The Song for the Brokenhearted YK:5771

By now you have begun to familiarize yourselves with our wonderful new Mahzor, the Mahzor Lev Shalem. This production, more than a decade in the making, represents a great leap forward in the realm of spiritual publications created by the Conservative movement and intended for modern Jewry as a whole. Not only is it replete with scholarly explanations, spiritual kavanot, traditional and modern poetry, and a new, refined translation; but it is also brutally honest.

What do I mean by that? Well, take notice of the name that was chosen for this Mahzor, Mahzor Lev Shalem, the Mahzor of a Complete Heart. What’s so special about the name you might ask; but take a moment to glance at what lies just behind this title, and I think you will understand what I mean. To speak of a Complete Heart is to recognize the existence of a broken heart. To speak of wholeness, is to give credence to the reality of brokenness. To make mention of the possibility of healing is to admit the existence of intolerable pain.
And ain’t that the truth.

We all come to Temple on Yom Kippur from different perspectives. Some of us are soaring on the wings of recent successes, new life in our families and auspicious new beginnings in our professional lives. We come here to reflect, to give thanks, and to praise God for the many blessings in our lives.
But others of us, many of us, come here with the burden of our broken hearts. We ache from the stings of our shortcomings, we painfully grieve over the loss of loved ones in the year that was; we are frightened of our failing health, cognizant of cancer, fearful of the specter of painful diagnoses. For those of us who feel this way, we are still here to try to give thanks, to praise God for the relative blessings in our lives; but we also come here to cry, to scream, to beat our chests as though they were an extension of God’s own presence. Our hearts are broken, and we worry that they may never be complete again.

And sometimes it feels as though it is not only our hearts which are broken, it is our world as well.

In January the earth split and shattered from beneath the people of Haiti; killing nearly a quarter of a million people, and leaving many more homeless, harmed and in danger of disease and despair.

During Pesach, our own community here in Rhode Island suffered epic flooding, destroying homes, wiping out retirement nest eggs, further crippling our already stagnant economy.

At the very same time a deep-water oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and beginning what would become the single largest ecological disaster in the history of our country, with the end result being an estimated 205 million gallons of oil released into the once blue waters of the gulf.

This summer unprecedented wildfires raged in Russia, while a deluge of biblical proportions left twenty percent of Pakistan underwater.

Yes sometimes it truly feels as though the very heart of our natural world is breaking in two.

And finally, it seems as though our great country is broken as well.

Our economy continues to teeter on the edge of the dreaded double-dip recession. Some two years after the stock market’s collapse and the outrageous sins of Mortgage companies, Wall Street and Bernie Madoff, many of us are still struggling to make ends meet. We work harder for less money, we pay more for less, and we worry about the soundness of our financial futures.

In our political realm, things seem more broken than ever before. Hatred and intolerance abound, threatening to permanently bury pious concepts such as statesmanship, discourse and respectfully agreeing to disagree.
And the numbers reflect this sense of brokenness. In a recent poll, some 61% of respondents believe this country is heading in the wrong direction. Only 11% will admit to having faith in Congress, only a third will state their trust in our public school system, and less than half of Americans feel confident about their religious institutions.

So, with the pain of loss and the burden of our worries, with trepidation about a broken world and a broken country we sit here together on Yom Kippur and we ask ourselves a timeless, universal question: What is the cure for a this sense of brokenness? How can we learn to feel whole again? How can we hope to once again reassemble the pieces of a shattered faith, a shaken confidence, a broken heart?

Well, I believe the first thing that must give us hope is the knowledge that we are not alone. Friends, tonight and tomorrow we sit in the world’s largest support group. Almost a thousand in this room alone, nearly two thousand in the entire building, 14 million world-wide will take the time over the next twenty-five hours to sense their brokenness and yearn for a time of wholeness and holiness for the entire world. You must remember this as we strain, and cry and allow ourselves to feel the grief, the loss, the worry of the year that was; you are not alone. We are here with you.
Secondly, and just as importantly, this holy Jewish tradition of ours feels your pain. It has the vocabulary and the conceptual power to speak these words of brokenness with you! It comes from the power of our Torah: as Rivka Imeinu, Rebecca our foremother cried out from amidst the pain of her family’s conflict:
אִם-כֵּן לָמָּה זֶּה אָנֹכִי
“If this is how my life will be, then why do I even exist?”

It comes from the cries of the Prophet Jeremiah:
לָמָּה הָיָה כְאֵבִי נֶצַח וּמַכָּתִי אֲנוּשָׁה֙
“Why must my pain be endless, my wounds incurable?”

It comes from the poetry of our Psalmist:
וְאַתָּ֥ יְהֹוָה עַד-מָתָֽי:
“And You God, how long can you ignore my suffering!”

Yes, search your Bible and you will find the words which speak to your pain, which testify to the truth of the human condition: that we are not alone in our sufferings, no, our foremothers, our prophets and our poets know the song of the broken heart.

Now I suppose we could stop here and say; see you are not alone, not only does everyone in this room share your brokenness right now, but there are words from our sacred texts which also echo your pain, your suffering, your loss. But something tells me that still wouldn’t be enough.

You see no matter how many times we reach out to a friend and say, I know how you feel; no matter how often we are offered platitudes and canned responses to our pain, it does not bring us closer to the only answer which can ever hope to please us: God’s answer; God’s response to our own personal suffering and to the suffering that exists in our world.

For this answer we will need to search deeper.

There is a famous Hasidic story which tells of a conversation between an illiterate tailor and the renowned Master, Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchiv.

The great Rebbe is curious as to what the tailor, who cannot read, does during the Yom Kippur services since he can not recite the prescribed prayers.
The tailor reluctantly replies: Each Yom Kippur I speak to God, and I tell God that the sins for which I am expected to repent are minor ones, they are relatively inconsequential: I may have kept leftover cloth instead of returning it to the patron, I may have over-charged from time to time, and certainly I am guilty of forgetting to say my prayers with regularity.

But You God, You have committed truly grave sins. You have removed mothers from their children and children from their mothers. You have let thousands starve, others be struck with debilitating illness, and you have let countless prayers go unanswered.
So let’s make a deal. If you pardon me, I am ready to pardon you as well.

Rebbe Levi Yitzhak paused for a moment as he contemplated the wisdom of the tailor’s teaching. But then his anger overtook him. “Indeed you are not only an illiterate but you are a fool as well! You were too lenient with God,” said the Rabbi, “You should have insisted that God immediately bring redemption to the entire world. For surely God would have been forced to oblige.”

This story is at once supposed to be heretical and theologically liberating; it is meant to be funny as well as enlightening. Here the tailor teaches us the ultimate lesson in the piety of hutzpah. The truth is that our sins are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. Surely we should reflect upon them and try to do better in the year to come, but few if any among the sinners of the world are guilty of the egregious acts the tailor ascribes to God in this legend.

As audacious as this story might sound to us, it too speaks a truth to the human condition: Many of us can’t help but ask, and just where has God been through all of this? Where was God this year as our hearts were breaking due to the crumbling of our most sacred relationships or as we teetered on the edge of financial ruin? Where was God this year when the earth split and swallowed the people of Haiti? Where was God this year when a baby was made an orphan, or a mother was made childless due to cancer?

Well, I am here to offer up a deal to you on this Kol Nidre night. If we can find it in our hearts to learn to forgive: to forgive God for the imperfection of our world, to forgive our religion for its frailty, to forgive those around us for the harm that they have caused: then like Rebbe Levi Yitzhak before me I am willing to offer nothing less than salvation for the world.

So tonight, it is time for us to forgive God. We must forgive God for God’s silence in the face of our heartfelt prayers, and we must learn to recognize that silence does not always indicate absence. We must forgive God for our flawed world, the disasters which befall us without warning, the harshness of inexplicable disease and the sudden finality of death.

But we must not let ourselves entirely off the hook either. There is enough food in the world so that no one should go hungry, if only we could learn how to use it effectively, instead of feeding our insatiable need for luxury. We must recognize that natural disasters are happening with frightening frequency in part due to our own addiction to warming the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses. Let us remember that perfecting a world is a partnership between divinity and humanity and while we must learn to forgive God for not creating a flawless world we must also take responsibility for our own failures as stewards of this precious gift.

Also, tonight, as a cure for our broken-heartedness it is time to forgive our religion. It is time to let Judaism off the hook for its shortcomings.
For all the times it failed you in your moments of crisis. For the moments of disconnect you have felt when confronted by an anachronistic law, a chauvinist concept or a text which feels embarrassing in the rosy light of modernity: Forgive it. Recognize that Judaism, like any religion is by its nature a frustratingly flawed attempt at reifying and ritualizing a holy relationship with an ineffable God, but as Jews, it’s the one we’ve got. And in my opinion, and in the opinion of our generations, it represents the best attempts ever offered at defining the indefinable.

And since we are forgiving Judaism, why don’t we forgive the Synagogue as well. Forgive Temple Emanu-El, forgive us for the times we have not always met your needs, and forgive your rabbis and cantor too. Forgive us, for that time we didn’t call, or for not immediately remembering your name. Pardon us, for we are only human; and being human, we are limited, imperfect and prone to personal and interpersonal failings. Forgive these things tonight.

But you must not let yourselves off the hook so easily either. I hope that you will take the time to examine over this next day the amount of effort you have invested in learning about your religion, in experiencing the daily rhythms of your Temple, in calling your clergy and getting to know them, and allowing them to get to know you. Let this year be a year of forgiveness, but also a year of rededication as we work together to build newer, stronger relationships with our Jewish tradition.

Finally, if we really want to heal our broken hearts, and this is the hardest one, I know, we must forgive each other. The neighbor who wronged you somehow – forgive them. The old friend who disappeared in a time of need – forgive them. The family member who slighted you, who disappointed you, who broke your heart in the first place – forgive them. Because these things can never be replaced: a good neighbor, an old friend, and our own flesh and blood. The time for forgiveness has come.

There is a famous teaching by the Hasidic master the Kotzker Rebbe who said: That in this world, “There is nothing as whole as a broken-heart.” What I take this to mean is that from within brokenness comes the potential for wholeness, from amidst loneliness hides the potential for communion, within pain there is the possibility of healing once again.

Let this be the year when we mend our hearts through the power of forgiveness: Forgiving our God for the fragility of our world, forgiving our Judaism for its flaws, and forgiving our friends and our families for their imperfections.

And so I pray this year for a world of forgiveness. For a world of forgiveness is by definition a redeemed world. And like Rebbe Levi Yitzhak before me, I can guarantee you that the power of forgiveness is such that it will ascend to the very throne of heaven, God’s holy seat of judgment on this Yom HaDin, and it will ensure salvation for the Jewish people and the entire world.

The only question is, will we actually have the courage to do it?