Yom Kippur 5768: As the Gates are Closing, Reflections on Yonah and Ne'ilah

(This is the d'var Torah that I gave at Minyan Tehillah's Yom Kippur services, just before the closing Ne'ilah service)

On a hot and humid Shabbat afternoon last month, as I walked home from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, I began to think about Yom Kippur, about sefer Yonah, about the closing service of Ne’ilah…and about my dad.

At the time, my dad was back in the hospital, his third stay at the Brigham in the six months since he moved here from California. As some of you know, during the past year my father has had serious health problems, and his health has continued to decline. In response to this, my brother (a doctor here in Boston) and I helped my dad and mom to move to the Boston area, initially for a temporary stay for health treatment, and eventually – now – so that my parents can live here; so that they can be close to their two sons and their grandchildren (my nephew and nieces); so that my dad can get the best health care possible, coordinated by my brother; and so that we can do our utmost to make the remaining years of my dad’s – and my mom’s – lives as comfortable and as enriched as possible.

Walking home from the hospital after visiting him, I thought of all of the interventions that we are trying to improve my dad’s health, the seemingly endless and countless probes and blood draws and tests and procedures. And I wondered whether all of this was, really, right. My brother and I, along with our folks, have made a choice to try to provide the best care possible for my father, but, in the end, we have no idea whether this is the right choice. At times, I am certain that we are doing what’s best; at other times, I feel uncertain, vulnerable, unsure.

On Yom Kippur, and especially at Ne’ilah, we experience the tension between, on the one hand, our active attempt to do everything possible to enact atonement for ourselves and for our community, and, on the other hand, the ultimate impossibility of knowing whether all – or any – of these actions are having or will have their desired effect. In the first case, we have a perspective that connects truth with din (judgment). From this view, it seems that, if we do teshuvah, our atonement should be complete and order restored where it was once disrupted. In the second case, we have a perspective of truth that recognizes chesed, lovingkindness. From this view, the success of our atonement results from an overflowing kindness that is, essentially, a gift.

We stand right now between Mincha and the beginning of Nei’lah, the closing of the Gates. We just read the book of Yonah, which begins with the strange tale of Yonah’s flight from God, but later on portrays Yonah as the most – and perhaps only - effective prophet in the Tanach. In just five words – “Od Arbayim Yom v’Nineveh nehpachet (Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned!)” – Yonah delivers a decree that causes all of the inhabitants of the great city of Nineveh, from the king to the nobles to the common folks to even their cattle, to don sackcloth and ashes and to fast and to do teshuvah. When God sees the teshuvah of the Ninevites, He rescinds the punishment.

When Nineveh is spared, Yonah is incensed, and we learn in his response why his story began the way it did. Yonah, the son of Ammitai, receives the Nineveh mission from God, and then, shockingly, he goes AWOL. He flees on a boat toward Tarshish, as far away as possible from God. When a mighty tempest tosses the boat toward oblivion, all of the sailors on board cry out to their gods, but Yonah remains asleep. The captain of the boat comes to Yonah, and calls on him to rise up, and call to his God, because “Ulai yitasheit ha-Elohim lanu v’lo novad (Perhaps God will pay heed to us and we will not perish)”. Yonah does not respond. When the lottery falls upon Yonah, and the sailors ask him probing questions, the kind of questions that we might ask ourselves in a moment of intense introspection: What is your work in this world? From where do you come? What is your country? Of what people are you? Yonah answers directly, and though his response seems incomplete, it is bracing in its honesty: I am an ivri – a Hebrew – and I fear Hashem, the God of Heaven, who made the sea and the land.”

Yonah is cast into the sea, and a giant fish swallows him. He delivers an eloquent psalm of praise to God from the belly of the fish, and he is spewed back out to land and returns anew to his mission. And here we pick back up where I started. Dismayed at his success, Yonah prays to God, saying “O God, is this not that which I said while I was still in my own country? It is for this that I began to flee to Tarshish – for I know that you are “El chanun v’rachum erech apayim v’rav chesed – v’nicham al ha ra’ah”. You are a compassionate and merciful God, slow to anger, full of overflowing kindness – and renouncing punishment.” This line imperfectly mirrors the line that we read throughout Rosh Hashanah, and today, and which we will read many more times still during Ne’ilah. I say “imperfectly” because our line reads, “Hashem, Hashem, el rachum v’chanun, erech apayim, v’rav chesed, v’emet…” And it goes on: “Notzer chesed la’alafim, nosei avon, vafesha, v’chata’ah, v’nakei.” Hashem, Hashem, God, compassionate and merciful, slow to anger, and full of overflowing kindness and truth, preserver of overflowing kindness for thousands of generations, forgiver of iniquity, willful sin, and error, and Who cleanses.” These are the 13 attributes of God, spoken by Moshe. The key difference, between Yonah’s and Moshe’s – our – version is the word “emet”. Truth.

Yonah is all about emet. It’s right there in his name – He is ben Amittai; the son of truth. Actually, the son of “my truth”. But Yonah’s truth, his version of emet, is limited. In Yonah’s understanding, when God says that the sinners and their sinful city will be overturned, it will be overturned. There is a straight line between Yonah’s view of truth and the concept of din – judgment. Yonah understands the God Who we call “Dayan emet”, the true Judge. Or the Judge of truth.

But we also call God the Merciful and Compassionate One. And that’s precisely the point – God has a perspective of truth – and of din – that goes beyond a limited, straight-line understanding that sins must be punished, that a sentence must be carried out. For Yonah, in this moment at least, the compassionate aspects of God cannot coexist with the din. The Book of Yonah draws this out beautifully by contrasting Yonah’s rigidity with the responses of others – the “ulai” of the ship’s captain, saying that “perhaps” crying out to God might help stop the storm; the repeated attempts by the tzadik-like idol-worshipping sailors to avert the shedding of Yonah’s blood, even when it’s clear that it’s their only hope; and then the king of Nineveh, who says, “Mi yodea yashuv v’nicham ha-elohim v’shav mei-charon apo v’lo novad (Who knows – God may turn and relent. He may turn back from His wrath, so that we do not perish)”.

The king of Nineveh asks, “Mi yodeah”. And as we stand at the moment of Ne’ilah, these words resonate as a link to what we are about to do. We have spent nearly 24 hours fasting, praying, reflecting on our shortcomings and our failings and all that we could be but still are not. We have spent ten days since Rosh Hashanah trembling at the decree promised in Unetanah Tokef, and working toward the teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah that might “ma’avirin et ro’ah g’zeirah” – that might avert or alleviate the evil of the decree. Since the start of Elul, we have heard the sound of the Shofar that Bernie Steinberg spoke so eloquently of, which awakens us slumberers with the piercing cry that cuts through all of the words to the heart, the mind, the soul. After this day of fasting, we are all at a point where we are differently attuned to our bodies, where we are both distracted by our hunger and yet more focused than ever on the moment.

We have come through all this, and now we have our last chance on Yom Kippur to examine our deeds, to probe our inner lives, to approach God and plead for forgiveness. We come with questions, and words: “Mah anu, mah chayeinu, mah chasdeinu, mah tzidkoteinu, ma yeshuateinu, ma cokheinu, ma g’vuroteinu?” What are we? What is our life? What is our chesed? What is our righteousness? What is our salvation? What is our strength? What is our might? And then our words reach their limit: “Mah nomar lefaneicha, Hashem Elokeinu?” What can we say before You, Lord our God?

We are at the end of our words, the end of our tears, the end of our pleadings. We do our part, but this is incomplete.

To enact teshuvah, we must ask forgiveness, and we must also – as Sam noted last week – be forgivers. But we also must be able to receive the gift of forgiveness, with a full heart, with an openness. This, I think, is the critical link between Yonah and Ne’ilah. The king of Nineveh says “Mi yodeah” not as a way to hedge his bets, but as an invitation to the possibility of redemption despite the harsh judgment that Yonah delivered, directly from God.

Rambam (Maimonides) says, in his Laws of Teshuvah, that “each person should regard himself throughout the year as if he were half innocent and half guilty and should regard the whole of mankind as half innocent and half guilty. If then he commits one more sin, he presses down the scale of guilt against himself and the whole world and causes his destruction. If he fulfills one commandment, he turns the scale of merit in his favor and in favor of the whole world, and brings salvation and deliverance to all his fellow creatures and to himself.” Rambam’s teaching reminds us that every moment is a Ne’ilah moment, and puts an almost unbearable weight on our every action. But at the same time, Rambam opens for us the possibility that, no matter how far we have strayed, we can do teshuvah in a way that might tilt the balance for ourselves, for each other, and even for the world.

As we stand at the closing gates during Neilah, we are in a “mi yodeah” moment. We are in a moment of truth. But it is not the moment of truth as Yonah would understand it. For the truth is not in opposition to chesed; rather, it is encompassed in chesed. God cannot be separated into parts that we agree with and accept, and those that we do not accept – God is God – God is One, with both din and chessed among the divine attributes. The very end of Ne’ilah makes this abundantly clear, as we say “Shema Yisrael” 3 times, declaring God’s unity; and then say “Baruch shem k’vod malchuto” 5 times, declaring God as the Eternal Ruler of the Universe; and then, perhaps most strikingly, we say “Hashem hu ha-Elokim”, 7 times. We say it in desperation, we say it in exultation, we say it in relief, we say it in terror. What we are saying, at the ultimate moment of “Mi yodeah”, is that God is God, but also that the God that we associate with din/judgment is one and the same as the God that we associate with rachamim/compassion. The truth is encompassed in the chesed.

Amid our uncertainty, during Ne’ilah we also celebrate that the answer to “Mi anu” – Who are we? – is: Anu ameicha, v’ata elokeinu – We are your people, and you are our God. Amid the uncertainty, we move from requesting that God “U’chetov le-chaim tovim kol b’nei veriteicha” to “Va-chatom le-chaim tovim kol b’nei veriteicha”. From “Inscribe for a good life all of the children of Your covenant” to “Seal for a good life all of the children of Your covenant”.

The question of how we move toward this certainty is answered in a beautiful metaphor that we find at the very end of the Mishnah in Tractate Yoma. Rabbi Akiva says, “Happy are you, O Israel! Before whom are you made clean, and who makes you clean? It is your Father who is in heaven, as it says, And I will sprinkle clean water on you and you will be clean (Ezekiel 36:25). And it says, O Lord, the mikveh (hope) of Israel (Jeremiah 17:13)—Just as the mikveh cleans the unclean, so the Holy One, Blessed be He cleans the children of Israel.’”

When one goes to the mikvah, one must clean one’s body entirely before immersing, even to the point of trimming one’s fingernails. One approaches the water, which is drawn and watched over by others. But in the actual moment of purification, what happens is ineffable, invisible, impossible to define. In the same way—the Yamim Nora’im and all of Yom Kippur day are like our preparing to enter the water, our getting rid of every imperfection, scrubbing away at our iniquities. Standing during Ne’ilah is comparable to the moment when a person enters the mikvah. Just as the actual moment of purification is beyond our comprehension, so what happens during Ne’ilah is beyond our control—that’s why we talk of it as the time when the gates are closing. What bridges our vulnerable uncertainty to our realization that, yes, this is Yom Kippur and we have been atoned is…tikvah. Hope. Not a delusional, wishful-thinking hope – but the hope that flows from the Mikveh Yisrael, the font of hope, the God that can encompass truth and lovingkindness, judgment and compassion in an integrated unity.

At the end of the day, I do not know whether what I am doing is enough, is adequate. At the end of the day, I do not know whether my family is making the right choices with, and for, my father. I have no way of knowing, just as you have no way of knowing the impact of your own decisions and actions as they pertain to yourselves, to your families, to your friends, to your community, and to the world. But this uncertainty should not paralyze you, or me. On the contrary, as Rambam notes, every action we have has the potential to shift the balance toward merit. The special ingredient, even in the darkest and most uncertain moments, is hope. This hope calms our uncertainty, and moves us toward atonement, and at – one – ment.

May we open ourselves, in this moment, and throughout the year to come, to the gift of being forgiven, to the responsibility of being a forgiver, and to the hope that drives us toward actions filled with chesed toward others – and toward ourselves.

G’mar tov.