If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game
If you are the healer, it means I’m broken and lame
And thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame
You want it darker, we kill the flame.
Hineni, Hineni - I’m ready my lord
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These lyrics are thought-provoking and somewhat troubling. Our holiday of Yom Kippur is similar. It is not what I would call a fun holiday.
Purim has costumes. Passover has creative rituals. Sukkot has the outdoors and the physical sensation of connecting to our world and our creator. Shabbat has rest. Rosh Hashanah holds the sweet hopefulness of a New Year. And unlike Yom Kippur, all of them have one other thing in common ... food.
And yet, we all do Yom Kippur. Many of us fast. Most of our community attends synagogue tonight, and will be present tomorrow from the morning all the way through the evening time. We choose to recall sad memories of loved ones who have passed on. We beat our chests as we admit fault after fault. Yom Kippur is the ultimate expression of the humility I spoke about on Rosh Hashanah. We are small. We have sinned. We have made mistakes - against others, against ourselves, against God.
Yom Kippur holds up a mirror to our inadequacies and foibles, our mistakes and our regrets.
I think that we choose to observe this difficult holiday because at a fundamental level, we know that we should confront these things. We want to confront these things.
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Leonard Cohen released the album, You Want it Darker, just 19 days before his death. The author of Pitchfork's review of the album wrote that The album lyrically references the encroaching blackness of death, the insularity of plumbing the soul ever-deeper, and a fresh fatalism toward the spinning world. These words describe the essence of Yom Kippur, don’t they? Today, we have the fatalism of Unetaneh Tokef, individual prayers of meditation and introspection, and Yom Kippur makes us acutely awareness of our own mortality.
I began this sermon with the first stanza from Cohen’s title song. It includes Hebrew chanting by Gideon Zelermyer, cantor of the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue in Cohen’s native Montreal. The one word that Cantor Zelermyer chants during the song is Hineni - here I am.
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Hineni is a powerful word. It occurs only eight times in our Torah. We heard its first use last week on Rosh Hashanah, during the chanting of the Akeidah: God decided to put Abraham to the test. God said to him, ‘Abraham,’ and Abraham said, ‘Hineni.’
When you’re around the house, and you call for someone in your family, you’re usually asking a question of geography. You want to know where someone is. But when God asks the whereabouts of Abraham, it’s a question of spirituality and intention: Abraham, I’m about to tell you something very important. Are you ready to hear it? Are you ready to do it? That is the question. Hineni is the answer.
Today, God asks each of us: Where are you?
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Leonard Cohen wrote several songs that employed Hebrew, but none is as well-known as Hallelujah. It’s been covered dozens of times, by a diverse range of musical artists including Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, k.d. lang, and Willie Nelson. Just one week after Cohen passed away, many of us were moved as Kate McKinnon opened Saturday Night Live with her own rendition.
Each stanza ends with the word, Halleulyah, as if that’s the only response to everything that comes before. This is the last stanza of the song:
*Maybe there’s a God above
All I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
And it’s not a cry that you hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah*
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A teacher of mine was talking to us about Moses on Mount Sinai. After being discovered by Pharoah’s daughter, after running awy from the only home he knew, after discovering God at the burning bush, after finally agreeing to lead the Israelite people, after 10 plagues and the splitting of the Red Sea, and after the incredible burden of leading the Israelites to freedom, Moses is alone with God. For 40 days. But this isn’t the remarkable thing about Moses’s story. It’s what happens next ... After those 40 days were over, Moses goes down the mountain to be with his people, to live a normal life. To live an imperfect, life that would be sometimes filled with misfortune and pain. And he chose to do so. That’s a broken hallelujah.
Some of us are sick, and still take time to volunteer at community events. Some of us have experienced tragedy, but make sure to comfort other families in our community. Some of us are struggling with relationships or finances or the demands of our jobs and yet still show gratitude to be alive. This is what it means to follow the command in our Torah portion tomorrow, Tivchar Chaim, choose life.
Yom Kippur reminds us that our lives our broken, but, much more profoundly, that life is a broken hallelujah.
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I’d like to share one more selection from the song:
*I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the lord of song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah*
Pirke Avot (2:21) teaches, You can not complete the work, but you can not desist from it.
There is rarely a perfect opportunity to do something. I could call this persion, if only things were better between us. I would do this project, if only I had more time and energy. We will always have if only's. But even though we do not have the perfect time, even though things are not oideal, we must do the work anyway, with nothing on our tongue but hallelujah.
The theme of Cohen’s song is the same as our liturgy today. We stand before God and say: We are not so arrogant and stiff-necked as to say before You, Adonai our God and God of all ages, we are perfect and have not sinned; rather do we confess: we have gone astray, we have sinned, we have transgressed.
The hallelujah of life’s joy and holiness is not a result of not making any mistakes. The hallelujah comes from accepting our mistakes, forgiving ourselves, forgiving others, and then working to do better. Choosing life.
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This Yom Yippur, each of us continues to write the lyrics of our lives. Let's make sure two words are written and lived: Hallelujah. Hineni.
Tonight and tomorrow, we do force ourselves to see our own brokenness. But we also see the beauty that’s strewn throughout our broken lives. We see it - all of it - and we say Hallelujah. But we can not stop there. We must also hear the question that God asks: Are you ready to move forward? Are you ready to live life? And we must say, Hineni.
