October 9, 2008
We all have our own reasons for being here in synagogue today: our own hopes for what this day and year will bring, our fears about last year’s mistakes’ repeating themselves again, our doubts about whether repentance can mean anything for us in 5769.
As Modern Jews, we hear the Kol Nidrei prayer, we sing Avinu Malkeinu, we read the Unetaneh Tokef and the confessions of sin -- but what do we really believe? What do we really feel today? If the Wicked Son of the Passover Seder were here, he might ask: What is all this teshuvah to me?
The writer Howard Harrison, in a poem entitled “Yom Kippur,” struggles with these questions. He takes us through a crisis of cynicism, a crisis of faith and meaning, and he emerges with a little more reverence, perhaps a little more faith, on the other side. He writes:
Night and day, and somberly I dress
In dark attire and consciously confess
According to the printed words, for sins
Suddenly remembered, all the ins
And outs, tricks, deals, and necessary lies
Regretted now, but then quite right and wise.
The benches in the shul are new. So this
Is what my ticket bought last year; I miss
My easy chair, this wood is hard, and I
Have changed my mind, refuse to stand and lie
About repentance. No regrets at all.
Why chain myself to a dead branch, I fall
In estimation of my neighbors who
Would have me be a liberated Jew
Ridiculing medieval ways
Keep up with them in each swift modern craze
To dedicate our souls to modern taste
To concentrate our minds on endless waste.
“Medieval” must be too new a term
For deeper, longer, truer, something firm
Within me used the word “waste.” Despite years
Assimilating lack of faith, the fears
My father felt of God, their will to know
That vanity and greed were far below
The final aim of life will help me, too,
Atone, and be a Jew, and be a Jew.
~ Commentary, vol. 20, no. 4 (October, 1955), p. 355
As we fast today, stripping off that layer of comfort that food provides, and retreat into this sanctuary from the persistent pace and pressure of our everyday lives, may we also find something firm within us: a still small voice that says no to vanity, no to greed, no to pride, no to stiff necks and hard hearts.
If we each place our individual fears, regrets, and hopes upon the altar of community, and let our prayers and doubts mingle, then we can support each other in reaching atonement, or -- as a wise wordsmith said -- “at-one-ment.”
May it be God’s will for us today. Together we say: Amen.
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