Judge Dennis Davis
Repentance, Reconciliation, and the Lessons of the High Holy Days for the Contemporary World
Judge Dennis Davis - Repentance, Reconciliation, and the Lessons of the High Holy Days for the Contemporary World
- But Dennis, I just want to say welcome to everybody. Welcome on this beautiful Sunday, and Dennis, whenever you, I think start because we’re two minutes into.
Yeah, fine. Thanks Wendy.
Thank you very much. Welcome back everyone.
This is the first session of this evening and there is a second one which takes place, I think, half past seven UK time, half past eight South African time, in which I’ll be interviewing John Schlapobersky about his book “They Came for Me” and which has some wonderful implications for this particular time of the year as well. But more about that later. Tonight, in this particular session, the topic of course, repentance, reconciliation, and the lessons of the high holy days of the contemporary world. So what I want to do in the time available to me, and I suppose as usual I’ve been slightly ambitious in this, is to do the following. I want to try to finally get to a point where I can argue why the lessons of the the days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur do have relevance for us, not just individually, but socially, politically, and economically for us. And I’ll get there. But if you want really a crisp one liner, which is really the take home point, it is perfectly clear that if you look at these days, the Asseret Yemei Teshuvah, the 10 days of penescence as we call it.
Teshuvah does not mean penance. It means return from a, from the Hebrew source word shuv, to return. And I’ll get back to that in a moment. If you really want to know what it’s about, it’s that unlike Christianity, Judaism does not believe in original sin. It believes in free will. It believes in the ability of human beings to make choices, good ones or bad ones. Someone, sometimes we behave majestically, we behave, if you wish, almost in a divine way in extraordinary ways. And then in others we behave egregious levels of immorality and dastardly conduct. But the question which always arises is, can we do better? And what ultimately the concept that Teshuvah is about is the idea that number one, we truly and sincerely can recognise where we’ve really made terrible mistakes. That we can acknowledge that and we can therefore use the energy of that acknowledgement to be in a position. We are faced with exactly the same conditions where we behaved abominably in the past, we may be able to do a mitzvah. In other words, where we committed an avera, a sin, if you use the Hebrew word, in the past, in the same circumstances because of the energy which was unlocked by this process we will act in exactly the opposite way, in a far more moral way.
That is ultimately what the trajectory of this day is about. But in order to get you anywhere near the meaning of this, I need, perhaps, to go back a little bit, because there are two foundational themes for this day and without fuffing around, they are these. They stem from two of the greatest rabbis that we have had in our tradition, both coming from Spain, Maimonides in the 12th century and Nachmanides in the 13th century. And both of them have a lot to say about the meaning particularly of Yom Kippur. And indeed this whole process, if you wish, of Teshuva, of repentance. Maimonides, of course, is utterly remarkable. Arguably the most important rabbi, and not just of his time, but from the time that he wrote thereafter. And he wrote the “Mishneh Torah”, which is the great codification of Jewish law. And “The Guide for the Perplexed”, many would say the most important Jewish philosophical text of all time. Also wrote a text called , which was essentially laws of repentance. And Maimonides sourced the whole process in which we are now engaged, interestingly enough, in a text, in the text of both the book of Leviticus and Numbers, Vayikra and Bamidbar. And the, you’ll notice that what he basically says, he doesn’t talk about, the source is not Teshuvah, to give you the English, “when a man or a woman shall commit any sin that men and women commit to commit a trespass against the Lord and that shall be guilty, then they shall confess their sin, which they have done, and thou shall make restitution for the guilt in full and add upon that in relation to the person whom they have sinned.” And so Maimonides, and I’m cutting this very short, essentially sources the whole idea of these 10 days in these texts in the notion that we have an obligation when we sin to confess it and to put it right. And the way he sees that done in general terms is through, particularly in biblical times, through the time of the temple, where one would go up to the temple and one would give a sacrifice for the sins one made and one would acknowledge one’s transgressions and act accordingly. And this was then ritualised into the position of the high priest who would then, essentially, on Yom Kippur atone literally for the sins of the entire nation.
And, of course, there was the symbolic use of the scapegoat at that particular point in time as everybody congregated in Yerushalayim Jerusalem at the Temple Mount where the particular process went. It was a ritualization of the notion of confession, and acknowledgement and commitment to do better. And if, that of course was lost when we lost the temples. And what took place thereafter was the way in which rabbis sought to transform our religion, to transform the tradition. And essentially through the synagogue, we all in a way became priests as a congregation. And we, therefore, did the ritual there. And if you want to know where it is, if you look at the additional service, the Musaf service on Yom Kippur, the entire narrative, well, a very significant part of that service is the narrative of the high priest and of this particular process by which the high priest sought to have the people forgiven in the eyes of God. There was a ritualization process that we now have absorbed. And essentially, if you wish, the individualization of that, the idea that we actually sit on Yom Kippur and seek to, as it were, perform those rituals and gain the strength thereby to psychologically put ourselves in a position, whereas I’ve indicated earlier we would only do good, whereas previously we had done poorly. That was the fundamental and foundational idea behind Maimonides’ notion of the Teshuvah as documented . And I’m sorry for doing this so quickly, but there’s a much to cover in short time, and I’m just giving you the telegrematic ideas which emanate from that particular book. Now, there was also a second rabbi, Nachmanides, a century later.
Also a great rabbi who wrote a wonderful code to Jewish law, and who in 1263 was involved in a great disputation in Spain between the Christians and the Jews, as to which was the more valid religion. An entire debate took place over four days between Nachmanides and Pablo Christiani in presence of King James I. In 1263 the central idea of the debate was whether the Messiah had appeared and what the Messiah was. It clearly was so that Nachmanides won that debate. The King James, however, in order to, sort of, safeguard the Christians said, “I’ve never heard anybody who lost a debate argue better”, which he meant Nachmanides. Nachmanides, however, then published a document reflecting the debate, which perfectly, obviously, showed that he won. He was then expelled in 1263, landed up in Jerusalem where he formed the shul, which is course still there, the the Ramban Shul in in the old city of Jerusalem. And he had a different view, a very different view of the idea of Yom Kippur. And that is also found in the Torah and it is found in the Book of Devarim. And it’s found in the particular partial, the section of the Torah that we read before Rosh Hashanah. And what is fascinating about that particular passage, if I may put it to you, is here, what what you will find written eight times is how the Jews are commanded to return. The word shuv, right, to return, is used in various various ways, in various meanings, all of which are designed to say that the people of Israel must return, return to God, return to a moral way of life, return to the traditions which they’ve issued. Otherwise a whole series of curses will be brought upon them.
And Miam and Nachmanides, therefore, seize the idea of Yom Kippur in the notion of our nation, of the people of Israel essentially recapturing a moral commitment and returning to the tradition and to the implications, normative implications of their tradition, which they have a issued previously. And the simple point I’m making is that we’ve got two different rub, two different approaches to the day. And I don’t think you can understand the prayers unless you understand all the implications of the day, unless you actually quarry down and understand from whence this comes, Nachmanides and Miamonides. And both of these traditions are encapsulated in the prayers of the Yom Kippur service. We have a whole series of prayers, I think 10 times where we say we have sinned, we have transgressed, and we have the , or the sins that we’ve committed. We do this ceremonially and ritually 10 times during the day. And that, in a sense, encapsures the, if you wish, the Maimonian tradition of the notion that we essentially publicly acknowledge that which we’ve done wrong and essentially seek to capture sufficient energy that in the following year from this Yom Kippur to next Yom Kippur, we will in fact do substantially better in our lives. But if you then go on and read the two torsions from the prophets, which are chosen for the morning reading and the afternoon reading on Yom Kippur, you find the most extraordinary things written. In the morning reading, we are told Zaia, what kind of fast is this? Don’t you come here with your sack cloths and ashes. Don’t you come here with your piety and your proclamations of, that you have transgressed. What have you done in relation to the poor, to the homeless, to those who vulnerable?
How have you changed their lives? How have you related to them? I’m not making this up and I’m not seeking here to push my own progressive politics. You can go and read it for yourself. I am paraphrasing what is in the Haftara. That is what the rabbis chose for the day. Here is the tradition of Nachmanides, the notion that this is a collective responsibility of redressing the world. Of, in fact, ensuring that the world is a better place. Not in some individual existential way, but perhaps it’s the individual existential way that fuels the commitment for that which is in that Haftara and which sets out what the purpose of a fast is. And then it goes further, if I may suggest to you. It goes further because in the afternoon at a time when we really, really have done quite well, I would’ve thought about about fasting, we read the book of Jonah and again, what we read there is the obligation of Jonah, of Jonah the prophet, instructed by God to go to the people of Nineveh, not Jewish, in fact enemies as it were. And, in fact, demand that they actually do teshuva, they return to some ethical life. And hello, they all do. That’s the interesting thing. They all do, which is an interesting implication that they were prepared to do this, which shines a light on what our commitments are. And you cannot therefore get away, it seems to me, you cannot get away from the fact that Yom Kippur has these two elements in it, and they all are combined, interwoven, in the text of the prayers that we, in fact, say on the Yom Kippur day. And so what I’m trying to suggest to you is that the individual and the collective are inextricably linked through these two traditions, and they are there in the prayers.
I mean, I could spend a lot of time going through the various prayers with you to indicate how they fit together, but you’d have to accept for me in broad terms that that was the purpose. Now, if we accept that as a fundamental proposition, then what does this question of repentance really mean, of Teshuva, in the broad sense? In other words, how, what’s the methodology for it? It’s all very well, me telling you that these two traditions are encapsulated in the textual readings of the day. But how does this occur? And fortunately, we are privileged to be able to stand on the shoulders of giants. And for me, I’m now going to do something old-fashioned, which I was taught whenever I engage with the traditional rabbis that that taught me engaged with the tradition, they used text. And I’m going to use text too, and I’m going to use text of two giants in the 20th century with your permission. One, a fairly lengthy extract, which I’m going to take you through, but it’s very important to my argument. And it is the text of rabbi, chief Rabbi Jonathans Sacks, may his memory be blessed. Who died that long, not that long ago. And some of you may recall that we were all privileged to hear him on lockdown University. And then I’m going to refer you to the text of the man who’s called The Rav, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchick, who wrote a text, many, well, two foundational texts in particular, “Halakhic Man” and “On repentance”. The “On Repentance” is a text that is well worth paying reading on this time if you can get a copy of it. If you have to go, if you know, if you have a long schul service it’s a pretty good thing to read during the schul service that give you a great deal of meaning. And I want to take two extracts out of that. Seems to me a pity that we don’t borrow more from these great giants when we actually teach this stuff because that’s where we can really learn.
So Judy, if you give me the first text and let me take everybody through it. This is a text that Jonathan Sacks from a text from Jonathan Sacks and what it’s about, what my purpose is here, if I may suggest, is my purpose is to show you what in fact really Teshuva is all about in the truncated form that I’ve given it. Let me give you what the full meaning is. Judy, can I get the first text?
[Judy] It’s up Dennis.
Oh, I can’t see it. Why is that?
Ah.
It’s a bit problematic for me.
Oh.
Ah. I can get.
Sorry.
Can you help me?
[Judy] Yeah, I’m just having a quick look ‘cause something’s, something is happening to my machine. I think I might have to stop share and then come back in again.
Okay. Alright.
[Judy] So sorry, I think there’s a bit of a technical issue on my side.
I should have actually had my print out copy, which I normally do, but I.
[Judy] Sorry, Dennis, let’s just see what I can do.
Maybe I can do this differently if you can’t.
[Judy] Yeah. I’m really just trying to figure out what’s, what systems, what’s gone wrong here.
I can, I can get, if everybody can see it, I think I can read it from a different source if I can. Oh. Let me see.
[Judy] Just be aware, I see my system has gone a bit gobbledy on myself.
Okay, no, I might be able to get this. Here we go.
[Judy] Because I can see it on my screen and.
No, I can’t. Oh, dear. Wait a minute. I’m just seeing if I can find why I, I had it. Dammit.
[Judy] Sorry, Dennis.
There we go. I’ve got it. Yeah, so the, it starts, David Constant before wrote a book, by the way, “Before Forgiveness”, which is a pretty reasonable book that Rabbi Sacks talks about. And he argues that forgiveness, at least in the earliest, in its earliest form, appears in the Hebrew Bible and he cites the case of Joseph. What he does not make clear is why Joseph forgives. There is nothing accidental about Joseph’s behaviour. In fact, the whole sequence events from the moment the brothers appear before him in Egypt for the first time, to the moment when he announces his identity and forgives them is an immensely detailed account of what it is to earn forgiveness. Recall what happens. First, he accuses them of a crime they have not committed. He says they aspires, he has them imprisoned for three days. Then holding Shimon as a hostage, he tells them that they must now go back home and bring back their youngest brother Benjamin. In other words, he’s forcing them to reenact that earlier occasion when they came back to their father with one of their brothers, Joseph, missing. Note what happens next. They say to one another, surely we deserve to be punished because of our brother. We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded for us for his life, but we would not listen. That’s why the distress has come upon us. They do not realise that Joseph could understand them since he was using an interpreter. This is the first stage of repentance. They admit that they’ve done something wrong. This is the very first text that we have of this particular kind, I’m suggesting to you, which is why Rabbi Sacks’ text is so interesting.
Next, after the second meeting, Joseph has had he special painted, planted in Benjamin’s sack, it is found when the brothers are brought back. They are told that Benjamin must stay as a slave. “What can we say to my lord?,” Judah replied, “What can we say? How can we prove our innocence? God has uncovered your servant skills. We are now, my Lord, slaves. We ourselves and the one who was found to have the cup.” This is a second stage of repentance. They’ve confessed, they do more. They admit collective responsibility. This is important. When the brothers sold Joseph into slavery, it was Judah who proposed the crime, but they were all, except Ruben, complicit in it. Finally, at the climax of the story, Judah himself says, “So now let ne remain as your slave in place of the lad. Let the lad go back with his brothers.” Judah who sold Joseph as a slave, is now willing to become a slave so that his brother, Benjamin, go free. This is what the sages and Maimonides, the finest complete repentance, namely when circumstances repeat themselves and have an opportunity to commit the same crime again. But you refrain from doing so because you’ve changed. Now Joseph can forgive because his brothers led by Judah have gone through all three stages of repentance: admission of guilt, confession, and behavioural change. “Forgiveness,” written by Rabbi Sacks, “can only exist in a culture in which repentance exists.
Repentance presupposes that we are free and morally responsible agents who capable of change, specifically the change that comes about when we recognise that something we have done is wrong and we are responsible for it and we must never do it again. The possibility of that kind of transformation simply did not exist in ancient Greece or any other pagan culture. To put it technically, Greece was a shame and honour culture. Judaism was a guilt, repentance and forgiveness culture, the first of its kind in the world. Forgiveness is not just one idea amongst many. It transformed the human situation. For the first time it established the possibility that we are not condemned endlessly to repeat the past. When I repent, I show I can change. The future is not predestined. I can make it different from what it might have been. And when I forgive I show you that I, that my action is not mere reaction, the way revenge would be. Forgiveness breaks the irreversibility of the past. It is undoing what have been done.
A point made by Hannah Arendt in ‘The human condition’. Humanity changed the day Joseph forgave his brothers. When we forgive and are worthy of being forgiven, we are no longer prisoners of our past.” It’s an utterly remarkable passage I want to share, that’s why I’ve shared it with you. It’s an utterly remarkable passage because it captures everything of this particular concept that I’m talking about. It combines, in a sense, the insights of Maimonides about the idea of confession. It combines the notion of Nachmanides that this is a social issue. Ah, Judy, my thing has suddenly come up. Thank you. It is a remarkable, it is a remarkably eloquent, as typical of Rabbi and that’s why I want to use it. I don’t need to tell you this. Here is a giant telling you this. This is the essence of the day. And what he’s saying is just think about it. These are massive implications for us in the 20th first century. What he’s saying, in effect, is that that you have to have in, if society is not going to continue to repeat the past, it has to be broken. And the only way it can be broken, the only way we can break it, the only way we can, essentially, have a better world is if we actually acknowledge that which we’ve done and be honest about that. And we then are able, as it were placed in the same situation that we were to do exactly the opposite of what we previously had done. So that’s why it’s the first text that we’ve ever had, which ultimately, which ultimately gets us to this position because it, because, and that’s why Constant is right. Although the book has got its own problems but be that as it may. But why this is so important is because as a text, just consider it from our own implication.
If you take a society like my own, South Africa, the problem with South African society is how do we move away from endlessly repeating the past? And that doesn’t just mean, in a sense, the reconstruction, the continuous reproduction of the apartheid society. It means how do we actually get to a society that’s less corrupt, that is that essentially doesn’t have 45 to 50 million people who living on the margins. That is a society which doesn’t care for the vast majority of people. How do we do that? How do we actually, in a sense, answer the call of Isaiah when he says, “What is this fast about?” And it is certainly not about the, about simply being in sack cloth and ashes and pumping our chest and saying , that I sinned in the eyes of God. In fact, it’s actually remarkable what he actually says. And let me just give you, if I may, one little part of it where he says this, he writes as follows, “Because of your on your fast day, you sort out personal desires and you repress all of them you grieve. Because you fast with grievance and strife and strife with the wicked fear, you do not fast the fits the day to make your voice heard above. Can such be a fast I choose? A day when man merely afflicts himself. Can it be bowing his head like a in making a mattress of sack cloth and ashes? Do you call this a fast day and a day in favour of God? Truly as is the fast I chose, open the bonds of wickedness, dissolve the groups that pervert justice. Let the oppress go free in a null or perverted.
Surely you should divide your bread with the hungry and bring the moaning, put your home. When you see the naked cover him and do not ignore their kin. Then your light will burst forth like the dawn and your healing will speedily sprout.” I wonder how many of us, and I include myself in this, when we walk on Yom Kippur, certainly at a time when there wasn’t COVID, and we go past homeless people or people desperate in the streets. How many times have we paused to think about them or about the society in which we’ve located which has allowed us to occur? And yet we go into shul and we read this. So if you really want to know what Yom Kippur is about, there it is. And here is the methodology. You can have as many as you like and nice sounding words, but this is why the source of the entire day is to be located in this text and why Jonathan Sacks has captured it. That it’s the question of how do we transform the world? How do we not, how are we not condemned to repeat over and over and over again? And that’s the magic of the idea, the idea that we have free will. That just that we have free will to do good things and free will to do bad things. We also have free will to address that, which we ultimately had caused in the first place. And I wonder then if, or I may, if I can move on to the other text, the text of Rabbi Soloveitchick. Now that it’s up on my screen, Judy, I don’t know if you’ve moved to that one yet or I’ve got it myself.
[Judy] I have moved, confession compels man.
Oh great. Well, I haven’t got it, but that’s fine. So here, if I can read you two short extracts from Soloveitchick, which goes to the heart of what I’m talking about, and I want to then come back to that in the modern condition. “Confession compels man in a terrible state of torment to admit facts as they really are, to give a clear expression to the truth. This indeed is a sacrifice, a breaking of the world, a torturous negation of human nature. Both remorse and shame are involved in this process. And teach us, oh Lord, our God, to confess before thee all our sins. To look to inward at the truth. To look out, ourselves straight in the eye to overcome our mechanisms, self-defense, to smash the artificial barriers, to go against unnatural inclinations to run and hide, to tear down the screen, to put into words what our hearts have already determined. Just as the sacrifices burnt upon the altar, so do we burn down by active confession, our well barricaded complacency, our overblown pride, artificial existence, our rationalisation, if you wish.”
Oh, well I know what he’s talking about, but everything is impossible. Oh, well, yes, it’s true that the world’s in a powerless place, but what are we supposed to do about it? Oh, well, yes, it is true that there’s people that terrible, either I did terrible things to them, but they deserve what was coming to them, et cetera, et cetera. Soloveitchick is talking about a fundamental existential cleansing, which is what is at the root of the day. And, in a way, that means stripping down all our rationalisations and actually trying to look inward at ourselves and saying, “We cannot any longer escape from this. We are ashamed because of what we’ve done and we now need not to reproduce the past, but to reconstruct it.” And that is why there is an utterly remarkable passage, which I think is just fabulous, where he says this, “The main principle of repentance is that the future dominates the past and reigns over it in an unbounded fashion. Sin, as the cause and beginning of a lengthy causal chain of destructive acts, can be transformed, underneath the guiding hand of the future. Into a source of merit and good deeds, into love and fear of God. The cause is the past, but the direction and development is turned by the future.
When the future participates in the clarification and elucidation of the past, it points out the way it is to take, defines the goal, its goals, indicates the direction of its development, then man becomes the creator of worlds.” In other words, in other words, ah, thank you. I’ve got it up now that when you say that the future dominates the past and reigns over it, what that means is we can’t change the past technically, in a chronological way, but we sure as goodness can change the past by what we do. That, in other words, whilst the cause in the past, the direction development is determined by the future. It’s what we take from the past, which determines our future, but it also reconstructs our past. So again, let me take my own country, South Africa for that particular example, but it’s true all over that we, it’s often said in South Africa, “Well, you know, we’ve got over the past and let’s just move on.” But in terms, until such time as one actually comes to turn with the past, the future never can actually be free.
But if we are able to really understand our past and fueled by the injustice that it created for all, we then, in a sense, have a different future and we reconstruct the past because this past, instead of being this negative weight on our society and us as individuals, we are released from that into something quite glorious and different. To give you a small example of this, and I know there are many South Africans on this call, and I assume there were many South Africans on this call who were in South Africa in 1994 when the elections took place. And I’m assuming that there were many of you who stood in those queues with people who might have been your domestic workers or your employees or homeless people, whoever it was all together in the heat of the day, long, long queues sharing water and sharing food. And we all had, on that particular day, we had some extraordinary experience that the past was now lifted from our shoulders, that we could move into a new society. That the future did not have to be like that past, but the past could actually instruct us into what future we wanted. That we could reach out to the rest of our fellow South Africans to reconstruct a society so different from the past that, in fact, we would’ve learned from the past and, therefore, made the future.
And that’s I think what rabbi Soloveitchick, who, of course, was one of the greatest rabbis of all time, had to say in this particular regard about this particular vital, this vital construct. And so when you ask me what does Yom Kippur mean for us today in a parlous world, in a world where in many ways democracy is on retreat, where we have lost the idea of community, where to a large extent we look inward and not, we don’t reach towards others, where essentially retreat to a past and hold onto a grimley. All of this that Soloveitchick writes and Sacks writes, seem to be, we seem to be missing it. We seem to be going past it. I was struck, let me give you another example. It seems to me that if in fact we really wanted to develop that kind of communitarian vision that Maimonides had as part of the Yom Kippur and is encapsulated in both the Haftarah of Isaiah and the Haftarah of Yonah then explain something to me. How can people possibly refuse to have the vaccine? What is happening in this case and particularly United States, but it’s also true here, where people, in the sense, say “To hell with that”, you know, “I have my freedom and I couldn’t care less about you.” So that means you free to infect me and you free to infect others. And your freedom, essentially, is destructive of the construction of the community. And what Yom Kippur is actually saying to us is that we think about that, that kind of activity, that denial of freedom to others for one’s own self aggrandisement really, when you then go back to the text of Jonah, of Joseph and you ask us off what is the day about?
It is about the recalibration of society in circumstances where the day can’t just be a fast day because we are passed. It’s a fast day because we break the yoke of injustice, because we ultimately see in each other a community which in some ways, as a sin in towards the end, “We bring down the kingdom of heaven onto earth.” It doesn’t matter whether you believe in God as such, if you believe in the fundamental principles which were encapsulated in tradition, then what Soloveitchick and Sacks are telling us is that’s the ultimate challenge of Yom Kippur. It’s an unbelievably profound day. The idea that you can reconfigure the past and, in a sense, change the past by your actions in the future is profound an idea as I know. Let me end because we do have another session and I also wanted to give some time for questions. I wanted to end by saying to you that what the day does then is to focus our attention on, in a sense, as Maimonides would say, on our own existential flaws.
Which is why in fact there is this ritual which is supposed to provide us with an impetus, a pause in our lives by which we actually can do that, which was done in biblical times, but in a different way. And at the same time, in a sense, return to those principles which Maimonides sourced as foundational to the day and which are tracked in the prayers. And so some of you, I know a couple people I’ve heard this and I apologise, but when I did my sermon on second day Rosh Hashanah and I was talking as I do every year about, , the sacrifice of Isaac, I gave a whole series of interpretations which we had, which we could debate at a different time. But at the end I wanted to read a text from another great rabbi. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who, of course, was a great rabbi of the mid 20th century. Wrote a wonderful book called “God in Search of Man”. And of course on a political level, of course, he marched with Martin Luther King, one of the prominent Jews who was part of the Civil Rights movement. And he engages with the text, the , the sacrifice of Isaac. And this is what he writes, “Here is the experience of a child of sin,” he writes, “Who is reading in school the chapter which tells of the sacrifice of Isaac on the way to Mount Maria with his father. He lay on the altar, bound waiting to be sacrificed. My heart began to beat even faster. It actually sobbed with pity for Isaac. Behold Abram now lifted the knife and now my heart froze within me with fright. Suddenly the voice of the angel was heard, ‘Abram lay not to a hand upon the lad.
For now I know that you fear God.’ And here I broke out in tears and wept a aloud. ‘Why are you crying,’ asked the rabbi, ‘You know that Isaac was not killed.’ And I said to him, still weeping, ‘But rabbi, suppose the angels had come a second too late.’ The rabbi comforted me and calmed me by telling me that an angel cannot come too late. ‘An angel cannot be late my Heschel, but man, made a flesh and blood, may be.’” And that’s the challenge. The challenge is we can be too late, we can be too late to save our democracy, to save our society, to be transformed under, as Soloveitchick says, under the guiding hand of the future. And so what the day is about, and it’s really important that we grasp it, it’s a complex day. It’s a day not just of introspection for our own psychological purity. It’s a day of introspection of how we can reconstruct our world, how in our own small way we can actually make a difference to the world in which we live. And it’s a day, which it seeks to fuel us, the ability that faced with exactly the same situation where during the past year we did something wrong, this year we would do it right. How many times have we said that to ourselves in our lives? “If only had a chance, a second chance” We do have a second chance.
That’s what Yom Kippur tells us and it’s what we do with that second chance that really counts. I wish you all a wonderful year and the , may you all be inscribed in the book of life and have a joyous year. But let me answer questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Oh. “We really have five days of judgement . Two Rosh Hashanah, one Yom Kippur and eight,”
I dunno what the other one is, but we do. Yes, I mean that’s true, but it’s the 10 days which are absolutely crucial.
Elizabeth, “Do we not tend to use the term sin in the collective since where sin transgression is really in the eyes of beholder. The psychopath would blame the sin on the victim, whereas someone with empathy would search their selves for a reason to repent.”
Yes, I mean that probably is true, but sin is also, I mean, trouble about a psychopath is, of course, they can’t recognise to a large degree that, hopefully we aren’t all psychopaths. But I think the idea is when we use, the word is not only sin, there are a whole range of words we use. If you look at the part of the, of the liturgy, if you look at any of that, we go, you know, we leave nothing to chance. So we say we have been guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have spoken slander, we’ve caused perversion, we have caused wickedness, we have sinned, we’ve extorted, we’ve accused falsely, we have given evil counsel, we’ve been deceitful, we have scorned, a whole range of of issues. The Ramban Shul moved out the old city and established a thank you in the in Greek colony in Jerusalem. Yeah, thank you for that. It’s remarkable that’s still there.
Sorry, Monty, “If the evil enterprise is a properly directed, maybe you are less rep, is properly directed.”
I’m not quite sure what that means. Maybe we were less to repent for. I think we’ve always got a lot to repent for.
Anonymous, “Every time we, the is a message from the Teshuva as a prerequisite.”
Yes, that’s the point. If you look at the Yom Kippur, anonymous, if you look at the Yom Kippur text, you will find there precisely what I’m talking about. You will find that the idea is that you have to, as were engaged in this process, and then there are two words that are used continuously during , there is God, God actually in the active sense that we forgiven. , in the passive sense, which is much more the priestly approach. When the priest used the word and the people shall be forgiven, there’s always the prerequisite. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll send you, anonymous, sources of the text. I’m so sorry, obviously, yeah.
[Judy] I think there’s just something, I think there’s just a computer glitch. So you know what I’ll do? I’ll send out the text to the entire.
Could you send the text. I do apologise to everybody. I’m sorry, you know? Yeah.
And Ellie, “Thank you for bringing up the suffrage of the personal liberty starting, sadly we have lost our sense of community.”
That’s what I was trying to show Ellie. And I think that that’s the point of this idea, which certainly Nachmanides pursues and that’s why such an important component of the day.
Isn’t, Marilyn, “Is not the basis that you manage to recognise in each person.”
Yes, exactly. Exactly. But when do we do that? Then I thank you so much.
Q: “Do you think the rabbis were referring to helping only the Jewish, the broader committee?”
A: Well, Isaiah doesn’t talk only about the broader community, and I’m afraid to say yes, in the conservative tradition, the question of giving , the non-Jews doesn’t seem to come into force. But if you start with the foundational principle right from the book of , you know, that we’re all created in the image of God, not just Jews for that matter. Then in a sense, it seems to me that the broader sense of repentance, and certainly that’s why I respected Rabbi Sacks, because it seemed to me, he of the, in the modern orthodox world was the one great voice who tried to speak in that broader sense, which is why he was such an important contributor and so tragic that he died so short, soon, as it were.
Q: Bev, “The awakening that we have actually done something wrong is fundamental rest of return process. The conscious resistance of the unconscious about the act can be pared with the rationalisation, need patriot culture, delinquent culture predicated and power, many and the deception of others. What are your thoughts on not just in our restaurants, but of our vulnerable people in our public communal manies?”
A: Well, I, you know, I don’t want to get into various communities, but the the point that you make is absolutely right. That, and that’s what Yom Kippur tries to actually confront us with, is the way in which we rationalise. We rationalise the state of our society, we rationalise the state of how we treat others, we rationalise our complete non-commitment, as it were, to the atrocities that are often perpetrated in our name, sadly. And what Yom Kippur is saying is enough. You can’t do that. If we are going to not repeat the past, we’ve got to get beyond that.
Q: Steven, the man becomes the cradle. Does Soloveitchick use the plural integrate each person and the world do?
A: Yes. That’s what Soloveitchick does, and that’s indeed what Heschel does. We are partners in creation, the world. In fact, to be perfectly frank, we are there to create the world. And that’s why, it seems to me, that that is central to the tradition. How is it? I mean, if you look, if you look at, I mean, I’m sure you many of you have during the course of your, whenever you’ve been in shul, but when you look at the prayer, and let me just read you the English where it says, “And they will accept upon themselves the yoke of thy kingdom that you may reign over us eternity. And, basically, the whole idea of it is all the worlds inhabitants will recognise and know you. Every knee shall bend, every tongue shall swear.” In other words, the idea is to bring down the kingdom of heaven unto earth. Now, frankly, that’s our job. And you don’t have, you know, it’s not about God, it’s about us. And so you’re dead right. We are partners in the process of creation.
Is your, Teddy, is your explanation saying…
Yes, it is about . That’s exactly why I use the, that was why exactly, Teddy, I used prayer for that purpose. And frankly, I’m always frustrated by the fact that, you know, people don’t use the texts in the real, in the sense and read them in the manner in which certainly these greats, like Soloveitchick and Sacks did. And as we should, we should join to do that because if we are partners in creation, then in fact it is for us to actually create our own world in our own way. And you know, my own rabbi, Rabbi , who taught me, who was a student of Soloveitchick and got his smithers from Soloveitchick, which is like getting kind of Oxbridge Smithers, if you wish. And twice I was privileged to go through the text on repentance, the Soloveitchick book. What he taught me, which was so true, was that when we actually look at those two central parts of our liturgy, of the Bible, the one where Abraham argues with God to save the people of Sodom and we’re much more relevant to these days where Moses argues with God and to save the Jewish people. As he points out, if they can argue with God, we can argue with rabbis. We can argue that it’s not quite that way. That in fact, we are part of creating a tradition and therefore we need to engage with it accordingly.
Q: Are we required to forgive?
A: Yes, I think we are Valerie. I think we are, because otherwise we can never move on. Doesn’t mean we have to forget. I think that was one of the great insights of Nelson Mandela. That we should never forget but we should because we should never forget for what happened, but we should forgive, otherwise we can’t move on.
Thank you very much, Elaine.
Q: Esther, how can anyone in this community complain about anything like that?
A: Well, I’m, I agree with you but Wendy and their generosity, thank you very much to everybody else for their, oh, hang on, I’ve got another one here. Devara.
Thank you very much, Rachel.
Devara, “We must take into account that Joseph’s brothers did not trust him because they created a lie about what Jacob had said on his deathbed. There’s just support, so not only on Yom Kippur, but we are constantly.”
Yes, it is a constant process and it’s not just about Yom Kippur, but it is pretty useful to have this concentrated period where you, we can think about these matters. And hopefully, when you all ensure over this period, perhaps when you read these texts or just go and read Soloveitchick on repentance, or read anything that Jonathan Sacks written about, it’ll give you your, it’ll give great, great meaning to Yom Kippur. Thank you very much and I do wish you all .
Wendy, that’s it for the, and I’m sorry to everybody for not having got the text. But Judy, thank you very much for your help.
[Judy] Thank you, Dennis. I’m, and as I said, I’ll just, I’ll send a copy of this text out to everybody. I dunno what.
[Dennis] Okay.
[Judy] Obviously a glitch and I can’t control what happens.
[Dennis] I know.
[Judy] So we’ll see everybody in about an hour.
Yeah, take care. Bye.
[Judy] Take care everybody. Bye-bye.