As I prepared for these yamim nora’im, these days of awe, I engaged in a letter-writing practice to begin to put down on paper what needed to be said and to whom. This is Letter Number One.
A Letter to my Children
Even as I write this letter to you, to Lev and Eli and Maya, I am really writing this letter to all children, to the generation rising, to all who will inherit what we are creating for you during our time here on earth. The truth is that I hope the future is worthy of each of you, but I fear it is not.
I feel it is important for children of a certain age to know about the world, which is why, Lev, Eli, and Maya, we listen to the news on the car radio every morning on the way to school. I try to explain what you hear, encourage your questions, and do my best to impart to you that you are connected to that which is being reported on whether you feel it or not, whether it is here in our backyard or halfway around the world. I believe deeply in our morning ritual. I want you to be informed; I want you to care. But sometimes, when we listen to the stories about wars and wildfires, about the rollback of reproductive rights and the decaying state of our democracy, my chest starts to constrict as I consider the world we are leaving to you.
On this new year, I desperately want to tell you that the world is getting better with the passage of time. I feel like it is my job as your parent to ensure that the world is safer for you, for this next generation, but I fear we are not living up to the task. If there was ever teshuvah, repentance that needed to be done, it is for this.
Now I stop writing and put the pen down. For how can I write such a letter of despair to my children and by extension to all our children? My fear has seemingly outpaced my hope. I need to regroup. I put the letter aside vowing to return to it when I can find some nechemta, some bit of uplift to grab onto. And so, I sit. I wait. I think. I search. And then with a deep inhale, I pick up the pen again, grab a new piece of paper and begin to write Letter Number Two.
A letter to Yochanan Ben Zakkai
Why a letter to you? Yochanan ben Zakkai, you have been dead and buried for almost two thousand years now. Yet, I write to you in a desperate attempt for the sake of my children to decipher how you did what you did. How you battled the despair of your time to birth a new era for our people. Our tradition credits you with not just the beginning of rabbinic Judaism, but with all of Judaism. We – the Jewish people - would be a footnote in the annals of history if not for your spiritual creativity.
You are our people’s exemplar of hope and resilience and transformation. For it was you who understood that there was no way the Roman siege on Jerusalem was going to end well. It was you who had the foresight and maybe the brilliant insanity to imagine the possibility of dramatic and necessary change.
And so, what did you do? As the Romans surrounded the city, zealots, Jews just like you, guarded the city gates on the inside to prevent their fellow Jews from fleeing. They burned the food stores to create urgency in an attempt to get everyone to take up arms. But you saw the writing on the wall, and you didn’t want Judaism to end when the Temple fell.
And so, your disciples helped you, a living man, crawl into a coffin. Of all places, you chose a coffin as the vehicle for our rebirth. The zealots would surely let your disciples pass if it was to bury you outside the city walls. If only you could escape, then you could bargain for something on our behalf. What were you thinking as you were carried out the city gates enclosed in that box in a ploy to save our people? How could you possibly conceive that even as we were on the verge of our very destruction that a radical new beginning was possible? Who among us today is capable of such radical thought?
But your story is exactly the story we need to be reminded of in times like these. For the state of our world, we too might relate to the feelings you may felt in that box, closed in, claustrophobic, dark, alone… But what if we believed as civil rights leader, Valarie Kaur taught that this darkness is not this darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?
Once safely outside the city gates, in what must have appeared to be a miraculous moment of m’chayeh hameitim, the resurrection of the dead, you climbed out of that coffin and went straight to Vespasian, the Roman general overseeing the siege. You flattered him, called him Emperor as if you could see into the future, and convinced him to give you Yavneh, a place where you and a small group of sages could settle. And it was there that you transformed Judaism from a cult of sacrifice on the altar in Jerusalem to a Judaism centered around study and law, people and prayer.
I pen this letter to you, Yochanan ben Zakkai so that I can remind myself that there have been days when the world as we knew it collapsed. But we rose again. You were like the dead, but when you rose from that coffin, you gave us life as well. From your example, from your very life, we learn that when the worst happens, that we, too, can rise up and truly live again.
I put this letter aside, throwing up a prayer of gratitude to our ancestor. Grabbing a new piece of paper, I begin Letter Number Three.
A Letter to Us
This letter is penned to those who hold responsibility over the reality we are living today. It is a letter addressed to you. It is a letter addressed to me. It is a letter to all of us because there is teshuvah that needs to be done.
The Rambam taught that the work of teshuvah consisted of these three indispensable steps: The first step is the recognition of our sin. The second step is the actions associated with repair: actions like asking for forgiveness and mending that which was broken. The third and most crucial step only occurs when we encounter the same opportunity to miss the mark and having learned from our mistake, we make a different decision.
So, let’s do it. For the sake of our children, for our own sake, let us consider our teshuvah as a society. Step one. What is a sin of our era that we need to name? It is a sin we have seen before and cannot seem to shake.
It is the same sin that caused Judaism’s ancestor, Yochanan ben Zakkai to flee and begin anew. The rabbis taught that in addition to Roman subjugation, the temple fell due to sinat chinam, to baseless and boundless hatred. Hatred among who? Among ourselves. Our people had turned on one another in those awful years, thinking they were the only ones with the right answers, the right path. The Sadducees thought they had truth on their side. And so did the Pharisees. The zealots, too.
Does this sound familiar? Sinat chinam is right here in our midst, in our day as well. We know we are in trouble when the very essence of truth is questioned. We know we have a problem when the legitimacy of elections is challenged. We know we have fallen off a cliff when the Capital itself is stormed. Extremism took over Yochanan ben Zakkai’s world, and it is taking over ours as well. There is a siege on our values and principles as a nation. The threat to democracy is real and our sin is that we have allowed it to happen.
Step two. After we recognize our sin, Rambam taught that repair comes next. What is the opposite of sinat chinam, boundless hatred? Rav Kook taught it’s ahavat chinam, boundless love.
Love is not just a word, some fluff we throw out into the universe as vague philosophy. Love could and should like a series of actions to which we hold ourselves and each other accountable.
Love looks like people rising up to demand a discourse of truth-telling in our country. For too long, our society has settled for dialogue that is increasingly devoid of facts. We must re-train ourselves to look beyond pithy soundbites and false narratives drawn together out of political invention. We must call for and expect leadership who tells the truth.
Love means making room for dissent. Judaism has long championed diverse views, recording minority opinions in our legal works even as we firmly took a stand on issues when decisions were required. The same should be true for us today. Dissent should not be stifled, nor should it be used to choke our system and hold it hostage. We need to celebrate civil conversation, rigorous yet respectful debate, and reaching across the aisle.
Boundless love means we must lean into the promise of America where all our voices count. Our democracy depends on access to the polls, and we must fight attempts to narrow who can vote.
In our fractured society, pulled apart by partisan politics exacerbated by the pandemic, love means finding the ways in which we can be united again. Sinat chinam, boundless hatred has consumed us. It is time for a shift in paradigm. To do that, each and every one of us must be engaged in the project of protecting our democracy.
Step two will be a long and frankly unending process – and that is where step three comes in. We will be challenged again and again to put down the threats to our democracy. We will have to ask ourselves repeatedly, have we learned from our mistakes, and are we ready to start making different decisions?
This day, Yom Kippur – some call it a rehearsal for death. Or maybe it is the thing itself: death on a smaller scale. We stop eating, we wear white, we confess – all the signs of the end of a life. But then at the close of Yom Kippur, there is a shift. We pray: Open up the gates, let us back into life, back into second chances. Some teach that the shofar’s tekiah gedola at the end of it all, with the sun going down, the ark open, all of us hungry and exhausted and vulnerable, that shofar call is the howl of a mother giving birth. We are being birthed into a new day, a new year, a new opportunity to live again.
There is a prayer for coming back to life. When Yochanan ben Zakkai rose from his coffin, I wonder if he uttered the prayer from our Amidah, Baruch atah Adonai m’chayeh hameitim, Blessed are You, Adonai who gives life to the dead.
This prayer, it can be on our lips in our days as well: Baruch atah Adonai m’chayeh hameitim. Let us lay to rest that which needs to be laid to rest: the sinat chinam of our era, the divisive extremism of these last few years, the slow stripping away of our rights and our dignity. And let us revive that which needs to be revived: our very lives, our democracy, our future.
It was Yochanan ben Zakkai who taught, If there is a sapling in your hand when someone says to you, “The Messiah has come!” be sure to finish planting the sapling first, and then go greet the Messiah. He wisely understood that hope is something we can hold in our hands and can plant for our future. We do not know what is around the corner, for good or for bad, but what we can count on is us. As I bring this letter to you and to me to a close, Yochanan ben Zakkai’s words are echoing in my ear: Keep planting saplings. Keep doing the sacred work. And when you are down and the world is closing in, keep rising up.
I put this letter to this side now, keeping it close by as a witness to the work we must do. With a nechemta in my heart, I now return to Letter Number One.
To my children and yours. To the grandchildren and great-grandchildren. To the generations rising, expectant, ready. We are sorry. We are sorry for the ways we have failed you. We are working on sacred repair. We cannot promise you that the future will be better than it is today, but what I know for certain is that there are those among us who care and who will not shrug off our responsibility towards you. Like every generation that has come before, you will bear the burdens of the past and need to take them on as your own. But we promise, we commit to work to lighten those burdens as much as we can - just as you will do for your children.
If we have done what we are supposed to do, you will grow into a future where our democracy will be strong, civil discourse will have returned, and a spirit of boundless love rather than boundless hate will frame your lives.
We will plant saplings that we hope and pray will bear fruit and will shelter you from the many storms that will come your way, and we will teach you to keep planting, too. And we will teach you this blessing so that it is ever on your lips as it will be on ours:
Baruch atah Adonai m’chayeh hameitim. Blessed is the Source of Life who revives us even when we feel like we are dying.
Baruch atah Adonai m’chayeh hameitim. Blessed is the Source of Second Chances who with a howl will birth us into a new year.
Baruch atah Adonai m’chayeh hameitim. Blessed is the God of all Generations who renews us so that we can rise up and live again.
And let us all say, Amen.
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