Kol Nidre Sermon '11

Kol Nidre Sermon
October 7, 2011
Rabbi Steven Glazer

During this past summer, I read the obituary of a man who was the kind of Jew you don't find anymore! This man was a Bundist, a Yiddishist/socialist. He loved the Jewish people, Jewish culture, Jewish ethics, with a passion; but he had no use at all for the Jewish religion. He refused to enter a synagogue for any reason; and he ignored all the practices and ceremonies connected with Judaism, with one exception. He would fast!!!! But not on Yom Kippur!!! On Yom Kippur he would eat!!! Yet he would fast on Tisha B’av!! When an acquaintance of his questioned him about this, his answer was as follows: "Tisha B’av is about Jewish suffering. That means a lot to me! I care about Jewish suffering! But Yom Kippur, what is that all about??? It's about sin, about repentance, about confessing our sins to God. What do I care about things like that?

Many of us here tonight can identify with the Bundist's feelings. Things like sin, repentance, and confession are not ongoing concerns in our lives! And yet, as I thought about his statement, I realized that Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur are not really about sin and apologizing to God. What this day is really about is one word which ought to be important to us, and which we don't stop and think about often enough, which is exactly why we need a holiday dedicated to it. The word is forgiveness!

From the opening lines of Kol Nidre, which we recited only moments ago, to the story of Jonah which we shall read late tomorrow afternoon, this entire day is about forgiving and being forgiven! If Yom Kippur is at all important to us, then the idea of' forgiveness ought to be more relevant to us tonight than it usually is.

Many of us have permitted our lives to become restricted by disagreements and grudges, decisions we made months, or even years, ago that we weren't going to speak to someone anymore, things we've kept more faithfully than most other promises we make to ourselves.

It was not the Bundist's remarks alone that caused me to think about "forgiveness" this summer, but two other things as well! One was a torah verse and the other was a phone call. First, the torah passage! The legal code of ancient Israel made a distinction between premeditated murder and manslaughter. If you deliberately killed someone, then you were executed. But, if you caused someone's death accidentally, your life was spared! You still had to suffer the lesser penalty of exile, so the victim's family wouldn't seek revenge, but you were not put to death!! That was the law!! Now, what if you claimed that it was an accident, but other people weren’t so sure? The torah says that if you had been on bad terms with the victim, if you were known to be enemies, then it would be hard to claim it was accidental! The precise language reads as follows:

"If he was not your enemy yesterday and the day before," then we accept your claim that it was an accident. Now what does the phrase "if he was not your enemy yesterday and the day before” mean? The Talmud takes the passage literally and says: this is the definition of an enemy - someone you haven't gotten along with for three days!!

Do you understand the implications of that comment?? What it says to me is this: if somebody hurts you, offends you, lets you down, you're entitled to be upset with him or her for a couple of days. These things happen between close friends, casual acquaintances, members of the same family! Somebody treats you badly - it's perfectly all right to be angry with her or him for a day or two, today and tomorrow. The torah says you can do that!! But, by the third day, you ought to be over your anger and friends with him or her again. And, if you persist in being angry into a third day and longer, it's because you're choosing to prolong the argument!!!

Why would anybody deliberately do that?? Why would anyone choose to prolong unpleasantness??? I think we know the answer, but it's one of those nasty little secrets we don't like to talk about. There is something perversely satisfying about being the injured party. It makes us feel righteous, in some way morally superior! We can look down with scorn at the individual who has hurt us! We feel nobler being the wounded one rather than the inflictor of the wound.

Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, used to tell the following story: there was a man living near him in one of the D. P. Camps after the war who borrowed ten dollars from him and assured him that he had a package coming from a relative any day, and would positively pay him back as soon as it arrived. At week's end, the man had an excuse for not paying, and the next week he had an even better excuse. This went on for almost a year. Finally one day, the man came up to him with a ten dollar bill in his hand and said: "My visa has just come through, and I’m leaving for Canada tomorrow. Here's the ten dollars I owe you.” Wiesenthal waved him away and said: "No, no, you keep it. For ten dollars, it's not worth changing my opinion of you." Now Wiesenthal was wrong, of course. It's a bargain to give up a grudge for nothing. To get paid for doing so is a double bargain!!!

This brings me to the phone call! It was from a graduate student who was conducting a study of the dynamics of forgiveness as a social process. What happens when a person forgives someone? How does he or she arrive at the decision? And what is the effect on her or him afterwards? I don’t know what the graduate student gained from our conversation, but I learned a lot! She told me, for example, that among all the people she had interviewed, there was unanimous agreement on one point. When they forgave someone, when they let go of a grievance they had been carrying for a long time, there was, for every single one of them, a physical sense of relief, a feeling of having put down a burden. They didn't realize they were carrying this load of bitterness until it was taken away from them; and then, suddenly, they felt so much lighter and freer! They had all, at some level, been enjoying the bittersweet moral posture of being the aggrieved victim and hadn't wanted to give it up. And now, they discovered that it felt a whole lot better not to be a victim any more!

There is a story told of two Buddhist monks making a pilgrimage to a shrine somewhere in India. As they are traveling, they come to a large mud puddle, and they see an attractive young girl in a beautiful new dress standing at the edge of the puddle, afraid to cross for fear of ruining her dress. One of the monks impulsively picks her up and carries her across the puddle. The second monk is put off by what his friend did; and, for the rest of the day, it bothers him. He doesn't say much to his friend at all, answering him in only grunts. Finally, at day's end, when they stop to cook dinner, he says to his companion, "You know, it's not right for monks like us to get too close to women. They represent a temptation." And his friend turns to him and says, "Are you still carrying that girl?? I put her down six hours ago!"

We're all carrying burdens of bitter memories and resentments which serve no purpose except to weigh us down, to make us feel very noble for being so weighed down, and to create barriers between us and other people. And we can't imagine the sense of relief and freedom we will feel when we find the courage to finally put those burdens down!

The graduate student told me of another finding, which neither of us could totally understand. There is apparently a close connection between the power to punish and the power to forgive. Not actually punishing, but knowing that you could!! When you feel weak, helpless, sometimes resentment is the only weapon you have. But, when you know that you can get even with someone if you wanted to, then for some strange reason you can afford to be magnanimous.

Remember the story of Joseph and his brothers?? How they were jealous of him and got rid of him by selling him into slavery. For two decades Joseph lived in anticipation of getting even with them. He could see it in his mind's eye - how he would make them grovel and plead for their lives. And in his mind, he enjoyed every minute of it. And finally one day it happened. All his dreams of revenge came true. He had his brothers in his power. He played tricks on them. He threatened them with imprisonment. And then something very strange happened to Joseph. He discovered that he wasn’t enjoying it one bit! He, who had dreamed of revenge all those years, found out that now, as he tasted it, it had turned to dust in his mouth. He couldn’t enjoy what was happening. So Joseph breaks down and cries. He reveals his true identity to his brothers, hugs and embraces them, and reassures them that he no longer bears any anger toward them. Joseph discovers that he didn't really want to get even with his brothers, that he didn't really want to hurt them as they had hurt him. What he really wanted was the power to hurt them. Once he had the actual opportunity, he didn't have to use it. At that point he could be magnanimous! He could forgive them, and rid himself of the burden of hating them and wanting to hurt them which he had been carrying for twenty years.

The graduate student and I also talked about the religious basis of forgiveness, not just what happens, but why! If someone has hurt you, why should you forgive her or him?? She told me that she had asked this question to a number of clergy, and the general answer she had gotten went something like this: "None of us is perfect; we all do selfish, inconsiderate things. As we would like to be forgiven for the things we do, so should we forgive others. It's the noble, charitable thing to do. Forgive him or her; you'll be a better person for it."

Well, I told her that my answer was different. I don't urge people to be noble. I don't say to them that what someone may do to you is no worse than what you might do to him or her. It may very well be worse!!! I approach the matter differently. If someone hurts you, if she or he does a terrible thing to you, he or she doesn’t deserve the right to loom so large in your mind! She or he doesn't deserve the power to make you a bitter, resentful person, to change your personality for the worse. You want to get even with him or her?? You don't get even by continuing to hurt!!

You don't get even by becoming selfish, mistrustful, vindictive! You get even by letting go, so that she or he can no longer pull your emotional strings!! F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: "Living well is the best revenge." I would paraphrase him and say: "Becoming whole, outgrowing bitterness and vindictiveness, living serenely is the best revenge."

I would like to see you end Yom Kippur this year significantly lighter than you began it - and not because you have gone a whole day without eating, but rather because you will have divested yourselves of the burdens of bearing grudges, resentments, and misunderstandings that happened years ago. Like everyone else who has given up a grudge, you'll be astonished by the sense that you are lighter, that a burden has been lifted from you!

All told, there are three things we must do tonight and tomorrow relating to the idea of forgiveness. First, as I’ve discussed at some length, we have to give up the anger or resentment we feel toward people who have hurt us or let us down. Not because they didn't do anything so wrong. What they did may have been monstrously wrong, cowardly, selfish, immoral! That's their problem!! Also, not because they deserve to be forgiven! Maybe they do, maybe they don’t?? I’m not even sure how you measure that!!! We have to give up the anger and the resentment because of what it does to us, because it burdens and distorts us, and it's just not worth it. Second, we have to forgive God for all the unfairness in the world, for the sickness and the accidents, and the fact that other people were born luckier and better looking and more talented than we were. It's not fair, and I suspect God knows that! But one of the major themes of these high holy days is the chutzpah we Jews historically possess. And it is this chutzpah which allows us to forgive God, to say to him: "You know, Lord, I have good reasons to be upset with you, but I’m not going to let that come between us because I need you. I need to be able to turn to you, to get strength and hope from you. And if I’m mad at you, it would just get in the way."

And finally, we have got to be able to walk out of here at sunset tomorrow feeling forgiven, ready to start the New Year. Have we done things in the past year which disappointed and offended God?? I'm sure we have. Last year and every year!! After all, we're only human!! Will God forgive us?? Every page of the Yom Kippur liturgy tells us that we're much harder on ourselves than God is on us. He has no vested interest in being angry at us. He wants to let bygones be bygones and start out fresh!

Have we hurt and offended other people during this past year? I suspect that almost all of us have, in one way or another. Will they forgive us?? I really don’t know?? They're a lot less reliable than God on that score!! But that's their problem more than ours. If they choose to go beyond the torah's two day statute of limitations on anger, if they choose to be resentful, then they're the ones who will have to carry the emotional baggage of grudge and grievance. If you feel that you have repented and cast out what you did that was wrong, then you should be able to feel cleansed, even if they are still angry at you!

May we who come here seeking forgiveness, seeking to be taught to forgive and be forgiven, be unburdened of all our lingering anger, our jealousies and resentments, our grudges and grievances. And may we all know the joy of feeling forgiven. Amen!