We start the evening service of Yom Kippur with a strange proclamation. We say in the introduction to Kol Nidrei:
By the authority of the court on high and by the authority of this court below, with divine consent and with consent of this congregation, we grant permission to pray with those who have transgressed.
I think it is very strange that we start this day granting permission to people who committed a transgression to pray with us when we know full well that we missed the mark at some point during the year that passed.
Who are we to permit anything? Who among us has not done something that requires reflection and atonement?
This prayer opens the Yom Kippur service exactly because none of us can claim that we have not committed any sins. In the beginning of the service we affirm that no matter what our faults are, no matter the mistakes we made, on this holy day there is a place for everyone in the community. And we are clear that although we all have sinned, we are also not the only ones. We give each other permission to pray together because we recognize that we are flawed beings, who require compassion and understanding, who need to be in community to have our eyes opened to the opportunities we have to grow and change.
The Talmudic Tractate Yomah has a story to explain the need for our communal eyes to be opened. In Yomah 23a/b we learn that a lottery had to be instituted for the cohanim (the priests) to perform each task relating to the sacrifices. The reasons for instituting the lottery happened because of two incidents.
The first happened when two priests were running on the ascending ramp, racing to determine who would clean the ashes produced by the sacrifices of that day. The priests were tied, when one of them shoved the other, who fell and broke his leg. The second reason for instituting the lottery happened when again two priests were tied while racing up the ramp. One of them was about to win the race when the other took a knife and stabbed his colleague in the heart. Both stories for instituting the lottery are disturbing. For whatever reason, the Cohanim felt they needed to resort to violence to have a job. We are not given a reason for the extreme competitiveness we see here: maybe there were too many Cohanim and not enough tasks, maybe they were compensated for the tasks they did and without the compensation they and their families would go hungry, or maybe they were motivated by the zeal of performing tasks at the Temple. What we learn from this story is that violence and disregard for safety and life was the norm, and it had to be stopped.
The story continues.
The father of the young priest who was stabbed, came and saw that his child was alive. He said: “My son has not yet died. For this reason the knife, which is in his body, has not become ritually impure through contact with a corpse.
If you remove it promptly, it will still be pure for future use.”
In other words, the ritual purity of the knife was more important to the priests than the shedding of blood. Even the dying young priest’s father worried about the purity of the knife, not about the pointless death of his child.
How would you feel if you were standing at the Temple and you saw that one of the Cohanim was stabbed, and the other was pushed from a ramp?
How would you react if you heard a parent speaking about the death of their child as less important than the ritual purity of a knife?
Would these priests be welcomed in the community to pray together?
Where was the compassion, the regard for others, the care, the loving community?
In the same way that the cohen who shoved the other from the ramp, and the cohen who stabbed the other, and the father of the dying young cohen had lost perspective, the community in Jerusalem seemed indifferent to the abuses that were happening in the Temple Mount.
Rabbi Tzadok stood up on the steps of the Entrance Hall of the Sanctuary and talked to the community about happened in the Temple. The murder had happened in Jerusalem. Jerusalem did not belong to any one of the tribes, it belonged to the entire nation.
Rabbi Tzadok asked:
Who would be responsible for the incident — the sages, the priests, the people who saw the incident, or the whole nation? The people felt enormous grief when they understood that everyone was responsible for what had happened.
Murder and violence became the norm in Jerusalem, in their capital, and the whole nation was responsible for the atmosphere that was created. There was no one else to blame but themselves.
Rabbi Tzadok realized that the people had become inure to suffering and to the abuse of power. Their priorities were wrong. He pushed the people to see that their indifference to the violence that was happening, and the normalization of unacceptable speech and behavior was destroying the community. Rabbi Tzadok wanted them to understand that they had to feel outraged, and only if they changed their minds and their behavior they would avoid even bigger tragedies.
It is true that the behavior and priorities of the Cohanim were the central issue.
The escalation of violence was the responsibility of the whole nation, but the specific behavior that had to stop was the one exhibited by the Cohanim. Their bad behavior, unfortunately, did not stop. As a reaction to their behavior, zealots and other extremist groups in the community also did not stop, creating the vicious cycle that resulted in the loss of Jewish sovereignty and the destruction of the Temple in the year 70 CE.
This year, more than ever, we need the voice of Rabbi Tzadok, a voice that will shake us out of our complacency and indifference.
But Rabbi Tzadok alone was not able to stop the madness and avoid catastrophe.
Today all of us have to do the work of Rabbi Tzadok if we are to avoid the chaos that can result from a fractured society. It is time we examine our priorities. Is our priority to be right and convince others of our “rightness,” to win arguments, or are we able to remain engaged in conversation and create a space where we can mend the fraying fabric of our society? Is our priority to live with certainty about our principles or can we ensure that the principles we live by are safeguarding life? Is our priority to impose one solution, the one we think is right, to every person and situation, or can we have balance and recognize that every issue is complex, and therefore a “one size fits all” solution will not work?
You know my answer. We cannot be indifferent to suffering. I believe we can find solutions for mass shootings, solutions to end hateful speech, solutions to the conflicts generated by social inequality and economic decline. We can find solutions for international conflicts, we can find solutions for famine, for human precipitated disasters, for water shortages, for the lack of resources for education and health care.
For us to find that solution we have to care. We cannot respond to chaos with indifference. Ellie Wiesel, in comments he delivered at the White House in 1999 said:
“Indifference can be tempting—more than that, seductive. For the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbors are of no consequence. And, therefore, their lives are meaningless. Indifference is the epitome of evil. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
We are not allowed to be indifferent to human suffering, to what is happening in the world, to the violence and hurt that are around us. We do not have the luxury of being complacent, of being indifferent.
On Yom Kippur, we are invited to join the community in prayer and care, and to show that we care. We started this day by giving permission to each other to be in community and pray together even though we have many faults.
We take this chance to open our eyes to the injustice and suffering that is happening. We have to show that we are not indifferent to the plight of the immigrant, of the poor, of people who are dying because of issues with health care affordability, of women who are having their rights restricted and transgender people. We have to care about our environment, and be conscious about our impact in the world. We have to care about each other. We want God to be compassionate with us, and we will be compassionate with each other.
May we be blessed with the ability to care. May we remember that we all are accepted in the community, although we are not perfect. Most of all, may we be present and not indifferent to everything that is happening around us.