Shanah Tovah. For all of us, Yom Kippur is a day where we come before God as we ask for forgiveness for the faults and the mistakes we have made over the past year. It is our hope and our prayer that God will hear us and will grant us atonement by sealing us in God’s book of life for the coming year. Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, each of us has the obligation to ask for forgiveness to those whom we have hurt and to those whom we have embarrassed over the past year. If I have hurt anyone in this congregation over the past few months, by not caring, by not listening or by not paying attention when it was necessary or if I simply was not present when you needed me, I ask for your forgiveness on this Kol Nidre eve and challenge myself over the coming year to be a better Rabbi, a better listener and a better person to my family and to my congregation.
Throughout our lives, we have different roles. They include roles within our families, within our places of employment, within our community and beyond. As we encounter different experiences and live through certain moments in these different roles, we enjoy the positive and we learn to deal with the negative. For whatever reason, it seems that it is our instinctive behavior to always focus on the negative and simply acknowledge the positive. We tend to talk so much more about the bad things that happen to us and to others and we do not as often appreciate and express verbally the wonderful, special and holy things that happen to us in the world. How often is it that we get together as families for birthdays and other wonderful lifecycle events? Probably not as much as families get together to pay their last respects to family members at funerals, which have, over time, turned into family reunions. How often is it that in the work place, executives converse with their employers about the wonderful things they are doing? Probably not as often as the times, which arise where communication is present when the need to criticize arises. How often is it that Jewish communities and congregations express critical comments about things that need to change and people who need to change in order for success within those communities to take place? Why is it that we cannot express and speak of the wonderful things and the dedicated individuals who create wonderful and holy communities such as Bet Shira and other congregations and institutions to which we choose to affiliate with and dedicate ourselves to?
I challenge our minds and our souls on this Kol Nidre to take the opposite approach. I challenge us to focus on the positive and to simply acknowledge the negative. We certainly cannot forget about moments of sadness, moments of frustration and moments where we need to rebuke and constructively criticize others in a most humble way, but these devices of communication cannot override complimenting others and focusing on the wonderful things and the tremendous people that exist in our world.
Although we do not often think about it, our Jewish tradition teaches us through customs and rituals that we are to primarily, focus on the positive and secondly, to acknowledge the negative. When a bride and a groom happily marry each other under the Chuppah, the moment is holy, the moment is joyous and the positive and pure experience can never be replaced. However, at the end of the public Chuppah ceremony, the groom shatters a glass or a general electric light bulb. The reason for this is with every great and enjoyable moment, which is celebrated, comes a segment, a piece of sadness. It is the shattering of the glass that reminds of the destruction of the Temple and the need to rebuild the pieces of the glass through moral stability and ethical peace. But at the end of the ceremony, after the glass is broken, what traditionally happens, those present scream out Mazal Tov! The positive experience reappears and it trumps and becomes triumphant over the negative moment. Our world today, unfortunately, does not allow the same to happen on a daily basis.
Our newspapers, our radio stations and our televisions are always focusing on the negative aspects which exist in our world, and it is usually the last five minutes of every news report after the weather and sports, which is allotted for altruism, for beautiful acts of loving kindness. It is the negative, which is the focus, and all that remains is a simple acknowledgement that there is a place for good in the world, that the priority of goodness is secondary to the priority of deceipt, of violence, of hatred. And it is not just the media that portrays the reversal of what it reveals as beings more important. We create the same in our lives as well.
The typical phone calls I receive on a day-to-day basis are usually when a Congregant is in the hospital or God forbid passes away. The people who come in to my office to speak with me are usually in need of counseling as they are struggling with certain aspects in their lives. Why is it that the phone calls and visits are a minority when there is a celebration, and why is it that very few visits have to do with an individual coming and telling me what a wonderful experience they had on a vacation, or at a lecture or a concert they attended- everything always seems to be communicated very clearly and in great detail when the negative arises, and the details and experiences are communicated so minutely when wonderful things happen to individuals in the world today.
Our world and our lives are wonderful, but how much more healthy would they be if we would only allow ourselves to focused on positive experiences and when the challenges of negativity face us, we should not allow them to play the primary role of communication in our lives. There are individuals in our world that suffer from depression, suffer from anxiety and suffer from anger. I would argue that many people who feel this way are not subject to complements and are not subject to feeling a sense of positive feelings constantly surrounding them. If only our world was able to capture joy and happiness and spoon-feed it to those who have struggled with being unhappy and miserable through the majority of their lives, how much healthier would our world be.
I would like to share with you a powerful story that speaks to the ability to focus on the positive as opposed to always focusing on the negative.
The story is about a King’s son who once had fallen critically ill. His Royal father called for the greatest doctors in the land. They tried all kinds of cures for him, but to no avail. In despair, the King had a proclamation read to his subjects calling on all who thought they could cure the prince to come to the palace. Now it happened that in a distant city of the Kingdom there lived a doctor who was both poor and without reputation. When he heard the King’s request he traveled to the capital.
“Lead me to the Prince!” he said to the King.
He had no sooner examined the youth when he knew the nature of his illness, which was a very ordinary one. It could be cured by boiling various herbs that grew everywhere in profusion. But because the greatest doctors in the land were present, he was afraid to mention the matter of the herbs lest they laugh him to scorn as a concocter of old wives’ cures. So he thought the matter over very carefully, and, choosing his words with great deliberation, he addressed himself to them:
“Most distinguished doctors! According to my poor understanding the prince can be cured by boiling certain common herbs, but inasmuch as my healing knowledge is small, I very much doubt if I’m competent to prepare this medicine. Therefore, I most humbly beg you to let me lean on your greater knowledge.”
Delighted with the compliment the celebrated doctors accepted their poor colleague’s counsel and prepared the herbs he specified, The Prince recovered from his illness and there was a great celebration throughout the land.
We as individuals feel so wonderful when others complement us. We as people are filled with pride and confidence when others believe in us and do not doubt us. We as beings are strengthened through our character when others describe us positively in public and in private and not through avenues of negativity and criticism.
Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur is not only a day where we afflict our souls by fasting and by engaging in conversation with God as we ask for forgiveness. But Yom Kippur is a time where we look in the mirror and figure out what we can do this year to change ourselves. We must find ways to share with ourselves and with those who are constantly surrounding us more moments and experiences, which are positive. We should begin to complement others on a regular basis and not jump to criticize. We must take advantage of opportunities to share and to travel with others exciting journeys and trips and upon our return to share pictures and stories with those who were not given the gift of traveling with us. We must attempt to bring more altruism into our lives by avoiding conversations of gossip and increase our conversations of holiness and friendship.
As we begin our day of atonement, there is a Midrash that Yom Kippurim is known as Yom K Purim! That Yom Kippur is like the day of Purim, the joyous occasion where we celebrate and enjoy the liveliness that the Jewish people were given in the town of Shushan through the expression of eating and drinking, of dressing up in costume and communal celebrations of Megillah Readings and today’s enterprise known as the Purim Carnival. Purim is a day where we focus on the positive and remember the negative. Yom Kippur should therefore be the same. Certainly it is not a day of eating and drinking but it is a day where we indeed acknowledge the negative, where we come face to face with the errors and the mistakes we have committed over the past year. But more importantly, it is a day when we stand as angels in their most positive and holy form. We start anew and find ourselves in possession of a clean slate as we find new ways and new identities of how we will present ourselves to the world in the coming year.
May our expressions and our character to others and to ourselves be ones filled with joy, filled with complements, filled with goodness and righteousness, and when the climactic moments of negativity, hatred and sadness arise, we should acknowledge them, we should live with them and we should accept them, but they should not and will not be allowed to dominate the way in which we live our lives to their fullest.
As we go forth focusing on the positive and acknowledging the negative, may God support us and strengthen us with a new and healthy beginning, as we begin to pave a new path of thinking and more importantly build a new road of living. Our world needs us as we are the ones to fulfill what God needs and we are the ones who must fulfill what we need as well, more moments and conversations filled with goodness, bringing smiles to the faces of others and to ourselves.
May we be sealed for a year of having positive feelings, encountering positive experiences, and sharing them with the world around us. Amen.
