In a midrash, a commentary, on the Yom Kippur parsha, the Zohar imagines that when God was getting ready to create humans, God consulted the Torah. Timelines don’t have to make sense when you’re talking about the Eternal. In the story, God consulted the Torah, and the Torah said to God, “Do you really want to create a human? They are destined to transgress. They are destined to provoke you and make you angry. If you were to deal with humans justly, really giving them what they deserve, you’d just be flooding the planet over and over again, Noah style. It’s going to be a mess. The Torah’s verdict, as this story goes, was basically that humans might not even be worth it. Now, this is just a story. Not necessarily the way I actually think about God, or Torah, or the way you actually think about God, or Torah. But stories are good for making us think. So think about this one.
God was going to create humans anyway, whether the Torah thought it was a good idea. Clearly God’s mind was set. And so God pushed back against the Torah. God replied, “Is it for nothing that I’m called, El Rachum v’Chanun, Erech Apayim – compassionate and gracious, slow to anger?” And then, to prove it, God created Teshuvah, our ability to realign ourselves and return to our best selves. God basically created repair. And not only is God talking to the Torah; God is also talking to Teshuvah, saying, “I wish to create humanity in the world, on the condition that when they make you, Teshuvah, from their transgressions, you will be ready to forgive their transgressions and atone for them.” And so, the Zohar teaches us, every single hour, Teshuvah stands ready for us human beings.
But what are you actually supposed to do when the world is on fire? Or when your country, or your city is on fire? Or when your marriage, your home, your family is on fire? Or when your body, your brain, your physical or your mental health is on fire? Or when the fires are so intense that as a defense mechanism, you’ve just become numb? What are you supposed to do? What does teshuvah look like when the problem is enormous? When it involves so much beyond your control?
There are plenty of examples of what the Torah warned God about. I imagine each of us can come up with a long list. For me, I’m thinking about war, about violence. I’m thinking about kidnapping and deportation and imprisonment, thinking about families being separated from one another. I’m thinking about gunshots on the street. I’m thinking about depression and anxiety, loneliness and rage. I’m thinking about the relentless challenges of caregiving. I’m thinking about boredom, fear, yelling at loved ones, and fantasizing about dark stuff. The human condition is wildly varied, but a lot of it hurts. If the heaviness on you is different from the heaviness that’s on me, I see you, I hear you. The list of examples could go on and on.
Cordovero, the medieval kabbalist, gives us insight into this moment in his commentary on one of the darkest moments in the Torah: Noah’s Ark. It’s so weird how we put the ark and the animals on children’s nursery furniture, because thinking about it now, it is not appropriate for children! In the story of Noah, practically everyone is destroyed! Imagine your scariest nightmares about climate horror, or nuclear war, it’s terrifying. And this is the set up Cordovero gives to start talking about teshuvah. Because it’s really hard to imagine what repair could possibly look like sometimes. When you see crazy stuff when you open the news. When you’re deep in a financial hole. When you can’t stay married but you can’t get divorced. When you’re in bad physical pain all the time. We’ve all got at least something that feels impossible to get out of, or to come back from.
So Cordovero is like, fair enough, but whatever is going on, it isn’t worse than the mabul. It isn’t worse than the great flood. And after the mabul, after the great flood, a lot of bad things kept happening, but there was also teshuvah. And it looked like this, according to Cordovero: Noach built an altar to God, and burned different animals so that the smoke would literally go up to the sky. Not because God is in the sky, but because God felt hard to reach, or unrelatable, and so Noach did something, anything, to symbolize a kind of reuniting with God.
And, the Torah tells us, וַיָּ֣רַח יְהֹוָה֮ אֶת־רֵ֣יחַ הַנִּיחֹ֒חַ֒ God smelled the pleasing odor of that meat and said okay, I like it. There’s not going to be a flood just like this again. I’ll never destroy absolutely all of it; never completely shatter the world. And Cordovero calls Noach’s burning of that meat “teshuvah.” But do not get it confused: The important thing here is not burning meat. The important thing here is not some specific ritual. In tomorrow’s haftarah, the prophet Isaiah’s going to make it really clear that fasting and burning animals aren’t necessarily the kinds of teshuvah that God wants.
What makes humanity worth creating is any sincere intentional action that demonstrates that we are trying – to get closer to our fellow humans. To get closer to a relationship with the divine. To get closer to a feeling of gratitude, of possibility, of repair and healing and rectifying the wrongs and the floods and horrors. To do one reparative action at a time. To acknowledge the ways in which it’s true that the world isn’t completely shattered; that we are still all connected even as we bomb and shoot and abuse and ignore each other. And ourselves. For Noach, teshuvah was an attempt at reconnecting from a perspective of gratitude and abundance after a trauma that could have left him completely bitter, egocentric, and terrified. Instead, he built a bridge. The bridge was just made out of meat smoke – it was, as we would say now, symbolic – but he built it and it showed an intention towards healing. That is a step in the way of teshuvah.
Cordovero says something else too. He says “Binah hi teshuvah.” “Understanding is teshuvah.” It’s the notion that makes Cordovero think of Noach expressing hope for repair with God in the aftermath of the Great Flood. “Understanding is teshuvah.” And the thing you have to understand about Cordovero is that he was an early scholar of the Zohar. A next generation medieval scholar. And in the Zohar they are really into these different ways of talking about God, through talking about aspects of God, the Sefirot; these divine emanations. It’s that map of ten dots that you might have seen in a kabbalistic diagram; those are the Sefirot. At the very top of the map, it’s Keter – God at God’s most mind-blowing and transcendent, at one with everything that is. But that kind of absolute oneness is impossible to really comprehend with our human limitatations, so then you have other emanations or aspects of God in the middle – things like loving kindness and justice and wisdom and understanding. Binah. Binah, or understanding, which, Cordovero said, is teshuvah. And at the bottom, you have Shechinah – God’s presence within us, which anyone can feel when we really tap in. Like I was talking about on Rosh Hashanah morning.
So Binah, or understanding, Cordovero says, is teshuvah. But why? What’s understanding got to do with repair? Because on the map of the sefirot, it’s right above Gevurah, or Din – justice, harsh judgment, power, boundaries. Binah is right above it, right between it and Keter, endless transcendent divinity. And I think that’s why Cordovero says that “it is the way of Binah, Understanding, to sweeten all of the judgments, the Dinim, and to nullify their bitterness.” Understanding is one step closer to Ultimate Transcendence, and so it’s got some extra perspective to offer to Dinim, harsh judgment, justice, boundaries, all that, and it transforms the judgment. It drips that sweet context, that valuable perspective, onto the judgment. Understanding drips sweetness and expansiveness and transcendence onto the harsh judgments. And so, Cordovero says, Understanding is Teshuvah. Understanding is what gets us from punishment to healing, repair, and reunification. Just like Noach burning meat into the air and thinking about what got him into this mess, and what enabled him to survive, and how God came to unleash so much pain and destruction. That connective effort, the signal that good will and sincere effort would become facets of the human condition, caused God to let go, the story goes, of the desire to create another great flood. It sweetened the harsh judgment.
We can imagine our judgment drizzled with so much sweet sweet honey of mystical understanding that it dissolves. But what do we do with this enlightenment? In particular, what do we do with it when our world is fire? What does this kind of teshuvah look like? In a few weeks, I am going to do what I can only describe as my equivalent of burning meat into the sky in the wreckage of a great flood. I’m going to try and take a specific, connective action that I have the capacity for, if only barely. I am going to try to make a move that feels like teshuvah, to me, in one of the areas where I’ve felt the most pain and bafflement.
I’m going to go back to Israel for the first time since before October 7th. For the first time in years. I’m going to fly there right after one of your Bar Mitzvahs. I’m going to spend the night with a dear friend and her family just outside Tel Aviv, meet her new baby, now a toddler, and see how her older kids have grown. She’s so Israeli, she taught me how to use my CitiMini as a double stroller. You pick up the big kid and put them on top of the sunshade. It worked for us for like a year. She was my chevruta back in the day. I love her. I’m going to take in everything I can that I love about Israel in a single day: a big Israeli breakfast I hope, the Hebrew language, the smells of herbs along the footpaths, the names of the street signs, lots of indescribable things.
Then the next morning, I’m going to the West Bank with a group of rabbis for what’s called a Protective Presence trip. We’re going to be volunteering, supporting a group of Palestinians in their olive harvest, and, hopefully, deterring any violence that might come their way. There’s been a lot of violence in the West Bank lately; a number of Israeli settlers intimidating, attacking, and in some instances, even killing Palestinian people in their farms and villages. I guess the settlers feel like that land should be theirs, by right of the Torah, and so they’re taking it back by whatever means necessary. I don’t think they’re going to see me and some other progressive American rabbis there hanging out with their Palestinian neighbors and think, “Aw, a lady rabbi wants us to be nice, so let’s be nice.” But apparently, from what I hear, the more witnesses present, the less likely all-out violence is to occur. That’s the hope. And also, I keep thinking about a talk I went to, with an Israeli and a Palestinian, Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah, who do peace work together. Abu Sarah said that the first time he ever met a Jew who wasn’t carrying a gun that was meant to keep him at bay, was a Jew who was on one of these Protective Presence Trips. He said that was the first encounter that made him think he might be able to get involved in the peace movement. And so, for three nights and four days, I’m going to be staying with a Palestinian family that I don’t know yet, and trying to get to know them and their community, and develop my own understanding, build connections, and sweeten my own judgments, including the idea that I am powerless in this terrible situation.
After those three nights and four days, I’ll go back to Jerusalem, the city where I lived for an academic year, and try to breathe as much of it in as I can in a few hours. I’ll get together with a couple of my favorite professors that I studied with there. I’ll try to breathe in as much of their perspectives and their presence as I can. And then I don’t know where I’m spending the night, but I have to be at the airport by like 2am, and fly all day, and get home not quite in time for Shabbat but kind of, and then I have another one of your Bar Mitzvahs in the morning. I tried to do this during my sabbatical. I couldn’t get a flight because of the war.
It would be really easy for me to not do all this. It’s actually kind of crazy for me to do this. But that’s why I haven’t been to Israel in years. That’s why I continue to feel more and more distant from it all, more useless in the horror of it all. It’s inconvenient. It’s complicated. There’s pain. There’s messiness. It’s an emotional rollercoaster. But I feel compelled to do this. It’s an attempt to connect, and develop my limited yet sacred understanding to sweeten my bitter yet sacred judgments and turn it all into something like teshuvah.
On Yom Kippur, we will ourselves to believe that we can still take that one next connective step, that one more reparative behavior. Because a simple act of outreach, of aid, of healing, for another, or for ourself, really does require some degree of emunah, of faith, or at least of optimism that our good works mean something. It has the possibility of being a constructive response in the face of a flood.
“Then,” the Zohar continues, “on this day [of Yom Kippur]… all these maps shine, glowing in radiant joy, until all is sweetened, and then all judgments are bathed in light.” The Zohar literally says, On Yom Kippur, there is a path forward that we can see. On Rosh Hashanah, we’re like, I want to make a change! I want to do a thing! I want to make teshuva! But what?? But how?? And the the Zohar here tells us that on Yom Kippur, whatever it is that you’re thinking about, that you think, oh, maybe this could be the helpful next step, but is it really gonna be that helpful? Maybe you could have this hard conversation, or maybe you could take this hobby up, or do this kind of volunteer work, or maybe you could make this crazy shift in your life, but is it really gonna do any good?
If you’re thinking that, that is the map lighting up in your mind. On Yom Kippur, you’re given permission to get excited about this thing that feels crazy, excited enough that you make a plan to do it; and that’s teshuvah. On Yom Kippur, we imagine a roadmap. We can even like the map. We can dare to be excited about it, and think it’s sweet. It can look bright to us. No matter how hopeless everything has seemed. No matter how bad things actually are. You, now, sitting here, in the wreckage of the flood, can envision a map within you with a single next step marked on it, and you can believe that it’s meaningful, and that if you put in the effort to that that meaningful thing, it’s going to have an impact – on you, on the world, on God.
God says to Noach, God says to us, “So long as the earth endures, Seedtime and harvest, Cold and heat, Summer and winter, Day and night Shall not cease.” There’s a way in which nature does go on forever, and it’s powerful to examine our place in the cycle, in the civilization, in the planet, in God. From our place in the whole, we take steps towards teshuvah. That possibility, that lifeline, has been with us for as long as we’ve existed. Just as day and night exist, so too do rupture and reconnection; transgression and teshuvah. Today, the map, like a constellation, lights up before us. We plan our next move. We begin to light a fire.