselves to be marked by life -- to rediscover the nourishing properties of hope --– well that’s what moves us away from all that holds us back, and calls us forward into what Judaism calls mayim chayim: living waters.
God we stand in awe before your deeds.
Our liturgy speaks of the Divine spark that makes us human. I look at you and I stand in awe of that intersection – that point where the ideal meets the real and somehow… somehow once again, we rise to that call to become more than we are. I stand in awe before your deeds. You’ve weathered change. You’ve survived the loss of something that defined you and found new ways to make meaning. You insisted on working for change in this world. Sometimes you wondered whether these ideas were quaint, or passé, and sometimes you thought how much easier it would be to close your heart. Sometimes you did. Maybe you had to. But life called to you again, and you answered. You answer still.
And I pray you will find that, in the words of writer Martha Beck, you’ll never be as hurt by being open as you have been hurt by remaining closed.
Pitchu lanu sha’arey tzedek – open for us the gates of righteousness … and we shall enter.
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