This past summer, I was blessed by you, our congregation, to take some sabbatical time. In between a couple of conferences, service at our local Reform camp, Camp Newman, some travel, and lots of reading, writing, and resting, I also spent time in my garage, attempting to get it in order. I like the areas in which I live and work to be clean and organized, but if I am going to be honest with you, our garage was not that place. It was where we stockpiled memories, clothes that no longer fit, dishes gifted to us for our wedding that truthfully have barely been used, childhood knick-knacks, and all the accoutrements needed to build a sukkah. Some of the boxes had moved house to house and coast to coast and had barely been opened.
My desire to clean out my garage this summer was only reinforced by a TV show I discovered on a plane called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. It’s based on a book and the Swedish concept of dostadning, which translates as death cleaning. It means decluttering your home with the intention of making it easier for your loved ones after you are gone. Death cleaning is not morbid but rather a way to make sure we are prioritizing that which needs to be prioritized. Each episode of the show centered around three Swedes who would meet people in their homes and help them go through their sacred junk. Some of them were moderate hoarders, others were starting new chapters, and a few were preparing for the final stage of their lives and didn’t want to leave the burden of their belongings to others after their passing.
Each episode started off as if was about the accumulated stuff, but it was never really about the stuff. It was about helping someone whose physical stuff had overwhelmingly multiplied go through the spiritual stuff of their lives. Death cleaning is an emotional laborious process; it is about making sense out of sentimental chaos and making intentional choices that affirm life and legacy. I watched as many episodes as I could on that flight. Clearly, I was craving what they were selling. The idea of cleaning out one’s life, especially on sabbatical appealed.
And so, when I came home from that conference, I set to work. Now I want to paint you a picture. My garage wasn’t just your run of the mill crammed garage, no. The entirety of the space had essentially become fully unwalkable, unusable space, boxes piled four or five up everywhere. Over the years with kids and moves and busy lives, Jeff and I have accumulated quite a lot of stuff.
There were times while I was working when I had to open the garage door just to be able to walk. I’d put some boxes in the driveway outside while I sorted, but an open garage door meant that passersby could view inside as well. They bore witness to boxes on top of crushed boxes and our stuff strewn all about. I remember being so embarrassed as our neighbors walked by, including some of you who saw the state of our garage. They were probably thinking, Oy vey my neighbor…or oy vey my rabbi is such a mess! I wanted to close the door and hide it all. And I thought, isn’t that like life? We try to hide our junk away from the world, but somehow it always seeps out.
As I was sorting amidst the mess, I couldn’t help but wonder how much we are held captive by the junk that is no longer serving us. And that, too, is just like life.
This season, we are tasked with the work of cheshbon hanefesh, the accounting of the soul. Cheshbon hanefesh is the spiritual equivalent of a deep clean of a garage, getting into every nook and cranny, opening up boxes sealed long ago. We each need to figure out for ourselves: what is our spiritual clutter?
Physical clutter is easy to see; the papers that have yet to be sorted, the tchotchkes taking up all available space, the books we keep saying we will read… that we will never read. Spiritual clutter, on the other hand, is far more stealth. Not forgiving someone is spiritual clutter. So is replaying the mistakes of your past even if you have already done everything you can to rectify them. Spiritual clutter is our regrets, our guilt, our addictions. It’s our stress and our compulsive need to compare ourselves with everyone else. It’s our inability to let go of the past or the dream of a future that will never come to be.
Just like the clutter accumulates in our garages, it also accumulates in our hearts until there is no room left for what we really need. All the space is taken up with fear and anxiety so that there is no place left for purpose in our cluttered hearts.
My garage? I can’t even park my car in it. I can’t use my garage for the purpose for which it was created. We can’t use our hearts for the purposes they were created for either when they are so filled to the brim with the boxes of our torments and insecurities. There is simply no room left for God in a cluttered heart.
Yom Kippur, this day, exists on the calendar like a spring cleaning of the soul, like a spiritual alarm clock that goes off every year reminding us to do the serious and soulful work of cheshbon hanefesh before it is too late. Because the truth is: I am going to die. And so are you. We just don’t know when.
Yom Kippur translates as the Day of Atonement. Kippur, kaper as a verb can also mean to cleanse or to purge. This day in ancient times was about acknowledging the many transgressions that would build up over the year and clog the spiritual pathway between us and God. In Leviticus, we learn that these transgressions were handled in three primary ways to prepare the people for the year ahead[1].
The first way was to cleanse the temple space. The ancient temple was treated as the dwelling place for God. To do the work that was required, they needed their holy space to reflect its purpose.
The second way our people dealt with the transgressions of the prior year was a public, dramatic ritual where the sins of the community as a whole were placed symbolically onto a goat who was sent away into the wilderness. The act of doing so provided a ritualistic way to let go of guilt and to allow the community to move forward. In a way, our ritual of tashlich echoes this tradition as we let our sins float away down river. This, of course, assumes we are doing the real, accompanying work of teshuvah, apology, and repair.
While the ritual of the goat was public and for the whole community, the third way to prepare for the new year was more personal. Each person was asked to fast, a practice we continue today. Fasting allows you, in a way, to play-act death, for in death, we no longer consume. Fasting is meant to help you clarify that which is most important to you. Those Swedish death cleaners were onto something quite ancient and profound. Whether through death cleaning or through re-enacting death via fasting, acts that help us get in touch with our mortality have the potential, if we allow them, to lead us to profound revelation.
The power of physical and ritual acts, throughout time, has always been about fostering the necessary, inner work happening in our neshamas, in our souls.
Maybe you are fasting. You have just begun so the hunger pains have likely not hit just yet, but when they do, they should remind you just how fragile our bodies are, and this life really is. And if you are not fasting this Yom Kippur and are mentally and physically able to do so, let me offer that maybe this is the year to try… or to try again. Rather than to punish us, the ritual act of the fast is meant to remind us that we can face discomfort and survive. It is meant to prepare us to do this same work out in the world: to know we are powerful enough to stave off our immediate impulses whether they are to gorge or to hoard or to judge or to gossip or to withdraw out of fear. The fast is meant to help us realize that we are the ones ultimately in control of ourselves and over what we are able to do and not do.
We need to feel empowered to do the work of change for it is not easy. We tell ourselves we can’t fast because it is inconvenient and unpleasant. We tell ourselves we do not have the time to truly examine our lives because we are too busy and important. We tell ourselves we can’t let go of our past mistakes because somewhere inside of us we believe we are our mistakes. We have become the spiritual hoarders of convenient lies.
It is high time for us to face our truth. We hoard toxic relationships that no longer serve us because we are afraid of losing love. We hang on to that box full of the worry that we are not enough because it has embedded itself into our heart and we don’t know how to rip it out without ripping our whole heart out. And if we let go of that anger we hold over that relative or friend who hurt us, that anger that feels like it has defined us, we are not sure we will know who we are anymore.
The truth is that we will never know until we do the sacred work required of us this season.
In our central text for the holy days, Unetaneh Tokef, we read, “On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed: who will live and who will die.” Life is finite. We don’t want to die with the spiritual equivalent of a cluttered garage, having never opened the boxes that make up our lives.
These days of awe remind us that we should not wait to be happy, and these boxes are holding us back. So, let’s deal with our spiritual clutter now so we can enjoy life in the moment while it is unfolding around us. Don’t wait for that “magical time” when you finally finish school or retire or lose the weight or have the baby or get the dream job. Because we do not know when our end will come. Now is not the time to let the spiritual clutter decide your life just because it might be safer that way. As Brene Brown has taught: you can choose courage, and you can choose comfort, but you cannot choose both.
Who will we be when we finally, courageously let go of the clutter in our hearts?
We will be ourselves, only lighter and freer and odds are a whole lot happier. Unfettered to our past and full of newfound clarity, we will bravely begin new chapters.
After the spiritual high of Yom Kippur, we come back to earth for Sukkot, which begins in just five days’ time. In many ways, Sukkot is an extension of the truth-telling we are sacredly starting here on Yom Kippur. If Yom Kippur is about getting vulnerable… well, so is Sukkot. The first mitzvah commanded for us to fulfill as Yom Kippur ends is to hammer the first nail into the sukkah we are meant to build.
Sukkot asks us to build the flimsiest piece of architecture possible. A sukkah is not kosher if it has four sturdy, complete walls, and it needs holes in its roof so we can see the stars and so the rain can pour in. How is this an extension of Yom Kippur? That sukkah, which was never meant to withstand a strong wind, is built to remind us that all the things that once mattered the most to us, our status and our ego and the material stuff that we thought made up a life really mean nothing in the end. What matters most is what is found in our hearts. The walls may fall down around us, but if you’ve got a strong heart and your foundation is made up of faith and family and friends, then no storm will ever truly take you out.
Decluttering our hearts allows us to make room for our most authentic selves. It allows us to make room for God.
In Exodus, God instructs our ancestors to make space for the divine. God says, V’asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham. Make me a sanctuary and I will dwell among them.[2] God is seeking space among us and with us. God’s words reverberate down the generations to this very moment, asking us: Will we make space for God?
As that question floats in the air around us on this Yom Kippur, I have a confession to make: I didn’t finish cleaning my garage this summer. I did a lot – I really, really did - but there is more work to do. The truth is that there is always more work to do. On our garages and on our souls. The goal at the end of the day is not to be perfect - that is its own kind of spiritual clutter – but to keep working at it diligently year after year. Just like keeping our garages uncluttered requires regular maintenance, so, too, does the work of our hearts. But I believe I can do it, and I believe you can, too.
V’asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham. Make me a sanctuary and I will dwell among you. In the year to come, may we be courageous enough to let go of that which has weighed us down and held us back. May we create enough room in our hearts for what really matters. And may we follow the words of our Torah and make enough space, sacred space, to truly let God in.
Shanah tovah. G’mar tov.
