Kol Nidre: Despair and The Impossibility of a Sermon
- rabbirobynashworth
- 5 days ago
- 10 min read
Writing a sermon is never easy. I’m always aware of the privilege, the power and the responsibility of standing on the bimah, taking up a chunk of our time together, to deliver words that seek to capture the times we are in, how we may be feeling, and perhaps most importantly, what our Jewish traditions can offer us in these times, in the context of the yamim noraim, the Days of Awe.
That’s my understanding of what a sermon, generally, is about, but I wonder what yours is. What do you want from a sermon, particularly on the most auspicious day of our calendar? Do you want to have your feelings and experiences named and held, mirrored back to you in some way? Do you want your truth articulated? Do you want answers or pronouncements? Do you want declarations and condemnations or questions and comfort or inspiration? Maybe you want something political with either a small or big ‘p’ on any one of the big, urgent issues of our day. Maybe you want nothing of the sort and want a break from the everyday and to find grounding, and you hold out the hope, however tenuous, that the spiritual and political are separate.
If you ask Chat GPT, a generative AI chatbot, “what do Jews want to hear in a sermon this year”, the responses range from - they want to hear - ‘you are not alone’, ‘you can begin again - return is always possible’, ‘we are accountable - and beloved’, ‘loss and grief are welcome here’ and ‘being Jewish matters.’
When I asked for more specific ideas given the global landscape and the situation in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, as those answers were slightly cliched and general - the chatbot replied with these ideas: ‘how do we live ethically when the world is burning?; can we still believe in community?; how do I live with uncertainty and still find purpose?; and the first suggestion the chatbot gave - ’how do we hold moral clarity and moral complexity - together?’ Chat GPT told me, on this topic, that ‘many congregants are ‘feeling deeply torn, ashamed, scared or furious’; ‘exhausted by the pressure to take sides’; ‘alienated by public Jewish discourse that feels simplistic, weaponised, or hollow’; and ‘longing for a space where their grief and their conscience are both welcome’. But it warned me that you and I would not want to hear ‘partisan sloganeering'; ‘moral relativism that flattens trauma’; ‘denial of pain - whether Jewish or Palestinian’; or ‘a silence that feels like abdication’.
Well, not bad. I certainly heard myself in that - it has some of what I need, and articulated some of what I don’t need. I’d be interested in your reflections as we talk over the next day - did it capture something of what you are looking for?
How to talk to all of that? Well, it’s impossible - the impossibility of a sermon to do everything for everyone and ending up with nothing for no-one. So let’s zoom in. There was one sentence that I was struck by in my short conversation with Chat GPT (which itself comes with all sorts of ethical implications). It suggested one focus could be ‘Yom Kippur as protest against despair - not through denial, but through renewal’. Despair. This word has been following me around for longer than this artificial conversation. I’ve been living it - maybe you have too. Despair at knowing what to say, how to say it and whether to say it. Despair at the promises I have held onto up until now, which seem broken and bloody. Despair at what the present and the future hold.
And, here is my confession, on the eve of Yom Kippur - God, universe, Shechinah - I feel full of despair, and I feel guilty because despair doesn’t feel very Jewish.
Brené Brown, a researcher of emotions, explains that despair is an emotion that arises when we are hurting. She writes the following:
Despair is a claustrophobic feeling. It’s the emotion that says, “Nothing will ever change.” It’s different than anger or sadness or grief. Despair is tinged with hopelessness.*
Or maybe even more viscerally she retells the theologian Rob Bell describing despair as ‘the belief that tomorrow will be just like today’.**
Tonight is the night to bring all of these emotions - our deepest darkest thoughts and feelings, our despair, our hopelessness - as captured in Yom Kippur liturgy - ‘Here I stand in shame and confusion’. Given that, in essence, Jewish prayer is a long, wordy conversation, I want to bring two conversation partners to talk to despair. The first - well I’m cheating, not a person, but a set of people - the prophets. And the second, whose work will look at just as we begin Neilah, the last service of Yom Kippur, Franz Kafka, a Jewish German-speaking writer. He had many struggles and his work speaks to despair again and again.
Let’s start with the prophets because over the last two years I have spent most of my time with them (they are quite interesting company!). We read a selection of their works every Shabbat as our Haftarot. The word Neviim, which we translate as prophets, can literally mean, those who speak or utter, or those who were called. There were the speakers of their time - the first to have their words collected, written down and inscribed by those who followed them.
The attraction of the Latter Prophets, and why progressive Judaism understands itself as prophetic Judaism, is because they sought to provide meaning and perspective to times of utter agony and despair. The scholar Marc Zvi Brettler says we need to understand the context of the prophets to understand them. He even reworks some classic verses from Amos, chapter 1:
Thus said Adonai: For three transgressions of the residents of Manhattan. For four, I will not revoke it. Because they shop in expensive shops and neglect the poor. Eat in five-star restaurants while others starve. I will send down fire upon Fifth Avenue. A conflagration on 57th St. And it shall devour the fancy penthouses, Destroy the mansions. And the people of “the city” shall be exiled to California’ said Adonai.***
I’ll leave you to imagine how you may re-work Amos’ words for our own context. But I do not think, today, we have to try that hard to imagine what motivated the prophets, if we put aside the very visceral call from God. They lived in times when their tribal way of living had ceased. All of sudden huge, violent empires swept the lands, displacing people from their homes, destroying their temples, outlawing their practices - Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian - whatever the name of the empire the effect was pretty much the same.
The life lived by the Israelites changed immeasurably and it must have been utterly terrifying and destabilising. The prophets responded, or reacted, in various ways. Second Isaiah delivered, mostly words of comfort and hope: ‘Nachamu, nachamu - Comfort, oh comfort My people, says your God…[your] term of service is over’ (40:1-2). Some prophets decried the leaders of their time and, in turn, the people for putting their faith in leaders and temples rather than God. Others with rhetorical flourish and complex word-plays condemned, often using violent imagery against women. Miriam led through song and dance. Some like Nachum, became lost to rage and pronounced all-consuming violence against the Israelites’ enemies - that book is not easy reading. Yet it makes sense, as Brené Brown writes - when we are in despair we can become ‘desperate for someone to blame because blame is an effective way to discharge pain and it gives us a sense of counterfeit control.’
Whilst we think of the prophets, solely, as true arbiters of justice and moral behaviour, the prophets’ responses were varied and some extreme, capturing the worst, and the best, of humanity at times of despair. I am guessing that during this time as we contemplate the climate catastrophe, the utter horror of the death and destruction in the Middle East, the troubles on our shore, the news from America and beyond - that we have inhabited each one of these positions.
It is our job to discern when our responses are despairing, hate-filled and destructive - false prophecy - and when we are despairing but hopeful. For one other thing Brené Brown teaches is that ‘hope is a powerful antidote to despair’ and that hope is not an emotion but a ‘cognitive-behavioural process’. She suggests the ‘micro-dosing’ of hope. I, therefore, want to offer two micro-doses of hope tonight, from the prophets, as an antidote to despair.
Firstly, there is something that the prophets did, almost universally, which I want to focus on as we continue to navigate despair. Whilst the Israelites faced ruthless, seemingly all-powerful enemies, they continued to call upon their people to do better. Their call is quite astonishing. They don’t only blame others but look at their people squarely and honestly. Jeremiah offers a searing example - here’s an extract from chapter 2 [vv.1-9]:
The word of GOD came to me, saying,
Go proclaim to Jerusalem…
Hear the word of GOD, O House of Jacob,
Every clan of the House of Israel!
Thus said GOD….
But you came and defiled My land,
You made My possession abhorrent.
The priests never asked themselves, “Where is GOD?”
The guardians of the Teaching ignored Me;
The rulers rebelled against Me…..
Oh, I will go on accusing you
—declares GOD—
And I will accuse your children’s children!
The prophets were unrelentingly critical of their people, even when they were the ones being assailed. They held the particular and universal together, demanding that the people turn back to divinity, to holiness and what they determined as ‘proper’ behaviour and practice. All of this is summed up in the Mishnaic saying from Pirkei Avot -
וּבְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
‘In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be a human’ [Avot 2:5].
And this is our task over the next day. An honest accounting of ourselves - the good, the bad and the ugly. Kol Nidre is our first step. Just like picking up the phone after an argument with a loved up to say I’m sorry, can we talk; or walking into the doctor’s surgery to say, I need help. We sit here to make an unrelentingly honest appraisal of ourselves - not hiding, not following distractions, not blaming others, not trolling online, not ranting or raving, not dismissing but a reflective, vulnerable act of accountability.
And the power of Yom Kippur is that we do not do this immense task ourself, but together. Tonight and tomorrow we are called as a people to sit down on a huge therapeutic couch as it were, together, to hold our gaze directed at ourselves, at each other, at our Jewish family across the globe to ask, where are we failing, what can we do differently? To do so is not to give up on our world but is an absolute commitment to the potential of humanity, and, more particularly, Judaism. Turning up is a belief in the goodness of humanity and our potential to be better and do better, to hold ourselves up to the highest moral and ethical standards, no matter how challenging that may be. This is work of Yom Kippur, in the words of the philosopher Martin Buber, ‘to begin with oneself, but not end with oneself. To start from oneself but not to aim at oneself’**** and is our first micro-dose of hope. We have turned up, we are here and we have already begun this work. We have, perhaps through our despair, turned up in the belief that the next year can be different - tomorrow need not be the same as today - that is the promise of teshuvah - of return and renewal.
Our second micro-dose of hope, following from this, lies in the prophets’ commitment to imagine a better world.
Yes, they raged, they extorted, they grieved, they screamed, they challenged kings but, alongside all of their criticising they had not walked away or given up. They offered no easy answers but did say to their beleaguered people, imagine, our world could be different - I believe in you. They offered unimaginable visions of a time that was full of insecurity and violence. It was a brave and necessary act.
Walter Brueggemann, a famous Christian biblical scholar who passed away this year, drew out these two aspects of prophecy - to criticise and energise.***** This is the double dose - one doesn’t work without the other. We do not over-do our self-reflecting or stay there. Our work is not to self-blame. We cannot lose ourselves by either turning entirely outward or completely inward. We are not the problem but in our becoming we can be part of the future becoming. We confess over the next day and we imagine. We beat our chests - ashamnu, bagadnu - as we also read the holy words of Isaiah (tomorrow’s Haftarah) who spoke to the Israelites [57:18-19]:
It shall be well,
Well with the far and the near
—said GOD—
And I will heal them.
Like Abraham we see that even the darkest of moments can be averted or transformed. In itself, the act of imagination is an act of protest, returning to the AI’s ironic use of this word. An act of protest, of survival. We dream, we believe, we imagine, we choose life [Deuteronomy 30:19].
The prophets understood that empires want us to despair, to become numb to life, to lose connection to the holiness within and the potential for holiness without - to lose hope. To imagine takes courage, it may feel as impossible as it is to write a sermon in these times, but it is of vital necessity. We imagine despite and because of the despair. We cry out
וְעַל כֻּלָּם אֱלֽוֹקַּ סְלִיחוֹת. סְלַח לָֽנוּ. מְחַל לָֽנוּ. כַּפֶּר לָֽנוּ
(for all these sins, forgiving God, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement) - believing we can be better, imagining a time when our world is fair and just, to embrace Yom Kippur as a protest against despair, in ways that our chatbot cannot even begin to imagine.
V’al kulam - For all these things, may we turn within for the hours ahead, be gently critical of ourselves as an act of belief in the possibility of our becoming (in the words of Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg)****** and be determinedly energising as we seek to imagine a time different to today.
Ken Yehi Ratzon, may this be so. Amen.
** Brown, B. 2021. Atlas of the Heart. London: Penguin, p.102.
*** Brettler, M. Z. 2005. How to Read the Jewish Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p.138.
**** Buber, M. 1994 [1965]. The Way of Man: According to the Teaching of Hasidism. London: Routledge, p.24.
***** Brueggemann, W. 2018. The Prophetic Imagination: 40th Anniversary Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
****** ‘We are capable of becoming’. Ruttenberg, D. 2022. On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends In An Apologetic World. Boston: Beacon Press, p.143.
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