I’m going to tell a story about a fierce debate about something with no practical application whatsoever. Rabbi Eliezer and the Sages had a dispute about the legal status of an oven constructed out of small pieces of earthenware fixed together with sand. Rabbi Eliezer said this oven, known as an oven of akhnai, was tahor—it was pure and could not become tamei, could not become impure, since only complete utensils and tools and vessels can become impure in Jewish law. This oven was not a complete appliance. It was comprised, in a haphazard way, out of pieces of earthenware held together with sand. Rabbi Eliezer claimed that because it was not complete, because it had cracks, it was not a real oven and so it remained pure, just like any natural object like a stone or a piece of lumber, or a lump of clay.
The other sages, the overwhelming majority responded that the oven was indeed an oven, despite its unconventional and unusual form. Since it was an intact and useful object, it was susceptible to ritual impurity like any other tool or vessel.
The Talmud tells that Rabbi Eliezer succeeded in calling forth miracle after miracle to in an attempt to convince his colleagues that his interpretation was correct, but all to no avail. A stream reverses its course, a tree flies through the air, the walls of the beit midrash begin to fall. But Rabbi Eliezer’s colleagues, led by Rabbi Yehoshua, will not relent. Finally a voice from Heaven itself, a bat-kol, is heard in the beit midrash: “Why do you argue with Rabbi Eliezer, seeing as he is correct in all things?!”
But this too does not win the debate. “The Torah is not in Heaven,” Rabbi Yehoshua responds, Jewish law is decided by majority rule and not by miraculous intervention. After this episode, Rabbi Eliezer was excluded from the beit midrash. If you bring miracles into the beit midrash in an attempt to sway the debate, you don’t belong in the beit midrash.
But surely Rabbi Eliezer knew this. Why was he so insistent that the oven be considered pure? Why was it so crucial to the other sages that Rabbi Eliezer be excluded from the beit midrash? They had won the fight. He had been their teacher and elder colleague. Why fight him so fiercely, even in defiance of open miracles? Was it just about the principle of majority rule? What larger issue was implicated in this seemingly arcane disagreement about oven purity?
In the time of the Temple, open purity mattered a great deal, because a pure oven that could not become impure would be very useful, for example, to priests wishing to bake with trumah grain as they served in the Temple. Indeed, we will read later today about the service in the Temple on Yom Kippur and the importance of the Torah’s purity laws. But Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, and the other sages had this debate after the destruction of the Temple. This dispute is one of the most enduring stories in the Talmud and it has had little or no practical importance for most of Jewish history.
Why were the stakes so high?
Rav Yehuda Amital z’lt, explained the dispute in the following way: according to Rabbi Eliezer, something fragmentary, something broken, something constructed in a piecemeal fashion could never be considered complete. The oven of akhnai remains pure because it isn’t truly real. An ersatz oven cannot be called an oven. Only that which is perfect deserves consideration.
The other sages understood that we are the oven of akhnai. We aren’t perfect. Our souls have been broken by tragedy, by fear, by sin, by doubt, and we have put them back together in a piecemeal fashion. If you look closely you can see the cracks where the pieces have been placed together. There’s a risk the whole thing could fall apart under stress. But that’s what it means to be human. That’s why Rabbi Yehoshua and his colleagues understood that the oven of akhnai must—absolutely must—be considered to be an oven.
I find this idea to be very compelling and significant, but part of the challenge of Yom Kippur is to internalize all of the compelling and significant ideas that we encounter. Our Jewish bookcases are filled with meaningful messages just like this one, but how do we really bring them off of the bookcases and into our lives? There’s a temptation to be satisfied with inspiring ideas, but on Yom Kippur we try to make sure that these ideas really penetrate our hearts and impact our lives.
As someone who loves books and owns more than his fair share, I struggle with the project of translating ideas that I read into actions that can define my life. I recently encountered a provocative and almost ironic treatment of this tension in the very first sentence of the very first chapter of a guide book for ethical development by Rav Avraham Kook called Muser Avikha.
I opened the book, looking for guidance for ethical and religious growth and read:
נראה שאי אפשר לצאת ידי חובה בענין חובות הלב רק אם יסדר ספר לעצמו
Really, you need to write your own book if you are going to be successful in this task. If you want the ideas that your intellect encounters to connect with your heart and transform your life, you can’t read someone else’s book.
Write your own book. Since each individual is unique, with a unique mosaic of deficits and assets, strengths and weaknesses, there is no guide book that we can pull off of a shelf to make us into kinder people, more devout people, or more conscientious people. Becoming more aware, both to the suffering of others and to the spiritual possibilities around us, requires us to activate our hearts. And we can’t activate our hearts merely by reading a book written by someone else.
Is there no cognitive aspect, however, to moral and spiritual transformation? That can’t be true either. There is a large role in Judaism for intellectual cognition. There are truths that our minds need to confront, but those truths then have to navigate the passage from our minds to our hearts. Sometimes, the farthest distance in the world is the distance between our minds and our hearts. We may know something is true without that knowledge transforming us.
How can we tell whether or not the things that we believe are things that we believe in our hearts or are merely ideas that we assert in our heads with no further impact? Rav Kook suggests that the act of prayer is a sort of test of where one stands in relation to the deeper spiritual reality of the universe. For example, when we pray for health and life on Yom Kippur: אבינו מלכנו כתבנו בספר חיים טובים, “Write us!” we pray, “into the Book of Life,” do we know the value of a human life? Are we praying for the chance to enjoy fine wine, eat juicy steaks, merit children who get good grades, or to live in a city with a winning baseball team? If our understanding of what a human life is worth is limited, if our understanding of what a human being is capable of accomplishing is so truncated, if our vision of human flourishing is so prosaic and feeble, then we won’t have anything to pray for and our prayers will be empty.
I want to be quite clear that turning to God for the basic necessities of our physical survival and comfort is natural and honest and good. But the horizons of our prayers need to extend beyond those basic necessities, and the horizons of our prayers need to expand beyond ever more elaborate and lavish expansions of those simple needs.
A day like Yom Kippur, spent fasting and in isolation from our most basic human needs and comforts, and a day devoted to prayer, can serve as a sort of test. Have spiritual truths, about the potential for human life, about the mission of the Jewish people, about the special qualities of the Land of Israel etc. been integrated into our hearts? Do our prayers resonate when we pray on behalf of these things or are they dry?
And perhaps no prayer can accomplish this more effectively than Yizkor.
There are two functions of Yizkor on Yom Kippur and they exist in some tension with one another. Reciting Yizkor on Yom Kippur forces us to acknowledge our own mortality and take stock of what legacy we are creating that will survive after we are no longer alive. Our possessions do not follow us once we are dead. Our wealth is dispersed, our fame and importance is fleeting—cemeteries are filled with men and women who considered themselves to be indispensable.
But reciting Yizkor on Yom Kippur also reminds us that it is for us, the living, to shape the legacy of those who are not alive when we declare, in the Yizkor prayers, that we are doing good in the world—we are pledging donations to tzedkah, we are doubling-down on our commitment to mitzvot—all in honor of someone no longer alive. If they can continue to inspire us to do good in their names, then we can continue to shape their legacy even many years after they lived. Yom Kippur is understood to be the pinnacle of the season of judgement. By pledging to tzedakah, we shape the place of the deceased in the World of Truth, since we are showing that their impact in this world continues after death.
That’s the paradox, that is the tension: we contemplate our own mortality at the same time as we recognize that those who are not alive can leave behind dynamic and living legacies that are shaped by our choices to be inspired by their memory.
This is also part of the spiritual test, the check-up, that Rav Kook suggested. Someone who is spiritually aware, someone who has paved a pathway between her mind and her heart, someone who has forged a connection between the ideas that he thinks about and the way his heart resonates, will be able to recite Yizkor in the context of the rest of the day’s prayers. And, those of us who have not made those connections strong, can use Yizkor to teach our hearts some very important truths.
The worth of a human life cannot be measured in money or in fame. The potential for a human life cannot be measured in any of the physical pleasures that we give up on Yom Kippur. As we abstain, for one day, from food and drink and separate from our bodies, we contemplate the enduring legacy that will remain after we are no longer alive. And as we connect, through prayer, to the memories of those we have loved who are no longer alive, we show how they are very much a real presence here among us—as treasured memories, and as inspiring examples who can continue to inspire us to do good in the world.
At Anshe Sholom, we invite everyone to remain in shul for Yizkor. Even if you are blessed with parents who are alive, please consider staying.
We recite memorial prayers for those who died in the Holocaust, a crime that wiped out entire families with no surviver left behind to mourn. Even if you have no deceased relatives to mourn in your immediate family, you can mourn for them. We recite memorial prayers for fallen soldiers of the IDF and of the United States armed forces. Their deaths were in our service and the freedoms and privileges we enjoy as Jews and as Americans are because of their sacrifices. There were also dozens of Holocaust survivors, the only surviving remnants of their families, who came to Israel and died weeks or days later in the War of Independence. Their stories are preserved in the official Israeli government Yizkor website, but they deserve to be remembered by all of us as well. If you have no blood relative to commemorate today, these Jewish heroes deserve your attention.
We also recite Yizkor for the deceased rabbis of this congregation. Although I never had the merit to meet any of them in person, each of us should remember that the ways that our shul is a force magnifier for our capacity to do good in the world is because of their dedication decades, and even centuries ago.
And this Yom Kippur, we will recite a memorial prayer for Burt Levenson, whose untimely death was publicized in the final hours before Rosh Hashanah. Since the death of his beloved brother Sheldon four years ago, this shul was Burt’s family. We are the ones in mourning. We are the ones saying Kaddish, and we are the ones who will recite Yizkor tefilot for Burt and anyone who is here today is welcome to join.
Since his death, I have been so touched by the outpouring of love and grief from members of the community who knew him for decades, and from newer members of the community who might not have even known his name, but who appreciated his quiet, humble decency and his regular friendly presence in shul. Most of all I have been touched by the consistency of the stories that were shared about Burt. He didn’t try to impress anyone or use flattery. There was no pretense about Burt whatsoever. In the words of the Talmud, he was “tocho k’baro” – what you see is what you get. The modesty and humility of his lifestyle could not be greater. His worldly possessions easily fit in his small studio apartment, with room left over. But he left behind a powerful legacy of decency, menchlichkeit, and love of Torah.
Part of my test this Yom Kippur in mourning Burt, is to internalize how someone so humble and so simple was in reality a spiritual giant.
Let’s try to test ourselves as we pray. Do the horizons of our spiritual imaginations match the grandeur of the liturgy? Can we use this day and the hours we spend in prayer as a tool to build that bridge between our minds and our hearts? In a few minutes Yizkor will begin. Whether you stay in shul or quietly and respectfully step outside, internalize the truths that Yizkor expresses. Let’s try to remember our vulnerability and our brokenness, and also the ways that we can nevertheless put the pieces back together into something functional and of service to others. Like the oven of akhnai, we can be whole at the same time that we are broken.
As we ask God to write us and seal us into the Book of Life, let’s write our own books that can connect the cognition and awareness of our minds to the deeply felt emotions in our hearts, and to the actions that follow. The Book of Life is a book that we co-author alongside God.
G’mar Hatimah Tovah. May you each, and all of Klal Yisrael, be sealed in the Book of Life.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 