A historically oppressed community at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder lives in the lowest part of the city, the section most vulnerable to floods. When those floods come, as they inevitably do, that community suffers the most. Sound familiar? Aaah, but it's actually Rome I'm thinking of believe it or not, 16th to 19th century Rome to be exact. And which is the group at the bottom of society's heap living in the lowest, most vulnerable part of Rome during those centuries? You've got it - the Jews.
In the year 1555 Pope Paul IV issued an edict which imposed many severe restrictions on the lives of Jews in the states then under papal jurisdiction. One of the worst aspects of this new legislation was the confinement of all Jews to one particular quarter of Rome, called the ghetto. Needless to say, the section chosen for the ghetto was not the choicest real estate in the city. Situated on a low-lying, dank site on the left bank of the Tiber River, the ghetto was subject to intermittent flooding. One nineteenth century visitor to the Rome Jewish ghetto describes it this way: "Directly ahead are the ghetto houses in a row, tower-like masses of bizarre design, with numerous flowerpots in the windows and countless household utensils hanging on the walls. The rows ascend from the river's edge, and its dismal billows wash against the walls. It is only a few steps from the bridge to the ghetto, whose level is extremely low. When I first visited it, the Tiber had overflowed its banks and its yellow flood streamed through the Fiumara, the lowest of the ghetto streets, the foundations of whose houses serve as a quay to hold the river in its course...The water covered the lower rooms of the houses at the bottom. What a melancholy spectacle to see the wretched Jews' quarter sunk in the dreary inundation of the Tiber! Each year, Israel in Rome has to undergo a new Deluge, and like Noah's Ark the ghetto is tossed on the waves with man and beast…Those who live beneath take refuge in the upper floors, which are intolerably crowded and tainted by pestilential atmosphere. The stoppage of food supply and of work increase the misfortune, and the flood ruins everything that cannot be removed…Never has a people wept more than these Jews of Rome.[1]
There was of course much weeping in New Orleans this year, too. So much damage all around, yet it was the poorest and most wretched lower sections of the city which were most inundated by Katrina's water and whose residents had little means of escape. While not confined to their neighbourhoods by legal edict as were the Roman Jews, the residents of the poorest neighbourhoods of New Orleans who suffered the most from Katrina were certainly stuck there by the force of their socioeconomic circumstances.
We all reacted with horror to the tales of suffering that came out of New Orleans this year. But I would daresay that for most of us, there was also a certain sense of distance between ourselves and that event. As with December's horrific tsunami, and this week's devastating south Asian earthquake, it is easy to feel sympathy for the victims, but a lot harder to identify with them. There's the physical distance for sure, in the case of Katrina 1200 miles between New Orleans and Toronto. Political distance too - an international border between us, and a political context in the American south very different from what we're used to here. And cultural distance, the unique history and culture of New Orleans being so distinct from our own. Finally, there was a racial and socioeconomic distance between most of us, and the folks who suffered most from Katrina, since as we all know by now most white middle class folks had the resources to get out before the hurricane hit - still suffering loss of property perhaps, but not loss of life and not the degradation and the violence that ensued in the days following the disaster. So while I'm sure most of us felt a tremendous sympathy for those who suffered from Katrina, and many of us contributed generously to relief funds, a sense of distance may have interfered with our fully identifying with the victims, and even more so for the Asian disaster victims even farther off our radar screen. Unlike 9/11, the people we were seeing on our TV screens in both those disasters just weren't us.
Does it matter how close a kinship we feel with those in need, as long as we do our part to help them? Perhaps not. But this Yom Kippur I find myself thinking a lot about the human ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes and feel a kinship with them even if their lives are very different from our own. To what extent is it possible? What does it give us if we succeed in doing so? What are the limitations on our ability to fully identify with another person? And are there ways of transcending those limitations?
As the account of the Jews of Rome show, it wasn't so long ago that we were the ones living in low-lying areas most vulnerable to the ravages of nature. It wasn't so long ago that our community, living in squalid conditions, was at best felt sorry for and at worst actively hated by those who lived at higher elevations. We were the despised minority, often blamed for our own low station in life. How easy it is to forget, to create a distance between us and our own ignoble past -- so as to minimize our connection to people in our own time we may pity, but with whom we desire to feel little in common.
On Yom Kippur, our goal is to make the connections that tend to elude us during the rest of the year. As we've seen, there may be people with whom we feel little sense of connection. There may also be parts of ourselves that many of us prefer to remain alienated from. Yom Kippur is our Day of At-One-Ment, a day when we are "at one" with -- feel a sense of identity with - people and experiences, deeds and sins that we have successfully kept at arms length for far too long. The account of the Jews in the Roman ghetto might help us bridge the distance between ourselves and those who suffered the most from Katrina. Yom Kippur helps us bridge other self-protecting gaps that we have created during the course of the year. It helps remind us that those people who commit sins are not as far from us as we might imagine - in fact, they are us. Ashamnu Bagadnu Gazalnu - we have sinned, we have betrayed, we have stolen etc. Our Vidui is in the plural, reminding us that these are our sins, all our sins as a community, and we must acknowledge and own them on this day.
One of the sins I've been thinking about a lot this year has to do with forgiveness - in particular, the tenacity of our determination to withhold it. We create a distance between ourselves and the people in our lives we feel have done us wrong; that distance perhaps allows us to feel that we are very different from them, or even morally superior to them. We worry that true forgiveness will threaten that sense of difference from those who have wronged us, and thus many of us find it very hard to bestow. Why is it so difficult? Why are we so determined to hold on to that distance? Some of is real and necessary for sure. But I think that often our reluctance to forgive takes root early on in our most primary relationships - those with members of our family from whom we have a strong psychological need to differentiate ourselves.
The writer Anne Lamott wrote a book about her family and her faith called Traveling Mercies. In it, she ponders forgiveness, what it means, how to get it and give it, and especially how we learn to forgive. She suggests that it all starts, and perhaps ends, in our families. "I tell you," she writes, "families are definitely the training ground for forgiveness. At some point, you pardon the people in your family for being stuck together in all their weirdness, and when you can do that, you can learn to pardon anyone. Even yourself, eventually. It's like learning to drive on an old car with a tricky transmission. If you can master shifting gears on that, you can learn to drive anything [2]
[In families], you get to see something real and human. I think that's why most of us stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull - because when people have seen you at your worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much. And that gives us license to try on that radical hat of liberation, the hat of self-acceptance." [3]
Lamott makes a strong case for forgiving our families, but for many of us how much more satisfying to hold onto a grudge! How we savor our feelings of righteous indignation! The recognition that that other person might not be so different from ourselves threatens all that. A lot of factors in our familial relationships are not in our power, but still many things are under our control - such as our own readiness to cross the divide and forgive others as we would have God forgive us this day. Who is it for you? Is it a particular family member? A friend? A coworker? A partner or former partner? Is it the person sitting next to you? Yom Kippur calls on us to stretch ourselves to find the forgiveness that lies within. The masks that Lamott talks about, the maintaining of distance between ourselves and others, our reluctance to put ourselves in their shoes for fear of what that experience would leave us vulnerable to - all these things do not belong here on Yom Kippur. Today is not a day for keeping our distance; it is a day for traversing it. Lamott describes taking her mother out once on a very hot day, and the mother insisted on wearing an ugly old cardigan which Lamott couldn't stand and was perhaps embarrassed by. Suddenly Lamott has an insight: "I understand... that my family is like this old sweater - it keeps unraveling, but then someone figures out how to sew it up one more time; it has lumps and then it unravels again, but you can still wear it; and it still keeps away the chill." [4]
And finally this observation: "forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past." [5]
Lamott's own past as she describes it in the book is very different from mine, and probably different from yours in many ways as well. Her basic biography would seem to put her at quite a distance - she grew up in the San Francisco area, her hippie parents rejected their Christian faith, she had a miserable marriage and problems with alcohol and drugs. Little in common there for me. Yet as we've seen, Yom Kippur is about bridging those distances and finding those points of connection and those shared experiences which allow us to expand our understanding of ourselves and why we do what we do. And in this regard, Lamott has much wisdom to teach even those of us with a very different background from her own. Wisdom about forgiving the people closest to us for their foibles, and wisdom about forgiving ourselves for not being everything we'd hoped to be, or attaining everything we'd hoped to attain.
As most of you know, I lost my father this year, and I'm going to speak a bit more personally for the next few minutes than I usually do in public remarks. So many times in my role as rabbi, I'd been in the position of offering comfort to those who'd lost parents or other loved ones - including to many of you sitting here this morning. So many times, I'd tried to help people make connections to our ancient Jewish tradition at a time of loss. So many hospital bedsides, so many phone calls informing me that someone had died, so many funerals, so many shiva calls, so many eulogies to write. So many times hearing the thud of the earth falling on the casket in the grave. So many times leading yizkor…for other people.
Now you should know I take tremendous satisfaction out of this aspect of my work, nihum avelim, -- because when somebody dies usually there isn't all that much that friends really can do to help. Yet I am one person who can do something to help, and that is something I consider to be a gift of the rabbinate. Yet this time, it wasn't about somebody else, it was about me. It had never been about my own loss before. I wanted to be a good son in this circumstance, not a good rabbi. I wanted desperately for the rituals to work for me this time, not for somebody else. Like so many others, I had my issues: I wanted my family to feel united in its grief. I wanted to forgive my father his imperfections, and for him to forgive me mine. I wanted to find ways, most notably through the daily kaddish recitation, to keep my connection with him alive, even though he is not. Bridging the distance - between our two lives, and between life and death.
It hasn't been easy: how could I really hope to understand him? He was a child of the Depression whose parents had to move the family to a new Bronx apartment every year because they couldn't keep up with the rent. He was the first in his family to go to college, a son of immigrant parents whose old world orthodoxy he utterly rejected without seeing much Jewish out there to replace it with. He was a GI during World War II, and a civil servant his entire working life who never took for granted the financial security offered by government employment. He never lived outside the New York metropolitan area, and other than his army years always stayed in close proximity to extended family. Politically liberal though he always was, his lifestyle was extremely old-fashioned and conservative, and I don't think he could imagine living any other way. He never used a computer in his life, but believed very strongly in the power of science and technology to make the world better, and save it from religious fanatics of all faiths. He believed in progress.
At the same time, how could he hope to understand me? A suburban kid, born not into wealth by any means but into a kind of financial security undreamed of in his childhood. I was the product of a family where higher education was taken for granted; my much older sister and brother were already in law school and medical school respectively almost by the time I became aware of them. Mine was a childhood where Jewish tradition was more something to be curious about than to rebel against because it simply wasn't present strongly enough to require rebellion. The radical social changes brought about by the 60's were already firmly embedded in our culture by the time I became a young man. My father was one of those people who cried when FDR died more than for his own father; I, product of a more cynical age, can't even imagine feeling that kind of affection for a national leader, even one whose politics I support. The choices that lay before me as a young man were so much wider than he had ever contemplated for himself. I've lived in Israel, in Los Angeles, in Montreal, in North Carolina, here. I've traveled a bit in Europe and Asia. I'm a rabbi, for heaven's sake! Nothing I did was weirder for him than that.
So different we were, and it is so hard to put yourself into someone else's shoes, even someone so close. And yet, as different as our circumstances were, and our interests and personalities and aspirations, still the bonds of affection were strong, and there were still moments of connection that transcended all the differences, moments of laughter shared, and memories savored. I remember particularly bike rides with my father on the boardwalk in my hometown of Long Beach, Long Island, and I remember too sitting on the porch of our house with him watching the planes fly by on their way to Kennedy Airport, trying to identify which country they came from, and singing George M. Cohan songs in between planes. Those were the moments of connection that helped us transcend our profound differences in interests, temperament, and generation. I hope you have had such moments with your loved ones as well. Moments of connection leading to genuine forgiveness, vanquishing whatever resentment each of you might have felt over those differences. Those moments can sustain you through those tough times when the lack of understanding seems most acute, and our anger or resentment most powerful. Those are the moments that can sustain you through the loss of that person as well.
Exactly five months after my father died, I stood on this very bema in the presence of family and friends and watched my daughter become bat mitzvah. Again, a new life experience for me, one where many of you could be my tutors, and were. Again, a passage I had helped dozens of families through while wearing my rabbi's hat, reassuring folks, telling them everything will be fine. But I had never been in the Abba role before, and it is certainly different. My rabbinic experience may have helped a little bit - but in the end, I was pretty much just a nervous-proud parent, as so many of you have been. And if there is any relationship where forgiveness needs to be practiced it is in the relationship of parents and their teenage children. Bridging a distance which each generation of new parents deludes itself won't afflict them in their relationship with their kids, as it afflicted them in their relationship with their own parents. No delusions here, on Yom Kippur. The generational chasm is hardwired into the relationship, no matter how "cool" the parents think they may be (and I happen to know that I'm particularly "cool"!). There are moments, incredible, precious moments, when the chasm is bridged, forgiveness and love and openness and intimacy reign. They may last just for a flash - but those moments are often enough to sustain the relationship through the bitterest times, when there seems to be little common language or interests, and when the generation gap feels like a yawning abyss.
Yom Kippur itself is a flash. One day out of 365. What can it possibly mean? Tomorrow we all go back to work and school. Will we have changed? Maybe not dramatically. But as the writer Betsy Platkin Teutsch has noted with respect to Teshuvah (repentance), "it need not be a dramatically large change to be significant. A subtle shift now, of even just a fraction of a degree out of 360, can take one on a vastly different path over the course of a life's trajectory." [6] May this day be one marked by such a subtle but impactful shift for the better, for all of us.
Hurricane Katrina reminded us that there is much that is out of our control, as if we needed such reminders after 9/11, after the tsunami, after Alicia Ross and Cecilia Zhang and Holly Jones, and SARS, and everything else out there we spend so much time worrying about. In the fearsome words of the Unetaneh Tokef which we recite on this day, God decrees who shall live and who shall die. Who by sword and who by beast. Who by hunger and who by stoning. Mi va-esh umi-vamayim. Who by fire and who by water. We pass like sheep before God, and God inscribes our destiny in one of the divine books. Sounds like there's not much for us to do except wait for whatever destiny God has determined for us.
And yet the Unetaneh Tokef concludes Utshuvah Utfila Utzedakah maavirin et roa hagzerah. Repentance, prayer, and charity temper the severity of the decree. Meaning, we can affect what happens to us. Maybe not perfectly, but our actions do matter. Actions like reaching out to hurricane survivors whose fate was so similar to our Roman Jewish kinsmen. Actions like reaching out to the people of Darfur, undergoing a genocide different in many ways from the Shoah and yet, at the end of the day, carrying enough similarities to test our commitment to the slogan "Never Again." Actions like finding forgiveness in our hearts for our family members who are different from us or who have hurt us. Bridging distances - that's what this day is about.
One final distance I want to reflect on briefly this Yom Kippur: when the Kohen Gadol entered the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur in biblical days, and pronounced God's holy name, he was attempting to bridge the distance between Bnei Yisrael and God. This is perhaps the greatest distance of all. It's a gap that exercised our medieval philosophers a great deal, and they tried their best to articulate how an eternal, incorporeal, unchanging God who was all good, could interact with the material world of which we are a part, a world of accidents and illness and bodily needs and death and evil and constant change. Can such a gap ever be bridged? Some contemporary theologies try to solve it by eliminating the gap altogether, but in so doing they create another challenge. They propose a God who is not transcendent at all, but who rather resides inside each of us, the force inside us that makes for good. In this way, there is no gap because God is not external to us. In this system, it becomes difficult to imagine God as one who commands or judges or forgives. For some of us that's not a great loss. But I have to ask, if there's no gap to bridge, and God really is us, then isn't there really no relationship with another at all? Is that what we really want? If not, then perhaps the Yom Kippur goal is to come ever closer to God, but never actually to eradicate the distance totally, for isn't it the distance -- however small -- that allows us to remain individuals?
So many centuries after the last Kohen Gadol entered the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, we're still trying to bring God close while holding on to our own individuality. So many generations since God first realized Adam was alone and resolved to make him a companion, we're still trying to bring other human beings closer as well, while still remaining true to ourselves. We're trying to deepen our relationship with the others in our lives, trying to understand them and empathize with them even when their experiences have been so different from our own. And from this sympathy, perhaps, forgiveness will flow, and perhaps we won't be so quick to judge or condemn. Because at the end of the day, we might not be so different after all. My father and I shared so much; sometimes I open my mouth and I can't believe it because it sounds like it's him talking and not me - I'm sure many of you have had that experience. And those villagers in Aceh, Indonesia, or on the Sri Lankan coast whose lives were suddenly revealed to us after the tsunami, and all those Katrina victims we read about in the news - are they really so different from us? In religion and culture yes. In skin color yes. In socioeconomic status yes. They are different, and I don't want to minimize these differences because they are real and significant in many ways. But when we saw them mourning their losses, they were just human beings - husbands, wives, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers. Human beings trying to support themselves and their families as best they could, trying to keep themselves and their loved ones safe as best they could in a world filled with natural and manmade dangers at every turn. Is that really so different from us?
This Yom Kippur, let's try to articulate to ourselves where we feel the greatest distances in our lives, and let's try to bridge them somewhat. If it's between us and a family member or friend, let's reach way down inside to find the empathy and the sense of commonality that leads to forgiveness. If it's between us and the needy of the world, let's remember that they're not as different from us as they may appear, and that the Torah commands us be kind to the needy, for the specific reason that we ourselves had once been strangers in the land of Egypt. If that distance we're feeling so acutely this day is between us and God, or between us and Jewish law and tradition, let's try to be more open than we've been to G-d and Torah, and let's expand our assumptions about who God is or what the tradition has to say - there's usually a lot more in there than we suppose. If we're feeling alienated from the Jewish community, let's try to reflect on what we can do to make the community better. If the distance we want to work on most today is the gap between who we were in the last year, and who we'd like to be in the year just beginning, let's remember that this day is dedicated to the ever present possibility of change, that patterns can be broken and ruts climbed out of.
This day is about bridging distances, even the one between us and heaven. We fast, and we deny our body its other needs and pleasures as well - erasing the difference between us and the angels, at least for a day. As our hunger pangs increase during the course of the day, we feel how arduous this work is -- because we're not angels and it doesn't always come naturally, this bridging of distances. It's individual work, yet we do it in each other's presence. In that way, we derive strength and support from each other. I wish us all strength as we continue the day's labours, and as we strive, with God's help, to gain greater understanding of ourselves and the other people in our lives and in the world, and as we strive to come nearer to the best that is in us.
Gmar Hatima Tova.
Notes
[1] Ferdinand Gregorovius, The Ghetto and the Jews of Rome, pp.85-88.
[2] pp.219-220.
[3] p.215.
[4] p.219.
[5] p.213.
[6] Quoted in Machzor Kol Haneshama.