Brokenness: We’re All in It Together
Yom Kippur 5782
David Nichol, Ruach Israel Congregation, Needham, MA
It’s been told in my family that a defining point in my grandfather’s relationship to Judaism came during Al Chet (“For the sin…”), a confessional prayer that we repeat several times during Yom Kippur.
For the sin we have committed before You by running to do evil, and for the sin we have committed before You by gossip. . . .
For the sin which we have committed before You by vain oaths, and for the sin we have committed before You by baseless hatred. . . .
For the sin we have sinned before You by scorn, and for the sin we have sinned before You by evil speech.
As the story goes, my grandfather thought to himself, “I didn’t do all these! Why am I even saying this?” From there it was but a short step to, “This religion isn’t for me.”
Do not separate yourself from the community
Perhaps you’ve asked yourself similar questions. Why do we recite these together? I can’t remember any “running to do evil” or “baseless hatred” from the past year. Even if we still participate, saying the words year after year, it’s difficult to invest the prayer with emotional depth. Should we just recite the lines that apply to us?
At very least, praying in such a way puts us in good company. Similar supplications are found in the mouths of biblical heroes (see Ezra 9, Exodus 34). Some of the quintessential prayers of this season are taken from the words of Daniel:
O Lord, great and awesome God, who stays faithful to His covenant with those who love Him and keep His commandments! We have sinned; we have gone astray; we have acted wickedly; we have been rebellious and have deviated from Your commandments and Your rules . . . all Israel has violated your teaching and gone astray. (Dan 9:4b-5, 11 JPS)
No doubt these words sound very familiar if you have spent time (and paid attention?) in High Holy Day services, or have prayed the selichot (penitential prayers) that we say leading up to Rosh Hashanah.
You may have already noticed that Daniel, who is generally seen as a deeply righteous person himself, does not say, “All of my nudnik neighbors have sinned”; rather, he includes himself. Whether he himself has personally done these things is apparently beside the point.
We might be inclined to think of his prayer as intercession, or intervening on behalf of another. Perhaps Daniel, out of loyalty to his people, is asking God to be compassionate to them as a personal favor, as it were. It’s as if Daniel were the mayor who intercedes with the police chief when his son gets in trouble. Or perhaps it’s like a character witness who testifies during the sentencing phase of a trial, so the guilty party might be shown some leniency.
However, this intercessory mode feels wrong to me. Daniel is truly making confession. He is in sackcloth and ashes, acting as if he himself were the guilty party. In the intercessory mode the intercessor is still separate from the accused; they step in, but their life is not quite on the line in the same way. There is a separation, a power imbalance. The character witness in the trial walks free regardless.
Not so Daniel, who says, “The shame, O Lord, is on us, on our kings, our officers, and our fathers, because we have sinned against You. To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, for we rebelled against Him, and did not obey the Lord our God by following His teachings that He set before us through His servants the prophets” (9:8-10).
If Daniel is in fact righteous, why does he do this? He certainly has what it takes to do pretty well for himself in Nebuchadnezzar’s court. Yet he takes a posture of unity with his people. Note that his paradigmatic prayer isn’t “thank you for the good food and my nice apartment in the palace,” even though that may reflect his situation just as well. He rejects that vision of his situation, and sees himself as inextricably tied to the situation of the Jewish people.
Likewise, describing Yeshua as one who simply intercedes for us does not do justice to his work. He did not put in a good word for us, but emptied himself of his own nature, becoming one of us; not in a show of unity, but in the essence of unity, even to death (Phil 2:6-11).
One reading of Philippians 2 is that Yeshua’s exaltation was in fact because he identified with Israel so radically: “For this reason God highly exalted him…” (TLV). What if what makes Daniel righteous is not his behavior before or after this prayer, but this prayer itself—or at least, that he lived in a posture of unity with his people despite the fact that he could have walked away?
Your brokenness is not yours alone
We can see the virtue of identifying, even radically, with our people. From here it looks like the right thing to do. But such mental gymnastics! How can we, as modern people who live in the world of individuals, really change our mindset so profoundly?
Fortunately, this is not a “mind-over-matter” moment, where we need to convince ourselves of something helpful, whether it’s true or not. Far from it! Rather, our connection with our people—or to go further, the interconnectedness of the created world—is a deep truth that we insulate ourselves from.
You don’t need inside information to be aware of the brokenness in the world; nor do you need to watch all five seasons of The Good Place to wrestle with our own complicity in the suffering, oppression, and hopelessness that seem inescapable. I went fishing recently, and saw with new eyes the struggling of the worms not to get hooked. It’s like they know what’s happening. To put a hook through a worm struggling, squirming for its life, is heartbreaking if we allow it to be. And the hooked fish fighting for its life! It’s much easier to buy a container of whitefish salad. But is that any better? The fish still gets eaten! What about the environmental cost of the container, or the low wages of the people who make the whitefish salad? I may retweet a Facechat post about the Uyghur genocide, but that doesn’t stop me from buying cheap goods made in factories that support their oppressors.
No, we are not isolated from the brokenness of the world. It is our brokenness. In the words of our tradition, “We are not so brazen-faced and stiff-necked as to say before you, we are righteous and have not sinned; rather, we and our ancestors have sinned.”
But sublimating the deep pain of the soul is second nature to us. Even if we have the inclination to dwell on the dissonance of life, the disappointments, and the sorrows that we encounter, we rarely have the time. So it’s almost a reflex to push those things aside and focus on what is in front of us: the problems we can fix, or at least the distractions that can give us momentary relief. The Days of Awe, culminating in Yom Kippur, are a time to reject this reflex; instead, to pry open the cap we put on our hearts. To let it out. To acknowledge that we are part of the brokenness, and that we need help.
Paradoxically, confessing that we are part of the problem is part of the solution. If the story of Yeshua is any guide, then even God did not redeem the world by separating from it, but by descending into it. So we identify with the brokenness, not as a helpful mindset, but as a truth that can set us free. We identify with our people’s mistakes, because they are ours as well.
If we cannot stand with Israel in oppression, how can we participate in the freedom that follows? If Yeshua accepted the punishment of our people, how can we exempt ourselves? If he did not open his mouth to defend himself, how can we? Shall we not drink from the cup that he drinks?
Paul the shaliach did not write Philippians 2 to make a theological point, but to encourage us to imitate Yeshua’s humility. So let us take this time to acknowledge our complicity in how the world is: as individuals, members of families, representatives of a people, and part of the world. Let us lean into our responsibility, confess it . . . and with God’s help, find freedom—even joy!