October 2016, Yom Kippur

Dear friends,

We are currently in the midst of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, Aseret Yemei Teshuvah – the Ten Days of Repentance, which culminates in Yom Kippur the holiest of them all. For most, these days may be seen to basically constitute the heart and soul of Jewish guilt. For the non-observant who wish they were more so, it is obvious how this is so. But even for the non-observant who are uncomfortable with their tradition, still many of them nonetheless go to Shule at this time and very often with rationalisations of guilt. And of course for the observant, these days represent God as the austere judge who punishes us for all our misdemeanours unless we literally get on our knees, as we do in the Aleinu prayer, and pray for forgiveness.

The problem with all of this is that it seems rather pointless, shallow, and spiritually bankrupt. If you really want to be more observant then you will no doubt prioritise it and become more so. If you don’t, it is obvious it is not that important in which case why feel guilty?

For those who keep coming to Shule simply to ensure Hitler doesn’t win, the guilt is as misplaced as it is absolutely useless. Statistically, the chances their children will follow suit is not very high, their grandchildren negligible. It would be a lot more intellectually honest and emotionally sound to teach your children to have integrity and not insist on holding onto something which you disdain.

And for some the idea of God as a judge who will harshly punish all our shortcomings is one that can easily lead to spiritual lip-service and hypocritical behaviour. In my youth I decided that since I hadn’t killed anyone, robbed anyone, or done anything to intentionally cause great hardship or misery to anybody else, I was fine. Ultimately I felt that my inherent limitation as a fallible human being was sufficient grounds for God to not be too harsh in judgement.

The truth is that Yom Kippur, and the rest of the High Holiday Season, is much less about guilt and much more about personal development and spiritual rebirth. Really it is a very simple yet profound idea that sums up the whole point of religion in general and Judaism in particular.

According to our tradition Yom Kippur is the day that Moshe came down with the second tablets. It is the day God proclaimed forgiveness to the Jewish People after their grave sin of the Golden Calf, which constituted disloyalty of the highest order. Only a few months after God delivered the Jews from slavery, weeks after receiving the Ten Commandments – the first three of which prohibit idol worship – the Jews, upon seeing Moshe had not yet returned, replaced both him and God with a Golden Calf.

God responds with fury and approaches Moshe with a proposition; allow me to destroy this stiff-necked people and I will create a new people from you and your offspring. God wants to annihilate the Jewish People he had just saved from the suffering and injustice of slavery!

It is easy to relate to God’s anger. How could he betray me after all I have done for him! How could she act so disloyally when I stood by her side in her time of hardship? We all have our own baggage of accumulated anger, variations of the above in one form or another.

God had a strong case after all. The people God had just redeemed from servitude with the greatest show of force and care, in a flash turned against their saviour reneging on the commitment they had just given.

But Moshe, the voice of reason and empathy, staunchly defends the people. He uses every argument to convince God to forgive them, indeed even threatening God he will cease playing the main character in what will later become the best-selling book of all time.

Moshe is reminding God to put the experience in context. These people are a product of 400 years of slavery. If they seem fickle in commitment, perhaps it might have to do with their haunting past. Maybe they just don’t know what it means to live with any uncertainty. They need to at all times be able to say ‘this is my master’! If Moshe is not around and God has gone absent from their immediate experience, their need for authority will propel them to all sorts of foolishness.

And Moshe wins out. God’s anger is neutralised and disaster is averted. This we are told is achieved on Yom Kippur, which is why at the end of the Kol Nidre service we quote God uttering forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not about forgetting the past, but putting it in perspective. This is precisely the problem with anger; it makes us lose perspective. If we learn to take a step back, and react with rational empathy rather than emotional insecurity, we find ourselves more able to transcend our ego.

This is in fact the whole point of religion, to transcend the ego. Some people stress the importance of subjugation to God’s will as the point of religion. But this is not at all borne out by this seminal story. Moshe did not just accept God’s will hell-bent on destruction, he used all his abilities to successfully alter God’s will.

And to me this is the most astonishing part of the story. It wasn’t God teaching Moshe how to respond appropriately; it was Moshe ‘convincing’ God! We are being taught the very lesson of forgiveness not through judgement and authority but with empathy. After all, if God is susceptible to anger then we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves. Of course the point of the story is that we grow to feel less insecure about ourselves, and through this find it in our hearts to let go of the harshest judgement of others.

Chatima Tova to all and an easy fast.
Rabbi Shneur