Yom Kippur Morning 5785

Retelling our Stories

There is a story from our tradition of a Rabbi Nahum, whose followers once cried out to him about how terrible their sorrows and burdens were. Each, individually, bared their soul to the rabbi, pouring out their heart of how awful their lives were, while confessing guiltily how they looked at their neighbors, who seemed unburdened by any great tragedy or calamity. Brokenhearted, Rabbi Nahum proclaimed to his community the following resolution: let everyone write down their sorrows and bring them to the synagogue, where they would be hung on pegs. Then, everyone would be allowed to choose the ones they preferred, a fair exchange. At once, the community jumped at the chance to relieve themselves finally of the weight of their problems, excited at last to live as the others lived. They came together and hung their sorrows on pegs, and began to walk around, like attendees of an art exhibit, to choose those they liked best. After some time, first one and then another sheepishly picked up the very same sorrows they had brought with them, until everyone had done the same, the pegs bare. When Rabbi Nahum asked the last community member why they chose their own burdens, she confessed, “all the rest would seem even more difficult to bear.”

A story, but in every story is a grain of truth. So often, we see our lives as full of woe and fraught, troubled terribly by our experiences, and we think our neighbors and friends have it easier, or better. But if we were asked to change places with them, our eyes open to the reality of their lives, and how it is not so different from our own. What is more, we open our eyes to the reality of our own lives, seeing, at last, not only what is dull and dim but also all that shines in our lives.

Each of us has our stories, the tales we relate about our experiences, ourselves, and our lives. It is at least part of what makes us human—our need to recount our lives narratively. We express it in other ways as well, of course—through art and music, poetry, and dance—but telling stories is fundamental to how we express ourselves and how we see the world. Sometimes, as described above, we are unreliable narrators, our view so narrow as to not allow us to see the full scene. And sometimes that narrowness of perspective, that unreliability of narration, affects us in profound and damaging ways, especially with regard to our relationships and behavior.

The easy example is of when we put ourselves in the center of the narrative—give ourselves ‘main character energy’ as they kids might say—and insist that we are always in the right, we are always blameless, we are always the one harmed, never the one causing the harm. We don’t have to look far in our media landscape for people who seem to lack any sense of humility, any ability to see things through the eyes of the other, people in leadership—be it in government or business—who are so afraid of looking weak that instead they project a false, egotistical strength that is easily pierced. And to be sure, we all fall victim to that way of thinking from time to time, especially when we are under pressure, or late, or stressed. But there is another way we feed ourselves false narratives, and I would argue, sometimes a more destructive kind of story we tell ourselves: the one where we have committed a slight, or caused a harm, and have therefore seen ourselves as permanently defective, deficient, and perhaps even incapable or unworthy of redemption. Whatever harm we have caused—real or imaginary, and more on that in a bit—has rendered us in our own minds illegitimate. You know, in college I remember watching the Kenneth Branaugh version of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, in which a pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves, as Don John, recites the line, “it must not be denied but I am a plain-dealing villain” in his best surfer bro drawl, and I laughed and thought “how absurd! No one actually ever thinks they are the villain. They always assume they are the hero of their own story.” What I have learned since then is that yes, many of us imagine ourselves as the villain, not in a fun “Bill-and-Ted” kind of way, but in a way that hurts our relationships with others and ourselves. Late at night, in the darkness, we reiterate and regurgitate our past errors again and again, reinforcing rather than relieving the notion that we are, simply put, bad. I have seen it and heard it: the people who think of themselves as off-putting, unlovable, unkind, helpless, broken. Perhaps there are those in our sanctuary, in this holy place surrounded by community, who believe this about themselves right now, who will not deny their own imagined villainy.

The truth is, so often the story we tell ourselves about ourselves is only that, a story, one that we’ve invested in over time, perhaps one that was told to us at some point by someone who perhaps meant well, but wasn’t necessarily seeing us clearly, seeing all the possibilities before us. The author Neil Gaiman tells a story of how he was invited to an evening program filled with luminaries—writers and scientists, musicians and artists—and he felt out of place until an older man came up to him lamenting how he felt out of place, having only ever done what he was told, went where he was asked to go. That person lamenting was, of course, the astronaut Neil Armstrong. We collect adjectives that describe us over the years, some positive, some negative: we are studious or nerdy, lazy, or self-aware, stubborn, or determined, sensitive, or emotional, tough, or inert, honest, or unkind, the list goes on and on. But do we stop to reflect on whether we agree with the way we have described ourselves, with the way others have described us?

What if we could reimagine that narrative? What if we could put aside the idea that whatever we did—in our youth, as parents, as children, to friends or family—was a sign of our evil and cruelty, or our brokenness, and instead work our way back to seeing ourselves more clearly?. We might even have a word for that process, that ability to reimagine the story. We might even call it t’shuvah. When we imagine that word for repentance—literally meaning to turn ourselves—perhaps we find ourselves mostly thinking of, well, thinking of past sins and talking to ourselves about how we are not going to do those behaviors again. But that idea of turning, the directionality of it, implies another way of imagining the process of t’shuvah, that of rewriting our own story. Not to make ourselves the main character, not to justify our past harmful behaviors, but to recalibrate our own expectations for ourselves in those moments, and allow ourselves a little grace, a little forgiveness. Was the thing we did bad? Sure it was. Did it hurt someone? Yes. Does it make us terrible? Well, it made us young and foolish or was the behavior of someone under duress or not paying attention, or someone who did not have all the facts. Perhaps we missed the target at that moment. We can do better. We can be better. We can learn and grow.

And if that is true for us, that must also be true for others. That might sound self-evident, but you would be surprised. As you might imagine, as rabbi, I am privy to all kinds of conversations, people sharing about their hurt and their interactions with others. Now, I am not spilling any tea, especially on Yom Kippur, but so often when I hear folks describe their experiences, their suffering at the hands or voice of another, I wonder about the offender in the story. Were they having a bad day? Did they even know that they had hurt someone else, or been given the opportunity to make any corrections? Or were they written off? I have seen too many times when someone was hurt and hurt badly by another’s behavior or words, and that offending person was completely oblivious to their actions, and never given the opportunity to correct it or explain themselves. They were simply assessed as bad. When we err, we hope for graciousness and forgiveness of others, hope that our failings are not signs of moral turpitude or defect. Do we allow the same chesed toward others? Are we willing to reimagine the story not that they were awful and beneath our contempt, but out of sorts and needing the benefit of the doubt?

Our tradition, the Jewish Tradition, is full of stories. Stories of people who defy definition who, more often than not, fall down and fail to be their best selves in the moment. Whether stories from the Torah or rabbinic writings or folklore, our patriarchs and matriarchs, prophets and judges, rabbis and teachers have never been models of perfection, but rather models of a willingness to reshape their own stories and trajectories through careful reimagination and redefinition of themselves. Jacob the thief and trickster becomes Israel, who sees angels and offers blessings. Sarah the cruel mistress of Hagar becomes the loving mother, her voice filled with laughter. Rabbi Akiva spends the first half of his life an illiterate shepherd before finally becoming one of the greatest sages of his generation. Resh Lakish is a bandit and gladiator—a man of profound violence—who is convinced to use his strength for Torah. The rabbis of old even the wicked pharaoh of the Exodus narrative as going into exile and become the King of Nineveh, the very same one who proclaims a fast and orders the city to undergo t’shuvah when Jonah offers his prophecy against the city. Think about that for a moment: the worst enemy of the Jewish people in the entire Torah becomes, for the rabbis, a model of humility and repentance before God that we lift up at Yom Kippur afternoon!

So what would all of this look like? How would we even begin? First, we need to figure out how to tell our own story, to ‘re-author’ ourselves, and not accept the narratives about ourselves or society that we have gotten used to. Is it that my character traits are weaknesses or failings, or are they gifts that are simply not used correctly? Is my perception of my experience correct, or am I accepting other people’s versions of the story, minimizing my own feelings and perceptions? From there, we need to play out different ways of being. Perhaps we have a story about ourselves that we are short-tempered. We could wallow in our defectiveness, regretting the conflicts we find ourselves getting into. Or we could externalize our problems and recognize that they are not us. There is a big difference between thinking of yourself as an angry person and thinking of yourself as someone who reacts angrily in certain situations. Now, that could be me mincing words, but I just changed the issue from it being a personality defect to an issue of circumstance. There are certain times and situations where you get angry? Great, let us figure out how to get you out of those situations, and techniques for calming yourself when you cannot escape. Fundamentally the issue is not the person, who is just a person; the issue is the behavior. Our behaviors are not us any more than our cars or clothes are—they are things we can change, but only if we’re willing to believe that they don’t have to define our story.

From there we might be able to do some discernment: why do we react with anger? How did that start? Does it come from a feeling of helplessness, say, or because that was the model of conflict resolution we saw? We might then be able to start taking our problems apart one piece at a time. We might even feel a weight lifted off our shoulders. And we might be able to respond with more empathy toward others as we see them grappling with their issues. If we are not actually angry people, maybe they are not either. Maybe they are in pain. Maybe they have never had a chance to see the world differently. It does not mean we can change their narrative, mind you—this is something you can only do for yourself—but it does mean we can change how we respond in the moment, how we perceive the other, how we exist in our own skin. From there, we might be able to see our burdens as less burdensome, our failings as less catastrophic, we might be able to see ourselves as more capable in mending our relationships and repairing our actions than we thought.

Earlier in our service we read the words of the poet Ruth Brin: there are neither angels nor emanations; only people like you, in whom God has planted a striving for justice, freedom, and peace. None of us are angels, nor are we villains, just people, striving toward justice, freedom, and peace. May we remember that about ourselves. May we remember that about one another. And may we learn to craft new stories, better stories, that give us the space to reimagine ourselves and our boundless possibilities. When we leave this place tonight, having heard the shofar, giddy from our fast, may we be open to a new narrative we can tell ourselves, one that leads to holiness. Amen.