We’ve beaten our breasts.
By now, more than once.
We’ve confessed our sins.
We’ve ascribed glory, great goodness, holiness, majesty, mercy, purity, compassion, faithfulness, uprightness, to the Kadosh Baruch Hu. We’ve reached out in almost every way everyway we know how – calling the Holy One our Sovereign, our Parent, our Lord, our Creator, our Destiny. Our Beloved.
By this time, in our Day of Atonement, the claims of our bodies may already be hushed, giving way instead to an intensity of spirit. By now, we may be feeling rather holy ourselves.
Even perhaps a little angelic.
As a matter of fact, we have support from the Highest Authority that on Yom Kippur we even look angelic, according to our sages. "All the days of the year," says the Midrash Tehillim, "HaSahtan, the Accuser, has permission to accuse Israel, except on Yom Kippur."
"You can’t even touch them today," says the Holy One to HaSahtan, "Go and see what they’re busy doing."
And so, according to the midrash, HaSahtan does drop in on us on Yom Kippur, and what does he see? To his chagrin, enfolded in pure white, as many of us are today, we are fasting and we are praying. Ridden with shame, abashed and defeated, he returns to heaven.
"Nu?", says the Kadosh Baruch Hu – "what did you find?"
"You were right," HaSahtan admits. "They looked like malachai hasharet - angels on high. I couldn’t touch them."
Angels on high. Yes, intensely engaged as we are here in quests of the spirit, we have set aside the more familiar, usually inescapable, often nagging, appetites of the body. But it is precisely because we have done so today that we are in danger.
What kind of danger could it possibly be?
It is a danger about which our tradition has warned us ever since the beginning of last month, ever since the first of Elul, when we are instructed to begin reciting Psalm 27, "The Psalm for the Season of Repentance," early each morning.
Now I admit that when I recite the psalm in shul, I never really get through it. Before I’ve reached even line 7 or 8, poof! we’re supposed to turn the page and go on to the next one -- a Psalm of David on the dedication of the Temple.
And so I’ve learned: I never even try to read the whole psalm in shul. Instead, my eyes dart from line to line, choosing my favorites. The result is that, in shul, the psalm comes out in what Reader’s Digest might call "the condensed version":
Adonai is my light and my salvation: whom should I fear?
One thing I have asked of Adonai, for this I yearn:
To dwell in the House of Adonai all the days of my life
I’ll sing and make music to Adonai.
Hope in Adonai, be strong and God will encourage you, Hope in Adonai.יְקֹוָק אוֹרִי וְיִשְׁעִי מִמִּי אִירָא
...אַחַת שָׁאַלְתִּי מֵאֵת יְקֹוָק
אוֹתָהּ אֲבַקֵּשׁ
שִׁבְתִּי בְּבֵית יְקֹוָק כָּל יְמֵי חַיַּי ...
אָשִׁירָה וַאֲזַמְּרָה לַיקֹוָק...
קַוֵּה אֶל יְקֹוָק חֲזַק וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ וְקַוֵּה אֶל יְקֹוָק:
How inspiring those words are to me. Adonai is my light and my salvation: whom should I fear? The line makes me feel as if a kind of "invisible shield" surrounds me – as if a spiritual membrane, a glowing light, protects me, and though I may be ridden with all kinds of fears I can easily let go of them all because I’m sub species aeternitatis, a fleshy little being in the Holy One’s cocoon. With that sense of sure protection,
why wouldn’t I "sing and make music to Adonai"?.
But what a profoundly different psalm it becomes at home, when I do take my time, when I read and absorb every line.
How actually deceiving my abbreviated "shul version" is.
It is true. The first half of the psalm seems to express a boundless spiritual confidence.
Adonai is my light and my salvation, whom should I fear?
Adonai is the refuge of my life, of whom should I be afraid?
When evildoers assail me and slander me,
these enemies and adversaries stumble and fall.
And even if an army was arrayed against me, my heart would be fearless,
If a war rose up against me, I would trust my faith.
To say those words is to rouse oneself to overcome all fear, all enemies, all adversaries – whether they be suicidal terrorists preparing to blow up the airplane I’m flying on, or, l’havdil, the adversaries within me –my own persistent character flaws, anxieties, shortcomings.
As the psalm continues, it grows more intense:
One thing I ask of Adonai, one thing I seek:
Let me live in the House of Adonai all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of Adonai, to pray in God’s Temple.
For God will hide me in the Temple on a day of trouble
Concealing me in the hiding place of God’s shelter,
Setting me high up on a rock.Raising me high above my enemies.
And I bring offferings to the Temple with shouts of joy,
Singing and making music to Adonai.
What, really, is happening here? What has happened to the psalmist, and what happens to us when we recite those words? What has happened, I believe, is that in the insistence that, to draw close to God, to believe that our faith in God will enable us to overcome all fear and to triumph above all the challenges that beset us, whether from within ourselves, from those close to us, from those not so close to us, from the darkling plain of everyday life, from the hurly-burly of the world – that insistence has led us into a trap.
For angelic as we are at this moment, as spiritual as we feel, we will not "dwell in the house of Adonai" forever, nor, unless we are true Tsaddikim, will we ever gaze upon God’s "beauty." To seek to do so is to try to hide oneself from the troubles of life – like a cousin of mine who refused to visit a very sick loved one because he won’t "go to hospitals," or be present at his own mother’s funeral "because he doesn’t do funerals." Imagining that a deep relationship with the Holy One is a way to escape "the day of trouble," that if we are good and faithful Jews, we will be set "high upon a rock "- free from having to struggle with the tumult of quotidian life – or, that to be "spiritual" is to allow nothing, really, to upset us, that, if we’re"spiritual," we are unperturbable -- is a profound illusion. Spirituality, ritual observance, faith – they do not make us protected beings.
No wonder, then – in lines our Silverman mahzor does not include – the psalmist, who a moment ago saw himself "high upon a rock" or hiding away in God’s Temple, longing only to gaze upon God’s face forever, suddenly descends into terror and despair. All at once the whole mood alters. The false confidence disappears. He feels abandoned, bereft. God has altogether vanished. Hear me Adonai, he cries, I’m calling You – answer me! My heart is saying to you that I want to see Your face, don’t hide Your face from me, You were my help, don’t abandon me! My father and mother leave me – in the face of death, in the face of my ultimate aloneness, You should take me in! He sounds desperate. After all, he asked only "one thing" – peace, oneness with God, total bliss, Shabbat forever. What went wrong? Why is he so desperately alone? So forsaken? Like others who have sought to numb pain, to rise above life, by fiercely embracing spirituality, the psalmist crumbles. False witnesses have risen against me, he cries out, how can You abandon me? Life caught up with him after all.
In the end,neither the inflated nor the frightened ego of the psalmist speaks. Hope in Adonai, Be strong, take courage, hope in Adonai. Is it the psalmist’s innermost voice, is it the voice of the authentic soul, is it our wisest self, finally speaking? For, in the end, we learn there is no exemption from life’s troubles. No matter how angelic we are today, no matter how profound our teshuvah,odds are that the year to come will not be free of sources of sorrow. No matter how spiritually intent we are today, the world will not be exempt from suffering. HaSahtan may see us as malachei hashahret on Yom Kippur, but the Accuser will be back when the gates close.
The true message of the psalm we recite from the first of Elul all the way to Hoshanah Rabbah at the end of Sukkoth is one that teaches us about the true nature of the spiritual life. It is not to be found in the psalm’s first line. It’s not to be found in my "condensed version." The closest most if not all of us will come to seeing the face of God is in all likelihood looking with love into the face of another.
When the folk singer Woody Guthrie was first told of his impending paralysis, an inevitable outcome of the muscle degeneration of Lou Gehrig’s disease, he wrote a song called God’s Promise:
I didn’t promise you skies painted blue, all colored flowers all your days through.
I didn’t promise you sun with no rain, joys without sorrows, peace without pain:
All that I promise is strength for this day, rest for my worker, and light on your way.
I give you truth when you need it, my help from above, my undying friendship, my unfailing love.
I sure didn’t say I’d give you heaven on earth, a life with no labor, no struggles, no dearths; no earthquakes, no dry-spells, no fire-flames, no droughts; no slaving, no hungers, no blizzards, no blights –
I promise you power, this minute, this hour, the power you need when you fall down to bleed. I give you my peace, and my strength to pull home...
In this year to come, may we be strong, may we have courage, and may we turn to Adonai for the strength to pull home.