Yom Kippur 5784: Hold The Center

On Rosh HaShanah I spoke to you about grounding ourselves in gratitude and joy, and about paying attention to what truly matters in life.  About how growing real happiness comes from connecting with others and serving; About how we stay grounded by literally being aware of the gifts from the ground, from the sun and the water and the land.  I invited you to re-conceive of the world, to re-imagine the world as you wish it to be.  Even though we won’t get there in our lifetimes.  If you can make gratitude and service, joy and chesed — kindness — into habits you’ll be more resilient, and you’ll be more able to take on a small part of tikkun olam, of fixing this sometimes bewildering world we live in.

Tonight I want to acknowledge just how broken the world is.  In May, NY Times Opinion writer Margaret Renkl wrote the following to new graduates:

You are children of the 21st century, and yours is the first generation to recognize the inescapable urgency of climate change, the first not to deny the undeniable loss of biodiversity. You have grown up in an age permeated by the noise of a 24-hour news cycle, by needless political polarization, by devastating gun violence, by the isolating effects of “social” media. You have seen hard-won civil rights rolled back. You have come of age at a time of existential threat — to the planet, to democracy, to the arc of the moral universe itself — and none of it is your fault.

Yet this is not the first generation to face existential threat.  Nor, to tell the truth, will it be that last.  In 1919, just after the end of the First World War, William Butler Yeats wrote:

                Turning and turning in the widening gyre
                The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
                Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
                Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
                The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
                The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
                The best lack all conviction, while the worst
                Are full of passionate intensity.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”  Doesn’t it feel like that, sometimes, when you look around?  But I want you to “Hold the center.”  

One of the ways it felt like things were falling apart recently is when I got a message on Sunday, the second day of Rosh HaShanah, that we’d received an emailed bomb threat.  It was a hoax, as was every single reported instance in the US of a bomb threat to a Jewish organization leading up to Rosh HaShanah.  And it was also sent by someone who knows very little about the Jewish community:  In the ordinary course of things, we wouldn’t even have been checking email on Rosh HaShanah.  Nor does Berith Sholom have services on the second day of Rosh HaShanah.  So it was sent by someone who knew nothing more than that we’re Jewish, and wanted to cause havoc.  And failed.

But something good also happened in its wake.  On Sunday morning, the second day of Rosh HaShanah, one of our Orthodox neighbors was on his way to services at Beth Tephilah on River Street.  When he came to Berith Sholom and saw the police tape and all, he asked what was going on.  And he decided that we needed a blessing.  So he blew 100 shofar blasts — that’s a full, traditional shofar blowing for the whole Rosh HaShanah morning service.  “T’kia Sh’varim T’ruah T’kia” is four … and so on all the way to 100!

That’s “holding the center”: When an Orthodox Jew decides to give the Reform Jews a blessing.  I am grateful that we live in a community where that kind of menschlichkeit, that kind of basic human decency, prevails.

I want you to hold the center.  And I want you to be full of passionate intensity.

But our “passionate intensity” needs to be in the service of holding the center: of creating balance.  

My yoga teacher says that there’s no such thing as being perfectly balanced.  She says there’s always movement; when we’re standing on one leg, we lose our balance and find it again, over and over.  There’s no rigid “I’m balanced and that’s the end of it.”  We wobble about.  And that’s a healthy adjustment to changing circumstances.  

So I’m not going to tell you where the center is, because I can’t: it changes.  But I am going to remind you how to find it.  We have Jewish spiritual technology — and I don’t mean Zoom — which helps us keep our balance and guides us back to the center.

The Mussar tradition is a spiritual practice based on the idea that by cultivating inner middot, personal characteristics, we improve ourselves.  It doesn’t have to be spiritual: Ben Franklin had a similar practice, after discovering that knowing what was right and wrong did not mean one always did right and avoided wrong.  As he wrote in his autobiography,

I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employ'd in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established…

In Mussar we constantly work on balancing our characteristics, our middot.  Middah means “measure,” referring to how much of a characteristic, a personal virtue, we need at this moment.  It changes.  There’s no rigid “I’m balanced and that’s the end of it.”  

Knowing that we do not have all the answers, or even all the information, is part of achieving this constantly-shifting balance.  Kol Nidrey — the prayer that began our service tonight — reminds us that despite our best intentions, we do not and cannot possibly know everything.  It reminds us that no matter how wise we are, it is appropriate to conduct ourselves with anavah, with humility; to embrace “the gift of sacred uncertainty.”  On page 17 in our book, Rabbi David Stern wrote this “Reflection on Kol Nidrei”:

In its emphasis on humility, Kol Nidrei provides a corrective to the toxic certainties of polarized discourse. What if we approached each other with the humility to recognize that our most confident convictions will always be qualified by the limits of our own knowledge and understanding? In its haunting melody and strangely legalistic language, we begin to sense the twilight truth: our high horses too often stumble, and our soapboxes stand on shaky ground. Kol Nidrei grants us the gift of sacred uncertainty: the chance to begin this new year with a sense of what we do not know, rather than a narrow certainty about what we do. It's what Buddhists call "beginner's mind." What if every time I were ready to proclaim some self-evident truth, I allowed Kol Nidrei to whisper in my ear, "Says who?" - Rabbi David Stern (b. 1961)

Kol Nidrey reminds us to stay “open to contradictions, ironies, and unintended consequences, [which are] essential to understanding what really has happened and continues to happen in the world around us.”  (Carleton Voice, Vol 88, No. 2, Winter 2022, “The Provocateurs,” p. 17)  These words are from my college alumni newsletter, in an article about two left-wing professors who are using progressive values to critique the sometimes stifling orthodoxy, a rigidity of thought, that currently flourishes on many college campuses.  Like Kol Nidrey, these professors encourage their students and the members of their community to recognize the limits of human abilities and to embrace anavah, humility, rather than utter certainty.  

Rabbinic tradition illustrates the importance of anavah in public discourse through the stories of Hillel and Shammai and the students who carried on their traditions.  Hillel and Shammai never agreed on anything:  Not how to light Chanukah candles (start with one and go up to 8, or start with 8 and diminish to 1); not how to say Sh’ma; not whether this food or that food was kosher; not even on laws about marriage.  Nevertheless, they and their students ate in each other’s houses and married each other.  In one famous dispute, they argued for 3 years, at which time a voice from heaven announced that each of them was speaking God’s truth — but that people should follow Hillel’s opinion.  A decision had to be made, a way forward found, but neither of them was wrong.  However, Hillel’s opinion prevailed.  Why?  Because Hillel’s students were kind and gracious; because they taught not only their own ideas but also the ideas of the school of Shammai, and in fact they would teach Shammai’s opinions first.  (Talmud Eruvin 13b)

Hillel and Shammai are the classic exemplars of machloket l’shem shamayim: an “argument for the sake of heaven.”  It’s an argument about something that truly matters, and it is conducted in a way that respects the humanity of whoever you are arguing with.

The concept of machloket honors the fact that human beings are often going to disagree.  We have different perspectives and experiences, different knowledge bases, different goals.  But if we begin with the assumption that the other person is just different, not evil, then we can listen and learn why their opinion makes sense to them.  Like Kol Nidrey, embracing machloket helps us avoid “toxic certainty.”  

Humor also helps!  You’ve no doubt heard the saying, “Two Jews, three opinions.”  We say it jokingly, meaning that uncertainty is built into our tradition — even internal uncertainty!  But I was recently taught to understand it in a new way:  You have an opinion, and I have an opinion.  That’s two opinions.  When we discuss our opinions or argue about them, we sharpen our minds against each other, and we come to a third opinion which is better than either of ours was initially.  Listening carefully to people we disagree with, listening to learn from them, can improve our own thinking.  So machloket is also a technique for coming to better decisions and opinions.

The story is told in the Talmud of Rabbi Yonatan and his student and dear friend Resh Lakish.  Their study sessions were full of argument.  After Resh Lakish died, Rabbi Yonatan was distraught.  Another rabbi was sent to comfort him and support him.  Rabbi Yonatan would teach something, and the new rabbi would say, “Yes, there is ruling which supports that opinion.”  Rabbi Yonatan asked him, “What is the point of your agreeing with me?!  When Resh Lakish and I studied together, he would raise 24 objections to whatever I said, and I would have to answer each of those 24 objections, and the conclusion would therefore be better and clearer than whatever I said originally.  Your agreeing with me accomplishes nothing!”  Rabbi Yonatan embraced disagreement not as a necessary evil, but as a necessary good!  (Talmud Bava Metzia 84a)

Finding balance requires that we wobble.  We go a little this way, we go a little that way.  We embrace opposing forces to find stability.  This is how we hold the center.  This is how the world is sustained.  

In a midrash — a story about the story — the Rabbis imagined how God deliberately built in balance at the creation of the world:

There once was a ruler who had delicate glassware.  This person said to themselves:  “If I fill these glasses only with hot water, they will burst.  If I fill them only with freezing cold water, they will contract and crack.”  So what did the they do?  Mixed hot with cold, and filled the glasses, and they endured.

And similarly, thus said the Holy Blessed One:  If I create the world only with the attribute of rachamim, of compassion, people will run amok!  If I create the world only with the attribute of din, strict justice,  how will the world be able to endure?  Rather, behold! I am going to create it with the attribute of din, justice, and the attribute of rachamim, compassion, and long may it endure!  (Bereshit Rabbah 12:15)

It’s so Jewish to imagine God not even being certain what’s going to happen.  Whether the world survives.  Leaving it in large part in our hands.  

Yeats imagines a falcon circling farther and farther from the falconer; the world spinning out of control.  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”  

But now I’d like you to think of another swirling, chaotic system:  A hurricane.  The eye of a hurricane is a sweet spot:  a wall of cloud and howling winds around you, but blue sky above.  

“Holding the center” means being able to find the still, quiet place in the eye of the hurricane.  All that energy swirling around you, with things flying off in all directions, actually creates this place to stand still.  And in that quiet place, to listen for the still, small voice.  

We hold the center.  We keep wobbling back into balance, and sustain the world.  

Let us neither loose anarchy upon the world nor impose such rigidity that no one can breathe. In a society that appears to be fragmenting into insular silos, let us hold a place of connection.  And in a world that is flying apart, let us hold the center.