Often when I officiate at a wedding, at one point in the ceremony I ask the bride and groom to look into each other’s eyes and to see everything there is to see: the moment they fell in love, the moment of standing under the huppah, and the ripe possibility of the future. Mystics say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, that in the eyes you can see everything. It is a moment of such vulnerability, hope and optimism – a moment of intense intimacy – and I stand watching them with a mixture of awe and wonderment. Still I know, as anyone who is or has been married knows, that the oceanic feeling of union is transitory. Under the busyness and stress and all the burdens of daily life, the eyes that once revealed everything get shrouded over. The windows of the soul are covered. The eyes no longer reveal the heart’s truth. And, as it sometimes happens, when a couple comes to sit in my office to talk about a marital crisis, more often than not one of them will say “I feel as if I am not seen,” or “I want to be known truly and to be accepted as I am.” To be seen. To be accepted. Without being seen, without being known we feel alone, alienated and separated from those around us. We sense a huge abyss between ourselves and others. Worse, we begin to feel separated from our own truest self.
Judaism, like every spiritual tradition, urges upon us an ideal of union and oneness, yet places us squarely in a world of separation. In Genesis, God creates through the act of separation: light and darkness are divided, the lower waters separated from the upper waters, the land from the sea, Eve ripped from the side of Adam. In the Zohar, the dynamic of separation is known as “Sod Ha-Nisirah – the secret of division” – which infuses all of life with existential tension. Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz teaches that “these opposites reflect the fact that even though a unified world has great advantages it is rather static, whereas a divided world is much more dynamic and capable of change.” The spiritual teaching here seems to be that wholeness must be ripped apart in order for something new to be created. Separation and repair are built into the fabric of creation.
I know this experience of separation. You probably do too. My friend Doris experienced it when she told me that she looks at her husband of 15 years and feels he is a stranger to her. And my teenage daughter experienced it when she realized that her best friend in the world often insulted her for no reason. When you yell at another driver on the road or speak curtly to a co-worker, you might wake up to the experience of feeling estranged from these others, as if they and you were not the same species. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook warns of the spiritual danger of interpersonal isolation when he teaches: “The heart must be filled with love for all… all this love must be expressed in practical action, by pursuing the welfare of those we are bidden to love, and to seek their advancement.”
I’d like to suggest to you today that this dynamic of separation and repair provides us with a deeper understanding of the notion of sin. Sin is the prevalent motif of this holiest of days. It is why we gather: to recite the “al chet” over and over, to atone “for the sins we have sinned before You.” Yet the term “sin” feels outmoded and archaic. It rubs us the wrong way. Where sin once meant rebellion against the will of God, or at the very least, a violation of one of the 248 positive commandments or the 365 negative commandments, or any of the myriad details embedded with each commandment, today we prefer to think of sin as “missing the target,” a mistake, a step off the right path. And surely we do act in ways that wound deeply the ones we most love, we hurt people we encounter with our thoughtlessness, we sin against the earth and we desecrate our lives. But a sinful act is born from the loam of separation: not just disconnectedness from others that causes us to disregard their feelings but more poignantly a disconnection from ourselves, from our own truest essence. Before a sin becomes an action, it is a spiritual state.
The Kabbalistic tradition sees sin as a concealment of God’s face. To me this suggests the concealment of our own face. Just as we hide our eyes, the windows to our own soul from others, just as we hesitate to be seen, we hide our face from ourselves too. Some of us have difficulty looking at ourselves in the mirror. We know if we look too closely we might discover that mixture of selfishness and self-debasing that constantly pursues us, that prevents us from loving ourselves and from loving others. Our disregard of others reveals a disregard of ourselves. Hasidic teaching foreshadows psychological insight in suggesting that the flaws we see in others that make us so angry or judgmental are merely a mirror image of what we see in ourselves. Since we refuse to see ourselves we hide from others as well.
When we allow ourselves to be truly seen by another we cannot help but be transformed by the experience. When you allow another to look into the window to your soul, to know you, you are giving them a gift and showing them that they also matter. Separateness is bridged as minds and hearts touch, even for a few minutes. We are afraid to be known, afraid that we will be discovered with all our blemishes and faults, but the reward of being seen is an end to isolation and a beginning to healing.
Within the sanctuary in the desert there was a tent known as “Ohel Mo-ed – The Tent of Meeting.” The Tent of Meeting was the Holy of Holies, empty, except for the Ark of the Covenant. On top of the Ark was a cover, and on that cover were two cherubim made of gold. The cherubim were angelic forms, with wings spread out and, according to the rabbis, one had a male face and one had a female face. The faces of the cherubim were turned towards each other. And it is there, the Torah tells us, from the empty space between the two faces, that God meets Moses and speaks to him. The cover of the ark on which the cherubim sat was called the “kaporet” – the same word as Yom Kippur. When people meet and truly turn to each other, that is where God is found. That is where “kapparah” is found – a covering over the separateness that brings wholeness and healing.
The Torah’s insight into true meeting is profound. The corrective to human separateness and isolation is to face the other, to meet another in openness, to share our experience and to be seen with appreciation and acceptance. When a group of people from our community and I began the Panim el Panim project – Face to Face – we thought it was just another synagogue program. But it is not just another synagogue program. It is a cultural sea change in the way a community could function. Instead of being isolated individuals who do activities together – be it study or prayer or carpooling kids – Panim el Panim asks of us a harder and richer task. It invites us to meet another, to share stories about who we are and what we care about in our lives and what our concerns are. When I sat down to share stories with Hector, a dad from the Canal, I was a little frightened of him because he is so different from me: a Spanish accent, a frum Catholic, knew nothing about Jews. But in 30 minutes I came to know a man who worried as much about his teenage children as I did about mine, a man who struggled to adapt to a new land and language, much like my grandparents, a man who loved God and ritual much as I do, a man who shared the struggles and hopes of every dad I know. Hector and I do not need to be friends, but we are connected to each other through sharing our stories.
Martin Buber wrote that “All real life is meeting.” I think he was right. Entering the Tent of Meeting with another, witnessing a life and allowing oneself to be known is transformative. Panim el Panim will transform our community, especially in a time when we have no building to hold us together. The corrective for isolation is meeting, knowing, seeing. And that is why I intend this year to meet each week with one person or couple from the congregation whom I do not know, so that I might know them and they might know me. I have asked the members of our board to meet one new person or family each month. And now I am challenging all of you to do the same: go over to someone you do not know and ask them to get together for 30 minutes just to share a story, just to know and be known. So we can overcome the isolation that is killing our souls and our community.
How lucky we would be if we were separated only from others, but we find ourselves not only estranged from others, but estranged from ourselves as well. As much as we suffer from the hurts we receive from others, I think we hurt more from our self-estrangement. But what if we were to turn to ourselves with a willingness to witness who we truly are in this moment? What if we were to examine each strand of our character, the strands of radiance and those that are murky, and cherish them, accept them exactly as they are? It is because we fight against those parts of ourselves that disturb us – and make them unacceptable -- that we can find no peace. Until we accept ourselves as we are at this moment we can never have a sense of well-being. And it is only through pure acceptance of ourselves that we will come to know the growth and the change that we desire.
For most of my adult life I have struggled with depression. I have never really spoken about this before in public, probably out of fear. Rabbis should be strong, and capable of handling everyone’s burden, and I didn’t want to appear weak, to you or to myself. I was in rabbinical school when first entered therapy and I remember my therapist saying to me (in an elegant Viennese accent) “you must make friends with your depression.” I thought he was crazy. It took another twenty years for me to understand that until I would accept depression as part of me, until I cherished it as part of me, I would not be able to work with it and move through it. It took me a long time to recognize the blessing of compassion I learned in accepting the challenge of depression. This acceptance of who we are, in all our fullness, is what I mean when I say that God is present in every experience and every aspect of our lives. We need not be afraid of who we are. Fear constricts and hardens the heart. What we need is acceptance.
My favorite definition of forgiveness is that “forgiveness means giving up all hope of a better past.” If separation is the beginning of sin, then acceptance is the beginning of forgiveness. It is difficult to forgive until we accept the person or situation that hurts us as it is at this moment. It is near impossible to forgive ourselves until we accept ourselves exactly as we are, in this moment.
The harder it is for us to accept exactly what is at this moment, the more estranged we are from life and from God, the ground of all being. Reb Nachman of Bratzlav taught that the experience of separation was a blessing in disguise because when we come to know the pain of separation we can turn once again to God. The real sin, says Reb Nachman, is when we are so disconnected from God we don’t remember that God is always there, waiting for us.
That is why Yom Kippur is a gift. We mistakenly believe it is a day for suffering, a day to torment our souls, but it is rather a day of great hope, a day of spaciousness in which to experience God. We were taught to think of Yom Kippur as the terrifying day on which God judges every living creature for life or for death, but in fact Yom Kippur is the day on which we come to know that God waits for us in the empty space of separation, that God is ready to help us repair and heal our isolation, that God accepts us completely as we are now and as we will grow to be. Over an over again on this day we will recite the thirteen attributes of God’s compassion. We will sing “Adonai, Adonai…” repeating God’s name twice to signify as Maimonides suggests, “I am Adonai who loves you before you sin, and I am Adonai who loves you after you sin.” Over and over again we will chant: “For on this day atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you; of all your sins shall you be clean before Adonai.” This is not a prayer. It is a promise to us, here and now. God has already seen our yearning, our separateness, and God has already accepted us just as we are: human, frail, flawed, finite, beautiful, radiant, full of goodness, full of potential, full of hope. The God of Yom Kippur is the God of compassion who forgives us before we even ask. God looks through the windows of our souls and sees us truly, knows us in our entirety, accepts us in love.
“Separation and repair are built into the fabric of creation.” The empty space created by our separation from others, from ourselves, from God, is the empty space from which our healing may creatively emerge. It is the empty space from which God speaks to us: “You are beautiful, my children. Turn to each other. Face yourselves. See your true essence of love and compassion hiding deep within. You don’t need to be afraid. Find the courage for acceptance and you find forgiveness and peace.”
So may it be for us. So may it be for everyone.
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