(Delivered October 11, 2024)

Shabbat shalom & Shanah Tovah!

A saying in the recovery community that has jumped the tracks to mainstream usage holds that doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results, is the definition of insanity. Turns out it’s also an uncomfortably accurate description of how we humans sometimes approach the process of teshuvah. Maybe it’s different for you, but every year around this time, I settle in and focus on what went wrong in the past year and what I hope to improve in myself. I talk to the people in my life that I think I may have hurt and ask to make peace. I resolve to be more patient, more thoughtful, more generous. I plan all the ways I’m going to contribute to my communities: the meals I’ll deliver, the people I’ll call, the donations to worthy causes I will make. I imagine myself a year from now, glowing with the shine of authentic virtue. And then, even so, somehow my humanity gets the better of me every single year. 

I first started to realize this while doing a family Tashlich several years ago, when Akiva and Gideon were little. Bill and I scouted out a place in Newton near a body of water, packed some snacks, got everyone dressed and into the car, and headed over. After a short walk, we found ourselves in a clearing in the woods and talked earnestly about what we wanted to throw away from the past year and what we wanted to do better. What struck me—with both hope and rue—was how much our comments resembled those of years past. The things we wanted less of in the new year—arguing, thoughtlessness, impatience, meanness—were exactly the things we had wanted less of in the year just ended. Did we really do such a bad job of it the last time (and the time before and the time before the time before) that we’d have to work on the same things yet again this year? It’s discouraging to name the same errors year after year, to set the same intentions as the year before and know that we’re likely to be setting (or re-setting) them—same time, next year.

But our wise liturgy already knows this about us. Kol Nidrei is literally a legal formula that admits to failure before we’ve even started. It says, essentially, we have the noblest of ambitions and incredibly good intentions. But we don’t really have such high hopes that we’ll fulfill them. In fact, our expectations are so muted that we’re saying out loud—three times—that we are going to do our best but we already know we’re going to miss. 

Because missing is what humans do. 

In tomorrow morning’s Torah reading, we’ll hear about the origins of Yom Kippur: the High Priest’s ritual for taking on and discharging the whole community’s errors. We’ll hear about his sacrificing animals, about his sending off a goat invested with all the sins of the Israelite people, about his entering the Holy of Holies to encounter God and make atonement on behalf of his community. And the final move we’ll hear about is the commandment to do it again every year, for all time. From the beginning, teshuvah was destined to bear repeating. It’s a feature, not a bug.

If you’re feeling cynical, you might start to think: Teshuvah doesn’t work! So why do we do it?!

After the realization I just mentioned, I wondered the same thing. A lot. What is the point of all this self-reflection, all this redirection, all this apologizing? Where’s the payoff if I still have to do it next year, sometimes with the same people, and about the same issues? 

Little by little, I’m coming to see that when it comes to teshuvah, process and results are both important—and in fact, process has its own unique value. It’s the process of heshbon ha-nefesh, literally the accounting of our souls, that helps us improve. That is to say, while the things we resolve to do differently may or may not come to fruition exactly as we imagine them, the process of soul-searching wears away at our inner defenses in a way that helps us grow. Widening our perspective to truly understand how something we have said or done was harmful helps us grow. Finding the humility to offer a sincere apology helps us grow. Like so much in our tradition, it’s not about instant results but rather about the long game. Even though we may never fully overcome our worst instincts, even though we won’t completely stop making mistakes, this process of working towards teshuvah offers the possibility that in the future we can, at least, make different or softer mistakes, and perhaps move sooner and more devotedly toward making amends when we do.

Despite our best and most earnest wishes, and our most focused efforts at teshuvah, the existence and structure of Yom Kippur remind us that it’s part of being human to need regular reminders and scaffolding for the process of resetting our moral compasses. Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook, who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, located teshuvah at the core of creation: just as the purpose of creation is its ongoing striving to return to the perfection of Gan Eden, so too the human work of teshuvah is seen as an ongoing, ever spiraling endeavor. It is, like each of us, always in the process of becoming. 

Or perhaps even in the process of being. I sometimes liken the inner work of Yom Kippur to that moment in meditation when you realize your mind has gone away, and you simply bring it back. That moment of homecoming doesn’t mean you’ve “achieved” meditation and can wash your hands of it. And the moments of monkey-mind don’t mean you stink at meditation and shouldn’t even bother. Rather that moment of return means simply, for that moment, you’ve come home to yourself. You’ve exercised the muscle of return. And every time you exercise that muscle, it… gets a little more exercise. 

In his teaching about Parshat Tzav, the late nineteenth century Hasidic master known as the Sfat Emet, spins out a beautiful metaphor for the ashes that remain after the completion of the korban olah—the burnt offering. In the Sfat Emet’s rendering, the final mitzvah of that offering is תְּרומָת הַדֶשֶן—elevating the ashes. Rather than being a mere cleanup operation, removing the residue of the ashes becomes a way of lifting up to God even the parts of ourselves that we might imagine have no value: the hard edges, the self-involvement, the dark thoughts. But in the Sfat Emet’s words:

הֲרֵי הַכֹּל בִּכְלָל בְּרִיאַת השי”ת

See, all of this is included in the creation of the Holy Blessed One

Every aspect of us, like every aspect of the world, is part of the work of creation, and as such has intrinsic value. Even those things that appear to be, in my teacher Nehemia Polen’s phrase, unassimilable into goodness, are part of the divine labor and have the potential for transformation and renewal. The dark sides of human nature—those things we wrestle with each year as we do teshuvah—are also reflections of God, waiting to be uplifted and made whole. This is the work of teshuvah, and it is more urgent than ever. The ashes of our lives, this is what we confront every year at this time. Lifting up the parts of ourselves that we wish were different and the actions we’ve taken—that we wish we hadn’t—is a way of acknowledging our humanity, God’s divinity, and the holy power of trying again. 

So while I wish I could promise you that I will always be nice to my spouse and patient with my children and attentive to my parents, while I wish I could tell you that I will give tzedakah as often as the thought arises in my mind and tend to the planet as much as it deserves, past years and my own humanity suggest that I will try and fail and try again. We can’t erase our past mistakes and walk away as if they never happened, and we can’t look at our future mistakes with a casual “oops, oh well” and move on. Instead we keep the mistakes for learning, like the Israelites kept the broken tablets in the Ark along with the new ones. Both the shards and the unbroken tablets remind us what we’re capable of—the countless and even terrible mistakes we will continue to make, and the repair for which we will continue to reach. Over the course of this challenging day of reflection, self-denial, and soul-searching—let’s come back to ourselves. And let’s support each other, as we attend to the ways that our ever-broken lives are dreaming of wholeness and holiness.

Gmar tov and shanah tovah!