Podcast #33 Yom Kippur

During a conversation about Yom Kippur, the speakers discuss the importance of introspection and going inwards during the ten days leading up to Yom Kippur. They emphasize the personal nature of this journey and the challenge of finding a recipe for spiritual growth. They suggest that slowing down and moving towards the center of oneself is a way to connect and reflect. They share a story about seeing oneself as damaged goods on Yom Kippur, but also recognizing the inherent goodness within. They discuss the concept of cognitive dissonance and the need to reconcile the belief in one's goodness with the recognition of hurtful actions. They mention the importance of asking for forgiveness from those who were hurt and the obligation to forgive. They highlight the idea that we always do the best we can in any given moment, even if it leads to hurtful actions. Shalom Shlomo. Shalom Elisha. So we are both before Shabbat and before Yom Kippur and so we're going to be talking mostly about Yom Kippur but we'll see maybe Shabbat will make its appearance here in our podcast. I'd like to refer specifically to one of your Yom Kippur drashot because we are in the ten days of repentance and as you write in your wonderful drashah I'm writing about a journey inwards. This is the only worthy journey I know of. Every parashah, they're all variations of human yearning inwards. This is your avodah shehalev, this inward look. So Elisha as our shepherd for your flock, what should your flock be thinking during these crucial ten days leading up to the highlight of Yom Kippur which is on Sunday night? Wow, no pressure, no pressure whatsoever. It's tricky. It's really tricky because first of all it's really fun kind of reading. I think many of us have experienced this reading something we wrote like a few years ago. Interestingly enough this morning I was writing in my journal and something which echoed what I wrote here in the drashah and maybe that could possibly be a possible answer. First of all it is very personal. Life's journey is personal and I don't believe in formulas, in recipes for how to live life. We all experience life very differently. So I could say all kinds of words. You could say all kinds of words. Even the word go inwards. Where is inwards? Where where? How do you go inwards? How does one do that? But when one does indeed go inwards, he or she knows exactly what we're talking about. But if we had to give a prescription of going within, going to the inner, the infinite inner. Where? How? And I think it's one of the biggest challenges anyone who works in spiritual realms probably has because you can teach, you can give a recipe for baking a cake and even that doesn't always work that well. There are recipes but for the spiritual work there are very few recipes. So I would say the following at the beginning of our conversation because I'm sure it's going to bubble up as we talk. Slowing down. Slowing down is a great way of connecting. I have the image in my mind of a wheel and the further you are in the periphery of the wheel, I'm sure there are better words in English, but the further you are along the spikes of the wheel, the more you're running. And life is a rush and a spin and the closer you get to the center of the wheel, the more still you get. And at the invisible, infinite center of the wheel, you actually stand still. So maybe that's what we need to do in these 10 days. Slow down. And how do we slow down? By getting further and further to the center of the wheel. Or one could say, it's not about slowing down, come to the center of the wheel and then you will slow down. That's a perfect metaphor. I will think of that wheel. I'm reminded of the Simon and Garfunkel song, slow down, you're going too fast. And think of the wheel and then move toward the core of the wheel which is our own core, our own inner self. And Elisha, I have a story to tell and it comes from Rabbi Sachs. It was an endless fountain of wonderful ideas and wonderful stories. And I think it's relevant to this issue of our inner journey. The story goes as follows. He had a member of his congregation named Suzanne. Suzanne had done many things and once had a store in Curacao and she sold shoes. And a well-dressed lady came into the store with a pair of shoes and showed them to Suzanne and said, Suzanne, these are beautiful shoes. I want several more pairs. Can you get them for me, please? And these are shoes by a designer named Monsieur Damage. Suzanne turned the shoes over and looked at the sticker on the bottom of the shoes and the sticker said, D-A-M-A-G-E-D. There was a D. Damaged goods. Damaged goods. These are shoes that were damaged goods and were sold at a discount. But of course, she didn't say anything to the lady. She said, yes, I know the work of Monsieur Damage and I will get you more of these shoes. But Rabbi Sachs' point is so beautiful. Elisha, we are all damaged goods. We are all damaged goods and on Yom Kippur we think about this. And how do we think about it? We think about it as being good people who may have done hurtful things during the past year for which we need to repent. But in this inner core, I think we have to desperately preserve, even though we are damaged goods, we are goods. Good. We are good people. And to retain that strongly. What a great story. What a great story. And I'm hearing something a little bit different from this amazing, amazing story. And that is what this woman who came in asking for these really beautiful shoes, if she can get more of them, is that they are not truly damaged. They were not really damaged goods. We are, as you just said, we are goods. We are good. We think we are damaged. We judge ourselves harshly. We always come back to this point. We judge ourselves. Others judge us. We judge others. So we walk around the world feeling like damaged goods. And maybe that's what the repentance is all about. And it goes along with exactly what you just said now. That recognizing, no, we are not damaged goods. We have never been damaged goods. And this woman came to the store. Her English wasn't great. She was sure it was French. And we're giving her obviously the benefit of the doubt. And she saw in these shoes something really, really beautiful. Furthermore, what we call damaged is exactly that's what makes everybody special. If we all were perfect according to external parameters, we'd all be exactly the same because perfect is one way of being perfect. The so-called damage is that's the colors that we see. That's the differences. That's the beauty all around us. Now it's easier said than done. We do feel like damaged goods. And can we maybe on Yom Kippur entertain and maybe these 10 days of awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur entertain the idea that there cannot be damaged goods in God's world. God is perfect. And if God is perfect, there cannot be damaged goods. So this is relevant to some work in psychology, Alicia. And let me explain. There's a brilliant psychologist named Leon Festinger, really tough guy. But he was the pioneer of a theory called cognitive dissonance. I'm sure you're aware of this. Cognitive dissonance means we believe Proposition A, we believe in Proposition B, but they contradict one another and this causes great discomfort. And I'm thinking of this in the context of Yom Kippur. Proposition A, I am a good person. My inner core, I am a good person. I am not damaged goods as you say. Proposition B, during the year, I have done hurtful things. Things that through deed and word hurt my loved ones and other people and even strangers. I have done hurtful things. I'm a good person. I did hurtful things. Good people don't do hurtful things. Something has to give in these two propositions. And one thing that can give, and this is partly through very religious people, is I'm not a good person. I'm a sinner. I'm not a good person. And I reject that. And I prefer to resolve the dissonance as I am a good person. Good people do hurtful things. There is a way back. There is a way to correct it. And a little later we'll discuss how the somewhat strange Yom Kippur ceremony, the scapegoat, how that is highly relevant to this cognitive dissonance. That is really beautiful. I'm looking forward to that next step that you'll lead us through. Yeah, that resonates with me very much what you just said now. And the idea that we are essentially good and not damaged. And we do things. We do things that are hurtful. And one of the ways to think of repenting is indeed acknowledging that and asking forgiveness. And it's really beautiful. And Judaism is certainly unique in the sense that it demands that forgiveness can only be asked from the person that we've hurt. We cannot ask God to forgive us for hurting another person. And that's really beautiful. And along with that is the person who was hurt, that we've hurt, there's an obligation on that person to forgive. And so it's one thing if I recognize, yes, I'm actually a really good person and I've done hurtful things and now I'm going to apologize. And I sincerely apologize. I recognize that what I did was hurtful and I apologize. We need the other side to forgive. And that's also part of Yom Kippur and there's a lot of halachot about forgiveness from the side of the person who's hurt. And I think one of the ways of forgiving goes back to what you were suggesting earlier. And that is that we always, always do the best that we can at any given moment. And I'm saying this deliberately knowing this is not an easy thing for people to agree with. Yesterday with our Bar Mitzvah class, because also Shanafil on Sunday, so we had our Bar Mitzvah class instead of Sunday, we had it on Monday. And being there for 10 days, I told them a story about a good friend of mine who is an amazing, amazing person and did some really, really awful deeds. And I asked him at the end of the story, you know, would you forgive him? Would you be able to forgive him? Almost all of them said absolutely not, absolutely not. And there was one kid who said something very interesting. It's a really, really amazing group we have right now. And he said there's always a freedom of choice. The story is about a person who through an addiction, he fell into a pretty bad addiction, and he hurt people through the addiction. He was addicted. And the kid said we always, always have the freedom of choice on how we choose to act. Now, I always didn't say you're wrong, God forbid. First of all, I'm glad he thinks this way. Hopefully it's going to really empower him. But while a part of me agrees with this kid, there's another part that says not quite true. I would say when we do something, whatever it is, good or bad, at that moment, at that moment and not a moment later, I'm talking about that particular moment when we did what we did, we, being that we are good people, we did the best that we knew that we could at that particular moment. A second later, I think we also discussed this before, but a second later, we may say, oh no, what did I just do? I'm so sorry. But at that particular moment, that was the best that we could do. If at that particular moment, it occurred to us on any level that we could do any better, we would do better. But at that moment, we couldn't. So, on the side that was hurt, if we can recognize that the person who hurt us at that moment, for whatever reason, that's the best that they could do. Lisa, there's a physiological explanation for that. Business people and marketing people know that. Part of our brain is called the limbic brain. It's sometimes called the reptile brain. It's the brain where we have our basic emotions, and it drives a great deal of our behavior. Marketing people know that. They appeal not to our rationality. They appeal to our limbic brain, to our emotions, to make us feel something toward a product. Many of our actions are driven by this. You know, we sometimes talk about avodah shel halev. I looked this up, Alicia. So, the heart is an incredible muscle, and it has oxygen and blood flow, but it also is a brain, Alicia. The heart has 40,000 neurons, which are brain cells in the heart. So, literally, we feel things in our brain, but also in our heart, and it, in part, drives our behavior. Before you continue, I never thought about that. That's a really beautiful ... We always talk about the heart being like a brain, or as a metaphorical idea, but you're saying, no, no, no. It's actually concrete. So, thank you for this novelty, but go on. Just to strengthen what you said, we're driven by emotion. Emotions are not always evident to us, not always controllable, especially in teenagers. Good heavens. Teenagers do things that are amazing, horrible sometimes, but that part of their brain that controls it hasn't really developed fully yet, but we're all teenagers in many ways. We need to recognize that, and that's not rationalizing. In this cognitive dissonance, good people do bad things. Then, one way out of it is to rationalize. The circumstances, I wasn't feeling well, etc., etc. That's not the answer. That's not the answer. You need to go, as you say, inward, inside, to the center of the wheel, really to your core, and not settle for easy rationalizations. There's so much to be said about that. You're bringing up so many really deep and relevant issues here. One thought that comes to mind is that we easily get hijacked, kidnapped. It's so easy to kidnap our consciousness, our awareness. When we get angry, we can't see clearly at all. I've come to learn today that when I, and I think it's a pretty well-known thing, but I'm not so sure we all act on that, is when I'm angry, when I feel angry, to know that there's a part of me that's beyond the reptile brain. Right now, there's nothing I can do. I've been hijacked by this anger. I'm angry right now. I don't get angry very easily, but when I get angry, I get angry. But there's a part of me that's outside of the reptile brain that says, okay, Alicia, right now, you're angry. There's nothing you can do about that. If you try to calm yourself down, you're just going to be in denial. You are angry right now. The one thing you can do is just shut up. Don't speak. This is not the time for words. It's not the time for writing an email. It's not the right time to write a message, because right now, you've been hijacked, and whatever you say or do right now, you're going to regret it later. It's going to be used against you. That little tiny thing has been so incredibly helpful, but it also comes from the understanding that, yeah, indeed, we get hijacked. Those nerve cells that are firing around our heart, they've taken over. Absolutely. I'm very fond of Pilke Avot, Ethics of Our Fathers. Shimon Ben Shattach said, I've lived all my days among the wise, and I never found anything better than silence, not saying anything. I'm with you. Alicia, I want to turn to something slightly different. Part of the Yom Kippur service is the Avodah, the Kohanim, the dramatic entry of the Kohen to the holy place, and the scapegoat. The scapegoat is really puzzling. Two little goats, and one goat is sacrificed, and the other goat is sent to Azazel, sent off into the desert. And Rambam and the Chazal, the sages, raise an interesting question. Wait a second. When you have a sin, you have a chatat, you have an offering and a sacrifice, and you kill the animal. Except for one place, in the Seir L'Azazel, the scapegoat. The sin is not carried on the little goat that's sacrificed. The sin is carried by the little goat that goes off into the desert. And Alicia, goats are pretty tough. They can eat anything. So I'm pretty sure that little goat manages to survive somehow. What is this about, in any case, where the sin is actually borne by the goat that is not sacrificed, even though it's part of a ritual of sacrifice? What do we read into this? Yeah. Do you have to ask the toughest questions? Is that what they teach you, the technion? So first of all, you're suggesting something like a, somewhat of a novelty here. So the scapegoat is sent out of the desert, but usually, you know, we've all been taught. I'm not saying that this is the truth. We've been taught that he actually is then pushed off a cliff. And what you're suggesting, I actually like your ending much better. And it's a possible understanding. It is a possible understanding that they sent off to Azazel. That's what it says. Going to Azazel. Azazel, it's not clear what that word is. It's just going off to the forsaken, to wherever. Isaac says Azazel is Azal. The goat leaves. Right. Left. And in Gedi, in that area, there are wild goats. And they are incredibly agile on steep mountains. Right. So you're bringing an idea. And is it Rabbi Sachs' idea that the goat basically is not killed, is not thrown off the cliff, but basically goes to desert, kind of suggesting, and maybe that's exactly what Rabbi Sachs is saying. I didn't read this particular understanding of his, and I'm curious. I will read it. Suggesting that metaphorically, out in the desert, first of all, the goat will know what to do with it in the desert. In the desert, these sins that in the city were among human beings, among people, in society, we can't handle the raw materials of life. We have to behave nicely. We have to be cute to one another. We have to be civil. And that's a lot to ask for. Here we are asked to really take our limbic system, take our animalistic side, and culture it. This is not easy. And what comes out of what you're saying is we have this possibility once a year to take that part of us, that part that is raw, that part that says, yeah, I've been nice all year, but I'm really angry, or I have these violent urges about something or someone, or sexual urges. And being able to channel all that to that very strong animal, the goat, and that little goat, you call it a little goat, I love that, that little goat, that cute little goat, is going to go out in the desert and transmute those harsh feelings, emotions, energies, into life force and make the world a better place. I love that idea. And there's an additional thought that Rabbi Sachs mentions from Rambam related to the scapegoat. And that is the crucial importance of separating the actions that we do, our deeds, and the person, the person that we are. And we are good people. The actions are not always good, often not good. But when this little goat is sent off, it's carrying our actions. Our actions are separate. That's not us. That isn't me. That wasn't me when I did that. And I think that's a metaphorical way of separating our inner core, our inner self-worth. You call it self-validation from some of these actions that we really feel awfully sorry for. Right. Allowing those actions that are, as you said, that are not who we are, that's what you opened with, allowing these actions to be sent off into the desert. And that's really beautiful. And I'm trying to think, you know, since a lot of these ceremonies, I have a lot of faith in ceremonies. Ceremonies, you know, when couples discuss their wedding. I'll give you a little example. Only yesterday, last night, I got a frantic phone call from a couple that I'm about to marry in a few weeks, right after the holidays, and they said, you know, we really have a problem with seven blessings, with Sheva Baruchot. Can we change them? Can we change them? Or can we have some of our friends come and mumble the seven blessings, but also give us like real worthy blessings in their place? And just to satisfy you, the rabbi, we'll also just quietly say the traditional Sheva Baruchot. And my response was, first of all, let's get together again, and let's study those Sheva Baruchot, first of all. And you'll see that they're actually really deep and very profound, and you will love those seven blessings. But more than that, I told them, you know what? It's not about the words that we say. Don't look at the words. There's a ceremony going on here. There's a very visceral ceremony going on. Put your intellect aside, and something amazing is happening. Two human beings who only a few years ago didn't even know of one another. This man, this woman who met at a party, and here they are, joining forces, creating a new unity, a new home in Israel. No words anyway can describe the enormity of what's happening on that evening of your wedding. So the words are just the music. What's really going to happen there? The ceremony is going to be so much stronger than the actual words. That's the power of ceremonies. So I'm thinking about the ceremony of the scapegoat, and following my monotheist who says it's all metaphor. So if it's a metaphor, you know, here we will be on Yom Tippur. We don't have a temple any longer. We don't have a scapegoat. What do we do with it? Do we just read it as a beautiful, mythical story and analyze it? That's one possibility, certainly a possibility. And I'm wondering if we can also imagine, use our imagination, following Rabbi Sachs' idea of recognizing that part of tshuva, part of repentance, part of forgiveness, is that we can let things go. We can let things go. And if we hold on to them, we're not being Jewish about it. We're not being biblical about it. That it was meant to go. And if we can allow ourselves to connect with the idea that we can let go, Yom Tippur can be very, very different. That's an important thought. It reminds me of the nature of prayer. We say the same words again and again, sometimes three or four times in the prayer service. And I believe the prayer itself is not exactly those words. Herman Wolk once said this, the words of the prayer are like a garden, like a gardener making a seedbed, preparing the soil, tilling the soil, putting water and fertilizer. But the real prayer is the plant that we plant in the seedbed. So we prepare ourselves for real prayer by saying these words and by these rituals, and they're familiar. But then comes the real prayer, as we are saying the same words again and again, the real prayer that goes deep into the seedbed, that plants the seed. Yeah, and that is beyond words. It's a whole other discipline. And Elisha, before we end, I just have to mention this briefly. 50 years ago, Dovening Mincha, in our shul in Ramat Hasharon, and one by one the men were called out and went off to war, and skyhawks flew overhead to call up the pilots and went to sleep, and was awakened at 2 a.m. by a little Volkswagen taking me off to war. And it was a terrible, terrible balagan. And it has to be remembered, Elisha, we lost 2,500 young men and women in that terrible war. Some think we almost lost our country. We were close to it. You have personal memories of that as well. We need to remember this little country cannot be taken for granted. We have to do everything possible, every single person, to make it beautiful and strong and consistent with its values and able to defend itself because we are Jews and we never can take existence for granted. Yes, and indeed, the 50-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur War is going to really feature this year in our Yom Kippur services. The drashai is going to be dedicated to that. We're actually going to be singing instead of talking too much, as I always do. We're actually going to be handing out we're going to be handing out song sheets, about 200 song sheets around the people going to be gathering at the park and we're going to be singing the Yom Kippur War songs and both remembering the fallen soldiers and also the many men, mostly men, who came back from the war. They came back with their bodies intact and those who came back with their bodies not intact but those who came back with their bodies intact but their souls were really, really traumatized and they're living among us today and only in the last 10 years or so is there a recognition that people who came back supposedly intact were all injured by that war and to kind of recognize that and tell people when someone comes back from war they've been through hell and be there for them and whatever it takes and thank and also thank those men who at 2am in the morning heeded the call yourself, my dad and many other men who went out to safeguard this country, this homeland so we're going to be paying tribute to them as well. So may it be a very meaningful Yom Kippur and also Shabbat Shalom kind of in between and use these 10 days of awe to go within and to forgive yourself, forgive others and cleanse and let that goat let that goat carry all those misdeeds because we have so many of them let that metaphoric goat just take them away and say, you know, let go, just let it all go. Amen Elisha, Shabbat Shalom Shabbat Shalom, Chag Sameach