“First There Is a Mountain…”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
September 16, 2007
READINGS:
The first reading is from the Mishna Yoma 8:9, a well-known text, often reprinted in Jewish prayer books for meditation on Yom Kippur:
One who says, "I will sin and repent, and sin and repent again," will be given no opportunity to repent. For one who says, "I will sin and Yom Kippur will effect atonement," Yom Kippur effects no atonement. Yom Kippur atones for sins against God, not for those against people, unless the injured party has been appeased.
Our second reading is from Sogyal Rinpoche, a world-renowned Buddhist teacher from Tibet who has been teaching around the world for over 30 years. He is the founder and spiritual director of Rigpa—an international network of over 100 Buddhist centers and groups in 23 countries—and the author of the best-selling book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. In it he wrote:
...when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.
SERMON:
“Le shana tovah tikatevu.” “May you be inscribed for a good year in the Book of Life.” This is the traditional Jewish greeting from Rosh Ha-Shona, the New Year, which began this past Wednesday evening and runs through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which starts at sunset this coming Saturday evening. During this time, Jewish people from around the world observe and celebrate the season of fasting, penitence and atonement at this, the beginning of the Jewish New Year, 5768. These are the High Holy Days.
Many of us in this congregation come directly out of the Jewish tradition; some are related by blood, or by marriage, some of us by a gastronomic affinity. Some of us are not quite so directly related to Judaism at all.
In our Principles and Purposes of Unitarian Universalism, we especially claim our heritage from Jewish, Christian, Humanist and Earth-Centered sources. It’s our practice in the liberal religious tradition to celebrate these foundations that have fed our own tradition, and to recognize the universal values and truths inherent in them. And so, today we turn to the message of the High Holy Days to find the value of its theme as it relates to us in our time and place.
A danger in drawing from other traditions is the risk of misappropriating elements of those traditions. It's not our attempt here to pretend that we’re all Jewish for the day, or for the week. Instead we recognize that these High Holy Days are of major significance in the Jewish year, that they carry valuable lessons for us all about atonement, right-relationship, renewal and integrity for the long-haul.
Over the years, we’ve approached the High Holy Days from a number of different views. We’ve talked about extending radical forgiveness, and asking for forgiveness. We’ve talked about the word atone as it relates to being at one—within ourselves and in the world around us. We’ve talked about making confession – the discipline of being truly contrite, of claiming and owning our responsibility in our wrongdoings. And we’ve talked about new beginnings, starting over, fresh and new. It occurred to me in preparation for this morning, that something we haven’t really talked about is that maybe we get a little too good at forgiving ourselves – for the same things, over and over.
Many of you know that I was raised Catholic. I can remember my first confession at age 7. Okay, I’m lying a little bit. But I do remember it well enough to know that my list of sins went something like, “I disobeyed my parents five times; I fought with my brothers and sisters six times; I lost my temper four times,” and so on. The reason I remember it so well was that, while the number of respective infractions varied from one time to the next, the particular transgressions week after week and year after year, remained the same for a very long time. I’d guess that my classmates’ confessions were all just about the same. It must’ve been quite a challenge for the poor priest to stay awake on the other side of the curtain.
Over the many decades since then, my lists of indiscretions has changed. But the thing is, if you were able to see at a glance, over my entire history of wrongdoing, besides my embarrassment and humiliation, most of the things you’d see would show up in patterns that persisted over a number of years. Even now for example, when we have our Fire Communion Ceremony on the last Sunday of December each year, my list of things I’m ready to let go of is really very similar from year-to-year. These days procrastination, impatient driving, self-indulgence and arrogance are fairly high on my list.
I’m wondering how it is for all of you? I suspect that for some of you, if not many or even most of you that, if you get into the holiday spirit of atonement, you’re probably working on at least some of the same issues that you were working on last year, and possibly the year before that.
Confession really is good for the soul. It’s cathartic and cleansing and it makes room for new beginnings. But confession alone can be an overly available anesthesia for our conscience if we allow it to take place without taking the pains of making amends by really changing the way that we go about doing things, the way we go about living our lives.
I’m often reminded of my retired UU colleague Judith Walker Riggs’ statement, “If we want to know what we believe, we need only look at what we do. From what we do we can easily see what we truly believe.” Our behavior demonstrates our beliefs. So when we keep doing the same things over and over, what do you suppose it might be that allows us to think, or feel, or believe that we don’t really need to do more than confess our transgressions? What is it that allows us to slip back into those old comfortable patterns? What is it that allows us to feel that we don’t really need to turn toward goodness – that we don’t really need to change our ways for the better?
I have a couple of suspicions. I sometimes wonder if the easier sorts of confessions allow us to avoid looking more deeply into our hearts, where the need for some more meaningful transformation might be lurking. I also have to wonder how much more meaning we might be able to find and make in our lives if we were willing to go to those deeper places and do the spiritual, soulful work that awaits us there.
Another suspicion that I have is that we often miss one of the cues suggested to us by the High Holy Days. It’s a reminder that’s there to let us know that we’re playing for some very high-stakes. What hangs in the balance of the High Holy Days is nothing short of life and death. It’s about being published in the Book of Life.
In the arrogance, spawned I imagine by our affluence, we sometimes think that we are in control and that we get to pick and choose the kind of lives we want to live; or maybe even that we have the power to buy life itself. The truth is, as we all know somewhere in our consciousness, none of us is going to get out of this alive. And a larger truth might be that if we are going to make the most of the experiences of our lives, we can’t accomplish that by merely living comfortably. But we may accomplish it by living meaningfully — by being accountable for, and responsible for our lives. To do that with integrity, I trust we need to act in ongoing persistent ways that keep us in right relationship with life, with those around us and with our planet – intentionally focused in transformation for the long haul.
One of the great traditions of Judaism is storytelling. So for the High Holy Days, here is a story about atonement that points to that balance between life and death, and then encourages us, through life-changing atonement, to choose for ourselves between living and dyeing. The story is told of the 18th Century, Polish Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk.
There once came before the Rabbi a man whose life, having been marked with many sins, wished to make repentance. He sought direction in ordering whatever acts might be necessary for a complete return. Rabbi Elimelekh consented and told the man that first he would have to liquidate all his assets. The furniture, the jewelry, the real estate, the inheritance. And with everything thus converted into cash he was to come back. Only then would the Rabbi help him to make repentance.
The man did what he was told and stood now with everything he owned as a pile of money on the table in front of the old sage. It was a great fortune. The bills were paid. The last links were severed. "Now we are ready to begin to order the repentance. Write for us," asked Elimelekh, "all your sins and evil doings and transgressions on a sheet of paper and give it to me."
Again, the man did as he was directed and Elimelekh then began to read the confession aloud. The man was overcome by the weight of his own shame and guilt, but the Rabbi read on. After a short time even the Rabbi seemed shocked by the enormity of the sins and the Rabbi cried out in pain. "How could one do such things?"
The man fainted and fell to the floor. But Elimelekh revived him and went on with the reading. Again the sage cried out in astonishment and again the man collapsed at the recounting of his own wickedness, only to be reawakened by the sage. This crying out in disbelief and fainting and reviving went on seven times during the reading of the list.
When at last the ordeal was completed, Rabbi Elimelekh shook his head. "For sins as grave as these, there can be but one atonement: death. Such would have been the verdict of the High Court when the Temple still stood. The means for such an execution are burning." And the Rabbi then explained how such a capital punishment was to be carried out according to ancient legal tradition. They would take molten lead and pour it down the throat, thus burning the condemned man from the inside.
But even when the man heard this, his desire to make repentance was so great that he willingly accepted the verdict and with trembling, the punishment. "I will do whatever must be done," he said. He took a few coins from the pile of money before him and bought a metal spoon, some tin (for the flux), and some lead. He then returned to the Rabbi's house. There Elimelekh told him to make the fire and melt the tin and the lead in the spoon, being careful to see to it that they were properly mixed. The man did all this with complete devotion.
And when he reported the smelting done, the Rabbi asked him to lay himself on the floor and put on a blindfold. Rabbi Elimelekh then had him recite the traditional final confession, which the man did with a broken heart and great trembling. He took upon himself full responsibility for his sins and their punishment. He recited the six words of the Shema, the declaration of God's unity.
"Now open your mouth so that I may pour the molten lead down your throat," directed the Rabbi. And at that instant, the Rabbi took instead a spoonful of marmalade and put it in the man's open mouth. "You have made full atonement. Now get up, stand on your feet, serve the One whose Name is blessed, for you are another being. Take this money on the table and use it as a righteous man."
The story is rich in symbolism, in faith, and in the determination to make things right. In the end, the man is not asked to die for his sins, but to live and to live with them in a way that informs and shapes his newly created life. His life was not ended by being burned from within, but was recreated by a purity that was born from within.
We have no Rabbi who is going to condemn us to death. In this faith community, each of us is his or her own Chief Rabbi. Most of us will never be asked to die for what we believe. But each day our lives and our experiences ask us if we are willing to live more fully. They ask us if we are daring enough, committed enough, determined enough to live more intentionally. Each day we are asked to atone, to be at one within ourselves, with one another and the planet, and within the great All-That-Is.
Perhaps a 14-year-old girl in Amsterdam, during World War II, put it best when Anne Frank wrote: “Then, without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this; it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that a quiet conscience makes one strong.”
Still, it’s not enough in this once again war-torn, broken world that we live in, to think only of our own self-improvement, not enough to grow strong merely for our own gratification. We are not isolated beings. And again it is only our arrogance that allows us to think we are somehow unique, somehow isolated. The truth is, just as we are a part of all the beauty that exists, we are a part of that larger brokenness, too. The life of spiritual integrity also calls us to atonement in a corporate way in response to our common compliance with that brokenness.
Here are a few things that come to mind as sins of our time that have been around repetitively for a while. You’ll notice a theme here. High on the list is ecological arrogance: the squandering of precious resources, the pollution of air and water, the depletion of biological diversity and so on; cultural arrogance: as in the waging of unjust and immoral wars, racism, classism, hetero sexism – so many of our cultural oppressions fit in here; moral arrogance: wherein religion is used as a weapon for ideological and physical attacks on others in order to secure access to power for a few, while many of our nation’s children – especially in the inner cities – go improperly fed, under educated, imprisoned and are far too often the victims of violence perpetrated by the moral order that seeks to keep them under control and in their place.
Czech Poet, playwright and politician Vaclav Havel claimed that, “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness, and in human responsibility.” In this way, the destiny of our human race and of this planet is up to each of us individually and to all of us collectively. In this way, we are called to atone, not just during one season of the year and not just for ourselves, but on all days and in all ways.
The Chicago Unitarian social work pioneer Jane Addams, of the late 18th, early 19th Centuries, warned us that, “Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.” We cannot give up on the ideal of saving ourselves or our saving the world.
What an incredible thought to think that we could be participants in saving the world! Almost sounds arrogant, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t have to be. For the Talmud reminds us, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you [ever] free to abandon it.”
The High Holy Days are a time for taking stock, reviewing our lives, turning, changing and choosing. May they be a time as well that fortifies us for the days ahead, when we will be called to act faithfully on the choices we will have made. May our lists of iniquities next year show that we have at least moved closer to the vision of the beloved community that we aspire to. And may our actions always proclaim the strength of the beliefs that we dare to claim. “Le shana tovah tikatevu.”
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