This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

by Alan Lew

none of us is whole by ourselves. And this understanding is the basis of spiritual community. We all seem to know in the deepest part of ourselves that we need to be part of something larger than ourselves to be complete.

We are all Avaryonim, incomplete in ourselves. It takes the presence of other people to make us whole—to give credence and integrity to our experience.

They had felt such a deep sense of need, and our community—their community, in the larger sense—had answered it.

The Kol Nidre is also such a prayer. It is a prayer that calls the soul back to itself, a prayer that calls the soul to its real home, and that home is always in something larger than itself.

The Kol Nidre calls the soul to its community and to its rightful place in this great, shifting sea of life.

According to Jewish law, we don’t name a baby until it has been alive for at least a week, but this seemed like a bad time to stand on Halakah.

The rabbis had an expression—k’fitzat ha derech, a shortening of the way. It expressed a sense of telescoping a journey, the sense of crossing an impossible distance in a few brief strides.

Then one day we wake up and see it, and we feel terror. We say to ourselves, My God, what have I been doing with my life? The High Holidays are also a bridge, a compressed journey—k’fitzat ha derech—the voyage from birth to death in ten days’ time. Rosh Hashanah is all about birth, and Yom Kippur is about death.

We say the Vidui, the final confession, on two occasions in our lives—on Yom Kippur and on the day of our death. The word for atonement—Kippur, kaparah—means a covering over. Death is a covering over.

We see the same fear of death, and the same clinging to life at all costs, among the rabbis of the Talmud.

There at the sacred center, at the Holy of Holies, a place we only entered on Yom Kippur, and even then only by proxy, only through the agency of the high priest, there at that center, is precisely nothing—a vacated space, a charged emptiness, mirroring the charged emptiness that surrounds this world, that comes before this life and after it as well.

Now we understand why the rabbis said, Repent one day before your death. Which, of course, could be today.

We need a taste of this emptiness, to give us a sense of what will go with us, what will endure as we make this great crossing. What’s important?

And we taste death on Yom Kippur to remind us of what we must hold on to, and what we must let go of, of who we are, and where we come from. We taste death on Yom Kippur to remind us that death forgives, and that Yom Kippur is a little death, and that they both cover over,

Yom Kippur, on the other hand, is all about losing. Losing nobly, perhaps, but losing nevertheless.

Suffering is endemic to the experience of being alive, and Yom Kippur is the day when we Jews also acknowledge the truth of this.

There is a certain point in our lives when it becomes clear that we are not going to attain what we dreamed of attaining in our lives, or far worse, we do attain it and it isn’t what we thought it would be.

There is in fact one human capacity that actually increases, that grows stronger and deeper as we grow older, and that is wisdom.

At the moment of death, the Torah suggests, we finally stop denying death, and when this happens, we also stop denying life. We finally see our lives for what they really are.

And at the moment of our own death, we also become capable of blessing, of seeing deeply into those we love, and giving to them from the core of our being.

We Jews aren’t supposed to wait for the end before we ask ourselves those questions. We are supposed to ask them all the time, and especially on Yom Kippur.

The rabbis wanted to bring us to the point of existential crisis. They wanted to bring us to the point of asking the crucial question, What is my life all about?

The best we can do is to lose nobly, and to lose nobly means to be able to say at the end of our days that we know what our life is about.

This is what Yom Kippur asks us today. What is the core of our life? Are we living by it? Are we moving toward it?

They understood that in order for forgiveness to be complete, the person who had wronged them needed to arrive at the point of a sincere apology by his or her own inner process, and they didn’t want to interfere with this process.

The rabbis recognized that forgiveness was a deep spiritual need for both parties. The wrongdoer needed to be cleansed of his wrongdoing and his guilt for it, and his victim needed to let go of the hot coal of anger he was holding on to.

Only love can produce love. Only compassion can free us from the prison of our own anger, the compassion we feel for others, and the compassion we feel from them, and the compassion we feel for ourselves.

Yom Kippur, or the day of kaparah, the Day of Atonement, is about the purification of the soul.

Love is as strong as death, and marriage, if it contains even the slightest trace of love, lasts forever.

Kaparah, the Hebrew word for atonement, means a covering over. The idea is not that atonement effaces our sins. It cannot. They will always be there, along with everything else we and everyone else has ever done—an endless and indissoluble concatenation of cause and effect, stretching back to the beginning of time and reaching forward to its end as well. When we make atonement, kaparah, we are covering over our wrongdoing with the will to behave differently.

it allows us to move on and let go of the past. Our behavior is still out there, and will always be, but we are no longer attached to it. We no longer need to feel guilty or angry about it.

I could ask them for forgiveness, but I couldn’t ask them to undo what had happened.

This moment had been hammered into place by the totality of creation. And stretching before us from this moment are the infinite consequences of our present action.

I resolve to begin anew. Now there is something new in the world, a new possibility.

Yet in a thoroughly broken world, when we carry our own spiritual brokenness into every endeavor, how can we expect to be the agents of real repair?

Precisely because we have such a strong sense of our own brokenness deep down, whatever happiness we experience carries a subtle undercurrent of fear. When things are going well, when we are experiencing pleasure and are getting what we want, we feel obliged to defend our happiness, because it seems so fragile, so unstable.

We block out the suffering of others. We cut ourselves off from the world’s suffering, because we fear it will undermine or destroy our own happiness.

As individuals we live and die, often without apparent meaning. As a whole people, we are always moving toward the light.

We are not the first culture in the world to intuit a sense of brokenness in human existence, nor are we the first people to celebrate a yearly ritual of atonement and judgment.

Out of fear, we project our inner darkness onto others. We make demons out of them and then cast them away. Out of fear, we turn away from our own sacred center. And this has never worked, not once, and it never will. And the reason is this. All human beings are bearers of the divine. And when we try to drive a particular group of people away, we drive God away with them. We sever ourselves from the God who has assured us a hundred times that he/she hears the cries of the oppressed and goes where they go.

We accept that to be human is to be imperfect, to be broken, and we realize that we don’t have to project our brokenness onto someone else. We don’t have to try to cast it out. We can fix it. We can repair it in the context of our own lives.

we move toward the light of God when we behave this way, when we care for each other,

TWICE A YEAR DURING THE DAYS OF THE GREAT Temple, on Tisha B’Av and on Yom Kippur, there was a service at the end of the day, called Neilah, or closing, because it was performed as the Temple gates were clanging shut.

But during the Neilah service, as the gates begin to close and the opening becomes narrower and narrower, this attractive energy becomes more and more intense, more and more noticeable.

The prayer we utter at Neilah is that most urgent of all human prayers, the prayer of the last chance. The gates of heaven are closing. We only have a few minutes left.

When I see this great trembling multitude sitting before me at Neilah, I feel as if I am in the presence of a single trembling heart.

A deep joy is seeping out from the core of my being and filling me body and soul. It began as a kind of lightness. I felt it as soon as the shofar was sounded to signal the end of Yom Kippur.

During the Days of Awe, I was stripped of everything, all my hope, all the illusions to which I had been clinging. Now I feel clean and light and full of joy.

This is a commandment we fulfill not with a gesture or a word, but with our entire body. We sit in the sukkah with our entire body.

There is nothing to hold back. There is only rejoicing. The full harvest has come.