This weekend marked
the passage of Yom Kippur, the most powerful day in the Jewish calendar. Its
liturgy and rituals press the worshipper, issuing fierce demands. Yom Kippur is
not for the faint hearted.
On Friday night and
Saturday, I observed Yom Kippur. The liturgy and rituals spoke loudly, but not
to me this year. They did not seize and hold me captive. My heart, mind, and
soul strayed from the prayers and occupied themselves elsewhere.
It was seventeen
years ago when Yom Kippur services helped restore me to the religion of my
upbringing. On that day, I was emotionally overcome, partly from abstaining
from food and drink (and coffee!) for approximately twenty-seven hours, as is
the custom. Fasting intensifies the solemnity we participants feel as we engross
ourselves in self-reflection, examining our thoughts, words, and actions from over
the past year for all traces of mean-spiritedness, dishonesty, and dishonor. We
spend the day in synagogue confessing our transgressions and asking God (the Father,
the King, the Deity-out-There) to forgive them. We come clean, and we pledge to
behave more virtuously.
For many years, Yom
Kippur’s activities have inspired me. They have invigorated me. On Yom Kippur,
I have affirmed my alignment with what is right and what is good.
What made this year
different? Well, throughout this entire year, I have held closely to the
practice of examining my thoughts, words, and behavior. Being in the habit of
self-examination robbed this year’s Yom Kippur of its singular importance.
Yet there was an even
more critical factor. This year, Yom Kippur’s confessions contrasted jarringly
with my deepened ongoing spiritual practice. The Yom Kippur prayers felt empty
and inauthentic, foreign to my evolving mode of spiritual immersion. For the
first time, I felt not at home in this liturgy that has so enraptured me.
Increasingly, I
immerse myself within a loving force, a force that I enter, a force that enters
me. Rarely any longer do I turn to a heteronomous God who judges me. Imagining
myself as observed and judged by an external force seems only to reinforce the
illusion that I am separate from the source of all power. Yom Kippur, in my
experience, asks me to stand before God and quiver. At no point during worship
do I feel lifted and carried by a loving current.
This Yom Kippur, I
couldn’t bring myself to stand before God the Judge. I could not dam myself off
from the current of love that carries me to infinite expanses.
Throughout my time in
prayer this Yom Kippur, my focus drifted away from the confessions at hand.
Instead, I found myself meditating, confirming my oneness with the One. Instead
of begging forgiveness from the heteronomous God, I focused on my soul’s light and
invited it to fill me. I did not stand before God. I melted inside God.
Inside God, the One
Energy flows through me. I am powerful, a conductor for the One Energy. I do
not cower before an external God who sits in judgment.
6 comments:
This year I chose to participate. The impulse to participate arose from the desire to connect with my native people as I am sometimes prompted despite a secular existence. I engaged as earnestly as I was able. I very much enjoyed what the Rabbi had to say. Yet I was not entirely subsumed into the spirit of the service. I did experience the comfort that comes from being with others of the same background. Still looking for that closer connection to God.
I attended services and fasted for the
first time in many years after having rejected the seemingly harsh and binary approach to atonement years ago (who shall live and who shall die etc). This year being 35 years old and having had many years away from any jewish or other religious practice, I found myself able to approach the service from a new, non literal perspective, and I had a moving experience. Where the text of the mahzor seems stark, I simply take it as a remnant of starker times, when perhaps many more people in a given year might be taken by disease or disaster. I also found the "other" of a god useful as a measuring device, almost a way to project my better self outside myself and to ask "have I really lived as I believe I should?"
A good read. Thank you Robert. As a nontheist, I don't feel equipped to speak about deities or higher powers. I like the idea of deep introspection. I agree that it ought to be a daily rather than an annual practice. I also think it's good that your spiritual practices are evolving. May we all ever evolve.
I can never connect to this liturgy, but then again, I can never connect to any liturgy, and I've been in so many in my religious travels. The only place I think I've ever felt at home spiritually is in Quaker meeting, where all is silent except when someone feels so moved to speak that they must rise and share their message.
Yom Kippur is particularly challenging. So much of that liturgy seems to presume that you are not engaging in constant reflection, that your life is not, in general, about improving yourself, that you're only considering these questions once a year, and finding yourself lacking. But I'm always asking those questions. I'm always wondering what the greater truth is, the greater morality. And I'm always (sometimes correctly, sometimes not) finding myself lacking.
But I never say anything about it (except to my husband, who loves YK), because everyone else seems really into it, so thank you, Robert, for writing this.
Thanks for sharing this Robert - interesting thoughts. While I personally found meaning on Yom Kippur, it's less from the perspective of cowering before G-d and more from the communal aspect of being amongst other Jews, even though I don't feel I have real "community"
However, the most meaningful moments of this year's Yamim Nora'im came this past Sunday, when our family unit, myself, Lara & the boys, made our annual Tashlich pilgrimage (we're not sticklers for dates) to this beautiful spot on the Snohomish River that we have been coming to for the last few years.
On the way we read a very thoughtful commentary by Rabbi Will Berkovitz that was the focus of our conversation. Here's a link to his words. Hope they're as meaningful to you, as one who I consider a real thinker, as they were to us.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-will-berkovitz/forgiving-god-on-yom-kippur_b_5927334.html
One of the things I spoke about this year is the fact that Yom Kipour is not only about the individual - the first person plural nature of the liturgy makes it as much of a communal spiritual experience as an individual one. While examining your own thoughts and deeds, you have to say 'we' instead of 'I' - to "move to the plural," which is the phrase I coined in my Kol Nidre talk - in order to make the introspective work effective. I wonder, Robert: did being new to the Jewish community in which you davened made it harder for any sense of that to happen? I also wonder if part of the reason so many people have difficulty with this holiday and its liturgy is because so many people don't feel genuinely connected to the Jewish community they're davening in. A big part of why I work so hard to build that sense of connection in our community is so that our plural spiritual connections can happen. But I know that's not a common experience.
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