Sermon – Yom Kippur Morning

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 18 September 2021

One of my favourite TV shows is ‘The West Wing’ – Aaron Sorkin’s fictional portrayal of the backroom reality of an American presidency. For a show that started airing over twenty years ago, it has remained a key part of the cultural-political zeitgeist.

One of my favourite characters in the show is a pollster called Joey Lucas. Pollsters typically ask lots of people the same question, gather their answers together, and use patterns in those answers to advise politicians on what to do. So, if a poll says that 90% of Americans support a ban on burning the American flag, pollsters might tell the president that he should come out in favour of such a ban – it will make him so popular that he will have the next election wrapped up before it even starts. Joey Lucas does not think so. Joey says: the answers you get to a poll are only as useful as the question you ask, as well as the assumptions you make about the answers. She points out that those pollsters who had asked about flag burning had not asked how much people actually cared about a ban. When asked how much they cared about the issue of flag-burning, it was not enough for it to sway a presidential election.

‘Numbers don’t lie,’ one of the President’s advisors tells Joey Lucas.

‘They lie all the time,’ she replies. ‘They lie when 72% of Americans say they are tired of a sex scandal, while meanwhile newspaper circulation goes through the roof for anyone featuring the story.’

Rather than concluding that a negative poll to a proposal to make Americans wait five days before buying a gun meant that the president should drop the proposal, Joey argues that it is in fact time for the administration to start persuading the public that the policy is needed. Otherwise, she says, our leaders will end up like the French radical who says: ‘There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.’

The important Jewish lessons that I learn from Joey Lucas are: 1. That there is always another question to ask that will refine our understanding of complex issues; 2. That nothing ever necessarily means anything else.

Sadly, the assumptions that we make usually limit the horizon of possibilities of what we might decide to do on the basis of the statistics we have.

Last month, the Jewish Chronicle published a piece entitled ‘We need to talk about marrying out, urgently’. The author, Jon Boyd, who runs Jewish Policy Research, cites a piece of research from the US about the statistics around Jews marrying non-Jews, and he comments on the fact that, of children born to mixed families in the US, only 28% are brought up as Jews. From this figure, he extrapolates the title of the article: that we must urgently address the issue of what he calls ‘marrying out’, since it almost always leads to children who are less engaged in Jewish life.

But, as we learn from Joey Lucas, the numbers don’t tell you anything unless you put them into a context. The context into which Boyd immediately hurls them is one that uses the language of ‘marrying out’ to describe a Jew who has found someone they want to spend the rest of their life with – who has found their beshert. Simply by using that language, we alienate, we dissuade those who may have a significant connection to Judaism from wanting to bring their new partner into their Jewish life.

And we are left with the question: what is it that distinguishes those 28% as Jewish? To decide that is to make a judgment about what Judaism is: to set up a gold standard of Judaism, and to say ‘this is Jewish life – and that is not’.

In the same line of the article, Boyd admits that, on top of that 28% leading a Jewish life (whatever that means), there are 41% who are brought up with what he calls ‘a semblance of Jewishness’.

What is meant by this ‘semblance of Jewishness’? We are left wondering to whom that refers – does it mean a child who has just one Jewish parent and doesn’t light Shabbat candles at home but has a bat mitzvah? Does it mean someone who goes to university and if someone asks them their religion they say they are Jewish but they decide not to attend the local orthodox shul or the cliquey university Jewish Society? Does it mean Jews who don’t go to synagogue every week, and who might eat non-kosher food, but feel an intrinsic connection to Judaism and the Jewish people? At various points in my life, all of these things would have referred to me – and yet here I stand before you, as your rabbi.

We might conclude, that those 41% – a not insignificant number by the way, particularly if you add to it the 28% who Boyd says are brought up as Jews – simply do not live up to that mythical gold standard of what it means to lead a Jewish life – a mythical standard that does not recognise the diversity of what being Jewish might really mean.

This mythical standard is best summed up by the photograph chosen to accompany the article, which depicts a very conventional Jewish wedding: a heterosexual couple under a chuppah decorated with flowers, the bride in white carrying a bouquet of flowers, the male rabbi looking on smiling – an idyllic scene, which is simply captioned: ‘A British Jewish Wedding’. But what this suggests to the reader is that this is what counts in those statistics as being ‘brought up Jewish’ – replicating the Jewish lives of the countless generations who have gone before. When we know, from our experience of living in this Alyth community, that there are so many other ways of being Jewish.

We have also learned this over the course of the last eighteen months, in which we have been forced to think of new ways to engage with our tradition that did not involve physically coming into our synagogue. A number of op-eds in the Jewish press have beseeched Jewish clergy to open up synagogues over the High Holy Days of 5782, to ensure that as many people as possible can have access to Jewish life – as though what we have been doing for the last eighteen months has been only a shadow, only a ‘semblance’ of what authentic Jewish life should be.

But why am I speaking about this on Yom Kippur, when this diatribe could be the subject of any Shabbat sermon?

I am speaking about it today because Yom Kippur invites us to think differently – to go on a journey of teshuvah, literally ‘turning’; because, during the rest of the year the busy-ness of our lives often prevents us from interrogating our assumptions and our prejudices. We are so often led down that path that x must mean y must mean z. We hear people reason for us, and we accept the conclusions because it is easier than asking that extra question, or saying have we just made an assumption there? We allow ourselves to be told that 28% means this and 41% means that and 52% means … and 48% means …

On Yom Kippur, we give ourselves the time and the space to rethink our assumptions – to separate x from y and to ask what our role is in it all.

Speaking about teshuvah, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav said that repentance is like saying the Hebrew word Ehyeh ‘I will be’:

Ehyeh [means] ‘I am prepared to be’. That is, before repentance, a person does not have being. It is as if they did not exist in the world, for it would be better for them not to have been created. But when they come to purify themselves, and do teshuvah, then they are in an aspect of ehyeh – that is, they exist in the world; they are prepared to be.

Yom Kippur is an invitation for us to think differently. It is an invitation to re-interpret what we thought we understood.

If our response is the predictable one; if we respond with the same ingrained knee-jerk behaviours that we always do; if we say ‘this must mean this’ – then perhaps, according to Rabbi Nachman, it is as though we do not really exist.

If we respond mindfully, thoughtfully, taking into account new responses that might go against the conventional wisdom but which feel intentional and not reflexive; if, in other words, we manage to do teshuvah and depart from our path to return – then we say ehyeh, ‘I am’, ‘I will be’: I am prepared to be me, intentionally me, and not what someone else expects, or what we think society expects of us.

When we say things must be a certain way we preclude the possibility of teshuvah.

On this reading, teshuvah can be so much more than simple repentance. It can be transformative.

The rush to return to our sanctuaries speaks to a deeply-felt desire to be with each other in a visceral sense – to feel each other’s physical presence. It is not wrong to feel that physical pull. At the same time, when we have pulled ourselves out of that comfort zone and lent legitimacy to new forms of worship and new forms of communal love, the effect has been profound – whether it is enabling a couple to celebrate their anniversary with their community over Zoom, feeling connected by meeting the Alyth minibus as it carried our Torah scroll around Hampstead Garden Suburb, or standing in the Alyth forecourt to light a giant chanukiah. By resisting the temptation to say ‘that is not real Judaism’ or to say ‘we were not able to celebrate our festivals properly this year’ we are able to truly be in the world, rather than slipping into the same old satisfactions and disappointments.

Similarly, the wedding of a Jew that does not look like the conventional one we see pictured in the Jewish Chronicle should not cause us to think that Judaism has been defeated.

If we respond to every time a Jew marries a non-Jew with the assumption that this is a loss for Judaism, that it must mean another family whose Yiddishkeit has been diluted and whose contribution to our Jewish communal existence will be diminished, we are not thinking very creatively.

If instead our response is to ask ourselves how we in our families and communities can continue to enable that new family to be Jewish, to mark sacred time with them, to bring their children through rites of passage, to allow them to say of themselves ehyeh, I am here as a Jew, then maybe we are doing the work that every year Yom Kippur calls us to do.

This might seem counter-intuitive on Yom Kippur, when we might think we are coming to services to judge ourselves against some abstract mythical golden ideal. We might – as a reflex, think that we cannot live up to the ideals of Jewish life if we only come to synagogue once a year; if we say we are Jewish but don’t go to the university Jewish Society; if we only have one Jewish parent and don’t light candles at home on a Friday night. But those moral reflexes can be deceiving – again, we assume that one thing must mean another, when it is not necessarily so. Yom Kippur is an invitation to think differently about that too. It is an invitation to be intentional about our lives and to take ownership of them: to say, there is no gold standard except my own; and to ask the question, am I leading the Jewish life that I want for myself? If so, great, if not, what do I have to do to change?

The medieval Jewish philosopher, Bahya Ibn Pekuda wrote: ‘Days are like scrolls, write on them what you want to be remembered.’ Yes, we carry with us prejudices and baggage, not just our own, but those of centuries of our ancestors before us. Yom Kippur is an invitation not to erase that but to build on it to make our own mark and to say ehyeh: ‘I am.’ ‘I will be.’ ‘I am prepared to be.’

Gmar chatimah tovah