Yom Kippur: A time to heal

 

If there is one thing the world needs right now, it is healing. Physically and spiritually, the world is lacking wholeness on many levels.  Luckily, tis the season for healing on both of these levels.  We find that repentance and healing are deeply intertwined.  For one, in one of the classic High Holiday prayers, ‘our Father, our King’, the line about repentance is followed immediately with a line about healing.  The Talmud says it even more explicitly, “Rabbi Ḥama bar Ḥanina said: Great is repentance, because it brings healing to the world, as it is stated: “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely; for My anger has turned from him” (Hosea 14:5).”  When we repent and heal internally, that paves the way for a more general healing for the world as the Divine responds in kind. But what is the key to successful healing?

              For that we need to look at a fascinating encounter between the first father and son in world history fresh off the first major homicide in world history.  Adam meets Cain post fratricide and asked, “What happened with your judgement”? He replied, I repented and received clemency” When Adam heard this he hit himself in his head and said, “Such is the power of tshuva, and I was unaware of it” At that time, Adam composed A song for the Shabbos day”.  There is much to explore here- why did Adam hit himself? Why did he not know about tshuva? Why did that lead Adam to write a Psalm for Shabbos?

              We live in a world where what is done is done.  A car that is driven off of its lot loses half of its value and it will never be new again. It is not intuitive to say that despite an action that was done, we can erase it in some way, and even say that the negative is a positive as it spurred future growth. Adam hits himself in the head as if to say, I didn’t realize we could recreate reality.  But to do that, we need time to reflect.  Adam right away wrote a song about Shabbat because he understood that a set time to reflect each week was the crucial dimension that makes repentance possible.  This is why sickness in Judaism is viewed as something disconnected. The root of the word ‘sick’ in Hebrew, ‘chole’ is related to the world ‘chol’, which means secular.  It is being in a distracted, unbalanced state not connected to anything bigger. When we repent via reflection we rebalance and find our inner connection to something bigger that ensures we live both a healthier spiritual life, and in turn, a healthier physical life.

Using our ears

Using our ears

Every mitzvah is associated with an organ. One might think that Rosh Hashanah, as the name indicates would be associated with our brains, the head! But this isn’t the case, the mitzvah of the day is shofar and that is the only mitzvah directly associated with the ear. Why is the ear the key organ to target on the first day of the year?

 Every day in Elul we blow the shofar and each time the sound is somewhat jarring.  Especially now that we gather for daily minyans outside, this is especially so.  Despite being outdoors, with the sound of cars and buses whizzing by, the shofar sound sticks out with its alarming notes even more now that it is contextualized with the normal sounds of the world.  What is unique about this mitzvah?

The ear is the only organ that has the shape of a bowl. It is an organ that receives from the outside in a way that is NOT automatic such as by sight and smell. Aside from taking in important sounds to keep you alive, such as the sound of a hiss, the ears are the organ that take in new information (granted reading is a sight endeavor technically, we talk to ourselves as we read).  A person is limited to what they are unless they can open their ears to listen to what else is out there.  If a person is willing to bring in new ideas from the outside, then life’s possibilities expand.  But those ideas can only come via curiosity. A person needs to look at the world and be bothered by the riddle of it all. If a person goes through life without awe, and without a deep yearning to seek answers to life mysteries then things remain stagnant. This is where the shofar comes in.

The shofar sound stands out.  It calls attention to itself and asks us to stay curious about life.  This is the job on Rosh Hashanah. It is to open our ears so that we can stretch beyond this year. First, though we need to feel that emptiness around us, which shouldn’t be hard this year with all it has brought.  After all, to be a kosher shofar, the horn needs to be naturally empty.  A horn that is not hollow but drilled is not called a kosher shofar.  Granted, a shofar has marrow inside of it, it is of a different material then the horn and comes out. Once it has been hollowed out, then the yearning can happen. As we start the year, let’s be bothered about  where our growth is and how the world looks, and use that yearning to create change this year.