Yom Kippur and Forgiveness
West Shore U.U. Church, Cleveland, OH
September 25, 2014
Video link can be found HERE.
A commitment to welcoming and hospitality asks that we make ready space for both those who are newcomers and long standing partners in our daily lives. Hospitality is a spiritual way of being that allows for grace to happen within and amongst us. Today, I want us to focus on the practice around making mistakes as a welcoming practice. Most of us do not willfully make mistakes in order to learn and this is not what I am asking you to do. Rather, today we will consider what it means to foster a space for openness when mistakes- deeds or words that have an unintended consequence- occur.
We cannot prevent making mistakes in our lives, we are human, after all. Each of us here has multiple ways of being and understanding the world which means there will be misunderstandings and trespasses. Each of us were raised with certain cultural and social rules that help us understand how to interact with one another day to day. For those born and raised in the United States and perhaps some regions of Europe, we have been acculturated into believing that righteousness and rightness equals good and mistakes and wrongs equal bad.
Ani Defranco is known for saying, “I was four years old when they tested my IQ. They showed me a picture of three pears and an orange. They asked, which one is different, it does not belong. They taught me different is wrong.” In school, many of us were taught that there were right and wrong answers. Wrong answers in class often led to humiliation or even failure in testing. Early, we are taught that perfection is possible through perfect grades, perfect athletic performance, perfect music concerts, etc. If we were lucky, we were taught to strive for excellence rather than to focus on perfection, but the simple fact remains that from the youngest ages, we are taught to believe that success is good and failure is bad.
From my grandparent’s Catholic church and from U.S. media and from many social conventions I learned that there was a “right” and “wrong” way of being in the world. It is right to help people, but wrong to talk to a stranger. It is right to work hard, but wrong to accept financial support from the government. It is right to be honest and tell the truth, but wrong to point out the lies our society tells us to keep the status quo. It is right to call my congressman, but wrong to refuse to participate in laws that oppress people. Even theologically, I was taught that god is righteous and nonbelievers were not righteous.
There is a very thin line between right and wrong and us and them. It is the very socializations that we receive about right and wrongness that hinder hospitality in spaces that are unfamiliar to us or with those who are strangers. If you believe that there is a “right” way to be and a “wrong” way to be and no middle ground or third or fourth option, it can be a socially awkward experience to walk into a space where you do not know the (air quotes) “rules.” How many people here today have spent more than an hour in a community with completely different cultural and social rules than the one in which you were raised. A day? A week? An month?
The problem with this right is good and wrong is bad type thinking is that it means that we begin to think of ourselves as bad people when we make mistakes and good people when we do everything right. As a child, I remember being so terrified of making a mistake that I would lie to my parents so that they would still think of me as a good person. This is a common experience for children trying to negotiate strict rules of right and wrong. It trains us as adults. We begin to do whatever we can to take the safe road and to avoid mistakes and never take risks that might allow us to grow. At perhaps its’ worst the result is that when we are born into a culture that has rules that hurt others to our benefit, we build up stories and cultural rules that prevent us from seeing how these mistaken rules hurt others.
In her book, Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith tells the story of growing up in the south. In 1948, she wrote, “Something is wrong with a world that tells you that love is good and people are important and then forces you to deny love and to humiliate people. I knew, though I would not for years confess it aloud, that in trying to shut the Negro race away from us, we have shut ourselves away from so many good, creative, honest, deeply human things in life. I began to understand slowly at first but more clearly as the years passed, that the warped distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child also.” This is a systemic denial through rightness and wrongness. One knows that to treat an entire group of people so poorly is wrong, so one has to build up big mythical stories to continue to sanction such behavior so that one can remain a good person. This is rightness and wrongness internalized into a total and utter lack of hospitality.
I am assuming that none of us are near this point today, but we see it around us every day and many, if not all of us, have experienced some form of the lie that maintains the goodness of the person or persons living it. It is one of the hardest and most difficult of human creations and some might even call it evil, but that is a topic for next month when our theme is evil.
So, you may be asking yourself, what does all of this have to do with Yom Kippur. This week is the most Holy of weeks in the Jewish calendar. It is the celebration of the Days of Awe- the time between Roshashana and Yom Kippur in which Jews all over the world rest, pray, and cleanse themselves for the coming year. Tomorrow, many will fast and pray during Yom Kippur as the new year begins. During this week Jews will ask for forgiveness from those that they have wronged and prepare to ask for forgiveness from g-d. The belief amongst many Jews is that their atonements will hopefully prepare a clean slate as g-d sets in stone the events of the coming year.
You notice that I say most and not all. Much like any religious tradition, there are variations within Jewish community on the most important meanings of Yom Kippur. I am not the one to tell you what the most important things are, for one simple reason- I am not Jewish- though I may be wearing a kippa- which I will explain soon. You see, I was born and raised in rural Indiana and though I experienced racism because of the color of my mother’s skin and the different culture that our First Nations traditions acculturated me in, I was raised in schools and a community that was 99% Christian in some form. I am sure I met someone who was Jewish during those years, but I wouldn’t have known it. There were no Jewish people who were out about it in the communities in which I was raised. Everything I knew about Judaism came from the Diary of Anne Frank, Chanukah, and World War II.
Now, admitting that fact was a place of embarrassment for me for many years. In college, I did not want to admit that I knew nothing about Judaism because it seemed that everyone around me knew way more than I did. I was afraid to be wrong. So, in this spirit, I went to my first Seder- the sacred meal celebrated for Pesach or Passover. I was afraid to speak and found little pleasure in participating because of this fear. Later, my friend, Susan, who led the Seder asked me if I was offended by the meal. I was all shock. As it turned out, she took my fear to mean offense. With much embarrassment, I acknowledged the truth. She welcomed me with open arms and thus began my education.
It was this friend who would later explain that Yom Kippur was about recognizing our humanness and facing our mistakes before g-d and people head on. The idea being not to assume that we are bad, but to assume that we are not perfect and there for atoning of sins has more to do with developing behaviors of asking for forgiveness and offering it rather than behaviors of avoidance and secrecy. This was the first time I encountered the idea that asking and giving forgiveness could be a spiritual practice.
I encountered this concept again when began to participate in Sufi Muslim religious practices. This past Sunday denoted the end of Ramazan and the celebration of Eid. Muslims all over the world celebrate the sparing of Abraham’s, peace be upon him, son Ishmael, peace be upon hi, by Allah. A story explained in the 37th Surah that you heard earlier. It is in Muslim communities where I experienced the very definition of hospitality. People were friendly, gracious, understanding when newcomers make social errors or are confused, and there is a spirit of care that is ever pervasive.
Already, today, perhaps I have made a mistake in sharing these stories with you both because they are not in the contexts of their native communities and because they have not been spoken in the language of Hebrew and Arabic in which they are more authentically understood and of which their holiness is most present. I wanted to share these stories because they are a part of the traditions that helped me understand a new way of thinking about rightness and wrongness- especially during this season when both traditions have celebrations and festivals and, in many parts of the world, these celebrations overlap or even are celebrated together. What I have learned in celebrating Pesach (or Passover), Rashashana, Yom Kippur, Ramazan, Eid, Diwali, and many other religious celebrations is the great sense of welcomeness present at these celebrations. These Holy Days are serious and somber at times and they are joyous and filled with love. American media would have me believe that all Muslims and Jews hate each other- that there is never a time of overlap.
What I have learned from experience is that this is far from reality. It is true in some places and in some places there is great violence, but it is not absolutely true. This kippa that I wear was given to me by a Native American Jewish friend after a Sufi Muslim dhikr. A dhikr is a gathering for prayer and song celebrating Allah and the words of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and other great prophets of the Muslim tradition. I had attended this dhikr to be amongst many dear friends and had forgotten to bring a head covering. Sitting next to my friend, I mentioned that I needed to buy a new head covering and just keep it with me and she said she would give me one from her family. I made a mistake in not bringing a head covering and no one in this community raised it as a concern or asked me to leave. It would not have been hospitable to do so and besides, the praying was more important than the rules. In these communities, I experience the radical yes without it ever needing to be explained.
At this prayer gathering were Christians, agnostics, Muslims, Jews, pagans, and many others. At the beginning, we Skyped with a Sufi friend of the community in Istanbul and sang “Come, come whoever you are” a song that he loves to hear because it is a song of the words that are printed at the entrance of Jalal adhin Muhammad Rumi’s grave monument. We then Skyped with a Sufi friend in Mexico City with whom we sang a Sufi prayer song in Spanish. After this, we shared a meal and then began to sing and dance prayers for about two hours.
There was nothing about this kind of communal variety in the text books I studied in Indiana. I doubt there are many textbooks that can explain the complexity of religious community that really exists in the world. Seminary was the first place where this level of variation had been made real to me. In one class we studied the book that you heard an excerpt from earlier- the Flying Camel. What little I knew growing up in Indiana about Jewish people only included the culture of Ashkenazi Jews- or those most recently from Europe who were then killed in the genocide of Nazism or survived into the diaspora.
It never occurred to me that there would be Jewish people who spoke Arabic or would live in Ethiopia. If I had stopped to think about it, it would make sense. The people in the Torah- I have learned not to call the early books of the Bible the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures as it can be seen as disrespectful by many Jewish people- the people in the Torah lived in the Middle East and North Africa. Of course there would be Jewish people still living there. Again, I had mistaken assumptions and understandings about Judaism and Arabs and Muslims that made invisible entire communities of people. I made this mistake, not because I am a bad person, but because I am a human, raised in a community of humans, who learned to believe in boxes and to bury history and to believe the stories that kept Christianity as above and apart from Judaism and Islam. Stopping to think about it, of course all three religions influenced one another and all of them were a part of one another, but the myths of separation that allowed King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to send mercenaries to commandeer land and gold and kill millions of First Nations peoples were the same stories that kept me from understanding the complexity of entire communities throughout the world. I inherited the mistakes of my ancestors and perpetuated them without even knowing. Again, not because I am a bad person, but because I am part of a human system. Before entering into a world of Seders and dhikrs and reading about Mizrahiot and Sepharadiot women, my assumptions were pretty much as they had been presented to me in main stream culture.
And here we come back to the main point. I had made a mistake- I had participated in systems that failed to be welcoming to others because of the very categories that I had been taught were the right ones from childhood. They showed me a picture of four people and asked me which one was different, they do not belong…I learned to categorize, to set clear rules for who is in and who is out of a given box. The problem is that humans are not predisposed to being placed in boxes.
Perhaps you have made similar mistaken assumptions in your life. To think in terms of right and wrong and to hold ourselves to behaviors that are right and wrong does not serve us as a community. If we want to be welcome to new people in our lives, if we want to have friends from cultures other than our own, if we want to live free from fear of risking the mistakes that might bring us all closer, we need to let go of the idea that making a mistake means we are bad people. In anti-racism work, we refer to focusing on intention and impact. We come together with good intentions, after all, we are good people, but we often say or do things that are hurtful to others- we make a mistake. For change to be effective, we must recognize our intent is not enough. Taking responsibility for the impact of our actions is the most hospitable thing we can do- it is the path to healthy relationships and beloved community. The goal here is to foster what my friend from college explained which is an approach to deal with the inevitable mistakes when they happen- to foster a pattern of asking for and offering forgiveness in our lives so that we may continue to be in community together.
Focusing on what we might do wrong can hinder growth and hospitality. I encourage you to practice right relationship rather than trying to be a good person. You do not have to practice being a good person- you already are one. Rather, than focus on who you are as a person- focus on your actions. This means that when you inevitably say or do the wrong thing that you will apologize, learn about how what you said or did was hurtful, and continue on with the risk taking. This means that if someone hurts you, that you share that it hurt you (when you are able to do so), and that you offer forgiveness to those who trespass. Depending on your own growing edges in life, you will find it easier to do one than the other. You will find it easier to be forgiven than to forgive or to forgive than be forgiven. In an effort to help us focus on this, I want us to spend a few minutes in prayer.
PRAYER
Coming to terms with your own ability to make mistakes does not mean that you can go out and willfully hurt people. It does mean that you have permission to be a good person who makes mistakes every day. The Rev. Ron Holsom once told me that if you are not making a mistake at least 25% of the time, then you are not growing. How are you doing by that bench mark? J
I leave you with this. If we are serious about being a welcoming multicultural community, we need to pay heed to the lessons of other interfaith communities that show that being forgiving to the stranger is the only way to build a truly diverse community, whether it is ourselves or a soon-to-be friend walking through the door for the first time. Break the molds, unlearn the categories, embrace the human variation that is natural among us, and be willing to make mistakes as you welcome and walk into new communities.
May we go forth and bless the world in the spirit of love.
We cannot prevent making mistakes in our lives, we are human, after all. Each of us here has multiple ways of being and understanding the world which means there will be misunderstandings and trespasses. Each of us were raised with certain cultural and social rules that help us understand how to interact with one another day to day. For those born and raised in the United States and perhaps some regions of Europe, we have been acculturated into believing that righteousness and rightness equals good and mistakes and wrongs equal bad.
Ani Defranco is known for saying, “I was four years old when they tested my IQ. They showed me a picture of three pears and an orange. They asked, which one is different, it does not belong. They taught me different is wrong.” In school, many of us were taught that there were right and wrong answers. Wrong answers in class often led to humiliation or even failure in testing. Early, we are taught that perfection is possible through perfect grades, perfect athletic performance, perfect music concerts, etc. If we were lucky, we were taught to strive for excellence rather than to focus on perfection, but the simple fact remains that from the youngest ages, we are taught to believe that success is good and failure is bad.
From my grandparent’s Catholic church and from U.S. media and from many social conventions I learned that there was a “right” and “wrong” way of being in the world. It is right to help people, but wrong to talk to a stranger. It is right to work hard, but wrong to accept financial support from the government. It is right to be honest and tell the truth, but wrong to point out the lies our society tells us to keep the status quo. It is right to call my congressman, but wrong to refuse to participate in laws that oppress people. Even theologically, I was taught that god is righteous and nonbelievers were not righteous.
There is a very thin line between right and wrong and us and them. It is the very socializations that we receive about right and wrongness that hinder hospitality in spaces that are unfamiliar to us or with those who are strangers. If you believe that there is a “right” way to be and a “wrong” way to be and no middle ground or third or fourth option, it can be a socially awkward experience to walk into a space where you do not know the (air quotes) “rules.” How many people here today have spent more than an hour in a community with completely different cultural and social rules than the one in which you were raised. A day? A week? An month?
The problem with this right is good and wrong is bad type thinking is that it means that we begin to think of ourselves as bad people when we make mistakes and good people when we do everything right. As a child, I remember being so terrified of making a mistake that I would lie to my parents so that they would still think of me as a good person. This is a common experience for children trying to negotiate strict rules of right and wrong. It trains us as adults. We begin to do whatever we can to take the safe road and to avoid mistakes and never take risks that might allow us to grow. At perhaps its’ worst the result is that when we are born into a culture that has rules that hurt others to our benefit, we build up stories and cultural rules that prevent us from seeing how these mistaken rules hurt others.
In her book, Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith tells the story of growing up in the south. In 1948, she wrote, “Something is wrong with a world that tells you that love is good and people are important and then forces you to deny love and to humiliate people. I knew, though I would not for years confess it aloud, that in trying to shut the Negro race away from us, we have shut ourselves away from so many good, creative, honest, deeply human things in life. I began to understand slowly at first but more clearly as the years passed, that the warped distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child also.” This is a systemic denial through rightness and wrongness. One knows that to treat an entire group of people so poorly is wrong, so one has to build up big mythical stories to continue to sanction such behavior so that one can remain a good person. This is rightness and wrongness internalized into a total and utter lack of hospitality.
I am assuming that none of us are near this point today, but we see it around us every day and many, if not all of us, have experienced some form of the lie that maintains the goodness of the person or persons living it. It is one of the hardest and most difficult of human creations and some might even call it evil, but that is a topic for next month when our theme is evil.
So, you may be asking yourself, what does all of this have to do with Yom Kippur. This week is the most Holy of weeks in the Jewish calendar. It is the celebration of the Days of Awe- the time between Roshashana and Yom Kippur in which Jews all over the world rest, pray, and cleanse themselves for the coming year. Tomorrow, many will fast and pray during Yom Kippur as the new year begins. During this week Jews will ask for forgiveness from those that they have wronged and prepare to ask for forgiveness from g-d. The belief amongst many Jews is that their atonements will hopefully prepare a clean slate as g-d sets in stone the events of the coming year.
You notice that I say most and not all. Much like any religious tradition, there are variations within Jewish community on the most important meanings of Yom Kippur. I am not the one to tell you what the most important things are, for one simple reason- I am not Jewish- though I may be wearing a kippa- which I will explain soon. You see, I was born and raised in rural Indiana and though I experienced racism because of the color of my mother’s skin and the different culture that our First Nations traditions acculturated me in, I was raised in schools and a community that was 99% Christian in some form. I am sure I met someone who was Jewish during those years, but I wouldn’t have known it. There were no Jewish people who were out about it in the communities in which I was raised. Everything I knew about Judaism came from the Diary of Anne Frank, Chanukah, and World War II.
Now, admitting that fact was a place of embarrassment for me for many years. In college, I did not want to admit that I knew nothing about Judaism because it seemed that everyone around me knew way more than I did. I was afraid to be wrong. So, in this spirit, I went to my first Seder- the sacred meal celebrated for Pesach or Passover. I was afraid to speak and found little pleasure in participating because of this fear. Later, my friend, Susan, who led the Seder asked me if I was offended by the meal. I was all shock. As it turned out, she took my fear to mean offense. With much embarrassment, I acknowledged the truth. She welcomed me with open arms and thus began my education.
It was this friend who would later explain that Yom Kippur was about recognizing our humanness and facing our mistakes before g-d and people head on. The idea being not to assume that we are bad, but to assume that we are not perfect and there for atoning of sins has more to do with developing behaviors of asking for forgiveness and offering it rather than behaviors of avoidance and secrecy. This was the first time I encountered the idea that asking and giving forgiveness could be a spiritual practice.
I encountered this concept again when began to participate in Sufi Muslim religious practices. This past Sunday denoted the end of Ramazan and the celebration of Eid. Muslims all over the world celebrate the sparing of Abraham’s, peace be upon him, son Ishmael, peace be upon hi, by Allah. A story explained in the 37th Surah that you heard earlier. It is in Muslim communities where I experienced the very definition of hospitality. People were friendly, gracious, understanding when newcomers make social errors or are confused, and there is a spirit of care that is ever pervasive.
Already, today, perhaps I have made a mistake in sharing these stories with you both because they are not in the contexts of their native communities and because they have not been spoken in the language of Hebrew and Arabic in which they are more authentically understood and of which their holiness is most present. I wanted to share these stories because they are a part of the traditions that helped me understand a new way of thinking about rightness and wrongness- especially during this season when both traditions have celebrations and festivals and, in many parts of the world, these celebrations overlap or even are celebrated together. What I have learned in celebrating Pesach (or Passover), Rashashana, Yom Kippur, Ramazan, Eid, Diwali, and many other religious celebrations is the great sense of welcomeness present at these celebrations. These Holy Days are serious and somber at times and they are joyous and filled with love. American media would have me believe that all Muslims and Jews hate each other- that there is never a time of overlap.
What I have learned from experience is that this is far from reality. It is true in some places and in some places there is great violence, but it is not absolutely true. This kippa that I wear was given to me by a Native American Jewish friend after a Sufi Muslim dhikr. A dhikr is a gathering for prayer and song celebrating Allah and the words of the prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and other great prophets of the Muslim tradition. I had attended this dhikr to be amongst many dear friends and had forgotten to bring a head covering. Sitting next to my friend, I mentioned that I needed to buy a new head covering and just keep it with me and she said she would give me one from her family. I made a mistake in not bringing a head covering and no one in this community raised it as a concern or asked me to leave. It would not have been hospitable to do so and besides, the praying was more important than the rules. In these communities, I experience the radical yes without it ever needing to be explained.
At this prayer gathering were Christians, agnostics, Muslims, Jews, pagans, and many others. At the beginning, we Skyped with a Sufi friend of the community in Istanbul and sang “Come, come whoever you are” a song that he loves to hear because it is a song of the words that are printed at the entrance of Jalal adhin Muhammad Rumi’s grave monument. We then Skyped with a Sufi friend in Mexico City with whom we sang a Sufi prayer song in Spanish. After this, we shared a meal and then began to sing and dance prayers for about two hours.
There was nothing about this kind of communal variety in the text books I studied in Indiana. I doubt there are many textbooks that can explain the complexity of religious community that really exists in the world. Seminary was the first place where this level of variation had been made real to me. In one class we studied the book that you heard an excerpt from earlier- the Flying Camel. What little I knew growing up in Indiana about Jewish people only included the culture of Ashkenazi Jews- or those most recently from Europe who were then killed in the genocide of Nazism or survived into the diaspora.
It never occurred to me that there would be Jewish people who spoke Arabic or would live in Ethiopia. If I had stopped to think about it, it would make sense. The people in the Torah- I have learned not to call the early books of the Bible the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures as it can be seen as disrespectful by many Jewish people- the people in the Torah lived in the Middle East and North Africa. Of course there would be Jewish people still living there. Again, I had mistaken assumptions and understandings about Judaism and Arabs and Muslims that made invisible entire communities of people. I made this mistake, not because I am a bad person, but because I am a human, raised in a community of humans, who learned to believe in boxes and to bury history and to believe the stories that kept Christianity as above and apart from Judaism and Islam. Stopping to think about it, of course all three religions influenced one another and all of them were a part of one another, but the myths of separation that allowed King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to send mercenaries to commandeer land and gold and kill millions of First Nations peoples were the same stories that kept me from understanding the complexity of entire communities throughout the world. I inherited the mistakes of my ancestors and perpetuated them without even knowing. Again, not because I am a bad person, but because I am part of a human system. Before entering into a world of Seders and dhikrs and reading about Mizrahiot and Sepharadiot women, my assumptions were pretty much as they had been presented to me in main stream culture.
And here we come back to the main point. I had made a mistake- I had participated in systems that failed to be welcoming to others because of the very categories that I had been taught were the right ones from childhood. They showed me a picture of four people and asked me which one was different, they do not belong…I learned to categorize, to set clear rules for who is in and who is out of a given box. The problem is that humans are not predisposed to being placed in boxes.
Perhaps you have made similar mistaken assumptions in your life. To think in terms of right and wrong and to hold ourselves to behaviors that are right and wrong does not serve us as a community. If we want to be welcome to new people in our lives, if we want to have friends from cultures other than our own, if we want to live free from fear of risking the mistakes that might bring us all closer, we need to let go of the idea that making a mistake means we are bad people. In anti-racism work, we refer to focusing on intention and impact. We come together with good intentions, after all, we are good people, but we often say or do things that are hurtful to others- we make a mistake. For change to be effective, we must recognize our intent is not enough. Taking responsibility for the impact of our actions is the most hospitable thing we can do- it is the path to healthy relationships and beloved community. The goal here is to foster what my friend from college explained which is an approach to deal with the inevitable mistakes when they happen- to foster a pattern of asking for and offering forgiveness in our lives so that we may continue to be in community together.
Focusing on what we might do wrong can hinder growth and hospitality. I encourage you to practice right relationship rather than trying to be a good person. You do not have to practice being a good person- you already are one. Rather, than focus on who you are as a person- focus on your actions. This means that when you inevitably say or do the wrong thing that you will apologize, learn about how what you said or did was hurtful, and continue on with the risk taking. This means that if someone hurts you, that you share that it hurt you (when you are able to do so), and that you offer forgiveness to those who trespass. Depending on your own growing edges in life, you will find it easier to do one than the other. You will find it easier to be forgiven than to forgive or to forgive than be forgiven. In an effort to help us focus on this, I want us to spend a few minutes in prayer.
PRAYER
Coming to terms with your own ability to make mistakes does not mean that you can go out and willfully hurt people. It does mean that you have permission to be a good person who makes mistakes every day. The Rev. Ron Holsom once told me that if you are not making a mistake at least 25% of the time, then you are not growing. How are you doing by that bench mark? J
I leave you with this. If we are serious about being a welcoming multicultural community, we need to pay heed to the lessons of other interfaith communities that show that being forgiving to the stranger is the only way to build a truly diverse community, whether it is ourselves or a soon-to-be friend walking through the door for the first time. Break the molds, unlearn the categories, embrace the human variation that is natural among us, and be willing to make mistakes as you welcome and walk into new communities.
May we go forth and bless the world in the spirit of love.