Kol Nidre Drasha 2009

How precious is your lovingkindness God, and humans take refuge in the shade of your wings. Mah yakar hasdecha elohim uvnei adam betzel cnafecha yehesayun. Good Yom Yov. Welcome to community. Welcome to Shira Hadasha. Welcome to your own heart and the entirety of your being- all welcome here and now. It is fitting to take a moment at this time- when we seriously pay heed to our interconnectedness and acknowledge the consequences of our actions and inactions- to acknowledge the original inhabitants of this land- the Wurundgeri people of the Kulin nation- to pay our respects to their elders past and present and to share our deep gratitude for being in this- their home country.

At this time, 8 years ago I have birth to Ktoret and I take the opportunity to honour and cherish all the birthing mothers and the impulse of possibility and renewal that birth represents for us all at this crucial juncture, entering the gates of Yom Kippur.

We have made it another year. William Blake said: We are put in the world for but a little while to learn to bear the beams of love. Not only is our one precious precious human life a blink of a blink, human life in general is also a blink in deep time. YK provides us with a sacred interruption to the noise, a non-commercial commercial break in what seems like the rolling drama of our lives.

Both YK and marriage are compared to death: the transformation of life- birth in to the passage of the unknown- that it represents. In the Talmud the terror of the thought of death is juxtaposed with the actual reality of death which is described as taking hair out of milk. Fully facing ourselves presents a similar paradox. Until we do it, we can’t stand the thought.

But facing the heartbreak of death –and everything else we don’t want to face- all the loss that we have had in our lives (leaving nothing out)- will give us more life. Like Nachshon ben Aminadav who had to enter the sea up to his nostrils in order for it to split, so too we need to do what we think will tear us apart and utterly destroy us in order to be in touch with our true strength and wisdom and love. Each one of us. Noone is an exception. Making ourself the exception is the sin, not anything that we have done or not done. That is why it is so important for us to be together. Each one of us provides the sacred essential piece of this miraculous humanness, a unique facet of this diamond of unprecedented brilliance.

If YK is about realising our actions and coming clean and starting again -then we do ourselves a disservice when we hide little pockets of our lives from ourselves. We are very smart and we also hide because we are realistic about the intensity of our own self-judgement and know that we couldn’t bear our own judgement of ourselves. Sometimes our mind is so elastic it hides us what we are hiding.

But the hiding of ourselves from ourselves- and the subsequent hiding of the hiding- could only be based on false beliefs we have about ourselves. I am challenging you to decide this Yom Kippur to identify at least one of these false beliefs- that have become habit of mind-

Instead of being a victim of these false beliefs we can step in to being the wonderful, loving, powerful, weak, perfectly flawed being we are. Each one a reflection of your neighbour. YK is not about us being victims. YK is about us taking responsibility- we can only do that, paradoxically, with gentleness otherwise we won’t be able to fess up. On Kol Nidre we ask to do it as and together with the avaryanim- the ones who have transgressed and as Rabbi Alan Lew suggests, the ones who are transient- just like ourselves- like all other humans.

If you want help to think of some; not good enough, something wrong with me, if only……then I’ll be ok, x that I did was wrong, y that I did was wrong, I should have done it this way, I should have done it that way…

Not only are we all connected but on a spiritual level, because we are connected, when we hurt another we are also distanced from ourself. When we have acted in compromising ways to others, when we have forsaken our integrity, then we have alienated ourselves from our truer nature and our unity in the divine source. As humans, and even as Jews, we may have done this as individuals and as a collective. The stakes have been smaller and greater. This period of introspection is a gift that allows us to return to ourselves, to the true glory of who we really are, with love and compassion. We have all fallen short of what we may have hoped for, so has our precious life. Stuff has happened. We have been betrayed and have betrayed others. We have been hurt and hurt others. But our joy does not arrive through endlessly rehearsing that disappointment but through letting our hearts crack open and again. Mah yakar hasdecha elohim uvnei adam betzel cnafecha yehesayun. The precious kindness is free, bountiful and available but WE need to take shelter in it. WE need to turn it to ourselves.

A story is told about the Baal Shem Tov who had an annual contest to find a baal tokea (he hadn’t heard about the Daniel Slonim Lionel Lubitz duo yet). One man had been practising for the whole year, learning the physical techniques and also the kavvanot, spiritual intentions. His day came to show the Baal Shem tov what he knew. He fell apart and just couldn’t remember one of the kavvanot. He was devastated after all this time to have forgotten something that he knew. He broke down crying. ‘You’ve got the job’ said the BST. He was in shock. … PAUSE….The thing that we think is our downfall is actually our gift or the key to our gift. I say it every year , it’s like my refrain- even maasu habonim hayta le’rosh pina, the stone that was despised by the builders has become the cornerstone. We’ve got it all confused. The energy we expend trying to hide could be better spent elsewhere. We have the power and tools and gift of transformation at our disposal. There is something about life that is easy, in a least expected way.

Last year, you may remember, I publically spoke of my commitment not to criticise my partner. People responded ‘what will you talk about then’, ‘What happens when he does something wrong?” ‘Can’t you give him feedback?’ People were a bit shocked. It reoriented me to own my feelings rather than automatically cast out the net of blame to cast off the hard feelings. Sometimes I failed. But having the direction to orient me meant and still means that even when I fall I know where I am falling from. I have established the standard. This year I have another of my rebbe’s to thank for my orientation. This is Ariel my 6 year old son. One of the countless blessings he gives me is the opportunity to feel my rage and powerlessness when I ask him to do things again and again and he doesn’t listen. You may have also felt this with kids, parents and partners..One particular day, he we got in to a big fight. He screamed and may have thrown some objects across the room, I screamed, we both cried. As I screamed I felt inside myself some kind of weird thrill of the power that I had to affect him. It simultaneously scared me ..I hope you all have a memory of a time when you had a thrill that kind of scared you….

Then I sat down with him and asked him to tell me what he didn’t like about me screaming. He told me, as he continued to cry. And I decided that I would try not to scream. I want to emphasise it’s not because I think there is something so bad about screaming or its wrong when it comes out- no one is to use this to further blame themselves. But I decided to stop because I wanted to orient myself away from the mistaken position of powerlessness from which my screaming emerged. I only scream when I feel like I am powerless and there is nothing I can do. It also reminds me- as it does others- of our early lives – time and time again when we were powerless and totally not in charge of our own lives and subject to the distresses of those around us- drinking them in as if they were true. Well, no longer. We have had kindness bestowed upon us- now we just have to take the power to make decisions to change our life the way we want it to be. We are powerful. We decide how to approach our lives, which inner voices we listen to, which goals we want to pursue.

Let’s imagine that the BST is our boss or parent or lover or internal voice not the Satan- the accuser. It may be like replacing hard-wiring. In the new model, what we do is received in the best possible light with deep understanding and compassion. We take the time to hold the babies we have inside ourselves. We can now give it everything it missed out on. When we do, we change history. We change the past and make a different future when we relate to ourselves in compassion.

We can make that choice. If we can only notice the negative voices inside our head- the ones that persist long after the initial relationships in which they may have been based, often long after oppressive figures and situations in our lives have passed on- then we can take responsibility to replace the judgement with the compassion, the harshness with openheartedness. We deserve it. Noone gains from the judgement. (Ignore that false belief- probably popping up already- that we all need criticism to do better- it’s not true.)

I’ve often been torn between what I thought was the split or dichotomy between referring to the inner spiritual life and journey and on the other hand talking about the commitment to social justice, our place and responsibility in the global situation. And now I am seeing that there is no split. It needs to be more fully developed but for now the more I can truly honour and cherish myself, the more empowered I am to act in the world in responsible and distress-free ways.

I want you, at this very moment, to forgive yourself, and to continue for the next 25 hours and beyond. Look now at how everything that you have done has been the best you could have with the resources available in the situation you had. This is the same of everyone. It doesn’t excuse wrongdoing but it opens up the darkness that happens in the world to compassion and healing- and transformation. We can’t look at ourselves or the world without compassion.

I’m not moving forward without you. I want to move forward with my whole self in its integrity and the more you can do that the more I can too. It’s something we can ONLY do for ourselves and yet it is something, for which we totally need each other. No one benefits from the senseless baseless hatred and harsh unnecessary judgement meted out to our selves primarily and to others and it will stop now. It will be replaced with the expansiveness, connectedness and the love that is our true nature. SO be it. Ken Yehi ratzon

How precious is your lovingkindness God, and humans take refuge in the shade of your wings. Mah yakar hasdecha elohim uvnei adam betzel cnafecha yehesayun.

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