[The following was a sermon for Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA, on Shabbat Noach. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.]
The story of Noah and the flood is a tale of violence, destruction, and renewal. Just last Shabbat Jews across the globe read of the creation of a world God unequivocally proclaimed “good”; indeed, after the sixth day of creation, the day on which adam, the human being, was made, God pronounces v’hinei tov m’od—“and behold! It was very good” (Genesis 1:31). As generations live and die upon the earth, however, something goes terribly wrong: “The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence” (6:11). God decides to drown all of creation in the chaotic waters of the Flood; the only person God warns of this plan and the impending doom is Noah, whom the Torah describes as ish tzadik, a righteous person (6:9). God instructions Noah to build an ark, to save his family, and to preserve pairs of animals to repopulate the world after the Flood waters recede.
For forty days the rains pour down, and the water rises so high that even the tallest mountains are submerged in its depths. For one hundred and fifty days Noah and the other inhabitants of the ark float upon the surface, their futures uncertain.
During the Days of Awe, our futures, too, were uncertain, and in that uncertainty we called out, “yizkor”—May God remember. May God remember our loved ones who have died, we pleaded; may God remember the good deeds of all our ancestors, judging us less harshly on their account; may God remember the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all Israel.
In the story of Noah, God remembers:vayizkor elohim et Noach v’et kol ha’chaya v’et kol ha’behema asher ito bateiva, vaya’aver Elohim ruach al ha’aretz vayashku hamayim—“God then remembered Noah and all the animals and all the beasts that were with him in the ark, and God caused a wind to sweep over the earth, and the waters subsided” (8:1).
After the Flood, God takes care that this remembering will always serve for renewal, not destruction: “And when I cause clouds to form over the earth, and the bow appears in the cloud,” God proclaims to Noah, “I will remember My covenant between Me and you and all living beings, all flesh, and never again shall the waters become a flood, to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the cloud, and I see it, I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living beings, all that live upon the earth” (9:14-16).
God makes a covenant with Noah, charging Noah and his descendants, like Adam and Eve, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and prohibiting violence and murder. God reminds Noah and his descendants that human life is precious, ki b’tzelem Elohim asah et ha’adam, for human beings were made in the image of God” (9:6).
How are these survivors of the devastating Flood, human beings, made in the image of God, different from the souls drowned in the waters that rose higher than the mountains? What changed after the Flood?
“The earth became corrupt before God; the earth was filled with violence” (6:11) God brings the Flood to wipe away the corruption and violence, leaving the earth to the descendants of Noah, a righteous man. But it is not the nature of human beings that changes after the Flood; as biblical scholar Tamar Cohn Ezkenazi argues, it is God’s expectations of human beings that changes.
Before the Flood, at the end of last week’s parasha, God decides to destroy the first creation: “And the Eternal saw how great was the wickedness of human brings on the earth,” v’chol yeitzer machs’vot libo rak ra kol ha’yom—“and the entire inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only wicked all the time, the Eternal regretted that He had made human beings upon the earth, and was heartsick. And God said, ‘I will wipe the human beings that I have created from off the face of the earth […] for I regret that I made them’” (6:6-7). Saddened and disappointed, God destroys the works of God’s own creation, human beings corrupt in their yeitzer, their inclination and instinct.
After the Flood, Noah builds an altar and offers sacrifices to God. In verses I chanted this evening, we learn, “The Eternal, inhaling the soothing fragrance, thought: ‘Never again will I bring doom upon the world on account of what people do,” ki yeitzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’n’urav—“though the inclination of the heart of the human is evil from his youth; never again will I destroy all living beings as I have done’” (8:21). Eskenazi finds this verse “striking,” for it represents “God’s change of heart” (WTC). What changes in the Flood?
The story of Noah shares some similarities with the creation story: the waters of the flood parallel the waters described in the time of tohu va’vohu, the unformed chaos that immediately precedes God’s first act of creation (Gen 1:2); the ruah Elohim—the breath or spirit or wind of God that “hovers” over the water just before God speaks, “Let there be light” (1:2-3)—can be likened to the ruach God sends to blow away the waters of the Flood (8:1). But Noah’s story is not the tale of a completely new creation, resulting in some new human being free of the potential for corruption and violence displayed by the preceding generations drowned in the Flood waters of God’s disappointment and anger. The human beings formed in Genesis, those drowned in the Flood, and the survivors, the descendants of Noah who are blessed to enter into a covenant with God—each of these human beings possesses a yeitzer, an inclination or instinct, toward evil, corruption, and violence. Human beings do not emerge from the ark changed; rather, as Eskenasi writes, “The transgressions that led to the Flood transform God’s expectations. They result in new rules to guide humankind and a promise of a perpetual covenant” (WTC 44, emphasis added). According to Eskenazi’s interpretation, the covenant God makes with Noah, a covenant that brings both responsibilities and rewards, is one that “aim[s] at channeling impulses and containing them” (Ibid.) God will never again Flood the earth, but not because human beings will never again distress God’s heart so with our wickedness, corruption, and violence. Instead, God acknowledges the limitations of these beings created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, but created, too, with free will, with a yeitzer, an inclination or drive, that can sometimes lead us astray.
The Sages argued that we were created with two yeitzers, a yeitzer ha-tov as well as a yeitzer ha-ra. In the Torah, when God forms the animals, the text reads, and God “formed,” vayitzer, spelled with one yud (2:19). But when God forms the first human being, the text reads, and God “formed,” vayitzer—with two yuds (2:7). Why? Why is the same word spelled in two different ways in the Torah? In the Talmud, Rabbi Nachman explains that the two yuds “show that God created two inclinations, one good and the other evil” (Bavli Berakhot 61a). Both the yeitzer ha-tov, the impulse toward good, and the yeitzer ha-ra, the impulse toward evil, were created in us by God, the same God who created us b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s own image. Indeed, the Sages, in the midrash collection Genesis Rabbah, find the yeitzer ha-ra in the story of the first creation, on that sixth day when God creates the first human being and declares, v’hinei tov m’od—“Behold! It was very good” (Gen 1:31). Believing that no word in the Torah is superfluous, the Sages wonder why, on this day, the Torah declares not just hinei tov (“it is good”) but hinei tov m’od (“it is very good”). Rabbi Nachman responds that tov m’od—“very good”—indicates both the yeitzer ha-tov and the yeitzer ha-ra (Genesis Rabbah 9:7). “Can the yeitzer ha-ra be good?” the Sages chorus. Indeed, it can: “But for the yeitzer ha-ra […] no man would build a house, take a wife and beget children” (Ibid.). Our impulses and drives lead us to all kinds of endeavors and actions, some of them good, some of them wicked. Our impulses motivate us to take action in our lives.
From a midrash on the Noah story, Genesis chapter eight verse twenty-one:
If you argue: “Is it not the Holy One Himself who created the impulse to evil, of which it is written, yeitzer leiv ha’adam ra mi’n’urav—‘The impulse of man’s heart was evil from the time he was expelled from his mother’s womb’? Who then can possibly make it good?” the Holy One replies, “You are the one who makes the impulse to evil stay evil. How? When you were a child, you did not sin. Only when you grew up, you began to sin.” If you argue: “But no man can guard himself against it!” the Holy One replies, “How many things in the world are even less bearable and more bitter than the impulse to evil, yet you manage to sweeten them. […] if you sweeten for your need bitter things that I alone created, all the greater is your responsibility for the impulse to evil, which was placed under your control.” (Sefer ha-Aggadot quoting Genesis Rabbah).
In this imagined argument, God reminds us that we have the power to shape our own actions, that our yeitzer is an impulse, not a mandate. It is up to us to discern when our impulses are good and when they are wicked. It is up to us to take responsibility for the choices we make in reaction to the realities we face. Our drives and impulses, like our skin color or our nationality, are accidents of our birth. We cannot control how we are made, how we emotionally respond to the world. But we can control what we do with our emotions and our impulses and our drives.
God takes mercy on human beings after the Flood, not because we emerged from the ark all tzadikim, all righteous like Noah, but because God decided to deal with our humanness differently. Human beings are capable of good and of wickedness; our drives and impulses sometimes lead us astray. Shall God utterly destroy us all each time we slip up? No. Instead, God makes a covenant with us and calls us to ethical behavior; it is our responsibility to respond to our impulses and drives, directing them toward the good. As Tamar Eskenazi writes, “God recognizes that the inclination to do evil is part of human beings. God’s observation does not claim that humans are inherently sinful but rather recognizes human limitations” (WTC 43). Sometimes we will slip up. But sometimes our desires will motivate us to live and work and create.
God entered into a covenant, with such imperfect beings. God let go of the anger and disappointment God felt in seeing the wickedness in the yeitzer of human beings—an anger and disappointment that led to the Flood and the destruction of a work of creation God had previously deemed “very good.” God replaced that anger and disappointment with new, more realistic expectations. God cut us some slack.
I find it particularly inspiring to read the passage where God smells the fragrance of Noah’s offering and decides, in full awareness of human limitations, to enter into a covenant with us—I find it particularly inspiring to read this so soon after Yom Kippur, the day on which the ways we followed our yeitzer ha-ra to terrible consequences are laid bare before us, before the community, and before God. I find it inspiring that our Torah does not only ask us to lament our sins, but asks us, too, to be gentle with ourselves, to be realistic. Our actions have consequences; we reap what we sow. And yet, God takes enough mercy on us to acknowledge our humanness. And if God can treat us with such mercy and kindness, all the more so should we be merciful and kind toward one another.
When God sees the rainbow in the cloudy sky, God will remember. God will remember that human beings are created b’tzelem Elohim and that this “very good” world we inhabit contains both the yeitzer ha-tov and the yeitzer ha-ra. Let us be patient with ourselves and one another, human beings worthy of being remembered, human beings created b’tzelem Elohim.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
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.]
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.
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.
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