Sermon: Kol Nidrei
“Why I Have Never Preached on Teshuvah – Until This Year.”
Metuchen 2008/5769
Rabbi Gerald L. Zelizer
I have never preached a sermon on the central concept of Yom Kippur – Teshuvah – because the whole notion of Teshuvah has always bothered me for three reasons.
First the fact that every year it repeats itself as the overarching theme of YK, risks it’s becoming, what Dr. Abraham Heschel called, “Religious Behaviorism,” - that is, a kind of cliché, empty, religious behavior, without spontaneity. Secondly, and more importantly, if Yom Kippur is really about Teshuvah with the Almighty, with other humans, then if we achieve it, why do we have to do it again the next year? Or conversely, does this annual invitation to repent allow us a spiritual loophole? We can sin, recite Ashamnu and Al Chet knowing that we automatically have the chance to repent at Yom Kippur. Thirdly, I have never liked the translation of Teshuvah as repentance – too Christian, so fire and brimstone, so stodgy. For that reason I have surprised myself by ignoring the subject in sermons past.
This year will be the exception. That is because a colleague of mine, Rabbi Harold Kushner, pointed out something in the secular calendar which caused me to reconsider. He wrote that in less than one month, on Saturday night, November 3rd, spilling over to Sunday morning, November 4th, we will have the chance to do something that we always prayed for. We will have the chance as we convert back from daylight savings time to standard time, to live twice the same hour in our lives – to have a “do-over.” As we fall back on November 3rd, we regain that hour of life, so to speak. But alas, most of us will simply sleep through that opportunity.
When Rabbi Kushner pointed that fact of the secular calendar, the whole concept of Teshuvah began to make more of a profound impact on me to the extent that I decided to talk with you about it. How many of us would like to live one hour again and do things differently? Do you think that our presidential candidates either of them, would want to take even seconds back? That for example, John McCain would want to take back time and live over again the 15 seconds in which he said that the “fundamentals of our economy are sound”? Or that Barack Obama would want to take back and live over again the 15 seconds when he remarked that question of when life began was “above his payscale?” We read much last summer about the tragic and sudden death of Tim Russert, by all reports, a superb individual and not just an outstanding journalist? But how do we know that on the day of his unexpected death he did not live one hour which if he had the chance, even he would want to take back?
I know someone else who wrote close to her death that she wished she could take back some hours and live them over again. Her name was Erma Bombeck. She was a popular author and newspaper columnist who some years ago when she learned that cancer was defeating her, wrote the following:
I would have talked less and listened more.
I would have invited friends over to dinner even if the carpet was stained or the sofa was faded.
I would have taken the time to listen to my grandfather ramble about his youth.
I would never have insisted the car windows be rolled up on a summer day because my hair had just been teased and sprayed.
I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains.
I would have cried and laughed less while watching television – and more while watching life.
When my kids kissed me impetuously, I would never have said “Later, now we’ll go get washed for dinner.”
Many years ago while officiating at a funeral, as a son in his 60’s buried his elderly father, the son confessed painfully to me “I waited all my life for my father to approve who I was, personally and professionally. I waited for the words as a teenager, as a person preparing for professional life, as a husband after marriage, as a mid-life person, and entering my own senior years. The words “I like who you are, I approve who you are and what you do,” never came. Then as my father was clearly on his way to death, I thought perhaps he would tell me. The words never came. And as my father slipped into a coma, I still waited for that approval. The words never came and he died.” Do you think that if that father knew how painful and serious that withholding of approval was from his now old son, the father would want to relive just one hour in his life?
Of course, there is no such thing as a worm hole in time except in science fiction. But maybe there is! Maybe that is what Teshuvah really is, beyond the clichés which bother me, beyond repentance which is an inadequate word, beyond the automatic and routinized ritual which we shall do tonight and tomorrow. Rabbi Josef Soloveitchik was for many years the Dean of modern Orthodox Judaism. In one of his essays he explains Teshuvah this way: In all other civilizations time flows from yesterday to today to tomorrow. The past shapes the present, and the present shapes the future. Cause and effect. Something happened yesterday or last year or ten years ago and because of that something will happen today, and that something today will cause something to happen tomorrow. The past determines the future.
But in Judaism instructs Rabbi Soloveitchik, it is the future that redefines the meaning of the past. Was something a tragedy, or was it a spur to growth? Was something a mistake or was it a learning experience? We can’t answer these questions solely today by examining what happened. That answer does not only depend on what happened in the past. The answer is impacted by what we choose tomorrow and even today. Sigmund Freud taught us that we are shaped by the past, by our childhood experiences. Rabbi Soloveitchik teaches the opposite. The past is reshaped by our choices now and tomorrow.
Let me give you an example with something that happens tonight. We will hear in a moment an appeal to purchase bonds in the State of Israel. We usually hear of that in terms if investment, interest rates, and supporting the State. But I want to suggest to you that the reality of that action is even beyond those descriptions. In a very real sense, when we purchase an Israel Bond, we are rewriting the Holocaust. We are saying that through an act of investment in the current state which has six-million Jews, the decimation of six-million Jews takes on a different meaning. The act of purchasing an Israel Bond does not bring back to life those who perished. It does say to the perpetrators, we will not let that be the last word. You tried to affect in the past our future as Jews. By purchasing Israel Bonds, we will use our future to reshape the ultimate meaning of our past.
I suspect that though when I raise the prospect of living an hour of your life over again, what comes most to your mind is not a public figure, not even the victims of the Shoah, but a whole wagon load of personal regrets – arguments that didn’t have to happen, words you found yourself wishing you could take back seconds after you had spoken them, omissions that you wish you could go back in time and fill in, chances you wish you had taken.
When I read how Rabbi Soloveitchik explains Teshuvah it took on new meaning for me. Teshuvah means more than repentance. It means a new chance to get back on track, to change our past by living differently our future. Let me give you a metaphor that occurred to me. Occasionally as I walk in Metuchen and see some of the new mega-mansions. There are two kinds. One mega-mansion is where an old house is totally torn down and a gigantic mansion built on the property. The second is where a part of the old house frame is kept and the mega-mansion built around that original frame. The second example is a potent metaphor for Teshuvah. The frame is kept. Your physical being is the same. That is your past. But a new structure is built around the frame and dwarfs the original frame. That is your future. That is Teshuvah.
I also told you that I am bothered by the religious behaviorism, it’s automatic quality. Why must we do it again and again? Why can’t we achieve Teshuvah and move on without automatically putting it into our Siddur every year? Another rabbi, Rabbi Adam Steinsaltz, helped me understand that conflict. Rabbi Steinsaltz is best known for his monumental translation and commentary on the Talmud which makes it so understandable to even a lay person who picks up his books. He is also a Jewish moralist. And he wrote a piece that helped me to understand Teshuvah as more than a cliché. I want to share it with you.
He writes that Teshuvah is the soul, our spiritual component, which remains cloaked in our earthly bodies. When we create a new self – a “ ” – “Briah Hadashah” a new being, our spiritual soul emerges and connects itself to God.
And I don’t like the translation “repentance.” The Talmud writes that: “A man does not sin unless a spirit of folly enters into him.” How different that sounds than the English meaning of sin and repentance. In Judaism sin is a touch of madness. Madness can be overcome when a touch of sanity and wholeness overtakes it. That is Teshuvah.
And how about the fact that Teshuvah creates a spiritual loophole? For we can always do Teshuvah yearly, so why worry? Rabbi Steinsaltz explains it this way. Teshuvah is an incremented process. That is, when you and I do Teshuvah this year we become a new person. The bar raises. And then the next year, not as a spiritual loophole but because the bar rises as we ourselves shift. We have to do even better Teshuvah next time around.
How does this play out on a personal level, with ourselves, our spouses, our parents, our children, our friends? How can we gain back that hour we have lost? How can we allow the future to reshape our present and our past? The Talmud writes in the name of Rabbi Eliezer: “Repent one day before your death.” His Disciples asked: “How does anyone know on what day he will die?” Rabbi Eliazer responded: “All the more reason to do Teshuvah today. In case you die tomorrow. A person’s whole life should be spent in doing Teshuvah.” Put in contemporary terms. The average life contains thirty-six-hundred weeks. Never to do Teshuvah is to assume that life is thirty-six thousand weeks. Do Teshuvah today.
Let me tell you about a dramatic case of a person who decided that he would “repent one day before his death.” He was a person I knew in a former congregation. His act of repentance may not impress you as world shaking. He did not change his life from one of robbery or white-collar crime or cheating on his spouse. He effected Teshuvah in a more mundane way in an aspect of life which actually make more of a daily impression. You see, he had been married to a wonderful woman for forty years. But because of personality quirks, he had an irritable temper, a short fuse. He got annoyed easily. So his loving and able wife was constantly kept on edge – never knowing when his irascible personality would spill over. In later years he became what we would call a curmudgeon, a grumpy old man. Then one day, his wife said something to him which was an epiphany. She said “You know what is my greatest wish in life? Not to be scared of you.” That statement caused this man to step back and see his effect on his devoted, beautiful and able wife. She was even developing physical sickness because of living in this constant state of tension and unpredictability. So this man went cold turkey. He decided that he wanted to repent one day before his death. He decided that he did not want to leave this world – whenever that would be, maybe tomorrow – with his irascibility as the most prominent memory in his devoted wife’s loving mind. He decided then and there that he would become a “ ” – “a new being.” He gutted himself and allowed his divine soul to take over. He never again looked back to that prickly curmudgeon self. And the two of them lived happily ever after. A serious case of Teshuvah, perhaps as serious than turning one’s self away from some other addiction, or crime, or sin in life.
There are some words that do not add up to Teshuvah. “You’ll have to understand why I did that.” “You’ll have to forgive me for what I said: I was very upset.” That is not Teshuvah. That is a way of saying “It’s your job to put this relationship back together again because I couldn’t help myself. If you’re going to be too stubborn to acknowledge that, whatever happens thereafter will be your fault.” Genuine Teshuvah reaches into the deepest part of our souls so that you say to yourself “I don’t like the person I was when I did that and I don’t ever want to be that person again.” Rather than “I don’t ever want to do that again,” That is why we call Teshuvah in Jewish terminology a “Briah Hadashah,” the creation of a new person. The person who did that was not me. It was an act of craziness.”
So there you have it. The tenth of Tishri tonight and tomorrow, gives us a chance to spiritually do what November 3rd will do on the clock.