For Yom Kippur

1. Getting Down to the Bare Truth:

The truth is always simple. If we could get rid of all the distractions and all the layers of obstacles – fear, ego, anxiety, physical distractions – that stand in our way, we could perceive the truth, inside us and around us.

The shofar blasts on Rosh HaShanah are like the blasts before Jericho; they can knock down walls for us, helping us shed whatever stands in our way.

On Yom Kippur the High Priest sheds his fancy gold garments and wears a simple white. We want to get to the bottom of things, to a kind of pure truth that lies normally hidden by the sparkles we put on ourselves for the world.

The Piaseczner Rebbe says that one of the principle ways to perceive God in the world is to cultivate in yourself a certain teminut, simplicity or honesty. When you ask a child a question, he says, the answer comes back to you straight from her heart. That is the charm of the child. We, on the other hand, have layers of thought and convolution before words come out of our mouths – if I say this, they’ll think I’m smart; if I say that, they’ll think I’m generous, . . . In the end what comes out is a bag of wind. The truth lies hidden beneath layers of social convention.

Truth is God’s sign, implanted in us as it is in every creation in the world. Our access to our Source is through this point of truth buried inside us.

It is not just in our interactions with others that we are often not totally present, not totally honest. It is also in our interactions with God. As Isaiah says in our Yom Kippur haftarah, “They pretend to seek Me every day, and they pretend to desire knowledge of My ways.” All these words of prayer we say – do they have wings to fly? What are they made of -- while we mouth words of piety and thanksgiving, are we thinking about what to make for dinner? What value do such words have – if they don’t come from our Truth, they will lie on the ground, dead and useless.

On Yom Kippur, we have a chance to taste the Truth. Tradition says that the gates of heaven are more open, that God is more accessible during this season, and especially on this day, as we, for our part are brutally honest about our own lives and shortcomings. May the spark of Truth we feel on this day carry us into a new year of temimut.


2.God is our mikvah:

Mikveh Yisrael Hashem (Jeremiah 17:13) literally means, “O Hope of Israel! O Lord!” but the rabbis playfully read it as “God is the mikvah, the ritual bath, of Israel” -- He purifies us just as a mikvah would.

I love this image of God as our mikvah. When one immerses in a mikvah, one is completely submerged in the water. Imagining God as our mikvah means feeling this sense of intense connection to God, feeling that He is all around us, that we are surrounded, embraced, cocooned by His presence. As we say in the daily amidah, God is our magen, our shield. It is as if we have a force-field around us of divine energy. The question is whether we can feel its presence, notice the face of God in everything around us.

3. Framing:

Do we really believe that God changes our decrees based on our repentance during this season?

We say: UTeshuvah utefillah utzedakah ma’avirin et ro’a hagezeirah: “Repentance, prayer and charity remove the evil of the decree.” Many years ago, I heard from Catriella Freedman the following interpretation of this phrase in the name of Rabbi Sam Shor:

Notice that we don’t say that the decree itself will be nullified. The decree, it seems, whatever it is, remains intact. What changes is its “evil” nature. How can we remove its “evil”? Perceiving something that happens to you as essentially evil is a state of mind, a matter of framing. We have the capacity to remove our sense of this event as evil through repentance, prayer and charity. These are the tools we are given -- not to change what happens to us in the world – we don’t have control over that – but to change how we react to and perceive what happens to us. Prayer, repentance and charity are practices that help a person learn to have the kind of state of mind that can see opportunity in difficulty, find comfort in tragedy. They are practices of introspection and generosity and they can shape our habits of mind so that we no longer feel the “evil” nature of the decree.