Rabbi Daniel H. Liben
Yom Kippur 5766

The Rabbis pose the following riddle. How, they ask, is Yom Kippur like Purim? The answer: On Purim we put on masks, so that when we look in a mirror we see someone else. On Yom Kippur, we take the masks off so that when we look in the mirror we see who we truly are. That is our task today- to look clearly at ourselves, to let go of our pretenses and self-justifications, to turn towards God and say, this is who I am. That's what I want to talk to you about tonight, about not hiding form the truth about ourselves, and not hiding ourselves from God.

Let me tell you a story about a favorite relative of mine, Bernie, who played hide and seek with God for many years. Bernie would only enter a synagogue under duress. His wife would fight with him on Rosh Hashannah, cajoling him to attend services with the family. "I'm a doctor, I save lives," he would say. "I don't need to go to Temple." Even at family simchas he preferred to linger in the lobby. A respected professional, an expert in his field, he was accustomed to feeling competent, in charge. But sitting in synagogue, he was like a stranger in a strange land, painfully aware of his lack of proficiency, and squirming uncomfortably. Who needed that? So he avoided it.

There is a back story to all of this. Years before, Bernie's parents hired a teacher to prepare Bernie for his Bar Mitzvah. The teacher was an old-fashioned melamed, a strict and unsympathetic man whose basic rule of pedagogy involved rapping his students on the knuckles with a ruler. Smart as Bernie was, he absorbed next to nothing from these lessons. The weeks and months passed, and Bernie was still completely unprepared for his Bar Mitzvah. He wasn't even ready to just have an aliyah.

Bernie's parents did the only thing that they could think to do: they cancelled the Bar Mitzvah, or at least the appearance in synagogue, but they went ahead with the catered party as planned. It made Bernie feel like a failure, a hypocrite. Bernie had been hiding from the synagogue ever since, not wanting to be reminded of the shame of his non-Bar Mtizvah. After that, any shame he felt in life was linked to that experience, and somehow became Judaism's fault. Bernie hid from God for years.

Finally, one day Bernie shared his sense of inadequacy and the story of his non-Bar Mitzvah with a therapist, who made a simple suggestion. "Why don't you do something about it," he asked?

"Like what?'

"Why don't you have a Bar Mitzvah?"

So at the age of 59, that's what Bernie did. He studied for a year with his Rabbi and Cantor. He prepared a Dvar Torah. He invited his friends and family, including children and grandchildren to the synagogue, and this is what he told them:

"The Torah teaches us that you shall not put a stumbling block before the blind. I realized that for most of my life, I was my own stumbling block. Its always easier to blame someone else than to face the truth about yourself. But it wasn't Judaism that pushed me away, it was me."

Listen to another story about playing hide and seek with God. Dan Pagis was a renowned Israeli poet, who died in 1986. In a memoir, his widow tells about a trip they took to California in the 1950's, where Pagis had been invited to be the first visiting professor from Israel to the University of California. It was early fall and the High Holidays were approaching. As one might expect, the local Jewish community anticipated their arrival, hoping to embrace the famous Jewish writer and representative of the land of Israel. Pagis, however, was afraid that the good Jews of Southern California might be shocked at his lack of proficiency with synagogue customs and rituals. He wasn't comfortable davening. So Pagis and his wife decided it was better to just avoid the whole package: the synagogue filled with its devout daveners, and the Holy Days with their attendant rituals, fasting, and prayers of penitence. They decided to hide out, to stay in the house behind closed doors, and let anyone who might think to ask, simply assume that they were not home, away perhaps, on a holiday.

The plan did not turn out quite as expected (but what plan does)? One morning, neighbors of theirs, a Christian couple, could see that the Pagis's were in, and urged them to join them for the day. They agreed, and were driven off by their new friends to a private home. Only after entering the living room which was arranged with audience style chairs, and dominated by a picture of Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper, did it become fully clear to the Pagis's that they were attending a religious service. The minister of this flock announced Pagis's presence with great fanfare, as it was truly a great honor to welcome a representative of the Jewish State particularly on the Jewish people's Holy Day. And thus did Dan Pagis and his wife, somewhat guiltily, end up spending Yom Kippur morning in Church.

And you thought you had something to say Al Het for!

In choosing to avoid the synagogue, Pagis found no relief sitting among strangers in Church instead. You can run from your issues, but you can't hide from them. The greater irony, however, is that Pagis, who felt uncomfortable sitting with fellow Jews on Yom Kippur, was one of the 20^th century's greatest modern Hebrew poets, and an expert in Jewish medieval literature. He certainly understood the Machzor. That wasn't it at all. For Pagis, like Bernie, there was a deeper pain, a loss too difficult to confront, that kept him running.

Pagis had his reasons for avoiding the encounter that Yom Kippur. Pagis was born in Roumania in 1930. When he was a small child, his mother died, the same year that his father left for Palestine, leaving him to be raised by grandparents. Pagis only arrived in Israel after the war at the age of 16, having spent part of his adolescence in a concentration camp. Much of his poetry concerns the Holocaust. In the poem that I would like to share with you, called Hide and Seek, you can hear echoes of his childhood, both the early loneliness as well as the experience of the Holocaust. He writes:

In its brevity, the poem runs a gamut of emotional stances that we sometimes take towards God. We sense that once we were close:

In the backyard of the world, we played, he and I We hope that, as in the child's game, when God hides, we will find him: I covered my eyes, he hid; one, two, three

And in our abandonment, we feel emptiness:

Not before me, not behind me, not within me.

And in spite of our secular modernity and our estrangement from faith, we still care to continue to search:

Since then I have been looking So many years

We grow weary of the search, and we give it up. But not completely.

The image of Man and God playing Hide and Seek is not a new one. I would guess that Pagis was familiar with a well-known Hassidic story about the Rebbe Dov Ber of Mezeritch. Once, the Rebbe's young son was outside with his playmates, playing hide and seek. It was his turn to hide. But after a while, he realized that the other children were no longer calling out for him. Terrified, he ran into the house in tears. Falling into his father's embrace he cried, "Abba I was playing hide-and-seek with my friends, and I hid so well that they stopped looking for me and went away." Dov Ber cried too. He said, "This must be how God feels, hiding the divine countenance from us to the point where some of us stop looking - and start living our lives without God."

Estrangement from God, as in any relationship, doesn't happen all at once. Life hurts us, and we feel God's absence. Under the allusion that we are alone, we allow ourselves to be less than who we are. In ways both large and small we compromise our integrity. We make a myriad of excuses for ourselves and we move farther and farther away. Like the Marranos, the hidden Jews of Medieval Spain, we lead lives of subterfuge and deception, seeing someone other than our true selves when we look in the mirror. But even the marranos would find their way into the synagogue on Yom Kippur.

Friends, we resume the search for God even when we have become estranged from Him because the search for God is also the search for our selves. To have a relationship with God is to regain the sense that we had when we were very young that all is right with the world. To have a relationship with God is to know that your life is connected to a reality much greater than your own. To have a relationship with God is to know that with all of our failings, our lives matter infinitely, and that they matter to God.

This is a day of ashamnus, and al hets, of dredging up the failures of will that we usually run from, taking refuge in a false but more flattering image of who we are. And yet, it is in the very moment that we sense that God hears, that we become transformed. We know that the meaning of our lives is far greater than the sum of our sins, and we take a step closer towards integrity.

People say that everyone at least walks through the doors on the High Holidays. No matter how assimilated, acculturated or otherwise distanced from Jewish life, at least three days a year it seems like everyone tries to walk through these doors (with or without a ticket). And following God's example, we always leave the doors open for them, open to the possibility of return particularly on this holiest day.

But the truth is that even many of us physically sitting here are not yet completely here tonight. And the doors remain open for us as well. Hiding in the shadow, like a beloved playing hide and seek, God waits to be found. The next steps are ours. Search deeply within your heart, and use this day wisely.

L'ShannahTovah Tikateivu v'Techateimu