There are times in life that rivet us on what's core and strip away the rest. In those moments, we can enter a tunnel of love and be transformed. If we're purposeful, or lucky, we can experience these times long before our last time. We can experience Eckhart Tolle's secret to life: we can die before we die – so that we can live. |
By Rabbi David Evan Markus
Note: These remarks mention current Mideast turmoil. New York's Rules Governing Judicial Conduct ban me from making public comment that might cause my impartiality reasonably to be questioned, including about the Mideast conflict's root causes or the merits of views about it. Instead, I focus my remarks on the spirituality of risking our hearts to renew them.
Gut yontif on this holy Kol Nidre night of shimmering light.
As we have done throughout these Days of Awe for 5785, each of us begins tonight by acknowledging, as medieval poet Yehudah HaLevi put it, לִבִּי בַּמִזְרַח (“My heart is in the East”). We turn our hearts east yearning for a just and lasting peace for Israel and her neighbors.
We’ve been building our High Holy Day theme of love, Judaism’s beating heart much as Israel is Judaism’s ancestral home. As we’ve seen, Judaism’s love is more than an emotion: it’s a way of life based on creativity, relationship, morality and courage. We’ve seen that Judaism’s core mitzvah is to love – וְאָהַבְתָ לְרֵעַךָ כָּמוֹךָ (love another as yourself) – not to be loved, and that this core mitzvah has tremendous implications for how we are called to live.
On this sacred night of atonement, we take up love’s implications for atonement, our spiritualized time to get right with our best selves and with the One we call God – the Infinite, the Universe, the Eternal. Yom Kippur gives us a potent toolkit for this moment. Being together in community – because we’re more whole together. Focusing on ultimate concerns of our lives – to help renew our lives. Focusing on mortality – to remind us that life is precious and time is limited. “The secret to life,” as Echkart Tolle said, “is to die before you die.” If we fast or wear white, these Yom Kippur rituals also remind us to lift from the physical to the spiritual – all to heighten our awareness.
In Israel, heightened awareness has been built into seemingly every minute lately. Take for example the tunnel of love – not the old fashioned amusement park ride, or the 1987 Bruce Springsteen song and hit album by the same title, but a very different tunnel of love.
This tunnel of love.
Note: These remarks mention current Mideast turmoil. New York's Rules Governing Judicial Conduct ban me from making public comment that might cause my impartiality reasonably to be questioned, including about the Mideast conflict's root causes or the merits of views about it. Instead, I focus my remarks on the spirituality of risking our hearts to renew them.
Gut yontif on this holy Kol Nidre night of shimmering light.
As we have done throughout these Days of Awe for 5785, each of us begins tonight by acknowledging, as medieval poet Yehudah HaLevi put it, לִבִּי בַּמִזְרַח (“My heart is in the East”). We turn our hearts east yearning for a just and lasting peace for Israel and her neighbors.
We’ve been building our High Holy Day theme of love, Judaism’s beating heart much as Israel is Judaism’s ancestral home. As we’ve seen, Judaism’s love is more than an emotion: it’s a way of life based on creativity, relationship, morality and courage. We’ve seen that Judaism’s core mitzvah is to love – וְאָהַבְתָ לְרֵעַךָ כָּמוֹךָ (love another as yourself) – not to be loved, and that this core mitzvah has tremendous implications for how we are called to live.
On this sacred night of atonement, we take up love’s implications for atonement, our spiritualized time to get right with our best selves and with the One we call God – the Infinite, the Universe, the Eternal. Yom Kippur gives us a potent toolkit for this moment. Being together in community – because we’re more whole together. Focusing on ultimate concerns of our lives – to help renew our lives. Focusing on mortality – to remind us that life is precious and time is limited. “The secret to life,” as Echkart Tolle said, “is to die before you die.” If we fast or wear white, these Yom Kippur rituals also remind us to lift from the physical to the spiritual – all to heighten our awareness.
In Israel, heightened awareness has been built into seemingly every minute lately. Take for example the tunnel of love – not the old fashioned amusement park ride, or the 1987 Bruce Springsteen song and hit album by the same title, but a very different tunnel of love.
This tunnel of love.
After the October 7 terror attacks that sparked this profoundly painful year of war in the Mideast – which we’ll discuss tomorrow on Yom Kippur day – Israeli soldiers discovered in Gaza over 1,500 tunnel entries, linking the above-ground world to a 300-mile labyrinth below. One of these tunnels, leading to a nerve center for Hamas terrorists, came to be known as הַמִּנְהָרָה שֶׁל אַהֲבָה (the tunnel of love) – an odd nickname for a terror tunnel, but here’s why. This tunnel was so dangerous that it developed something a reputation. News about it spread among Israeli soldiers. Before soldiers entered this tunnel, they took out their cell phones and called their loved ones.
Imagine what those calls were like. Spouses, significant others, parents – affirmations of love, apologies, urgent pleas for forgiveness, requests… just in case those words were last words. Most soldiers made it out safely and reunited with their loved ones. Some didn’t.
Some time ago, workers in two buildings made calls and left voice mail messages at the same time. The buildings were the World Trade Center; the time was morning on September 11, 2001. The callers knew that these were their last words. Recently a movie was made with the recordings: they sounded much the same as the “tunnel of love” calls – affirmations, apologies, urgent pleas for forgiveness, last requests.
There are times in life whose truth and power rivet us on what’s most important: everything else fades away. Because of how we’re wired biologically, many of these so-called “focusing events” that focus our attention arise from fear or loss; others are positive and arise from joy and wonder. Either way, nearly all arise from love. In its essential form, love has a way of getting to the heart of things in a hurry. Love can pierce ego, cut through defenses, and get to the point – which, we invariably find, is love itself. If we’re purposeful, or if we’re lucky, we can experience these times long before our last time. If we do, then we can experience Eckhart Tolle's secret to life: we die before we die, so that we can live.
Yom Kippur can be one of those times. We rehearse mortality so we can emerge into life more fully, bravely, honestly, fiercely and lovingly. Judaism offers us this chance to release the muck of hurt, guilt, regret and judgment that clog our hearts. But Yom Kippur isn’t magic. Real atonement is possible only if we lower our defenses, receive the deep truths of our lives and speak the deep truths of our hearts – no holds barred. Only then can Yom Kippur transform us.
It’s a lot to ask. Feeling deep truths – pain we caused, corrosion of conscience, straying from self, separation from the sacred – asks us to take off the sometimes thick armor we wear to protect our tender hearts. It’s the only way to the heart of forgiveness.
This is the heart of forgiveness: if we extend ourselves – if we deeply empathize with hurt we caused, bravely face our mistakes and do our very best to clean them up, then atonement is our birthright. If we’ve fully showed up to this season, then we already received its gift. Jewishly it already happened, at the end of Kol Nidrei: סלחתי כדברך (“I have forgiven as you asked”).
So, we're forgiven. Great. What are we still doing here tonight?
Yom Kippur aims at two pivotal points at the heart of forgiveness. One is that, for most of us, it takes time for forgiveness and atonement to sink in. The heart of forgiveness chases us, but this perhaps unbearable lightness of being can seem too good to be true. This year brought a lot of hurt in so many ways. Some of us, maybe all of us, steeled our hearts against feeling fully, just so we could go on with day to day life. We can’t just snap our fingers and, voila, no more self-defense. The heart needs time to open to the love and light that really is so good, so real, so healing, so transforming, that our bruised self-protected hearts don’t fully believe them. Yom Kippur is that time we need to let the love and light reach us.
Yom Kippur’s other point is that many of us are still in the process of showing up – and that’s okay. It’s been a long decade this year. We need the intensity, solemnity, imagery and especially time to settle in, get us thinking, get us feeling, cycle down our defenses and fully show up. Yom Kippur becomes our tunnel of love.
We need to start somewhere. We need to become vulnerable, but it’s hard to start, and it's hard to be vulnerable. If only someone else would start for us, then maybe it’d be easier. But maybe they feel the same way: it’s hard to start, and it's hard to be vulnerable. If only you would start, then maybe it’d be easier for them. This Catch-22 is a key reason why hurts fester.
It’s challenging enough at the micro level – between one person and another, within small groups, between each of us and the One we call God. The Catch-22 of real dialogue, real heart, real forgiveness and real atonement can be even more confounding at the macro level, between large groups beset by conflicting interests. It’s especially so when the point is not love but victory – especially victory at all costs.
In late May 2024, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about mangroves, which, I promise, are relevant to Yom Kippur. If you’ve been to South Florida or another tropical coast, you probably know what mangroves look like. They are bush-like trees that root deep underwater. They filter toxins, create sheltered nurseries for young fish, buffer the coast against storm waves, and literally hold coastlines together. The destruction of mangroves is one reason that hurricane storm surges have become so extra destructive – a tragic effect of Hurricane Milton we saw just yesterday and today in Florida.
What do mangroves have to do with Yom Kippur?
As Friedman wisely notes, society itself has lost its mangroves – its norms of truth and neighborliness; its balance of rights and also responsibilities; its capacity to filter toxins that now spread quickly online and in gossip; its safety zones for children, for tender emotions, for farm teams of up-and-coming public servants reared to put country and constitution first; and its corresponding resilience to societal shocks be they economic, public health or political. “Our society itself,” Friedman wrote, “has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves… – all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.” Friedman talked about how truth, shame, community, responsibility and civil discourse itself used to be societal mangroves. Without healthy mangroves, not only coastlines fall apart. Relationships, too. Societies, too.
Thankfully, mangrove loss is neither inevitable nor irreparable. Mangroves can regenerate, and we also can plant them. We must plant mangroves in our lives – not just moral lines we won’t cross and internalized mandates to promptly correct, but also courage and safety to deeply listen and courageously speak, times and practices to filter toxins of our lives, priorities that protect community and collective good. Yom Kippur isn’t a healthy mangrove forest by itself, but can nourish and replant mangroves in our lives.
Last Wednesday, Thomas Friedman was on MSNBC. He talked about mangroves, this country, and the Mideast. The Mideast might be the area of the world that has lost the most mangroves holding society together. Filters for toxicity and guardrails against punishing storm tides are all but gone. Seemingly nobody is talking to each other, partly because powerful forces purposefully stoke division and toxicity for their own reasons. We’ll talk more about this tomorrow, but for now consider this: if it’s a Catch-22 to fully open our own hearts because we crave safety and protection, imagine the Mideast.
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish recognized this Catch-22 and its grip on the Mideast. Even now long after his death in 2008, many call Darwish the Palestinian national poet. Darwish was no Zionist – something we’ll also discuss tomorrow – but sometimes he had a broader view. In just 14 Arabic words, Darwish gave voice to this Catch-22 and the cycle of violence leaving so many despairing of hope.
As some of you know, in 2022 I began learning Arabic because I believe it a rabbinic duty to extend ourselves in principled empathy. In much the same spirit, I invite you to hear Mahmoud Darwish's poem in his original Arabic:
Imagine what those calls were like. Spouses, significant others, parents – affirmations of love, apologies, urgent pleas for forgiveness, requests… just in case those words were last words. Most soldiers made it out safely and reunited with their loved ones. Some didn’t.
Some time ago, workers in two buildings made calls and left voice mail messages at the same time. The buildings were the World Trade Center; the time was morning on September 11, 2001. The callers knew that these were their last words. Recently a movie was made with the recordings: they sounded much the same as the “tunnel of love” calls – affirmations, apologies, urgent pleas for forgiveness, last requests.
There are times in life whose truth and power rivet us on what’s most important: everything else fades away. Because of how we’re wired biologically, many of these so-called “focusing events” that focus our attention arise from fear or loss; others are positive and arise from joy and wonder. Either way, nearly all arise from love. In its essential form, love has a way of getting to the heart of things in a hurry. Love can pierce ego, cut through defenses, and get to the point – which, we invariably find, is love itself. If we’re purposeful, or if we’re lucky, we can experience these times long before our last time. If we do, then we can experience Eckhart Tolle's secret to life: we die before we die, so that we can live.
Yom Kippur can be one of those times. We rehearse mortality so we can emerge into life more fully, bravely, honestly, fiercely and lovingly. Judaism offers us this chance to release the muck of hurt, guilt, regret and judgment that clog our hearts. But Yom Kippur isn’t magic. Real atonement is possible only if we lower our defenses, receive the deep truths of our lives and speak the deep truths of our hearts – no holds barred. Only then can Yom Kippur transform us.
It’s a lot to ask. Feeling deep truths – pain we caused, corrosion of conscience, straying from self, separation from the sacred – asks us to take off the sometimes thick armor we wear to protect our tender hearts. It’s the only way to the heart of forgiveness.
This is the heart of forgiveness: if we extend ourselves – if we deeply empathize with hurt we caused, bravely face our mistakes and do our very best to clean them up, then atonement is our birthright. If we’ve fully showed up to this season, then we already received its gift. Jewishly it already happened, at the end of Kol Nidrei: סלחתי כדברך (“I have forgiven as you asked”).
So, we're forgiven. Great. What are we still doing here tonight?
Yom Kippur aims at two pivotal points at the heart of forgiveness. One is that, for most of us, it takes time for forgiveness and atonement to sink in. The heart of forgiveness chases us, but this perhaps unbearable lightness of being can seem too good to be true. This year brought a lot of hurt in so many ways. Some of us, maybe all of us, steeled our hearts against feeling fully, just so we could go on with day to day life. We can’t just snap our fingers and, voila, no more self-defense. The heart needs time to open to the love and light that really is so good, so real, so healing, so transforming, that our bruised self-protected hearts don’t fully believe them. Yom Kippur is that time we need to let the love and light reach us.
Yom Kippur’s other point is that many of us are still in the process of showing up – and that’s okay. It’s been a long decade this year. We need the intensity, solemnity, imagery and especially time to settle in, get us thinking, get us feeling, cycle down our defenses and fully show up. Yom Kippur becomes our tunnel of love.
We need to start somewhere. We need to become vulnerable, but it’s hard to start, and it's hard to be vulnerable. If only someone else would start for us, then maybe it’d be easier. But maybe they feel the same way: it’s hard to start, and it's hard to be vulnerable. If only you would start, then maybe it’d be easier for them. This Catch-22 is a key reason why hurts fester.
It’s challenging enough at the micro level – between one person and another, within small groups, between each of us and the One we call God. The Catch-22 of real dialogue, real heart, real forgiveness and real atonement can be even more confounding at the macro level, between large groups beset by conflicting interests. It’s especially so when the point is not love but victory – especially victory at all costs.
In late May 2024, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about mangroves, which, I promise, are relevant to Yom Kippur. If you’ve been to South Florida or another tropical coast, you probably know what mangroves look like. They are bush-like trees that root deep underwater. They filter toxins, create sheltered nurseries for young fish, buffer the coast against storm waves, and literally hold coastlines together. The destruction of mangroves is one reason that hurricane storm surges have become so extra destructive – a tragic effect of Hurricane Milton we saw just yesterday and today in Florida.
What do mangroves have to do with Yom Kippur?
As Friedman wisely notes, society itself has lost its mangroves – its norms of truth and neighborliness; its balance of rights and also responsibilities; its capacity to filter toxins that now spread quickly online and in gossip; its safety zones for children, for tender emotions, for farm teams of up-and-coming public servants reared to put country and constitution first; and its corresponding resilience to societal shocks be they economic, public health or political. “Our society itself,” Friedman wrote, “has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves… – all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.” Friedman talked about how truth, shame, community, responsibility and civil discourse itself used to be societal mangroves. Without healthy mangroves, not only coastlines fall apart. Relationships, too. Societies, too.
Thankfully, mangrove loss is neither inevitable nor irreparable. Mangroves can regenerate, and we also can plant them. We must plant mangroves in our lives – not just moral lines we won’t cross and internalized mandates to promptly correct, but also courage and safety to deeply listen and courageously speak, times and practices to filter toxins of our lives, priorities that protect community and collective good. Yom Kippur isn’t a healthy mangrove forest by itself, but can nourish and replant mangroves in our lives.
Last Wednesday, Thomas Friedman was on MSNBC. He talked about mangroves, this country, and the Mideast. The Mideast might be the area of the world that has lost the most mangroves holding society together. Filters for toxicity and guardrails against punishing storm tides are all but gone. Seemingly nobody is talking to each other, partly because powerful forces purposefully stoke division and toxicity for their own reasons. We’ll talk more about this tomorrow, but for now consider this: if it’s a Catch-22 to fully open our own hearts because we crave safety and protection, imagine the Mideast.
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish recognized this Catch-22 and its grip on the Mideast. Even now long after his death in 2008, many call Darwish the Palestinian national poet. Darwish was no Zionist – something we’ll also discuss tomorrow – but sometimes he had a broader view. In just 14 Arabic words, Darwish gave voice to this Catch-22 and the cycle of violence leaving so many despairing of hope.
As some of you know, in 2022 I began learning Arabic because I believe it a rabbinic duty to extend ourselves in principled empathy. In much the same spirit, I invite you to hear Mahmoud Darwish's poem in his original Arabic:
Darwish’s point seems clear enough: someone must go first. Someone must break the cycle. Someone must risk.
Granted, some aren’t interested in peace, much less going first. They’re not up for the kind of bravery that opens the heart to release grudges however seemingly justified – not when a gun points at the head, when hate rather than love is what people hold most holy, when someone would rather die in glory than live in potential compromise.
But let's be clear: little in our lives, little we hold in our own individual hearts, is likely to be as dizzying complex as the Mideast. Opening our hearts amidst our slings and arrows – ones we received and ones we sent – isn’t the same as disarming amidst terror attacks. Many of us have locked down after October 7 and its brutal aftermath because secondary trauma is real: for neurobiological reasons, the mind often doesn't know the difference between seeing a car crash and being in a car crash. Seeing Mideast violence isn't the same as experiencing it, but minds and hearts still can be traumatized just by seeing it on the news, especially if we feel affinity for the victims.
Opening to ourselves, each other and the One we call God isn’t so risky as our hearts and minds might be telling us now. And after a year of so many big things, opening ourselves needn’t be big. It can begin as a gentle and subtle inner turn – that “still, small voice” the prophet Elijah heard after the tumult of storm, earthquake and fire.
Atonement doesn’t ask amnesia. It asks feeling. It asks getting real about the existential love at our core. We’re all mortal: none of us has infinite time. Especially with limited time, we can afford the kind of bravery that lets this love catch up to us and transform us. The heart of forgiveness and transformation is our birthright.
May this Kol Nidre night and Yom Kippur tomorrow focus us as a “tunnel of love.” May the fierce urgency of now crystallize our essence into the words, feelings, aspirations and promises of this sacred day. May the heart of forgiveness that is our birthright galvanize us to plant and tend the mangroves that can nourish and hold us together.
And in that merit, may this sacred season renew our lives, so that we can emerge into the life-giving love and light of a shanah tovah for each of us, and our loved ones, and our people, and our world.
Granted, some aren’t interested in peace, much less going first. They’re not up for the kind of bravery that opens the heart to release grudges however seemingly justified – not when a gun points at the head, when hate rather than love is what people hold most holy, when someone would rather die in glory than live in potential compromise.
But let's be clear: little in our lives, little we hold in our own individual hearts, is likely to be as dizzying complex as the Mideast. Opening our hearts amidst our slings and arrows – ones we received and ones we sent – isn’t the same as disarming amidst terror attacks. Many of us have locked down after October 7 and its brutal aftermath because secondary trauma is real: for neurobiological reasons, the mind often doesn't know the difference between seeing a car crash and being in a car crash. Seeing Mideast violence isn't the same as experiencing it, but minds and hearts still can be traumatized just by seeing it on the news, especially if we feel affinity for the victims.
Opening to ourselves, each other and the One we call God isn’t so risky as our hearts and minds might be telling us now. And after a year of so many big things, opening ourselves needn’t be big. It can begin as a gentle and subtle inner turn – that “still, small voice” the prophet Elijah heard after the tumult of storm, earthquake and fire.
Atonement doesn’t ask amnesia. It asks feeling. It asks getting real about the existential love at our core. We’re all mortal: none of us has infinite time. Especially with limited time, we can afford the kind of bravery that lets this love catch up to us and transform us. The heart of forgiveness and transformation is our birthright.
May this Kol Nidre night and Yom Kippur tomorrow focus us as a “tunnel of love.” May the fierce urgency of now crystallize our essence into the words, feelings, aspirations and promises of this sacred day. May the heart of forgiveness that is our birthright galvanize us to plant and tend the mangroves that can nourish and hold us together.
And in that merit, may this sacred season renew our lives, so that we can emerge into the life-giving love and light of a shanah tovah for each of us, and our loved ones, and our people, and our world.