Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson
Yom Kippur Morning Sermon – 5778/2017

The Zohar—the great medieval masterpiece of Jewish mysticism (say that five times fast!)—teaches that in this month of Tishrei, the sitra achra is at its strongest point of the whole year. Sitra achra is Aramaic for the “other side,” which is the Zohar’s term for the aspect of God from which evil comes. It’s the power in the world that obstructs our access to God and tries to distract us from the path we are supposed to walk on. You can think of it, if you want, as the dark side of the Force. We all have our own personal sitra achra, and this is the time of year when we try to confront it. And because each of us is a microcosm of society, we face a dual sitra achra: the evil within ourselves, and the evil of the world at large that we find ourselves ranged against. These two struggles, the inner and the outer, are inextricably linked together. So on Yom Kippur, we can’t fully address our inner sitra achra and get it to quiet down without also addressing the world we live in—and, conversely, we can’t direct all our energy outward at the world without also dealing with our own personal, interior villains.

This past year, I read Congressman John Lewis’s memoir, Walking With the Wind. Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of CBST in Manhattan told me it was required reading for anyone interested in pursuing justice, and having read it, I have to agree. I learned a huge amount from Congressman Lewis, but the thing that surprised me the most was a core lesson from one of his mentors, the Rev. Jim Lawson.

Now, I know there are folks in this room who remember the civil rights era, and even those who were active in it. Maybe you know the name Jim Lawson already. I didn’t—history hasn’t remembered him the way it has remembered Martin Luther King, John Lewis, even Ella Baker. But he is the teacher who first prepared Lewis for the roles he would later play.

When Lewis was a young college student, just beginning to learn the principles of nonviolent resistance and to train for participating in the movement, Rev. Lawson taught him that to really embody the ethos of nonviolence, the nonviolence must go to your very core. In other words, it’s not just enough to behave nonviolently in the face of violence, to turn the other cheek; you have to actually love the person who is
assaulting you.

I’ll say that again because it’s so counter intuitive: John Lewis had to love Bull Connor while Connor’s deputies and dogs were attacking him—with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might—or else it wasn’t really nonviolent resistance.

What an extraordinary concept. What a supremely difficult act of emotional gymnastics. I have to tell you right now that I don’t think I could do it. To his credit, Congressman Lewis doesn’t brag about having accomplished it himself—only that it was a high bar Rev. Lawson set for him and that he accepted for himself. But even if I couldn’t do it myself, I can still learn something valuable from it. We have a similar idea in Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, which understands God as containing a variety of aspects, or sefirot, that interact with each other. That is how the Kabbalists reconciled the complete unity of God with the various ways that Torah presents God—as, say, warrior, lawgiver, and parent. Two of the sefirot you will hear the most about in Kabbalah 101 circles are Din, which is also called Gevurah, and Chesed.

Din is judgment, constraint, boundary-setting, power. It’s also the source of divine wrath, what we might call righteous indignation. Din is the strict force that sets things right. It’s the mental state we find ourselves in when we castigate ourselves for all the things we’ve done wrong over the past year. It’s the anger that wells up inside of us when we look out at the world and see all the terrible injustice, the bald-faced lies, the greed that goes unpunished. And, according to some Kabbalists, it’s the place in God where the sitra achra, the Other Side, originates. Din is ascendant as Tishrei rolls in. That is why Rosh Hashanah is called Yom HaDin, the Day of Din. God’s anger is poised to rampage through the world, burning up everything that doesn’t measure up to a strict moral standard.

But a world governed solely by Din could not exist. Nothing would pass muster. And as much as we might want to turn Din loose on our enemies, the results would end up pretty ugly. So Din has a counterpart: Chesed. Chesed is God’s abundant, all-consuming love. It is boundless acceptance, whole-hearted welcome. It is a love that knows no limits.

I want to suggest that the Jewish version of Rev. Lawson’s loving your enemy might be tapping into Chesed. Imagine a love so big that it encompasses even the parts of yourself that you hate, even the people out in the world who do you harm, whom you think are evil. It’s not a love that says those people, or those parts of you, are fine the way they are, but it loves them just the same. Congressman Lewis writes that one way to practice this theology is to envision the person who is confronting you, even beating you, as a baby. And that made me think of a parent putting a giant bear hug around a kid who is throwing a massive temper tantrum. No matter how much the kid kicks, flails, and screams—no matter how much the kid actually hurts the parent in the process—the parent is not gonna let go, because yes, the behavior has to change, but in the meanwhile that’s not important; what’s important is the love so big.

How are we to take this hard-to- swallow advice about loving our dark sides and apply it to our internal teshuvah and/or to our public activism? I want to turn to Unetaneh Tokef, the haunting vision of God’s justice we say towards the beginning of Musaf on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, for two possible answers. First: Unetaneh Tokef describes God inspecting each one of us, like a shepherd who passes his sheep one at a time beneath his staff. I want to turn that image on its head. Rather than passing beneath the staff to make sure we’ve been counted, what if we envision that staff as “setting the bar high”? Yom Kippur isn’t meant to be easy. Maybe we should accept how difficult it is to love our enemies into oblivion and still, somehow, strive for it.

Here’s the second suggestion: Din and Chesed have a synthesis, a balancing point between them that blends their energies into something more sustainable. It is called Tiferet, Beauty, or Emet, Truth. And, to my ear, Unetaneh Tokef refers to it—though we don’t know who wrote this magnificent prayer, so I can’t tell you for sure that this was what the author intended.

Unetaneh Tokef begins:
“We shall ascribe holiness to this day,
For it is awesome and terrible,
And Your sovereignty is exalted upon it.”

Then,
“Your throne is established in Chesed,
And You will sit upon it in Emet.”

Did you catch that? Even though this month of Tishrei is when Din, righteous indignation, is ascendant, God establishes the divine throne in Chesed, abundant love. This is a slightly different conception than the piece of Talmud we looked at together on the second morning of Rosh Hashanah, where it seemed there were two thrones, the throne of judgment and the throne of mercy. Here, there seems to be just one throne, and God can move it around, almost as if from room to room of the divine palace. But it also seems that God can’t quite sit on the throne in Chesed, and so God compromises, and sits at the balancing point, Emet, Truth. Why? Look at the very next line of Unetaneh Tokef: “Emet, for You are a Dayan”—a judge, one who practices Din. Din—Dayan—same Hebrew root.

In other words, God wants to move from the natural spot of Din, to meet us all the way over on the other side, in Chesed, but God can’t quite make it. It’s against a part of God’s innate nature. A Dayan can’t fully get away from Din without giving up the identity of Judge. So God meets us halfway, in Emet, Truth.

Maybe we need to do the same. When we are struggling against our inner demons and our outer ones, we naturally want to turn our full fury against them. We know that’s not really healthy, that a scorched-earth policy leaves barren ground where nothing can grow. But we also can’t bring ourselves to love them to death—we’re not that level of tzadikim. So we compromise. We meet them in truth, the place that balances justice and accountability with love.

Yom Kippur is the day of truth. More than any other day of the year, it is the day that calls us to assess ourselves honestly, to see our role in the world clear-eyed. And it is also a day where we hope to grow beyond the selves we have been this past year. Instead of scorched earth, we seek to plant seeds of change. Perhaps that is one reason Sukkot, the festival of harvest, starts in just four days, as we symbolically harvest the fruits of the effort we have put in these past ten days of repentance. The Psalmist tells us, “Truth will sprout, from the ground.” (Ps. 85:12) Today we prepare that fertile ground from which truth can sprout, within ourselves, within our local community, and within our society at large. We do it through justice and love, so that we can ultimately reap and share the blessings of truth.