In the middle ages, it is well known that the Jewish community was constantly under assault. Anti-Jewish crusades, daily anti-Semitism and periodic bursts of manic Jew hatred was simply a way of life. So what did the Jews do? Their response was not to hide and cower and discard their Jewish selves. Instead, their resistance was intellectual and eternal. Instead of running away from the community, they codified the Talmud. And, in doing so created a work that is still used, studied, quoted from and delved into each day. And, while the Crusades are over and gone, the Jews not only survived but the magnificent intellectual and spiritual, insightful and sometimes frustrating Talmud still stands and thrives. Terrible times can create unbelievable works of art.
In the middle of this pandemic, there have, once again, been wonderful pieces of art. These pieces, like all good pieces, are not simply a passing glance where we say ‘that’s nice.’ Instead great works of art welcome us and challenge us and touch us someplace deeper.
A colleague showed me such a piece and I want to share it with you. I hope you had a chance to take a look at the song on the temple website and follow the lyrics. But, in case you didn’t I will fill you in.
It is called Keter Melucha – the Crown of Sovereignty. Crown, I remind you, is the English word for Corona, as in Coronavirus. It is also from the liturgical poem you all know called, ‘All the World Shall Come to Serve Thee.’ Today, there are two crowns: one is life-giving and one is death-dealing.
Here is the poem and, though there may be terms you don’t yet understand, I will explain:
Between Terumah and Tetzaveh
A slightly different birthday party
Everything seems to be just fine
Stages full of people and love.
Between Tetzaveh and Ki Tisa
Esther, Purim, drinks and joy,
Who will stay and who will travel
And who pays the consequences
Between Ki Tissa and Vayakheil
The world stops gathering
To be quiet, to be closed down
Yishmael, Edom and Yisrael
Between Vayakheil and Pekudei
There’s no one in the city or the field
There’s no one to deal with
The Tower of Babel is once again confounded.
What do You want us to understand from this?
How do we distance ourselves and draw near to this pain?
We want to live with You
And not be alone.
What do you want us to learn from this?
How will we know how to unify this separation?
Until we give You,
The Keter Melucha
Between Pekudei and Vayikra
We are all in the same pot
The spring has arrived, Pesach is coming
And with it, much hope
To rip up the evil decree
Come my beloved to greet the Bride
We don’t have strength anymore
To cope, to battle on.
What do You want us to understand from this
How to disconnect and re-connect to this pain
We want to live with You
And not be alone
What do you want us to learn from this?
How will we know how to unite in this separation?
Shema Yisrael
Adonai is one and the Name is one.
Between Adar and Nissan
The die was cast and, with it, our fate
They say this is the time for us to change our destiny.
Okay. The song is a little long so let’s go through it quickly. The references at the beginning of each verse, like Between Pekudai and Vayikra are Torah portions. He is reminding us how much things changed between each week’s Torah portion. Like the journey in the desert which was sometimes rudderless, we didn’t know what would happen even in the next seven days. We were, like our ancestors, wandering in aimless confusion.
As well, I hope you heard the references to the evil decree, to the joy of Purim and then to the silence of the streets, and so forth. But it is two images hidden in the poem that caught me unprepared and where I literally backed up and said, ‘Whoa!’
The first image is the title itself: Keter Malucha – the crown of God. The image is one of us imagining God as crowned on Yom Kippur, a day of great solemnity and celebration. It comes from my favorite Yom Kippur song, ‘All the World Shall Come to Serve Thee.’ But there is a shocking double-entendre. Did you get it? The crown of God is also the corona of God. Without having to be overly theological, the crown today is the corona and is something that was brought into the world. And then the question hits us: What do you want us to learn from this?
And that is where the second image made me stand up and say, ‘Whoa’ yet again. He hints at it and his answer is profoundly simple and at the same time profoundly difficult. Buried in the middle of the poem he says,
איך מתרחקים וּמתקרבים בכאב הזה
“What are we supposed to learn from this plague?
How to separate and reconnect with this pain.”
That is the strangest line. How do we reconnect with pain? And why would we want to? We spend a good part of our lives trying to avoid pain. So what is all this about reconnecting with it? The answer is as simple as it disturbing.
Because to reconnect with this pain is to reconnect with humanity and with God. Keeping far from the pain insulates us, for sure, but keeping far from pain lets the corona of God win, and not the Crown of God.
This plague, as reflected in this wonderful song and poem, is a struggle between the corona and the Crown.
We’ve all seen what happens when we have separated and not reconnected. Put plainly, one half of our humanity is simply lost. We discarded it and, once discarded, can be hard to pick back up.
I think that the two words of the year are ‘Hoax’ and ‘Corona.’ I dare say that the five people I buried did not die of a hoax or the more than 195,995 others didn’t either. We have seen the heartlessness of too many people. The real hoax was exposed: the hoax we tell ourselves that, when confronted with evil, we would not fall into evil. How wrong so many of us were.
When confronted with the 20,000,000 Ukrainians that died during the Great Famine, Stalin quipped the infamous and well-known phrase saying, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.’ How many times have we heard that this year in one form or another?
We have heard it from all corners of the country. To answer the question of the song, ‘What do You want us to learn from this?’ – we have learned what it means to be heartless, uncaring, unsympathetic, and mean. When mere breathing can be dangerous and even fatal, those who belittle the suffering have shown us a truly ugly part of their souls and, maybe even worse, they have shown it to themselves. Like the picture of Dorian Gray, too many of us will only see the inner ugliness if we look into the mirror of our soul. Such is the power of this Day of Atonement.
And Yom Kippur is about hope. So where is the hope in this song, in this poem? Like a lot of hope in difficult times, it is found in the other word buried deep in the song. While it is true that we may have disconnected -מתרחקים – from the pain, the other half of the equation comes to balance the scales in from the verb וּמתקרבים – to reconnect. Our humanity is restored when we reconnect. We are too human when we separate from the pain but we become fully human when we come together in understanding, respect, empathy, sympathy and love. We become human when we reconnect with the pain because to reconnect is finally, finally understand. Reconnecting restores our humanyity. And to live without our humanity is simply to exist.
Yom Kippur is the day we are confront that the truly ugly part of our soul that we put on display too often. It is as if, this year more than any other I can remember, that our yetzer ha-rah, our evil impulse is the thing that drives us and not the yetzer ha-tov, what Lincoln called the ‘better angels of our nature.’
In a synagogue in Poland there is a quote from Abraham Ibn Ezra, a mediaeval philosopher which says,
אדם דוֹאג על איבוֹד דמיו וינוֹ דוֹאג על איבוֹד ימיו.
דמיו אינם עוֹזרים, ימיו אינם חוֹזרים –
“A man worries about the loss of his money but fails to worry about the lass of his days. His money cannot help him and his days will never return.”
Imagine praying in that synagogue with those words towering over you. Each second of our lives gets us one second closer to our deaths while each penny we accumulate cannot save us from the inevitable decree. Praying for guidance and praying for the Yetzer Ha-Tov to be our guiding light is not a magical prayer: it is a prayer that asks God to help us restore our humanity to our already too-human hearts and souls.
Milton Steinberg, one of the giants of the Jewish world in the mid-20th Century suffered the first of his heart attacks in 1943. When he was finally let outside he writes about the experience. He says,
“As I crossed the threshold, sunlight greeted me…so long as I live, I shall never forget that moment…the golden glow of sunlight. It touched me with friendship, warmth and blessing. In that instant, I looked to see whether anyone else showed on his face the joy I felt. But as far as I could detect, none gave it heed. And then I remembered how often, I, too, had been indifferent to sunlight, preoccupied with petty concerns. I had disregarded it. And I said to myself, ‘how precious is the sunlight, but alas, how careless of it are men…I was reminded to spend life wisely, not to squander it.’ He did not squander it, by the way, and even though his doctors told him not to work so hard, he chose to ignore them and literally died at his desk while writing a few years later of yet another heart attack.
We are taught that this is the Day of Atonement when our sins will be ignored by God. I have no doubt that this is true. But there is the first half of the quote which is a bit more disturbing.
The whole expression says,
עֲבֵרוֹת שֶׁבֵּין אָדָם לַמָּקוֹם, יוֹם הַכִּפּוּרִים מְכַפֵּר. עֲבֵרוֹת
שֶׁבֵּין אָדָם לַחֲבֵרוֹ, אֵין יוֹם הַכִּפּוּרִים מְכַפֵּר, עַד שֶׁיְּרַצֶּה אֶת חֲבֵרוֹ
“For sins between a person and God, the Day of Atonement atones…
But for sins of one person against another, the Day of Atonement does not atone unless they have reconciled with one another.”
There is a big difference between the way we often read the first part of the Mishnah and what the Mishnah reads when we include the second part. Only when, and only if, we have begun to reconcile with those we have hurt with our deeds and words does Yom Kippur have any relevance, let alone, effect with God.
Today we’re supposed to crown God and embrace our Yetzer Ha-Tov with everyone in our lives. Yet how can we stop thinking about the other corona? This terrible corona, in a strange way, a gift. Because if we are brave enough and strong enough to see how this disease-causing corona has allowed so much inner ugliness to percolate to the surface, then maybe we will finally see that Yom Kippur and its calls for repentance is not simply a day to be endured, but rather a day that can truly change our lives and the lives of so many others.
The Mishnah’s message is also one of impatience: if we don’t purge ourselves of the hate and the loathing of others, if all we feel toward those who are suffering or suffered is some kind of visceral disgust, if all we can say to the dead and those that love them is that they died of a hoax, then, the Mishnah tells us, better to not even have pretended asking for soul-change. If we’re not going to change, what’s the point of Yom Kippur?
What this moment in our Jewish year is begging us to consider is how easily we can fall into what I call soul-death. It’s not the death of the soul, per se, it is the death of the gentleness, the kindness, the repentance, the forgiveness of the soul.
When Rachel Carson wrote ‘Silent Spring’ in 1962, it was somehow prophetic and not just about climate change but also about the corrosion of the soul we witness this day. She wrote:
“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one “less traveled by” – offers our last, only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
Today, I substitute the word ‘soul’ for ‘earth.’ Today, this Yom Kippur, is our chance, and maybe for some of us, our last chance to reach a destination that assures us of the preservation of our soul.
When we speak of ‘Who shall live and who shall die,’ we are not speaking only literally. We are speaking soulfully and of our soul. Yet the death of the spirit is the one death everyone of us can control. As the Chassidic story asks, ‘How far is God? And it answers, ‘God is but one step away. All we have to do is turn around.’ Or, to continue the music of the song and poem, our real Yom Kippur begins the moment we step out of our homes and comfort zones and instead of מתרחקים – creating distance to one another, we understand that that only leads to a death of the spirit of love and a exultation of the Yetzer Ha-Rah. But, where there is distance there is also potential for וּמתקרבים – for the coming together, for turning around and facing both ourselves and others. For embracing the compassion and love and respect that we tell ourselves our tradition teaches and that we know, deep down in our hearts, we have too often ignored.
This day is calling to us in the loudest possible voice our tradition can muster. The day is not about what we are wearing on the outside but about how we are wearing our souls inside. It is not about the liturgy on a live-streamed screen in our living rooms but about the liturgy upon our heart that too often goes unheeded. Today is not so much about acquiring a new soul, but rather acquiring a new soulfulness.
We say to each other Shanna Tova. You know it usually is meant to mean ‘Happy New Year.’ But it doesn’t really mean that. The root of the word ‘shanna’ is change. Shanna Tova really is a prayer for ‘a good change.’ Too many of us changed this year and we watched others suffer with our indifference, loathing and cynicism. Let this year be different. Let this year be a good change where we embrace וּמתקרבים – the supernal bonds that exalt our humanity. It is then, and only then, that the corona we are struggling with and brings out the worst in us can become the Keter, the crown. And if we choose to embrace that crown then we are listening to the voice of God.
I wish you all a Shanna Tova. A good year, to be sure. A year of health and prosperity and happiness and healing. And I also wish you a Shanna Tova – a year for a good change. Let it be a year when we replace the corona with the Keter and where we live the words of the living God on our hearts, in our minds and on our sleeves.
Shanna Tova
