Making Ourselves Known: Unburdening As A Bridge To The Divine
Yom Kippur, Society Hill Synagogue, 5784
There is one particular story from Torah that is sticking with me this Yom Kippur, and it’s a story that, while perhaps known to many, does not necessarily have an enduring role in the Jewish ritual calendar and so I want to take this opportunity to lift it up. And that story is the story of Yosef—the story of Joseph.
If you’ll recall, Joseph is the second youngest of the Patriarch Jacob, later known as Israel—we are bnei yisrael, descendants of Israel/descendants of Jacob. Joseph is the second youngest of Jacob’s twelve sons—but the first born to Jacob’s beloved Rachel, who died giving birth to Joseph’s younger brother Benjamin.
Because of Joseph’s status as firstborn to his beloved Rachel, Jacob showed deep levels of favoritism towards Joseph, and even, the Torah says, loved him more than any of his brothers. This favoritism and imbalanced love, the Torah teaches, engendered deep levels of resentment, and even hatred, in Joseph’s brothers towards him.
If that favoritism wasn’t enough to stir up his brothers, Joseph also told his brothers—and his father—about dreams that he had of them all bowing down to him; in one dream they were all represented by sheaves of wheat, in another by the sun, moon and stars. In the dreams, the different symbols representing the other family members bowed down to the symbol representing Joseph. Their hatred was—to say the least—further inflamed.
So, they conspire לַהֲמִיתֽוֹ to kill him, sensing their opportunity when their father sends him to check on them when they are out pasturing their sheep. Before they carry out the deed, one of their brothers convinces them to “settle” for selling him into slavery, to a traveling caravan, rather than murder him, and thus begins the Israelites descent into Egypt, following Joseph, down in his caravan.
Fast forwarding, Joseph manages to rise from his position of slave to grand vizier over all Egypt, buoyed as he is by his smarts, his ability to interpret dreams, and by divine providence.
When a regional famine sends his brothers to Egypt in search of food, they come to the palace, and he recognizes them, though not them he. He proceeds to, shall we say, toy with them, accusing them of being spies, and imprisoning one of them, sending them back to their home to retrieve their youngest brother Benjamin in order to free the one they have imprisoned. Only when they retrieve Benjamin, Joseph threatens to imprison Benjamin, too, and his older brother Judah offers to be enslaved in his stead, do we reach the climax of our story.
“Joseph could no longer control himself before all his attendants,” The Torah says, “and he cried out, ‘Have everyone withdraw from me.’ So there was no one else about when בְּהִתְוַדַּ֥ע יוֹסֵ֖ף אֶל־אֶחָֽיו Joseph hitvadah — made himself known to his brothers.
Putting everything else aside, asking everyone else to withdraw, he dropped all the pretenses, all the masks; he bared his soul. Hitvadah, he made himself known.
If you were cued in closely to the Hebrew of the Torah reading we just did — and there is no reason you needed to be, but if you were — you’d know that this word is linked to the central ritual of Yom Kippur.
In the Torah reading that was just chanted, it says וְסָמַ֨ךְ אַהֲרֹ֜ן אֶת־שְׁתֵּ֣י יָדָ֗ו עַ֣ל רֹ֣אשׁ הַשָּׂעִיר֮ הַחַי֒ Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat וְהִתְוַדָּ֣ה and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the people, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness. Hitvadah: the words are homonyms, or, more precisely, homophones, words with different spellings — one with an ayin, one with a hay — yet identical pronunciations, a linkage that would not have been lost on the ancient rabbis. To confess, as we’re called upon to do on Yom Kippur, is linked to “to make oneself known”, as Joseph did with his long lost brothers — dropping all the pretenses with them, all the facades, all the masks, baring his soul, facilitating his reunion with them after all that had transpired over those many years.
The experience on Yom Kippur is in some ways much the same. “Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the people, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness. And Aaron… shall bathe his body in water in the holy precinct and put on his vestments; then he shall come out and offer his burnt offering and the burnt offering of the people, וְכִפֶּ֥ר khiper, like from Yom Kippur
— וְכִפֶּ֥ר בַּעֲד֖וֹ וּבְעַ֥ד הָעָֽם׃ through these rituals, he makes expiation, atonement, teshuvah for himself, and for the people.
Through the process of confessing, or better yet, since the word “confessing” for us, sometimes gets confused with a christian connotation that many of us shy away from, through the process of, like Joseph, hitvadah, of making ourselves known, of turning ourselves inside out, making ourselves vulnerable, shaking out all the lint from our proverbial pockets, all the grime that has accumulated in the crevices of our souls, we make expiation, we make atonement, we make teshuvah, return—to God, to ourselves, to those around us, as did Joseph with his brothers.
This is the central experience of Yom Kippur.
But as a matter of fact, the ancient Israelites saw the need for a cleansing ritual not just once a year, but everyday—in fact twice per day.
In the first chapter of the book of Vayikra, Leviticus, the Torah describes the olah, the burnt offering, which we were called upon to offer twice daily, rain or shine, whether we were feeling guilt or gratitude. Hitvadah also shares a root, if you can believe it, with modeh, to give thanks, hodu ladaonai ki tov, give thanks before the source of being who is good. We made a point to bring an offering twice per day, whatever we felt: guilt, gratitude, l’hitvadah—making ourselves known. To ourselves and to God.
In particular, with respect to the daily olah ritual, the Torah says, “וְסָמַ֣ךְ יָד֔וֹ עַ֖ל רֹ֣אשׁ הָעֹלָ֑ה You shall lay a hand upon the head of the offering, that it may be acceptable in your behalf le’chaper alav, like yom kippur, kaper. in expiation for you.” To make expiation, cleansing, teshuvah for you. Every day.
Continuing — and getting a little more graphic, the torah says — “The offering [be it a bull, lamb, goat, bird] shall be slaughtered before יהוה,” it continues. “The burnt offering shall be flayed and cut up into sections. The sons of Aaron the priest shall put fire on the altar and lay out wood upon the fire; and Aaron’s sons, the priests, shall lay out the sections, with the head and the fat, on the wood that is on the fire upon the altar. Its entrails … shall be washed with water, and the priest shall turn the whole into smoke on the altar as a burnt offering, an offering by fire of pleasing odor to יהוה.”
Foreign, and perhaps noxious as this may be to some of us, this was the fundamental mode of religious expression for our ancestors, according to tradition, twice daily.
As biblical scholar Baruch Levine writes, “the purpose of sacrifice was to formalize or reaffirm and, at times, to repair the relationship between the worshiper and God, and between the community of worshippers and God.”
As we have said a number of times, the Hebrew word for sacrifice is korban, which comes from the same root as karov, near, to draw near: the sacrifice, for the ancient Israelites, helped them draw near, helped them bridge the perceived chasm between themselves and the divine.
Of course, as we know, sacrifice did not endure as the primary form of worship for the Israelites, for reasons both within and beyond their control.
In the year 587 BCE the Beit Hamikdash, the temple where sacrifices were brought, was destroyed. It was rebuilt about 70 years later and this second beit hamikdash stood another 587 years before this, too, was destroyed, never to be rebuilt, with only portions of the kotel, the western wall, remaining.
Its destruction has been described as an earthquake in the soul of the Jewish people, severing, as they saw it at the time, the main line of connection, rupturing the main bridge between the people and God.
Yet Judaism has always been about responding to adversity with ingenuity and resilience, and our ancestors responded in kind. One rabbinic text details an exchange between the ancient rabbis as follows:
Once, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai left Jerusalem, and Rabbi Yehoshua followed after him, and he saw the Holy Temple destroyed. Rabbi Yehoshua said, “Woe to us, for this is destroyed, the place where all of Israel’s sins are forgiven!” Rabbi Yohanan said to him: “My son, do not be distressed, for we have a form of atonement just like it.” “And what is it?” Rabbi Yeshoshua asked. And Rabban Yokhanah said, “Gemilut Hasadim.” Acts of love and kindness. A new bridge to God.
Still, the role of sacrifices in Jewish life did not altogether dissipate. In fact, in many ways, they have remained central. Many of us can picture the curious zeroah on our seder plate, that viscerally-evocative shankbone, reminiscent of the ancient passover offering. Further, we still read the Torah portions that invoke the sacrificial system, as we did this morning on Yom Kippur and as we do throughout the calendar year on Shabbat. And, of course, our central mode of Jewish religious expression to this day is built upon the sacrificial system, that mode of expression being, of course, prayer.
I know what some of you are thinking—Rabbi, would you really say prayer is the primary mode of Jewish religious expression? On Rosh Hashanah, didn’t we talk about how many of us aren’t religious, how many of us don’t connect, on a religious or spiritual level, with the practice of prayer? How do we modern Jews connect with prayer when we may not believe that prayer makes any real difference in the world?
In some ways I’m with you. We’ll talk about the different effects of prayer, but I concede that we live in a world where sometimes thoughts and prayers are not sufficient in and of themselves to effect the change we hope for.
And yet when I think about the central ritual that takes place when Jews gather, the religious expression around which we gather — at the home of a mourner for a shivah minyan, around a Shabbat or Pesach dinner table offering blessings, lighting candles, here in this room, on the most well-attended day of the year — the main ritual around which space is held, that we’re offering, is prayer.
And upon what is prayer built?
The talmud teaches רַבִּי יְהוֹשֻׁעַ בֶּן לֵוִי אָמַר Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi says: תְּפִלּוֹת כְּנֶגֶד תְּמִידִין תִּקְּנוּם. The prayers were built on the daily offerings, the daily sacrifices, the olah sacrifices, that we described above.
“Take my prayer as an offering of incense, my upraised hands as an evening sacrifice.”
So how we gather as Jews and as fellow loved ones when we come together for a religious moment still has the experience of bringing a sacrifice hardwired into it. In fact, the Talmud cites Rabbi Yitzḥak for the teaching that anyone who engages in studying the verses from Torah associated with the offering, it is as though they connected to God through the offering itself.
So putting aside for the moment our contemporary issues with animal sacrifice, transporting ourselves in time to an era when one of the modes of expression involved this form of a burnt offering, it’s worth exploring the function, the effect of such an experience. What understanding can the ancient experience of bringing an offering give us as we seek to make sense of prayer, and really make sense of being Jewish and of being human?
I am someone who does find myself praying regularly these days. It’s not that I haven’t gone periods of my life without praying regularly. I absolutely have. It’s not that I don’t sometimes have an ambivalent relationship to prayer. I absolutely do.
But lately, I’ve felt moved by it. It’s helped ground me in the presence of the divine, reminding me where I come from and to where I imagine myself called.
Once again, it is not that I imagine my prayers being answered in a literal sense, as though if I pray for a raise or an Eagles win, I’ll get it. Though please God, help redeem that last Super Bowl, God.
But I think prayer helps me see through to what matters; helps align my compass.
After a long break, I’ve found myself called back to it, authentically, not out of guilt. I’ve been one of those people lately who sets their alarm for five something and actually gets up most mornings, before the girls in my household do.
I’ve done so moved by the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Joshuah Heschel, which I’ve shared before, including his plea when he asks, “Is not listening to the pulse of wonder worth silence and abstinence from self-assertion? Why do we not set apart an hour of living for devotion to God by surrendering to stillness?”
I can do that most days. I can surrender to stillness for an hour, trying to ground myself in God, whatever that means to me in the moment. For me these days, as those who listened to my podcast interview know, it’s typically half an hour in the early morning before the hustle and bustle of each day, then fifteen minutes that I find somewhere during the workday, and another fifteen after I put one of my girls to bed (Caroline and I trade off between Lila and Nina). That’s an hour total.
I don’t restrict myself to the traditional matbeah, the traditional order of prayer, though I sometimes miss it. I, as we talked about on Erev Rosh Hashanah, open up my thoughts to the divine. I say “Hineini.” “Here I am.” Sometimes that’s all I got. Sometimes my thoughts meander for a dozen minutes at a time from everything to work to family to my latest tv show, before I remember what’s happening. Then I bring myself back once again, and I say, hineini. Here I am.
And sometimes, I am drawn to the sacrificial system, the paradigm of the olah, the burnt offering.
Going back to the description of it in Torah, in all its goriness, it reads: “the entrails of the offering shall be washed with water, and you shall turn the whole into smoke on the altar as a burnt offering, an offering by fire of pleasing odor to יהוה.
Sometimes I read this as an invitation. I read it as an invitation to—to use the modern, similarly gross idiom, spill my guts. To let it all out before God, however I understand that.
In some ways, that’s why we’re here. That’s what Yom Kippur calls for—lhitvadah, to turn itself inside out. That’s what Joseph did, to let it all out, to make himself fully known—to his brothers; to the divine.
This is the paradigm for those moments of prayer—to make oneself known. Putting it all on the table.
Remember that “table” in Hebrew is intricately connected to “altar,” the ancient rabbis calling the home the mikdash me’at, the little tabernacle, the little sanctuary, and the table, the mizbeach, the altar.
We put it all on the table—the stuff we’re ashamed of and feel regretful about, the stuff we’re grateful for that maybe we haven’t acknowledged yet; all the things that have been weighing on us, all the muck that has accumulated over the years, soot that has found its way into the crevices of our souls. What are we carrying? What is weighing on us, unexplored as it may be? What are the burdens that weigh us down— the burdens that we talked about last night that our inner exile, our inner child have been asked to carry—things that happened to us or choices we made, or just twists of fate that we haven’t fully acknowledged. Whatever we’ve been carrying that we haven’t made space for, that we haven’t given tender, soft attention to, that we haven’t scoured the recesses of our souls for… Now, we do. We put it on the altar. I invite you to do that for a moment, quietly, to yourselves: what are you carrying? What do you need to unburden from? What past harms, meted out to you or by you, past occurrences weighing you down, do you need to give space to and put on the altar. If you feel so inclined, let’s take just a moment.
Okay, What’s next?
You’re taking all these things that have been weighing on you, that you’ve been carrying around, that have accumulated grime, muck, soot over the years, that you haven’t given attention to, and, according to the text of the burnt offering יִרְחַ֣ץ בַּמָּ֑יִם. For those who wish, we’re going to wash them with water. We’ve put that stuff on the altar, and we’re going to wash them with water—the water of the atmosphere, the water of a cool spring, the water of your soul.. You’re going to take some cool, clear water, and all these parts that you’ve been carrying around inside you, that have accumulated that dirt, that soot, you’re going you’re going to —pssh — wash them off on the altar. You’re going to pour cool water on those hot parts of our soul we’ve been carrying around, drenching them in cool water—hearing the woosh, like water putting out burning coals, feeling the soothing, cooling salve of the water purifying, cleaning the grime from our being, from our soul.
So we’ve put on the table, we’ve washed it with water, like the text says,
And then?
Hiktir hakol.
We’re going to burn it up. Turn it all into smoke as עֹלָ֛ה אִשֵּׁ֥ה רֵֽיחַ־נִיח֖וֹחַ לַֽיהֹוָֽה
You’re going to turn it all into a burnt offering, an offering by fire, of pleasing odor to יהוה.
All this, all we’ve been carrying around, the burdens we’ve been carrying that we haven’t made space for, haven’t given attention to—regrets that we’re still holding onto, shame, fear, pain—jewish tradition says, you’re going take all of it to burn it up, turn it all into smoke—poof—as a pleasing offering to adonai. The very essence of that which distanced us from God, now serves as a bridge, a korban, draws us near, to God.
These experiences aren’t gone—this is not the memory erasure device of the movies; we don’t literally change the past. But the experiences can be transformed, our relationship to them can be transformed; like the offering we’ve turned into smoke on the altar, an offering by fire as a pleasing odor to the Lord.
Throughout the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, we chant unetaneh tokef, we lend power to the holiness of this day, and we chant “On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed – how many shall pass away and how many shall be born, who shall live and who shall die,” going through a litany of possible experiences we might encounter. And then we say וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה. Teshuvah – Repentance/return, Tefilah – prayer/reflection, And tzedekah – acts of charity and justice מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה avert the severity of the decree, or as it I like to translate it, transform the experience of our destiny, our relationship to experiences of our life.. While we can’t change what has happened—it is real—or some of the elements of our destiny—we will all die—we can transform how we experience the events in our lives, past, present, and future. We can transform what we do with what has happened. We can transform how we are in the world. We can transform how we proceed. Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
The Torah understands that inevitably, as human beings, though we seek to point our compass in the right direction, we fall out of alignment, we run amiss, adrift, and we need a means to bring us back: to ourselves, to rightness, to the Divine. In a sense, those degrees by which we were misaligned, the difference, the remainder, that ounce of holiness we couldn’t achieve becomes our offering, our bridge to return. Through the tabernacle in ancient times, we would make an offering which said, in effect, in this moment, I’ve gone as far as I can go. Accept this offering of the last degree of alignment that has vexed me; accept it as my offering to bring me close to You. Bring me back to you once again. Realign me with your goodness, with your holiness.
And, to our ancestors’ understanding, it would work. They would feel that nearness. By raising their consciousness, that last ounce would be transformed from alienation from God to intimacy with God.
Part of this speaks to the power of a very important feature of Jewish life: ritual. All of you are here because in some sense you believe in, consciously or unconsciously, or are at the very least curious about, the transformative power of ritual.
I’m not saying that everyone here believes in a magical understanding that if you beat your chest and fast while saying certain words that we start winning the cosmic lottery.
I am saying that what you are engaging in right now, over the course of the yamim noraim, the days of awe, is a ritual. We engage with them because, at the very least, we have implicit beliefs about their meaningful, potentially even powerful, real effects. We engage with a ritual because we think it will have a positive, and potentially even transformative, effect upon us. This could be as simple as it makes me feel good to light the hanukkah candles, to kindle those memories, or as profound as “fasting on yom kippur helps me proceed with my year with a feeling of lightness, a feeling of a renewal, an experience of being on a readjusted trajectory towards goodness and truth.”
The process of prayer, of recreating the burnt offering, as the process of prayer can be understood, has the capacity to transform our experience of ourselves, of the world, and of God. We don’t have to believe in magic, for that power to be real.
We hitvadah, we make ourselves known, scouring our insides for what has been weighing us down, and putting it all on the table; we douse it in cool, clear water; and we burn it up, as my father used to say, transforming it into smoke— those burdens that have been weighing us down, now is a pleasing offering to the lord.
When Joseph completed the process of l’hitvadah, of making himself known, the effects were total.“‘Have everyone withdraw from me,’ he said, So there was no one else about when Joseph hitvadah, made himself known to his brothers. And it says, וַיִּתֵּ֥ן אֶת־קֹל֖וֹ בִּבְכִ֑י he gave his voice over to tears.
After unloading all the weight he had been carrying—who knows what it consisted of: the anger, the resentment, the regret, the ambivalence, the yearning, the loneliness—when he made himself known to them. וַיִּתֵּ֥ן אֶת־קֹל֖וֹ בִּבְכִ֑י He gave his voice over to tears. His sobs were [then] so loud, the text that the Egyptians could hear, and so the news reached Pharaoh’s palace.” The cleansing, purifying experience of those tears, which had been held in, whose weight he had been carrying, for, oh so long.
Those, too, in that moment, were a pleasing offering to God.
May we each find the strength to be gracious unto ourselves; to scour the recesses of our souls as we need to, to unburden them, to place what we need to on the altar, and, when we’re ready, to offer it up. May our lives be pleasing offerings to Adonai. Shanah Tovah.
