This sermon was delivered at Mishkan’s 5785 Kol Nidre service. You can listen to this sermon on Contact Chai podcast or watch the sermon on Mishkan Chicago’s YouTube channel.
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In December of 2016, for the last episode of the year on John Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver stands at the end of a football field where there is an enormous effigy of the numbers 2-0-1-6, and he dramatically pushes down on the handle of a box of dynamite and blows up the numbers, shouting F You, 2016 in a burst of collective catharsis for himself and his millions of viewers.
Many of us were still in abject disbelief that Donald Trump had just been elected our 45th president in a campaign run on a sickening brew of racism, misogyny, false nostalgia and lies, and this was John Oliver’s way of expressing what so many of us were feeling right about then: it can’t get worse than this, right?
It feels almost quaint to look back on life back then and think about how bad we thought it was. To think back to Charlottesville, “Jews will not replace us,” ‘member that? and “there are good people on both sides,” and we thought it can’t get worse than this… And then think back to 2020 and people are getting sick and dying and it’s lockdown your kid is trying to learn 4th grade math on Zoom and you’re working next to him and your partner is doing therapy from the bathroom and the president just suggested that maybe you should inject yourself with bleach to treat COVID, and you think, “this is for sure the low point.”
I recently rewatched that John Oliver video and about four years into the comments one person wrote, “2020 says to 2016: Hey, hold my beer.” (It’s a Corona.)
And then the entire country watches as a racist cop drains the life out of George Floyd, we witness an actual insurrection as Americans violently try to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Roe v Wade is overturned, by now half the states in America have all but outlawed abortion, and you think, now it’s gotten as bad as it’s gonna get, right?
Then this year just blew it all out of the water with its relentless parade of horrors which, as we gather as a Jewish community tonight, we cannot escape. Just being Jewish or connected in any way to the Jewish community has made each one of us an unwitting participant or expected to be an expert in this global drama, not in a way any of us would have chosen. It’s devastating when you open the news, it’s inescapable when you scroll social media, and for many of us it’s been a feature of work for a full year. And it’s profoundly emotionally exhausting. And that’s on top of everything else we were already holding, in our own lives and families.
And if you’re anything like me, you’re constantly pushing down the grief and anxiety and anger about all of this and so much more all the time as you try to go about your life like everything is normal, despite the nagging feeling that the world is in freefall. For me, the pain of October 7th and its aftermath was compounded by everything that has come before it — which is to say, the constant state of crisis that is our reality — coming in the floodgate that I try so hard to keep closed so I can function. I think that moment just broke the dam, and suddenly it was like a torrent. Just too much to bear.
I heard this from many of you this year — people who never before struggled with mental health or depression or anxiety suddenly finding yourself going down YouTube or TikTok rabbit holes for hours, or doom scrolling social media just getting agitated, feeling impotent to do anything constructive and yet guilty at the same time for not being helpful, feeling despondent, angry, irritable, snapping at loved ones or not wanting to get out of bed. And those who had struggled with mental health were finding that old coping strategies weren’t working the way they used to. So you deleted Instagram or turned off Facebook notifications because they were driving you crazy, only to start getting itchy a few days later and turn them back on again, existing in a general state of feeling maladapted and ill at ease in this world, wanting to just run away and hide from it all, and then feeling guilty because for so many people, hiding isn’t an option.
This makes me think about Jonah, the prophet whose story we read tomorrow on Yom Kippur afternoon, who is confronted with the sins of the City of Nineveh and God tells him he needs to go there and do something about it.… And Jonah’s response is… he runs away! He runs from God, runs the opposite direction away from Nineveh and tries to hide. Literarily it’s powerful because his running away takes the shape of him going down, down to the harbor, down to a ship, down to the bottom of the ship, and then falling asleep (which in Hebrew is a verb form of the word to descend) — clearly referring to a kind of depression and darkness that he enters into trying to shut out the world… But there’s nowhere to hide, and the storm finds him.
Reality seems to find us wherever we are and whatever kind of hiding place we’ve constructed for ourselves, thinking it will shield us from the storm of these times. The waves are just too powerful. And as much as I want to say, it can’t get worse than this, right? I think we have to prepare for the possibility that it will.
And so the question is how do we live in this world, come what may, without drowning in sorrow, guilt, grief, anxiety, depression, burnout, and despair? How do we not just live, but maybe even, if we could be so audacious, thrive, in the midst of it all?
Let’s take a breath together. Always a good first step when feeling overwhelmed. Let’s do it again. As the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl has written, “In between stimulus and response, there is a space, and in that space is our growth and our freedom.” I hope that the spaciousness of tonight and tomorrow will give all of us the gift of examining how we want to respond to the constant stimulus of the chaos and trauma around us, constantly beckoning us, taunting us to jump into the drama ourselves, whether on social media or around our dining room tables. We don’t have to. Part of the spiritual technology of this day is the reminder that for all that is not in our control, much actually is, starting with our own attitude toward any given moment.
Second, I want us to lower the stakes. When everything in our feed feels like a 5-alarm fire, and it’s coming to our phone, so it feels personal… it’s no wonder we feel like nothing we do could as individuals possibly be enough. But let’s go back to the Jonah story for a minute, because the story has a few important lessons. From where I left the story off earlier, it actually gets worse for Jonah before it gets better. A great storm comes upon the ship and he drags himself up from his bed in the bottom of the ship and throws himself overboard, in the hopes of ending it all. But famously God sends a great fish that swallows Jonah and he goes down even further into the sea. When he finally hits rock bottom in the belly of a fish at the bottom of the ocean, he suddenly realizes, as many people do in that moment, that he wants to live. He doesn’t even know why. So with a sudden yearning for life, and gratitude for the one he has, Jonah promises to God that he will do what God has asked when he gets out of the fish. And so the fish spits him out and Jonah goes to the city of Nineveh (where he told to go in the first place) — a city riven with sin top to bottom, and he shouts an inelegant, short prophecy that the city will be destroyed if they don’t repent, and behold, the city repents! A cascade of teshuvah takes place from the King on down to the guy on the street corner. As an aside here I want to say that another lesson of this story, in addition to everything Jonah about as a character, is that no society is hopeless and beyond teshuvah — even the archetypal city full of corruption and evil, is able to reclaim its humanity and goodness. And this reluctant prophet, Jonah, had a role in it, and lemme tell you: he did the bare minimum, and did it dragging his feet and with a bad attitude. And yet, his is the story we tell on Yom Kippur. Maybe to remind each one of us that we don’t need to be the High Priest or Moses or Mother Theresa or Greta Thunberg. You could be a person who just does something in response to the calls of our time. And dayenu, it will be enough. And then maybe the day after that you’ll do it again, and dayenu, it will be enough. Like Michelle Obama said at the DNC, just do something.
The word “something” is important here. It’s not everything. There are people in this room who looked at a Venezuelan family, recently arrived to the city, sitting outside Jewel or Trader Joe’s and instead of walking by, or offering a sheepish smile or looking away, took it upon yourself to slow down long to say hello, to give them some money, or went in and bought some groceries for them. And then there were a few of you who kept going- who bought the family you just met phones, enrolled their children in school, found them apartments, got them healthcare. Why? You must have known that this wouldn’t fix the entire immigration system. And you knew that for every family that you helped there were another 10 or 20 or 30 without someone like you in their life who wouldn’t get this level of care. But you did the thing you could do, with the resources and the time that you had, and it made a difference. You did something.
Ask any of these people why they got involved in a stranger’s life on a particular day, and almost no one has a complete answer. Just that there was a person in front of them in need, and they helped and helping led to more helping. Sometimes it felt great to help and sometimes it felt confusing or difficult. But countering the thought of “there’s nothing I can do to help” with an action, however small, moves you from a place of stagnation and hopelessness to new terrain. Remember the words of Rabbi Tarfon who says in the Mishnah, “Lo aleikha ha’melakha ligmor. It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free to do nothing.” Take it as a personal challenge for the new year- do something even if you aren’t sure if it’s the right thing or feel like the problem is insurmountable. Do the bare minimum and do it with a bad attitude if you’d like. See where it takes you.
None of us is on the hook to fix the world by ourselves, but the doing of something is the source of the Jewish people’s relentlessly hopeful posture in the world. Because hope is the belief that with work, things might get better. Optimism, by contrast, is a more general feeling that things will get better, not based on anything in particular. I think of optimism as a gift of neurobiology, but hope as a practice that belongs to and can be achieved by all of us. Hope is the practice of doing something, no matter how small, toward tikkun, toward healing. Activists aren’t just radicals and people who claim the title — activists are anyone who acts in the common good, and in doing so reclaims a little bit of hope. Activists create hope by acting, and in doing so, have less time for despair, guilt and despondency. They have important work to do.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg in his book The Jewish Way, calls maintaining this hopeful posture in a world as broken as ours a staggering pedagogic challenge. So our tradition is designed very intentionally to dedicate times during the day, week and year for us to really internalize this idea and practice it — like fractals, or patterns of the same idea appearing again and again in different places to reinforce the idea. That idea is hope, embodied in the story of the Exodus from Egypt: the radical notion that we don’t have to and must not accept oppression, exploitation and violence as inevitable. We can’t get used to the world as it is — we must continue to remember that there is something better to be imagined and worked toward. And fascinatingly — the holidays that comprise this beautiful fractal, that commemorate this imperative of working toward a better world, are celebrate not by working, but by resting, by disengaging from the world so that we can slow down enough to recover and restore ourselves — for our own sake, for God’s sake and for the sake of the work ahead, which is the work of creating hope.
So I want to just talk about what that looks like today, here, for us, as we enter into this 25 hour period of disengaging from the world. The specific objects we abstain from on this day include food, drink, technology, sex, shopping, work, commerce, fancy clothes and skin products — which is to say sources of great pleasure, and also sources of much of the anxiety and guilt that make it harder for us to act in the ways we can because we’re tripped up in our relationships with some of these dimensions of life. Food, drink, shopping, compulsive exercise, work, sex… these are all places we can hide, like Jonah, to escape the world, or that can help us connect to the world more deeply. So Yom Kippur is a sort of extreme one-day-long communal elimination diet, that gives us the spaciousness to reflect on how our relationships with all these things help or hinder us in quest to act with clarity and integrity in the world, help or hinder our ability to do something to be of service. Because it’s not like we lack the information about where we could be helpful out there — every other email from Mishkan has some opportunity to serve at a soup kitchen or get involved in migrant justice or participate in local organizing campaigns or write letters to voters in swing states. (Seriously folks, read our emails, there’s good stuff in there!) But Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel observed half a century ago years ago that “We won’t perish for lack of information, but rather for lack of appreciation.”
The appreciation he’s talking about is something he calls radical amazement. Which I know sounds counterintuitive because part of what we’re talking about is identifying the problems in the world so that we can fix them, which doesn’t sound amazing. But knowing how to be helpful requires paying close attention to the world. And if you’re paying close attention then you cannot help but be radically amazed: wow’d by the beauty of the all the different kinds of green on the trees,, impressed at the creativity, determination and lengths people go to create a life for their family, grateful beyond measure for privilege of being alive in this infinite universe in this fleeting moment in history, and yes, irate at the injustice and unfairness that is inescapable if you’re paying attention. Radical amazement requires slowing down and stopping long enough to pay real attention to the people around us, and to what’s happening in our own hearts. This slowing down, this stopping, is part of what gives us the ability to reconnect with our soul and sense of purpose, to be renewed. And this renewal is what gives us life.
Rabbi Alan Lew, of blessed memory, writes, “Human renewal is one of the universe’s great mysteries, one we tend to take for granted. When our cars run out of gas we fill them up with gas. When our batteries run down, we recharge them. But when we human beings run down, we simply plunge into nothingness. We sleep. Nothing happens to us when we sleep, and it is precisely this nothing that restores us. When we lose touch with this nefesh, this sense of space, of emptiness, we feel overwhelmed, stressed, overburdened. So how do we find our way back to heaven, to the spaciousness out of which we emerged? How do we reconnect with our nefesh?
There is a story in the Torah about someone getting their nefesh back, though I use the word “someone” advisedly because the someone in question is God. After six furious days of creating the world, the Torah says Shavat vaYinafash, God stopped and did nothing, and was re-nefeshed, given a new soul. We reconnect with the nothing that gives our life meaning by by stopping.
When we allow ourselves to slow down, to be moved, to have real conversations and explorations into moments, interesting things start to happen. You’re suddenly working from a different place. Not the place of trying to consume as much information as humanly possible, not from the place of the keyboard warrior trying to out-argue and out-maneuver all the online enemies, or despair at the state of things far away — but rather the place of being really present, attentive to the people and opportunities right in front of your face, right in your neighborhood, right in your community, to make a difference right here, right now. And that’s where hope lives.
I took a 3 month long Sabbatical earlier this year and took this slowing down thing really seriously. It was hard for me, y’all. I find great purpose in what I do and I spend many more hours than your average person working — both because I love it, and let’s be honest, because I’m an addict! Both to the feeling of being needed, and also in a really basic dopamine-driven way, to my phone, to a degree I’m embarrassed to admit. I had to make an effort to not have it with me all the time, to not know what was happening everywhere all at once and weigh in with hot takes or at least observe and judge other people for theirs. I pushed myself to go for walks without it, took drives without it, read actual books and the paper version of the New York Times. Spent time with my kids and husband and friends without it. I detached from social media, where if you follow me you’ll know, there’s not much to follow because in taking space away from it I realized how much better I felt when spending more time IRL, in real life, in my physical body, in this world. Taking time away and disconnecting doesn’t have to be like Jonah, hiding from the world — it can be more like Noah’s ark, helping create a protected space where we take necessary shelter and re-emerge with a greater sense of purpose.
When I returned to work, the world was no less on fire than it was before, no less full of chaos, trauma and pain, but I was more steady. I was more open, more available to the people around me. Less reactive, more receptive. Not perfect, by any means, still full of mistakes and places I can do better next time. The practice of this day is exactly that: disengaging from the world in order to reconsider how and where we can act to create more hope in our lives and in our world… it’s a gift, which I hope you’ll accept with the seriousness with which the tradition offers it. Because your hopes and dreams for your life are worth it!
Here are some of the things you said when we asked you to finish the sentence, “This is the year that…
This is the year I will finish my half-read books. This is the year I intend to be more open to new ideas and quicker to embrace change. This is the year I continue to increase self awareness and CHILL.This is the year I will decide to love myself, negative voice in my head be damned! This is the year I turn away from my phone and remember the art and skill of daydreaming. This is the year I would like to think of how I can be of service to others and be less selfish. That I clear the clutter from my life – physical clutter in my house, emotional clutter, social clutter. That I find work that aligns with my values. That I breathe before responding in a harsh way or making a harsh or judgmental comment. This is the year I help sick friends more. That I focus on my health, both mentally and physically. This is the year I will lean in to change, and meet good and bad with grace and the joy of possibility. Over 50 of you answered this question so I’m sorry for the ones I didn’t mention here.
Over this next 24 hours pay attention to your instincts and drives to undermine your efforts to really observe this day and benefit from the spaciousness it offers. Ride out the impulse to check your phone by saying hello and getting to know people nearby or in the hallways, go for a walk outside, go to the park up the street, use the sanctuary when we are not in services as a space for quiet reflection or journaling, go upstairs and make a friendship bracelet, do an afternoon classes. Practice slowing down, practice listening more than you speak, and when you speak, adding kindness, gentleness and helpfulness to your world. So many of the sins we strike our chests for on this day are for versions of not doing that.
And I want to bless us all tonight to accept the challenge of being radically amazed by your life and this world, and maybe we can get a little taste of what it’s like to live with more joy, more purpose, more wonder, and a sense of the renewal, possibility, and hope, that will be a touchstone for us in the year to come, come what may.
G’mar Hatima Tovah.