Part of my Kol Nidre/Yom Kippur Eve sermon this year was a rerun of a previous image and framing I developed back in Kol Nidre 2017 (quick Kol Nidre primer here).
The application was a bit different, though, thanks to a powerful article by Rabbi Zack Truboff in the latest issue of Tradition - “A Torah of Trauma: Rav Shagar and the Yom Kippur War.” I always love the idea of finding a new way of thinking about an image I’ve previously developed - and I think it landed.
In ancient Israel, the climax of the Yom Kippur service was the moment the High Priest, the Kohen Gadol, entered the inner sanctum of the Temple. The moment was especially dramatic because, throughout the year, the Temple service took place exclusively in the outer sanctum and the courtyard - nobody was permitted access to the inner sanctum. Even on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, only the High Priest was permitted to step foot in the inner sanctum, and only for the briefest time.
perhaps our own encounter with the Void this Yom Kippur will be the catalyst for our own rebirth, our own growth, our own change - our own teshuvah.
Each motion he made from the moment he entered until the moment he left was fraught, precisely choreographed and practiced for an entire week in advance. It was said that if the High Priest deviated at all from the service, or even if his mind wandered from absolute focus and concentration, he would drop dead on the spot. The Talmud even reports that a rope was tied to his ankle so that, if he did not return, he could be extracted without having to send someone else in after him.
So imagine the scene. The High Priest reaches the critical point in the service, and turns to go inside, as the congregation watching him from the Temple Courtyard looks on nervously. As he steps through the doors and proceeds into the Temple Sanctuary, the ambient sounds - the animals that were to be the day’s offerings, the people standing in prayer, the priests and Levites who were assisting him - all began to fade away. It is a vast building, and he is the only person inside. As he proceeds, he is enveloped by silence, save for the muffled sound his bare feet made on the stone floor. If he paused briefly as he reached the curtain that separated the outer sanctum from the inner sanctum, he would have been struck by the stillness, the quiet. A moment ago he was leading a service in front of thousands of people. Now he was the only person there - nobody else could see him, and he could not see anyone. Taking a deep breath, he walked around the curtain and entered the inner sanctum. His eyes began to adjust to the darkness - there were no windows or light in the Holy of Holies, but for the glow of the coals in the pan he was holding to burn the incense. In that moment, the High Priest confronted the most frightening sight of all - nothing. Nothing at all.
You see, throughout the entire duration of the Second Temple, and through a good period of the First Temple, the kodesh kodashim, the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, it was an empty room. The Ark of the Covenant that contained the tablets bearing the Ten Commandments had already long been lost to history and legend. Even during the earlier period of Solomon’s Temple, the High Priest was instructed not to focus on the Ark itself, but on the space just above it. It turns out that the most sacred thing in all of Jewish tradition, and also the most terrifying, the very heart of the Temple, is actually nothingness, is actually emptiness itself. On Yom Kippur, the High Priest looked into the Void.
Fifty years ago tomorrow, Yom Kippur 1973, the state of Israel looked into the void. Yom Kippur 1973 - the fast that ended with the wail of sirens rather than the sounding of the shofar. The panic of tens of thousands of reservists who were pulled from synagogues and community centers across Israel, sent to respond to coordinated Syrian and Egyptian surprise attacks. The terrifying news of the near-total collapse of Israel’s defensive lines in both the Sinai and in the Golan. The devastation reflected on Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s ashen face as he returned from the northern front to report, in his own words, “The Third Temple has fallen.”
Fifty years ago tomorrow, like the ancient High Priest, the entire Jewish people stared directly into the Void - and would never be the same.
(A video of Shai Abramson, Chief Cantor of the IDF singing a Yom Kippur War-inspired melody for Unetaneh Tokef, the most who-shall-live-and-who-shall-die prayer in the High Holy Days liturgy, over backdrop of war footage.)
The reverberations are still felt, fifty years later. In many ways the fault lines, the factures and seams that threaten Israel’s unity and democracy today first were revealed during the Yom Kippur War and its aftermath.
I have cited before the massive international best seller and scholar Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus. Harari argues that what truly sets humanity apart from the animals is not our strength or raw intelligence. Rather, it is our ability to create stories, and then to believe in them. We create narratives, systems, entire worlds that are physically intangible but just as real to us, which connect us to each other in powerful ways. Chimpanzees don’t have corporations; elephants do not earn or spend money; dolphins don’t have nationalities.
In Israel in 1973, the stories in people’s minds were about the preparedness of the Israeli leadership, the reliability of its intelligence agencies, and the overwhelming technological superiority of the Israel Defense Forces. Among Religious Zionists, the stories were about Israel’s trajectory towards a messianic redemption that seemed almost palpable, especially after the euphoria following the Six Day War just a few years earlier. The Yom Kippur War undermined each of those stories; it forced people to consider that the way in which they understood the world was not true. That sense of confusion, disorientation, and panic is what it means to face the void.
We all tell ourselves stories, both about the world around us and also about ourselves. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, and what we are about. We tell those stories through the values we prioritize, the goals and dreams we strive for, the company we keep, the causes we support, the things we do and do not do.
But sometimes our stories fail us as well. Sometimes, instead of having the words and the language to describe the world around us, we find ourselves facing that which we cannot explain or make sense of. We find contradictions, inconsistencies too big to explain away. We, too, find ourselves facing the void.
The narratives and stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are the Kol Nidrei, v’Esarei, u’Shvuei - all of the vows, the oaths, and promises we make, to others, and to ourselves, explicitly and implicitly. They are the words that, when woven together, make up the tapestry of sense and order we try to impose on our lives.
During the year we often work hard to surround ourselves with stories, explanations, rationales that explain what we’re doing, or maybe why we’re not doing what we know we should be doing. But on Yom Kippur, we all follow the model of the High Priest. We take a step away from our everyday lives. We “annul” all of the words, all of the stories, all of the Kol Nidrei, v’Esarei, u’Shvuei and, unburdened, stare directly into the Void.
It may be scary to see what is left when all of the layers we build and accumulate around ourselves are stripped away. But it may also come as a relief, a brief respite to be who we truly are - or to imagine who we could truly be.
In 1973 there was a young rabbinical student, just married, named Shimon Gershon Rosenberg. Just after Yom Kippur he was taken to a base in the Golan, where he soon found himself in a tank sent to hold off the Syrian onslaught. Like many around him, his tank was hit almost immediately - his two crewmates, friends of his, were killed, and he was fortunate to survive and recover in a trauma unit at Maimonides hospital. Even as he went on to become one of the most creative and innovative Religious Zionist thinkers of his generation, known by the acronym of his name - Rav Shagar - he bore the scars of that experience for rest of his relatively short life (he died in 2007 at the age of only 57), both on his body and in his religious world-view.
In looking to make sense of the Yom Kippur War, Rav Shagar turned to the Hasidic master, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. A classic Kabbalistic idea is that God faced a problem in creating the world - if God’s presence is all-encompassing, there was actually no space for the world to exist! Therefore, the beginning of creation was actually the creation of nothingness, God contracted, as it were, to create the space within which the world as we know it could exist.1
For Rabbi Nachman, this story is symbolic of a deep religious truth - that there are places seemingly devoid of God’s presence - there are some questions without answers - things happen that we don’t have the words to describe or make sense of. And yet, at the same time, those empty spaces provided the room for creation. So too, in our personal experiences, it is within those dark, empty spaces that change, growth, rebirth, and recreation are incubated.
Rav Shagar rejected the easy answers to the Yom Kippur War - he didn’t look for a political or military scapegoat to blame. He couldn’t just say it was God’s master plan, and he couldn’t see it, as so many of his Religious Zionist leaders did and still do, as the prelude to a messianic redemption just around the corner. It was simply a dark spot in his religious consciousness, it was a question without an answer that he struggled with continually for the rest of his life.
In his own words:
Perhaps it was Rav Shagar’s struggle with the Yom Kippur War that drove his powerful creativity. And, in the same way, perhaps our own encounter with the Void this Yom Kippur, whatever that means for each of us, will be the catalyst for our own rebirth, our own growth, our own change - our own teshuvah.
In the end, after all of the prayers, rituals, services, sacrifices and sanctuaries - after everything was said and done - it was in looking into the Void that the High Priest came face-to-face with the Infinite.
Like the High Priest, today is a time to gaze into the emptiness of our own kodesh kodashim - our own inner sanctums. In the stillness and quiet deep within, we, too, may find God’s presence. Perhaps we may even find our own.
Unrelated, but powerful - the notion that to be God-like is to make contract oneself to make space for others. Imagine a democracy based on that notion!