Sermons and Divrei Torah
The Yom Kippur Bar Mitzvah
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Yom Kippur 5762)
Sometimes, to relieve the hunger and stomach rustlings of Yom
Kippur afternoon, I fantasize about the Bar Mitzvah buffet.
Now, perhaps it is because I am the mother of a twelve year old
that I have begun to obsess about Bar Mitzvah. I used to be just
the rabbi at these things, and I could righteously kvetch about
the excesses and ridiculousness of a ceremony less than a few
hundred years old that somehow has inherited the sanctity of Sinai,
and has become the raison d'etre of Jewish life around the world,
and people would tolerate my eccentricity, because I was the rabbi.
But now I am a Bar Mitzvah parent, paying equally close attention
to both choice of tallit and choice of napkin colors; worrying
both about the drash and the desert. I imagine the Bar Mitzvah
boy’s speech, 1951: "Today, I am a fountain pen." 1981: "Today,
I am a video game." 2001: "Today, I am a Pentium III, 600 Megahertz,
64 Megabites of RAM, 30 Gigabytes Ultra Hard Drive and a 56K modem."
What the Bar Mitzvah boy is really supposed to say: "Today, I
am a man." I find it ludicrous to suggest that this child, bedecked
in a suit for the first time in 13 years, is a man. While in
the days of the Talmud, it might have been true that a 13 year
old was an adult, since an 18 year old was already married, and
a 3 year old could recite the Torah in Hebrew, it is an anachronism
to say that in our world, Bar Mitzvah symbolizes a "rite of passage"
into adulthood. Unless we postpone Bar and Bat Mitzvah well into
our 30's, when some of us finally leave adolescence behind and
approach adulthood, we will not quite get the "rite of passage"
right. Think back on your Bar or Bat Mitzvah if you had one:
did you really become an adult that day? Bar and Bat Mitzvah
was, for many of us, the exact opposite of the entrance into adulthood-it
was, instead, the beginning of a long, protracted flight from
adulthood.
Long, protracted flights from adulthood- sounds alot like Jonah,
this afternoon's haftarah reading. Yom Kippur is the absolute
symbol of all that Bar Mitzvah is supposed to be: accepting the
priviledges and the responsibilities of being a Jew; the time
when we accept accountability for ourselves; the day we grow
up. Yom Kippur is supposed to be our communal Bar Mitzvah, albeit
without the sweet table. The long and arduous process of this
day of fasting, prayer and self-flaggelation echo the long and
arduous process of growing up, and our prayers this morning all
point back to us and say: we aren't there yet. We are still trying
to flee, like Bar Mitzvah children who literally run off the bima
with a sigh of relief, gifts in hand. Bar Mitzvah has become
a symbol, not of the taking on of responsibility, but of the
retreat from responsibility. It is, for many, a huge, lit-up,
neon exit sign. Will Yom Kippur be the same? Yom Kippur–our communal
Bar Mitzvah– is meant to be the day we ask, "Have I been looking
all year for the way out, or for the way in? Am I going to run
away from that which is good, which is healthy, which is hard,
or am I going to embrace it? And just what kind of Jew am I going
to be, after all?"
Jonah, the prophet looking desperately for exit signs in this
afternoon's haftarah, is the Bar Mitzvah boy in all of us, struggling
to escape from the burden of too many obligations, too little
faith, too much responsibility, not enough time. Jonah, the strange
prophet who would rather save a gourd than a city, knows the truth
and wants to run far away from it.
But God catches up to him, in the belly of the big fish. Alone,
abandoned, in this dark dungeon, curled up in fetal position in
this womb of escape, Jonah finally reaches out to God and, in
effect, says, "O.K. I will do it. I cannot escape my duty."
But it takes the punishment of being so isolated and frightened
to awaken Jonah to the realization that it is impossible to evade
responsibility forever. Hayyim Lewis writes, "Jonah is not escaping
from God, for there can be no flight from God's presence...if
anything, Jonah is fleeing from himself."
This is why Jonah is read on Yom Kippur, to keep us from fleeing
from ourselves. Jonah runs in the false hope that there is no
judge and no judgement, that in Tarshish, that large, wealthy,
urbane city, he can forget his troubles. Because..."when you're
alone and life is making you lonely you can always go downtown."
Let's go downtown, Jonah says, to Tarshish, where there is no
talk of God and community and responsibility and "yadayadayada."
Throw me into the sea, he says, I'd rather drown than change my
life.
But you're drowning anyway, Jonah. Overwhelmed, overworked, overburdened,
we use our status as busy, busy, busy to run away from the harder
things that life demands of us. I'm too busy, I can't cope: get
me to the closest exit sign.
Or-it's not my fault: another exit sign. Early on in life we learn
to deny responsibility for the things we do: one of my favorite
cartoons is Family Circus, where the children are constantly blaming
the fictional characters "I Dunno" and "Not Me" for broken cookie
jars, abandoned wet galoshes and the dog who was supposed to get
walked but didn't. We perfect this skill later in life by learning
to blame co-workers for mistakes we make, "passing the buck",
accusing our spouses of "causing" us to do something wrong, blaming
our kids for "making us" lose our tempers, blaming our parents-
especially our mothers- for all our inadequacies. We gradually
make ourselves unaccountable: it's simply not our fault. Then
we are faced with this incredible storehouse we have constructed,
this repository of all the tactics we have used to run away.
So, we have to get really sophisticated; to use new tricks, stronger
tricks, to ease the burden of being responsible, to run away faster
than Jonah. Some of us use food; we become overweight, disgusted
with ourselves, caught in the cycle of denial and self-loathing
that makes us eat more to drown out the sorrow of looking at what
we’re doing. Some of us use alcohol; learning to "socially drink"
at an early age, we see that wine and beer make us feel good about
ourselves; we appear more smooth, more in control. Some of us
use clean, middle-class suburban drugs, just now and then, to
get us high when the world gets us low. Some of us use sex, or
power, or violence, or all three together, indistinguishable from
each other. Oh, we say, that's not a problem in the Jewish community,
is it? Those exit signs are written in Hebrew and Yiddish and
Russian now, too. And some of us use more conventional tools-
we withdraw by sleeping, like Jonah in the hull of the ship, we
just tune it all out; or we slam the door and leave, or we work
late, inventing work that expands to fill time, or we go shopping-
"when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping..." or we just
sit in our rooms and cry.
But we go down, down into the belly of the whale, deeper and deeper.
We know what we are running from, the problem is we just don't
know what we are running to. Ernst Simon writes, "Four times the
text says ‘Jonah went down’: whoever flees...cannot persevere
on the old plane of his own being; falling, he must fall deeper
and deeper; the direction of flight is necessarily downwards."
Fleeing from reality is like swimming into a vortex- you just
go lower and lower, until one day you either drown or you wake
up, and struggling for air, you pull yourself out of the maelstrom
and swim to shore.
Freud and Maslow saw this flight from two opposite angles. Freud
thought that we are overwhelmed by the worst aspects of our inner
selves, and we run from our ugliness; but Maslow suggested that
we fear and are overwhelmed by our very best, and we run from
our beauty. He writes, "We are generally afraid to become that
which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most
perfect conditions...we enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities
we see in ourselves...and yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness,
awe and fear before those very same possibilities." This evasion
of growth Maslow calls the Jonah Complex. "Arise and go to Nineveh"
as God challenged Jonah, is really the challenge to get up ourselves
and cope: cope with the best of ourselves as much as the worst
of ourselves. "Arise and go to Nineveh" is the message of Yom
Kippur- come up from the depths and confront the finest you can
be. If "sin" is the ugliness in us, then teshuva, the process
of repentance, is recognizing and actualizing the beauty in us.
Then why do we still run so far to Tarshish?
Sheldon Blank asks, "What is Tarshish? In the story it is anywhere-
anywhere but the right place; it is the opposite direction...It
is the excuse we give- our rationalizations." Tarshish is the
"I'm outta here" of our lives. Yom Kippur is the place we come
to rest, relieved of the need to even eat or drink, faced only
with the day ahead and the stillness to stay in one place and
meet ourselves. Jonah is the kid in us who just wants to have
fun. Yom Kippur is the adult in us, prepared for the hard work
ahead.
How do we reject the allure of the exit signs? Sometimes it
takes being woken up by a storm. Jonah was awakened from his flight
into slumber by his fellow sailors, who were frightened by the
raging waters which threatened to break apart the ship and drown
everyone in it. They cry out to him, "How can you be sleeping
so soundly? Up! Call upon your God!" When Jonah sees the storm,
sees the harm and havoc he is causing, he admits the truth; that
he is fleeing from God and his mission. When he does confess,
and is willing to take the consequences of being called by God,
only then is the storm outside abated; because the storm within
Jonah is too.
It is the act of teshuva, the act of repentence, that helps our
inner storms stop raging. Like the first step in AA's 12-step
program, accepting responsibility and consequences, admitting
and confessing, begins the healing process. The root of the Hebrew
word teshuva is shuv- to turn around, physically. In essence,
to do teshuva is to turn all the way around to face ourselves
again. Teshuva is the act not only of dreaming about what we want
to become, but facing who we are. The vidui we said this morning
and will repeat this afternoon forces us to admit our weaknesses,
our failings and shortcomings. In facing them we now have the
choice to stop running from them and to resolve to tackle them.
We must admit that we have hurt others, both willfully and accidently;
we must admit that we have cheated and lied and blamed everyone
but ourselves. We must admit we aren't the best Jews we can be
or the best role models we can be. Teshuva acknowledges that
we are not perfect, as children often think they are; and thus
teshuva is the first and most integral part of growing up. It
is followed by forgiveness, forgiveness of self and forgiveness
of others- a truly grown-up act.
Yom Kippur is the day of our real Bar Mitzvah. By Neilah we should
be able to say in all sincerity, "Today I am an adult."
Yom Kippur is a rite of passage into spiritual adulthood, which
includes accepting the priviledges and the responsibilities of being a
Jew.
A child stands alone in front of the ark on the day of Bar or
Bat Mitzvah, and knows, deep inside, the truth of the day. No
party, no caterer, no band, can change what that child knows inside
about themselves, about their family, about their own commitment
to Judaism and their own relationship to God. Today we stand alone,
in front of the ark, knowing the very same truths. Only there's
no macarena, no DJ, no buffet to distract us. In just a few hours,
the party will be over, and we'll go back to our lives either
changed, or unchanged. The choice is your Bar Mitzvah gift.
Shana Tova.
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
