To watch this sermon, delivered on Yom Kippur 2024, click here.

If I am honest, I want more than my one life. It’s just the truth. I remember sitting outside in the yard as a young girl, five or six, looking up close at the leaves on a branch, or a caterpillar. There’s a picture of me, kindergarten or so, doing something intense-looking like tying a string on a branch or something that brought me up close to the branch, the leaves. Maybe I’m remembering the picture more than the moment. I feel the love of my parents taking that picture. They are getting older. I am so blessed they are still here, and full of grief too, knowing they won’t be forever. I mean, I hang out with you guys, that’s part of what we do together, we bury our most precious loved ones, together. (And also the less precious loved ones, too, let’s be honest.) We grieve, that’s my point. And we anticipate the grief, that’s so much of the pain we all carry. I’m no different in that regard than anyone else, even if I get to sit here in the fancy chair.

I thought about what I wanted to say today, what sermon I wanted to give. And then I remembered something I’d heard on a podcast, or maybe I read it, that we no longer have the interest in or capacity for oratory; that all we really want is sound bytes. I thought of the Red Zone, how we don’t even sit through a whole football game anymore, instead we watch 4 games simultaneously but just the good parts, and also we have a screen on our laps featuring something else altogether the whole time. So I thought about it, and then I thought: what if I don’t? What if I give sound bytes, along the way—and that’s what I’ve been doing, teaching, giving drashot along the way, getting in what I think is important for us as we go.

What are we doing here? What is this all about? What is at the heart of the matter?

Forgiveness. Compassion. Kindness. Course-correcting so we don’t find ourselves off by one degree our whole lives and then discover that instead of landing in LA you’re in the Pacific Ocean—for those who were with us last night —the lesson from the world of aviation, that if you’re off just 1 degree you won’t get where you thought you were going, especially if you travel for a long time. So we are who we are, and maybe we can’t really change who we are but we can course-correct. Chet, after all, sin, is not actually sin in the Christian, Western World sense. Chet in Hebrew, the word that gets translated as sin, is more like missing the mark. In archery or cornhole. You aim for here and you end up over there. Not because you weren’t trying but because we’re not perfect. Because we need to practice a whole lot to stay on course.

Dear God, help me give this kahal what they need to course-correct this Yom Kippur. No, that’s not quite how I mean it. Dear God, help us course-correct this year. We’re not off by a lot, maybe just one degree, most of us. Help them sit with me, help me bring them along as I just draw up a chair and talk. Pray, I mean. Which is just talking, talking to you, talking to God. I could teach them there’s a fancy name for it, hitbodedut.  How that word means “alone”—the Hasidim invented it, the Baal Shem Tov, a few hundred years ago, I mean he didn’t invent it but he gave it a fancy name or maybe his followers did, because they needed a way to reference that thing we do. That thing where you find yourself talking to God. When you’re out up close to the branches of the tree, tying those strings on the leaves or whatever. Or when you’re up at night all alone in the kitchen, wondering what happened to everyone you love. And then you’re talking to yourself, which is also talking to God. I could just sit here and pray-talk, show them that the siddur, the mahzor, all this liturgy—which I treasure, which is our treasure —that’s only the half of it. 

Yeah, I’ll share with them out loud some of what’s in my heart. Let that be enough for today. Let it maybe help ease someone out of thinking that the rabbi only prays in Hebrew or singing these words. I love praying that way too. It can be very deep, very holy. But this, this is good too.

If I am honest, I want more than my one life. It’s greedy. “Not enough time, for all that I want, from you.” “If I could save time in a bottle.” “Time keeps on slipping, slipping slipping, into the future.”

We are dying. All of us. Every day we are living and dying all at once. From the minute we are born. Life is finite. That’s really at the heart of all of this, Yom Kippur stuff. We won’t live forever. So—make the most of it while you can, while we here. That’s what the fasting is all about, and the wearing the death shroud, this kittel—in some shuls everyone wears them, not just the clergy—we will be buried in this. It’s like we’re in hospice today. No eating, no drinking. No ice chips, even. The body wasting away. But then when we don’t die—when we get through this day—we are reborn. Every single day, actually, reborn over and over and over again, every breath, every morning, after afternoon. Today—please God we should live another afternoon—reborn with the knowledge that it’s not going to last forever so we have to cherish it, and don’t waste ourselves on holding anger, on fighting and self-righteousness. 

That’s the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is that our fists have been clenched so tight this year. I want to share with them, with you, the exercise Krista Tippett shared this summer, that she got from a retreat in France, from a dharma talk where the monk invited everyone to clench a fist with one hand. So yeah, let’s do that, everyone try this: make a fist. And then try to move to force that fist open with your other hand. Notice that the fist only clenches tighter—this natural reaction to force. And then I invite you to try too a counterintuitive approach: cradle the fist with your other hand. How wonderful, that the fist naturally relaxes a bit, softens. 

A sea of clenched fists. A metaphor for the world right now. No, my friends, we don’t need to beat ourselves up anymore today. No more clenched fists holding tighter and tighter. We need softness, tenderness. Sweetheart.

I read something recently—it was a Yom Kippur sermon from a few years ago, by Rabbi Amy Bernstein whom I don’t even know, but her Torah is so beautiful, and she wrote about how we live in a world with dishwashers, microwaves, and jet engines, time ought to feel more expansive and abundant… But this is nobody’s actual experience, we don’t feel like we have more time because of the washing machine, and then she quotes some writer I don’t know named Malcolm Harris who wrote, “life accelerates, and everyone grows more impatient. It is somehow more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven.”

I love that line. “It is more aggravating to wait two minutes for the microwave than two hours for the oven.” We used to be able to wait days for letters from friends and now if my browser takes more than 4.5 seconds to refresh I’m beside myself. And underneath that, behind that aggravation, I think it’s deeper. It’s like whatever we are doing, there’s this sense that there is something else at least as wonderful to be done. Like we know there’s just not enough time, because—we only get this one life. And mine is more than halfway done. 4,000 weeks, the book, remember when that came out? Oliver Burkeman. Do the math, the average lifespan, that’s all you get. If we’re blessed with the average lifespan, we get 4,000 weeks, that’s it. So do the math, that’s not so many more weeks. We want more. I want more. For me, for all of us. But we don’t get it, we don’t get to choose, so we clench our fists, fighting against death and fighting one another and just fighting. 

This is the heart of the matter: to live knowing we are dying, right here, right now. Choosing life every minute. By softening the grip.  

One of my teachers, Jon Aron, shared with me a story that maybe I’ve shared before, I don’t remember, the story of a Buddhist monk on an airplane. How he’s on the plane traveling back from California where he’d been teaching to his home in Sri Lanka, they’re out over the Pacific Ocean and the plane suddenly take a deep dive and the announcement comes on to put the life vests on and the oxygen masks drop and there’s smoke, the engine is on fire. Everyone freaks out, they’re screaming and crying and praying and this monk he’s sitting next to the window and he looks out and sees—the most beautiful sight. Bright orange flames against the bright blue sky. And he just sits appreciating the beauty of that. Like here he could be panicking because he might be about to die but instead just experiencing what is, the panic and sadness but also the beauty, seeing that something beautiful is also happening. And then the story goes that they make a water landing, and the inflatable slide-ramp comes out the exit door and it’s his turn and remember he grew up in a monastery, he’s been in training since he was a child and he’s never actually been on an inflatable slide before. So the story ends with him laughing and enjoying the ride off into the water. That’s it, to be able to know that at every minute we’re living and dying, we don’t actually know if this is it, can we laugh and appreciate beauty and enjoy the ride while it lasts? 

My friend Anne told me that the purpose of the Kol Nidre prayer, the one we sang last night that all of our vows are null and void, is to help us let go of the life we promised ourselves and instead pay attention to the one we are living. Because life, in Hebrew, is always plural. Chaim. “I have lived many lives, some of them my own…” (Stanley Kunitz) Always plural because there’s so much to it, more than one, plural, no one to speak of it in the singular even. 

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
(Mary Oliver)

B’rosh hashanah yikatevun
U’vyom tzom kippur yachetamun.

I guess that’s it for now. Thanks for listening, God, friends. Thanks for choosing this life, this day, over and over and over again, as long as it lasts.