Kol Nidre 5768

The Yeshiva shel Ma’ala and the Yeshiva shel Mata

Good Shabbos, Good Yontif, and G’mar chatima tova!

Friends, a few weeks ago our Programming and Ritual Director, Rachel Kohl Finegold, gave a powerful sermon that could have been titled: Kol Nidre for Consumers. “All the ta’avot, the desires, I have had this past year, for the things I didn’t have but craved, all the things I pushed ahead in line to get, the things I desired, may they all be meaningless and null and void as I start my new year.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a formal Kol Nidre for ta’avot, for desires. I still have a craving for an I-Phone, to be able to have all of Google instantly at my fingertip –to retrieve information, to find out instantly whether what someone is saying is an urban legand, or the Truth. And I still drool for the exotic cars I see in my parking lot – and even, to be perfectly honest, for some of the German ones, which my father never would have approved of – nor would Rachel.

So why don’t we have a Kol Nidre for our ta’avot? Why isn’t there a Kol Nidre for our Yetzer Hara – for the evil inclination?

You could say all of Yom Kippur is a Kol Nidre for lusts and desires; a whole day of not eating or drinking or wearing leather or engaging in intimate behavior… But the Mishna at the end of tractate Ta’anit says that really Yom Kippur is supposed to be a joyous day – “Lo hayu yamim tovim liyisrael … K’yom Hakipurim”, and, especially in the afternoon, the men – unmarried ones – are supposed to be running after the unmarried women, and those same women are supposed to entice the men to come out to the vineyards – “Oh young man,” the women would shout, “lift your eyes and see what whom you are choosing…” clearly there was a lot of passion and desire going on on Yom Kippur. In fact, in the afternoon of Yom Kippur we read from the forbidden sexual encounters, and one explanation is to let us know that the other ones, within a halachic relationship, such as marriage, are halachically permissible – and encouraged. Moreover, even at the height of our spiritual experience on Yom Kippur, who has not craved a little bit of food– especially when you get home tonight from the heavy Kol Nidre davening?

So it seems that we do not deny our Yetzer on Yom HaKippurim: we venerate it. Vechol Ma’aminim shehu tov lakol, hayode’ah yetzer l’chol chay… Vechol ma’aminim she’hu yotzram babaten…

God gave us this Yetzer. In a few moments we will be resuming the davening with the Sh’ma, where all of our passions are celebrated by the words “bechol levavcha” – as the Midrash says, “bishnei yitrzrecha” – with both your “good” and your “bad or raw” passion.

So perhaps we don’t promote a Kol Nidre of the Yetzer – of the urge and desire – because that yetzer is an integral part of who we are as Jews, as servants of God. We don’t want to remove it or invalidate it – or deny it, chas veshalom.

Rather the Yetzer is raw passion, raw emotion, and just as consumerism competes for it – just as I-Phones and cars and video games and doing Facebook all day – all compete for it, so do God and Torah and Yiddishkeit. So rather than rejecting our passions, we need to establish on Yom Kippur what Professor Rodney Stark calls a “religious market.” In his “Religious Supply Side Theory” he posits that people are naturally religious, the yetzer is potentially religious, but that their religiosity varies depending on the vigor of what he calls “religious suppliers.” “Wherever churches – [or shuls] – are a little more energetic and competitive, you’ve got more people going to church,” he says in an article in that bastion of consumerism and capitalism, The Wall Street Journal. Stark goes on to prove his point when he compares the decline of old-line churches in Europe, such as the Church of Sweden, which can barely get a minyan for Sunday service, and some of the new Evangelical churches in Europe, which are happening places in those same countries, growing fast, and are jazzing things up to spark an enthusiastic response from their worshippers.

But wait, when we go out and compete for people’s passions, how do we know that we are being loyal to Hashem, to our tradition, to our Torah? Are we just competing in the market for people’s loyalty, and leaving Sinai in the dust?

In fact, competing so hard and forgetting about Tradition and Yiddishkeit can sometimes be the biggest turn off for people, the biggest turn-off for the yetzer in the religious market. Recently, as reported in the Forward, on a Friday night at a Reform summer camp for Jewish youth leadership in Warwick NY, the visiting musician was leading Kabbalat Shabbat services set to “easy-listening jazz.” As the musician played a jazzy version of the Barchu – Barchu at Adoshem Ham’vorach – some 40 campers – a quarter of the whole camp – got up and left. The service was too untraditional they said. Indeed, some of the kids who left, formed a minyan, with a more traditional Shabbat t’fila, in the bathroom! “I’ve been quite attached to saying the prayers the way I was bat mitzvahed with. It’s something I find really powerful,” one of them said.

Unfortunately, the Jewish people have a history of trying to appeal to people’s lusts and passions and hearts, and ending up with nothing Jewish at all.

The great German Liberal Jewish leader before the war, Frankfort Rabbi Ceasar Seligmann, describes a curious movement, the Berlin Refomgemein of 1845 which he says made an attempt to establish a “Jewish Church”… “We want to … establish… that form of Judaism which would correspond to the life of our times and to the feeling of our heart.” In the end, the Berlin Reformgemein came up with a worship service “from which nearly everything characteristic of the historical Jewish worship service had been removed,” according to Seligmann. How do we avoid the mistakes of the Berlin Reformgemein and Camp Warwik but at the same time remain “energetic and competitive” in the “religious market.”

Instead of a Kol Nidre denying supply side religion it affirms it through the Yeshiva Shel Ma’alah – the heavenly Yeshiva, or Rabbinical College or forum - that we have to face. As we read right after the Kol Nidre: Through consultation with the heavenly Yeshiva and the earthly Yeshiva, it becomes permissible –no, desirable – to pray with the sinner. We need to be energetic and open our doors – even compete - for those who wouldn’t normally come to shul or want to be part of our community, but we need to do it under the auspices of the heavenly yeshiva or forum, always with the questions, Are we being true to God’s Torah? To our tradition? To our traditional authorities?

So when Anshe Sholom enters the religious market, it needs to be under the rubric of this heavenly Yeshiva. And who is learning and teaching in this heavenly Yeshiva? Rav Yosef Karo who wrote the Code of Jewish Law – the Shulchan Aruch – is a member of this Yeshiva, but so is his Ashkenazic rival, Rav Moshe Isserles, who frequently will spring up in disagreement with Rav Yosef. And the Shach, Rav Shabtai the Cohen, a commentator from the 17th century, is there as well to argue with both of them. From the later 17th century the Magen Avraham, Rabbi Avraham Gombiner says his piece, and the 18th century Gaon from Vilna is there as well to move the discussion in a totally different direction than expected. In that same Yeshiva, Tosafot argue with Rashi, and disagree with the approach of the Rambam. They are all in the Yeshiva Shel Ma’alah – and the Halachic authorities of merely a century ago, the Mishna B’rurah and the Aruch HaShulchan, stand front and center, with Rav Moshe Feinstein and Rav Shlomo Zalman Aurbach, contemporaries, there to keep everyone in line. No energetic, appealing, religious action or change can be made without taking it for debate in this heavenly forum, the Yeshiva shel Ma’ala. God empowers us, in the end, to determine what is going on in that forum, in that Yeshiva, but the players are all there, black and white in our books, and in color in our tradition.

But to appeal to the passions and raw spiritual energy that people have, and that we want at Anshe Sholom, we need to also appeal to the Yeshiva Shel Mata, the earthly Yeshiva, or forum. The Yeshiva Shel Mata – on earth – is made up, for our community, of all of are our members: Those who show up at 6:15 in the morning, just to help with a minyan and those who find Anshe Sholom a place where they feel comfortable to attend or lead services, where they never have before; a woman setting up a chavruta learning partnership with Rachel Kohl Finegold; people clambering for a class on Kashrut or philosophy. A retired man who wants to claim his yeshivish roots and finish a masechta, a tractate of Talmud. A young man putting Tefilin on for the first time, and a middle aged woman who comes from Deerfield for a class I give in Skokie. A family doing Tashlich for the first time, or buying a lulav and etrog and having a sukkah for the first time; a man watching his kid at Tot Shabbat, and singing “put the chicken in the pot for Shabbat” so his wife can either sleep, or can run after the other kids… And the families and individuals who every month are kashering their homes and making sure that our local stores have kosher cheese and meat.
The Yeshiva shel matah, the earthly forum, consists of our members who have worked to make Lakeview a better, safer and more equitable place to live, by building day schools and other learning opportunities for kids and adults, or our many members who have boldly made aliya to Israel, or have decided to interrupt their carriers to spend a year or a summer in Israel. Or even more, standing at the center of this Yeshiva shel matta, this earthly forum, are our members who left to go into the Israeli army, or are helping Tzahal for a week or two through Sarel or other programs. And the tenacious mikvah committee that has gotten us to the doorsteps of a new mikvah in Chicago – right behind the shu. And the children of Anshe Sholom: these are an integral part of the Yeshiva Shel Mata – the earthly school of energetic, passionate Judaism.

On Yom Kippur, far from denying our urges and passions and raw enthusiasm and energy, we have to appeal to the lower Yeshiva and find out what its members demand, while at the same time knowing that the upper Yeshiva, the keeper of our tradition, is always in session.

Anshe Sholom and Judaism have to be dynamic and passionate. They have to capture people’s desire to grow and reach out to God and to the Jewish community, to our tradition and our people. We have to capture and harness people’s passions for the State of Israel in their politics on the right and the left. And their feelings on American politics also run the gamut. Passion and energy, raw, but funneled through the heavenly and earthly Yeshivas. This is legitimate “supply side religion” for us.

In 5768, may both of these Yeshivas enable us to rejoice in our passion, our yetzer, focused in a positive, religious direction and celebrating the most energetic and exciting journey of ‘bechol levavcha” – with every chamber of our heart, with every dimension of our God given desires.