We are familiar with the Torah verses that mandate our observance of Yom Kippur:  “In the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall practice self-denial [teannu et nafshoteichem] and you shall do no manner of work, neither the citizen nor the alien who resides among you.  For on this day atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you of all your sins; you shall be clean before Adonai.  It shall be a Sabbath of complete rest for you, and you shall practice self-denial [ve-innitem et nafshoteichem]; it is a law for all time.” (Levit. 16:29-31)

         The weight of solemnity and anxiety that modern Jews bring to this observance makes clear that in recent centuries we have moved far from earlier understandings of the kavannah, the intentionality, of Yom Kippur.  Rabbi Rifat Soncino calls our attention to an important interpretive option that overturns our routine Yom Kippur mindset: “the Hebrew root ayin-nun-heh from which we derive the English translation of “self-denial” can mean: (1) to answer, (2) to be occupied, (3) to be afflicted, but also, (4) to sing.”  He notes that based on this last understanding, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin renders our verse, “You shall enable our souls to sing,” rather than “you shall practice self-denial.” [Torat Chayim, v.8, no 49, 9/19/04]

         If Rabbi Riskin’s translation is correct—and we are not meant to afflict ourselves even on Yom Kippur—whatever are we to do about the Jewish stereotypes of guilt-ridden psyches induced by guilt-dispensing parents and spouses?  Most of us have pretty well assimilated the American Jewish comedic reputation, laughing—sometimes with amusement, sometimes ruefully—at the familiar formulaic jokes:

         You know, of course, what the waiter asked the table of Jewish mothers?  “Is anything all right?”

         Or, the one about a Jewish man who calls his mother in Florida? “Mom, how are you?”  “Not so good,” says the mother.  “I’ve been very weak.”  The son asks, “why are you so weak?”  “Because I haven’t eaten in 38 days.”  The son exclaims: “That’s terrible!  Why haven’t you eaten in 38 days?”  “Because I didn’t want my mouth to be filled with food if you should call.”

         And, lastly, an anecdote I love because I remember Oscar Levant so fondly: when the famed piano virtuoso and entertainer telephoned his mother to inform her that he had proposed to his sweetheart and she had accepted, his mother answered: “All right, Oscar; good!  I’m glad to hear it.  But did you practice piano today?” [Encyclopedia of Jewish Humor, p. 383]

         We have thousands of these to share, not just recollections from comedy routines or endlessly forwarded emails clogging the Internet, but also out of personal experience.  A good many of us have at least one personal guilt story in our repertoire, at least one example of how —no matter how hard we had tried, how much we had accomplished—we were not going to get credit for doing enough.  I’ve come to suspect that this schooling in personal imperfection and inadequacy enshrined in Jewish humor gives us an outlet to complain about and laugh at demanding mothers and wives, especially, instead of complaining directly about our religion’s demanding nature.  What’s that old saying?  “It’s hard to be a Jew.”  So much is expected of us: ritual mitzvot; commandments requiring us to attend to social justice, decent labor practices, environmental responsibility; a calling to become a holy people, a nation of priests in service to the God of the Covenant, the Giver of Torah.

         So what are we to make of this teaching from the sixteenth-century Rabbi Moshe Cordovero?:  “It is customary for all Israel to rejoice and celebrate on the eve of Yom Kippur and to prepare a feast of food and delicacies, and so is the law.  Because a worship comprised of somberness and suffering is not acceptable to God. Only a worship of joy and celebration. Therefore we begin Yom Kippur with festiveness and a lavish feast" (in Sefer Avo'dat Yom Kippurim).  Even earlier, the Jerusalem Talmud (Ta’anit 26a) depicts Yom Kippur as “one of the most joyful celebrations on the Hebrew calendar.”  And, before the time of the Talmud, the prophet Nehemiah (8:9) “reminded our ancestors [that] the so-called Days of Awe actually have no room for too much somberness and were to be commemorated with gladness of heart and festive celebrations." [Rabbi Gershon Winkler, High Holy Day Message 2006, via email]

          Relief, acceptance, blessing, and receiving of Torah inform Yom Kippur.  On Yom Kippur, Moses descended Mount Sinai with the second set of Tablets, and our ancestors—or as some midrashic stories suggest, all of us throughout all time—reaffirmed our Covenant with the God who brought us out of slavery, the One to whom we willingly bound ourselves, the One whose mitzvot we agreed to fulfill.  Yom Kippur seals the reconciliation effected between God, Moses, and the Israelites after the incident of the Golden Calf. 

When God commits to support Moses in his leadership of our fractious ancestors and to give the Tablets of the Law a second time, Moses asks for a glimpse of God, crying out: “Hareini nah et-k’vodecha,” Oh, let me behold Your Presence!” God agrees to shelter Moses from the full radiance of the Divine Presence, and to cause “all God’s goodness to pass before him.” (Exodus 34:18)  In response to Moses’ plea for an even more direct encounter with God than he had already experienced, “Adonai passed before him and proclaimed,” in words that we recite to this day in our High Holy Day worship, “Adonai, Adonai, El Rachum ve-Chanun, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgressions, and sin.” (Exodus 34:6-7)   During the Days of Awe, we deliberately call on God by these special names revealed to Moses in this passage, by God’s Thirteen Attributes of Mercy.  According to Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, God revealed these names to us as a divine gift, an invitation through all time to walk the pathway of return and reconciliation, the path of t’shuvah that remains available to us no matter how distanced we feel from God. [Paradigm Shift, pp. 165-6]

         Undergirding the entire ritual practice of the High Holy Day season is the assurance, the certainty of forgiveness if one repents sincerely.  We have no reason to fear that sincere repentence will be rejected, yet fear we do, accustomed to the sting of external and internal judgments, the deep knowledge of our imperfections.  For this reason, on Rosh Hashanah we read the verses of Un’taneh tokef, “Let us proclaim the sacred power of this day,” in anxious voices, for “This is the Day of Judgment!  Even the hosts of heaven are judged, as all who dwell on earth stand arrayed before You.” [Gates of Repentence, pp. 107-8] 

We read the list of possibilities keenly aware of the truth they transmit: some will live and some will die; some will be tranquil and some will be troubled; some will be poor and some will be rich; some will be secure and some will be driven.  In human experience, there has been no year without its disasters, losses, and griefs, nor without its joys, triumphs, and fulfillment.  The prayer is not so much about averting the negative, as about the importance of having God with us under all circumstances.  If t’shuvah, t’fillah, and tzedakah temper judgment’s severe decree, it is because our repentance, prayer, and tzedakah keep us connected to God’s sustaining love throughout all the vicissitudes of the year.  God remains present to us, wherever we let God in.

Yet our teacher Woody Allen argues, in the filmscript for Crimes and Misdemeanors, that “we have not succeeded to create a really and entirely loving image of God.  This was beyond our capacity to imagine.”  And why should we be able to imagine such a God?  We live in a tough universe, on a planet that for all its glories continues to be the site of seemingly endless suffering, most of it inflicted by some of us on others, often in the name of that very God we call “loving.”  What we know as reality obscures the unwavering Presence of El Rachum ve-Chanun, the Compassionate and Gracious One whose love for us can sweeten every outcome.  So, we hold back from believing Reb Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev’s assurance about our relationship to God, that “the essential nature of Divinity is compassion, which takes precedence over dualistic justice.” [Reb Moshe Aharon Ladizhyner, Nitzavim-va-Yeilech 5766, 9/14/06]

         At the dawn of Hasidism, the Ba’al Shem Tov told the following parable, and some of his followers adopted it as a meditation in preparation for the Days of Awe:

     Once a King decided to test his subjects’ understanding and devotion, so he built an elaborate labyrinth around the Palace.  Whoever wanted to see the King had to find her way through the labyrinth.  At each stage, there were both frightening deterrents and alluring treasures.  Although many set out to reach the King, none was able to succeed.  Either they were too frightened by the obstacles or too distracted by the treasures.  Finally, one came who simply would not settle for anything but finding the King.  When she succeeded, she realized that the labyrinth was illusory.  Nothing had ever really prevented her from reaching her goal.

         What an illuminating realization!  When we recognize that nothing prevents us from reaching our goal, from standing in the ever-compassionate Divine Presence, everything changes.  “When a light is brought to a dark place, all the darkness disappears.  The Ba’al Shem Tov teaches that learning the Torah, the teaching, of the labyrinth has the power to overcome all our confusion concerning who we are and what God is.  Guided by the light of our souls, we can make our way through all of the illusory obstacles that separate us from El Rachum ve-Chanun. . . . Our sages teach us that only our . . .  habitual patterns of behavior condemn us to imagine that we are separate from our divine soul.  Behind all of the illusory aspects of the labyrinth of our experience, God is always there for us as El Rachum ve-Chanun, and . . . we are awed by [the revelation] that Divinity cannot fail to forgive us, because a Power that is Rachum ve-Chanun cannot really bear to witness another’s suffering.” [Parable and ff., Reb Moshe Aharon Ladizhyner, Rosh HaShanah 5767, 9/21/06]

         Perhaps the most potent obstacle to realizing that El Rachum ve-Chanun cannot fail to forgive us is our fear that our personal failings are beyond the reach of God’s lovingkindness.  Who are we that God should pay attention to our regret, our repentance, our determination to change?  Who are we to expect such a healing?  Our tradition has answered this question for us over and over, and Yom Kippur returns in every new year to remind us of the certainty of forgiveness:

         From Sha’arei T’shuvah (Gates of Repentence), by the medieval moralist Jonah ben Abraham Gerondi:

                  We are good and upright and capable of sin and we have at hand the means of redeeming ourselves—with God’s willing help:

                  Repentence is one of the good things that the Holy One   has provided for human creatures that they might rise up from the pit of their acts, escape the snare of their sins, save themselves from destruction, and avert divine anger.  Because humankind is good and upright, You have warned them to turn to You even though they have sinned against You, for You know the inclination of their heart, as Scripture says, “Good and upright is Adonai; therefore You instruct sinners in the     way” (Ps. 25:8).  Were they to sin constantly and rebel continually against You, even then You would not close the gates of repentance, as the verse attests, “Turn unto God against whom you have deeply rebelled, O Children of Israel” (Isaiah 31:6) and as another verse says, “Return, you backsliding children, I will heal your backsliding” (Jeremiah 2:2).  [The Journey of the Soul, p. 192]

         And from Maimonides (Hilchot Teshuvah, Laws of Repentence)  Repentence is all that we have, now that the Temple does not exist and we do not have its altar to effect atonement. Repentence atones for all kinds of transgressions.  Were a person to be wicked throughout life and yet finally repent, that person’s wickedness would not be mentioned, for it says: “The wickedness of the wicked shall not cause the individual to stumble on the day that the individual turns from wickedness” (Ezekiel 33:12).  Yom Kippur by its very nature brings atonement to those who repent, as it is written, “For on the day    shall atonement be made for you” (Levit. 16:30). [Journey, p. 231]

         In the weekday Amidah, we praise God for being “ha-rotzei bi’t’shuvah, marbeh lis’loach,” abounding in forgiveness, welcoming repentance.  We would do well to make of these words a mantra: “abounding in forgiveness, welcoming repentance,” for this is the nature of the God who spends Yom Kippur moving from judgment to mercy as we pour out our tefillah (prayer), offer our sincere t’shuvah (repentance), and commit to renewing our lives in tzedakah, righteousness.  This morning’s Torah portion removes any anxiety we might have that we are not deserving or capable of fulfilling God's Instruction, of upholding our part of the Covenant: “Ki karov alecha ha-davar m’od, b’ficha u’vilvavcha la-asoto,” it is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, and you can do it.” (Deut. 30:14)

         Every moment of our lives transmits the Torah of our experience, for “it is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, and you can do it.”  And every one of us was brought into being to complete a divine task for we are uniquely qualified, and which only we can do, for “it is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, and you can do it.”  [Sfat Emet, Commentary on Bechutotai, 5632] On this day that of itself effects atonement for us, may we all recognize in ourselves the worthiness to receive forgiveness, God’s eternal desire to grant forgiveness, and the certainty that when the gates close at sundown, we will have completed the labyrinth and come into the loving and compassionate Presence of the King.  Keyn y’hi ratzon.