Kol Nidrei
SERMON KOL NIDREI 5786
Rabbi David Edleson Temple Sinai South Burlington, Vermont
GIVE ME ONE GOOD PRAYER
God Give me just one good prayer
That opens the gates everywhere
Give me just one honest word
That will leave me without a breath of air
The storm’s all around, I’m hanging by a thread,
I cry out to You with all my strength
My soul is in your keep
How can you be asleep?
Come rescue me.
That the chorus of a song by the Israeli singer Shmu’el Perednik. Shmu’el was on the bill at a concert Tim and I and some others from Temple Sinai went to August at Bethel Woods, New York. More than 14,000 Jews attended, and many of them were Orthodox. The concert was touted as “Jewstock” and feature Ishay Ribo as the headliner.
When the Chassidic Electronic Dance Music Duo Zusha came out and started the concert, there was great energy, joy, and people were having a great time dancing.
But then, when Zusha moved into a slower song, very quickly the same people who were just dancing moved easily into prayer. You could feel the shift and you could see it in the body language.
When Shmu’el came out to join Ishay Ribo he bounced out with his very neatly spiralled sidecurls and tzitzit swinging with excitement. After singing a new duet with Ishay Ribo, they began singing the song I quoted above “Give me One Good Prayer,” and again, people moved into prayer. It was powerful to be among that many people praying, but I confess as someone who grew up as a lone Jew in the deep South, I have to confess it also hit my ‘tent revival’ button .
Prayer is not so easy for most of us. As modern people, we have serious questions about whether prayer works and anyone is listening. As Jews living after the Holocaust, we know that all the prayers in the world didn’t work and that at best, God was hiding or taking a nap.
We are all still living in the aftershocks of the Holocaust, and while we have shown a tremendous resilience, many of us no longer have the foundation of faith to stand upon and that makes us less resilient.
It means many of us move our faith from God to politics, and politics becomes our religion, where politic disagreements become a battle of good versus evil. That is very destructive to society and democracy.
The lack of faith also comes with the danger of cynicism, which is to me worse than fanaticism.
Moral certainty and cynicism both profoundly damage our resilience.
Resilience requires flexibility, adaptability and the ability to imagine things can change for the better and we have some agency in guiding that change.
Faith of some sort is essential for resilience, whether it is faith in God, faith in yourself, or faith in people.
And prayer, which is rooted in faith, has been shown by many studies to help people be more resilient.
Prayer can be thought of as any regular personal or community practice during which we align ourselves deeply with our sense of values and sense of the world.
While the God language can get in some of your way, let me try to translate some key Jewish prayers into a language that seems more broadly acceptable to modern liberal Jews:
1. The shema is a meditation and statement that we believe that behind the dazzling diversity of the world around us, there is a Oneness that we are all part of.
2. The v’ahavta is a meditation that if we want to live our values, we need practices and habits to remind us daily of what those are.
3. The Avot, that begins the Amidah is a meditation on gratitude for our spiritual or literal ancestors.
4. The G’vurot that comes next is a meditation on the miracle of life and death, and deeply appreciating what a gift it is to be alive and aware of the world in the way we are.
5. The Kedusha is a reflection on our ability able to perceive something called holiness, or sacred, or bigger than we are.
6. The Aleinu is a meditation on our responsibility to be grateful for who we are as Jews, for the beauty of the world around us and on our duty to help shape the world into a more just and peaceful place.
The challenge is that in order to have those meditations during Jewish prayer, you need to pray regularly enough to know what those prayers mean and then, while reciting the words, let yourself fall into prayer and deep alignment.
Prayer is called a spiritual practice for good reason. It requires practice to get good at, to be be able to move quickly into prayerfulness both during services, and during hikes in the woods, or when tucking your child into bed. Or during concerts where we know all the words and can enter into them deeply when we sing along. Almost all of you have done that.
Prayer, while it can be very challenging for many of us, is at the center of Jewish spiritual practices. By learning how to pray regular, we remind ourselves daily of what we have to be grateful for, of what a miracle it is that we are here and alive, and it gives us the time to align ourselves with what matters more than the politics of the day.
Kol Nidrei is the only night of the year when Jews traditionally wear a tallit. The tallit includes the fringes whose very knots and numbers of coils carry are mean to remind us that God is One and that there are 613 mitzvot or right actions that we should strive for.
But the tallit is also called a “garment of light” and reminds us of the miracle of this world, as Isaiah wrote, “God spread out the heaven like a cloth, stretched it out like a tent for us to dwell in.” When I wrap myself each morning in a tallit, I say those words and then meditate on this phrase from our liturgy: “For with You is the source of life and by Your light do we see light.”
The Talmud - which is the great compendium of Jewish law, culture and practice compiled during In Jerusalem and Babylon from the 3-6th century - shares a beautiful midrash in Tractate Rosh HaShanah. Exploring the verse from Exodus in which God passes before Moses and declared “Adonai Adonai El Rachum v’Chanun” that we sing on the High Holy Days, Rabbi Yochanan taught that this verse teaches us that at that moment God put on a tallit like a prayer leader in order to teach Moses how to pray properly because he asked to see God and prayer practice is one of the key ways we can weave that experience into the fabric of our lives. In that moment, God taught Moses to chant that prayer and when we chant it, we are reenacting that moment on Sinai. (Rosh HaShanah 17)
The Talmud then asks, “what does God pray.” And their answer is powerful and surprisingly unified.
Two sources tell us that God prays,
· “May it be My will that my sense of mercy overcomes my anger.
· May my mercy come first among my other virtues, and
· may I act toward my children with the attribute of mercy and not the strict letter and justice of the law.
May God’s prayer be our prayer as well, not that we will not be angry, for anger can also be positive and necessary, and not that we will not desire justice for those who wrong us and the fabric of our society. We pray that while having those feelings, we choose to lean on the side of mercy and forgiveness and to choose to act with compassion even when it is not what our gut is telling us.
One more rabbinic insight into our prayers on the High Holy Days. When we pray, “Adonai Adonai” we should remember that one explanation of why it says God’s name twice is that God will be merciful and forgive us to the extent that we are merciful and forgive one another.
These are troubled times, and our nerves are frayed. We’re cranky and often fed up with all of the turmoil and fear. It can all become overwhelming, or perhaps worse, numbing. As the song said, it feels as if the storm is all around and we are hanging by a thread and we want to cry out to God, to Something with all our strength and all the pain in our heart and say “Help us. Rescue us from ourselves.”
On this Yom Kippur, whether you are a believer or not, let your heart open to that prayer, our heart’s plea that thing be better this year. As Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the mother of Hersch who was killed in the Tunnels of Gaza, said recently, we hope and we pray for positive change know that when it comes, it is often when least expected, and in the blink of an eye. If she can believe that with all she has been through, we can too.
Ken Y’hi Ratzon
