A Success that Misses the Mark

Yom Kippur Morning 5773, NYU Bronfman Center for Student Jewish Life

על חטא שחטאנו Al cheit she chatanu l’fanecha—for the sin we have sinned… for our failings… for the ways we have missed the mark…

The Hebrew language speaks about sin in terms of targets and slippages. To sin, להחטיא lehachti, is literally to “miss the mark.”

I’ve never tried to string a bow, loose an arrow, and hit a target, but judging from how much strength, precision, and patience it seems to require, I can only assume I would have done terribly in The Hunger Games. Sometimes, as the long and hungry minutes of Yom Kippur slowly tick away, I picture myself awkwardly raising an arrow to the taut bow. I’m already straining and my form is all wrong. And then, like a whisper in my ear, my own doubt distracts me—and the arrow falls lamely to the ground two inches in front of me. Nowhere near that bulls-eye. I failed.

Sometimes, even when we hit the target, but off somewhere in the outer edges, we also think to ourselves, “I failed.” We want that perfect shot. We want to succeed. And, somehow, success means only one thing. There’s one red bulls-eye, and our arrow simply must reach it with speed and precision.

None of us are strangers to this pressure to succeed—this pressure to excel at hitting that coveted bulls-eye. And the pressure seems to begin earlier and earlier these days—apparently, my wife and I are supposed to tour preschools this fall to ensure our 16-month-old son a spot in “the twos class.” We compete with our neighbors and our classmates for dwindling spaces in prestigious graduate school programs, or for research and travel grants. We put increasing pressure on ourselves to make more money, to earn more accolades.

And it seems that our cultural model of success is failing us miserably.

In her books The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well, psychologist and educator Madeline Levine demonstrates how our cultural obsession with success hurts us. In her work with middle- and upper-class adolescents, Levine discovered that pressure to conform to one, narrow model of “success” has contributed to a range of emotional, physiological, and behavioral problems among young people, including “stress, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, poor coping skills, an unhealthy reliance on others for support and direction, and a weak sense of self.” Levine is not alone Writers and researchers in education and adolescent psychology voice the worry that, in our manic scramble to “succeed,” we are failing at creating a culture of self-aware, self-confident individuals who can adapt to change and who, perhaps more importantly, have developed strong character traits and values. In our well-intentioned race to “the top,” we are neglecting to nourish a broad range of human emotional, psychological, and character needs. We are feeding ourselves on material success—on iPhone fives and on just one more minor and on another A for the GPA—but what are we missing? Levine tells of one affluent young girl, well on her way to admission to an ivy-league college, who turns over her arm to show the word she has carved into her own skin: “Empty.”[1]

“Empty” is a charge often railed against an entire generation—the generation and the demographic depicted in Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, the tale of a twenty-something named Hannah whose parents have cut her off financially and who struggles, as she says in one episode, “trying to become the person that I am.” Many critics argue that Hannah wants a “success” that has no substance—she simply wants to be successful. One Tablet magazine writer quips, “What neither character nor creator seem to understand is that success, defined on those terms, is impossible. If success is the goal, and if no other depths of feeling or breadths of interest are anywhere in evidence, what hope do these girls have other than making a spectacle of their lives?”

Don’t get me wrong—I like the show just as much as I know some of you do. I’ve talked to several of you about the strange experience of watching Girls—both the pain and the delight in seeing a struggle that many can relate to. Is it merely a show about self-indulgent, spoiled youngsters with an entitlement problem? Or is it a sign and a symptom of a broader cultural ailment? Levine argues that such a skewed vision of success is practically a cultural epidemic. She writes, “Many kids have become proficient at image management”—young people know how to appear successful. But, she continues, “[A] deeper examination of these children shows that their external success is superficial and even meaningless to them.”

Somewhere along the line, we have become caught up in a notion of success that leaves too many of us feeling empty. This “success” has gripped us tightly—so tightly that we can hardly breathe.

I have been thinking about success and failure a lot lately, as I watch my young son develop in ways that seem to me miraculous. Suddenly, it seems, he can throw a ball! For weeks, I had watched him try, and for the first time I really thought about how complex it must be—not just the aiming part, but knowing precisely when to let go of the ball. I watched him try and “fail.” I let him get frustrated. And then one day he held on to the ball much longer than usual, refusing, this time, to let it slip behind him. He threw the ball! Obvi, we all celebrated with a dance and some hugs and maybe a high five.

What am I teaching my son about “success” as he sets goals, misses the mark, and eventually reaches a target? What in our Jewish tradition can help guide me as a parent in teaching a more meaningful and realistic and emotionally healthy version of “success”? What in our Jewish tradition can guide each of us to a new kind of target?

The word מצליח—succeeds—appears many times in the Torah. Sometimes it implies that there is only one outcome that “counts” as success—hitting that bulls-eye. Often, the verb is associated with God: God is the one, the only one, who can truly be called accomplished and reliable. From the prophet Isaiah: “So is the word that issues from My mouth: it does not come back to Me unfulfilled”—literally empty, ריקם—“but performs what I purpose, achieves”—הצליח—“what I sent it to do.” Never a misstep, never a word spoken in vain, never a promise un-kept, never a goal un-reached. Certainly such “success” seems divine!

What about us humans? I think the verse in Isaiah points to an important factor in success, which is desire. When God says that all of God’s words “perform what I purpose,” the verb for “purpose” is חפצתי—what I desired. Every self-help book on success tells you: to succeed, you have to know what you want.

Today, on Yom Kippur, on our holiest of days—the day on which we acknowledge our missteps, our missed targets—what do we want… besides a sandwich right about now?

Many of us think we do know our goals for success: we can visualize ourselves in that career, or living in that beautiful house. But let’s make sure that what we desire is realistic enough, flexible enough, broad enough, ethical enough, emotionally and spiritually fulfilling enough—to really count for success.

From a Jewish perspective, some of the things that make us successful as people are not items to be checked off on a list—achieved once and displayed like so many trophies. “Honor thy father and mother? Check!” The Mishnah tells us that there are some obligations—some values we carry as Jews—that we never “check off the list.” There are some values we must fulfill again and again and again. Our rabbis adapted this list of values and inscribed it in our prayerbooks so that we might remind ourselves daily: “These are things that have no limit […]: honoring one’s father and mother, engaging in deeds of compassion, arriving early for study, morning and evening, welcoming guests, visiting the sick, providing for the wedding couple, accompanying the dead for burial, being devoted in prayer, and making peace among people. And the study of Torah encompasses them all.”

These verses kept coming to mind as I read Paul Tough’s book, How Children Succeed. Tough urges us to measure success not only by material success, but by emotional health, creativity, and empathy. He challenges what is known as “the cognitive hypothesis,” which he defines as “the belief, rarely expressed aloud but commonly held nonetheless, that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills—the kind of intelligence that gets measured on IQ tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns—and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.” The cognitive hypothesis contributes to the preschool-rat-race and to parents’ spiraling fears about their child’s scores on a whole battery of tests that require her to regurgitate bits of information. But, Tough argues, what really contributes to success is not whether we instill in our child piles upon piles of discrete information, but rather, “whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.”

To tend to those things that are limitless—to take seriously an obligation to those items on the Rabbis’ list—requires emotional generosity and a great deal of empathy. It requires redefining success to include not only material wealth or professional accolades but how much we have integrated ourselves into our communities, how much we tend to learning for learning’s sake, how much we cultivate spiritual exploration, and how much we give to those in need. Success is measured by how well we tend to that which is limitless: our character.

And, during our 25-hour Yom Kippur fast, we remind ourselves of another important lesson for success: failure.

It’s something many of us fear. It’s something we even dread. I recall the many times when, as an instructor in NYU’s Writing the Essay, I received emails and phone calls from frantic parents about their child’s grade. Many of them were worried not about a literal failure—all of my students passed the class. They were worried about a B+. Trust me, I’m an overachiever, and my own definition of personal success is often, frankly, unreasonable. But I know, too, that I need days like today: I need Yom Kippur. I need it not to set the bar even higher, not to convince myself that all I’ve done over the past year is miss the mark again and again and again. I need Yom Kippur to remind me that missing the mark can help me to be a better person. I need Yom Kippur to help me recalibrate my notions of failure and success.

What matters for success—so says Paul Tough and Madeline Levine and positive psychology and educational experts and our Sages, the Rabbis, too—what matters for success is not so much how much information we can stuff into our heads. It is not so much how well we did on our SATs. It is, rather, how much grit and determination and passion and drive we bring to all our endeavors. It is our ability to envision not just hitting the bulls-eye, but the ways we might miss… and what we might do when that happens. It is developing our character and our values through habits, through daily and weekly and yearly practices that remind us that we are whole persons—brains and hearts and hands and souls.

Our target is not a small one, but an ethos. Our target—our definition of success—is not a bulls-eye. It is a way of being and acting in the world. This is what we desire.

The prophets remind us that what God wants of us is not that we “check off” items on a list. Not that we rack up accolades in just one area of human existence. We can succeed by imitating the God who declares, “For I the Eternal act with lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness in the world, for it is these I desire.”

חסד משפט וצדקה—Lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness. These are not achieved in isolation. These are not achieved with a quick tweet. They are achieved through a daily attention, in community, to a broad range of human needs—intellectual, material, emotional, recreational, financial, spiritual. Levine puts it this way: “While we all hope our children”—and, we might add, ourselves— “will do well in school, we hope with even greater fervor that they will do well in life. Our job is to help them to know and appreciate themselves deeply; to find work that is exciting and satisfying, friends and spouses who are loving and loyal; and to hold a deep belief that they have something meaningful to contribute to society.”

When our son was born, Rachel and I thought about the values we wanted to pass on to him, and we gave him a name that would serve—both for him someday, and for ourselves, too—as a reminder of those goals, those values. Ilan.

An ilan is a tree. A tree that drinks deep and reaches to the sky. A tree that can offer shade. A tree that must, if it hopes to survive the winds of the world, remain flexible. We read in the Mishnah:

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariyah […] used to say, anyone whose wisdom exceeds his deeds, to what may he be compared? To a tree—an ilan—whose branches are many and its roots few—the wind comes and uproots it and turns it on its face […]. But anyone whose deeds exceed his wisdom, to what may he be compared? To a tree whose branches are few and whose roots are many—that even should all the winds in the world come and blow on it, they will not move it from its place […].

Our success is measured not by what we know, or how much we know, or how many pieces of paper we have to prove that we know it. Our success is measured in our deeds. In deeds that increase our love of learning. In deeds that increase our empathy. In deeds that nourish our roots and that enable us to spread out our branches, sheltering others in our shade.

This Yom Kippur, may we each find the potential to be that tree, that person of whom the Psalmist writes: “[T]he Torah of the Eternal is his desire, and on that Torah he meditates day and night. וְהָיָה כְּעֵץ שָׁתוּל עַל פַּלְגֵי מָיִם אֲשֶׁר פִּרְיוֹ יִתֵּן בְּעִתּוֹ וְעָלֵהוּ לֹא יִבּוֹל וְכֹל אֲשֶׁר יַעֲשֶׂה יַצְלִיחַ He shall be like a tree planted beside streams of water, which gives its fruit in it season, and its leaves never fade, and all that it does succeeds.”



[1] Levine, Madeline. The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.
[2] Leibovitz, Liel. “The Unbearable Lightness of Girls.” Tablet. April 6, 2012.
[3] Levine, Madeline. Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success. New York: Harper Collins, 2012.
[4] Isaiah 55:11.
[5] Daily prayerbook, adapted from Mishnah Peah 1:1.
[6] Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Jeremiah 9:23.
[9] Levine, Teach Your Children Well.>br>[10] Mishnah Avot 3:17.
[11] Psalm 1:3.

Loving Neighbors, Strangers, and Selves

[The following is my sermon for Yom Kippur Morning at Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.]

On Rosh HaShana, two days before the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, my neighbor waited for the subway train to arrive on the platform. Suddenly, five New York City police officers assembled near her in a semi-circle, “staring quietly” straight ahead. What did they surround? A Muslim man who had rolled out a prayer rug to kneel and recite his evening prayers.

The Shabbat between Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur is called Shabbat Shuva, the Shabbat of turning—turning toward God in repentance, as the new year moves from the Day of Remembrance into the Day of Atonement. This year, Shabbat Shuva coincided with September 11th, a day of remembrance for those souls killed in the terrorist attacks of 2001. A day of remembrance. A day when all was turned upside town, a day on which we turn to one another for support. A call to us on this Day of Atonement.

Usually a somber day of solidarity and mourning, this September 11 brought different sentiments and slogans to ground zero, including one picture of an innocent victim of the World Trade Center attacks with words beneath: “‘We love you!! Islam mosque right next to ground zero??? We should stop this!!’” (Anne Barnard and Manny Fernandez, “On Aniversary of Sept. 11, Rifts Amid Mourning,” NY Times, 12 September 2010).

By now all of you have heard about the controversies surrounding the building of an Islamic cultural center in downtown Manhattan—inaccurately referred to as the “Ground Zero Mosque”—and a Florida Christian minister’s plans—eventually cancelled after pressure from the Obama administration—to burn copies of the Quran on September 11. At one conservative protest held near the proposed site of the Islamic cultural center, a few blocks from ground zero, a crowd gathered to support the organization “Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America”; some shouted, about Muslims, “‘Kill them all!’” (Ibid. )… We love you… Kill them all.

Indiscriminate, bigoted, and violent, this call to kill all Muslims came not only on a day of national and, for far too many, personal mourning—September 11. It came not only on a day of remembrance and renewal for Jews—Rosh HaShana. It came on a day of celebration for Muslims—Eid, the festival marking the end of the fast of Ramadan, a time of year when Muslims, like Jews during the Days of Awe, look for the forgiveness of their sins and make amends. With recently reported incidents of violent assaults against Muslim cab drivers, shots fired into a mosque in upstate New York on September 4th, and calls for the burning of Islam’s holy book, many American Muslims, according to several newspapers, planned to have a low-key celebration this year, fearing that marking Eid would be misinterpreted as an act of hatred or disrespect.

A day for remembrance. A day for turning. A day for atonement.

September 11, 2010, was for many a day of alienation, a day of suspicion, a day of being labeled an outsider, a stranger.

This afternoon, on our Day of Atonement, we will read from the Holiness Code in Leviticus, a series of laws following the declaration, “You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal your God, am holy” (19:2). We learn what acts will help us to be holy, and we read: k’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (19:34).

The ger, the stranger, is not an enemy, nor a brother nor a kinsman. He is not a Jew, yet he lives, “either temporarily or long-term,” notes the Women’s Torah Commentary, in the Land, alongside the biblical Israelites (see Kaminowski, WTC 710). The ger is a “stranger,” not a citizen but treated like a citizen, a political and kin-group outsider. Often bundled together with the orphan, the widow, and the Levite (the tribe dedicated to Temple service and thus unable to participate in the normal political and economic life of the ancient Israelites), the ger is one who must be supported, treated kindly, incorporated into the system of justice. Throughout the Torah, we are repeatedly enjoined not to oppress the stranger, not to make the stranger into an enemy: “There shall be one law for you and the stranger who resides among you […] You and the stranger shall be alike before the Eternal” (Numbers 15:15), “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19), “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exocus 23:9).

The rabbis later adapted the word ger and applied it to a different kind of outsider: the convert. So, in Hebrew, the ger is twofold: the stranger who never “belongs” to the kinship group but whom one is obligated to treat with justice, and the convert who mystically, theologically, and legally “becomes” kin. One blogger called the Talmudic ger “someone who feels strange, but wishes to belong” (VirtualJewishLibrary).

Who are these strangers among us, those clamoring to belong, those who feel strange?

In the United States, not all Muslims are gerim, if ger is distinct from “citizen.” Many Muslims, of all shades and sects, are patriotic American citizens who, at least in name, according to the letter of the law, “belong” here. And yet so many Muslims are speaking out about feeling strange, alien. I think the analogy is worth exploring, this year, on the heels of a September 11th that turned from a day of remembrance to a day of bigotry and ignorance, confusion and exclusion.

On Yom Kippur, we are enjoined, “You shall love [the stranger] as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). How do we love the stranger, and precisely what does it mean to love the stranger “as yourself”?

The Hebrew verb ahav, love, appears as a command only three times in the Torah (WTC). It appears in the V’ahavta, in Deuteronomy: V’ahavta et Adonai elohecha, “And you shall love the Eternal your God” (6:5). And it appears twice in parashat Kedoshim, the section from Leviticus that we read on Yom Kippur afternoon: v’ahavta re’echa kamocha, “and you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18) and k’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love [the stranger] as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (19:34). Scholar Tamara Cohn Eskenazi sees these three commandments about love as “three dimensions of a single, deep connection: to love God is to love others, those like us and those who are not” (“Another View on K’doshim,” WTC 716). Though we tend to link kedoshim, holiness, with separation, Eskenazi points out that the Holiness Code in Leviticus emphasizes connection, not separation. We learn that “holiness comes from cultivating relationships […]:the connection to parents whom one must honor, to the poor and disadvantaged whom one must protect, to the neighbor and stranger whom one must love, and of course to God” (Ibid. ). Holiness is about relationships; we are holy—or not—in how we treat one another.

On Yom Kippur, we remind ourselves that the Gates of Heaven are open to hear our pleas, that we will be forgiven, by the end of the day, for sins committed bein adam lamakom, between human beings and God. But sins committed bein adam lachaveiro, between one human being and another, are forgiven only when we approach those we have wronged to make amends. It is this same spirit that infuses the laws in the Holiness Code: laws that remind us that the Jewish covenant calls us to act with love not only toward God but toward one another—to our neighbors and to the strangers among us (cf. WTC 703).

How does one “love the stranger as yourself”? Suan Retik and Patti Quigley turned from their immeasurable grief to love, and love of the stranger, in the wake of the deaths of their husbands in the 9/11 attacks. As reported in the New York Times, these two women turned to strangers whose emotions they could perhaps understand: Afghani widows. As the US government responded to the terrorist attacks with a war, these widows founded an organization, Beyond the 11th, that provides education and economic assistance, designed to battle the conditions that made so many Afghanis easy targets for fundamentalist Taliban recruiters (Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Healers of 9/11,” New York Times, 8 September 2010). This is how we might love the stranger as ourselves, by reaching out, across ignorance and fear, to build a better world.

Reaching across ignorance and fear is precisely what Feisal Abdul Rauf, chairman of the Cordoba Initiative and imam of a Lower Manhattan mosque, intended in proposing the Park51 Islamic cultural center. Modeled after the YMCA and the Jewish Community Center, the space was designed as a shared community space for performances, social events, education, and recreation, with a swimming pool, classrooms, and multifaith prayer spaces (as well as individual prayer spaces for Muslims, Christians, and Jews) (Feisal Abdul Rauf, “Building on Faith,” New York Times, 7 September 2010). Indeed, he calls two commandments the institution’s cornerstones: “to love the Lord our creator with all of our hearts, minds, souls and strength; and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves” (Ibid. ). Rauf intended not to avoid the tough issues of the day, not to ignore the radicalism and fundamentalism that have become most associated with Islam in the popular media, but rather to confront the difficult issues head on, to provide a space for real dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims and to provide for a broader understanding of the variations in Islam (Ibid. ).

The word ger already carries ambiguity in Hebrew: the stranger, the convert; the one who does not quite belong but whom we love, the one who once stood outside and now is embraced as one of am Yisrael, the Jewish people. Things get even more muddled in our contemporary example; when those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon lay claim to Islam, it is difficult to distinguish between the enemy and the stranger we are called to love. But making that distinction is crucial if we are to live the values and the ethics God calls us to live today, the Day of Atonement.

We need not pretend naively that enemies do not exist, that dangers do not threaten our freedoms, or that terrorists did not claim the lives of thousands of innocents on September 11th. But we can ill afford—neither as Jews nor as Americans—to lump all strangers into the category of enemies. President Obama crucially noted in his September 11 commemoration remarks at the Pentagon, “‘It was not a religion that attacked us that September day; it was Al Qaeda, a sorry band of men which perverts religion. And just as we condemn intolerance and extremism abroad, so we will stay true to our traditions here at home as a diverse and tolerant nation’” (Quoted in Barnard and Fernandez).

The polarized rhetoric that erupted this year on 9/11, Shabbat Shuva, a day of turning from the joy of the renewal of the new year to the process of making amends, reminds me so much of religious conflicts in Israel, where “Judaism” and “Jewish” are words that have been unfairly monopolized by a version of Orthodoxy that excludes and silences women, marginalizes and punishes gays and lesbians, and discounts Reform converts and rabbis. In fact, the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism, a Reform organization based in Jerusalem, launched an ad campaign to combat this monopoly, with the slogan, Yeish yoteir mi derech achat lihiyot yehudi, “There’s more than one way to be Jewish.”

Indeed, our Torah portion this afternoon, Kedoshim, is a reminder that there is more than one way to live our lives according to our own Jewish tradition. In Reform synagogues, we read an abbreviated version of the list of commandments that will, the Torah says, help to make us holy. We leave out the troubling section about a man who “lies with another man,” the verse that uses the word “abomination” and has led to so much violence (including self-inflicted violence) against gays and lesbians. I had to remind myself of that stark fact as I read website after website of vitriolic anti-Muslim sentiment that equated Islam with sexism and homophobia.

Don’t get me wrong: I know that certain individuals and governments who claim to follow Islam—do promote sexism and homophobia. I have read the reports of stoning for adultery, stoning for homosexuality, honor killings against women believed to be “unchaste.” But there’s more than one way to be Muslim, too, although people on both sides of the frantic debate about burning the Quran and building the Islamic cultural center often forget variation and subtlety. They forget the ambiguity inherent in the word ger; they forget the challenge to distinguish between enemy and stranger; they forget the commandment to “love the stranger as yourself.” We can remember, not forget, by openly discussing and debating, right on that dangerous line between enemy and stranger. We can confront the fundamentalist and extremist versions of any religion—Islam or Judaism, Christianity or any other faith. We can call moderate and liberal Muslims and Jews to speak out against the extremists who lay claim to their respective religious traditions. And we can love the stranger as ourselves—love the imperfect, love knowing there are faults and failings, love with compassion and with principle. K’ezrach mikem y’hyeh lachem ha’ger ha’gar itchem, v’ahavta lo kamochah, ki geirim hayitem b’eretz mitzrayim, “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).

We are called to love the stranger in the same way in which we love ourselves.

Well, sometimes loving ourselves is a complicated endeavor, particularly on this Day of Atonement, when we stand in awareness of all our faults and failings, our shortcomings and our sins. We wonder whether our deeds of chesed outweigh the times we have missed the mark. We cling to the memory of Rosh HaShana, the Day of Remembrance, the day when God remembers not every misdeed we have committed but remembers the covenant between God and the Jewish people, remembers the acts of g’milut chasadim of all our ancestors. We remind ourselves that God loves us, because God loves the Jewish people, and we try to love ourselves. This love is a struggle.

In our struggle to love ourselves, to love God with all our hearts and souls and beings, to love our neighbor, and to love the stranger as ourselves, we can think about Jacob, the man who was renamed Israel, the one who struggled with the Divine.

Our forefather Jacob famously wrestled with a stranger, in the middle of the night. Though the Torah does not call this mysterious figure a ger, a stranger, the story tells us nothing of substance about him. He is ish, a man, an individual. He might be an angel, a Messenger of God. We read only that “a man struggled with [Jacob] until the break of dawn” (Genesis 32:25). Though Jacob pleads with the man to reveal his name, he refuses; Jacob injures his thigh, physically altered by this ambiguous encounter (is it hostile or friendly?). The man gives Jacob the blessing he requests, and because Jacob has “prevailed” in his struggle with both “divine beings and men,” the nameless man gives Jacob a new name: Israel. Left alone, injured, Jacob immediately changes the name of the place where the encounter happened, marking it as special. He calls it “Peniel,” a composite of the Hebrew words for “face” and “God,” as in “I have seen a divine being face to face” (Genesis 32:25-33).

Jacob struggled with the strange, the unfamiliar, and in that struggle was forever changed… was blessed.

We have turned our attention to change and blessing; we have turned from our past misdeeds; we have turned toward an effort to live the new year in peace and in blessing, with acts of kindness and with good deeds.

When violence and terror plague us, let us turn to one another in comfort and in healing. When extremists claim their religion as justification for murder and oppression, let us voice our opposition, let us lay claim to our own definition of religious living. When our neighbor rolls out his prayer rug, let us surround him in open and honest dialogue, and not in suspicion. When our neighbors build their house of worship, let us enter its doors in hope.

This Yom Kippur, may we turn our own struggles to love the stranger into a source not of strife but of blessing.


[This post was inspired by the prayer “For Unexpected Intimacy” in Siddur Sha’ar Zahav.]

Fast, with All Your Heart, All Your Soul, All Your Being

[The following is my sermon for Kol Nidre, the evening that begins Yom Kippur, at Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.]

Catholics traditionally fast on Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent, a time to prepare spiritually for Easter. Raised Catholic, I fasted each year—not at the insistence of my parents or my teachers, but from my own desire to do my religion “right.”

I fainted each year, too.

As an adult convert to Judaism, I struggle with Yom Kippur and the fast. Why do I fast? How do I fast? Do I continue the same fast of my childhood, the one that inevitably leads to fainting? What does that fast teach me? Does it help me turn back to God? Fasting to the point of fainting treads dangerously into the territory of donating money just to get the recognition, into the territory of “I-am-more-observant-than-you.” I am not sure what I learned from these fasts, what I learned about God and my spiritual and ethical duties.

In some ways the opposite of the Lenten fast, which precedes what Christians call the renewal of Easter, the Yom Kippur fast comes after the renewal of our year. We have eaten the apples and the honey, and now we stand, shrouded in white as we will in our own graves, standing before an Ark empty and stark as a coffin (for this analogy, I am indebted to my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman). Our tradition calls us to know, in our minds and our hearts and our bodies, that we are mortal and fragile. That this life is temporary. We become more aware of our bodies.

Yet many people assert just the opposite: fasting takes us out of the physical, and into the spiritual. Relying on a stark divide between body and soul, religious leaders (not only in Judaism but in other spiritual traditions as well) claim that we can pay better attention to the “spiritual” when we “overcome” the physical. In an online forum, Orthodox rabbi Mendy Hecht calls Yom Kippur “G-d’s designated annual day of total spirituality,” a day on which we do things “that make us like the angels the most” instead of things “that make us like animals the most.” Yom Kippur makes us less human, some people say, and that’s a good thing; humans are bogged down in the physical, in necessity and desire. We should strive to be more spiritual, more like the angels.

It’s a big fad: spiritual fasting. A few weeks ago, I browsed the bookstore at the Pittsburgh Airport and found dozens of Christian evangelical books and journals on fasting for spiritual insight. You can buy fasting kits online, complete with promises that days of consuming just vegetable broth will give you a “natural high,” that it will rid your body of otherwise unspecified toxins, that it will bring you closer to God. Fasting websites abound with language of “discipline,” “submission,” and “control”: fasts are supposed to make you a “servant” or a “soldier” for God; no longer dependent on food, you can focus instead on serving the spiritual.

Yet today, we stand, shrouded in the color of burial and death, very likely aware of our bodies—as we will likely be even more so tomorrow, as Ne’ilah approaches. We come here tonight in the spirit of teshuva, turning, repenting. We reflect on our actions over the past year, all the things we have sown, and we come face to face with what we will reap. We come with the sound of the shofar still ringing in our ears, a clarion call for us to live Jewishly, a plea for God to remember the covenant.

In Leviticus, we read “In the seventh month, on the tenth of the month, you shall afflict yourselves and do no work […]. For this day will atone for you, to purify you from all your sins; before God you will be purified. It is a Sabbath of Sabbaths for you, and you shall afflict yourselves” (16:29-31). Is all our fasting about affliction?

In the Book of Samuel, King David fasts in an attempt to effect change. The prophet Nathan has just confronted David with the grievous sin he committed with Bathsheba, who was another man’s wife. David not only violated the marriage, but arranged for the husband to be killed in battle. God vows to punish David’s household. The guilty David suffers, watching his innocent son, born to Bathsheba, fall critically ill. “David entreated God for the boy; David fasted, and he went in and spent the night lying on the ground” (2 Samuel 12: 16). David’s servants try to get him to eat, but he refuses. After seven days, the child dies, and David’s servants fear what he will do when he learns of this tragedy. But David does not continue his fasting; instead, he bathes, puts on fresh clothes, and bows down in the Temple. He returns home and breaks his fast. His servants are confused: “[N]ow that the child is dead, you rise and take food!” they wonder aloud. David answers, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept because I thought: ‘Who knows? The Eternal may have pity on me, and they child may live.’ But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?’” (2 Samuel 12:22-23).

Perhaps David’s fast is like ours: we plead, we afflict ourselves, we wonder whether God is paying attention to our suffering, and we hope that God will forgive us before the Gates close at Ne’ilah. Rabbi Michael Strassfeld writes of our Yom Kippur fast, “We are meant to feel that the natural course of our existence is suspended on this day while our lives, or at least the quality of our lives, hang in the balance. We are to face what a permanent suspension of existence—death—would be like, and thus to learn how to better embrace life” (Strassfeld, The Jewish Holidays, 111). This fast is not a self-absorbed attempt to have spiritual visions or a pointless test of our self-control. At the end of our fast, like David, we return to the rhythm of our lives, hopefully more aware of not only our capacity to miss the mark, but our capacity to make things right.

Why do we fast? Not to prove to ourselves that we can. Not to prove to others how observant we are. While the discipline of a fast can remind us viscerally of the discipline required for teshuva, turning or repentance, our fast cannot end there. We spend a day in self-assessment and public confession, as individuals and as a community. We make amends for past wrongs and we make resolutions for the future. Strassfeld writes, “Yom Kippur is supposed to lead from thought to deed—from looking at ourselves to transforming the way we act” (Strassfeld 119). This, indeed, is the message of the haftarah passage we will read tomorrow, from the prophet Isaiah: “Is this the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when the Eternal is favorable? No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin” (Isaiah 58:5-7). In turning our attention to one another, to the most vulnerable among us—in being present for one another, God in turn will be present for us. As Isaiah says, “When you call the Eternal will answer; when you cry, he will say, Hineini, Here I am!” (Isaiah 58:9).

Spiritual fasting websites claim that fasting will not only rid your body of harmful toxins but will give you a direct experience of that hineini, that presence of God—the feeling that something Divine is listening to you, looking out for you. Writer David Rakoff, who is basically an atheist, embarked on one of these fasts, paying three hundred dollars in exchange for email consultations and a strict regimen for a twenty-day fast: three days of restricted intake on either end, and fourteen days of a very limited liquid diet of broth and herbal tea. He wondered whether he would shed not only toxins and weight but the rationalism that kept him away from all things spiritual. He wanted enlightenment and clarity and focus—all virtues the website promised he could gain through denying his physical body. He thought the experience would show him something new, like “a new color,” something impossible, something he had never seen before (This American Life, Episode 259, “Promised Land”).

But Rakoff did not experience peace or tranquility or insight. He didn’t have visions. He felt sleepy, he reported at first, and he had a hard time concentrating. As the fast continued, he felt better, focused—but no new insights. On day six, he worried that something had gone terribly wrong; he felt faint. He got reassurance from his doctor, who was skeptical and would have preferred that Rakoff end this quest. But he continued with the fast, which he calls “self-obsessed”: twenty days of “narcissistic rumination” that served to increase what the writer calls his “usual feelings of venality and guilt.” Fasting doesn’t solve anything for him, doesn’t reassure him that life and the universe have a purpose. Toward the end of the ordeal, Rakoff recalls a slight feeling of detachment; he was “aware” of the problems in his life, but they didn’t matter as much to him. Worried that he had gone about the fast incorrectly, he called a woman who has fasted like this five times. She reported a radical cleansing of her body; she saw and felt the toxins released. “You feel like you’re new,” she said, “like you’re a new person […] your highest self” (This American Life). Is this the fast we desire?

About halfway through his fast, Rakoff rode the subway in New York City. I will try to retell the story as he told it on the radio: “One night on the subway, I see a woman at the end of the car. She leans over to the people sitting next to her and asks in a quiet, friendly, almost business-like tone, ‘Do you have any extra food I can buy off of you?’ I can only hear her because the train is silent. She isn’t standing in the middle of the car addressing us. She’s just asking those within earshot. I walk over and give the woman a dollar before I get off at Union Square. ‘But do you have any extra food?’ she asks me. I apologize and say that I do not have any extra food. But I know in that moment that there is neither clarity nor serenity enough in the world that would give me the chutzpah to tell her why not” (This American Life).

Is this the fast God desires? Is this the fast we, as a Jewish community, seek on Yom Kippur? Choosing not to eat so that we can gain something for ourselves, some kind of insight or spiritual experience—choosing not to eat while others go hungry? Rakoff saw the sadness in fasting for “spiritual enlightenment,” out of choice and whim and as an intellectual experiment, in the midst of a city where too many people go home hungry, or can go to no home at all. The woman on the subway asked quietly not just for food, but for extra food. She did not want others to go hungry to feed her, but she wanted something to eat. Such a fast gets it backwards: we pay so much attention to our own bodies, to ourselves, that we cannot see the person in need right before our eyes.

What matters tonight and tomorrow is not what passes our lips, not the form our fast takes. We each make our own decisions about our health as we decide how to restrict the intake of food and water and the pleasures of the body denied to us on Yom Kippur. What matters is not that we torture ourselves or punish ourselves. What matters is not that we go on a spiritual quest for visions and enlightenment.

What matters is that our fast awakens us in ways the shofar call did not—awakens us to the fragility of our lives, to our role as partners with God in bringing about a just society. What matters is that we face the empty Ark, dressed as the dead are dressed, with a new awareness of our duty to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, and to welcome the stranger. What matters is not that we think today alone about our bodies, but that we carefully consider each day what we eat, where it comes from, who prepares it, how they are paid and treated.

God, through the prophet Joel, declares that our fast is desirable. God instructs us, “Turn back to Me with all your hearts, and with fasting, weeping, and lamenting” (Joel 2:13). But this fast cannot be a show. “Rend your hearts rather than your garments,” God urges (Joel 2:13).

May our fast move us, in our very being, to turn our lives toward the care of the neglected, the vulnerable, and the lonely. May we be partners with God in caring for one another.

Turning and Returning

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, doesn’t come like a bolt out of the blue. The entire preceding month offers opportunities—personal and communal, formal and impromptu—for teshuva, often translated as “repentance” and related to the word “return.” Some Jews pray for forgiveness in the synagogue, pouring out emotion, crying, throwing up their hands. Some ask others for forgiveness, initiating honest conversations about wrongdoings of the past year. Yom Kippur itself, the day of judgement, begins with Kol Nidre, the eve of Yom Kippur, and ends at Neila, the closing of the gates, when Jews ask God to forgive us as an entire community, acknowledging our own small existence relative to God’s power.

In Brooklyn, I would walk to shul on Kol Nidre among the diversity of people in my neighborhood. Some, observing the custom of not wearing leather on Yom Kippur, I could spot straightaway as Jews walking to synagogue—dressed in fancy clothing but donning flip-flops, for example. Most were on their way to the park if it were a warm night, or headed to dinner, or coming home from work, relieved. In Jerusalem, I walked out of my apartment building to find dozens of people in the street, many wearing either the white kittel (a garment worn most by Orthodox men, resembling the garment that will cover them in death and burial) or wearing white clothing more generally—both serving as reminders of the unique and awesome significance of this day, the day on which God decides our ultimate fate. It seemed like everyone was headed to the same place, for the same purpose. This turning felt nearly automatic, not even a conscious choice.

Walking to shul on streets empty of cars, with traffic lights taking a rest for the entire day, in a community and a city where most of the other people on the streets were also headed to pray, I started to ask myself about turns and returns. What happens next year, when the walk to shul on Kol Nidre again becomes a choice I make? If my decision to pray on Kol Nidre, to fast and spend the entire day in shul on Yom Kippur, is challenged, how will I respond? What kind of turns will I take?

In many ways—and these ways are complicated by the fact that I am a Reform convert, a woman, and a lesbian—being a Jew and not living a Jewish life in Israel would be impossible. On Shabbat in Jerusalem, buses stop running and businesses shut down. There is practically a shul on every corner and people walk around the city dressed in their finest, celebrating and gathering with friends. I have a community of people to share Shabbat dinner with every week. The school year and the work year here run according to the Jewish calendar. The entire country, in one way or another, observes Yom Kippur (whether in synagogue or not). On Kol Nidre, after services were over, I walked with my friends to a nearby neighborhood. We must have seen hundreds of others dressed in white, walking, in the middle of the street, past closed shops and restaurants.

Teshuva for me begins this year and carries into the next. I hope that I can turn my own Jewish practice back in Brooklyn a bit towards Jerusalem. Just as we face East, face Jerusalem, face the Temple, face the Holy of Holies when we pray, I want to turn my “home” observance toward this place, where Judaism infuses nearly every aspect of life.