For Yom Kippur: The Release of Kol Nidre

Why do we start Yom Kippur with Kol Nidre?  What does an official annulment of vows have to do with the work of repentance and forgiveness that is Yom Kippur?

What are vows really?  They are our attempts to change ourselves through sheer will power.  A vow is an announcement that from now on we will not eat chocolate.  Or that every morning we will go for a run.  Or that, next time we are feeling that triggered, we won’t act on it; we will remember to pause and be mindful.  Or we might make a more general vow to ourselves that, as we go through life, we will remember what is important; we will stay present and connected to God.  

These vows are born of our sincere desire to change and improve.   We see our own potential and we see the vast distance between that potential and our reality and we strive to bridge that gap by setting a goal, making a plan.  Vows are a symbol of human will power.  God spoke and it was so; we try to do the same; we speak and try to make it become so through our words and plans and efforts, through our intense striving.  

But we fall short.  Every single year we fall short.   Kol Nidre is an expression of our deep disappointment in ourselves.  Every year we try and somehow every year we do not meet our own expectations.  We are failures in our own eyes.  

And, to top it off, we know, deep down, we know so clearly, that the same will be true next year.   Indeed Kol Nidre reflects this knowledge; we annul both last year’s and this year’s vows, as if we are being honest with ourselves that yes, next year, too, we will fall short.

What we are doing in Kol Nidre is acknowledging our inability to sustain change on our own, admitting out loud our powerlessness to make the improvements necessary -- through our own will power -- to move forward in our lives.   

As is clear from the 12 steps of AA as well, this admission of powerlessness is the first step to true change.  We can’t do it alone.   Human will power can only go so far.  When we strive and push and effort our way through change, we end up depleted, defeated and despairing.   

Kol Nidre is a ceremony of release, of letting go of our sense of being able to effect change fully on our own.   First we list all the different ways we have tried; we have tried so hard and in so many different ways -- there are seven words for the ways -- kol nidre ve’esare ushvu’ei  . . .   “every vow and bind and oath and ban . . . “   We wanted so much to make it work.   

And then we list the ways we are letting go of all that striving --  we announce that all of our vows should “be released, forgotten, halted, null and void, without power and without hold.”   We are letting go of our sense of the power of our own will.    We can’t do it this way -- with all these human mechanisms -- and we admit it and surrender. 

The point of this release is “to let go and let God.”  We enter Yom Kippur with this ritual because it is a way to make room for God’s participation in our change, to replace our frenetic attempts to control with a surrendered alignment with the divine.  Instead of all these vows, we relax and admit our flaws over the course of Yom Kippur and trust that God will ease these burdens and lift us out of the place we are in.  

And so, immediately after Kol Nidre, after we have practiced this release of human efforting, we turn instead to God to help us out of our mess.  We say: “Please forgive this people’s iniquity in the abundance of Your kindness.”   We have made the shift; we have admitted our own powerlessness and allowed God to enter.   

“I can’t,” we are saying.   I can’t do this.  I have tried so hard, in so many ways.  Now, at this moment, I am letting go of all those attempts, of all the energy of striving and pushing.    I stand -- and, later, I bow low, prostrate -- in complete surrender to God.  I give myself over to His mercy and kindness, to His forgiveness and salvation.   I cannot save myself.

What joy comes from such total surrender!   It is like the flip of a switch.  Suddenly, there is peace and joy and confidence.   We ask God to forgive us and then we know -- without any worry or doubt -- that He will.   Next in the liturgy, we say the line that we will repeat again and again throughout this day:  Vayomer Hashem -- Salakhti kidevarekha!   “And the Lord said:  I have forgiven as you asked!”     The words are said with triumph and sureness -- I forgive you!  We know it!  We feel it!  All that striving for so long, and in one moment of surrender, there is a peace greater than any we could ever imagine.  We are held.  We are redeemed.   Our failures and disappointments are ok; they are all just a way for us to learn to let go.  

It is like the flip of a switch -- sudden light, a total shift, made with one simple move -- but it is still not easy to do.   We are so used to being in charge, to pushing, to making an effort.  And it’s not that letting go requires no effort.  God says: “I have forgiven as you asked.”  As you asked.   You have to ask, to be open to needing God, to admitting your limitations and inability to do it yourself.  That admission is precisely what we are doing in Kol Nidre, releasing ourselves from vows, from our human efforts at change, and allowing in the healing and forgiving light of the divine.   We can’t do it on our own.  

(You can hear the sound of Kol Nidre by clicking here. Recording.by my son Medad.)

Below are four new posts for the High Holidays.    For a google doc that puts them all together for ease of printing, please use this link. 

(You can also always print them straight from the blog.)

Ketivah veHatimah Tovah! 

Handling Our Children's Suffering: A Rosh Hashanah Approach

I’ve been suffering a lot lately over my children.   Nothing extreme is going on with them, but each one has his or her life challenges and suffering to go through, and I find it painful to watch.

In looking through the readings for the two days of Rosh Hashanah, it strikes me that a lot of the texts deal with the theme of parents’ relationship to their children’s suffering.   Sarah worries over the taunting of Yitzhak; Avraham is saddened by having to throw out his son Ishmael from the house; Hagar cries when she watches Ishmael dying of thirst in the desert; Hannah cries for want of children; Avraham resolutely brings his son to the akedah, to the ultimate suffering; and in the second day haftarah, Rachel cries over her children who are missing (in the Jeremiah words that have become a famous song, Rahel mevakah al baneha).  Also, the gemara (Rosh Hashanah 33b) connects the shofar blowing’s sound to the crying of Sisera’s mother as she looks out the window awaiting the delayed arrival of her son, who has been killed in war.   On Rosh Hashanah, there is a sense everywhere that children are suffering and their parents are looking on, struggling to grapple with it.   

In the Jeremiah haftarah, and indeed throughout the Tefillot, there is another character who cries out over the suffering of His children, and that is God.  “Is Ephraim not a treasured son to Me, My child of delights?  As I speak of him, always, I remember him once more.  And so it is that my insides cry out for him.  I will be compassionate towards him, says the Lord.”   Perhaps all of the human stories we tell on Rosh Hashanah about parents and children are actually a way to illustrate for ourselves how God feels about us  -- the same kind of love mixed with pain, the same sense, as someone once said to me of parenting, of having your heart walking around inside someone else’s body.   In this context, we can understand and really believe in God’s tendency to compassion.  Yes, He will be compassionate to us; we know it deep in our hearts.

But there is something else in these stories, too.  It turns out that crying over your children’s suffering is not the only option.  There is one person in all these tales who stands out for his fortitude in the face of his child’s suffering, and that is Avraham in the Akedah.     He is not described as having any emotion at all as he sets out resolutely on the three-day journey up the mountain to sacrifice his son.   He just keeps putting one foot in front of the other.  His son, on the other hand, has some worries; but Pappa, he says -- where is the sheep for the offering?   Avraham’s answer is the key to an alternative way of being in the world with our children’s suffering.  What he says is Elokim yireh lo haseh le’olah, beni.  “God will see to a sheep for the offering, my son.”  God will see to it.   The Torah highlights these words again later as Avraham names the mountain Hashem Yireh, “God will see [to it].”  

What kind of a stance is this -- God will see to it?   It is trust, total trust that God is good and all that is needed will be provided.  There is no crying here, no worry, no suffering over his son.  Just faith and trust. He has handed it over to God, handed over the problem, handed over his son’s protection.   He doesn’t understand it; things seem bad; but he isn’t worried.  Avraham’s trust is like the mountain he climbs -- solid and unperturbed by whatever comes its way.  

Perhaps the Torah anticipates that such a stance with regard to our children will seem impossible to us-- to let go so completely and trust.   And so the Torah lets us know that even Avraham did not start out this way.   There is a kind of pre-akedah akedah, where Avraham practiced and honed this skill.   In the story preceding the akedah, read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Sarah wants Ishmael thrown out of the house, and the Torah tells us that Avraham was “greatly distressed” at this idea “because of his son.”   God intervenes and tells Avraham that all will be well; he should listen to Sarah and both children will be fine.  Hearing this, Avraham wakes up early in the morning to send them off, ready to trust God with his son Ishmael.  

And so the akedah is Avraham’s second time round.  It is a “test” of a skill that he has been practicing and working on, letting go and trusting God, even with his children.   This time he needs no special assurances.  He has learned that God comes through and provides and he can trust that.

Or if, for many of us, this still seems like too far a reach, we can always identify with Hagar, who learns the same lesson without showing Avraham’s extreme faith.   Hagar is in the desert, alone with her young son and runs out of water.  What does she do?  She tosses him under a tree and sits at a distance away “so that she won’t see him dying.”    How true!    Sometimes we can’t bear to see our children suffering and so we create some distance, shut it out from view.   Hagar, sitting at this distance, begins to cry, and an angel comes to her.  What does He say?  Don’t worry.  God has heard the child’s cries.  Note that God has heard the child’s cries, not hers.  That is something we need to learn; if our child is in distress, it is not just us trying to take care of the child.  There is something larger in the universe that cares.  God will hear the child and we can rely on that, relax into the idea that there is a caring God who will hear the child herself.   We are not the only parents here feeling the pain. 

God then opens Hagar’s eyes so that she sees a well right before her.     We are all blind to the existence of such a well  -- an eternal, everflowing source of sustenance that is always right near us, ever ready to provide for us and for our children without worry.     If we could see this well, as both Hagar and Avraham learn to see it, we would be much less worried.    Elokim yireh lo haseh le’olah,  God will provide the sheep for the offering, the water for drinking, whatever is needed on our children’s journeys.  We can trust that.

In our High Holiday prayers we cite Avraham’s actions as a reason for God to be compassionate -- just as Avraham overcame his natural compassion for his son by being willing to sacrifice him, so should God allow His compassion to overcome His judgment and be merciful with us.   There is a strange inverse relationship here; Avraham’s lack of compassion leads to God’s compassion.   Perhaps we can think of it this way -- Avraham’s trust that God will take care of things actually leads God to take care of things and be merciful and allow his son to live. By trusting and not worrying, Avraham is making room for -- allowing, really -- a greater compassionate force to step in.   The more we relax into God’s compassion and really learn to trust it -- to surrender both ourselves and our children to it -- the more we bring it into the world as a reality.     

All of this is great, to be in such a cycle of trust and compassion with God.   But unfortunately, such trust is not easy; there will often be an anxious child like Yitzhak around us worriedly asking about the sheep -- how will this all work out?  There’s no sheep!    As parents, we are confronted not just with the real-life problems of our children, but also with their anxiety over those problems.  And not just as parents.   This anxious child can manifest as a real-life child or as another grownup in our lives or, for many of us, as our own inner anxious child, the place inside us that is full of doubt and faithlessness and despair about the way things will work out.   

Avraham is speaking to this child.  He does not just say “God will see to the sheep for the offering,” but “God will see to the sheep for the offering, my son. “  Beni.  It is natural for this child to be anxious; the reality does look pretty grim.  All we can do is hold this child in all her anxiety and keep introducing her, again and again, to the idea of trust and to the sense of a presence as steady as a mountain, helping her gradually learn to see the well that is always out there and begin to trust that Elokim yireh lo haseh le’olah.  It’s ok; God will see to the sheep.  

Akedah, Take II

One thing bothers me about the story of the Akedah -- its end.  

In the story, Avraham endures an unimaginable trial of faith, successfully demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice even his beloved, long-awaited son to God.    

But how does the story conclude?  Avraham is rewarded for his faith.    His son is not sacrificed and he is told that “since you did this” you will receive great blessings and your children will be numerous and greatly successful.   

The problem with this ending is that it implies to us, the readers, that when a person has faith and trusts in God, the end is always good; we are saved from death or sickness or whatever predicament we were worried about in the first place.  Just trust and all will turn out well.  We all know this is not the case.  Trouble and difficulty come even to persons of great faith.  In the world we live in, faith does not guarantee results.   

Indeed, the High Holiday liturgy itself underscores this truth.  On Yom Kippur we read of the 10 martyrs of the Roman period, rabbis of great piety and learning who were tortured and killed in horrifying ways precisely because of their great faith.   Here there is no pretense of reward for faith.   

As a counterpoint to the Akedah story, consider another tale, told thousands of years later, a Hasidic story about Rabbi Yisrael of Rizhin:

Our Rebbe, may his merit protect us, once gave a talk about idle talk before prayer, and told about an incident concerning a certain Hasid who earned an abundant livelihood this way: once a year he set out to the market fair to buy merchandise. His merchandise included clothing for warmth, to protect against cold and chills. One year he travelled as usual to the fair and brought back a large amount of merchandise, but when winter came people were not gripped by cold and he was left with all the merchandise in store. He didn’t have a penny in his pocket, his family cried out for bread, but there was no bread.  One morning before prayer the landlord of the area came to buy all the merchandise. The Hasid answered that he does not do business before prayer.  With this the Rebbe, may his merit protect us, concluded.  

Everyone asked what was the end of the story. I say this is the end of the story, that is, the power of faith of a simple Hasid – how far it goes.  (Ner Yisrael 3:175-6, translation by R. Meir Sendor of Tal Orot).

This story avoids the problem of the Akedah by simply dropping the expected conclusion -- that the Hasid who, like Avraham, sacrificed everything for the sake of God, would, in the end, be rewarded richly for that faith.    We expect that end but we don’t receive it, as if to highlight for us that this good end is neither guaranteed nor the point.  

Indeed, the narrator of this tale suggests what the purpose of such non-happy endings is -- to demonstrate  “the power of faith of a simple Hasid -- how far it goes.”    The story explodes our conception of what a human being is capable of -- even a “simple” one, not the rebbe, just an ordinary Hasid -- to give up on desperately needed material goods for the sake of something more lofty, for the sake of an attachment to God that is so strong it overrides everything else.   Such strength!  Such conviction!  Such power in a simple human.  

Looking back now at the Akedah, it seems clear that this type of inspiration by example is the point of that story as well; the rewards come after, almost as an aside, but the main point here is Avraham himself, a paragon of faith against all odds, a human being who is able to know -- even while in this world -- that what really matters is God alone, and that all else can and must be sacrificed and surrendered, even when it feels like to do so works against everything we thought we wanted most.   

Perhaps we need to reinterpret what the reward is in this story.  Perhaps the reward is the faith itself.   To live a life of conviction and meaning, to know that each step we take up the mountain is what God wants from us, no matter how hard, to live with calm and trust in the face of all types of harrowing moments -- his son may die; he is in a war with kings; people fight with him over wells; a king wants his wife --  to live in the face of all that life throws at us with a sense of purpose and trust -- that is the reward itself, a life of peace and harmony, aligned with the divine will.  

I am reminded of the line from Psalms --   “As for me, I trust in Your loving-kindness; My heart rejoices in Your salvation (13:6).”    Hold on -- salvation?   How is he rejoicing in God’s salvation in the second phrase if in the first phrase, he is just trusting?   Has he been saved already or not?  Ahh.  This verse is indeed all about trust.  The salvation is the trust itself.   To trust in God’s goodness is already to be saved, no matter what the situation.

Indeed, God promises Avraham, at the end of the Akedah, that “because he did this” he will be blessed.   Yes!  He already is blessed through this act, through the faith itself.   

God also promises Avraham here again that his children will be numerous and blessed.   Throughout Avraham’s life, God and Avraham have been involved in a joint project -- the project of creating a future progeny that will continue Avraham’s legacy of faith.   Here, God promises Avraham that this project will succeed precisely because Avraham was able to be so strong in his faith.   This makes sense.    If the purpose of the progeny is to carry on Avraham’s legacy of faith, the best way to ensure that this legacy is strong is to strengthen that value in Avraham himself, so that it can be passed on in its strongest form.    

Take a minute to consider the power of this legacy, to feel its truth, and to feel how having faith is already to be saved, already to be blessed, already the reward itself.     

Life continually throws difficulties our way and we get absorbed in the content of them, thinking that if we could just solve each one -- if we just knew that our children would be safe or this project would work out  -- then we would finally have peace.     But if you watch your own anxiety, you will observe that, once one problem is resolved, the anxiety simply attaches itself to the next problem, so that there is never any peace.    

Attitude and situation can be separated.  As Avraham and the simple Hasid and the 10 martyrs show, a person could, on the other hand, remain calm in the face of any situation, be the mountain of faith no matter whether the sun is out or there is a raging storm.     The ability to be that mountain is the ultimate blessing that Avraham has passed on to us.   

In our High Holiday prayers, we say:  uteshuva utefillah utzedaka ma’avirin et ro’a ha-gezeirah.    Repentance, prayer and charity avert the evil of the decree.    The phrase ro’a ha-gezeirah literally means “the evilness of the decree,” and not simply “the evil decree” as we normally think.     I once heard the following interpretation of that distinction:  What is going on here is not that by praying and repenting and doing good deeds, we actually change our fate, the content of the decree itself.  No, what we are doing through these acts is changing our own mindset and ability to understand and withstand the decree as it is; we are averting the evilness of the decree -- whatever it is -- by changing how we perceive it and react to it and interact with it so that it no longer feels evil to us; we are becoming more like Avraham, who, through his faith, banished any sense of evilness from a decree that on the face of it would certainly have seemed evil to us.   We are learning that to walk with faith is to carry peace inside us, whatever the decree.  

I do not want to pretend any of this is easy.   The stories that we tell -- of Avraham, the simple Hasid and the 10 martyrs -- are aspirational; they remind us of what is possible for a human being so that we have something to hold on to and work towards and believe in.  Without such stories, without such faith, when we confront tragedy and really take it in, there is only despair and meaninglessness.    These are the days of the year that we assert with clarity to ourselves that there is something beyond this world that is worth dying and also living for. 

The Process of Teshuva: Turning a Misdeed into a Merit

The gemara (Yoma 86a-b) reports two different statements about teshuva in Resh Lakish’s name -- one, that teshuva is so great that it turns misdeeds from intentional into unintentional acts, and the other, that teshuva is so great that it turns intentional misdeeds into merits!      Which one is it?  The gemera explains that the first statement concerns teshuva done out of fear (yirah) and the second concerns teshuva done out of love (ahavah).  

This tradition strikes me as a deep statement about inner work.  Resh Lakish’s words here are ne’eseit lo -- “they become for him” -- the sins “become for him” like merits.   In other words, through the inner work of teshuva, some shift happens inside oneself with respect to these sins -- “they become for him” something different, something better; they start out seeming like sins but they end up, in an atmosphere of love, seeming like merits.  

This process has been my experience of parts work in the IFS therapy system.   Admittedly, the work is concerned less with actions and more with the aspects of the person that produced the actions, but I think the same could be said about true, deep teshuva, that it, too, is concerned with inner attributes.   

One of the fundamental tenets of IFS is that all parts have good intentions.  They may carry false beliefs and unnecessary burdens and have been through traumas that forced them into extreme roles, so that at the present moment, they are causing us, and maybe others, a lot of suffering.   But underneath it all, if we can hear their stories with friendliness and compassion -- in the gemara’s terms, with ahavah, love --   they inevitably turn out to be well-intentioned and to desire only good things for us and others.   Even a part that seems evil, like a tyrannical inner critic or a self-destructive or aggressive part, even such a part is actually aiming for the best given the circumstances, often trying to protect us through these extreme mechanisms from feeling something very painful.  

These parts, it turns out, don’t particularly like their extreme roles; they are suffering and exhausted, too.    When allowed to tell their stories and to unburden their burdens, and when there is also healing of whatever pain they are protecting, they gladly shift roles.  There is this idea in IFS that these parts -- after going through such a process -- will return to their naturally valuable states.  All parts are valuable.    We don’t so much get rid of the part as allow it to shift into a more positive role.  

As the gemara intuited, these shifts can only happen --  in their most complete form -- in an atmosphere of love.   We often think of teshuva as a harsh process of self-judgment, but things inside us tend to close up in such an atmosphere; they get stuck and intransigent.  On the other hand, when there is a sense of love and acceptance, an open embrace, then our parts feel safe enough to open up to the light of understanding and transformation.   Nothing can really move without love.

There is something else that happens that is a bit more subtle.   There are parts of us that have -- in our own internal climate -- been demonized or shamed for years.  These are not parts that are objectively “evil” -- they haven’t actually hurt anyone -- but parts that we, inside us, deem “evil” because they have been the source of humiliation and shame in the past, a loud part or an overeager part or a sensitive, intense part or a socially awkward part.    The work here might not involve getting these parts to shift.  It might instead involve getting us to shift our view of them, to see that they are not the “bad” parts we thought they were, but are actually, in a way, our strengths, or in the gemara’s language -- our merits.      Being loud and overeager is great energy; it is needed to start any project with enthusiasm.   Being sensitive and intense is painful but it means we are living at a deep level.    Being socially awkward -- in the light of love -- begins to appear as a kind of asset, too, a way of being genuine in any situation, without pretense.   Suddenly, what appeared to be a fault is an asset.   It is all gold inside us.  

It is all gold inside us because it all comes from God, who is wholly good.   What appears to be evil either needs a little shifting or shifting of our point of view; the essence is always good.  To do teshuva, then, is to return all parts to their original goodness, to their original divine origin.  Once we see them in the light of love -- of a divine love that brought them into being and that holds them no matter how far they stray or how burdened they become -- once we see them in that light, they can return to their goodness; they are truly turned into merits, into assets that are only stronger for their journey.  

Yonah and the Resistance to Love

Yonah resists being God’s messenger.   There is something about the message that Yonah can’t handle, and he tells us what it is at the end of the story:  

“O Lord!  Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country?  That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish.  For I know that You are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment (4.2).”   

What Yonah resists is God’s compassion and love, His tendency to love people, even the evil Ninevites, so much that He changes His mind about destroying them.  Yonah knows that this attribute is the essence of God, and Yonah wants no part of this love.

So Yonah runs away.  He gets on a ship to a faraway country, hides out in the bowels of the ship and goes to sleep.  He has other ways of escaping, too, like the suicidal urge that comes up throughout the tale: He is down in the ship, not caring about a storm that could kill him, and then he happily advises the sailors to toss him to the raging sea.  And later, in conversation with God, he explicitly says twice that he would rather die than live.  He would rather die than live with the knowledge of God’s love.    Dying is the ultimate escape, the ultimate protection against feeling something we really don’t want to feel.   

And for some reason, Yonah does not want to feel God’s compassion in the world.  

But whatever you resist inside you -- it becomes stronger, more extreme, destructive.    The message of God’s love -- through Yonah’s resistance to it -- turns into an angry storm on the sea, demanding to be listened to.    We want to sleep, but life keeps waking us up.  There is something here we need to see.

What is so poignant here is that Yonah is running away from the message of God’s care even as God is caring for him.   The story is ostensibly about God’s compassion for Nineveh, but it turns out to also be about how God cares for this single person, sticking with him at each turn, always there to catch him in his missteps and help him grow.    The ship that Yonah hires to escape from God turns out to be full of kind and God-fearing sailors who are at first loath to throw Yonah to the Sea.  And then, out on the Sea, God provides a fish to save him, and later, in the heat, He provides first, a gourd for shade, and then, because God sees that Yonah needs a different kind of experience, He provides a worm to attack the plant.     Sometimes the care God gives Yonah seems -- as in life -- like suffering, but it is all loving care, all provided for Yonah’s sake, with incredible patience and steadfastness.  There is a sense here that God simply does not give up on people, not on the people of Nineveh, and not on Yonah, who resists him, and not on each one of us.   

Can you feel the strength of this kind of care?  Staying with you through all your ups and downs, patiently waiting for you to wake up to the fact that you are cared for and to stop resisting.  

Yonah, in his antics of resistance, reminds me of a young tantruming child, flailing about, going this way and that, needing, above all, to be held in a firm loving embrace, to know that there is something holding him, even if he tries to run away and hit and scream.    The love will still be there.

Why does Yonah resist this message of love?  Why does he fight so hard against the idea that God’s essence is to be compassionate and caring?   

It is subtle and counterintuitive, but I think we all have a tendency at times to resist love, both human and divine, to want it but to fight against it or hide from it at the same time.  In some ways, I think the real thing we run away from, the thing that we are most asleep about and need to be awakened to, is not God’s judgment but God’s love.   

Like Yonah, we are scared of God’s love.  We want it -- we want it probably more than anything in the world -- but, precisely because we want it so much, we are also terrified of it, also constantly fighting it and running away from it, not able to stand still to receive it.   

We are scared of it partly because we are scared of feeling the pain of not having had it for so long, the hole inside us that is so large and gaping.  We are scared of it because it makes us feel vulnerable, open and exposed.  We are scared of its intensity, that it will overwhelm us.     We are also used to living in a harsh world of human judgment and criticism -- at least there we know how things work; we are scared of the unfamiliarity and seeming unpredictability of divine compassion.     

So we run away. We travel.  We get busy.  We go to sleep.  We wish for death.  Anything but feel the love -- and the intensity of the pain we associate with it.

We desire this love, but we run away from it.  

And yet, like Yonah, this divine compassion is actually our essence.  We were born into the world to deliver this message.  ( It may, at first glance, appear to be a harsh message, like Yonah’s about destruction, but that is not its essence.)      We were born to be vessels of divine love.  We may resist this task, but God will steer us again and again towards it.    It is our essence, just like the name Yonah.  Yonah is the dove that Noah sent out after the flood; it returned first with an olive branch, and, upon being sent out again, did not return at all, a sign that the world was once again habitable and whole.    So the name Yonah symbolizes the knowledge of God’s ultimate kindness.    Suffering will happen in the world, but not forever.   The world will always return to kindness.     

This is the knowledge that we carry somewhere inside us.  Yonah knew it, too.   The problem is not so much knowing it, but allowing it, not resisting it, relaxing into it, and carrying it into the world.  We are all unwilling prophets of divine love.  

Parashat Ki Tavo: The Energy Flow

 Et Hashem He’emarta Hayom . . .   

VeHashem He’emerikha Hayom . . . . (Devarim 26: 17-18).

You have affirmed this day that the Lord is your God. . .

And the Lord has affirmed this day that you are His treasured people . . . 

The words translated here as “affirmed,” he’emarta and he’emirkha -- there is much debate over their meaning since they do not appear in that form anywhere else in the Torah.  They could mean “affirmed,” “raised up,” “separated,” “beautified,” or “caused to say.”   

Whatever their meaning, what is so beautiful here is that this unusual word is used here twice -- once for our action toward God and once for God’s action toward us.   It is as if we have a secret language between us that no one else knows, and we use it only for each other, to remind each other of that special place of connection.   Indeed, the word he’emarta plays with the root amar, to speak, as if implying a new form of communication unique to this relationship.       

The shofar blow is a similar form of private communication.   It is a language beyond words, beyond reason, a language of the heart.   And, like he’emarta, the shofar also has reciprocality to it; we blow it and ask God to hear us, on the one hand.  And, on the other hand, as we remind ourselves in the Mussaf tefillah, God also blows a shofar, at Mount Sinai, and again, to herald the Messianic era.  The shofar, like the word he’emarta, symbolizes both sides, our voice and God’s voice joined together, both trying to move beyond words to a place of deep connection.  

Feel the back and forth flow in all this reciprocality.   We are he’emarta God.   God is he’emir us.    We blow the shofar -- sending air up to heaven -- and God blows back down to us -- sending us air in our lungs, renewed life for the year,  little inklings of revelation, and the hope of a future blowing of the shofar.    There is flow between us.   Back and forth and back and forth.  Ani Ledodi vedodi li.  I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me.  Reciprocality and flow, like a current moving back and forth between us, alive with energy.      

In next week’s parsha, teshuva is also pictured this way.   In one verse it says, veshavta ad Hashem Elokekha, “you will return to the Lord your God,” and in the next verse, veshav Hashem Elokekha et shevutekha, “then the Lord your God will return you” (Devarim 30:2-3).  Rashi notes that this second verb is in the wrong form; to mean “return” in the transitive form (He returned the people), it should have said veheshiv.    But, defying the meaning, the verbs are the same, as if to emphasize the parallel aspect here.  We return and God returns.  We are both doing the same thing, mirroring each other in a back and forth exchange.      

This is the essence of returning.  Returning is always to a place we have already been.  We have already been with God; we are in a constant back and forth flow with Him.    Like the ministering angels who are said to go ratzo veshov, running forward and then back again, and like the angels on Yaakov’s ladder, up and down and up and down,  we are in this dance of intimacy with God, back and forth and back and forth, closer and farther, closer and farther.        We can never stray too far.  We are always somewhere on the ladder that connects us and can feel the connection, like an umbilical cord with its own flow of energy.     So when we do teshuva, it is always a return; it is movement to a previous place, part of the flow of connection.

If you pay attention, you can feel the back and forth rhythm of all life forces in this world.  The primary one is our breath -- in and out, and in and out; we give and we receive; our insides are connected with the outer world through a neverending exchange of energies, through an intimate divine flow that runs in and out of us.   This rhythm is also in the sea and in the earth and the animals and plants, even in your freshly baked bread, the pulse of life.   

To return is to feel yourself a part of this universal rhythm, to feel how the breath links you to the world and to the Source behind it all, to live with awareness of this connection, to feel how it sustains you and nourishes you and how you also have something to give back in the energy flow, a part to play in both giving and receiving.  

Emotionally, this experience of flow can sometimes feel like an “answering.”   It can be as simple as waving at a stranger and receiving a wave and a smile back.  Some energy has been exchanged; we have participated in the divine flow, brought it down between us, and we can feel how the back and forth of it feeds us.  Or it may be more intense; we cry out in sorrow and there is something in the universe that answers the cry, like a ping inside us, exactly the response we needed at that moment.   We can also feel that flow between us at moments of great intimacy; someone’s heart mirrors ours in joy or in pain or just in love; there is energy flow between us, life-sustaining energy that partakes of the divine.  

Et Hashem he’emarta hayom.   VeHashem He’emikha hayom.   You affirm God and God affirms you.   When does this flow happen?  The Torah is explicit that it can only happen at one time, and that time is hayom, today.      When can you feel this connection, this back and forth exchange of energies?  Always right here at the present moment.   Just now.   Hayom.  We are so often not here in the now.    To do teshuva is perhaps above all to return to presence; to keep returning, again and again, to the divine energy flow of right now.