Erev Yom Kippur Sermon
Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton
October 1, 2006

Newness/Teshuvah, Compassion/Hesed, and What Is Ours To Do

"People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness I think… The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also eternal." [p. 240]

This teaching comes not from a rabbi, or a learned Talmud scholar, or even from a Jew. Yet it is a strongly evocative echo of our purpose in gathering here tonight and through tomorrow, this and every 10th day of the Jewish New Year.

This teaching comes from Dom Joseph Warrilow, a Benedictine monk better known as Father Joe. One of the many Catholic lay people who came to this wise teacher was the writer Tony Hendra, whose book, Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Sou,l brought to life a character for the ages.

The passage above was one of several that could have been written as a commentary on the themes of the Yamim Norai'm, these days of Awe.

One fundamental theme Father Joe takes on is that of newness and the question of what is old, and where we find renewal. Rosh Hashanah brings a fresh beginning, and the opportunity to review our actions, to move forward in our lives, yet all the while singing the refrain, hadesh yameyu kekedem, renew our days as of old.

We do this - look back while looking forward, looking forward while gathering up remembrances - not only in our Jewish ritual lives but in our civic and secular lives as well. What else, after all, is Remembrance Day, or even July 4th? Having been there is not the criteria for these wide mandates to recall what was - perhaps with longing, but not with mandated nostalgia. What is mandated is a sense of civic responsibility, and a broadening of our concerns beyond our immediate kin and community.

In this way too, anniversaries of great tragedies on the world stage readily invite our compassion, much as reports and images of the events themselves. Whether they have been on our own shores, or in remote places, they bring many images, some horrific and some uplifting. It is the latter I am thinking of at this moment - those images and stories of compassion, bravery, and selflessness, of individuals and communities reaching beyond themselves to turn compassion into action, horror experienced into horror survived.

We may be able to dismiss the historic, the worn images of soldiers and flags, keeping our emotional distance through intellectual rigor. Perhaps, though, our distance stems from another source. We take in so many of these stories, that even from afar, and even though many of us engage and contribute as well, we are often overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of suffering on the world stage, and fall prey to what has been named, among other monikers, "compassion fatigue."

My colleague Brant Rosen, whom some of you met when he visited us to speak of his experiences in Africa, writes:

"It is true that we are often simply overwhelmed by the sheer depth of the human suffering that the 24-hour news media brings to our door. As a result, when it comes to our compassionate impulses, we often don't know where to start. So just as we tend to compartmentalize everything in our immediate world--our family lives, our careers, and our social lives, our religious lives--we also compartmentalize our reactions to the larger world outside our door. Compartmentalized compassion." [Sermon, June 2006]

Rabbi Rosen goes on to critique a bumper sticker that I have long admired, and his comments gave me pause. The sentiment behind "Practice random acts of kindness and senseless beauty" reinforces the notion, he suggests, that compassion can, and should, come and go, and respond to the imperatives of the moment, the transience of feelings.

Judaism's model is to actually mandate, to require compassion, and to root it our experience as a people. As it is written, and repeated throughout Torah: You shall love the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt. Drawing from this and other biblical mandates, and consolidated in a systematic web of mitzvot, we are guided to shift our view of compassion as rooted not in potentially transient feelings, but in disciplined awareness.

Hesed is another word for compassion drawn from our Jewish system of mandated behaviors. Biblical characters, such as Ruth, Naomi's daughter in law, are rewarded for acts of hesed, translated variously as loyalty, compassion, or kindness. In the medieval era, Jewish hesed organizations actualized the obligation to care for all in their midst, surely not because they had access to 24/7 media reports, but because of the strictures of "commanded compassion," obligatory covenantal caring, or brit.

Hesed is also one of the thirteen attributes we chant and invoke as we open the ark on Yom Kippur morning. Of all the Biblical or Rabbinic verses that could have been selected to guide our engagement with Torah on this day of intense teshuvah work, we say a phrase, three times, that crams in as many synonyms for compassion as we might find in a single verse: Adonay, Adonay el rahum vehanun, loving and gracious God, erekh apayim verav hesed ve'emet, patient and abundant in kindness and truth, notzer hesed la'alafim, keeping kindness for a thousand ages …

Think how lucky we are, then that we do not need to rely on a personal sense of compassion, or awareness of God's hesed, to drew us in together, to call us to teshuvah. We can honestly say: the calendar made us do it! Though the Gregorian date may not suit us, though the ancient language may trip on our tongues, and feel unnatural, and the work itself not always effect the changes we hope for, we respond to the date, and the call to consciousness.

Think how lucky we are, as a people in covenant, that we do not rely solely on those sudden moments of awareness and insight, those unbidden encounters with trauma and its effects. We root our practice of teshuvah¸ just as I suggest we do root our practice of compassion, in our commitment to our tradition. Teshuvah and hesed, while they may well have some elements in common with a range of therapeutic or wellness practices, is in this way distinguished from them. Teshuvah, like compassion, is a religious obligation that is ours to claim.

Father Joe reminds his Catholic penitent of the ongoing availability of renewal. This same teaching, about the perpetual availability of teshuvah, is subtly obscured within the contours of our liturgy.

In some congregations - and my "Mapping the Siddur" students may recall learning this - the regular evening service is recited right after the conclusion of Yom Kippur. So following Neilah, the final blast of the shofar, and havdallah, the congregation might quickly recite the silent evening Amidah, conclude with Aleynu and Kaddish, and then hurry to break their fast.

What do they encounter, in the fifth blessing of the Amidah? The first word is: hashivenu, return us, and continues with the plea vehahazirenu biteshuvah shlema lefanekha, restore us through complete return.

Even more bluntly, the sixth blessing uses the core words and gestures of our vidui, or confessional prayers: slah lanu avinu ki hatanu, mehal lanu malkenu ki phashanu, banging on the chest for the words slah-forgive us for we have sinned, and mehal-pardon us for our transgressions. When in heavens names would we have had time for such wickedness?

So mere seconds after concluding our fervent, 25-hour marathon of teshuvah, we could cycle right back through this call to mindfulness, this spiritualized reading of the rule book. The fixed cycles of the daily and yearly calendar thus serve as a reminder that teshuvah is perpetually available to us.

We engage in teshuvah in the way we must strive to engage in compassion, as a covenanted people, as a group obligated to relational religious action. That we may struggle with some of the core concepts of Judaism is in and of itself no excuse for disengagement. It is, rather, the sine qua non of engagement. Our canon, from the Hebrew Bible through the Talmud, the Midrash, the vast, vast library of commentary, rulings, teachings and thought, is rife with contradiction, inconsistency and challenge. We proudly engage here at Beit Tikvah, turning our Yom Kippur afternoon Avodah service time over to a thoughtful presentation and discussion of troubling liturgical concepts.

Using the model of covenantal compassion - the obligation to care for others rooted in our commitment to our tradition - I glean a hopeful reminder of what we binds us to all humankind, as it is written: betzelem elohim, in the Divine image was humankind created [Gen 1:27]. All of humanity, was created thus; we take on the obligation to care, to act compassionately towards all, for we trust in the principle that all human life has value - inherent, intrinsic value. Tomorrow morning, I'll reengage this critical theme as we look at our Torah reading, and a painful way in which this value is being trampled on in our nation at this very season.

Tony Hendra, the lapsed Catholic screen writer, had returned to visit the Benedictine abbey where Father Joe lived, but it had been almost thirty years since he had engaged in his traditions core rituals. After re-experiencing Confession, and attending Compline, the evening service, he recalls: Something in me came alive, like the glow of a pilot light, a march lit in the distance at dusk. I went outside… The entrance area outside the church was empty and unlit… I looked up at the night sky the wind was sweeping clean. It wasn't an éclat as once long ago. The universe up there, all around me and within the atom, seemed not less impersonal, no less immeasurable. I listened. The way he'd once said: just listen, dear. In the roaring silence was a voice; my voice, it seemed, but then it always does seem to be your own voice: "Reconsider what you dismissed so long ago. Reconsider what you've grown accustomed to dismissing without a second thought. That's all you have to do. Rewind to zero and start again." [pp. 230-1]

We can return, return and return again, re-connect to each other, to our shared heritage, our covenant, our humanity.

Tonight, we look at ourselves, and we say of ourselves: we fail, we make mistakes, we hurt each other and ourselves; we succeed, we improve, we give of ourselves, and do good in the world. There are so many words, so many ways of understanding teshuvah.

Says Father Joe: "Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new."

We say: Hashivenu Adonay elekha venashuva Re/turn us PRECIOUS ONE towards you, let us return; Hadesh yameynu kekedem. Renew our days, as of old.

[singing] RETURN AGAIN Return again, return again Return to the home of your soul. Return to who you are, return to what you are Return to where you are born and reborn again Return again, return again Return to the home of your soul. Music: Shlomo Carlebach Text: Ronnie Kahn