Yom Kippur

Seeing a Reality Beyond Our Perspective

Jenny R. Labendz, 5765

Shanah tovah and gemar hatimah tovah. I hope that you have all been having a useful and productive aseret yemei teshuvah (10 days of repentance). Over Rosh HaShanah I overheard the basic idea of this devar Torah from Professor Paul Mandel at his yuntif table, and have been thinking about it since then.

We say over and over again on Yom Kippur the "ashamnu bagadnu," the traditional formulation for the vidu'i - the confession. We go from alef to tav - a to z - with all the ways in which we've sinned. And we constantly hear, read, and talk about teshuvah. If we look at what the Rambam in the 12th century or Rabbi Soloveitchik in the 20th century wrote on teshuvah, we find a myriad of instructions for how to deal with our sins, how to feel regret and what it should accomplish, how to seal our teshuvah by being in the same situation and "not doing it again," and on and on. And we all have our particular things that we realize around this time that we really need to work on, be it lashon hara, treating our parents disrespectfully, holding grudges....

But sometimes, we just can't escape the feeling that, well, we didn't kill anyone! We haven't raped anyone or stolen anything or done really anything so scandalous. No one is walking around feeling that their lives are ruined because of us. With all the evil people in the world, are we really so bad? We all know we're not "tzadikim gemurim" - basically perfect people -- but aren't we more or less ok? "Beinoni" - medium - or maybe even "beinoni plus"? Sometimes (though not all the time) it feels like Yom Kippur is just a bit overstated.

Devarim 29:28 reads: "הַנִּסְתָּרֹת לַיהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ עַד עוֹלָם לַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת כָּל דִּבְרֵי. הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת"-"Those that are concealed are for Hashem our God, but those that are revealed are for us and for our children forever to perform all the words of this Torah." This is commonly understood to mean that human beings are responsible to deal with public sins, according to the laws of the Torah. But private sins, hidden sins, God alone can and will punish. I would like to offer a variation on how to read this verse, based on an idea of Professor Mandel's.

It seems to us sometimes that we're basically OK people because we have a particular set of standards, eyeglasses, with which we view the world. Based on what we can tell of how things are and should go, we do the best we can and try to follow the Torah. But what if we're living lives of delusion? What if our whole way of seeing the world and our roles in it is skewed, and we're doing much worse than we thought we were at living up to what God wanted, because we simply cannot perceive how things really are? What if reality itself is hidden to us? In response to that which is revealed to us, we follow the Torah and do our best. But only God knows what we should be doing according to God's hidden perspective on the world.

On Yom Kippur, the most devastating realization is the potential gap between our "revealed" world, our more or less mundane sins, and the "concealed" world. A friend recently told me of an analogy that Peter Singer - a radical and somewhat frightening moral philosopher at Princeton - has made: If a train is speeding forward on a track that shortly forks, and on one arm of the fork there is a small child strapped down, and on the other a very expensive car, and you are in control of the tracks and can decide which way the train will go, what would you do? Obviously, we all choose to destroy the car and save the child. Anyone who doesn't is simply crazy and we would not consider that person normal in any way. But, says Peter Singer, we all make that choice all the time. The amount of money it takes to feed the starving children in the world is shockingly tiny. But we choose cars over UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund).

In the Torah, above the words "לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ" -- "for us and for our children" -- in the verse I quoted above, there appears a series of small dots, as in a number of other places in the Torah. The Sifre on Bemidbar (Beha'alotkha 11), a tannaitic midrash, comments on a whole series of them by pointing to the dramatic irony those verses contain, (that is, when the audience know something the characters don't). For example, in Bereishit when the angels come to visit Avraham, there are dots over one of the words in the verse in which they ask where Sarah is, because really, they know very well where she is. On our verse, the midrash says: "עשיתם הגלוים אף אני. אודיע לכם את הנסתרות" -- "But if you do that which is revealed, I will inform you of that which is concealed." The dramatic irony, then, is that things are never as concealed as they seem. There are ways of getting God to reveal them to us. This midrash suggests that we bring God to do this via our vigilance in being good according to all we know and see - according to our Torah. And with God's help, we will have the vision and the imagination to discover the ways in which we are going deeply wrong, and then to begin to rectify them.

The first verse of the last chapter of the Torah (Devarim 34:1) reads:

On this verse, the Or HaHayyim writes that God enabled Mosheh's power of vision according to the "אוֹר זָרֻעַ לַצַּדִּיק" (Psalms 97:11) - the "light planted for the righteous", which (according to the Rabbis) is the light from the first 6 days of creation, by which a person could see from one end of the earth to the other. The first thing we do Kol Nidre night in shul is take out the Torah and sing over and over again: "...אוֹר זָרֻעַ לַצַּדִּיק". We sing of this light that is planted for righteous ones.

May we merit to pray for and be granted the light with which to see a reality beyond our views of it, to use it to perceive our deeply sinful ways, and, most importantly, to better ourselves and the world.