Quiet Humility and the Teshuvah ahead: Yom Kippur 5785

About a month ago, Joseph and I decided to forego our smartphones. So we made a somewhat impulsive decision, packed up Elisheva, Tziporah, my brother Coby, and took a family trip to the Spectrum store. After convincing the salesperson that we really did want the lowest tech phone they offered; after explaining that we wanted to be more present, and less distracted, that we felt like our phones were stealing away our peace, she relented, and fumbled to help us through this wild transition. 

And so, with some uncertainty, and a fair amount of disbelief, we left the Spectrum store with our brand new–his and hers–matching TCL flip 3 phones. My new phone had big buttons and bluetooth connectivity, but it didn’t reliably connect to the internet or support apps like Instagram or Facebook. And for those first glorious hours, skipping through the land of low-tech, we felt liberated, free, and excited about what this change would mean for our family, for our mental health, for our general well-being. 

There were so many good reasons to make the switch. I knew I would sleep better (although I would miss doing the New York Times crossword before bed), I knew I would feel less scattered. I knew I would have to be more intentional about staying in touch with friends and family, but I was ok with that. I wanted so badly to rewire my brain, to retrain it to do the hard things and not be so taken by what I saw on this tiny, prevailing screen. 

Every time I picked up my phone, I knew that heartache wasn’t far behind. And yet, I couldn’t put it down– ever. My phone, this tiny universe that I could hold in the palm of my hand, so much more than a tether, a vise maybe. Something that was causing me pain and pulling me away from the life that I was working so hard to build. I was happy to let it go. 

But the thing I was happiest to leave behind? Because this was the thing breaking my heart the most, was the certainty and stridency and hate that I was observing in almost every corner of the internet. I was watching friends tear each other apart; watching in real time as our respective echo chambers became even more entrenched, harder to exit, safer, and more opaque. 

And since October 7th, and since the war in Gaza began, I have watched in true horror as people who I love and adore and admire and trust, have made light of other people’s suffering. I have seen people who I love talk about the death and suffering of Israelis and Palestinians with casual indifference. Engaging in a morally bankrupt exercise of mental gymnastics to explain away the tragedy that has swallowed us all whole. As if anyone deserves to lose a child or a sibling or a parent. As if whole communities should have accepted their annihilation as a necessary and inevitable part of the unfolding of middle east history. 

I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t cope with the hateful rhetoric and judgment thrown out into the wide open spaces of the internet like a grenade. I didn’t know how to put the pin back. So I opted out of it all. 

But this isn’t new. I remember last year when the OceanGate submersible went missing, and was later recovered. All five passengers were killed. Once the submersible lost contact with its crew on the surface, the internet began not only relitigating the tragedy, but tried to explain why the victims deserved their fate because they were wealthy and therefore frivolous. As if wealth insulates a person or a family from suffering. As if a risky decision gives us license to judge their lives and to deride their deaths. I was, as I’m sure many of us were, disgusted and ashamed. 

But that moment came and went. This year feels different. Because the pain and the trauma and the fear and the anger–it all just keeps going. And people are still prosecuting the war in Gaza and now in Lebanon from behind a screen. Jokes made about pagers exploding– it’s funny because pagers are outdated and the whole operation seemed as if it had been lifted from a John La Carre spy novel. But what’s funny about children at the grocery store being injured and maimed? What’s funny about even more people living in fear for their lives?

What happened to us? This is not who we are. Death and pain and injury and fear should bring us to our knees every time. When did we lose our ability to see ourselves in the other, to empathize, to fall down and weep, to be humbled in the face of such great suffering?

But then I take a step back and look my own behavior square in the eyes, and I cradle my heart in my hands and wonder where we went wrong, how we got here– and the truth becomes obvious. This is one way that we cope. And maybe, it’s less pernicious than I thought, because it’s all pain, all the way down. And we can’t take anymore. Could never stomach any of it. So we push it away and make it small. We run away from the reality that all the suffering over there is arbitrary. We tell ourselves that it couldn’t ever be us– because we all know deep down, just how untrue that is. 

How many of us have lived in Israel? How many of us have at one point dreamed about making Aliyah, about raising children who spoke beautiful, fluent Hebrew? How many of us dreamed about fighting for pace over there, on the ground? How many of us know people– family, friends, friends of friends, who were directly impacted by October 7th? How many of us have friends or relatives whose children serve in the IDF? It’s not far away at all. And contrary to what we all wish, it could have been any of us, all of us. 

Our goodness, our patience, and empathy, so much of it buried beneath the rubble. 

There are few liturgical moments that to me, capture the intensity and the possibility of Yom Kippur quite like selichot, the penitential prayers, when we call out from the depths, ממעמקים, and appeal to the very best of who and what G-d is. In every single service on Yom Kippur– during Kol Nidrei, Shacharit, Musaf, Mincha, and Neilah, and even a mention in the book of Jonah- we step into Moses’s shoes, and encounter G-d’s mercy face to face. Four times throughout the day we say:

וַיַּעֲבֹר ד׳  עַל־פָּנָיו וַיִּקְרָא ד׳ ד׳ אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב־חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת׃

נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִים נֹשֵׂא עָוֺן וָפֶשַׁע וְחַטָּאָה וְנַקֵּה

ד׳ passed before him and proclaimed: “!ד׳ ד׳ a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin…

I can feel the movement of these words. Can feel the chazzan leading us to the crescendo, the congregation taking over and singing G-d’s attributes together– registering a plaintive, collective cry for what we hope will be true in the new year. 

This passage is lifted from Exodus 34, the chapter in which G-d instructs Moshe to carve a second set of tablets after shattering the first. And this is one of the most important and revolutionary moments in all of Torah, because this moment is fundamentally about second chances and about triggering the source of G-d’s capacity to forgive– to be good, and in turn, to see our goodness however obfuscated it might be, and so it’s no wonder that it is a cornerstone of the Yom Kippur service. 

After the intimacy, ecstasy, and intensity of the revelation at Sinai, Moshe comes down the mountain to deliver the Torah to the people, only to find them worshiping the golden calf. And in this blinding moment of betrayal, disappointment, and heartache, Moshe smashes the luchot. Shatters the covenant and maybe even the possibility of repair into dozens, maybe even hundreds of tiny shards. But G-d initiates repair. In Exodus 34 we read:

And G-d said to Moshe carve two tablets of stone like the first and I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shattered. 

Here, G-d says, is your holy second chance. The people, your people, have let me down more than you know, but maybe, G-d says, there is something bigger here, something more important buried deep in this relationship. There is something worth preserving here. I’m not ready to let it go, G-d says, so we need to try again. And interestingly, in this new beginning, G-d doesn’t hide from Moshe’s sin– G-d says loud and clear, you shattered the luchot, this is how you hurt me. But this is also how we go forward. 

So Moshe climbs back up the mountain– alone and on Yom Kippur– a perilous and lonesome journey, to be sure. And as Moshe reaches the top of the mountain for the second time, G-d comes down and says those words we are each so intimately in tune with on Yom Kippur. G-d comes down in a swirling cloud, passes before Moshe, and declares:

G-d is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. 

Let me show you my goodness, G-d says. Let me show you that I am still me. Buried beneath the anger, the sadness, the grief. I’m still here. And G-d makes a new covenant with us– a covenant that at its core is about doing the hardest thing possible in service of something greater. Here, G-d shows us that it’s not just about second chances. Here, G-d teaches us that those second chances, if they stand any chance of surviving, must put relationships at the center. 

I often wonder about this moment. I try to put myself in Moshe’s shoes. What was it like to come this close to G-d? I imagine that it’s terrifying, dizzying, and utterly overwhelming. That it is truth, distilled. The rabbis also try to imagine this moment.

There is a midrash in tractate Rosh Hashanah of the Babylonian Talmud that says the following:

…the verse teaches that the Holy One wrapped G-d’s self in a tallit, in a prayer shawl, like a prayer leader, and showed Moshe the order of prayer. 

In this moment of near-catastrophe, G-d puts on a tallit– hiding, making G-d’s self small– and teaches Moshe how to pray. When we are confronted with pain that is too big to bear, whether it's ours or someone else’s, we can find peace beneath the tallit. When we simply cannot grasp the enormity of the world and its suffering, we can humble ourselves in prayer. We can call out, we can cry, we can ask, we can simply utter, in a still small voice, that we don’t understand. 

I wonder too, if G-d puts on G-d’s tallis as a way to channel G-d’s own rage and disappointment. Maybe G-d is wrapping the tzizit, the fringes, around G-d’s fingers, creating craters of string, preventing the blood from flowing freely. Maybe G-d is hiding under the tallis. Maybe G-d is slowly and carefully letting Moshe back in– like a small child standing beneath her mother’s tallis in shul. And maybe G-d just needs some spiritual armor to work up the courage to encounter us holy broken people again. 

But the midrash continues:

G-d said to Moshe, whenever the Jewish people sin, let them act before me in accordance with this order. Let the prayer leader wrap herself in tallit and publicly recite the thirteen attributes of mercy. Then, I will forgive them.

G-d has given us the key to unlocking G-d’s forgiveness. No, that doesn’t mean that all of our spiritual sufferings or theological puzzles will be solved simply by reciting this formula. But what if, here, G-d is teaching us how to slow down in the face of uncertainty and fear. To take a breath, a moment, wrap yourself in a Tallit, and come talk to me, G-d says. Let’s talk, face to face, beneath the safety and the warmth and the home of the tallit. Let’s daven together. Let’s daven and sing and cry for the world we all wish to live in, that every single one of us deserves. 

Our world is so desperate for prayer. For healing, for peace. And on Yom Kippur we spend the better part of 25 straight hours begging G-d to be good. But how can we ask G-d to be good, if we can’t be good. And I don’t mean ‘not good’ in the little ways that we mess up. I’m not talking about a momentary bout of road rage, or hanging up the phone on someone mid-conversation. I don’t mean those foibles and missteps that are so normal and make us human. Because our goodness runs deeper than that. Our goodness draws its power from our ability to see the full humanity of other people. Our goodness draws its power from our willingness to show deference, to say I don’t understand. And our goodness draws its power from those moments when we acknowledge that we can’t do any of it without each other, and perhaps without G-d. 

Joseph and I lasted exactly one week with our flip phones. They proved too complicated and cumbersome. And we realized that we actually didn’t want to give up the ease with which we could talk to our friends and family. Because staying connected, having relationships rooted in trust, and respect, and sometimes conflict, is one critical way to pull up out of the echo chamber. 

We daven here all the time. On Sundays, with our students; on Tuesday evenings so beloved community members can say Kaddish; on Friday mornings before herring, bagels, and Talmud. In the intimate circles of Kabbalat Shabbat on Friday evening, and once more on Shabbat morning. So if you are feeling weighed down, as I was, by just how cruel people can be on the internet, come daven with me, with us. You don’t have to know the prayer order like Moshe, or even know how to read Hebrew. Because davening, praying, crying out to G-d, we can do that in any language, and even in silence. Even with tears. 

We won’t solve the crisis of the Middle East on facebook or instagram. We won’t restore the security, safety, and dignity of Israelis and Palestinians in the imagined public square of the internet. We won’t achieve peace or respect or mutual understanding, or fundamental love by relitigating, retraumatizing, and casting dangerous, electrified boundaries around who is allowed to suffer and who isn’t– around whose pain is real and legitimate and whose isn't. We know this, we are better than this. 

I want the second journey up the mountain that Moshe makes to be worth it. I want us to be worthy of the unbelievable, and unearned, and holy second chance that G-d gave us all those years ago in the wilderness. That starts by looking within. 

May we be blessed with the ability to follow G-d’s example, to create shelters of humility and prayer, to lean into our pain, and seek to heal our broken hearts together. Gmar Chatimah Tovah.