Yom Kippur Morning
SERMON YOM KIPPUR MORNING 5786
Rabbi David Edleson Temple Sinai South Burlington, Vermont
THE CHALLENGE OF JONAH
Last night, I ended my remarks with something Rachel Goldberg-Polin pointed out recently. She said that the rabbis tell us that change, that salvation can come in the blink of an eye, k’heref ayin. She said that this idea gave her great comfort and hope as she has dealt with her son being held captive in Gaza and then murdered. She said that when approaching this very difficult new year that idea gave her hope. May it also give us hope.
This year, in the season of our High Holy Days, we have been subjected to a theater of the absurd at the Emmy’s. At the UN, we’ve been subjected to moralizing speeches from countries hectoring Israel while themselves funding deadly terror attacks on civilians in Gaza, Yemen, and also in the enormous humanitarian crises in Nigeria and Sudan.
And now, the Flotilla of Privilege and Mood Disorders has chosen to cross into Gaza on Yom Kippur, showing clearly that hate, not the delivery of humanitarian aid, is the wind that fills those sails.
In the midst of all this, in what did feel like the blink of an eye, we saw in the White House, a possible agreement to release the hostages, end the war, disarm Hamas, and give the Palestinians a way forward to self-determination.
It is just a beginning, and truthfully, Hamas will likely say no and even if it is yes, both sides are likely to do things to sabotage the deal while blaming the other side.
Even if this proposal falls through and more destruction and death ensue, it jolts the conversation significantly and the energy toward it gives us some hope. Given the year we’ve had, we should be grateful for any step toward a solution that gives both the Israelis and the Palestinians a way to get out of this cycle.
It is Yom Kippur, our day of forgiveness and atonement, and it will certainly take a great deal of atonement and forgiveness for any plan to work. It will not be easy. It’s easy to yell “ceasefire” but it is much more challenging to create peace. It will require the leadership on both sides to step back from their usual bellicose rhetoric and try cooling things down, and that is hard to imagine.
Both sides are aggrieved and have a lot to be enraged about, but a perpetual back and forth will ensure that Palestinians will continue to support violent leaders and Israel will have turned itself into the kind of brutal honor society that the Torah and the Rabbis worked so hard to avoid.
And any peaceful future is going to require forgiveness. Both sides are going to have to forgive.
That is also true here at home. Not all at once, but at some point we must look to mend at least some of what has been torn, and it will take apology and forgiveness.
Forgiveness comes in many forms, and some are easier than other.
Forgiveness can be simply choosing to let go of the past because it is harming us to hold on to it and causing us to live in anger and injury, while often having no impact on the person or people who injured us.
It can also be the choice to call a truce despite the desire to continue because the damage being done to society is just too great to make sense.
That is the sort of forgiveness that let us move forward more freely, leaving behind a hard situation that was never resolved or healed.
Jewish tradition, though, doesn’t let us off the hook with merely letting go. Jewish tradition requires that we take in the humanity of those that have wronged us.
It is a high bar and one that is made most clearly articulated in the book that is traditionally read on Yom Kippur afternoon: The Book of Jonah.
Jonah’s key themes are perfect for Yom Kippur:
1. You can’t run away from God.
2. That if we truly repent, no matter who we are, God will forgive us and;
3. We are all God’s creation, human and animal alike, and therefore deserving of empathy and mercy.
These are all key themes of Yom Kippur, but in reading Jonah this year as part of preparing for today, another aspect of the text really struck me as particularly relevant. What did the text mean to the Hebrew audience that first heard it.
If you remember that Jonah was commanded by God to leave Jaffa and go to Nineveh. Nineveh is a long way from Jaffa, about 600 miles in what is today Mosul, Iraq. Nineveh was the final and most prominent capital of the neo-Assyrian Empire, the one that under one king destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and forcibly removed its people, and then under another king, laid siege and almost destroyed Jerusalem and the Southern Kingdom. It is the same people, though now ruled by Babylon, which is modern day Baghdad, that then destroyed the 1st Temple and exiled the Jewish leadership in 587 BCE, and event we still mourn on Tisha b’Av.
In other words, the Hebrew speaking audience of the Book of Jonah would have absolutely hated and feared the people of Nineveh.
I can imagine the cheers breaking out when hearing the opening of the book, when God tells Jonah to go there and tell them they are going to be destroyed.
And when Jonah instead sneaks off in a boat to Spain, the opposite direction, they must have booed him. In their mind, God can’t destroy them until a prophet has warned them. I guess it’s the modern day version of dropping flyers over a city you are going to bomb.
It must have been no surprise to them, as it is to us, that a big storm prevents Jonah from escaping his fate, and then when the giant fish spits him out right back where he started and God says again, “Go to Nineveh,” they would have cheered again,
I imagine the room would go wild when Jonah finally arrives and calls out, “ Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
They wanted revenge, or victory, though I suspect in human tribal emotional terms that is a distinction without much difference.
So imagine how they must have felt when God decided to pardon them. Jonah’s reaction is probably a stand in for the people. He is so upset he wants to die rather than to see the city spared. He accuses God of planning this along, being merciful and forgiving against the people that had attacked his nation over and over and killed so many and burned so many crops. Jonah asks, “What do you mean they are forgiven?”
As humans, it is no easy thing to forgive people who have attacked us not once, but over and over again and who still live next door.
When it is your people, or nation or political tribe that has been attacked, the collective anger of the group builds upon itself, because we feel much more righteous in groups and than we do as individuals. Being swept along by the group, by our own intense groupishness, is very hard to resist. It’s in our DNA.
As Jews, we have every reason to feel the world has kicked us without remorse, over and over, and so it is outrageous for outsiders to suddenly preach universal values to us, values they only practice when it is convenient politically. This is especially galling when those very same people have specifically ignored those values when it came to their Jewish populations. You can call it generation trauma, or you can call it a reasonable reaction to history, but either way it is a lot to take and maintain one’s sense of caring and ability to forgive.
That is why God’s final lines in the Book of Jonah are so so powerful to their audience then and to us now. God is talking to people who have been attacked, murdered, laid siege too, and looted, people who have lost family and friends to these attacks and says:
“And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many animals as well!”
Imagine how hard that was to hear. Jonah was enraged that God was forgiving these people that he wanted to die, and then God says this. God demands that Jonah empathize with these people, that he see them as human beings created in the image of God.
The text never tells us how Jonah reacted to this. That’s where the story ends, leaving Jonah and us hanging with all our complicated feelings.
Our text tradition teaches us that even though it is very difficult, we have the ability to let go of injury. WE have the ability to see others as human beings and care about them, even when they have attacked you, because they too can change - that is outrageous, radical and powerful.
So much of the dialogue in the Middle East is focused on remembering a litany of grievances. More and more, the political dialogue here is the same. Those grievances can too easily become intertwined with our very identity. That’s why it is so difficult to forgive those who have harmed you, but to hold onto it is to perpetuate that very harm in the name of resisting it.
Maimonides, the great codifier of Jewish law, teaches:
It is a terrible sin to say to someone who is trying to change, ‘Remember your past deeds,’ to mention them in his presence in order to embarrass him, or to mention matters similar to them in order to remind him what he did. This is absolutely forbidden; we are prohibited in such by the general prohibition of verbal abuse, as it is stated ‘You shall not aggrieve, a man his fellow etc.’ (Leviticus 25:17).
This is hard for individuals to do and almost impossible for groups. It requires faith that the other person is sorry, that they have changed, and that we feel secure enough not to fear reinjury at any moment.
God believes the people of Nineveh have changed. Jonah is not there yet. I think today, many of us are Jonah, and the Israelis are Jonah and the Palestinians are Jonah, but Judaism calls us, as Jews, to try and be more like God, to be able to forgive. We are commanded to choose to forgive, because it is a choice we have to make.
This sort of forgiveness does not come quickly, in the blink of an eye. This sort of change likely requires generations to shift, and it will require leaders who instead of fomenting anger for political gain, foment peace for human gain.
It is also important to remember that in Judaism, forgiveness requires that the one who injured you admit they were wrong, apologize and ask your forgiveness.
The reason God forgave the people of Nineveh despite all they had done was that they admitted they were wrong.
They did t’shuvah publically.
The leader got off his throne and joined the people in public displays of regret, not celebrating their power but their ability to make real change for the better.
For long term healing, both sides will need to do a cheshbon nefesh, an accounting of what they did wrong, and that will be hard politically, especially when there are many on both sides who will actively work against it and are already working against it.
What happens over there is up to the leaders and people over there. It is not up to us. We have our own challenges .
I think most of us in this room are carrying around a lot of anger right now, because of what we are dealing with here at home, or about what is happening over there and way that is playing out here.
For me anger is much easier than forgiveness. Anger feels so righteous and certain. Anger can be intoxicating. I understand the exhilaration of a rowdy protest. Good times, really.
Over these past years, I fear we have become so accustomed to outrage and anger that it can be hard to shift from the noise of protest to the quiet work of forgiving. Compared to righteous indignation, forgiveness is delicate and fragile and soft. It often is not as satisfying as a good judgy anger; it doesn’t make us feel better than the other. Indeed, it requires we see ourselves through the eyes of the other, and that can be a hard mirror.
Still, if we want a different future, here and there, we must begin to do the work that Jonah calls us to do here. We must begin the work of forgiving those who have hurt us.
We must learn to care about the people of Nineveh.
Ken Y’hi Ratzon.
