YOM KIPPUR:

A Yom Kippur Sermon

Yom Kippur presents us with a thesis and an antithesis, both of which are transmitted to us by some of our texts.

First, the thesis. It is conveyed to us most eloquently in the words of Resh Lakish, a third century talmudic sage, as found in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma 86b--"Great is repentance, for the deliberate sins of one who repents become as inadvertent ones." Undoubtedly, this was meant quite literally. For when a person has a change of heart, is filled with remorse, and resolves truly to move in a new direction, it indicates that the actions or inactions of the past were born of a state of mind and a set of value's that were not the person's real choice. We learn, retroactively, who the real person is, and always was, by the act of teshuvah. And inadvertent sins, of course, produce no moral censure.

It is a lovely theology. (Legend even has it that Resh Lakish had a personal stake in this theology of clean, new beginnings, for he, too, was said to be a wayward son who found his way back into the rabbinic circle) But it is more than a lovely and optimistic theology. We consider it to be the most central theme of Yom Kippur. This day is celebrated because of the power of return, of teshuvah, to clear the slate, and to create a clean record. The power of return is a miraculous power, and it is the discovery and the legacy of our latter prophets. They taught the doctrine, and the Rabbis--Resh Lakish and so many others--ran with it. And so Yom Kippur has a spellbinding hold on us. For it brings the good news that renewal is possible, it promotes optimism and self-confidence, and it counteracts guilt and despair by releasing us from enslavement to our bad choices, and by assuring us that correct intentions for the future redeem and atone for the past.

And thus each Jew can begin again on this day, by resolving to do another act of hesed in the coming year, to study a traditional text in translation, to learn Hebrew, and to repair interpersonal relations that have soured.

That is the thesis about Yom Kippur. Viewed in this traditional way, this holy day has all of the wonderful charms of baseball. It is never too late, and errors can always be redeemed; indeed, in the final reckoning, errors can, for all practical purposes, be erased.

This is what we expect to hear on Yom Kippur. It is the "official ideology", if you will. But, as the young lovers in The Fantasticks had to learn, "despite what pretty poets say, the night is only half the day." And the romantic thesis of teshuvah as a rebirth, and as an amnesty, must be joined by the searching light of a somewhat harsher, but equally real, antithesis. Nothing can be so simple as a neat clearing of the slate. And it isn't.

There should be an urgency, and not just a romanticism, about Yom Kippur. Why an urgency? Because it is a terrible mistake to imagine that all things can be made new again. So, to borrow once more from that record-breaking musical, "we must be burned a bit and burnished by the sun" of the consequences that our actions have.

So here is a second text. Nearly twenty years ago, a minor flap broke out among the liturgists in the Episcopalian Church, because or a decision to eliminate a long-standing hymn that contained the following key line: "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, in the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side." That hymn attempted to affirm the significance of choices that may come our way once, or only briefly, but not linger forever. It asserted that we have to take responsibility for those choices because choosing poorly may not be fully rectifiable. But the decision was made to eliminate it because it implied that we are given only one chance to turn to God.

The prophets would, perhaps, have nodded their assent that we can always turn to God. But a deeper question lurks here. Should our thesis, that is the doctrine of teshuvah, lead us to imagine that all of our mistakes are revocable?

The truth is that the world operates according to laws. That is the true meaning of the second paragraph of the Shema ("If you obey the commandments I will grant the rain for your land"). Consequences follow upon certain acts, and those consequences can be enduring. Teshuvah is powerful, but it is not omnipotent. It may change intentional sins into inadvertent ones. But it may not erase the effects of those sins, those failings.

This is our antithesis, this seemingly un-Yom Kippurdig message that we don't much like to hear: Repentance cannot be made into a substitute for responsibility.

Our tradition understood this well. Here is a third text, from one of the most profoundly ethical passages in all of religious literature. It comes from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Bava Metzia 58b: the talmudic discussion here speaks of the specially devastating power of angry and slanderous words. It notes that these are worse than stealing another person's belongings outright. And why is that? "One is rectifiable, and one is not". Words are not dollars. They cannot simply be returned, or transferred. The mischief is done. And, although it goes without saying, we are reminded that there are other such irrevocable crimes as well, including, of course, such things as sexual violations and murder.

This antithesis shouldn't be surprising. As Ecclesiastes says, the crooked sometimes cannot be made straight. Unlike baseball, life is not unlimited in time. And certain decisions, by their very nature, do come by only once, or for a brief period.

Environmental issues are surely among these, and they have not only the most enduring, but also the most global of consequences. Sins against the earth also go to the very heart of what it means to rebel against the Creator by threatening unrectifiable damage to creation.

A fourth text, from the Midrash Rabbah on Ecclesiastes 7:13, describes God taking Adam around the Garden of Eden for an orientation, as it were, to the realm of nature. "See how beautiful all My creations are", says God in this legend, adding that "all has been created for your sake. So reflect on this, and take care not to foul or destroy my world. For if you do, there will be none to repair it after you. And what is worse, you will bring death even to righteous people in the future."

How rich and how wise this ancient legend is. Consider its essential message: Human beings are the crown of creation, able to improve upon, or else reverse and destroy creation, and thus our license to exploit nature is limited by the terms of our tenancy, and our ultimate responsibility to the landlord. Above all, it tells us, as God told Adam, that some intrusions into the natural world have irreversible effects, and can, in the aggregate, doom even innocent future generations. What generation ever needed this Midrash more than ours, in which the human power to create, and permanently to destroy, have reached unprecedented heights?

"You will bring death even to righteous people in the future", says our text. It goes on to give the following analogy: A woman committed a crime and went to prison, and bore a child there. The child grew up there, and one day petitioned the king, asking why he was there, since he had not committed any crime. The king, however, responded matter-of-factly that he was there not because of his own crime, but because of his mother's. So it is that the sins of earlier generations doom those that come after, if we don't heed the warning not to foul creation.

We rail against this notion, that the sins of the parents are visited on the children. Although the Torah states this rather forcefully, we meticulously excise it from our liturgy. All day on Yom Kippur, we recite, over and over, the list of divine attributes from Exodus 34: *God is gracious, compassionate, long-suffering, abundant in kindness, etc.". But the doctrine of intergenerational retribution at the end of that verse does not appear in our Mahzor. We prefer the thesis of repentance creating a clean slate to the antithesis of inexorable consequences and intergenerational justice. But we cannot avoid it.

Is it just for God to proclaim that the sins of the parents will be visited on the children? That "the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge"? A remarkably pointed fable (apparently, but not conclusively, the work of Rav Hai Gaon) gives us the disquieting answer:

There once was a hungry lion who was eyeing a fox with desire. The fox said to him: "What do you want with a scrawny little fox like me? Standing yonder is a well-rounded gentleman, who will make a much more satisfying dinner for you." The lion replied: "Don't you know that animals are forbidden to kill and eat human beings? I could be severely punished for that!" Said the fox: "Not to worry--the punishment will not overtake you, but rather your children; as you know, 'the fathers eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge'." The lion was seduced by this argument and ran towards the man to tear and eat him. As he was running, however, he was caught by a trap and found himself at the bottom of a deep pit. The fox gleefully ran over and looked into the pit. The lion cried from the bottom: "Liar! You said that only my children would be punished for my Sin!" The fox then said: "Fool! This punishment is not for what you just did, but rather for that which your father did. He once ate a human being himself." The lion cried out: "But that's not fair! Why should I have to suffer from my father's sins?" The fox answered with a sardonic laugh: "You yourself were just prepared to sin even though you knew that your children would suffer for it. How, then, do you dare to complain about what's fair!"

Translate this fable as follows: those who wish to complain in the divine court of equity about their lot in life may find that they lack standing in that court, if their own actions make it clear that they are willing to make their children suffer for their sins. The more that we show ourselves to be insensitive to the fate of our children and grandchildren, the less right we have to protest the unforgiving nature of reality.

So how have we done? We are a society that is much more readily distressed by an affront to the nation's flag than by an offense against its rivers. We know what the record is: Unrenewable resources wasted and depleted; forests that support whole life systems destroyed or removed in order to make possible everything from development to the raising of beef; species which for all we know were long ago painstakingly and lovingly spared by God from the Flood have finally been made to disappear; waterways and air have been fouled; and critical elements of the atmosphere have been destroyed. The second paragraph of the Shema has a new meaning to us: "if you obey the rules of tenancy in this world, then you will have lifegiving rain; if you do not obey those rules, but behave as if you were the creators and landlords, then the rain will turn acidic and no longer give life."

It is easy to condemn the large corporations that cut forests and create oil spills. It is much harder to face the fact--the incontrovertible fact--that so much of this unrectifiable damage to God's world goes on because all of us have imbibed the poisonous delusion of mastery, and because we have all, to one extent or another, bought into a lifestyle that inexorably leads to exploitation.

Is there a synthesis that binds our thesis to our antithesis? It is, perhaps, this: we must believe in the power of repentance, and find the courage to change precisely in the hope that it is never too late. But we must also understand that one of God's greatest gifts to us is the very lawlike quality of the world, for it makes us into true moral agents, able to anticipate consequences, and make free and responsible choices.

Yom Kippur is a day on which every moment is high noon. We wear the Tallit at night, as if it were day. Each tefillah contains the Kedushah of Musaf--the Kedushah of mid-day. This is the day in which we stand in the light of scrutiny, and we cannot avoid the irrevocable consequences of what we do with God's most basic gifts. This, too--this, above all--is a Jewish issue. And if we cannot see the justice in caring for the wonders of nature, let us at least do it for our children and grandchildren, who may otherwise be born into a prison they cannot escape.