The Holiness of Togetherness: A Yom Kippur Sermon
My friends, relatively few people heard my sermon last Friday night, which was sort of lighthearted. I was playing with the idea that tonight, Erev Yom Kippur, Kol Nidre night, is the holiest night of the year. I challenged that idea. I pointed out that it’s true that the Torah calls Yom Kippur a שבת שבתון, and that you can find translations that render these words as “the Sabbath of Sabbaths,” but I proved that translation cannot be correct by pointing out a passage in which the Torah calls every Shabbat a שבת שבתון—the fact is that no one can say with certainty what שבת שבתון really means.
I made the case that the holiest day of the Jewish year Shabbat, but that it is simply easier to designate an annual event as the most important of the year rather than a weekly event. Having proven my case I concluded by undermining everything I said by announcing that tonight I will talk about why I do see tonight as one of the two holiest nights on our calendar, and yes, the other is Rosh Hashanah, but the reason has nothing to do with a Torah verse. I always say that Judaism is very behavioral, and my reasoning is entirely based on the behavior of the Jewish Community of Lincoln.
That alone might be enough for you to have guessed where I am going, but if not, I won’t keep you waiting. It is my belief that tonight, by coming together, we have made a holy night into the holiest night of the year.
That may sound like a claim about the calendar. But it is really a claim about us—about what happens when two congregations decide that being together matters enough to make room for one another.
We could have gathered separately. We could have prayed with the melodies we know, followed the customs we expect, and sat among the people we usually see. There would have been holiness in each of those sanctuaries.
But tonight, we chose something that neither congregation could have created alone. Every person in Lincoln who came to synagogue tonight is here, in this sanctuary. Look around. Tonight, this is what our Jewish community looks like when we are all together.
And being together requires something of us.
There will be parts of this service that some of us would prefer to do without. There will probably be other things that some of us will miss. A familiar prayer. A particular melody. A moment when we expect to stand, or sit, or hear a certain voice.
Those things matter. They carry memories. A melody can bring us back to a childhood sanctuary. A custom can connect us to a parent or grandparent. The way we pray can express convictions we have thought about deeply and held for a long time.
So we should be honest: compromise sometimes asks us to give up something we love.
But it also asks us to notice what we receive.
We receive one another.
We receive the voices that would otherwise be praying somewhere else. We receive the presence of people whose Jewish lives have followed different paths from our own. We receive the chance for our children to see that the Jewish family is larger than the congregation to which their parents belong.
And surely that is worth a little discomfort.
My friends, I tend not to be a fan of the word “tolerance,” and I would never be so dismissive as to respond to anyone with the words, “So what?” Tolerance seems like an awfully low bar most of the time. I made this point in a Holocaust service committee meeting in Indiana by pointing out that we tolerate that which we do not like. It’s not the term we want for a Holocaust memorial, but it works well tonight.Can I tolerate a musical interlude that I would not have chosen if it means that we can all pray together?
And the words “so what.” I would never say them to anyone else, but I would say them to myself. So can I notice that some people stand or do not stand for the Shema and say, “So what?”
“So what?” does not mean that the Shema is unimportant. It means that I can say the Shema with my whole heart without making someone else’s posture the measure of their devotion.
I can stand according to my custom and allow my neighbor to pray according to theirs. I can love a melody without requiring everyone to love it. I can miss something tonight and still be grateful that I am here.
There is room in a holy community for all of that.
The question is what we will make most important. Will I spend the evening keeping track of everything I would have done differently? Or will I let myself be moved by something I could not have experienced any other way: all of us, here, together?
There is a kind of hospitality involved in this, even for those of us sitting in the pews. We make room within our expectations. We allow the service to belong to someone else, too.
And perhaps, as the evening unfolds, we can do more than tolerate.
Perhaps the unfamiliar melody will become the sound of someone we care about. Perhaps the custom we would not have chosen will help us understand a neighbor. Perhaps we will discover that making room for another person has enlarged our own experience of prayer.
We do not have to become identical for that to happen. We can leave tonight still attached to our congregations, still committed to our beliefs, still fond of our own ways of doing things.
But we can leave more attached to one another.
That attachment matters beyond this evening. When someone is grieving, the comfort we offer does not need a denominational label. When someone is lonely, an invitation does not need one either. When a child begins to discover the beauty of being Jewish, every one of us has a reason to rejoice.
We belong to one another in those moments. Tonight gives us a chance to live as though we remember that.
A congregation is a kehilah, a community. But our calling is to be a kehilah kedosha, a holy community.
We make that holiness real in the way we treat each other: in the room we make, in the patience we practice, in the affection we allow to matter more than getting everything our own way.
That is how we have made this holy night into the holiest night of the year.
Because we are never more holy than when we forget about who is Reform and who is Conservative, and simply love one another as members of the same holy family.
