Kol Nidrei 5786 Sermon

When Purity Gets in the Way

And why I want to see us dive in our white dresses into the chaos

Rabbi Hannah Spiro, Kol Nidrei 5786

Have I told you about the time Mayim Bialik from Jeopardy, Big Bang
Theory, and Blossom got a little annoyed with me? In 2017 a Black-led March
for Racial Justice was scheduled for the anniversary of the 1919 Elaine Race
Riot, where hundreds of Black sharecroppers were murdered in Arkansas
while protesting against unfair wages. The anniversary happened to be on
Yom Kippur that year. It was a meaningful date to the organizers, and it was
when they could get a permit. None of the organizers happened to be Jewish,
but once they realized the conflict, they contacted me through a mutual friend
to provide a quote for their statement of apology to the Jewish community.
They told me that they felt bad for inadvertently excluding Jews, that they
looked forward to working with the Jewish community on future dates, and
that theirs was an honest, stupid mistake, which they didn’t want to let ruin
the whole march. I absolutely sympathized. So I wrote a quote about how the
Jewish community would be there with them in spirit, that I found meaningful
what they would be doing at the same time as our prayer, and that maybe
some of us would even be able to attend the march between services. In fact,
many of us at Hill Havurah did just that, because they literally marched down
East Capitol Street as the last of us stragglers were getting out of services, so
some of us walked with them. It was super cool, honestly. It made that Yom
Kippur deeply memorable for me.
Well. I learned an important lesson that year, which was to make sure
to see any statement with my name on it before it goes out. Their letter didn’t

end up being an apology. It was more of a “this is what’s happening FYI” with
my quote tacked onto it. That was my bad, I guess, for not insisting on seeing
the final draft. But honestly, I stand by what I said, and I don’t apologize for
marching with them. A lot of Jews were upset, including Mayim Bialik, who
wrote on Facebook, “anyone else think that’s absurd? …it automatically
excludes a distinct portion of people who historically have stood up for racial
equality in enormous ways,” and “trust me: it’s on every calendar they
checked before setting the date.” Ahhh, I don’t know! I mean maybe? But
maybe not! I don’t know if we should assume the organizers were aware of
the full significance of Yom Kippur. When I talked to them, they hadn’t even
known that Black Jews existed! But after the mistake went public, believe me,
they were hearing from Jews. Mostly, complaining Jews.
And now I’m getting deja vu. I see us – I see me, sometimes – yearning
for an opportunity to collaborate with people who share the same goals that
we have, whatever they might be. More than once, I’ve been involved in
meaningful work on a cause that I share with the organizers, but then, in one
way or another, I’ve encountered behavior or statements that feel grossly
insensitive to Jews. Sometimes, it feels downright antisemitic. I know I’m not
alone; I’ve heard the same thing from a number of you. And at that point, we
often feel compelled to drop out of the activity altogether, or maybe even start
to see would-be allies in community building and community welfare as
enemies.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m overly picky about the groups and the people
that I’ll work with. Is it that I need the perfect allies? Or is that I need the
perfect excuse to prioritize other things? I feel like if we were there in great
enough numbers, we would be in the room when the anti-semitic statement

was getting made, and we could talk back. Am I being naive? It just feels like a
bad look if the only time people hear from the Jewish community is when
we’re calling them out for anti-semitism. We can’t just pop in and pop out.
We have to be in the room. Be in the movement. Lend a hand. Build trust.
This applies on the left and on the right. Jews need to be present if we want
our interest, histories, and sensitivities taken into account.
Anti-semitism infuriates me. We’ve seen powerful politicians espouse
conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers, about controlling the weather,
about targeting the victims of Covid-19. It’s so crazy you have to laugh, right?
When we see swastikas graffitied in our neighborhood, I am quickly reminded
of a super famous celebrity lifting up that very symbol in a very public way
this past winter, and it’s hard to just roll my eyes and laugh. We’ve had a
teacher in our community tell kids that the Holocaust happened because the
Jews ruined Christmas. We have multiple schools in our community that
engage in zero Holocaust education throughout all of middle school.
It feels antisemitic that I’m meant to feel self conscious about calling
antisemitism out. There’s this idea that we’re meant to lift up the importance
of the respect and dignity of all people – except Jews; we’re fine, and if you
don’t agree, you’re the problem. I hate that. And then you have the very real
fact that antisemitism is so often used as a weapon to turn us against other
people. When people are called out for antisemitism and they haven’t even
been antisemitic, it just makes the very real antisemitism that does exist feel
like a boy who cried wolf. That’s dangerous. It’s not fair. And then, of course,
there’s the antisemitism that perks up around the topic of Israel and Zionism.
Why would someone see my Star of David and assume that I’m okay with
Palestinians starving to death? Why would they hear me say I want a safe,

secure, peaceful Jewish state, and assume that I don’t want the same thing for
Palestine? I’m a human being, and like most human beings, I have empathy
for other human beings. But even if I didn’t – even if I had so much
intergenerational trauma or education or whatever you want to call it that I
was really fully focused on myself and my own tribe – for people to hate my
tribe unequivocally, or even just hold us to a high standard than others, would
sort of just be proving me right.
Antisemitism is not fair. It’s not rational, and it’s not okay. But it does
indeed exist. People have been raised not liking Jews for a long, long, long,
long time. If you’re raised not to like someone or something, continuing on
that legacy is the natural thing to do. It would be more weird if it did change.
So if we want to avoid people who are antisemitic, if we want to avoid people
who engage in antisemitism, if we want to avoid organizations and
communities and experiences that attract people who say antisemitic things
sometimes, we have ample opportunities to isolate ourselves. It’s not going to
be hard to do.
I don’t think it’s fair for us as Jews to have to be the prime fighters of
antisemitism, just like I don’t think it’s fair for Black people to have to bear the
burden of antiracist work. In a perfect world, we could all sit back and heal
while our allies fought for us, and then we could take turns.
But we are sitting here, in the real world, on Yom Kippur. We are
entering the Day of Atonement. And so we have to be real about our own
behaviors and patterns that need shifting. This is a very beautiful, yet very
broken world. It’s messed up that we as a community should have to do
teshuvah around the way we respond to antisemitism because there shouldn’t
be antisemitism in the first place, and it shouldn’t be on us to end it. But we

can’t ignore the reality of the situation. So we have to use this time of tough
introspection and brutal honesty, and open our minds to think about how we
can make things better.
There was a rabbi who lived in the 1200s, Rabbeinu Yonah Gerondi.
Rabbeinu Gerondi really disliked the teachings of Maimonides, a recent
predecessor, and he went beyond the healthy critique that is typical and
valued in Judaism. He tried to ban Maimonides’ books. Then he led a group in
publicly burning them. Almost a decade later, he was still telling anyone who
would listen all the ways in which Maimonides’ writing was deeply
problematic – until he saw others follow suit, but at an even more intense
level. Twenty-four wagon-loads of volumes of the Talmud were burned in the
same place Rabbeinu Gerondi had chosen to burn Maimonides’ works. At that
point, Gerondi realized how wrong he’d been – not in the substance of his
critiques of Maimonides, but in the way he’d attacked him. Gerondi spent the
rest of his life making teshuvah – and the three books he wrote about that
process became the works that he’s now known for. I’d like to share an
excerpt from one of them, Sha’arei Teshuvah – the Gates of Return, or
Repentance:
“There are many people for which the light of repentance is obstructed.
For since they are innocent and pure in their own eyes, they do not try to
repair their actions, as it appears to them they are [already] rectified, when in
actuality they sin greatly to God. Is it not written (in Ecclesiastes), ‘For there
is no righteous man on earth who does what is best and doesn’t sin?’ And
behold they are like a sick person who does not feel his sickness, so he does
not think of a cure. So his sickness constantly gets worse, until he is not able
to be healed…” (S.T. 2:8).

I love how universal this message is. Gerondi quotes the Tanakh saying
that literally *everyone* misses the mark in some way. We’re all innocent and
pure in our own eyes – we understand our intentions, we know our
backstories. We get where we are coming from. But that can’t be the end of
the story. We have to hold ourselves gently, and comfort ourselves because it
really is so hard and it really is so unfair, and then we have to hold ourselves
accountable. And in this instance, we have to locate the ways we’ve let both
the reality and the spectre of antisemitism alienate us and dislodge us from
our deepest values, and we’ve got to work towards healing, as individuals and
as a people.
This year has undeniably been a time of great pain and trauma. Do I
have to keep listing the reasons? Mortal fear. Moral injury. We all have a
different list but my god do we have a list. Our Holocaust and pogrom trauma
is activated. It has been triggered, again and again, by the anti-semitism that
truly does exist, right, left and center. It’s not just shootings and bomb
throwing – but it’s clearly also that. It’s the kind of anti-zionism that looks
more like a trendy way to forget Jewish history rather than a thoughtful way
to lift up Palestinian lives. It’s the kind of anti-anti-zionism that weaponizes
one side’s political campaign against another, using Jews as pawns in that
fight. And this might sound unrelated, but in my gut I it is so not: Our
Holocaust trauma is also triggered by atrocities taking place in our own city
not to Jews, by and large, but to our fellow humans. The checkpoints, the
disappearing, the violence. When I see those videos of people with a certain
look or name getting tackled and shoved into an unmarked van, it is nearly
impossible for me not to feel chills from the ghostly echoes of the Holocaust.
There’s no shortage of triggers. It has been a hard time to be Jewish. And in

the midst of such chaos, we are probably that much more likely to miss the
mark. It’s understandable. And if we’re too sensitive to examine ourselves
and to diagnose the sickness, so to speak, we’ll never get to the place of
thinking of a cure.
I would like to believe that we can be triggered, and in pain, and, like
Rabbeinu Gerondi taught, we can be loving and compassionate with ourselves
and one another through that pain. We can make teshuvah without a perfect
set-up for that teshuvah. We can be devoted participants in the really
important community–building and service work that is going to put us in
very close proximity to people who, due to ignorance or prejudice, are going
to say antisemitic things. We can do important work there, and, yes, we can
try to minimize that antisemitism. In public schools, in local activism, in the
way we move through the world. We have to be willing to get our ears dirty
and listen to some things that we don’t like to hear.
Tomorrow, we’ll read the words of the prophet Isaiah, calling us out for
our incomplete teshuvah. It’s not enough to fast. It’s not enough to pray. We
are supposed to let the oppressed go free. We are supposed to share our food
and our homes. We are supposed to stop hating on other people and live with
compassion and liberation as our guiding values. It’s so easy to see people’s
slogans and oversimplification and stupid, cruel assumptions and to get
cynical and just enter the fetal position and stay there. But Yom Kippur is
about reclaiming our Judaism, a Judaism in which we truly believe that every
human life has value and inherent dignity. It’s about challenging ourselves to
take that next step in teshuvah – the one that feels uncomfortable but right.
What feels emotionally edgy but ethically correct?

Tomorrow, Isaiah is going to call us to break free of the fear that keeps
us disconnected from our best, most righteous selves. Yes, we may be wearing
white and we are envisioning a pure, fresh start for the year, but the goal is
not to surround ourselves with purity. The goal is not to remain untainted by
the chaos and the complexity of the world. The goal is to dive in there and to
trust that we can remain righteous on the inside, and bring that righteousness
into the mess. We can speak our truth and speak our care, love each other and
ourselves, be humans and be holy. Our work is messy, but it must be done –
and we need other people, people who are often very different from ourselves,
to work with. I want us to have more tolerance for the mess. This year, in
5786, there is going to be a lot of work to do. I want us to be able to show up
for each other while we’re doing it – with balance and with compassion. I
want us to be gentle, but I don’t want us to be passive. It is not going to be
perfect or always feel good, but I hope our teshuvah-mindedness can make it
feel right. We are, necessarily, all in this together. This year, I want us to find
it within ourselves to walk that very cobbled path. I would rather see us show
up and fall and hurt ourselves and get back up a million times over than just
barricade ourselves at home. May we find patience, purpose, courage, and
community along our way. This year, may we find the comfort we know we
deserve, and may we step up to be the people that we know we have within
us. G’mar chatimah tovah.