The Holiness of Not-Knowing | Rabbi Alex Braver

In the weeks before the High Holidays, you will find everyone at PJ

clergy, staff, volunteers

deep in the work of preparation

and that is how it has been for millennia.

About 2000 years ago and one week ago.

So the week before Yom Kippur, 37 and 87, let's say

the contador, the high priest, was taken from his home and his family

and sequestered in a special chamber in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem.

For those seven days, he diligently practiced the rituals

sprinkling blood, offering incense, performing sacrifices.

Elders from the rabbinic court arrived daily

to rehearse the order of the service.

When to come and go, when to change out of his

glittering gold garments, and into his simple white linen ones.

When to immerse, when to slaughter, when to speak and what to say.

They read it all to him, and they demanded that he recite it back

to them without error.

On the final

morning, the elders would take him to the temple courtyard,

and they would march all the sacrificial animals before him.

All the poor doomed bulls

and rams and sheep, so that he would be familiar with them.

The next day.

That night,

before the elders departed, they had one last task.

They said to the high priest, we administer an oath to you

in the name of God, whose name is housed in this temple,

that you will not change one single detail

from all that we have said to you.

And then,

according to the Mishnah recorded by the rabbis

about 1800 years ago, but still long

after the temple itself had been destroyed,

who perished

the hidden portion of

the high priest would turn one way away in private and cry.

And the elders who had administered this oath, but also turn away

and hide their faces and cry.

Why is everyone crying?

And even more so, why are they hiding their faces

from each other when they do it?

According to the Talmud, there was a hotly contested

debate about a key step of the ritual.

It was the incense offering.

Some of them thought it should be offered outside the Holy of Holies.

Others thought it should be offered

inside the Holy of Holies.

And the elders who were on team inside

were afraid that a rogue Contador

might sneak in, who was secretly on the other team.

It might feel like splitting hairs today,

but I promise you this argument was deadly serious.

There is a well known legend about the Cohen God door

and how he would enter the Holy of Holies with a rope tied on his ankle.

Anyone heard this legend before, right?

So that if he went kaput in the middle and God struck him dead,

they could yank them out without having to risk their lives in the Holy of Holies.

The Talmud itself tells a

story about a kahin who did it wrong and wound up dead.

The next day, his body in a dump with.

I promise you, this detail is in the Talmud.

Worms crawling out of his nose.

Who said there was no glamor

in being a Jewish communal professional?

Though the stakes are quite high,

and you can imagine,

in that context, the oath was seen as very necessary.

But still they all cry.

The coin got dull cries because they didn't trust him.

And the rabbis, the elders there, felt trapped

because the risk, the ritual was too risky and to essential not to demand the oath.

But they understood how degrading it would be

to be suspected of heresy.

So everyone is in pain in this encounter, but no one can really show it.

Here at the heart of our tradition.

Sacred equation for bringing about Atonement and Tuva repentance.

There is a deep relational breakdown

here.

When God and the Jewish people are meant to return to each other, and here,

where everyone is supposed to be repairing the most important relationships

in their lives, the central figures of the drama

are weeping alone and uncontrolled.

There is an army of people here at that work

to make these days of awe as meaningful and sacred and seamless as possible.

But if someone is crying alone in our office

and unable to show their face to the rest of the team,

there is an existential problem in how we are going

about this entire thing.

The problem with the priests

and the oath is both theological and human.

It comes from a narrow and blinkered vision of God

and idea of God as a cosmic vending machine,

into which you put your prayers and sacrifices and good deeds,

and out from which comes are divine reward or punishment.

And from that narrow vision of God comes

a narrow understanding of humanity, and our role.

Our job is to be right, no matter

the cost, or else we'll end up in a ditch with worms crawling out of our eyes.

There is little room

for grace in a system like this, and little room for it.

For a sacred and healthy debate.

This type of thinking, though, has its appeal.

It provides a sense of security and stability.

It provides a sense of accountability and agency.

It makes you think that if you just do it right,

everything will go well for me and mine.

And if I do it wrong, then that's my fault.

I'm the one who's responsible,

and it imagines a world of understandable and predictable consequences.

And sometimes in life, that's how it works out.

If I'm reckless, I'm liable to get hurt.

And if I act like a jerk

to all my friends,

then I'm likely to end up isolated, alone.

And if I try to cheat the system, I'll only have myself to blame when I get caught.

So there is a certain truth in it.

But a God like this has no room for mistakes

and no room for dissent or curiosity.

And living under the thumb of such a god forces us to hide

our sadness, each of us crying privately in a corner, unable to share our doubts,

unable to share our fears or our challenges.

It's a myopic understanding of the divine.

It erases the self.

It erases the possibility for human creativity and change.

And taken to its logical conclusion, we end up worshiping a system

and not God.

This type of thinking, conceiving of a God so small

and so narrow, creates a very brittle religious life.

A life without any elasticity or questions, with no push or pull,

no flexibility.

And so when life throws a wrench into the gears, as it inevitably does,

or when we see the righteous suffer or the wicked prosper, or when our prayers

are not answered, or when we see someone get sick who did everything right,

even the

most beautifully constructed code of conduct crumbles

under the weight of our sorrow.

This doesn't just happen in theology, though.

We do it when we talk about politics.

When we talk about Israel.

When we consider the people we feel have wronged us,

when we imagine the future of our communities.

This type of thinking rears its ugly head anywhere

that we try to make meaning in our lives.

We're in a moment

when ideological purity tests abound.

One wrong word, one wrong idea.

When wrong question immediately marks you as an insider or an outsider.

I'm guilty, probably, of saying the wrong thing,

and also guilty of thinking about others in the same way.

I'm not talking about cancel culture per se.

Or maybe is that's a part of it.

I'm talking about something bigger, which is how

all too often the first thing we do when we're meeting someone new

is try to figure out what camp they're in,

so we can decide if they are righteous or wicked

and how quickly we attack or dismiss an idea

or the person voicing it when it doesn't fit our narrative.

The language may have changed, but we in our way,

are still administering the rabbis loyalty oath,

oblivious to how much it is hurting us,

oblivious to who is crying in private,

including us.

We're navigating a moment of profound change

and profound uncertainty, where even the word

unprecedented has gotten stale.

Our world should make us humble.

Our world should make us doubt.

Our world should fill us with questions,

and it should inoculate us to the illusion of definitive answers.

But instead we are assaulted.

Every day, every hour, every minute, every scroll, every swipe

by people who project an astonishing level of confidence

and who are certain that they are doing

every step of the ritual exactly right.

This rigidity,

this lack of wondering, is tearing us apart.

It's tearing us apart from each other.

It's tearing us apart from ourselves.

And it tears us apart from a God who our tradition tells us

transcends this petty narrowness.

In the Psalms it says

mean how mates are corrupt to an uneven merger.

We call to God from the meets are from the narrow.

Because we're stuck in this world that pushes us and tries to confine us.

But when we listen to the answer, God answers us from the mercy of

from the expanse.

Sky is wider, more expansive

than we are.

And so if we give in to the temptation

to slide right into those false

binaries and the safety that we think

they will give us, the us versus them,

and if we adjust our ears to the high volume of the outrage machine

that surrounds us, how can we hear God's voice calling to us from the expanse?

The rabbis who composed the Mishnah understood this.

And so, even as they longed for the certainty of the ancient

sacrificial system, which was long gone

by the time the Mishna was compiled,

they embedded this detail

in the story The Lonely Tears.

They couldn't excise it from the story,

because I think it was meant to be a reminder of the human costs

of such a system.

They saw a God who demanded

perfection in the temple service, but they also understood,

I think, that that God was one of God's many faces.

Many faces.

Here's another face

preserved also by the rabbis

in the Talmud.

And this is another story about the same Yom Kippur ritual.

It's retold by contemporary Israeli scholar Ruth Calderon in her book

and this is

the text about one of those high priest named Ishmael

and his experience of entering the Holy of Holies for that

same contested ritual of lighting the incense on the inside or the outside.

So this is Ruth Calderon's retelling.

Although he is alone in the temple, he feels beleaguered by the priestly

elders who seem to be peering at him with expectant eyes, measuring each step

he takes and each wave of his hand, he is seized by a sense of fear.

What if he's not worthy?

What if he makes a mistake?

Ishmael, the high priest, senses a presence.

Someone is watching him.

He stands in place, enveloped in the smell of the incense,

his eyes gradually adjusting to the darkness.

Someone is sitting there.

Is there someone else in the sanctum?

Did he make a wrong turn?

He sees a light and a high and lofty throne.

Ishmael.

My son, bless me.

He's being addressed by name as a man addresses

his fellow Ishmael, pronounced just as his mother would say. It.

Bani, my son.

This is a face to face encounter

filled with grace, like a meeting between father and son.

But bless me. What could that mean?

He tries to overcome his fear and has preconceived notions.

He wishes to be fully attentive and freed from his anxieties.

Suddenly he understands.

Ishmael is showered and blessing, and he is ready to bestow blessing on others.

The words come to him with love.

They follow one another without any effort on his part,

like a person praying for the well-being of a friend.

May it be your will that your mercy conquers your anger,

and that your mercy overcomes your stern attributes.

He enjoys the newfound generosity of spirit.

He's happy that he wants to bestow goodness.

He glances at the seated presence with a hint of embarrassment.

He continues, and may you behave toward your children

with the attribute of mercy, and may for they sit their sake.

May you go beyond the boundary of judgment.

The seated presence nods graciously.

Ishmael's doubts are assuaged.

He knows what to do next. He comes to the Ark.

He places the fire pans between the cloths.

He stacks the incense on the coals,

and the whole sanctum is suddenly filled with smoke.

He exits and then enters an outer chamber and offers a prayer, keeping it short.

He does not want to worry the people outside who will be concerned

about the feet of the priest in that holiest of chambers,

at the holiest time of the year.

It's a beautiful retelling of this story,

and it tells the story of this encounter.

Additional.

This high priest could never have prepared for

to encounter God's presence in the Holy of Holies.

No amount of rehearsals, no amount of oaths could have given him the right work.

Right words to speak in God's presence.

It's a moment when no formula will do,

when purity tests or loyalty oaths are forgotten.

And so he leans into the possibility

that something will emerge from the quiet,

and that there is something

holy in the spontaneous and the true.

And he trusts that the words that God needs to hear

will flow out of his mouth.

And embracing the not knowing,

he finds abundance and potential and generosity of spirit.

It's an experience so powerful that he can even bless God

in that moment.

The blessing that comes out from his mouth is one that sees a God of complexity.

It contains both stern and kind attributes.

He doesn't deny the fullness

of what composes God's inner life,

but rather than flattening that, he just asks for one of those many

the attribute of mercy to take the lead.

When I was in rabbinical school, I was very concerned with memorizing Mr.

Baraka. Right.

The prayer for healing,

because I wanted to recite it perfectly and fluently

without having to consult a text or look it up on my phone

when someone was in need.

And don't get me wrong, it's a great skill to have

and it's a very meaningful ritual,

whether you're a traditionalist or a Debbie Freedman person.

I mean, Shapiro, right?

They both are great. Both are great.

But in the quiet and

charged moments when I have stood at bedsides

and when I have encountered heartbreak and human yearning

in my work as a rabbi,

and those times when I step into a kind of holy of holies,

I have learned that one thing

more than anything else can ruin those moments,

and that is thinking that I know what to say

because it's actually not knowing

that sustains those moments.

With the not knowing comes presence and curiosity

and openness and blessing.

And so all the Maisha Baraka said, I've said over the course of my life

are sustained not by the words of the text,

but by the authentic connections that came before

or after those recitations.

In the story, Ishmael is transformed

not because of

his planning, not because of his fealty to the rules.

Although he does obey the rules.

He's a good boy, and in fact, obeying the rules is what allows him to enter

into the Holy of Holies

and allows him to have this unexpected and radical encounter.

So there is a place for following the rules.

But at a certain point, strict compliance fades away

and he discovers that God is different than he expects.

God is sweet.

God is open, almost playful and parental.

Like a mother. Like a father.

And that experience transforms him.

And it's the formula for us to be transformed.

Also.

There are things that are immutable.

Our services follow a certain order with certain set prayers.

We're not going to serve bacon cheeseburgers at kiddush.

We're not going to serve bread at the sader.

We do have boundaries, and there are certain ideological

and ethical boundaries and expectations that we do need to uphold.

There are certain oaths and purity tests

that are essential for our safety and for our self-respect.

We cannot tolerate anti-Semitism creeping into the discourse.

We have to fight back when it is shouted without shame,

especially by people in institutions that should know better.

We won't

stand idly by as ideologies that trample human dignity are greeted

in polite society with a shrug

or even worse, and applause.

We must speak up even when the call is coming from

inside the house, even from within our community.

And we are a diverse community.

And even though we're not 100% aligned on many things,

we all agree that there are red lines and that they are being tested and mocked

and blurred in this moment in very terrifying ways.

But the truth is that there is no ideology

and there is no belief system, and there's no intellectual framework

that can ever survive, impact with reality

and emerge unchanged.

And when that happens,

we can either cling to those structures and each cry

in our separate corners, lamenting that our neighbors no longer feel like kin

or we can loosen our expectation,

loosen our structures, loosen our dogmas and our party lines,

and open ourselves up to encounters that might surprise us

and might transform us, and might even bring blessing.

That work,

which is the work of discerning how to protect our essential core

without becoming stiff necked as is the way

of our people, and obstinate.

It's hard and exhausting and confusing work.

But no one said it was easy to be a Jew.

Unfortunately.

Ishmael's encounter

is a kind of Tuva.

It's a story of transformation and of return.

He discovers, at the heart of the Yom Kippur ceremony, a holy surprise,

a God who addresses him as a mother, as a father,

a God who invites feedback in conversation,

a God who wants the song of his soul and not another.

Misha Baraka.

Can you imagine the seed of doubt that was planted in his heart,

walking out on that Yom Kippur?

The doubt about the meaning and purpose of his entire life's work,

and how hard and confusing it must have been for him to explain

to his colleagues what he had seen, and how it should affect their vocation,

and how maybe they should reorient their entire worldview

to take into account a God who asks for blessing.

But even seeds of

doubt or seeds, and who knows what might grow.

Maybe the following Yom Kippur, when the rabbinic court

showed up to administer the oath and swear him again to perfect obedience.

Maybe he kept his face turned toward them,

and maybe he let them see his tears

as he looked upon and honored theirs.

And who knows how the seeds planted in us

today, on this Yom Kippur, might open up the possibility of seeing our past

differently, of seeing our mistakes and our failures in a new light,

or even seeing the first green shoots

of a brighter and more hopeful world ahead.

I love the way you put it, Amichai

puts it in his well known poem,

From The Place Where We Are right flowers will never grow in the spring.

The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.

But doubts and loves dig up the world

like a mole a plow and a whisper will be heard.

In the place where the ruined house once stood.

Haberdasher Nesterov raid ends with the ruined house.

You who know Amichai certainly knew.

Habibi, does your caravan rabbinic Hebrew almost always refer not just to a house,

but to God's house, to the temple in Jerusalem destroyed 2000 years ago.

The whisper

returning to this place of rigidity

and seeing that there is the possibility of doubt,

and in that possibility the possibility of growth to

the precision and perfection of the incense and the blood sacrifices,

and the tortured oath that struggled to hold it all together.

That all ended when the house was destroyed.

We understand now that Jews

live in its ruins,

and we are tasked and blessed with the opportunity to make meaning

and to evolve and to question and to grow

in this world and our world.

God's voice is just a whisper.

It's best heard when we put

down all of our knowing and just listen.

Marty Machover.