So, it’s Kol Nidre. Here we are. The last of the Ten Days of Teshuva. As we’ll say tomorrow evening at the Neilah service, the gates are closing. One last day to do our spiritual work of teshuva before the Book of Life is sealed for the year.
Teshuva used to be translated as repentance, but nowadays we prefer the friendlier and more accurate translation of “returning.” I think of teshuva as “returning home.” Returning home to God or to our best selves. Returning to a sense of rootedness and connectedness, returning to where we are meant to be.
So, here we are beginning this last day of our journey home. And the pressure is on a bit. How do we make it home? It’s a particularly challenging time to think about returning to home. We, at Kol Shofar, are without a home for a time. We’re here davenning in this unfamiliar place, in this temporary rented space. Perhaps not being in our spiritual home reinforces our sense of dislocation in our lives generally, the sense that we’ve gotten lost from where we thought we were headed or from where we wanted to be – in our careers, in our relationships, in our values, in our spiritual lives.
And even more challenging than our communal dislocation is the fact that many of us are experiencing a particular unrootedness in our lives right now. This past year has been the worst economically since the Great Depression. 14.5 million people are out of work. The unemployment rate in California is over 12%. With record high foreclosures and people in our own community struggling to make ends meet, people literally having to move out of their homes because they can’t afford them, it’s hard to imagine really settling into a deep sense of home when our homes feel less stable than usual.
So how do we feel at home in our lives, when for good reason, our sense of home is a bit shaky these days? How do we do teshuva, and return home when our synagogue home has been dismantled? Or when our own homes are a mess for one reason or another? Well, it seems that not being at home might be just the thing that allows us to truly return home.
Rabbi Alan Lew, our dear friend and local rabbi who died this past year, may his memory be a blessing, taught that the entire high holiday season, from Tisha B’av, two months ago, to Sukkot, which begins at the end of this week, is a journey from one collapsed house to another. On Tisha B’av, we mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and on Sukkot we leave our sturdy homes and sit in another “broken house,” the sukkah. Rabbi Lew taught that we need the experience of our house crumbling, of our sturdy constructs falling away, in order to face the truths of our lives and in order to truly come home.
And thousands of years before Rabbi Lew, the Torah similarly suggested that the Jewish spiritual journey is about not being at home and finding God in the process. Abraham was commanded to Lech Lecha, to go forth from his father’s house and from the comforts of everything that was familiar to go to an unknown place that God would show him, and doing so, he became the father of the Jewish people. Moses was commanded to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, which had been their familiar home for 400 years, and the entire rest of the Torah is the story of their journey home to the Promised land and forming a relationship with God along the way. So, for those of us that feel that sense of not quite being at home, we’re in good company.
The Israelites learned that even while living forty years in the wilderness that they could find home. In Exodus, God instructs us to build a portable holy place, the mishkan, the tabernacle, a place where God will dwell. God says: V’asu li mikdash v’shachanti betocham. Build me a sanctuary and I will dwell in them. Many commentators point out that you would have expected the Torah to say: “Build me a sanctuary and I will dwell in it,” but because the text said “in them,” it can only mean that the holy place is in us. In other words, home is an inner place, a spiritual state that we cultivate, not necessarily a physical structure.
So how do we find this inner home, and how do we work with this time of dislocation to get there? I’d like to suggest that we have the answers right here in our community. In observing you all, I’d like to reflect back what I see. What I see is that being without a building is a metaphor for how our lives are sometimes, when we’re uprooted, when we’ve lost our place in the world. And how we cope with this challenge as a community can teach us how we return home.
So, what do I see? You’ve all been troopers, you’ve been resilient to change and disruption, and you’ve been positive, supportive, and grateful. Look at us having to spread out in three different locations, Shabbat morning at Westminster, offices in San Rafael, Beit Binah in Kentfield, and then coming into the city for High Holidays, and for Simchat Torah, we’ll have to be in yet another location! We had to hold the first day of Sunday school in a park because we had nowhere else to go. It’s not easy, and there’s plenty we could complain about. Look at us right here, the light is different, we’re not in our regular seats, we had to figure out where to park, where to go. But everyone made the best of the situation. We haven’t heard one complaint. Everyone has shown compassion and patience and forgiveness with the fact that hey, we’re all doing the best we can.
Interestingly, these are the very qualities that we are seeking on Yom Kippur. Throughout the next day, we’ll repeat the words: Adonai, Adonai, El Rachum V’Chanun Erech Apayim, v’rav Chesed V’emet, notzer Chesed la’alaphim, nosey avon vafesha, v’chata-a v’nakey. These are known as God’s 13 Attributes of Compassion. It’s a verse from the Torah, where God describes God’s own self – that God is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and forgiveness. As we seek God’s compassion and forgiveness, we quote God’s own words, hoping to invoke these qualities.
And our tradition teaches that we invoke these qualities by embodying them ourselves. If we want compassion and forgiveness, then we must be compassionate and forgiving. How compassionate and forgiving have we needed to be with ourselves as we manage this time of being without a home! Just figuring out where everything is, which Torahs are where and tallitot and prayer books and having what we need at the Palace and Westminster and Davidson – it’s been an unbelievable feat (and tomorrow we’ll thank the many, many people who made it all happen), but we’ve had to have tremendous compassion for ourselves and for each other as we’ve gotten through it. Sometimes, life is not so easy, and we just do the best we can.
And God forgives us. That’s what this day is all about. Like we said earlier in Kol Nidre when we also quoted God’s own words from the Torah, Salachti Kidvarecha, I have forgiven, as you have asked.
Returning home is when we find this compassion and forgiveness for ourselves and for others. When, no matter how much we’re struggling in life, we settle into that overwhelming sense of compassion and forgiveness, that: it’s alright, we’re all just doing the best we can. And sometimes, it takes things in life falling apart – the recession, job loss, the loss of loved one, the end of a relationship - to really find that deep compassion and forgiveness and to find that the Divine qualities are within us to bring us home, no matter what’s going on around us.
Another thing that brings us home, especially when our actual home is in disarray, is gratitude. Again, I look at you. Everyone at Kol Shofar has been so grateful and appreciative, making the best of the situation, seeing the good in it, in fact. You love the chairs; they’re so comfortable and you can shuckle in them! The sound is great! It’s fun here – someone even put kippas on the statues in the lobby. You’ve been great sports and have had a sense of humor about things.
A bar mitzvah boy recently got up and expressed his gratitude when said in his drash how much it meant to him to have his bar mitzvah at Westminster church. He said, in a world filled with so much hatred, especially between people of different religions, it was so powerful that we could share holy space and that we could walk arm in arm down Blackfield Drive with our friends from Westminster as they welcomed us into their home.
Even as we were leaving home, we were coming home because we felt tremendous gratitude. Imagine if we felt that kind of gratitude in the other places in our lives where we are not at home, if we felt gratitude for what we do have.
That’s what Jews do. I know we like to think of ourselves as kvetchers, but the Hebrew word for Jews is Yehudim, and it comes from lehodot, to give thanks. So that’s what it means to be a Jew, to be one who is grateful. There’s a beautiful teaching in the Talmud (Brachot 20b) that explains the reason why God loves us: In the Torah, we’re commanded: v’achalta v’savata uverachta, “You shall eat and be full and bless God,” meaning, according to the Torah, we only have to give thanks for food when we’re satisfied, only when we’ve had plenty to eat. But we go beyond that. We say the whole Birkat HaMazon, the whole grace after meals, even if we’ve only eaten but an olive, only eaten a little bit. Even if we’re not full, we give thanks.
In other words, we don’t have to have everything we might want to feel gratitude for what we do have. We’ve learned at Kol Shofar, we don’t even have to have a house to feel that we’re at home.
The beauty of the human spirit is that when things fall apart, the best in us shows up, and we see just what we are capable of. We’re still capable of gratitude, and we can still reach out to each other. When some of our elderly couldn’t get here to high holiday services unless they had a ride, you stepped forward and reached out to help. We’ve realized, as we’ve moved around like nomads from Westminster to Kent to Davidson to the Palace that home is about relationships, friendships, feeling seen and known and connected.
In the mishkan, in that portable sanctuary that was our spiritual home as we journeyed in the wilderness, the Torah says that all of the cloths and planks that formed the tabernacle were joined together. The Hebrew is stunning: it says they were Chovrot Isha El Achota, literally, that they were “connected, a woman to her sister.” And the cherubim, the golden figures in the holy of holies, they were facing each other Ish El Achiv, “a man to his brother.” The Torah suggests that a spiritual home, that place (remember) where God dwells within us, is the place where we are connected to one another, where we hold each other up.
Tomorrow at neilah, we’ll chant Avinu Malkenu, and like we always do, everyone will put their arms around each other and we’ll sing our hearts out, and we’ll know that even without a building, even with everything that’s going on in our lives, that we’re home, that when we’re deeply connected to each other, that that’s where the Divine dwells.
So this is returning home. It’s finding that inner place of home where our hearts rest in compassion and forgiveness, where we’re filled with gratitude, where we’re connected to those around us. It’s not about buildings, jobs, or houses. In fact, sometimes, like on Yom Kippur, when we let go of the physical world, it takes those structures falling away for us to find that inner home, that place where God lives.
We’re like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Who knew the Wizard of Oz was actually a story about teshuva? Her house gets turned upside down by a tornado which sets her on a long journey. She knows that “there’s no place like home,” and she does eventually get back there, but in the meantime, she makes some friends, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion and together, they discover that the heart, the wisdom, and the courage that they were seeking were actually there within them all along. *
We too can find the inner resources, the Divine qualities that we need to be home. It’s a challenging time for many of us in our lives these days, but look at how we as a community are getting through this very challenging time of having no building. Life’s challenges create an opening for compassion and forgiveness, for gratitude for what we have, for connection with each other. Sometimes it takes not being at home to find that deeper sense of home. Sometimes things have to fall apart for our virtues to really emerge and for us to see just how amazingly resilient and strong and holy we humans are.
May we all return home.
*Thanks to Estelle Frankel for pointing out the theme of teshuva in the Wizard of Oz idea in her book, Sacred Therapy.
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