Back to Rabbi Harold Kushner
Some of you may remember that a few years ago, I began my Yom Kippur sermon with the observation that that year Yom Kippur fell just nineteen days before Halloween, and I made some comparisons between the two occasions. I would like to do something similar tonight. In six weeks, each of us will be given the opportunity to do something we have often wanted to do. For many of us, it will be something we have prayed for the chance to do, something we thought would make our lives significantly happier. In six weeks, we will be invited to do something about which we have often said, "If I could only do that, it would mean so much to me." And almost without exception, virtually every one of us will ignore the opportunity. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?
As Saturday night November 3rd becomes Sunday morning November 4th, we will change from daylight savings to standard time. We will move the clock back and we will have the extraordinary opportunity to live one hour of our lives over again. And most of us will sleep right through it. What a waste of an extraordinary opportunity.
What do you think it would be worth to that Senator from Idaho to be able to live one hour of his life over again and do it differently? Or Mel Gibson to not respond to being stopped for a traffic violation with an anti-Semitic outburst? Or Don Imus, who lost his job because of one casually uttered racist slur, or any number of politicians or public figures who saw their careers damaged by words they wish they had not spoken, things they wish they had not done. What would they give for the chance to go back in time and have a chance to do it again and do it right this time?
And what about the rest of us? Isn't Yom Kippur a time to contemplate moments in our lives that we wish we could go back and do differently, words we spoke that we wish we could recall, words we withheld that we now wish we had uttered, things we didn't do that in retrospect we wish we had done? But of course that is in the realm of fantasy, science fiction.
Or is it? It is the audacious claim of Yom Kippur that we can use the future to change the past. Rav Yosef Soloveitchik, for many years the dean of modern Orthodox Judaism, in one of his essays, explains it this way: In all other civilizations, time flows from yesterday to today to tomorrow. The past shapes the present, and the present determines the future. Cause and effect: something happened yesterday or last year or ten years ago, and because of that, something will happen today, and that something today will cause something to happen tomorrow. The past determines the future.
But in Judaism, Rav Soloveitchik insists, it is the future that determines the present and defines the meaning of the past. Was something a tragedy that destroys a person's faith or was it a spur to growth and a strengthening of a more mature faith? Was something a mistake or was it a learning experience? We can't answer those questions solely by looking at what happened. We can only understand yesterday in the light of what we choose to do about it today and tomorrow. Where Sigmund Freud taught that we are shaped by our childhood experiences, Soloveitchik taught that we are shaped by our vision of the future and by choosing our future, we go back and define our past.
Now obviously there is no time machine, no wormhole in the space-time continuum, that would actually enable us to travel back in time seventy-five years to pre-war Germany and prevent the Holocaust from taking place. But we can do things today and tomorrow, choices drawn from our vision of what kind of people we want to be and what kind of world we want to live in, and those choices will change the meaning of the Holocaust. They won't be able to bring our Six Million martyrs back to life but they will determine the ultimate meaning that will be assigned to their lives and their deaths.
Our political and financial support for Israel today and tomorrow (literally today and tomorrow when we will be invited to invest in State of Israel bonds) will ensure that the Holocaust did not cause the disappearance of the Jewish people. It led to our people's re-emergence onto the stage of world history. That was not an inevitable result of the Holocaust, yesterday determining today; it happened only because people with a vision made it happen.
Our support for Jewish learning, in our own families and in major centers of Jewish scholarship, will mean that Jewish learning did not disappear when Hitler invaded Poland and Lithuania. It was transplanted to this more congenial environment, not because of anything Hitler did but because of what we chose to do after Hitler.
Our relationship with our non-Jewish neighbors and with oppressed minorities around the world will be one way in which our actions today decide what the long-term impact of the Holocaust will be. Will we respond with compassion for other oppressed, endangered people so that the slogan "Never again!" will apply to God's children everywhere? Or will the Holocaust teach us to say "doors were closed for our people; why do these people deserve better?" Will the memory of the Holocaust teach us to believe "scratch a Christian or a Muslim and you'll find an anti-Semite?" Or will we come to recognize that in today's America, the bigots and the hatemongers have been marginalized, and most people turn out to be pretty nice neighbors once we get over our initial wariness and stop scratching them?
But I suspect that when I raised the prospect of living an hour of your life over again, what probably came to mind was not geopolitics but a whole wagonload of personal regrets, - arguments that didn't have to happen, omissions that you wish you could go back in time and fill in, chances you wish you had taken, words you found yourself wishing you could take back seconds after you had spoken them.
And here too, Rav Soloveitchik's insight that we are shaped today not by our memories of yesterday but by our vision of tomorrow, comes to our aid. Let me summarize his message in one sentence that, if you take it to heart, can save you dozens of hours in therapy: You are not a prisoner of your past; you are the architect of your future.
Let me show you how that works. A few years ago, a prominent Jewish educator died in Israel, and among the eulogies that appeared in the press, one person remembered an incident early in her career. She was headmistress of a school in Jerusalem for orthodox girls. One day, the fourth grade teacher came to her and said "We've got a problem. Things are disappearing from girls' desks and lockers. At first, it was just little things, pencils and hair ribbons. This week, money and articles of clothing were missing. We have a thief in the class." What did the headmistress do? She called the class together and said to them, "What I'm going to say now applies to only one person in this room but I don't know who it is, so I'm going to say it to all of you. Someone has been stealing from her classmates. We take this very seriously. If the missing articles are put on my desk by 8:00 tomorrow morning, I will consider the matter closed. If not, I am warning the person who did this that there are two possibilities as to what will happen next, and they are both bad. Either you will continue to steal and one day you will get caught, and you will be embarrassed and your family will be shamed. Or else you'll continue to steal and you won't get caught, and that will be even worse, because then every day of your life, you will have to think of yourself as a thief. Now I want you to consider this very carefully: is what you are taking worth thinking of yourself as a thief for the rest of your life?" The articles were on her desk the following morning and the stealing ended. A ten-year-old girl decided that what she would do tomorrow would be determined, not by what she had done in previous days, but by her vision of what kind of person she wanted to see herself as being.
That is what I mean when I say that it is your vision of the future, not your memory of the past, that determines what you do. When you have learned the meaning of that story, you will have come to understand the central concept of Yom Kippur, the power of Teshuvah.
Teshuvah is a hard idea to translate into English. It is usually rendered as "repentance," but that is really an inadequate translation. Teshuvah is more than apologizing, more than saying "I'm sorry." It is certainly more than the half-hearted pseudo-apology that you hear so often from public figures: If something I said or did offended you, I apologize. That's just a way of saying that any hurt feelings are really your fault, not mine. I think I've told you about my rabbinic colleague who claims he begins the Kol Nidre service by saying "If I have done anything in this past year that disappointed or offended any of you, you're probably just too sensitive." To say "if something I did offended you" is not really a way of saying "please forgive me." It's really a way of saying "I forgive you for misunderstanding me."
So what is Teshuvah? There is no precise word for it in English, probably because the concept doesn't exist in a culture that prefers to believe "any misunderstanding is probably your fault more than mine." Teshuvah means more than "I'm sorry for what I did and I'll try not to do it again." It means something like "I don't like the person I was when I did that. I don't like being someone who could do such a thing, and I don't want to be that person any more." It not only accepts responsibility for the past; it looks to the future. It points to a change in who you are, not just in what you do.
As an example of how that process works and what happens when it doesn't work, let me share with you what I think is the saddest verse in the entire Bible. It's found in a story about King David, early in his years as king. It occurs on what should have been the happiest day of his life. He had succeeded in uniting the northern and southern tribes of Israel into a single nation with him as king. He had conquered Jerusalem, which had not belonged to any one tribe, and set out to make it Israel's political and religious capitol. As the centerpiece of that effort, with great pomp and celebration, he arranged to bring the Ark of the Covenant, which had literally been stored in somebody's barn, to its permanent home in Jerusalem. The procession with the Ark included singing and dancing, and King David joined in the revelry with everyone else.
His wife, Queen Michal, daughter of the previous king Saul, watched all this from a window. For whatever reason, she didn't take part in the celebration. Maybe she felt left out; maybe she felt that all that dancing and jumping was beneath her dignity as the daughter of one king and the wife of another. Whatever the reason, David comes in all sweaty and exuberant, feeling wonderful about how the day went, and Michal says to him, "Well, Mr. King of Israel, you really did yourself proud out there today, jumping and exposing yourself with your robe flying open in the midst of all those servant girls." The implication is, "I didn't grow up on a sheep farm like you. I grew up in a palace and I know something about how kings are supposed to behave."
David is deeply hurt by her remark. Not only did it spoil his day of celebration, it hurt him where he was most vulnerable, reminding him that he didn't become king by right of succession. He had been born a poor commoner. He became king when King Saul and all of his sons died in battle, a battle that David chose to sit out. So he answers Michal, "I wasn't dancing before servant girls. I was dancing before God." But he is so hurt and so angry that he doesn't stop there. He goes on to say, "I was dancing before God who rejected your father and made me king in his place."
And then we come to the words that never fail to move me to tears,
Ul'Michal bat Shaul lo hayah yeled ad yom motah. Michal daughter of Saul never had a child to the day she died, meaning, I assume, that David and Michal never approached each other as husband and wife after that argument.
I find that so unbearably sad. Here were two people who once loved each other so much. David risked his life for her. King Saul had said to him, "You want to marry my daughter? Go out and kill a hundred Philistines single-handedly" no doubt hoping that one of those hundred would kill him first and solve both the problem of a political rival and the problem of an unwelcome son-in-law. Michal is the only woman in the entire Bible who is described as falling in love with a man. Caught between the two men in her life, she chooses to deceive her father to protect the man she loves. It must have driven Saul crazy to find both his son Jonathan and his daughter siding with David against him.
What happened to all that love? One argument, one set of ill-chosen words at a moment when they were both tired and emotionally vulnerable, was enough to destroy it. David would go on from that day to collect wives, including occasionally other men's wives, in what I can only understand as a frantic effort to recapture the pure, uncomplicated love he once felt for Michal and he never found it again. Michal lived out her days haunting the corridors of the palace, watching a succession of younger women take her place, feeling pitied by everyone who looked on her as the "unloved wife." And the saddest part of it is that it didn't have to happen that way.
When David and Michal woke up the next morning, they didn't have to let their feelings about each other be determined by what had happened the day before. They could have chosen to let their feelings toward each other be shaped by their vision of what they wanted to happen that day and the day after, architects of their future rather than prisoners of their past. They could have acted toward each other on the basis of a vision of two people who shared something special enough to be able to accommodate each other's faults and be vulnerable to the other person's ability to hurt them. But what would have had to happen for that to occur?
I don't think an apology would have been enough, especially the kind of apology that puts the burden on the other party. "You'll have to understand why I did that." "You'll have to forgive me for what I said; I was very upset." You realize, that's not an apology. That's a way of saying, "It's your job to put this relationship back together again because I couldn't help myself, and if you're going to be too stubborn to acknowledge that, whatever happens will be your fault." What David and Michal both needed at that moment was an act of genuine Teshuvah, not repentance, not feeling bad about what happened; they already had that. Not even sincerely wishing it had not happened, but genuine Teshuvah that reaches into the deepest part of your soul, so that you say, "I don't like the person I was when I did that and I don't ever want to be that person again." Not "I don't ever want to do that again" but "I don't ever again want to be the kind of person who would do that." It's more than a change in behavior because, as we all know, when the same person tries to adopt new habits, new ways of doing things, the old habits keep stubbornly emerging. You know it's wrong but just the same, you reach for the bottle, you reach for the food, you reach for the lie to get out of an awkard situation, and you think badly of yourself for doing it again. What is needed is what is known in the terminology of Jewish law as becoming a b'riah hadashah, a new person, and if you're a new person, then those things you are ashamed of, those things you wish you could go back in time and undo, you didn't do them. That wasn't you; that was somebody else by the same name. In the story I told you earlier about the Jerusalem girls' school, the girl who took the articles gave them back because she could not handle the thought of being a thief, and at that point, she was no longer the same person who had taken them.
Now I know this sounds like playing with words: that wasn't you, it was someone else by the same name. But if you think about it for a moment, I think you'll see there is some validity to it. If a person is defined by his values and his ways of doing things, change those values, change those habits and you really aren't the same person. You're someone new. But it's not easy.
You know how hard it is to change a bad habit. You do your best, you really mean to change, but time and again that feedback loop keeps telling you to repeat the behavior you're trying so hard to overcome. The only way to stop the cycle is to become a b'riah hadashah, a different person, free from the prison of the past, like the New Jersey physician known as Bill W. who was so disgusted with his chronic alcoholism that he founded Alcoholics Anonymous to show others how to break free of the prison of the past. It involves saying "I'm tired of wrestling with that particular demon," whether it's our eating or drinking habits, our personal behavior, our tendency to not always speak the truth. "I'm tired of wrestling with that particular demon because he wins too often, so I'm going to totally get rid of him." And that is why we have Yom Kippur.
If we're going to be serious about it, Yom Kippur can't just be a day of skipping lunch, sitting through a long service and then saying to God "OK, I did that for You; what are You going to do for me?" There are some scholars who see Yom Kippur as a rehearsal for death. We don't eat, we don't drink, we abstain from marital intimacy. The clergy, some of the congregants, even the Torah scrolls wear white, like funeral shrouds. Personally I find that image a little too morbid. At most, I'm prepared to think of it as the kind of death that leads to a rebirth, the sacrifice of a part of our personality so that a new person can emerge. Think of this day when for twenty-four hours we totally shut out the outside world, -- think of it as being like a caterpillar wrapping itself in a chrysalis and emerging a short time later as a butterfly. It takes courage. If you have been a caterpillar your whole life and there are aspects of being a caterpillar that you don't like but you've never been anything else, it takes courage to commit yourself to being a butterfly. But if you are serious about this day and prepared to take it seriously, that is precisely what it can do for you. It can wear down your defenses. It can weaken the hold that habit has on you. It can liberate you from your shadow, from the parts of your past that you are embarrassed by, the things that you wish you had done differently and let your new self emerge. It can give you the New Year as a brand new start, no longer a prisoner of your past but the architect of your future.
My friends, on November 3rd, we change our clocks, but on the 10th of Tishre we change ourselves. Do it right and we will walk out of here at sunset tomorrow a new person, the person you have always wanted to be, rather than the person you have too often settled for being. You will have become the person God has wanted you to be all along, the person those who love you have wanted you to be all along, and you will have reason to thank God for the New Year and for the new life that God has given you.
Shanah Tovah.