Yom Kippur, 5766, 2005
Yom Kippur, 5766, 2005 Rabbi Julie Hilton Danan
It was one of those years when baseball’s world series coincided with Yom Kippur. One congregant was having serious spiritual struggles about the issue. Finally he went to the rabbi. “Rabbi,” he said, “I know that Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish year and that the Kol Nidrei prayer is something that every Jew tries to be there for. But this year there’s a crucial World Series game on television that very same night and I don’t know what to do.”
The rabbi didn’t get upset, but said, “That’s what they invented VCR’s for.”
The congregant replied in joyful amazement: “You mean I can tape Kol Nidrei?”
Yom Kippur isn’t usually a day that we make jokes about. It’s the most serious and holy day of the Jewish year, a day that brings even the most alienated Jew to synagogue to fast, pray, contemplate mortality and seek to improve his or her character. This is a day on which we take an unflinching look at some serious life and death issues. Our planet has put these issues in the forefront lately through many enormous natural disasters, from the Tsunami to Hurricane Katrina, to this week’s deadly earthquakes and mudslides. How do we understand them and God’s role in them?
Lately, our focus during the disasters has led us to criticize the government, FEMA, the Red Cross, and so on. But somewhere in the recesses of our souls we ask, “Where was God in the Tsunami? Where was God in the Hurricane?” To paraphrase one wiseacre on the Daily Show: “We’re going to have a national day of prayer: God, can you please save us from any more acts of God?
Yet behind the joke is a profound discomfort. We are in the Days of Awe. But “Awe” is a concept almost lost in our modern secular society. The constant barrage of media news has dulled our sensitivity and blunted our compassion. It seems impossible to live our daily lives and yet truly feel the suffering of humanity. In the face of natural disasters, we are finally jolted from our complacency. Such events are awesome in their power, almost beyond our comprehension. Then our thoughts turn to wonder what kind of God do we worship, who has such awesome power to destroy as well as to create? This is the emotion that our ancestors spoke of, “yirah,” a combination of fear and awe.
Like trees bowing in a hurricane wind, we try to sense the power of God. God is far beyond our ability to comprehend with our minds. God is Ein Sof, totally beyond anything that we can grasp.
Throughout the ages, Jewish theologians have tried to make sense of why a benevolent God allows human suffering. To account for human evil, we can say that God gave us free will, but how do we explain suffering that is part of nature? Hundreds of years ago in the north of Israel, Rabbi Luria described a creation story startlingly like the “Big Bang.” When God’s light was too powerful to be contained in the vessels of the universe, creation was shattered, flawed from the start. But the scattered shards of divine light are everywhere, in every situation, waiting to be gathered up and repaired in a process that he called Tikkun Olam, a process that has become a modern Jewish synonym for Social Action. Centuries later Rabbi Harold Kushner’s classic book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” would provide a more modern and rationalist version of the same idea: God is good and loving, but not all-controlling. God needs us to serve as partners in healing, repairing and perfecting God’s still-incomplete creation.
Another explanation of why nature is not always kind comes from the two main names for the Divine in Jewish tradition: Elohim (God) and Adonai (Lord or Eternal). Throughout the Bible, these two names for God that recur again and again: Elohim and Adonai.
Tradition equates Elohim with God’s attributes of judgment and Adonai with God’s attributes of mercy. Rabbi Harold Schulweis is the most recent teacher to emphasize this traditional Jewish explanation of our two experiences of God.
In the opening chapter of the Torah, creation is described as the work of Elohim. Hassidic thinkers pointed out that the name Elohim is equal in gematria, Hebrew numerology, to “Hateva,” meaning “Nature.” When we say “nature,” we really mean God’s creation, which is filled with God’s Presence. So how is that equivalent to “judgment?” Nature is beautiful and uplifting. Many if not most of us find God, experience the Shechinah or Divine Presence, when we commune with nature. But nature can also be awesomely destructive. Nature has its laws, laws which are fundamental to our existence. Laws like gravity or chemical reactions are morally neutral. As the Talmud points out on several occasions, regardless of our moral intentions, “Olam k’darko noheg”-the world follows its natural course. Nature has its own processes that are based on natural laws set in motion with the process of creation.
At the same time, Judaism has another name for God, “Adonai,” translated “Lord,” or “Eternal.”
Actually, Adonai is the substitute name that we use for God’s four letter sacred name, the Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, which we no longer pronounce out of reverence for its sanctity. Adonai represents the transcendent aspect of God. Our lives are not limited by the laws of nature. We always have the possibility of transformation, of transcendence, of mercy and kindness, represented in the name Adonai. Adonai inspires the overflowing of love, courage, caring, and goodness that often follows the worst disasters.
When human beings are created, the names of Adonai and Elohim are joined together as Adonai Elohim, the Lord God. Likewise in the Shema and in our blessings we join the two names and aspects of God by saying, “Adonai Eloheynu,” “the Lord is our God.”
In Unetaneh Tokef, a central prayer of the High Holidays, which we will recite at Musaf tomorrow, we catalog the list of natural disasters that may overtake human beings in the year ahead: “who by fire and who by water,” and so forth. These represent the aspect of Elohim, the aspect of reality that is beyond our control. But we conclude with the phrase, “But Teshuvah, Tefillah and Tzedakah-repentance, prayer and righteousness, overcome the evil of the decree.” This doesn’t mean that we can change nature through these means, but that through changing our behavior we can bring healing and transformation into almost any situation.
For now we must turn to human responsibility. While natural disasters originate in nature, they are also inextricably linked to human society. They are not just “acts of nature,” but nature inter-acting with human society.
We saw this in stark relief during Hurricane Katrina. Poverty, inequality, government priorities, population growth in vulnerable areas, and many other factors make “acts of God” much worse for human beings. If you think that natural disasters are getting worse in recent years, you are right, according to a United Nations website on the environment. But it’s not simply that there are more such events, but that there are more people living in the most vulnerable areas, and particularly people who are poor, lack insurance, or live in flimsy housing that is easily destroyed.
In addition, we human beings are drastically degrading the environment by cutting down forests and destroying wetlands that protect from flooding, and releasing carbon dioxide that leads to global warming and climate change, making weather disasters more severe. Dramatic one-time events grab the headlines, but probably the greater environmental threat to our planetary future comes from slow changes like deforestation, melting polar ice-caps, destruction of species and depletion of natural resources, the ongoing ravages of wars and conflicts, or the spread of diseases such as AIDS that are devastating whole populations in Africa. These disastrous slow natural disasters are acts of humanity.
Our prayerbook, from the Reconstructionist movement, once took out the traditional second paragraph of the Shema, which they understood to describe drought and exile from the land as mechanistic punishments from God. But with our more modern understanding of the environment, we know that failing to live in harmony with the laws of Elohim, the laws of nature, will indeed lead to environmental degradation and disaster. So the editors of our prayerback acknowledged the wisdom of our sources and put back the second paragraph of the Shema.
Some people in our congregation have lived through natural disasters or witnessed the aftermath firsthand. A few years ago, my family and I were stranded for three days while on vacation in the Texas hill country when a massive flood took place. What I saw then is that natural disasters can bring out the worst in some people, but surprisingly they can bring out the best in far more people. They bring out the quality inspired by Adonai, the transcendent power of compassion and caring. Thus we have seen that in recent disasters, there has been an outpouring of tzedakah, or charity and good deeds to help others. What the Torah, what the prophets would tell us is: don’t wait for a dramatic event to do these mitzvoth.
According to the prophet Isaiah, social justice and charity provide the true meaning of our Yom Kippur fast. That’s why we have provided materials and envelopes to enable us to donate to two outstanding national Jewish tzedakah organizations: Mazon provides food for the hungry (including victims of the hurricanes) and American Jewish World Service does world-class work in alleviating poverty and injustice throughout the planet. Don’t leave them on the table. Tomorrow afternoon at 3:00 we will have a Social Action forum to learn and share ways that we can contribute to Tikkun Olam, healing the world. Instead of staying home and watching the clock, join us. Fasting and praying isn’t enough. We have to give tzedakah and we should each find an action to take to heal and repair the world.
If human beings could practice empathy, compassion, and giving to others on a daily basis, if we could reach out to conquer poverty, mend society, heal the environment and stop the “slow natural disasters” that are going on behind the headlines every day, then we would truly reach “heavenly days right here on earth,” the coming of the Messianic era. May this Yom Kippur be the day that we each resolve to find and do our part for Tikkun Olam. May we interact with nature for the good, and may we act in God’s image, as God’s partners, as God’s hands bringing healing and transformation to society and to our planet. Amen.
