Behind the Twelve Steps – The God in Victory and the God in Defeat
A Sermon by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis
Yom Kippur 5757
Temple Valley Beth Shalom, Encino CA
September 22, 1996
(This is a transcription of an audio recording which can be found at www.schulweisinstitute.com)
Ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and they’re linked together.
They’re called the High Holy Days, but they are not the same. That is to say, Rosh
Hashanah is not Yom Kippur and Yom Kippur is not Rosh Hashanah because each of
them speaks with a different voice, with a different temperament, with different
attitudes and each of them conveys different lessons.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are not only different. They are contradictory. How
did you begin Rosh Hashanah at home? We began with Kiddush, the sanctification of
wine and Rosh Hashanah; you had challah which sometimes is, on Rosh Hashanah,
baked in the shape of a ladder on which we place no salt. On Rosh Hashanah, you
have apples and honey.
Yom Kippur begins around the bare table. There’s no wine. There’s no color. There’s
no apple. There’s no honey. Just a bare table with two candles and a yahrzeit light for
the soul. Yom Kippur is a day of abstentions from food, from drink, from conjugal
relations, from bathing and from cosmetics.
Rosh Hashanah is not Yom Kippur and Yom Kippur is not Rosh Hashanah. We dress
differently. On Rosh Hashanah, we wear our finest clothes, suits, dresses, and
polished shoes. But on Yom Kippur, there are no leather shoes. At best, we are to
wear straw slippers or simply to remain in our stocking feet in the same manner that
you sit shoeless during shivah, the seven days of mourning. No shoes on Yom Kippur.
With shoes, you have heels and with the heel, you can trample the earth. You can
grind down whatever is in your way. On Yom Kippur, you walk the earth less
confidently.
Rosh Hashanah is meant to remember life. Yom Kippur is meant to recall death. On
Yom Kippur, the ritual clothing worn is Tallit and kittel, a prayer shawl and a white
garment like a Techrichim, like the shroud. On Yom Kippur, we fall upon our faces and
we lie motionless and still as a corpse.
Just consider the way which we begin the Torah reading. On Rosh Hashanah, you
begin with God promising and keeping his promise to give to the barren Sarah a child,
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Yitzchak, which means laughter. But tomorrow, you will see we begin with the very
first sentence with death, the death of children, the death of the sons of Aaron, Nadav
and Abihu who were struck down for bringing some strange fires onto the altar. And
Aaron, their father, is dumbstruck and remains silent.
Rosh Hashanah is not Yom Kippur. On Rosh Hashanah, the shofar is blown. It is the
symbol of triumph. It is the coronation of the king. It represents the revelation at Sinai.
It is the coming of the Messiah. But on Yom Kippur, the shofar is muted. There is
nothing to shout about at Yom Kippur.
Rosh Hashanah deals with the creation of the universe. And as I mentioned to you,
that creation of the universe that is celebrated, not celebrated on the 25th of the Elul
which is the creation of the world but celebrated on the first of Tishri. It celebrates the
human being, the power, the potentiality, the will of the human being. Rosh Hashanah
recognizes the assertive, the energetic, the activist, and the powerful human being.
Adam and Eve are ordained and they are told, “You fill the earth and you subdue it.
You conquer it. You shall have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of
the air and over every living thing that creeps upon the earth.”
Rosh Hashanah captures the promethium the heroic, the activist character of the
human being who is regarded as a creator with God, a partner with God in creation.
This is characteristic of Rosh Hashanah spirit. It is the triumph of the human being.
When the prophet Isaiah declares, “Ye are My witnesses and I am the Lord.” The
rabbis add this commentary. God says, “If you are My witnesses, human beings, then
I am God. But if you are not My witnesses, then I am not God. If you are My
witnesses, then My left hand says God becomes like My right hand. But if you are not
My witnesses, then My right hand becomes My left hand. If you exercise your free will,
if you are human beings on My behalf, then God neither sleeps nor slumbers. But if
you do not exercise your power, your efficacy, your potency, then God sleeps and
slumbers.” What greater paean to the human being than in this remarkable Midrash.
When a human being goes on the road, a troop of angels proceeds in front of him and
proclaims, “Make the way for the image of a Holy One.”
That’s the spirit of Rosh Hashanah. It extols the human will and I have always loved
the athletic powerful conception of that deed. And as an American Jew, I found that
ancient Jewish optimism and activism echoed in Emerson, in Mark Twain, in Thoreau,
in William James. I found it embedded in the story that was told to me, was sung to
me and probably, you sang it to your children. It is the famous American fable of “The
Little Engine That Could”. It is the supreme metaphor for self-will. “I know I can. I
know I can. I know I can. I know I can.” And when we reach the top, “I knew I could. I
knew I could. I knew I could.”
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I love that potency, that power of the human spirit that is in Rosh Hashanah. That’s
why in early years, I always favored Rosh Hashanah over Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur
was alien for me. Yom Kippur confessed the human weakness and reminds me of my
finiteness and my frailty. There is at the heart of the Yom Kippur liturgy something that
is very sad, “Man’s origin is dust and he returns to dust. He obtains his bread at the
peril of his life. He is like a fragile potsherd, like the grass that withers, like the flower
that fades, like a fleeting shadow, like a passing cloud, like a wind that blows, like the
floating dust, like a dream that vanishes.” I’ve always felt distant from Yom Kippur. It
seemed to do very little for my self-esteem but Yom Kippur was not to be denied.
I am older now. And as I grow older and cling to my powers and confront serious times
more frequently than before, Yom Kippur speaks to me in the way that it has never
before. I have grown more familiar with sickness, with dying, with death, with
hospitals, with mortuaries. And the word of T.S. Eliot resonates in my inner world, “I
have seen the moment of my greatness flicker and I have seen the eternal footman
hold my coat and snicker and in short, I was afraid.”
More often now than before, I stand before open graves and call to mind the terrible
truths, the penetrating truth of Ecclesiastes, “There is no one who has power over the
spirit to hold back the wind. There is no authority over the day of death.” And in my
study, in the privacy of my study, I am aware more so now than ever before of the
shadow side in life, of failure, of bankruptcy, of the pink slip, of the weightlessness of
career, of the disappointment with dreams and I have come to appreciate the depth of
Yom Kippur.
The bravado of the little engine seems more and more like braggadocio, a kind of
boasting, “Sure, you can do it. Just do it.” You can do anything you want to. You can
pull yourself up in your footsteps. Now, in the gloom that crowds into my life, I hear
another voice that cannot be denied, “I can’t. I can’t. I cannot will to feel. I cannot will
to laugh.” Sure, you can say as the photographer does, “Just say cheese.” And he
flashes his camera and thinks that he has captured on his negative my affirmation. But
he has captured nothing but the parting of my lips and revealing of my teeth, which is a
poor simulation of happiness.
So, I come to Yom Kippur not like I do the Rosh Hashanah. I enter Kol Nidre not as a
great success, not as a vanquisher, not as a conqueror. I enter with a sting of defeat,
my own and those who have shared with me their despair, with those who have had
their wills broken again and again, with those who have no control over the will. They
come with addictions and addictions are different, but not really so. Theirs are not my
addictions but I know their struggles. Am I not possessed by similar addictions, only in
different places and in different degrees?
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I have seen them and heard the face and the voice of the statistics. One out of ten
Americans are addicted to some substance or are haunted by the deific of drivenness,
the compulsions to gamble, to drink, to smoke, to overeat, to overwork, addictions to
approval. And I call upon my resolution at will and I just say to them, “Just say no or
just don’t do it.”
Who are these people, these addicts? Why do we hurt ourselves? Why are we
oblivious to the consequences of our act? Why do we rip our flesh and ingest poisons
and inhale the dust of despair? Who are we outside the sanctuary? Now, we are so
fine, so secure, so well-dressed, so well-clothed but I mean alone, behind the marble
doors of our homes, bored and empty and worthless in our own eyes. Before my eyes
and yours, families unravel, children grow apart, anger deepens and the will is
exhausted.
These addictions come not from some perversity or some mindless hedonism. They
come out of helplessness, out of the heaviness of the heart and they mock the
hyperboles of The Little Engine That Could. For them, there must be another story and
they give new book on the Twelve Steps to recovery. This one I read is published by
Jewish auspices, is endorsed by JACS, an abbreviation for “Jewish Alcoholics
Chemically Dependent Persons and Significant Others”. It is a book that they say have
helped them. It is based on the Twelve Steps of the AA founded in 1939, Alcoholics
Anonymous, arguably the most powerful model of psychological healing in our society.
And I read it because it gives me an insight into the tensions between the
assertiveness, the willfulness of Rosh Hashanah and the acceptance of Yom Kippur. It
helps me understand the soul of those who come to the synagogue defeated.
Let me read to you just one or two of the steps. The first three steps declare, “We
admitted we were powerless over…,” and you fill in with the substance is, “that our
lives have become unmanageable. Two, “We came to believe that a power greater
than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” Three, “We made a decision to turn our will
and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.” What is stated here?
It is, first of all, a confession of defeat, of powerlessness, an expression of the need to
find some help, some guidance, some direction, to have as it puts it, “God remove all
the defects of our character.”
I hear in the Twelve Steps, the Yom Kippur footsteps of those who walk shoeless. On
Yom Kippur, I do not stand before God triumphant, successful but as a finite, fragile,
frail individual. And the voice of the Twelve Steps helps me understand the different
tones of Yom Kippur, the sounds of those who have tried repeatedly to rise on their
own two feet and have repeatedly fallen.
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Am I cut off from God because of my failure? Is the only way that I can come to God is
through my prosperity, my independence, my autonomy, my success, my selfsufficiency? What I need in my failure is not a God, majestis dei, the majesty of God,
the God who is Judge, Ruler and King but in my failure, I need to approach a God who
is humilitas dei, the God of humility. I hunger for God as a Comforter, as a Consoler,
as a Forgiver. It’s a different God that I seek in failure that when I do when I am
successful. And it is a sentiment that is found in the Gomorrah Megillah, “Whenever
you find the power of God, you will also find His humility.” There is a God and that God
is to be approached and is approached differently, depending on your state of affairs,
depending on your emotions, depending upon your mood.
In Yom Kippur, it is not the sovereign God but the loving God that I seek. And the
temple picks up in the Machzor those words from the Book of Jeremiah, in which God
hears the lament of Rachel’s weeping for her estranged children. “Is not Ephraim my
beloved son, my beloved child, for even when I speak against him, I remember him
with affection? With love, my heart yearns for him. I will surely have compassion upon
him.”
You have to look carefully at the Yom Kippur prayers. They have prayers that
acknowledge limitations. “What are we? What is our life? What is our strength and
our might and our power and what can we say before Thee?” My resolutions I have
made 100 times and they have been broken. I have to, therefore, throw myself on Thy
will and Thy power and Thy strength.” “Shaddai, we are clay in Thine hand.” It’s a cry
for help. You shape me. You mold me. You make me strong. You redeem me. You
hug me. You lift me. You embrace me.
Yom Kippur is not Rosh Hashanah. Yom Kippur is the Sabbath of Sabbaths. It ‘s the
time when a tired soul needs what William James called “a moral holiday”, a time to
relax the clenched jaw and the fist and the nails and to find tranquility which comes
from placing my life in His hands. “The Lord is nigh to the broken-hearted.”
So that in contrast with the assertiveness of Rosh Hashanah, we have a new mood, a
new mode and a new theology and it’s one that I never talked about. It’s the one that
I’d never paid attention to. It’s in the mystical Jewish tradition and it is called “bittul
hayesh”, the nullification of the self. This is not the strong, powerful, assertive, athletic
self. This is “bittul hayesh”, the nullification of the self and it has a paradoxical kind of
advice and counsel which I have never understood.
It says, “You want to find yourself, lose yourself. You want to remember yourself, then
forget yourself.” “Do you want not to die, and then die so that you shall not die?” The
strange paradoxical form of liberation or what it means is to be able to discover a self
that has been buried beneath the debris, beneath the litter of power and of property
and of prestige and of pettiness and of competitiveness and the arrogance of the small
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self that blows itself up and says, “That is who I am. That’s exactly who I am.” But that
small self is being suffocated. What is the small self and what is a large self?
I give you a story, an analogy from the mystical tradition. It’s a very interesting
analogy. It says the healthy human eye doesn’t see anything of itself. With a cataract,
it perceives what looks like a cloud. Afflicted with glaucoma, it sees a rainbow halo
around the light. But the eye that is truly healthy doesn’t see it. So, the selfish ego,
the narcissistic ego sees only clouds and halos, mirages that it considers to be real
vicious. The healthy ego sees clearer precisely because it is not focused on the
egotistical, narrow self and therefore, it may discover the larger self.
Yom Kipper is not Rosh Hashanah. They’re very different. And you need them both
because they correct each other. Rosh Hashanah without Yom Kippur places the
whole world on my shoulders and tells me you can do anything that you will. But the
danger of Rosh Hashanah without Yom Kippur is that it tempts you to become
triumphalists. It tempts you with hubris, with pride and with arrogance and you need
Yom Kippur to humble yourself and to remind yourself of the limitations of your self-will,
to overcome the omn-, the omnipotence fancy of our infancy.
And yet, if you have Yom Kippur without Rosh Hashanah, then you compromise your
will and your courage and your competence. If you keep on residing in me only, with
God’s will, God will take care of it more, then you immobilize yourself. You paralyze
yourself and you lose your role as a co-mender of the tattered world. The danger point
of Yom Kippur is an overdependence on God’s will that will paralyze my own. The
danger is that if you keep on relying upon some power higher than you and greater
than you, you will become dependent upon guru, upon imam, upon priest, upon rebbe,
upon tzadik.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have different gestures. They have different bodily
motions and they have to be understood. Before the Amidah, you are suppose to bend
low, “Baruch Atah” and remain there, low. You cast your eyes downward because you
are not self-sufficient and you are not God. But do not remain too low or remain
stooped too long. When it says, “Adonai,” you have to rise up. You have to lift up your
eyes. You have to rise from your melancholy and cast the ashes from your head and
change your clothes and light the candles and lift the cup.
Notice the body language of Korim which we will do tomorrow. You will say, first,
falling on your knees and on your face, “V’anachnu korim u’mistachauh u’morim” “We
bend low and submit and give thanks.” And then, we will spring up and we will say,
“[Lifnay Melech malchau hamlachim”, “Before the King of all, the Holy One.” There is a
wonderful minhag that when you are standing next to somebody who has fallen on his
face, you pick him up. You put your arm around him and you support him.
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So, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are complementary life moods. They are polar
extremes, one of independence and one of dependence, one of will and one of
acceptance. And they are both resolved. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the last
prayers of Neilah, in which both High Holy Day attributes, those of Rosh Hashanah and
those of Yom Kippur are united and end in a crescendo repeated seven times, God is
Great, and you conclude with a Tekiah Gedolah, with a long and loud blast. That
shofar has been muted for 24 hours and now, it is released. That sound of the shofar
is blown through us, through our own soul, through our own breath, the breath which
God has given us. “You and I, we who failed, from whence shall come our help.”
Listen to the breath within us. That breath is our strength. It is our hope. It is our
consolation and that breath is innate. We are born with it. That breath enables us to
fill our lungs with hope.
Where shall we look for help, we, who are defeated—above or below, His will or ours?
The choice is not between doing God’s will and thereby, extinguishing our own. The
choice is not between that or not doing God’s will and thereby, blowing our own horn.
Humility and self-regard are not opposites. God’s will and our capacity must become
one.
I need a transcendent power to flow into my own, to make God’s will my own and my
own will His. There is a divinity within me larger than my egotistical self. See, the
mistake we make is when you put your will versus God’s will, you think that your will is
that small, little, petty, insignificant, narcissistic selfish will. You have to look for help
above within but not within that points to that narrow, inquisitive, greedy, manipulative
ego and not the above that leaves all to God, but to the above that dwells below.
Above and within Anilah, above and within Anilah are synonymous. Deep speaks to
deep.
Yom Kippur reminds us to forget our smaller self and Rosh Hashanah reminds us to
remember our larger self. Yom Kippur reminds us to fall on your knees because we
are not God but Rosh Hashanah reminds to rise. And I need both Rosh Hashanah and
Yom Kippur wisdom and that is the oneness that we speak about when we speak
about God—God in success and God in failure, God in prosperity and God in
adversity, God in sickness, God in health, God in feast and God in fast.
It is a wisdom—Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. A huge wisdom and you need to
have them both. You got to be here on Rosh Hashanah. You got to be on Yom Kippur
and you listen to me, you’re going to be there on Sukkot as well.
Said a Chasidic rabbi, “You have to have in your pockets, two verses and if you have
these two verses, you will become a whole human being.” If you extend your hand into
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the pockets of your trouser and remove one of them, it will say, “It is for my sake that
the world was created.” And if you put your hand in the other pocket, you’ll remove a
note with a verse, “Thou art dust and unto dust, thou wilt return.”
Rosh Hashanah is not Yom Kippur. They are both one and with spiritual wisdom. If
we understand what we are about, if we understand our success and our failure, we
will become one. May God bless us with a sense of wholeness, with a sense of
oneness so that we shall be able to live with God, win our defeat and in our success.
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