Rabbi Miriam's Kol Nidrei sermon - delivered Friday 11th October 2024
Hineni, heani mi’m’us
Here I am, empty of deeds
At a loss to speak to this Yom Kippur, in the week of the anniversary of the past awful year for our people. A year which for you personally will have had highs and lows, connected to Israel and not connected to Israel. A year in which some of us have run marathons, some literal, some emotional.
As we begin the last day before the gates close and our coming year is sealed, we ask Hashem, please, may You write and seal our year ahead for good, for life, for calm, for peace, for understanding, for kindness. May the words of tomorrow’s Haftara come to be:
אָז יִבָּקַע כַּשַּׁחַר אוֹרֶךָ וַאֲרֻכָתְךָ מְהֵרָה תִצְמָח
“then your light will break out like the sunrise, and healing will grow fast over your wound”.
Tonight’s words are about hope. In sharing these ideas, I am indebted to Rabbi Sharon Brous of IKAR and Rabbi Shai Held of Hadar.
To talk about hope at such a time feels, I recognise, audacious. I am a hopeful person, and yet have felt my own hope erode over the past weeks. I have dedicated half of my working life so far to inter-faith dialogue, and yet, relationships with the Muslim and some Christian communities are at a strained all-time low. Anti-semitism is not everywhere and we have to remember that the vast majority of people in this world are good, and yet it is growing. It is hard to see how our community here in the UK, our Israeli family and community, and the entire Middle East will ever recover from this time.
Now, these days of Awe are actually a time of hope, because they are predicated on the belief that we can improve. Judaism has no concept of us being mired in original sin or needing God’s grace and saving. Rather, Judaism believes we can turn ourselves around. And Yom Kippur, for all its heavy themes of judgement, is a hopeful day. Tomorrow’s Torah reading confidently says:
כִּי־בַיּוֹם הַזֶּה יְכַפֵּר עֲלֵיכֶם לְטַהֵר אֶתְכֶם מִכֹּל חַטֹּאתֵיכֶם לִפְנֵי הֹ” תִּטְהָרוּ׃
“For on this day atonement shall be made for you to purify you of all your sins; you shall be pure before Hashem”.
Yom Kippur is a curious combination of hopeful faith and our work. Almost a mixture of passive and active, but I don’t think hopeful faith is passive. We believe that by the end of Neila, Hashem will forgive us, but this is meaningless without us putting in the work over the coming day. Yet with a combination of our efforts and Hashem’s grace, we have much to be hopeful about.
Now, I don’t know if this hope is quite enough for me this year. Previously I’ve focused on my own aspirations to improve and my regrets about the past year. This year, my sins are almost the least of my worries. This year, my focus is so deeply on our hurting, violent world, the bereaved, the hostages, the fearful in Israel. The bafflingly huge numbers of innocent people suffering, homeless and dead in Gaza, in the West Bank, now in Lebanon. It is as if my focus has shifted firmly from the individual to the communal.
Nevertheless, hope, however difficult and tenuous, however hugely ambitious, is an imperative. Rabbi Shai Held writes of how the Hebrew word for hope, tikvah, also means “thread,” as in the phrase tikvat hut ha-shani, the cord of crimson thread that Rahav hangs outside of her window as a sign for Yehoshua and the Israelites to let her family live (Joshua 2:18). He says,
“I find myself thinking: sometimes hope is little more than a very slender thread, but that thread is everything, almost literally salvaging life from the grips of death.”
In last week’s Rosh Hashana Haftara we read that even as our ancestors were taken into exile. “Yesh tikva l’acharitech”.
“There is hope for your future. And your children will return to their borders.”
And a verse in Iyov, Job, uses the word tikva for a tree כִּי יֵשׁ לָעֵץ תִּקְוָה
There is hope (tikvah) for a tree:if it is cut down it will renew itself;its shoots will not cease.
A chopped-down tree may look dead, but under the surface there is the possibility of more life.
This is so Jewish - to seek life and renewal even when things seem hopeless. Our people has done this over and over again throughout our history.
But what actually is hope?
Rabbi Sharon Brous spoke of hope recently, and qualified her words by saying the following:
“I’m not talking about cheap hope, false hope. I have no use for hope as a drug, a distraction, a diversion. Hope as an escape from the pain, and an escape from responsibility.”
On the contrary, she argues, hope is not a feeling. Hope is a verb. An action. A spiritual practice. A moral imperative.
Hope is not the conviction that things will be OK. If anything, as the literary critic Terry Eagleton writes,
“hope and temperamental optimism are at daggers drawn.”
Hope and optimism can be opposites. I think this idea is a revelation. A PollyAnna-ish optimism can actually be the enemy of real hope because it relinquishes us of any responsibility to act.
Optimists say: everything will be ok! Everything happens for a reason! Trust in God! It is what Gen Z might call toxic positivity:
“an extreme form of optimism that involves dismissing negative emotions and replacing them with false reassurances.”
I want to be really open with you and share that I chose to speak about “hope” tonight because one of my teachers says that a Kol Nidrei drasha should be like a big hug. Everyone is feeling a little anxious on Erev Yom Kippur - the fasting, the praying, the big themes. And they need a hug in sermon form. So I picked hope. But as this sermon developed it became clear to me that what I was originally thinking of was optimism, not hope. And that would have been a disingenuous subject for this year.
So what is true hope?
It is, Eagleton explains,
“a movement toward the good, not simply a craving for it.”
Or in Rebecca Slonit’s words:
“Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position [it won’t be fine at all]; both excuse themselves from acting.”
In Rabbi Brous’s quest to understand hope in this bleak time, she picked up the phone to the son of Vivian Silver, Yonatan. Vivian was a fierce fighter for peace, who was killed by Hamas in her home on October 7th. Since her death, her son, Yonatan, left his job as a social worker and has picked up the baton, carrying on his mother’s work.
“Where do you find hope?” Rabbi Brous asked Yonatan.
“I don’t wake up feeling hopeful”, he said. “I wake up and do the work. Hope is in the work.”
So what hopeful work can we do? Well it starts here, tonight, on Kol Nidrei, with our outlook. In this week of the anniversary of October 7th, we have a choice. We can embed the trauma we have all experienced to some degree. We can choose fear and victimhood as our narrative. I sadly think that a lot of our community is in this place. And it’s deeply understandable. But living and acting from fear and trauma is not healthy, and leads to troubling results. Our trust of the outside world shrivels. We turn inwards. We act defensively and with suspicion.
There is another choice. We can choose hope. We can have a vision of a better world and take steps to bring it to fruition. They might be tiny steps. A donation to a charity rebuilding homes or setting up dialogues. It could be making eye contact with someone’s whose views unsettle you, even giving them a smile. Writing, or speaking up, or recognising someone else’s pain. Or steps to maintain your own feeling of hope. Tend a garden. Take care of the next generation. Volunteer. Come to shul… because hope is not a feeling, hope is an action.
Amos Oz, the literary giant and great warrior for peace, was asked, in an interview: considering all that has been broken, and all the grave challenges of our time, what should we do now? Here’s how he answered:
[There’s] a fire, and the flames are big and horrific. Every one of us has to choose what to do when confronting a big fire. You can run for your life and leave those who can not run to burn, because unfortunately they cannot run. You can write an angry letter to the editor blaming those who started the fire. But you can also take a bucket of water and pour it on the fire.
And if you don’t have a bucket, use a glass or a cup.
And if you don’t even have that, use a teaspoon. Every one of us has a teaspoon. Fill it with water and throw it in the fire.
We are living through very difficult times, and we have to hold onto hope and we have to be part of enacting hope. Just like our prayers over the coming 25 hours - may we all embody a mixture of hopeful faith, and active work. So let’s get out our teaspoons, fill them with water, and throw them on the fire. Small, brave acts of hope as a verb; hope as action.
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