Last week, just hours before Rosh Hashanah began in Israel, I received a frantic phone call from one of our children studying there in yeshiva this year. Hoping to save a bit of money, he had purchased an all-Hebrew machzor for himself, the bookstores had already closed for the holiday, and he was dreading going into the holiday with long yeshiva davening, an opaque machzor with so many unfamiliar prayers and piyutim with uncommon and rare words, and without even a good shul book to accompany him. I coached him through this crisis, recommending that he download and print some of the reading material we have here in the shul library, and, thank God, he reported back after the holiday that all had gone well and he and I had even read and appreciated some of the same material.
We do say a lot of words this season, and we say them in a lot of different ways. We make simply declarative pleas. We recite ornate poetry. We murmur in near silence as we recite the longest amidah prayers of the year. We converse over shared holiday meals with friends, turn to one another in reconciliation, sing together as a congregation in harmony, and cry out in tearful and plaintive calls.
It adds up to a lot of days in shul. It adds up to a lot of words, today in particular, it adds up to a lot of pages in the Yom Kippur Machzor.
The table in the lobby where the Yom Kippur machzorim are placed was so heavy, because the machzor has so many pages, that it damaged the floor. The maintenance team was upset, I thought, “what a perfect metaphor.”
Perhaps we have so much to say, and we say it in so many different ways and modes of expression because the spiritual and ethical dynamic of this season calls upon us to navigate a dialectic, to operate between poles pulling us in two directions. Last winter I heard Professor Shraga Bar-On describe this entire season as an expression of a paradoxical synthesis of maximum accountability and maximum forgiveness. I’ve been thinking about that framing ever since. During this season we embrace an ethos of maximum accountability for our actions and character and impact on the world. And during this season we affirm our belief in God’s promise of maximum forgiveness.
Our holiday season opened with Selichot, penitential prayers, two weeks ago with the line לך ה׳ הצדקה ולנו בושת הפנים you are righteous, God, and we are ashamed of ourselves. Selichot prayers have been recited each weekday morning of the season, opening each day with that refrain, לך ה׳ הצדקה ולנו בושת הפנים. On Yom Kippur, we said Selichot after Maariv last night and we will conclude Ne’ilah with a final recitation of Selichot.
לך ה׳ הצדקה ולנו בושת הפנים
The phrase בושת means that we have failed to live up to the standards that we have set for ourselves. We know we could be better than we are and so the gap between the reality of our lives and behavior and character and what we are capable of attaining, can have no other outcome other than בושת.
The theme of accountability exemplifies Rosh Hashanah, a day, the Mishnah tells us, all creation pass before God כבני מרון -a difficult to translate phrase that indicates that indicates that we are counted and scrutinized one by one. We can’t make excuses because “everyone else is doing it” and we can’t hope to stand in the back, with our own crimes and misdemeanors unnoticed, as the Torah warns in Parashat Netzavim שָׁל֣וֹם יִֽהְיֶה־לִּ֔י כִּ֛י בִּשְׁרִר֥וּת לִבִּ֖י אֵלֵ֑ךְ – which Ibn Ezra interprets as the inner monologue of a sinner who thinks he can slide by on the merits of his or her neighbors.
On Yom Kippur we add Vidu’i, the alphabetic confession, in two forms, to Maariv, and Shacharit, and Mussaf, and Mincha and Neilah, also at the end of the communal amidah.
Rabbi Moshe of Kobrin, whose Hassidic court was a forerunner of the Slonim Hasidic dynasty, once asked why we confess by reciting an alphabetical Vidu’i. His answer was that there is no end to our accountability, there is no end to things over which we must confess, but there is an end to the alphabet.
But alongside this ethos of maximum responsibility and full accountability, is a promise of maximum forgiveness and atonement. From the first night of Selichot we have been reciting the Thirteen Attributes of Divine Mercy with their offer of forgiveness and renewal after even the most severe breaches.
ה׳ ה׳ אֵ-ל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶֽרֶךְ אַפַּֽיִם וְרַב־חֶֽסֶד וֶאֱמֶת: נֹצֵר חֶֽסֶד לָאֲלָפִים נֹשֵׂא עָוֹן וָפֶֽשַׁע וְחַטָּאָה וְנַקֵּה
Hashem, Hashem, Merciful and Gracious God, Slow to Anger, and Abundant in Kindness and Truth … “And Acquitter of those who repent.”
Maximum accountability and faith in maximum forgiveness are there from the beginning.
From the first night of Selichot we have been building towards this day and its promise of forgiveness and atonement. Maximum responsibility and maximum forgiveness accompany us through this season.
Yonah, the anti-hero of Yom Kippur, was, perhaps, the first to notice this tension. After Nineveh is spared, as we will read this afternoon, Yonah complains about God’s forgiveness:
הֲלוֹא־זֶ֣ה דְבָרִ֗י עַד־הֱיוֹתִי֙ עַל־אַדְמָתִ֔י עַל־כֵּ֥ן קִדַּ֖מְתִּי לִבְרֹ֣חַ תַּרְשִׁ֑ישָׁה כִּ֣י יָדַ֗עְתִּי כִּ֤י אַתָּה֙ אֵֽ-ל־חַנּ֣וּן וְרַח֔וּם אֶ֤רֶךְ אַפַּ֙יִם֙ וְרַב־חֶ֔סֶד וְנִחָ֖ם עַל־הָרָעָֽה׃
“Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that You are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment.”
Does this sound familiar? It should sound very familiar, but different in a very important way. Yonah cries out to God and accuses God of being אֵֽ-ל־חַנּ֣וּן וְרַח֔וּם אֶ֤רֶךְ אַפַּ֙יִם֙ וְרַב־חֶ֔סֶד. What does he leave out? Yonah leaves out “emet;” he sees truth and forgiveness as being irreconcilable and, as a devoted student of our greatest prophets, Yonah could not compromise on truth. But Yonah doesn’t get the last word. We read the book on Yom Kippur because forgiveness is not the enemy of truth, forgiveness is the outcome of an honest account of our mistakes.
Next week, we will sit in the Sukkah and rejoice in God’s post-Yom Kippur embrace. We will rejoice on Shemini Atzeret and Simhat Torah, which the Talmud characterizes as God’s afterparty when stepping away from the spiritual intimacy of the holiday season is just too hard. Maximum responsibility, accompanied by maximum forgiveness, gives way to intimacy.
This is a different way of thinking about ethics and accountability from the categorical thinking that dominates so much of the Western world. We are accustomed to sorting people into categories: victims and oppressors, friends and enemies, those on the right side of history and those on the wrong side. But categories can leave little room for relationship to complicate our judgment, for forgiveness to offer a fresh start, or for hope to open our eyes to the possibility of a different future
In a few moments we will recite Yizkor prayers on behalf of the dead. We will invite their memories to come into the room with us and we have a chance to engage with their memories and their legacy in the spirit of Yom Kippur. We should remember them with honesty. And we should subject ourselves and our lives to the honest appraisal of those who raised us and shaped us, our deceased relatives and mentors. But we should remember with a spirit of forgiveness and extend that spirit outward to those whom we remember and inward to ourselves as well.
One striking feature of Yizkor prayers is that we recite them, one at a time, for each individual we remember and each Yizkor memorial prayer names the relationship. “May God remember my father…” “May God remember my mother” and so on. The relationship is placed at the front of our engagement with memory, just as relationship and intimacy is the goal of this entire season of accountability and forgiveness.
This is why it can be so powerful and so meaningful to encounter people who knew our deceased relatives in different ways that we knew them. I’ll share two examples. In 2020 I had a phone conversation with a man, then in his 90s who had known my grandfather in Nuremberg in the 1930s when my grandfather was a manager at the bristle factory that this man’s parents owned. As a young child he would visit the factory and my grandfather was a kind and friendly presence there until the “Polish Yidn” were deported in 1938. In a two minute phone conversation, he turned my grandfather, who was killed in 1945, from a black-and-white photo of a man with a star on his sleeve, into a person with a personality who lived on for decades in the memory of a child he had encountered at work.
And in more mundane circumstances, because my father died when I was young and because he was a psychoanalyst and so much of his professional life was necessarily hidden from me, it has been so powerful to encounter people, even recently, who knew him in a very different way. I’ve met his colleagues, unexpectedly, sitting next to me in shul, and once, without expecting it, found my father quoted in a memoir written by one of his patients:
Towards the end of Sheila Weller’s book “Dancing at Ciro’s” she writes:
What kind of woman doesn’t even want to meet her grandson?” I asked my psychoanalyst, the late, eloquent Fred Wolkenfeld.Fred was a somber man. The weight of the world always seemed on his shoulders. “A very unhappy woman,” he answered.
In the world of memory, truth is a thesis, forgiveness is its antithesis, and the two are synthesized by a relationship. This is the work of this season and its insistence on maximal accountability and its optimistic belief in the reality of maximal forgiveness, leading to a renewal of intimacy with God and harmony among people. And this is the work of Yizkor, which preserves our relationships with those who are no longer alive so long as we live and engage in the process of memory.
In Yizkor, we don’t have to choose between truth and forgiveness. We can remember the people we loved honestly, with all their complexity, and still allow love to have the final word. We can let their memory call us to account for the lives we are living, and we can also receive from their memory the hope that our own lives can still change.
