I want to start by telling you where this sermon will end. This sermon will end with me reflecting for you, or perhaps explaining to myself (in what may turn out to be the cheapest and most public form of therapy), how it is I came to be standing here as your rabbi. Now, this is not a story of dramatic metamorphosis. Surprising probably no one, I did not have a rebellious phase of cutting off my hair and eating ham sandwiches at a rave on Shabbat (that’s what rebellious phases look like, right?). But this is also not a story of obvious inevitability, a clear line from Temple Beth Hillel Preschool to the Jewish Theological Seminary. It’s a story neither of predetermination nor of transformation. Rather, I came to be here, because of nothing more - and nothing less - than honest self-exploration.
We’ll get there. But for now, I need to start by giving you good news and bad news. Let’s start with the bad. The bad news is that chances are high that none of us are actually better people than we were when Yom Kippur began. Likely, we will emerge from this day (and even this month) more or less the same as we entered it.
The good news? I don’t actually think that was the point of the Yom Kippur. I don’t believe that we are really meant to fundamentally transform who we are - who we have spent decades becoming - in the span of mere hours.
Which is good, because science tells us that this would likely be impossible. William James, go-to psychologist for the study of personality, advanced a theory that key attributes essentially stabilize in adulthood. After turning 30, the theory goes (giving me a pressure-filled next few months), we can make peripheral changes around the edges, but who we are is more or less static. Meaning - not even the most prayer-filled, well-intentioned 25 hours can make much of a dent.
So why are we here?
In these waning hours, I want to put forth a different model of what Yom Kippur entails and demands. A model that asserts: the purpose of this day is not to transform ourselves, but to explore who we really are, in good and in bad - and to then use that knowledge toward holy ends. Exploration, not transformation.
The Talmud seems to agree with me (or, more humbly and accurately, I agree with the Talmud). Masechet Yoma asks “מאי נעילת שערים”? What is “neilah”? “Shmuel amar - mah anu u’meh chayinu.” Shmuel’s response: “Who are we, and what are our lives.” Neilah is both as big and as small as that reminder, in these final moments, that this is what we hope to leave this day closer to answering. Not who should we have become, but mah anu. Who are we.
And Yom Kippur has within it, gifts to us, the mechanisms for uncovering those depths, the good and the bad.
Honoring the “good” comes as part of an expansive vision of teshuva. The Slonimer Rebbe writes - “Complete teshuva is both correcting bad acts, and lifting up ma’asim tovim, good acts. Just as the wicked corrects his sins, so does the righteous bring wholeness to her good.”
Mah anu? Who are we? We are a collective people and a collection of people who are full of these ma’asim tovim, these good and great acts. This year, as an Adas community, we cared for one another in unprecedented ways. We - you! - ensured that in the early days of quarantine, each member of this congregation received a personal check-in. We (again, you) delivered onesies to newborns, meals to family members of hospital-bound sick. We stood on our corner week after week and declared, with rain-soaked signs, that black lives matter; we read books and cooked food and taught English over choppy Zoom hook-ups. And so many of us rose, too, to the intimate but no less profound challenges of our homes and families with grace, patience, resilience, and strength we did not know we had. Mah anu? This is who we are.
And - “who we are” is also a people who have fallen short. Yom Kippur demands that we acknowledge this too.
In its earliest iteration, Yom Kippur was a process not of emotional introspection, but of wiping away from the Temple’s altar the buildup of impurity that proliferated in conjunction with Israelite wrongdoings. Yet while, through this process, the altar may have been ritually cleansed, its human actor - Aaron the priest - did not emerge physically clean.
Leviticus 16 tells us that as part of expiation, Aaron was to slaughter sacrifices and - with his finger - sprinkle their blood atop the altar. Thus he cleanses and makes holy the“ - ”וְִטֲהר֣וֹ וְִקְדּשׁ֔וֹ ִמֻטְּמאֹ֖ת ְבּנֵ֥י יְִשָׂרֵֽאל׃“ ritual impurity of the Israelites.” The deed is done, the day has passed - and left in its wake is a high priest whose hands are dripping - stained - here, with literal blood.
Our day demands no less of us - a look in the mirror, a coming to terms with, where we have fallen short. Maybe more than the purified altar, it is Aaron, here,who is our model guide, asking us to notice where our hands and spirits are stained.
Because stained we too are. We leave this day stained by structural injustices that endure. Stained by biases explicit and implicit, by privilege left unchecked, outside (and, likely, also inside) our doors. Stained by 200,000+ COVID dead - a number higher than it needed to be. Stained by a world underwater, on fire. Stained by the justified fear of people of color who encounter police, stained by families separated or by those living on the sidewalks or by the cries of our neighbors living at the transitional housing facility down the street who encounter racial slurs as their kids play at our shared parks. Stained, too, by the moments in which we were impatient, unkind, unforgiving, to those close to us.
Mah anu? Who are we? We are all of these things. Resilient, strong, generous. And - a people with bloody hands of our own. All in the self-same moment - still, now at the bitter end of this so-called day of atonement. And - this recognition does not detract from Yom Kippur’s purpose. It actualizes it. Through its vision of teshuva, through its Torah precursor, Yom Kippur asks us to look at and admit to the totality of who we are - good and bad. To explore, not transform.
Because it is only then, when we truly know ourselves, that we can show up as the best version of ourselves in the world - that we can effectuate the most change, bring about the most holiness. Counterintuitively, it is when we finally give up on transforming the self that we can most transform our world.
For how this unfolds, we journey to the 19th-century Lithuanian world of musar. Because musar has a formula for this exploration, and its subsequent channeling into action.
It begins with a scaffolded journey through “middot” - character traits, like humility, patience, courage, or faith. Week by week, one at a time, musar’s practitioners examine how these qualities are calibrated within us - in what quantity these qualities exist in our souls.
Examine, but not determine. Because - and this is the catch - from musar’s perspective, middot are all morally neutral. Humility is not, in and of itself, good or bad. Neither is honesty. Nor trust. These traits just...are.
Which makes sense. We can understand, for example, how generosity might be largely positive, but still has its limits, its pernicious edges. Remember the (overly) giving tree, reduced to a measly stump. Anger, too - righteous anger has necessary value, even as unchecked anger wreaks destruction. Or need for recognition - lauded as the attribute of “kavod,” honor-seeking - can, at its extreme, turn into the insidious narcissism that currently rules our land to dangerous effect.
I recognize this in myself. One of my core middot is “the desire and ability to love and be loved.” This is how I give most beautifully to myself and the world - and, believe me, it is my deepest challenge.
When I was seeking advice on even a simple example of this to give you, Rabbi Holtzblatt reminded me of one of the first shivas I did here, in which I had with me the containers from the dinner I scarfed down in the uber. But I was so nervous about making a good impression - being liked - that I climbed into the bushes outside the shiva house before going in to hide my salad bowl so that I didn’t have to bring it inside but could still retrieve it to throw out afterward. See, my biggest challenge.
Because that’s the thing about middot. It is not that they are good or bad. Middot - our particular constellation of traits - just are who we are. The point of musar, like Yom Kippur, is not to change - since one middah is no better than another, it would be counterproductive to try to force an unnatural middah onto an unsuspecting soul.
Instead, Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, the father of modern musar, outlines three stages to the sort of internal spiritual growth and eventual wordly transformation that musar can engender - a journey that arises out of, that necessitates as its start, this deep reflection and acceptance of the authentic self. This exploration is Stage 1: “hergesh,” “sensitivity.” Hergesh is becoming aware of mah anu, of who we are. Of what are our middot.
Hergesh leads to stage two - “kibbush hayetzer,” “conquering our inclination.” While this sounds like the misguided personality-distortion I warned against earlier, kibbush hayetzer is more nuanced and specific than that. Kibbush notices that sometimes, the quantity of a middah can be off. When I am in distress, my middot can and do run amok. Loneliness or insecurity, for example, may over-activate my desire to be liked, and lead me to say or do something I don’t quite believe. Prolonged uncertainty (from a 7 month pandemic, say) may kick my propensity for fear into overdrive and cause me, for example, to panic stock cans of tuna despite the fact that I am both a vegetarian and also existentially repulsed by the idea of shelf stable fish.
What’s crucial here is that the middah itself is not wrong - it is just, in these moments, uncalibrated. The corrective, then, is a tempering, a dialing down, not a full scale swap.
Now if this whole project were about self-actualization, stage 2 would be the end. I’m my best self, weaknesses controlled, sermon done, game over.
But musar pushes us one step further - this is a religious task, after all. And so we move to stage 3, tikkun - holy repair. This stage, says contemporary teacher Rabbi David Jaffe “is about using our desires and urges for good... - putting that same inclination in service of something productive. The classic rabbinic example is the person with a murderous instinct who becomes a kosher butcher. Or someone who loves winning competes with themselves to do acts of loving-kindness.” Tikkun is about using our middot to “transform me into we” - to make my mend in the world’s broken fabric.
This is the closing of the loop - the high purpose of the hergesh, the mah anu exploration into our rawest selves good and bad, the reckoning of our ma’asim tovim and stained souls, that filled this day. We need to know who we are, understand how we are, so that we can be the most effective agents for good - can bring our best selves most powerfully to this sacred task of tikkun.
I want to end by giving us two examples of what this formula - hergesh, kibbush, tikkun - can look like. One personal, and one societal.
The personal is what I promised minutes ago - how I came to be here as your rabbi. For years, I wanted to work in law or policy - to be that fierce champion I so admired of the underserved and underrepresented. I went through the motions, took classes, worked internships. But at so many turns, I felt as though I was pushing against an invisible wall. Because while the disposition of every advocate does differ, I came to realize that the essential core middot just did not align with my own. My middot were no better or worse than my mentors’ - the role models who could lean into righteous anger, confrontation, or truth-telling, in a way that I could not. And I still wanted to be an agent of good.
But my way of doing so was not, it turned out, most naturally or effectively going to be in a courtroom. My little tikkun, my humble contribution toward the cosmic project of repair, was going to be most authentically served in a different role. This role.
Hergesh: noticing who I am. Kibbush: removing the outside forces, the settings or environments, that tried to yank out of me middot that just were not there and squelch those that were desperate to shine. And now, hopefully, tikkun: serving our people and the world in the way I best know how.
The specifics will look different for you (if the ratio of lawyers to rabbis in this congregation is any indication, then the specifics are quite different). But this formula - this movement from knowing the self to serving with purpose as the best self - can be widely applied.
Now societal. This example comes from Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be An Anti-Racist.” Kendi writes - “racist power has [turned] discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor or against someone based on their race, it is not inherently racist. The question is whether discrimination creates equity or inequity. If discrimination creates equity, it is antiracist. If discrimination creates inequity, it is racist.”
What Kendi radically offers is the realization that even racial discrimination - something that has caused such societal harm - is not in and of itself good or bad. It just is - and, like our own middot, can be calibrated for, or oriented toward, bad or utilized for good. How? Through our formula.
Kendi continues - “the remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination...challenging inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group.” Whether done through direct government payment, changed policies, or something like affirmative action - all of which technically and inherently “discriminate” (in that they notice race and make an according distinction) - repairs such as these do so with an equity-seeking end, and are thus anti-racist.
Kendi cites Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun as saying “to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.” We can cite Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent on a ruling that refused to advance affirmative action: (quote) “supposedly race-neutral initiatives were insufficient to achieve the educational benefits of diversity.” This circumstance needed some active, anti-racist, racial discrimination.
The point, then, isn’t to eliminate discrimination. It is to notice that and when we do it (hergesh), be vigilant about when it has to be tempered (kibbush), and then orient it toward equity-producing ends. Tikkun.
The power, or purpose, of neilah’s question mah anu - who are we - is, we now see, one of consequence. Because before we can be our best tikkun-doing, equity-seeking, properly situated selves in the world - the world that needs this restoration to wholeness in the worst possible way - we have to first know who we are. To take the honest and sometimes hard look such that we can be both authentically good and authentically us at one and the same time, making the halves of that equation mutually dependent and therefore possibly powerful and powerfully possible. More than a contrived exercise in temporary self-improvement, that self-exploration is the job of Yom Kippur.
We are on the brink. The day is dwindling, and the world outside is crying out for our aid and participation. We are feeling, I know I am, overwhelming and intense urgency to fling open the doors of our sanctuary or homes and dive headfirst into this necessary mending.
What I want to offer us, in this final hour, is one last pause. One more chance at that crucial reflection. One moment of mah anu. Such that when the stars are out and the gates are closed and this day has slipped away, we will be equipped - as our most authentic and honest selves - to do that holy repair in the fullest way that our God-crafted spirits know how.