pull up a chair

i emerge here from a day of prayer, a day of poring over the sins of my soul, and the sins of us all collectively. it is a day that’s not easy to leave behind. certainly not this year.

Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, opened with the rabbi once again sharing shattering news. a horror in manchester, england, he told us, without details, had left more than one dead.

morning light streamed in.

i felt us all move in closer, a natural deeply human instinct to harbor each other. it’s those natural instincts that tend to get drowned out on ordinary days, days when it’s noisy, days when we’re so distracted we don’t pay attention to the sound of our breath, the warmth of our skin, the deeply human instinct to run toward, not away, from someone who’s hurting.

we live in a world so distant now from the original vision. from an edenic world where boughs were bent from the heaviness of their fruits, where the silence allowed for the chorus of chirring and chirping to rise from the underbrush, from the branches. in the beginning, in the genesis, after the cascade of wonders—light, darkness, seas and sky, dry land and waters, seed-bearing plants and fruits with seeds buried inside, two great lights in heaven’s vault, the demarcation of day and night, teeming waters and birds filling the air, wild beasts and slithering, down-on-the-ground ones—the one who’d imagined it all, the one we name God, God looked down and saw still a void. how would the garden be tilled? how would it be kept?

and so God made beings in God’s own image, so genesis tells us. and for a short flash of time, man and woman lived in peaceful accord. but temptation arose. and it all shattered and changed. eden was no longer. the man and the woman were banned.

and all these millennia later, we are a people plagued by temptation. temptation of power, of greed, of malice and evil, of hurtful whisper, and weapons of war.

we have fallen so far from the garden of peace and tranquility.

and so, on Yom Kippur, we atone. all world religions, as far as i know, hold confession at the core, are built on the knowing that we will go wrong, exercise evil, traffic in hate.

and so, through the day, over and over and over again, we confess. we confess in short form and long form. we confess and confess, each go at it grating closer and closer to the core.

against the backdrop of the world in which we are living, these are a few of the confessions we prayed:

“The ways we have wronged you by hardening our hearts; and the harm we have caused in Your world through careless speech.”

“The ways we have wronged You by giving in to our hostile impulses; and the harm we have caused in Your world through inflexibility and stubbornness.”

or this, one of the pleas to the Almighty and Merciful, Avinu Malkeinu:

“Avinu Malkeinu, halt the reign of those who cause pain and terror.”

so ardently we confess and we pray.

to enter the sanctuary, be it the one of a synagogue or the one under the heavens in my own backyard, is to submit to a paradigm other than the distortions of a world ruled by greed, and power, and envy, and lust.

in these past godawful years, when i can almost hear the walls of decency and democracy crumbling, i retreat more and more into the sanctuary. the voice to whom i answer is that of the Merciful, Benevolent God, a God who is gentle, and tender, a God who seeps into the deepest parts of me, the parts where i surrender, where i know my place is so, so small, and yet, whatever light i can bring to this world, whatever infinitesimal flickering flame, it matters. because we are not the only flame. we inch closer together when word comes, once again, of horror and chaos and evil upon evil. we are many, many flames. or we can be. if we so choose.

it is a mighty thing to stand and sit through a day when over and over we confess our sins, our evils, our hurt-making acts. we are a nation that could do with a day of atoning.

and i am blessed that i, a lifelong believer in God’s tender mercy, was asked to atone for the sins of my own and the sins of us all.

i enter quietly back into this shattered, and shattering world.

i will not extinguish my faint little flame.

what will be your flame this holy day?

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i leave you with words of john lewis, the late great hero of civil rights and warrior for justice:

Every human personality is something sacred, something special. We don’t have a right, as another person or as a nation, to destroy that spark of divinity, that spark of humanity, that is made and created in the image of God. 
—John Lewis 

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and should you care to be moved by one of the gentlest, fiercest spirits ever to walk among us, this beautiful interview, recorded just last week, of jane goodall, the great primatologist and anthropologist who died at 91 on wednesday. bless her, she was deep in her last book tour when her blessed heart beat its last.

i remember how, when there was a jane goodall special on national geographic, my mother would huddle us around the TV, for she was someone worthy, and i always found her a brilliant source of hope, kindness, an uncanny attunement with nature and nature’s creatures. i have prayed all my life to live to be a wise grace-filled woman like her…..wrinkles worn with dignity, hair whitened by the sun, wrapped in her shawl, at once wise and funny, of the moment and yet timeless. . . .