Hi everyone, David Zvi here. This is the launch of Jello Menorah, a newsletter about breaking out of the standard ways of talking about religious ideas. If you like product design, science fiction, the Babylonian Talmud, and Jewish history, you’ll like this newsletter. If you secretly like capitalism and don’t hate Jews, you’ll like it even more. (If you were on my previous mailing list, you’ve been moved to this one!)
For my first post, I am attaching a Yom Kippur sermon I delivered recently (as in, on a previous Yom Kippur, not on Passover or something insane). It is an attempt to avoid doing everything you’ve seen done in other sermons.
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Yom Kippur in Five Acts
ONE: KOL NIDREI
Here is what I am afraid of: I am afraid that if I forgive God for all the things He has done that He will actually leave, that He has been waiting here this entire time for me to say salachti kedevarecha and now he will move on, and I will be un-chosen, we will be unchosen, and we will see each other at the bank and say hello and maybe chat but then look away, because the cashier said, “Next!” and now someone else is calling me to account. I am worried that we are still chosen because a debt is still owed, because something has not been made right, because the Jubilee is known only to God and the shemittah does not dissolve debts that are bein adam le-makom, between me and God.
And so, each Kol Nidrei night, as I cut the knots of Gordian commitment and throw the ropes into my words like a hametz bonfire on Passover Eve, I whisper: “No, but not you; not you because I have not finished with you,” the little-known philosophical Proof From Grudge, and I leave something bound, like a sign between my eyes (that is, my face), and I turn to the doors and say, “It is with the permission of the sinners, the avaryanim, that we give man and God permission to pray.” That’s when I begin.
TWO: SHACHARIT / THE NAMES
For you are our A and we are your B;
You are our C and we are your D.
Like an E in the hands of an F, so are we in your hands.
My G, my H, we have sinned before you.
My G, my H, we have no H other than you.
The 13 attributes, Who took us out of Egypt, even the ineffable One becomes effable, and its name after name after name. It’s the Day of Names.
My daughter is nine months old. “Say ‘Abba’!” I say to her. She beams at me, opens her mouth wide so I can see her sole two teeth, bottom center, bangs her palms on her high chair tray, but says nothing. “Abba!” I say again. “Say ‘Abba!’” She issues a high-pitched gurgle of delight, says nothing. “Say ‘Avri!’” My son adds. “Say ‘Avri!’ Say ‘Avri!’ Say ‘Eema!’ Say ‘Eema!’” She gives him the biggest smile and laughs. She has no idea what we want. She is so, so happy.
It’s like that for a month, at least. And then one day: she says it. Not an unending gurgle of repeated syllables, “ababababababa,” but a crisp two syllables. “A-ba.” Just once. Like she’s been saying it for years. Yael and I quickly confer, like Olympic judges: does this qualify for First Word status? Yes, we concur: first, it’s a likely First Word candidate. Second, she didn’t blur it. And, most important, she was looking directly at me when she said it. The deliberation takes fifteen seconds; only now are we excited. “Yes!” we tell her, all smiles. “Yes! That’s right! Abba! Abba!” And I pick her up and hug her tight, because she has said my name.
But it’s not my name. My name is David Zvi. One day, when my son was two, it occurred to me that he did not know this.
“Who is David Zvi?” Yael asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. We are sitting at the dinner table. I am on his left.
“That’s my name,” I say.
“Oh,” he says, but he doesn’t know what I mean. To him, I already have a name. It is Abba.
Abba is the name I picked for myself, because it was what my father picked for himself, because it was what my grandfather picked for himself. My people do not name their children for the living; they name themselves for the living. We all want to be the same person, who is not really a person.
Abba is not quite a name and not quite a title: it’s me as my relationship. When we are around the children Yael calls me Abba, too. In private she calls me Sweetie. “Sweetie!” my son says to me, mimicking Yael’s intonation, playing with me. He doesn’t know what it means, only that in saying it there is minor trespass. “No,” I frown. “That name is not for you.” Abba. Avi. Avinu. To be a parent is to be overtaken my your own names, the birth name subsumed by the births of others.
This, for the rabbis, is what we do best; the first human power was the ability to name things. It is naming which separated us from the angels who raised their eyebrows when God brought up the human subject. We named the animals, all of them, aardvark to zebra. The angels couldn’t do it. It was a trick so good that it justified bringing the world into being.
And so, Avinu Malkeinu, we say:
We are Your named and You are our named;
But also:
We are Your children and You are the one whose name we do not know.
But one day?
“On that day God and God’s name will be one.”
THREE: MUSAF / YOU’RE THE MAN
Consider Nathan the Prophet. Did he say, “King David, you killed a man and took his wife; shame on you?” No! He said, “A rich man stole a poor man’s sheep. Who’s wrong?” And when David said, “The rich man is wrong,” Nathan said, “Surprise: you’re the rich man.” Atah Ha-Ish: you’re the man.
Do you know why he did it like this? Simple: kings love parables. They love hearing them and they love being in them. If you want to teach a king, you should do it with parables. You must present them to themselves as just and then say, “Don’t you want to be the person you already are?” It really works — and because it works, we speak to kings as though they’re kind whether they’re kind or not, whether we’re describing or prescribing. Atah ha-Ish — you were the man, you are the man, you’ll be the man from here on out.
This can get us in trouble. Once upon a time, a royal advisor wrote to his ruler, “Savage, inexorable anger is not becoming to a king…If he grants life and dignity to men who have risked and deserve to lose them, he does none save what a man of power can do.” The advisor was Seneca and the king was Nero, who had just months before poisoned Brittanicus and would shortly launch an assault that would leave to the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash. Atah Ha-Ish: you need to be the ish, the adult in the room. Because you’re the kind of person who needs to be told that.
And so, King of the Universe, I ask you this: what would you say about a ruler whose clemency was contingent on constant and repetitive praise, whose mercy depended on being labelled merciful, who needed to be persuaded that punishment was not in his best interests?
Hmm?
Surprise: “Adonai hu ha-Elohim.” Lord, you’re the God.
FOUR: MINCHAH / JONAH
The night Jonah wore his prophet’s cloak and tried to escape
this way
and that
God called to him, “I need your help — ”
and Jonah said, “I’m running away!”
and an ocean tumbled by with a boat for Jonah
and he sailed off to Tarshish through night and day
and in and out of storms
and over the side of the boat
into the terrible waves
God said, “I’LL EAT YOU UP — I LOVE YOU SO.”
And Jonah said, “NO!”
But the Leviathan came with its horrible teeth and flashed its horrible eyes
And swallowed Jonah
And he lived in its belly
Until Jonah spoke up
And it spit him out in the land of Nineveh
And Jonah spoke to the king
And they were saved
Jonah sat in his booth
And that very night a tree grew
And grew
And grew
Until it made shade for Jonah all around
God made the tree fall and Jonah felt ill.
Then all around from far away across the world
God said, “Should I not care
About where the wild things are?”
But Jonah gave up being the prophet of all the wild things
and sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day
Into the light of his very own land
And it was still there.
FIVE: NEILAH
Once upon a time there was an Ottoman Empire in which God’s name was precious but not everyone could read. Because any scrap of paper could contain God’s name it was assumed that all did, and because all did, any paper found on the street could not simply be thrown away. Instead, the Ottomans stuck the papers in the walls — both prayers and shopping lists, divine names real and imagined, all filling up the cracks, so that they would litter the walls and not the ground. Really, though, it’s because God has always liked walls, from the Western Wall to the very first wall, which divided day from night on the very first day. The name of that wall is “twilight,” but today it is called “neilah,” the closing gate, first barrier and last, the wall inside which Yom Kippur is breeched, impregnable but for finger tips and paper clips.
This is what I write: “I have been desperately trying to contact you but you don’t seem to answer your phone. All of my voicemail messages go answered. All of my text messages go unanswered. All of my emails receive an autoreply saying that you’re there, that you’ve always been there and will always be there, but that you can’t respond to every message right away and don’t know when you’ll get to mine. I don’t know how to get ahold of you. Please call me. Adonai hu ha-Elokim, please call me, Adonai hu ha-Elokim. That’s Adonai hu ha-Elokim, Adonai hu ha-Elokim. Once more in case you didn’t catch it: Adonai hu ha-Elokim. Adonai hu ha-END OF MESSAGE.”
When Neilah is over, God stops listening; the bulletin says that that happens on Wednesday at 7:43 P.M., but to be honest I don’t think He reads the bulletin; even if he did, he probably put it off until later — “Later, later,” God says, sporting with the Leviathan, “I’ll do it when mashiach comes! Don’t ask me when that is — don’t worry, I’ll get around to it, I’ll close it, I’ll close it, I’ll close it.”
And so I pray: Master of the Universe, hashem hashem, slow to anger, slow to answer your messages, slow to get around to it — just as I put up a sukkah last year and did not take it down until well after Hanukkah, so may you leave the gate open and go worry about more important things. Give us another few months — give us another few years — or just wait until the redemption itself and kill two birds with one stone — and may it be Your will — next year in Jerusalem — Amen amen amen. Amen.