Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur Sermons
Love and Loss
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sing) Kol Nidre. I’ve made some promises I haven’t kept. Like I promised I wouldn’t cry when I dropped my first born son Noam off to university in August, and I cried.
(Sing) Kol Nidre. I’ve made some promises I don’t intend to keep. Like I promise I will not cry every time he comes home for a short visit and then leaves again. I’ll cry.
(Sing) Kol Nidre. We parents make some promises we can’t keep. Like we’ll always protect them from all harm, from hurt and fear and frustration and challenge, we’ll make them playdates so they end up with just the right kids for him and we’ll be sure they get that paper done on time.
(Sing) Kol Nidre. We make some promises we’d better keep. Like promises of love for those kids no matter what.
(Sing) Kol Nidre. Only one promise that will be kept for all time: we will have love, and, if we do have love, we will have loss.
Kol Nidre ostensibly is about making, breaking, and keeping promises. No one really knows the history of this formula—it isn’t a prayer because it doesn’t even mention G-d’s name, and it isn’t a petition because it doesn’t ask for anything. It is a declaration, and to tell you the truth, not a very uplifting or soaring set of words. It’s written in Aramaic and not even Hebrew; and we really don’t know for sure when it was written or why it was written. Perhaps to absolve the Spanish Marranos who were living as Christians in public but Jews in private; or to remove impediments to repentance by forgiving in advance any rash vows we might make. But the words don’t move us, really. Lets be honest-it’s the tune of Kol Nidre, the tune that keeps us coming back and stirs us and moves us and makes us cry and tells us something about ourselves. Even in the most classical of Reform synagogues in the early nineteenth century where the chanting of Kol Nidre’s words was abolished, the organ would play the tune as worshippers entered the sanctuary. Why so moving? Why so intensely rich that we stop cooking in our kitchens when the classical music station plays it and we find ourselves standing in awesome silence, wiping our hands on our aprons and holding our breaths until it is over?
Why? Because the tune of Kol Nidre is the tune of loss and of heartbreak. We relate to that tune deep down in our kishkes because each of us knows loss and heartbreak. The tune comes on suddenly, and abruptly- like loss and heartbreak. We come in, we sit down, we stand back up, we haven’t got time to think about it and the sound pierces us from the very first note. It goes down deep, even deeper than the sound of tomorrow’s triumphant shofar, because it touches the place within us that has known promises broken, and promises unfulfilled. It practically hurts us to hear it because in it’s mournful first notes we hear ourselves crying over our losses, over spouses and parents and siblings now gone; over toddlers grown up too fast; relationships ended; opportunities wasted, words unspoken, angry goodbyes, goodbyes never said. It makes me cry to hear it, every year, because I look out over this congregation and I see some of you crying, and I feel what you are feeling and I cannot properly mend your heart or mine in a sermon or a song or even a prayer.
(Sing) Kol Nidre: It is the pain of impermanence we hear. I cried when Noam stepped through his dorm door because I knew that portal was the symbol of something I had to come to grips with: everything changes, everything passes, time is slipping through my fingers and I cannot stop it. Like the opening notes of Kol Nidre this knowledge came on too suddenly, I wasn’t ready, I was caught off guard. I thought I was prepared, but I was surprised and shocked when it came.
Rabbi Alan Lew has a beautiful teaching on the pre-Kol Nidre formula in which two witnesses flank the Torah, and we declare that it is permissible to pray together with “avaryonim.” Our prayerbook translates this phrase as “sinner” from the root avar “to transgress.” But the root avar also means “to cross” or “to pass over”. The very name for Jew- Ivri- is the one who crossed over. We are the avaryonim-the ones just passing through. From one portal to the next. From love to loss and back again to love. Our lives are a constant passage, and we cannot hold them back even for one moment.
Rabbi Lew writes, ““We try to hold on as hard as we can, we try to hold on to the moment, we try to hold on to our strength and our youth, we try to hold on to each other, but we may as well try to hold back the waves of the sea...”
But the song does sound like the waves. (SING) va’charamei, v’konamei, v’kinuyei: there is a change of direction. The music rises, it lifts, it is quietly joyous, hopeful and strong. Lew continues, “...there is a kind of rising emotion, a heroic, even a defiant persistence...Kol Nidre expresses all this... because of this impermanence, this heartbreak, the soul expresses itself, expresses its singular one-time gift, leaps out of the water with joy...”
If we didn’t know sorrow, we wouldn’t recognize joy. When we realize that we have but one chance, one leap to make, we rise to the occasion and find our way out of the heartbreak that is the human condition. When we understand—in the depths of our being—that love and loss go hand in hand, that the opening notes end in a crescendo— we can hear the sound of heartbreak and it doesn’t destroy us.
Some of us here tonight had the perfect year. You’ve had a new baby or gotten married or landed a new job or found a new love. Kol Nidre rises for you as a song of power, of fulfillment and satisfaction. You’ve crossed a threshold too and your joy holds up everyone else as a kind of hammock of happiness. But some of us here tonight had a year of loss. You’ve lost someone you loved, you had a relationship fail, your job has gotten worse or someone in your family is ill. You are worried about your health or your money or your past or your future. Kol Nidre reaches out a hand that says trust in healing. Reach out to the community for support. This too shall pass.
Robert Fulghum wrote, “Crossing these thresholds is a rite of passage. Revival is a lifelong ritual. Nothing about being human amazes me more than this capacity for revival. How dull and meaningless and hopeless life can seem--only to become exciting, vibrant, and filled with hope the next day...All our exits may become entrances. Daily, we redeem ourselves in unspoken rituals of renewal...Whatever the name, however large or small the act, the urge to reassemble the fragments of our lives into a whole is the same.”
Kol Nidre is not only the tune of heartbreak, then. (SING) va’charamei, v’konamei, v’kinuyei: it is the tune of reassembling, the tune of finding new purpose, the tune of mending and repairing and climbing up a mountain to see over the fences that once kept you back. It is the tune of ascending, coming up for air, freeing ourselves from the past when the past holds us back. It is a leap.
So we avaryonim can leap over. The word avar has another meaning-to enter. What new lands can we enter when we cross those thresholds? When we let go of the past? When we let go of past regrets, of all the could haves and should haves. What new peace can we enter when we let go of the grudges and hurts; the “he saids” and “she saids”? We enter a new place when we find a way to build from our loss. When our letting go is a positive thing. When we “avar”, cross over, from that loss into new ways of loving.
There is a story told of a man who found the cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared. He sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could, and it could go no further. So the man decided to help the butterfly. He took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shrivelled wings. The man continued to watch the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Neither happened. In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shrivelled wings. It never was able to fly.
In his kindness the man did not understand that the struggle required for the butterfly to get through the tiny opening was G-d's way of forcing fluid from its body into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it let go of its cocoon. It couldn’t be helped to do this. The process cannot be speeded up. We pass through those cocoons all by ourselves, and only then we take flight.
I thought of this story as I said goodbye to Noam at university. I thought of my own struggle to let go, to stop myself from snipping the cocoon for him to keep him close to me. I thought of how to mark this loss—though it is a positive one— with a song of strength. Since Noam loves learning, I’m going to help build a school in Guatemala so others can learn. Maybe some of you will come with me to help-let me know if you’d like to be on my “tikkun olam tours” list.
And I thought of this story as we sat shiva for my father-in-law just this past May. Baruch’s dad had very, very advanced Alzheimer’s so we actually lost him years before we lost him. First unable to recognize us and then slowly losing all power of speech, movement, coordination, confined to wheelchair, unable to feed himself, Zayde was gone years before he died. My father in law was, at the end, squeezing through the very narrow hole his life had become, trying to fly heavenward so he could be released. We thought of how to mark this loss— a negative one— with a song of strength. Since Zayde was a gardener, we planted a garden.
We try and make sense of our losses in any way we can, though so many of them make absolutely no sense at all. We love the way Kol Nidre concludes because the notes get stronger and stronger and in the end it is as if the whole community is shouting- Yes!: love and loss go hand in hand. Yes!: we grieve and we celebrate. Yes!: we’ll take it all, the whole package.
Separation, letting go, giving away: these are themes that run through the Torah. In Genesis, which we will begin anew in just a few short days, G-d creates the world from an act of separation: light from darkness, water from water, water from land. Life is born from separation. When God began to call a people, that first call to Abram was to leave his father's country and house. Abram lets go, in order to build a new life. That new life is what he gives us, the Jews who follow after him. He let go to enter a new life. We are bound to follow him.
And as for love, we never fully lose it. Safe within our hearts are the little children who have grown up, the parents who have died, the relationships which ended so we could move on to better ones, the experiences we’ve accumulated that give our lives a rich history. When you fly a kite, and it is high in the air, you can no longer see the string. But you can feel its tug all the same, and the tug keeps you connected to both the unseen string and the kite. A hasidic disciple once asked a another Rebbe’s disciple, "Have your teachers left any writings as a heritage?" "Yes," said the other. The first asked, "Are they printed or are they still in manuscript?" "Neither," replied the other. "They are inscribed in the hearts of the disciples." We are disciples of all that life has given us, and its teachings are inscribed on our hearts.
Milton Steinberg calls this holding tight with open arms. Kol Nidre moves us so deeply, I think, because it reminds us we have to hold tight with open arms. So, as Carl Sandburg wrote,
Gather the stars if you wish it so.
Gather the songs and keep them.
Gather the faces of women.
Gather for keeping years and years.
And then . . .
Loosen your hands, let go and say goodby.
Let the stars and songs go.
Let the faces and years go.
Loosen your hands and say goodbye.
Shana Tova.
