Last month, I left a piece of my heart in New York where my husband Len and I dropped off our daughter for her first semester in drama school. The rigorous admissions journey was exciting for her, if grueling for her father. To audition on multiple campuses, Len took her on what I called her “national tour.” What followed was the real challenge: the waiting! She realizes that if she goes into acting professionally, such limbo will be her perpetual existence. She will need to tolerate the uncertainty, not allow the unknown future to spoil her present, she will even need to embrace the ambiguity. And yet, as she reflects, isn’t that the existence of all our lives?! Those of us who are not waiting on auditions may find it easier to live under the illusion of certainty, but audition or not, we face uncertainty, an unknowable future, ambiguity. And on Yom Kippur, our sacred day of reflection and intention, there is no concealing it.
At the start of this evening’s service, barely settled into our seats, we rose for the haunting prayer of Kol Nidre. Both its beauty and its anguish meant to crack open our hearts, its words compel us to question everything we think we know. We hear: “All vows, resolves and commitments, let them be discarded, forgiven…” Or perhaps an alternative translation: “Words matter, promises are important, yet still so much is out of our hands; so you do what you can do.” Kol Nidre, then, compels us to with humility, face the truth of uncertainty.
In this time of global chaos, polarization, mistrust, antisemitism, authoritarianism, climate crisis, isolation– but really, in any season of our lives—when we feel the ground beneath us shake, pessimism and paralysis can conspire to consume us.
How many of us catastrophize about the future? Inspired by her Judaism, professor of strategic design Lisa Kay Solomon teaches Stanford students to imagine how they can shape the unknowable future by considering: what are the variables that are fixed, and what are the variables that are flexible—open to our influence. Solomon would invite us to consider: How would you complete the sentence: “the future is…” Try it out, just completing it with one word. The future is… anyone say: Bright? Bleak? Limitless? Ours? Hopeless? Understandable if we are feeling doomed. And yet… Instead of reacting to a future we don’t want to be a part of, can we transform the weight of discomfort into a state of possibility? Can we transform a sense of helplessness into a sense of agency where we shape a hopeful future of compassion, community, connection?
For one of our congregants life’s uncertainty became more obvious with a job loss. Feeling baffled, worried, and a little lost when laid off from a tech company as a young father, at first all he can see are the risks of the wilderness of unemployment. He starts to network and finds he enjoys reconnecting with people. In downtime he serves his community, volunteering for his child’s school, for the synagogue, and for a local election, discovering purpose in the experiences. The man at once feels the stress of not knowing his next steps, and also the promise of possibility, and understands it is in the space of ambiguity, where spiritual journey happens; reflection on the past and intention for the future–reflection and intention — teshuvah.
As the man considers every option from becoming a stay-at-home parent to going back to school, he reflects that the job loss offers him an opportunity to make a mid-life shift that he might not have afforded himself. What would it take for all of us to welcome uncertainty, invite such periods of contemplation and spiritual growth, set aside our assumptions about what is next, put all options on the table?
Most of us need help in reaching such a state of fruitful ambiguity. The very discomfort about uncertainty that wires humans, to prepare for the tiger lurking behind the tree, but obscures from us the fruit on that tree, might lead us to seek a world of predictability, simplicity. Yet, that is not reality.
Jewish text conditions us to tolerate complexity. The first chapters of the Book of Genesis tell the story of creation. Actually? the stories of creation. Society often folds the narratives together into one, but our origin myth is a pair of 2 distinct stories. Consider the question of human nature. In the first story, after creating humans God says- we are very good. Whereas, in the second story, in the middle of the Garden of Eden, God plants a tree of knowledge of good and evil…whether we are good, still yet to be determined. So, to what extent are we humans good? And to what extent, do we struggle between good and evil? We are still figuring that out–wrestling with interpretations. From both creation stories we glean essential values, but there is no one neat and tidy conclusion about the world, about people, or about God–we do not claim to know.
Rejecting fundamentalism, our text demands a tolerance for discord, expanding our capacity for complexity. I like to think of Torah Study as communal “ambiguity-training.” Torah Study conditions us to endure uncertainty, to take comfort in walking through the unknown together, to flourish in that shared space of ambiguity, to ground ourselves in our tradition’s teachings, so that we gain clarity about our values and find potential for fruitful ambiguity, as we embrace an unknowable future.
I have the honor of accompanying you through some of the most intense seasons in your lives. For many, health struggles mean extended periods when all you can do is take one day at a time, one day of treatment, of healing, of prayer, at a time… of overcoming ailments thought incurable, living with chronic illness, or facing the malady, that may not be treatable. So often, I am blown away by the volition you find, when so much is out of your hands. Illness, or even end of life, becomes precious time to do things that matter — to sit with friends, to receive meals and love from the community, to make amends or forgive, so that nothing is left unsaid, to make plans or leave an ethical will–a document of your values for those you leave behind. You look this time of uncertainty square in the face, and turn it into a time of intimacy and holiness.
Ten days before her death, inspired by her Jewish values, writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal published a column in the NY Times Modern Love series, called: “You May Want to Marry My Husband.” Dying of cancer and close to the end, in between morphine micro-naps Amy penned her version of a singles profile for her husband. She sought to help him find his next love story for the future she would not be able to share with him. Awaiting her untimely death and not knowing what the future would hold for the family she left behind, Amy reclaimed some power. Not only did she tell the world how wonderful her husband was, attracting potential future mates, Amy made clear to her husband and their children that she gave her blessing for him to live his life fully after her death. So much is fixed, inevitable, out of our hands; so then the question of our lives is, what will we do with, all that is not fixed, but is flexible, possible, open to our influence? Can we find empowerment, even as we live with uncertainty?
Yom Kippur’s response? A great shofar will cry and a still small voice will be heard. Who shall live and who shall die. Who will rest and who will wander. We do not claim to know. The Unetaneh Tokef prayer that we will recite tomorrow morning reminds us: the ground has always been shaky. When we ask: Who shall live and who shall die. Who will rest and who will wander…Unetane Tokef, proclaims: Do something. Repentance, prayer, and righteousness. The essence of the High Holy Days, and of all of Jewish life– teshuvah, tfilah, tzedakah. There’s always something we can do. Even in a harsh, uncertain, complex, anxious, incomprehensible reality, we have agency.
Jewish text conditions us to tolerate complexity. A story from the Talmud. During the Roman siege of ancient Jerusalem, the city was controlled by Jewish zealots who forced the war to continue even as the Jewish community suffered violence, starvation, and defeat. By this point of the war, the destruction of the ancient Temple was inevitable and there was no possibility for Jewish life within the walls of the city. Still, the zealots refused to surrender. The rabbis of the time, longing to save Judaism, started to imagine a Jewish life that might be possible outside of Jerusalem.
Rabbi Yochonon ben Zakkai concocted a plan. Knowing that the Romans and the zealots allowed dead bodies to be carried out of the city at night for burial, Rabbi Yochonon and his students conspired to fake his death. They placed Rabbi Yochonon in a coffin, and in a funeral processional he was smuggled out of the city. Once free of the battle, Rabbi Yochonon ben Zakkai settled in the north in Yavneh where he established a Jewish community and Torah academy that preserved Jewish life, and transformed it into the beginnings of the Judaism we know today. The story is tragic for Jerusalem. Still, in the worst of circumstances, with no good choices and no clear solutions, the community, resolute in its vision to bring Judaism to the next generation finds a way to be the ancestors their descendants need them to be. In a coffin, brushing up with death in a way our Yom Kippur rituals lead us, our ancestors build a future for an unknown world.
Yom Kippur offers rituals of death – wearing white, fasting, emptying the ark of its Torah scrolls as if it becomes a coffin for all of us –we brush up against death, so that we do not forsake life. We cannot deny all that is real – the volatility, complexity, ambiguity. We claim it – and we claim life. We find comfort in the ways our tradition conditions us to endure ambiguity together, even to devote the time of uncertainty to spiritual growth. Together, we find agency amid the ambiguity, for teshuvah, tfilah, tzedakah. There is always something we can do.
The Jewish calendar prescribes the time for reflection and intention is now. And the Jewish calendar teaches, at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, what is the very next thing we do? The moment Yom Kippur ends we put the first nail into the sukkah, acting out the connections, between reflection and resolve.
We build the sukkah; it is in a fragile hut, exposed to the elements but together with community –it is there, where we find the comfort of connection, and we celebrate abundance and joy. Amid uncertainty? Agency. Yom Kippur cannot exist without Sukkot. Today we reflect. Then moments later in our imperfect, unsettling world, together, we build.
