Changing Text, Changing Life
A Sermon for Yom Kippur 5769
Rabbi Ellen Lippmann
What is it about sacrifice and the Days of Awe?
On Rosh haShanah, as I protested then, the long-standing tradition is to read the story of the Akkeda, the binding or potential sacrifice of Isaac.
On Yom Kippur, the traditional text is of a different sort of sacrifice: the sacrifice of a goat and a bull, while another goat (often called the scape goat, possibly because he escapes) is sent off into the wilderness carrying all the people’s sins to a place or a demon called Azazel, as Brett Parker told us so convincingly here last year.
What do these sacrifices have to do with each other?
Poet Alicia Ostriker links them, asking
who shall live and who shall die
which goat will have his throat cut
like an unlucky Isaac
spitting a red thread and which goat
will be sent alive to the pit where the crazies are
thread tied lightly around its neck
Another link is Leviticus 16, the beginning of the section traditionally read on Yom Kippur. Here is how it begins: “The Eternal One spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron who died when they drew too close to the presence of the Eternal.”
Aaron’s sons died when they offered “strange fire” before God, which God had not commanded. In response to their death, the Torah tells us, “Aaron was silent.” Silent, we can imagine, in the face of inexplicable, confounding power. Here there is no command from God to submit or respond to, no chance to say Hineini. Here there is only stunning death. And death, more than any experience I know, brings us close to God’s power. It is that power that we recall in the memory of sacrifice that leads us into the heart of Yom Kippur.
We had two deaths in the larger Kolot community this summer, both stunning in their loss. At the cemetery for one of them, I learned about a custom I had never known: that in some Jewish communities they take off their shoes at the cemetery, to walk in bare feet on the ground that will soon or just has covered the dead. Why? To recall Moses at the burning bush: Take your shoes from off your feet, for the place you are standing on is holy ground. I was stunned into silence to learn of it.
One of the most powerful Jewish rituals surrounding death is the reading or speaking of the final vidui, the deathbed confession. It echoes Yom Kippur’s confessions, the words we speak or sing at many times throughout Yom Kippur’s hours. In part, it reads, “O my God and God of my ancestors. Let my prayer come before You, and disregard not my supplication. O forgive all the sins I have committed from my birth until this day…may my death expiate all my sins, iniquities and transgressions which I have committed before You…Into Your hand I commit my spirit.”
Yom Kippur is practice for death: We confess, we wear white, we don’t eat, we don’t bathe, we move past our bodies into the realm of the spirit.
Yom Kippur lets us taste death without dying. The sacrifices show us the irrational, destructive, animal side of death—and they bring us close to God in a way nothing else can. How? By connecting us literally or figuratively to the stuff of life. Real, animal sacrifice involved blood and guts, fat, sinews, bone. We meat eaters often prefer to ignore this reality in the slaughtering process, but the description of the Yom Kippur sacrifices leaves us no out. Aaron takes the blood of the bull and the blood of the goat, sprinkles it around the altar, and later the hides, flesh, and dung are taken outside and burned. It’s real.
Spiritual sacrifice—our task on Yom Kippur—should also get close to the bone, should push us to dig deep into the painful truths we so often want to hide from, stripping away layers of denial and artifice like stripping flesh from bone. It is painful and scary, sometimes, and can suggest a death of the old self, of the old protections.
The word for sacrifice in Hebrew is korban, from the root to be close, to bring close. Our ancestors offered sacrifices to get close to God. The Latin root for sacrifice means “sacred work,” a good translation of the Hebrew Avodah, which variously means sacrificial service, prayer service, service of any kind, work. Our sacred work on Yom Kippur is to try to get close to God, in part by digging deep and stripping away, in part by recognizing that we are mortal and may die at any moment, in part by bringing to life the memory of the sacrifices.
So for the second time in 10 days, I want to suggest a change in text.
In the 19th century in Germany, in the early days of Reform Judaism, the rabbis decided to replace the traditional texts of Yom Kippur which were too archaic, too bloody, too emotional for their rationalist ways. They replaced Leviticus 16, with its reminder of Aaron’s dead sons and its description of the Yom Kippur sacrifices, with Nitzavim, a democratic text about all of us standing to enter into covenant with God, a covenant and teaching that are accessible to all. We will hear that text tomorrow morning. For the afternoon of Yom Kippur, those German rabbis replaced a list of prohibited sexual activity—some I think we’d still want to prohibit and some we dearly love—with the Leviticus 19 Holiness Code, reminding us of the greatest of Torah’s social legislation. We’ll read that tomorrow afternoon.
I want to keep the Holiness Code with its aspirations for generosity, communal connection, and just relationships. But I want to bring back Leviticus 16 and the sacrifices in the morning.
I love Nitzavim, with its evocative description of how readily accessible the Torah teaching can be for us, and its choice to do good or evil. I think it offers us a chance to stand before God without intermediaries, just us, no priest. But I think that in gaining a good example of all of us standing, attentive, ready to enter into covenant with God, we lose the reminder of and the practice for death that are so crucial to Yom Kippur.
Some of you are now going to be asking, “Is she suggesting the opposite of what she urged last week?” I don’t think so. The Akkeda is about God’s command to Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice, not a tale of the power of death nor a reminder of it via descriptions of blood and guts. Abraham had a choice about his son’s death. Aaron had no choice. The goat, the bull of Yom Kippur have no choice. I don’t advocate killing, but I deeply believe that staring death in the face is at the heart of Yom Kippur.
Rabbi Leon Morris wrote recently that “the language of the Temple and sacrifice, which could have lent itself so easily to metaphor, art, and poetry, disappeared, and the vast number of sources that were rooted in such language were cut off. We need these sources today, particularly during Yom Kippur…The language of these sources expresses vital ideas about relationship, closeness and distance, gift-giving, and the connection between human behavior and God’s willingness to abide among us.”
In the death bed vidui, the dying person can say, “Modeh ani lifanekha…” which we sing every day or each Shabbat morning at Kolot as “I give thanks before You.” Here, in confession, it means “I acknowledge You…” The line between life and death, between gratitude and confession, is very thin. If you have seen someone, person or animal, die, you know that line. There is breath one moment, and no breath the next. When we sing “Modeh ani lifanekha” we also thank God “she-hekhezarta bi nishmati, b’hemla, rabbah emunatekha.” God who returned my breath, my soul to me overnight, in mercy. What great faith You have in me.
Yom Kippur is our time to acknowledge God’s faith in us and to try once again to find our faith in God. We need a korban, or the memory of a korban, a gift that brings us close, to help us do so. To hold that memory close, and vivid, we need, as Rabbi Morris suggested, new approaches to reclaim our difficult texts. Although Temple and sacrifice have long ceased to exist, he says, the imaginative, interpretive, and linguistic influence of these texts can indeed last forever.
A few years ago I heard a rabbi speak about what had happened at his synagogue one Yom Kippur. He lived in small town Oklahoma, and had become friendly with someone who raised birds—doves, or pigeons. On this Yom Kippur, the bird man came to the synagogue with a truck load of birds, and the whole congregation went outside to meet him. Each person there got to hold a bird, stroke it, speak to it, tell of that person’s sins. After everyone had had a chance to bond with the bird in this way, they all—at once—let the birds go. Up and up they flew, carrying the people’s sins and hopes and touch. The rabbi said, “I wanted to fall on my knees; it was the most stunning thing I had ever seen.”
On Yom Kippur, as at a grave site, we are standing on holy ground. Take off your shoes, and feel the dirt underneath, the blood underneath, the holiness that links the animal and the angel in you. Ha Makom asher atah omed alav admat kodesh he.
