The Yom Kippur Sermon I wanted to Hear

Well, welcome all of you, my family, my Madlik family, to the Madlik Podcast this year.

It’s a Wednesday after Yom Kippur 2023.

And this is the Yom Kippur Sermon that I wanted to hear.

So, what is Kol Nidre?

It’s a legal formula that really belongs for the afternoon before Yom Kippur.

And similar to the Seder, where at the beginning of every Haggadah, there was a legal formula getting rid of all the Hametz, the leaven, that we need in order to begin the Seder.

So, too, I believe, on Yom Kippur, we have Kol Nidre, a legal formula that gets rid of all of our vows that enables us to begin the Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, the Shabbat Shabbaton.

And many people focus on the beautiful tune, the heart-wrenching tune that is universally sung, and that’s the importance of this legal formula.

Many people try to get around the fact that this is a legal formula that talks about getting rid of our vows.

But the word for a vow is a neder.

And neder also can mean the normal, the regular, the thing that we are used to.

There is a Talmudic saying that says, Tadir v’she’enu tadir tadir kodim.

תָּדִיר וְשֶׁאֵינוֹ תָּדִיר — תָּדִיר קוֹדֵם

That which you do on a regular basis takes precedent over the exception.

And of course, Judaism, like any religion, is based on consistency, normalcy.

Faith is based on believing in something that never changes.

That’s what our anchor is when we believe.

There’s regularity, there’s commitment, there’s allegiance.

And so I would like to think that the oaths that are referred to in the Kol Nidre formula really refer to that aspect of our lives, the regular, the normal, the anticipated, that we use to anchor our life.

And Judaism, as I said before, like every other religion, normally gives great precedence and preference to the normal.

Not only do you make a blessing first on your Talit, which you wear seven days a week, before you put on your Tefillin, which you only wear six days a week.

Not only do you cite a blessing for something that you do on a regular basis before the special blessing for a holiday, but there’s a beautiful custom that we all do every Friday night that we might not even be aware of.

One of the reasons we are told that we cover the challah is because according to the rules of Tadir ve’enotadir todir kodim, that we give precedence to that which is regular, that which is normal, we should actually begin every Friday night with the blessing over the challah.

Because we bless the bread, we break bread at the blessing of God every day of the week, but we only make a kiddush one day a week.

So what are we instructed to do?

We cover the challah so as not to embarrass the challah.

שמדין סדר הקדימות בברכות יש לברך קודם על הלחם ואחר כך על היין, אך בשל האיסור לאכול לפני ה”קידוש”, צריכים לקדש קודם, ולכן מכסים את החלות עם כיסוי חלה כדי ש’לא יראה הפת בשתו‘[5]. או שעל ידי הכיסוי זה נחשב שהן אינן נמצאות על השולחן.

רבי ישראל מסלנט פעם התארח אצל משפחה לסעודת ליל שבת. בעלת הבית שכחה לכסות את החלות ובעל הבית גער בה. אמר לו רבי ישראל מסלנט, למה מכסים את החלות? אמר לו אותו אחד, שהפת לא תתבייש מהיין. אמר לו רבי ישראל, וכי לפת יש רגשות? הסיבה היא, להרגיל אותנו על כל צעד ושעל לא לגרום בושה לאף אחד, ובמיוחד לא לקרובינו.

And that too is part of normalcy.

We try not to shake the boat.

We try not to create waves.

We don’t want to say anything that might upset somebody.

We want to just glide, keep with the status quo.

And that too is part of our daily life.

And the truth is that we say a psalm, starting from Rosh Chodesh Elul, which is the month before Rosh Hashanah, and we say it all the way until Hoshanah Rabah, which, as I said in the beginning, is actually the day when the gates of repentance actually do close, the last day of Sukkot.

And it’s Psalm 27.

And in it, one of the most iconic lines is, Ahat shealti me’et Hashem oto avakesh, shefti beveit Hashem kol yemei chayai.

One thing I ask of the Lord, only that do I seek, to sit, to sit happily, comfortably in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.

And this too, this is what we want.

We want to be comfortable with our God.

We want to be comfortable with our beliefs.

There are traditions that say that you should be koveya makom le tefilato in Baruchot 6b.

קּוֹבֵעַ מָקוֹם לִתְפִלָּתוֹ

It says you should find a seat in the synagogue that is your seat.

And if you go to that seat every time you enter the synagogue, you’re not going to be distracted.

You’re not going to have to get acclimated.

You will be acclimated.

That kviut, that normalcy, that regularity, that is the epitome of what we are looking for.

But, but, …. there’s another thread.

There’s another tradition in our tradition.

And in Pirkei Avot, it says, do not make your prayer something automatic.

Al ta’aset filat ha’kava.

אַל תַּעַשׂ תְּפִלָּתְךָ קֶבַע

While we are told on the one hand that we look for that normalcy, that we look for that regularity, we are also told God forbid that one prayer that you say will be identical to the last prayer that you say.

You have to innovate.

You have to find the meaning of the moment.

And actually, if we go back to the Psalm 27, that we say, starting in Elul, and going all the way to Hoshana Raba, we need to lead and read a little bit further.

Because after it says, one thing I ask is to sit in the House of God all the days of my life.

It also says, lachzot benoam Hashem u’levaker behechaloh.

I want to gaze upon the glory of God, and I want to visit in his hechal, in his temple, in his maybe tabernacle, maybe in his tent.

And then it goes further, and it says, he will shelter me in his pavilion on an evil day.

Ki yitzpeneni b’sukah biyom ra.

So, in a sense, the rabbis were brilliant in picking this psalm.

Because in this one psalm, in these one verses that are told to us as one thing, I ask from God, like everything else in Judaism, that one is actually many.

And what that one thing is, yes, I want that consistency, yes, I want that regularity, but I also have to be aware of making my prayer keva, of making my religion and my faith regular, normal, predictable.

Because in fact, I have to be a visitor.

Every time I come to that temple, to that tabernacle has actually to be like the first time.

And that tabernacle and that temple, God forbid, it should be built from brick and mortar, and not have the temporary fleeting nature of the passing cloud and the wilting flower and the sukkah that is falling.

So we say on Sukkot, the harachaman who yakim lanu et sukkat david hanafelet, we say may the merciful one raise for us the fallen tabernacle of David.

We actually refer to the sukkah not as a standard, as a permanent edifice, but at something that is constantly falling, something so delicate that without our faith, without our support, we could lose it in the fleeting blink of an eye and the living breath that we breathe.

So in fact, what I believe Kol Nidre is all about is actually to make that transition on Yom Kippur, the most cataclysmic holy day of the year, from that which is predictable, that which is normal, that which we are feeling very comfortable… to throw that all out in a way identical to the way we purge ourselves of the leaven before Passover in order to make the Exodus.

The journey that we need to make on Yom Kippur is similar one of getting rid of those institutions, those dogmas, those anchored beliefs that we never question, and to throw them out and to become a vaker behechaloh, a visitor in God’s holy temple.

And this year, I heard at least two sermons from rabbis who felt compelled as they should have to make a parallel or to make a reference to what in Israel is actually the most important meaning of Yom Kippur.

Most Israelis, when they think of Yom Kippur, they don’t think of an ancient ritual.

They think of a war.

They think of the Yom Kippur War that occurred 50 years ago.

And if you watched Israeli TV for the days preceding Yom Kippur, that was all over the media.

That was what was being remembered.

And I would like to think that unlike the sermons that I heard that tried to draw a distinction between the existential threat that was caused by the Yom Kippur War and the current situation in Israel where you have people demonstrating for the soul of the country, the sermons that I heard, most of them, and I only have two, so it’s not statistically significant.

But many of them were saying, I know what a threat is.

I know what an existential threat is.

And what we are having today is just a hiccup.

That today we live in the most glorious, blessed moment in our history.

We have a state, we have seen threats from the outside, and this is not it.

And I think they are making a drastic mistake.

And I think that they are missing the whole message of Yom Kippur.

Because what Yom Kippur says is that every Yom Kippur is a moment of crisis, and dare we not see that crisis and learn the lessons.

When I was in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza a few days before Yom Kippur (protesting Netaniahu’s visit to the UN), I was reminded of my youth.

The last time that I was at a protest in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza protesting a regime that was overbearing and taking away the rights of Jews was the Soviet Jewry Movement.

And all Jews got together in solidarity with the Jews of the Soviet Union.

And what is not so well known is that at the beginning of the Soviet Jewry Movement, this was not something in terms of demonstrating against the Soviet Union that was accepted, that was supported by institutional Judaism, by UJA, Federation, even by the State of Israel.

The early founders of the Soviet Jewry Movement were rebels.

They were outcasts, people like Jacob Birnbaum, Rabbi Avi Weiss, Glenn Richter, Shlomo Riskin.

And yes, even a radical named Meir Kahana, who is not one of my favorites.

But the point was that they were saying that we’ve seen this movie before, where a Jewry would stand up and say, as they did during the Holocaust, this too shall pass.

We don’t need to rock the boat.

We need to cover the challah and make sure that everything is just the way it is.

And be thankful for where we are.

And ultimately, the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ), young people, demonstrators, moved all of world Jewry to unite, to unite behind something that really touched and retained and discovered and preserved the soul of the Jewish people.

And as I was at that demonstration at Dag Hammarskjöld, I felt the same thing.

There were, I would say, predominantly Israelis there.

Very few American rabbis, Rabbi Cosgrove from Park Avenue Synagogue was there.

But most rabbis are afraid of rocking the boat.

And what they don’t understand is to support the population of Israel.

And by some counts, seven million Israelis over the last six months have demonstrated in 4,000 different locations.

They are an inspiration to Hungarians, Polish, Turks, who demonstrated for democracy for a week, for a month, maybe for half a year.

This is the most sustained demonstration of people, citizens for liberal democracy.

It is a light unto the nation, those of us who cannot show solidarity with the demonstrators, just for the very fact that they are taking their future into their old hands, that they are willing to shake up the status quo and demand their own rights.

We are missing the boat.

We are not listening to the call of Kol Nidre.

So I felt myself at Dag Hammarskjöld very much like I did as a 17-year-old, when I demonstrated with my parents against the Soviet Union.

And when I started surveying sermons that were given on Yom Kippur, that inevitably brought up the Yom Kippur War, but did not connect to the dots, or if they did connect the dots, it was by way of saying, this is different, this is not an existential threat.

The woman who is the de facto head of the protest movement, and the truth is it doesn’t have a head, it is a people’s movement.

There were those that say, oh, we should visit and talk to the opposition parties in the Knesset.

This is more than the Knesset.

This is the population of Israel that is seeing what can happen if we continue in the way we are.

But the woman named Dr Shikma Bressler, who is a physicist with access to the particle collider in Switzerland, she’s a Weizmann Institute professor, she actually did connect the dots to the Yom Kippur War.

And the connection that she made, she said, we will never bury our heads in the sand again.

The Yom Kippur War was a tragedy not only because we were attacked, but because we knew we were going to be attacked.

There are stories of mothers, grandmothers who came to visit their children who were stationed at the Suez Canal a few weeks before the war.

And they said, what are all those troops doing on the other side?

And they were told, oh, our generals tell us it’s just an Egyptian military exercise.

There were warnings.

There was, as Shikma Bressler said, there were writings on the wall.

And so, she said that this time we will not ignore the writing on the wall.

That is the real connection to the Yom Kippur War.

That we need to see what is at stake here.

And we need to stand in solidarity with the people of Israel.

We are heading into the holiday of Sukkot.

And as I said, the bumper sticker of the holiday of Sukkot is of a sukkah that can fall at any moment.

And that in fact is the epitome, the end game of what Yom Kippur is all about.

That we need to know that we cannot just live in normalcy as individuals or as people of this earth or as members of the Jewish people.

Because what we have is like a sukkah ha-no-fe-let.

It is like a sukkah that can fall at any time.

And I have recently, we’ve talked about it on Madlik, when we listened to Daniel Gordis and Yossi Klein Halevi, who said, yes, they understand how world Jewry takes a back seat to the people of Israel who serve in the army and the democratically elected government of Israel.

But I would argue that on Yom Kippur, both the day, but also 50 years after the war, and also this Yom Kippur, that we are struggling, I would say, with an existential threat from within, we do need to realize that what we have is hanging by a thread, that it is a sukkah ha-no-felit, and that we Jews have been out of Israel more than we have ever been in it.

We Jews have lost the homeland more than we have been in it.

If you watch the movie on Golda Meir, there is a line that Moshe Dayan, who is despondent, possibly responsible for the hubris and the belief in normalcy that led to the Yom Kippur War.

And what he says is, this is Horban Bayet Shlishi….the destruction of the Third Temple…

The secular Jew Moshe Dayan understood that the third temple is actually the state of Israel.

It’s not a place that is on a hill in Jerusalem.

It is the whole state of Israel.

It is the heart and the soul of the Jewish people.

And when it is threatened, it is a Horban Bayet Shlishi, a destruction, potential destruction of the third temple.

And we have seen that movie.

And the movie that we have seen is that that was caused not by external enemies, but it was caused by Kinayim and Zealots, who had ulterior motives, nihilistic motives, I would argue, otherwise known as Messianism.

And they could care less whether they shattered and broke a few eggs and brought destruction.

And that is ultimately what we are up against on this Yom Kippur.

But it’s not all bad news.

There is good news as well.

I have heard political thinkers, talking heads, talk about this 75 years after the founding of the state of Israel is actually our constitutional Congress.

We have deferred the discussion that we are having until today.

And from that perspective, it is a Rosh Hashanah.

It is a new year.

It is a time for all of us to embrace the arguments, discussions, that you would have in a constitutional Congress.

We need to figure out now, and if not now when, who we are, what we want, and what is at stake.

I have heard other thinkers talk in terms of this moment is one where all of us are exposed to an insight into how do we go from here.

What does it mean to have an occupation?

What does it mean to let Messianists wag the tail of the dog?

And those thinkers have used an analogy that this is a little bit of, it’s a virus, and we are getting the vaccine.

And we have an opportunity to see, it’s not about judicial reform.

The judicial reform gives us an insight into where this is going.

So, my blessing for all of us is that we actually do learn the lesson of the Yom Kippur War.

And it’s not a lesson that the Yom Kippur War is any different than the moment that we live in now.

Every Yom Kippur, but especially this Yom Kippur, is a time for us to break the normalcy and to realize how precious and how those things, like democracy and like our faith that we have in prophetic Judaism, hangs by a thread.

And if those of us who hear the sound of Kol Nidre, of the shofar, do not stand up in solidarity with each other, then we can lose it all and the sukkah can fall.

So I wish all of us Shana Tova, a Hatima Tova that we will have after we sit in that sukkah hanofelet, that fragile, precious, temporary sukkah, and come together all under the sukkah Shalom, that roof that lets us have a glimpse of the stars.

But we understand it is our harvest to harvest.

It is our future to make.

Shana Tova, Hu Me Tuka.