A JEWISH HOME HAS AN OPEN DOOR

A Sermon for Yom Kippur 5768

Rabbi Ellen Lippmann

Whenever I come home from traveling anywhere, I do two things. I greet my home by a moment’s pause at the mezuzah on the front doorpost. And I go to the ocean, usually at Brighton Beach to remind myself that I am home. Sometimes I swim, sometimes I just stand and gaze for a few moments, taking in the sight of the sea. My home is now, the present, for me, and the sea is eternity, a glimpse of the cosmos 15 minutes from home.

What does it mean to be home, to make a home? On this Yom Kippur, when our task is to come home to ourselves, what does it mean to come home? Rabbi Alan Lew suggests that we have to leave home to find a home and that it is a profoundly Jewish journey.

We spend a lot of time with words of prayer and pangs of hunger on Yom Kippur. We read and sing confessions and prayers of praise and words of hope. Sometimes these words and songs take us home, in a deep and profound way and sometimes, frankly, they don’t. Sometimes we get so caught up in the words and what good fasters we are that we forget that the words and the fasting and the wearing of white are just tools, intended to help us make that journey home, to the home inside and the home in the endless span of time and space, what some here call God.

On this Yom Kippur, how do we find our way home?

When I think of home, of the home I live in and love, I think home means to be safe in a place that you have created, having added furnishings and art work and human connections to the walls, floors and roof you have rented or bought. It is, ideally, the place you live: the place you can become who you most deeply are, removing the masks you wear to navigate the world. It is where you express your heart, and let it rest, the place the Shekhina dwells with you and gives you peace.

How tempting it is to stay home these days, given the hard world in which we live, tempting to stay in bed, in fact, and not get up to face the world. Some days I think “if I pull these covers a little more over my head, maybe the war will go away, people will stop killing each other, we’ll have good leaders in Washington. If I can only go back to sleep, the hammering of the new development in the next block will stop, and the one that will block out our morning light won’t start to be built. If I stay here, safe inside, maybe Israel and Palestine will make peace while I am not looking, someone will figure out health insurance and reasonable mortgages for all, and education and health care will break out all over Africa.”

But as Harry Brod of the University of Delaware writes, “a Jewish home has an open door.” I can’t hide inside, covering my head and wishing the world away, and neither can you, tempting though it is. At some point, I have to get up and face the world:

Someday, what Arthur Waskow calls “global scorching” may make the sea I love roar through Brooklyn looking for me. Someday, and today, young American soldiers will come home, some in coffins, others without limbs or eyes. Yesterday and today, Iraqis lose their homes and their lives and Darfurians lose life after life after life and I have to wonder how I am responsible or what I can do. Yesterday, today and tomorrow, Israelis are injured and killed by Palestinian rocket fire and Palestinians are killed and maimed by Israelis and I always wonder how I am responsible and what I can possibly do.

The truth is that you and I do a fair amount. Every day I hear from Kolot members who do the most extraordinary things, using their power, their music, their art, their organizing skills to try to make this world a better place. Yet the world is manifestly not a better place and often I at least feel helpless to respond.

Harry Brod writes, “I identify the voice impelling me to open the door as the Jewish voice within me. It is what makes my home a Jewish home. The mezuzah beside my door points and beckons inward. Keeping the door locked against others violates the principles it houses.”

This is the voice of my conscience, reminding me it is time to get up, time to open the door, let in what light is left, and move out into the world again.

Yom Kippur gives the voice of conscience time to regroup, refresh itself, before we move on to the real world, the world outside this inward-looking home we create today and carry with us in our hearts.

There are many words in Hebrew for what we call in English, living, as in “where do you live?” Leishev is to dwell or sit, as in dwelling next week in a sukkah or sitting in a yeshiva to study or Abraham dwelling in Beersheva after the binding of Isaac. Lagur is to live somewhere, and is the word used for the question, “Where do you live? Eifo garah?” L’shakein is the word God uses for divine dwelling, as when God tells Moses to tell the people to build a mikdash, a holy central place, and God will dwell among the people. God’s in-dwelling presence is what we call, therefore, the Shekhina.

Yom Kippur asks us how God will dwell among us. It urges us to ask “How does my voice of conscience connect to this mikdash, this holy place, and how do we invite God in or pray in such a way that we connect truly and not just have a great show of words and fasting? What is written on the mezuzah of the doorway to our hearts?”

My first thought in trying to answer this question was of the Aleinu. Just as the Sh’ma is written in the mezuzot on our actual homes’ doorposts, so perhaps our internal doors’ opening words are the Sh’ma’s companion piece, the words we end our prayer with, even as the Sh’ma leads us in: Aleinu l’shabeyakh la-adon ha-kol, latet g’dulah l-yotzer bereishit. “It is up to us to praise the Lord of all, to give greatness to the Shaper of creation …May tikkun olam, repairing the world, make manifest your mighty dominion…BaYom Ha-hu—on that day the Eternal will be one and God’s name will be Oneness.”

Dr. Henry Slonimksy once wrote “on that day, not as yet, alas, but surely on that day God shall be one, as God is not yet One. For how can God be called One, that is, real, if humanity is rent asunder in misery and poverty and hate and war? When humankind has achieved its own reality and unity, it will thereby have achieved God’s reality and unity. Til then, God is merely an idea, an ideal…Til now, God merely subsists in the vision of a few great hearts, and exists only in part, and is slowly being translated into reality.”

How do we start to translate God into reality? How far do we have to travel to open our doors? The pull to shut them tight is very great, to shut out the fear, the anger, the helplessness we feel in the face of the current war, the aftermath of Katrina, the number of deaths in Darfur, the intractability of Israel and Palestine.

Leonard Fein expressed our fears and began our translating when he wrote in a new take on the Unetaneh Tokef, “Who will live and who will die? Who by landmine or cluster bomb, who by ethnic cleansing, who by handgun, who by drunken driving, who by negligence and who by malice?”

It would be so nice if our homes could be spared, as they are in reality spared most of the world’s horrors. How nice if we could just bask in that space: We are not the ones being killed, we are not the ones who have to watch a beloved family member murdered or raped before our eyes, we are not the ones struggling to find any food at all, we are not the ones fearing death at any moment. How nice then just to live our lives and shut out the world.

And yet: our mezuzahs and our prayers and our history will not let us bask. We are reminded: Aleinu, it is up to us to repair the world and translate God into reality.

So many of us, of you, are immersed in repair of the world. Tonight, we begin to translate God into reality by beginning to open our doors and pour out our hearts. The Aleinu is indeed a fine prayer for our hearts’ mezuzahs. But it is not the only prayer we need for the journey we make back toward home, the home where we really live. Leonard Fein began to show us how to do that, how to translate a prayer from the 11^th century to the 21^st and have it hit us where we live.

We can sing Avinu Malkeinu and the Unetaneh Tokef and HaYom HaYom HaYom with all our hearts. But without our own prayers, we won’t really be opening the doors to our hearts, the home—the makom, the place—where it all comes together. I am not sure how many of you say or write or cry or sing or meditate your own prayers. Tonight, let us write one together, using all we have brought on this journey so far, all we are willing to pour out of our open hearts:

[I will begin, you call out a line that tells of your feeling or your thought or your desire or your praise. I’ll take notes and create a prayer out of what we pour out]

I’ll start:

Dear God,

I AM ANGRY THAT THE WORLD IS SUCH A MESS AND I AM AFRAID I CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT.

Here is the prayer we created together, reconstructed after the fact:

Oh, God, the Source of Life, Your presence fills time and space. We are angry that the world is such a mess and we fear we can’t do anything about it. Help us recognize what we can do. Help us find and be the leaders who will repair the world. Help us never to be paralyzed by our fear, rather give us a vision for what the world might be and help us to draw inspiration from the progress we have made so far. Help us remember the power that is in ourselves and let us know that we are not alone. Help us to hear each other better, and share with us the gift of honesty, no matter how many facades You must break through nor how cynical we may be. Help us to want less so that others may have more. Teach us to start small and close to home, to notice the man lying on the corner cold and alone. We can’t even reconcile the members of our own family, so how can we repair the world? But help us to put our passion into action. Let us make the world a better place.

Last week after Rosh HaShanah services, a Kolot member told me he is looking forward to learning about prayer this year, because after all the Rosh HaShanah prayers he wanted to know, “Why do we praise God so much?”

Peter, here is one answer: We are translating God into reality. We start by opening our doors. This Yom Kippur is the time and the place to start.

Copyright 2007 Rabbi Ellen Lippmann