Delivered on Kol Nidre 5783, 4 October 2022 at Drexel Hillel
Right now we are faced with newness on many levels. It’s not just the new year 5783 but we are also at the start of a new term and new academic year. Some in our community have returned to campus after having had transformative experiences over the summer, some are on campus for the first time experiencing new levels of freedom, some of our faculty are returning from sabbatical or research endeavors. There are new experiences happening all over the place. It’s also a time when things can feel out of balance. Some of us are living in new places, starting co-op, our friends may have graduated or are off studying abroad, or we are adjusting to being away from home for the first time and haven’t found a niche yet. The beginning of the term is still an adjustment period, and it can be a rocky adjustment. Given all of these new contexts and meeting new people, for many of us the impulse to put on a happy face is at its highest at the start of the term.
One place where I see this putting on a happy face tendency play out more than any other is on social media. On the one hand, I find social media to be incredibly useful as a tool to keep in touch with friends and family. In my early 20’s I moved away from my hometown in Oregon to live with friends in Utah. In my late 20’s I moved back to Oregon for school, and just this past summer I moved out here to Pennsylvania for Rabbinical school. I have friends and family in so many different places and social media helps me stay engaged with them. On the other hand, we know social media only tells a slice of the truth - one story of many possible stories we could be telling about our lives. We have all seen the perfectly filtered pictures of the best parts of our friends lives, the fun, the success, curreated snapshots that don’t show the whole picture. And when I’m on social media, my inclination is to share similarly curated moments of my own life. I understand the impulse.
Life comes with both joys and challenges, but when we only talk about the joys it can cause us to wonder if we’re the only ones experiencing the challenges. Educator Elizabeth Cox says, “Everyone is susceptible to a phenomenon known as pluralistic ignorance, where we each doubt ourselves privately, but believe we’re alone in thinking that way because no one else voices their doubts. Since it’s tough to really know how hard our peers work, how difficult they find certain tasks, or how much they doubt themselves, there’s no easy way to dismiss feelings that we’re less capable than the people around us.” The more we put on a happy face and present the polished sides of our experiences, the more we perpetuate this cycle, and not just with those around us, but with the narrative of what we tell ourselves about who we are and what we do.
It’s an inclination for many of us to pretend that success is the whole story. On a college campus this can be especially true, where high achievement is often the goal. We hold up our successes without looking back to see what we had to go through to get there, without celebrating our efforts, mistakes, and perseverance. I’d like to suggest that it’s not only helpful to us and those around us to share those pieces, but it’s a holy act to acknowledge the journey, not just the destination. The word for truth in Hebrew is Emet, spelled with an aleph, a mem, and tav. My teacher, Rabbi Alex Weissman pointed out to me that aleph is the first letter of the aleph bet, mem is a letter in the middle, and tav is the final letter. Truth contains it all. Yet most of us are just sharing "aleph" pieces of our stories, maybe even a “mem” piece here and there, but rarely do we share tav experiences, those bits that illustrate the fullness of the truth of what we’ve gone through.
I’m talking about this today because we’ve made it another cycle of the year and are here again at Kol Nidre, on the eve of Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is this moment where we bear ourselves, our entire, whole selves. It’s a time when we strip away the facades, remove the Instagram filters, and stand before God, ourselves, and each other in this raw state. Yom Kippur is the moment in the year when we are most vulnerable. We are removing the layers that hide us from each other, and it’s not always pretty, or easy, or painless, but it’s a necessary process that we repeat year after year.
Fortunately, this process isn’t undertaken alone. We come together as a community, to pray, to fast, to confess our errors communially in the plural. We aren’t called to stand up and face our choices alone. Finding the joy of Yom Kippur is that we do this in community, together. When we are tempted to think, “I’m the only one feeling this way,” Yom Kippur responds, “everyone else is feeling that too, some just hide it better than others.”
Kol Nidre, this complicated piece of liturgy which we recite three times, stresses that it’s the whole community, righteous and unrighteous, strangers and friends, all of us that stand together this night. It reminds us that our actions within the community matter. As much as the choices and actions of others impact us, so do our choices and actions impact others. As Rabbi Yael Ridberg writes, “Kol Nidre is the beginning of a time to come together with other, complex souls, directing prayer and action inward as well as outward.”
So as we go throughout the next day, from now to sunrise, to sunset again at Nei’la tomorrow, I invite us to remember that we are here together. The choices we make about how to present ourselves to the world don’t just impact us, they impact those around us. I invite you to do an experiment, see what it’s like to share how you are with someone. Not how you want to be, not how you tell yourself you are, but how you actually are. I’m not going to ask you to practice this kind of openness with a stranger right now, but find a friend or family member in the coming days, when you’re sharing about your life, or when you’re celebrating a success, see what’s it’s like to acknowledge the challenge, the messiness that went along with it. May we find wholeness and truth with ourselves and each other throughout the coming year.
G’mar hatima tova!