Asking forgiveness
Kol Nidre 5770
Last year I spoke to you at length about forgiveness—specifically, my sense that we need to find a way to forgive others. Yom Kippur speaks about mechilah and slichah and kapparah—about our obligation to forgive indebtedness, about recognizing the frailties of others, and about granting atonement. Last year, I added a fourth category I called shachrirah, a kind of letting go—a forgiving we might need to do even when those who have harmed us have not, may not, or will not ask for forgiveness.
As I reflected on the message I might offer you this Kol Nidre night, this night of vows, it seemed time to speak to myself and to you about the other side of the equation. If last year I focused on giving forgiveness to others, this year I wish to speak of making teshuvah—repentance—ourselves—that critical work that we focus on in earnest tonight.
We are taught by Bachya ibn Pakuda, an 11th century Jewish philosopher, that once, a traveler making his way through a difficult and perilous countryside came to the bank of a river too deep to be forded. He could not turn back, and he could not remain where he was. How then, was he to come to the other side? Then he considered the purse dangling from his belt, containing in the form of gold pieces all of his worldly wealth. In his desperation, he began to toss the coins one by one into the river, hoping to raise a pathway for himself over its bed.
It was in vain, of course. The bag nearly emptied, the river could still not be crossed. Finally, one gold coin remained. Holding this in hand, the traveler cast about for some other plan. Looking here and there he spied a ferryboat far down the river that, in his frenzy, he had failed to notice earlier. Regretting that he had wasted his treasure to no purpose, yet fortunate in that one coin was left to him for passage money, he hastened to the boat, gave the gold piece to the ferryman and crossed to the other side, thus saving his life and going on his way.
We come again to Yom Kippur, a day in which we strive to atone and begin again. How often do we turn to repentance as our last resort, when we’ve exhausted all other options? What if it could be, instead, our first expenditure? Rabbi Bachya teaches, “for the wise and prudent it is the first coin in the purse—that disbursement of spirit which makes possible the negotiating of life’s most dreadful passages—which enables people to go on their way safe and rejoicing. But for so many of us, frail, all too often insensitive and undiscerning, it is the last coin in the purse, the one which, when every resource has been exhausted, when we are left only with our need and desperation—we pray will purchase us a secure crossing to fresh possibilities and new hope.”
Tomorrow afternoon, we will read the book of Jonah, and as I read Rabbi Bachya’s intense parable of crossing the river, my thoughts turned to the depths of the Jonah story. The rabbis courageously placed this Haftarah portion on the Yom Kippur docket because, I think, it captures the unique Jewish call to repentance. It is too bad that the story is read so late in the afternoon, on an empty stomach and an aching head, because I believe that the book of Jonah lies at the heart of the moral revolution of Judaism—that change is the soul of teshuvah—of repentance, and, too, that change is hard.
Having written this sermon in its entirety, I then had the pleasure of studying the Jonah text with our Torah study group this past Shabbat morning. Ceil Baldwin, Carl Wagman, Joel Silverstein, Ellen Mass, Bob Meyers, and Jane Young helped me see this story even more clearly, and I am grateful to them for being my teachers.
As you know, the story is told in four brief chapters. Jonah, son of Amittai, is told by God to deliver God’s judgment over Nineveh because of its wickedness.
Jonah hears God’s voice calling him to travel to Nineveh to tell the truth to its citizens. Forty days more and the city will be destroyed because of its sinfulness. But defiantly, Jonah turns a deaf ear, suppresses the voice of prophecy, and boards a ship heading to Tarshish in the opposite direction of Nineveh. But God thwarts his escape by whipping up a violent storm, and Jonah buries himself in the hold of the ship, apparently falling asleep as the storm rages. The storm does not abate, and the captain and crew suspect that Jonah may somehow be the cause of the terrible turbulence and throw him overboard at Jonah’s behest. Having thought he could escape God first by running away, then by hiding in the belly of the ship, then by hoping he might be swallowed up by Davy Jones’s Locker, Jonah is instead swallowed by a fish, and spends three days in the belly of the beast. Only now, finally, does he call out to God. Only once the waters closed in, and the deep engulfed him, and weeds entwined about his head, only then did he cry out, “Deliverance is God’s!” At that moment, he is spewed out on the dry land of Nineveh. There in
In Hollywood, this would have been the end of the story. Jonah would have learned his lesson, repented, and never strayed again. But life is not like Hollywood, and neither, I’m afraid, is Jonah.
Instead, rather than take pride in his prophetic work, Jonah seems bitter that God called him in the first place. Seemingly unrepentant of his own big sin of running away from God, Jonah adds insult to injury by being angry that God didn’t just do it all with bothering Jonah, since God is all-powerful. Jonah escapes to the east of the city, nearly dying of the desert heat until God provides a plant to shade him. The next morning, the plant dies, and Jonah is once again grieved. The book ends with a famous question from God: “You, Jonah, cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow…Should I not care about Nineveh… in which there are more than 120,000 persons, and many beasts as well?”
So many questions arise for me about this text. Why is Jonah so upset, and with whom? And why did he suppress his prophecy? And why does he flee again and again, when just turning around would be so much easier?
And even as I feel so judgemental about Jonah, I hear Jonah from within my own bone marrow. Out of our guts, we recognize him. There are moments in our lives when we hear the unambiguous, still, small voice of conscience. There are moments when we know in the depths of our souls what is right, what we should do, dare I say, perhaps even what God requires of us. And there are moments when we subtly, quietly repress the imperatives of conscience, we hide; we pretend we hear nothing, see nothing, feel nothing—not the faults of others, and certainly not our own. Cleverly, like Jonah, we douse the spark of prophecy in us, and run away, looking for any other option.
Listen to the Jonah text! “The ship was sinking, Jonah went down to the inner part of the vessel and he lay down and fell into a deep sleep.” We know that sleep. It did not come from exhaustion. That sleep was a flight from serious responsibility, from life, from owning up to his mistakes and taking his place in the continually unfolding mystery of creation. Rabbi Harold Schulweis says that “Jonah was playing possum with his conscience.” That sleep was a sleep that simulated death, the moral fatigue that drains our sense of purpose, that leads us to believe and proclaim that change is impossible, that inertia is better than transformation, that it is better to throw all of our coins into a raging river than to go upstream in search of a ferry.
But then the captain of the ship draws near to the slumbering Jonah and cries out, “Why are you sleeping so soundly? Arise and call out to your God!” In a way, this nameless, most prophetic character in the whole book says to Jonah: Search your heart! Turn around! Do not pretend that you cannot change your behavior. Do not pretend that everything is determined, that it is all bashert, that fate and destiny is beyond you. In that moment, something shifts, ever so slightly, for Jonah. It is not God who tells the sailors to throw Jonah overboard; it is Jonah himself. For the first time, he recognizes that hiding his shortcomings will not make repair them or make them go away. But his awakening is painfully brief-- he does not yet repent; instead, having take one step forward, he throws himself backward, by telling the men to heave him overboard.
If you think about it, the idea of repentance is a relatively new one. It took a long time to introduce this radical concept. When Adam and Eve sinned, they were punished and thrown out of the Garden of Eden, but there was no mention of teshuvah, of repentance. When the people in the time of Noah sinned, there was deluge and destruction, but there was no cry from Noah to the rest of the people to change. And even when Sodom and Gomorrah sinned, Abraham argued with God about the nature of the punishment, but there was no voice crying out for the people to repent.
What we read on Yom Kippur is a very different story. From the captain of the ship to the people of Nineveh, the Jonah text is at once about recognizing how hard it is to change, and, at the same time, about believing that teshuvah is possible. If pagans can change, if
To my knowledge, Jonah is the only book in the Bible that ends with a question mark. At the end of the story, God says: you care only about yourself. If that is so, God asks Jonah, and through Jonah, asks us, “who will care for the rest of creation?” It is like the unanswered question that Cain asks God after Cain killed Abel: Am I my brother’s keeper? We KNOW the answer, I think, I hope. But do we act on what we know? To me, the only unresolved question of the book of Jonah is, does JONAH know the answer? Did he repent? If he were put back in the same position again, would he make a different choice? Would we? God’s question at the end of the book calls out to us. How would we answer?
The Jewish prophets arose to awaken the fugitive conscience inside of us, the Jonah in each of us.
Of course, there are things that cannot be changed, but not all things are immutable. On the Day of Atonement, we focus on the areas where we can transform ourselves. We are not perfect, AND, we are not entirely a product of biological, cultural, or economic conditions. We are not helpless and impotent. We do not have to deny ourselves the regenerating power, --that turning-- that grand crescendo—that repentance, prayer and charity can help us temper life’s severe decrees. Nothing forces us to run away from our responsibilities. We do not have to throw ourselves overboard. We do not have to hopelessly throw all of our coins into the water, seeking to do anything but what we know to be hardest but truest. This Yom Kippur, let us begin by returning, and not wait until we have no other choice.
People often call the synagogue in the week leading up to this night to ask, “What time will Yom Kippur be over this year?” I am tempted to tell them, “Yom Kippur is never completely over.” This day of fasting technically ends 18 minutes after sunset tomorrow, but our struggle to resist temptation, to master our instincts, to let our better selves emerge, to truly and fully turn and ask forgiveness is a constant, never ending task. And we cannot simply let our errors build up; we cannot simply leave the places where we missed the mark accumulate over the course of the year; we cannot wait for Yom Kippur to atone for us, like a ferry crossing we buy with our last desperate coin.
May we have the strength and moral courage to change that which has crippled us and kept us on the other side of the river, kept us out of the promised land.
For those who wish to know, the services will be over around sundown tomorrow. The time for the real service will then begin.
L’shana tova.