A Garment of Light

To watch the video recording of Rabbi Ingber's sermon, begin at 02:03:20

(Audio disconnected for first few minutes of sermon)

The sermon of the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939 came at the beginning of the horrors. The sermon of that year, just after the beginning of the bombing of Warsaw, and in the aftermath of his own tragedy losing his son and daughter-in-law, and with the concomitant communal trauma, stress, and shock, the rebbe still had within him the power to elevate, the power to awaken, the power to bring forth hope. But as the war endured and stretched out for years, in the writings of the rebbe in his Aish Kodesh, the Holy Fire, his derashot, his sermons, it became harder to discern the lift, the hope, until finally in the very last sermon recorded in his book from the Warsaw Ghetto, delivered on July 11, 1942, just days before the beginning of the deportation to Treblinka of most of Warsaw's Jews, Rabbi Shapira writes a sermon in which he explores two spiritual attainments or perspectives that are known quite well within the worlds of Jewish mysticism and kabbalah and chasidut.

One is called itaruta me-le-eila. It's an Aramaic phrase for, "an awakening from above."

And the second frame is called itaruta me-le-tata, "an awakening from below."

Used together, they are often signals for the differential between God's grace and God's power, awakened as it were from above, and human initiative and agency, our ability here below to awaken, as it were, a reciprocity from God.

The rebbe, exploring this theme, writes after he discusses the superiority of itaruta me-le-tata, that there is a well-known Talmudic passage that says that King David's composition of the Psalms came about because King David was inspired by his own awakening, his own capacity to lift himself up into a state of muse, a state of song. He used joy and for that reason, King David's Psalms became revered and received, beloved and sung, longingly, plaintively.

But the Warsaw Ghetto rebbe explains that we have another tradition. Precisely because prophecy and song-writing and muse comes from joy, the prophet Jeremiah, didn't write the book of Lamentations, the book of sadness, after the destruction of the temples, but rather when he was in a state of joy, not yet witnessing the destruction of the temples. The book of Lamentations was written preemptively, so that Jeremiah might have something to say. In deep sadness, stress, and trauma, the rebbe says it's almost impossible to preach.

Our times, at the this moment, are so different in so many ways from 1942, but there is a part of me that, maybe like you or others standing in the same position that I am tonight, maybe there is a part of us that says, how can I sing? How is it possible to sing? How is it possible to find the muse, with all we have witnessed and experience?

Maybe on Rosh Hashanah last week, we could talk about rainbows, but today, where will we get our strength from? Where do we find our Oz?

In the tradition that we have, there is a common way to begin a prayer, so I will begin with it at this moment, but I also want to interrogate it.

Yehi ratzon milfanecha.

We say before the source of all power, the source of all knowing, the omni-everything, "may it be your will." May it be your will.

We recognize in that plaintive prayer, in that supplication, we say to God: my will - like this (very small); your will - like this (large, majestic, powerful).

May it be your will.

May it be your will that we have health.

May it be your will that we have healing.

May it be your will that we have abundance.

May it be your will.

This prayer and its posture - like Rabbi Shapira's posture of a God from above who blesses us below - recognizes human vulnerability. It recognizes human limitations. And, as it were, it gives God, the universe, power that we might otherwise arrogate to ourselves.

Yom Kippur is a day of "If it be your will, God."

Yom Kippur is, as everyone has already heard from me for many years, I've said this to you over and over again - Yom Kippur is the day of our dress rehearsal for death.

There's a book I was reading in preparing for the chagim called, "You Might Die Tomorrow." You can go to their website: youmightdietomorrow.com. Yom Kippur is a day on which we say, "We might die tomorrow," so we invite in that liminality, that limitation.

We invite into our experience the empty ark, the aron, which in Hebrew means a coffin.

We imagine ourselves at the end of our life, without will, without power.

We imagine ourselves on Yom Kippur not eating, not drinking, not pleasure, not sex, nothing of the body, as if to say another day to rehearse our death.

Yom Kippur also has the annulment of vows, a common practice before someone passes and the vidui, the confession, which is so much a part of the deathbed ritual in Judaism.

So many of these pieces are reminding us that Yom Kippur is a day to remind ourselves of that which we have no control over. That which is beyond our power, our reach, not within our will to decide.

There is one more piece I'd like to explore with you tonight, another symbol and expression of something quite powerful that holds within it, I think, a source of inspiration and elevation.

You might be wondering, if you are watching, we wear these funny robes on Yom Kippur, known as a kittel, from the German word for smock. Kind of like the smock you wear - as a kid, I would put my hands through my dad's shirt, put it on backward and finger paint. It's a covering over work clothing too.

This kittel, we are told, is a shroud, and we wear a shroud, again, to remind ourselves of death, but I think there is a deeper, more profound reason we wear it on Yom Kippur, and it acts in the opposite direction.

First, a little lesson in Hebrew. For those of you who have never seen the Hebrew alphabet, a few of important pieces before we teach a bit of Torah and apply it. There are two letters in the Hebrew alphabet which, for all intents and purposes, sound exactly alike. The first is an ayin - although there are many different expression of ayin, different ways to vocalize it. The second is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph. It has just a wisp of a sound, it's just air. "Ah." Aleph and ayin.

These two letters - so similar in the way they sound, at least in most pronunciations, work off each other in the most remarkable way in a Midrash, in a rabbinic interpretation of a verse from the book of Genesis. We are told in the book of Genesis:

The word for skin - spelled ayin vav reish - or. We were made from skins, or given skins, after we ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

The story's context, for those doing a refresher on your Bible course here, this moment in the Torah is in the moment after God has commanded Adam and Chava (Eve) not to eat from the tree. When they are told: not your will, but mine be done, on earth as I've decreed it in heaven. That tree over there, don't eat from it, for when you eat from it, your eyes will become awakened and you will become mortal. And in this mythic structure, mortality was connected to this rebellion, this resistance.

Adam - or earthling - and Chava - life force - eat from the tree of knowledge and good and evil and immediately they are aware they are naked. They have a boundary. They are exposed. And, so, to protect their vulnerability, to protect their skin, they are given skin - leather, or peltz.

And here is the midrash, the rabbinic story:

There was a second century rabbi named Rabbi Meir, whose name means "Light," Meir from the word Or, or light. He has a thing with switching aleph and ayin, and lest you think, "Oh, interesting," listen to this:

In the Torah of Rabbi Meir, apparently, he had his own version, where it says God clothed Adam and his wife, Eve, in garments of skin. Rabbi Meir says, I take this aleph off my chest and turn Or with an ayin into or with an aleph - light. Rabbi Meir has an argument. Rabbi Meir has an opinion. He says in the aftermath of human will gone amuck, in the aftermath of the fall where human beings asserted their will over the divine will- in the moment after, in the Torah it is taught we have skin, but Rabbi Meir says no, "Original Skin" is made of light. Your Original Skin is made of light.

The illuminant, the powerful radiance of your divinity of your empowerment, of your will, is the source of your light. Skin. Light.

And, so in Rabbi Meir's Torah, here is how he had it written: Or with an aleph. God made for Adam and his wife garments of light. Garments of light.

Garments of light, for me, is one of those radical teachings that we could possibly imagine. Garments of light that we ourselves, in the aftermath of our own will, our own assertion, our own power, our own agency - when all that we could have done was said, "God, you are in power. Let your will be done," God says, "No! Your will is what made the problem," we say, "Okay!" And Rabbi Meir says, "Yes! You are made of light. You have power." And in the world of skin and light, in the world of boundaries versus a universal unity we are all called from, a prime-or-deal (primordial) power, we are both skin and light.

Think about what it means to wear this kittel on Yom Kippur. What it means to put on the garment of light. A garment of light. The heart of this day, where everything in the liturgy speaks of a power greater than us, is to wear a garment of light and say, "u-teshuva u-tefila u-tzedakah." Notwithstanding our limited power. Notwithstanding what we can't reach for. Notwithstanding what we can't know, we still assert on this day that our will be done. That we have the power to change the course of history. That we, all those systems are bigger than us, although parts of a system greater than us individually, we each - every one of us - when we wear our garments of light, we can change the decree. When we each put on this garment of light, or, or the self that we are, the human we are, we have the power to turn God's will and other powers beyond ours into our will.

When Abraham walked into his father's shop and smashed the idols, he was wearing garments of light.

When Moses stood in front of the tyrant, the most powerful man in the world, and said, "Let me people go," he wrote a garment of light.

When the Jews turned from an exile consciousness and said, "We will go home," our will, not your will be done. Retzoneinu. They wore garments of light.

When a small group of territories decided to cede from the great monarch of Great Britain and penned their Torah and said in it, "We the people," they wore garments of light.

And when the very law of that newly founded land reified the soil that had been soaked and bloodied by bigotry and inhumanity and genocide, there were those who rose up, and donned their garments of light, and said, There is no law greater than the law of human love. There is no law greater than the power of one human being to change the universe. Our original skin is light.

When Rosa Parks sat on the bus, not because she was tired, but because she was tired of injustice, she was dressed in the wardrobe of light.

We had a chance to go down to Montgomery, together with a number of rabbis, and we stood together in witness to the 4,400 African American men, women, and children who were hanged and shot and burned alive and drowned and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950.

And with that legacy, a lesser man than John Lewis might not have taken those steps onto the Edmund Pettus bridge, but he was wearing garments of light.

And for all of those who wake up in a world in which the deck is stacked against them and say, "your will," the Torah says, "put on a garment of light."

The power of this image on this day is to remind us - all of us, especially now as we have seen 200,000 souls taken, many of which could have been saved - we are wearing protective gear as an act of courage, an act of profound empowerment against what would seem to be so much greater than us. Our will. Retzoneinu. We put on garments of light to remind us that even though we are vulnerable, even though we are skin and capsulated egos, even though we are so limited and so many things are beyond our control, we awaken ourselves from below to sing a song.

Every year, I sit and listen over and over again to various songs that remind me of this time of the year and there is one in particular that I've brought before here at Romemu. And for some reason, this year I started listening to it and I started to cry.

The great prophet, Leonard Cohen, at a point in his life when he felt he had no power and was down and out, he sang a song which he called a prayer. And in it he says, "Yehi Ratzon," if it be your will: