On Vulnerability: A Sermon for Yom Kippur 2001

The portion of the evening prayers from which the Hebrew phrase is drawn is a plea for the protection of our lives: "Grant, Lord our God, that we lie down in peace, and that we rise again, O our King, to life." So the paradox to which Rabbi Waskow is drawing our attention is an exquisitely balanced one; it is for the protection of our lives, not for some lesser benefit, that we are asking to be sheltered in "the most vulnerable of houses." And the house is indeed that vulnerable. The laws governing Sukkot say as much, stipulating that the roof of the sukkah, the skhakh, must be dense enough to provide more shade than sun, but not so dense as to prevent us from seeing the stars at night, and that the walls must be secure enough to stand up in normal wind but not in a raging storm. Other biblical instances of the word imply the same idea. Job describes the unstable state of the evildoer by saying, "the house he built is like a bird's nest, like the sukkah made by a watchman. He lies down, a rich man, with his wealth intact; when he opens his eyes it is gone" (27.18). And, closer to the festival we are now celebrating, the fragile booth that Jonah builds, from which to observe what God will do with Nineveh, is also a sukkah; and though Jonah "sits under it in the shade," the shade that the sukkah provides is insufficient; once God withers the tree that he has made spring up above the sukkah, the sun, burning through the weaker shade of the sukkah itself, "beat[s] down on Jonah's head, and he bec[omes] faint." A vulnerable house indeed! And that vulnerable house is, the prayer tells us, the house of God's peace, the house that is an image of God's peace. Whatever great poet made that phrase was asking, what humanly understandable shelter is most like the incomprehensible peace of God? And the answer given by that poet is, not the rock of Israel, not the citadel of Zion, but the sukkah -- which suggests that the condition of peace, even the condition of God's own peace, is and should be vulnerable and open.

I've found myself thinking a lot about this idea, over the days since the terrorist attacks, and I'd like to share with you some of the thoughts I've been having. I'll come in the end, as I said in the beginning, to some reflection on those attacks and on American responses to them; but I want first to extend this ideal of vulnerability, to suggest some of the ways in which that ideal is manifested and commanded in the holiday we're now celebrating.

When we began the holiday last night, we began it, or might have begun it, by reminding ourselves that on Yom Kippur, Israel must "pray with the sinners." And, as Franz Rosenzweig wrote, "no matter what the origin of [this] obscure phrase may be -- [it] means praying, in the capacity of all of [hu]mankind, with everyone. For everyone is a sinner." We are commanded, that is, to make our community open and porous.

We are also commanded, in our repentance on this day, to crave forgiveness not, as Rosenzweig also notes, "[for] the sin of transgression of laws which separate[Jews] from the other peoples of the world" -- not, that is, for transgression of specifically Jewish mitsvot. When we say the al kheyt, "for the sin which we have sinned before you," we do not name such sins as desecrating the Torah, worshipping graven images, violating the sabbath; rather "only our human sin is named in the moving recital of the sins ïwhich we have sinned.'" We make our community open and porous, that is, not only by praying with sinners, but by centering our prayers upon those sins that join us together with all the peoples of the earth. We thereby anticipate the fulfillment of the prophecy made by Isaiah: "my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples" (56.7). For what house can be more open, more porous, more vulnerable than one in which all peoples pray together?

When we name the sins we are confessing, both in the al kheyt and in the ashamnu, we strike ourselves; we direct our aggressive force, the force of our hands, against ourselves. That is a physical gesture, which I at any rate sometimes make without thinking about it, mechanically. But the physical gesture is an emblem of a moral gesture; when we go through the prayers of this holiday and the whole season of teshuvah, of repentance and returning, that has preceded it, we are wounding ourselves morally -- we are, in the language of the Bible, afflicting our souls. Ordinarily, when I consider my moral conduct, I armor myself against such reproach. I say, with Eve, "the serpent tempted me, and I ate," or with Adam, "the woman you put at my side -- she gave me of the tree, and I ate." I say that my behavior is no worse than that of other people. I dwell at length, in fact, on the bad behavior of other people. I point to my own good behavior on other occasions or in another spheres. I say that I had compelling reasons for my behavior. I describe my questionable or bad actions as the result of inattention or exhaustion. All these modes of argument are ways of armoring myself against reproach. Doing teshuvah asks me, asks us, to remove all such armor -- to be vulnerable to the wound of moral reproach. It asks us to refrain from looking at others' actions, regardless of how wicked, to focus on the failures and omissions in one's own actions, both as an individual and as a member of a community, regardless of how much one might like to defend them. On this day, in this season, the force of moral analysis, like the force of the striking hand, is turned inward.

I don't want to go too far here. Arthur Waskow goes on to write, "the sukkah comes to remind us: We are in truth all vulnerable. If ïa hard rain[ïs] gonna fall,' it will fall on all of us." True enough. But Jewish law also tells us that when it rains, even if the rain is only enough to spoil the taste of the soup, we may -- we must, in fact -- leave the sukkah for a safer place. And though every night we're commanded to pray to be sheltered in the sukkah of God's peace, we also have abundant occasions for praying to be sheltered in less vulnerable places. In Psalm 27, for example, recited morning and evening from the beginning of Elul until Hoshana Rabba, we say, "He hideth me in the shelter of his tent [ahalo], he lifteth me up upon a rock [btsur]." Whatever sort of vulnerability Jewish tradition asks us to pray for, it does not ask that we pray to be left naked to our enemies.

But it does ask, as I've been saying, that we pray to be sheltered in the sukkah of God's peace; and in this season, it asks that we pray with sinners, that we confess the sins that link us to peoples other than our own, that we turn, at least symbolically, our physical force against ourselves, that we turn, and not just symbolically, our consciences and our moral scrutiny against ourselves, that we ask forgiveness of those we have wronged.

I think this ideal of physical and moral vulnerability should be brought into play in our present crisis, and in a minute I'll say how. But I need to preface those remarks with some reflections on what it will mean for me to make them, here and now.

I'm very aware of the situation in which I speak, and fearful of taking unjust advantage of my role in this service and in this community. I'm a professor here, and I'm speaking to an audience composed at least partly of students; I'm aware of the inequities of power between professors and students, and don't want to exploit it. I'm also aware of a certain inequity between the darshan, the preacher, and the congregation. I have come, this morning, to pray and to speak, and you have come to pray and to listen. And listening can be difficult, if what you're listening to is not in accord with what you believe. I can't alter these inequities. I can pledge to you that at another time and in another place, I'm ready to take the other role, to listen to you as you speak or write; I'm also ready simply to talk with you about these matters, face to face, neither of us being the darshan or the audience, both of us participating equally in dialogue, each, as Martin Buber puts it, regarding the other as "thou" rather than as "it."

But for the moment, for this morning, it's my task to speak, and I feel obliged in conscience to say as precisely as I can what's in my heart and mind. I do not think the mood in the United States right now has much to do with teshuvah, or for that matter with any of the Jewish modes of wise vulnerability I've been talking about. I have seen, on the part of the US government and many of its supporters in this country and abroad, little interest in repentance or return, little undefensive and self-afflicting scrutiny of bad United States actions that might have contributed to these catastrophic attacks, though they cannot, absolutely cannot, justify them, little willingness to repent for bad past actions whether or not they so contributed, little passion for seeking forgiveness from those who have been wronged by such actions.

Maybe it's too early to ask for such thoughts and moods, with legitimate grief and legitimate anger still so thick in the air. And maybe, if all I saw was such grief and such anger, I wouldn't be led to say what I'm saying this morning. But I'm seeing other things as well. Our national conversation dwells not only on the iniquities of others but also on our own virtues. Our chief desire, it seems, is to be impenetrably armored, both against danger and against guilt. I believe that desire will mislead us. It leads, or may lead, to the building of walls, to worrying only about the safety of those on our side of the wall, to condemning the conduct only of those on the other side of the wall, to the scapegoating and ignoring of others and the exaltating and ignoring of ourselves. Both as Jews and as Americans, both as victims and oppressors, we have, long and grim experience of that desire. A variety of that desire lies behind Pharaoh's chilling exhortation to his courtiers: "see, the children of Israel are too great for us, and too strong. Come, let us outscheme them, otherwise they will increase still further-- and it could happen, when there is a war, that they would join with those who hate us, and fight against us, and draw themselves up and away from the country!" A variety of that desire lies behind the Jewish curse upon Amalek, the commandment to exterminate all that tribe, men, and women, and children, and animals; a variety of it lies behind the American decision during World War II to put Japanese Americans in internment camps. In my view, a variety of that desire is motivating, some of our present talk about a war against terrorism and those who support or sympathize with it; and surely a variety of that desire was motivating the terrorists who carried out the attacks in the first place.

Sometimes, when we think about the relations between religion and the world, we think of religion as a refuge from the world, and we want to keep that refuge safe. I certainly recognize and share that desire, even if on this occasion I haven't in conscience been able to act in accord with it. But what I'm wanting to do, by bringing talk of these questions into our most solemn day, our sabbath of sabbaths, is not to let the world impinge on religion; it's rather the reverse. I want these noble principles and practices of Judaism to have some bearing on the world.. Against the desire to be invulnerable, against the self-exalting and self-deceiving focus on the iniquities of others, I would set the practice of teshuvah, and the imperfectly sheltered sukkah of divine peace.

Created by: Jiayang Chien '05
Maintained by: Lawrence Rosenwald
Date Created: August 6, 2003
Last Modified: August 7, 2003