17 Sep Dvar Torah with Rabbi Josh Rosenfeld – Yom Kippur
ב״ה | ערב יום הקדוש ה’תשפ”ז
“Rabbi, where is God?”
Years ago, when I first began teaching High School seniors, I would pass around an index card and ask each student to write down their single greatest question about God and Judaism. The answers were anonymous, honest, often startling. All year, whenever there was a spare moment, we would pull one out and grapple with it.
Many of those cards have stuck with me over the years. Consider the following: “You talk about the holiness of Israel, the greater holiness of Yerushalayim, the still greater holiness of the Kodesh HaKodashim – and then you tell us God can be found anywhere. So which is it?”
I think my answer that day crystallizes what Yom Kippur (what the old country reverently called Yoim HaKudesh, or “The Holy Day”) is all about.
I once read an essay called “I Used to Be a Human Being,” by a writer describing his “distraction sickness”, a life of constant posts, notifications, and updates, feeding an audience of hundreds of thousands until it nearly broke him. He checked into a week-long silent retreat in the woods, devices locked away at the door.
Alone on a forest walk, he was suddenly overwhelmed. Childhood memories long buried rose to the surface. He collapsed at the base of a mossy redwood, on a carpet of fallen leaves, and wept for an hour with no one to text, no selfie to take, nothing to broadcast. He emerged changed, resolute, and returned to himself. Teshuva, really.
Where is God?
The Kotzker Rebbe told his chassidim that God is wherever we let God in – what Rav Shagar called מרחב האמונה, a safe space for the Divine. Rabbi Elazar Azkiri’s piyyut (liturgical poem) asks us to build Him a sanctuary within, בלבבי משכן אבנה. During this time of High Holidays, the Voice of our Beloved is knocking (Song of Songs 5:2), and Rav Soloveitchik tells us to remove our earmuffs and open the door. Our sages teach that heaven still whispers שובו בנים שובבים return, wayward children.
And yet, surely the whole world is already filled with Hashem’s glory, as the Zohar teaches: לית אתר פנוי מיניה, there is no place empty of Him. So why is the Kodesh HaKodashim (Holy of Holies in the Temple) holier than anywhere else? I think the answer is that God’s presence is everywhere and always; this is His world, after all, but the barriers between us and that presence are not everywhere equal. The Beit HaMikdash was the one place where almost none of those barriers remained. The holiness there was so exposed that an unprepared Kohen risked his life entering it; the Kohen Gadol spent the week before Yom Kippur sequestered in silence, and in the Temple’s more cynical years, a rope was tied to his ankle in case he never emerged. A residue of that holiness clings to the land of Israel still. It happens in time, too: Yom Kippur is our Beit HaMikdash b’zman, a temple built not of stone but of our thoughts, words, and deeds, from Elul’s first shofar to Yom Kippur’s Kol Nidre and onward to the closing prayers of Ne’ilah.
Dressed alike in white, without food or devices or feeds to scroll. We come with one goal, which is to be accepted back into God’s embrace, as individuals, families, and a community. To do Teshuva, and to walk out with a clean slate between us and our Creator. Every restriction of this day, the fast most of all, exists to clear that space, and to remind us how much of the year we spend behind walls of our own making.
Yom Kippur is our mossy redwood, surrounded, this time, by a forest of white, of family and community. It is a day of noble silence, broken by Kol Nidre’s ancient melody and the sound of fists against chests during Al Cheit and confession. On Yom Kippur, we answer the Kotzker’s call, the paytan’s plea, and Rav Soloveitchik’s imperative: to clear space and let God in, despite the distance that’s grown over the year.
So BCHA community, let us open the doors. Let us welcome in a שנה של שפע, a year of blessing; a שנה של אור ואהבה, a year of light and love; a year in which the deepest requests of our hearts are answered for good and a שנה טובה, in which each of us is written and sealed for life for ourselves, our families, our community, the Jewish people, and the world entire. גמר חתימה טובה