Sermon for Kol Nidre - 5768

At a party in 1961, two men, one a comedy performer and the other a comedy writer began a legendary conversation that became a classic comic skit. The party was hosted by Dick Van Dyke and the two men were Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Mel Brooks had just undergone painful surgery for gout and feeling some discomfort he quipped, "I feel like a 2000 year old man," which led Carl Reiner to begin questioning him what it's like to be a 2000 year old man and to describe the history that he had witnessed.
During the interview, Carl Reiner asks Mel Brooks, the 2,000 year old man, when did theology start, when did people begin to develop an awareness of God and believe in the Almighty. The 2,000 year old man answered, “Well, I’ll tell you. First there was this guy named Phil and Phil was big and Phil was strong. We were scared of Phil. Every day we would pray. ‘O Phil, please don’t hurt us. O Phil, please don’t hit us with that rock.’ And then one day, a bolt of lightning came out of the sky and struck Phil dead. It was at that moment we knew, ‘There’s someone bigger than Phil!’”
In ancient human history, we can see how people used theology to try to make sense of their world, the randomness of it and the order of it. They saw order and patterns in the movements of the sun, moon, stars and planets. They saw it in the tides and in the seasons and in every living thing. Yet death, disease and injury were random events which the innate human sense of ethics and fairness had trouble understanding. To explain the unexplainable in their world, they developed the idea of God or more accurately gods. Primitive man ascribed supernatural qualities to the sun and moon and all celestial bodies as well as to the major natural forces on earth such as wind and rain. As we became a more agrarian society, gods of rain and sun and gods of fertility became increasingly more important and their worship came to predominate religious life. The fear was that if we sinned, if we failed to appease these gods then we were condemned to drought and famine and ultimately death. The Canaanite religious cult which our ancestors encountered in the earliest days of Israel’s existence focussed a great deal of energy on worshipping these gods through fertility rites and cultic prostitution. When comparing Judaism with paganism, my medieval theology professor Rabbi Kravitz would make note of these Canaanite practices and jokingly begin to sing, “Give me that old-time religion.”
Back in July, Pope Benedict the 16th made a similar call for bringing back the old-time religion but it had nothing to do with pagan fertility rites and orgiastic rituals. What the Pope called for was the restoration of the antiquated Mass of the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent was the 19th ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church convened during the 16th century at a time of crisis for the Catholic Church. Catholic means universal and the Catholic church believed it was the embodiment and sole authority for Christianity. The Protestant Reformation, especially the Lutheran aspect, was a very serious threat to the authority of the Catholic church. The Council of Trent met on three distinct occasions over the years 1545-1563 and dogmatically restated Catholic doctrine, reasserting its primacy among Christian denominations. This reactionary council galvanized its followers, eliminated theological confusion among many Christians, and prompted a Counter Reformation which severely limited the spread of Protestant Christianity. The origins of catechism and the traditional theological doctrines of Catholicism especially those dealing with heaven and hell, original sin, resurrection, and salvation are found in the documents from the Council of Trent.
James Carroll, a Catholic and the author of the 2001 bestselling book Constantine’s Sword, an historical expose of the Catholic Church and their treatment of the Jews, wrote in the Boston Globe that the Council of Trent Mass that the Pope is advocating proposes a theology and an image of God that “more and more believers, including Catholics, simply do not recognize as the God we worship.” He goes on to say that the Pope is totally mistaken and misguided by taking this stand. James Carroll compares it to the Church’s stance in the days of the Council of Trent against Copernicus and scientific thinking. He equates it with the Pope denying science and claiming the Catholic Church’s exclusive position as the only authentic way to God. In his July 16th article, James Carroll chastises the Pope for failing to see that “the contemporary religious imagination has been transformed by understanding born of science. Once a believer has learned to think historically and critically, it is impossible any longer to think mythically.” He concludes his article by saying that the Pope’s call for a return to the Mass of the Council of Trent with its antiquated theology and anti-Judaism is a naive retreat into a fundamentalism that most believing Catholics in the 21st century have rejected.
One of the theological ramifications of the Council of Trent was the strengthening and soldifying of the doctrine of original sin. The Catholic concept of original sin is based on the story found in Genesis of Adam and Eve committing the grevious sin of eating of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. As punishment for their sin born out of temptation and lust, Adam and Eve were banished from the garden. Adam was forced to work for a living, Eve had to endure labor pains and human mortality became an eternal fact. In the letter to the Romans, Paul refers to Adam as the man who brought death into the world. The early church fathers interpreted this verse as equating sin with death and that Adam was guilty of bringing sin, what they called original sin, into the world. Although there were a series of debates for over a thousand years of church history regarding original sin and if it truly was sin and how it affects Catholic theology and liturgy, the Council of Trent dissolved all debates about original sin and repositioned it into one of the cardinal beliefs of the Catholic church linking it to all the sacraments especially baptism.
Comedians joke about Jewish guilt versus Catholic guilt. There is no contest. While Jews might feel guilty for not having achieved well enough in school, for not pleasing our parents, for not being good Jews, Catholics are guilty of original sin as soon as they are born. It is not a guilt caused by a transgression committed, a mistake made, a offense incurred; it is a guilt that is inescapable. It is not dependent on a misbegotten, misguided, or misinformed act, original sin is a state of being. And it becomes the constant lifelong struggle for Catholics to keep from returning to that state of being. Baptism washes it away but each Catholic person has to work their entire lives, pursuing confession, seeking communion and fulfilling the sacraments to keep oneself cleansed of the inherited stain of original sin. We say ‘schver tsu zein a yid’ it is tough to be a Jew but when it comes to sin, I think its tougher to be a Catholic.
For Judaism, sin is a mistake; whether committed voluntarily or involuntarily, whether by volition or by accident, it is still a misdeed for which we must repent, apologize and seek forgiveness. The word itself for sin, chet, comes from the sport of archery where it means to miss the target. A sin in Judaism is an act that requires a readjustment, a course correction, a reacquisition of the target. It is not an ineradicable stain on our soul. It is not a finite flaw in our character that will mark us and haunt us forever. It’s a mistake, it’s a goof, it’s a screw-up. Sin in Judaism is admitting that all of us are human, fallible and prone to faults and failings. None of us are expected to be perfect and none of us should aspire to be perfect. It is not possible. That is why we have the Ten Days of Repentance, that is why we have Rosh Hashanah, that is why we have Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, who is perhaps best known for his inspirational and healing book from 1980 entitled, “When Bad things Happen to Good People,” wrote about sin, guilt and forgiveness in his 1996 book “How Good Do We Have to Be?” In this book, Rabbi Kushner again tackles very profound universal human issues in a calm and healing fashion. He writes, “Life is not a spelling bee, where no matter how many words you have gotten right, if you make one mistake you are disqualified. Life is more like a baseball game, where even the best team loses one-third of its games and even the worst team has its days of brilliance. Our goal is not to go all year without ever losing a game. Our goal is to win more games than we lose, and if we can do that consistently enough, then when the end comes, we will have won it all." God does not expect us to be perfect; this is not part of human nature.
Kushner also explores the concept of original sin. He suggests that the Biblical story about original sin describes the discomfort God felt when Adam sinned. We are forced to feel the same stress when our children fail as when God sees us fail. Despite our children’ failings, we still love our children. Rabbi Kushner uses this fact to teach us that God will love us despite our failings, that humankind's spiritual inadequacies are inherent. Rabbi Kushner retells the Genesis story of Adam and Eve to demonstrate that the imperfections of humankind do not merit the loss of God's love, nor should they foster the guilt and anxiety that they often do in a society driven by a misguided preoccupation with perfection. For Rabbi Kushner, acceptance and forgiveness are the means for overcoming the insidious consequences of a preoccupation with perfection and leading towards wholeness and healing.
As we read in our liturgy for these Yamim Nora’im, these Days of Awe, God does not seek the death of sinners but that they should turn from their misguided ways and live. The purpose of this process of teshuvah is not self-degradation or self-negation. God is not looking for us to spiritually and emotionally beat ourselves up each and every Yom Kippur for the wrongs we have done, for the offenses we have committed, and for the people we have hurt. The end result, the ultimate goal of teshuvah is forgiveness and while that may come from outside ourselves either from our friends, our family members and maybe even God, the most important forgiveness is the one we give ourselves.
The Talmud suggests a numerical limit of three for forgiveness. We are required to ask three times for someone’s forgiveness. After that, the burden of obligation rest with the person who has refused to offer forgiveness. But how can a person offer forgiveness, if he or she has not learned how to forgive him or herself. Self-forgiveness is not a convenient way to excuse all our actions and avoid accountability and responsibility for them. On the contrary, self-forgiveness is the means by which we free ourselves from toxicity and emotional retardation. A person who cannot forgive him or her self will wallow in self-pity, self-recrimination and self-doubt ultimately living a selfish, unhealthy, and less productive life. A person, who cannot forgive him or her self, does not understand the nature of forgiveness and consequently, cannot forgive others.
My rabbinics professor Rabbi Norman Cohen taught me to always read the words of our rabbis with an acute awareness of the baggage they brought to bear on the discussion or interpretation. All of us, even the elite and most sophisticated among us, bring baggage with us. Our self-recriminations, our self-doubts, our resentments are the stuff of that baggage which we shlep around with us each and every day of our lives. How many of us still recall with shame and embarrassment that stupid and careless thing that we said or did that hurt that young man or woman that we liked? How many of us still feel the guilt and pain over an offensive remark or an unintentional slight made by us many years ago that drove away those we loved? What does it benefit us to keep carrying around that heavy, negative baggage? Will that shame or guilt or pain erase our actions? No. They are irretrievably in the past. We need to let them go.
Once we accept the fact that we will never be perfect, once we accept the fact that we are fallible and that nobody, not even God expects us or wants us to be perfect, once we admit without shame or guilt the failings in our behavior, discard the grudges and resentments we hold against ourselves, and take responsibility for who and what we are, then we will have truly practiced self-forgiveness and we can move forward towards wholeness and healing.
Rabbi Kushner wrote that the original sin is not what the Catholic Church says it is nor is it the temptation and lust of Adam and Eve, the original sin is believing that we cannot be loved because we are not perfect, because we have sinned. Adam and Eve believed they had lost God’s love after their sin. Children believe they have lost their parent’s love because they have sinned. And as adults, we carry this forward into every close personal relationship letting our past misdeeds poison us into seeing ourselves as unlovable and unworthy.
On this Yom Kippur, we pray for God’s forgiveness; that’s the easy part. On this Yom Kippur, let us do the difficult. Let us forgive ourselves. Let us wipe our own slates clean. Let us permanently eradicate our original sin. Let us give ourselves atonement and absolution and rid us of those self-doubts and self-recrimination and those feelings of shame and guilt, which we have carried around with us for far too many years. And if we do that, then we can forgive our friends, family members, fellow congregants and all those we love and be truly blessed with a good year of health, happiness and peace.
And let us say, Amen