Neilah & Havdallah - v02 FOR CAPTIONING
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Keep talking.
All right?
So here we go! Everybody ready?
Ready. We're ready.
All right,
guys,
tell you everything. Here we go.
Welcome back. If you're- If you're tuning in now
you are here for the home stretch.
I often compare the davening on the high
holidays, you know,
by musaf on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur I'm
comparing it to like hitting the wall mile
17 or 18 of a marathon.
But the truth is,
at Neilah
this is really more like mile 21, 22, where
the slog is real and you haven't yet hit that
adrenaline filled
stride of the last mile.
But we'll get there but we'll get there.
So stick it out.
For many people, Neilah is a time when we actually
stand for the entire time
if you can and sing with as much force and
power, digging as
deeply as we can muster at the end of this day
of digging deeply.
There is a story about Rabbi Akiva's origins.
He is considered the greatest sage,
but he wasn't born that way.
He was a shepherd.
He didn't know the Hebrew alphabet and he
went out every day to tend to sheep.
And he was 40 years old when one day he was
out with the sheep
and he noticed water dripping on a rock,
water dripping on a rock. Drip, drip,
drip, drip. And he
stared at it.
That was sort of like a burning bush
moment for him.
He just, he just had an epiphany.
And he said,
If something as soft as this water
can hollow out,
can pierce something as hard as this
rock. He noticed
not only was the water falling on it,
but it had cleared a hole.
It had worn a hole right through the rock,
he said,
then Torah surely can pierce my heart.
And he put down his staff and he went to go learn
Torah and he had to sit with the
children in the kindergarten to
learn the alphabet,
and day by day he learned letter by letter,
and over the next many decades he became
the greatest sage
that Israel ever knew.
By Neilah,
by this moment in the afternoon on Yom Kippur,
I imagine that we are like the rock.
You know,
we come here sort of like that rock and the
events of our lives
the annoyances, the challenges,
the things we said, the things other people
said to us drip,
drip,
drip and we just sort of, we shake it off,
we move on,
we push forward,
we don't let it get us down.
We and at some point we are
actually invited
to, made better by, breaking,
breaking
open,
opening up the doors of our hearts, of our
egos.
We open the ark at Neilah for the purpose
of standing
close to the Torah and having our heart
touch heart.
And so,
as we go into this Neilah amidah
I want to invite you to be open. Even more
open than you've been,
and see what may pour out
but also what may come in.
And my hope for you is that it transforms
you as powerfully
as Rabbi Akiva was transformed.
And for all of us that we are open to
evolving, to learning, to
growing in this coming year for health and
for goodness,
for ourselves and for everybody else around us.
Let's daven.
So Neilah is the closing of the gates technically,
but somehow,
with the notion that the gates of heaven are
closing
suddenly the words that appear in the liturgy
are so much
more opening. Open for us
the gates of righteousness. Open for us.
We're knocking on your door, open for us,
for our people,
for all people.
The gates of light and blessing.
And so we're knocking, we're knocking on
heaven's door and we're
inviting ourselves to open up just a little bit
more. Somehow the urgency of the
closing makes us a little more open.
I invite you to share what gate or gates
you need.
You need to open for yourself or maybe need
a little bit of help from on high to
open for you. For open- To open for all of us.
We are knocking on your door, compassionate one.
Don't turn us away empty handed.
Open up for us the gates of light. Blessing.
The gates of rejoicing. The gates of happiness,
the gates of beauty.
The gates of a good reputation. The gates of merit,
the gates of delight, the gates of purity and
salvation.
The gates of cleansing, and the gates of a good
heart.
The gates of pardon and consolation.
The gates of forgiveness.
The gates of help.
The gates of making a good living and the gates
of righteousness.
Shaarei kommiyim, shaarei r'fuah shleimah. The gates of self respect.
The gates of full health,
the gates of peace and the gates of teshuvah.
We're gonna turn to 390.
Okay.
You lovingly gave us this day of Yom
Kippur.
A day of forgiveness,
of pardon,
of cleansing,
A day which provides forgiveness for our sins against you,
the ones we did to each other.
That's what we need to figure out now.
On this day and in days to come remember us
with goodness. Provide us with blessing.
Enable us to live.
Have compassion on us, through us. Help us
help us help each other.
Our eyes are directed toward you and we
know that you and we can be kind
and compassionate.
All right.
We're coming in on the home stretch.
We're getting there.
I needed a change of scenery.
Um,
I'm thinking about as we go into this last
confessional,
This last be vidui
I'm thinking about a moment.
My first year of rabbinical school.
You know,
everybody goes into rabbinical school
wanting to grow, wanting to learn,
basically wanting to be the rabbi that they
never had. Wanting to become a saint.
Tzaddik.
And so we lay ourselves at the feet of our
teachers,
of our deans,
of our professors, of our rebbes and say,
teach me how to be wise,
you know?
And so I walked in one day to the beit midrash,
to the
area where we all studied.
But there was only one person sitting in there,
and he was sitting there with his pencil,
tapping his head.
Tap,
tap,
tap,
tap,
tap,
tap,
tap,
tap tap.
His foot was going on the floor.
Tap,
tap,
tap,
tap,
tap,
tap,
tap.
He was clearly very nervous and having a hard time
writing whatever it was that he was writing.
He had
a blank sheet of paper in front of him.
I said,
um, what you doing there?
And he said,
well,
Reb Mimi gave me an assignment.
He had been working with Reb Mimi.
What's the assignment?
What's what's so hard?
He said.
I've been sitting here for 45 minutes,
and I can't think of one thing I like about myself.
His assignment was to think of one thing,
actually,
13 things he liked about himself,
and he couldn't even get number one down on paper.
Dr Brene Brown talks about courage,
what it takes to be courageous,
what it takes to be creative publicly.
And when people think of courage,
they often think of you know,
somebody who's impenetrable, who doesn't have fear,
who doesn't, you know, who just goes right in
headlong into whatever the dangerous
or,
um,
unlikely situation is without hesitation.
Without fearing failure.
That's courage.
And what she has discovered through a
decade and a half of research is
courage is not not
feeling fear.
Courage is feeling fear and vulnerability and
embracing it,
knowing it,
even coming to love it,
certainly recognizing it,
naming it,
not allowing vulnerability
to get in the way of who we are. Actually
incorporating it into who we are.
And so one of the biggest reasons why we don't, why
why we don't go there,
why we don't share our fears and our
vulnerabilities,
the ways that we're feeling insecure or
unfinished.
Why we don't share that stuff is because
we're ashamed
and what is shame.
Shame is the fear that people won't love you
anymore.
It's the fear of disconnection,
and so what we do on Yom Kippur with the this,
you know,
with the confessional,
the naming Ashamnu,
Bagadnu,
we have been wrong.
We have rebelled.
We have sinned.
We have lied.
We have cheated.
We have given people bad advice.
All of this stuff I just want you to notice
we're not saying I am bad.
We're saying I did something wrong.
There's a difference between guilt and shame.
Guilt is I did something wrong.
Shame is I am unlovable.
I am unworthy.
We're not going for shame
here.
Shame gets in the way of growth.
Shame doesn't actually promote growth.
You know, any parent knows this.
You know,
the last thing you want is for your kid to say
I am stupid.
I am dumb.
I can't do this, right?
And yet,
as adults,
we get into these patterns of self talk and
then and then get
so invested in them that we can't even think
of one thing we like about ourselves.
Now,
of course,
if you're one of those people who just thinks
you're amazing all the time
so then
you know,
maybe this particular kavanah,
this drash, isn't for you.
But for everyone else
we're going to now go into Ashamnu
Bagadnu.
That's not the things we did wrong.
We're going to go into a confessional of
naming some of the things that we did right.
Some of the ways that we were present,
Not that we necessarily succeeded even but
that we tried.
That we cried,
that we loved, that we were actually right.
And my hope and my prayer as we go into
the new year,
of course,
we've got a name
the ways and the places that we and other
people around us do wrong,
not are bad
but,
you know,
missed the mark.
And we offer that feedback lovingly and in a
way that doesn't shame
somebody you know,
but allows them to hear you and to grow.
But I think more powerful.
And this isn't exactly my bright idea.
This is just positive
reinforcement is how do we find the things
that are good?
How do we look for the good?
You're going to hear this as one of the- as
one of these confessionals.
Mitzinu et ha-tov.
We found the good.
How do we look for the good?
Amplify the good. Name
the good. Help ourselves and one another
repeat the good.
I know,
for me,
that's sometimes hard.
That's something I would like to commit to more
and more and more in the year to come.
And Lord knows our world needs more
amplifying the good at the very same
time as we're naming the things where the
mark has been missed.
So,
uh,
if you're not already standing,
I invite you to stand as we go into our next confessional.
Rav Kook says his commentary, therefore
If our prayer books air like an archaeological
tell of different prayers from different eras,
layered one on top of the other,
the prayer that were about to say the priestly
blessing is the bottom
layer of the tel.
It's the oldest Jewish texts that we have
archaeological evidence for.
It comes from the Book of Numbers in the Torah,
in which God tells Moses to instruct his brother,
Aaron,
and the other priests to channel blessing for
the Israelites.
And we still say the words of this ancient
blessing today,
traditionally said by kohanim,
people who are descendants of this original
family of priests.
And it's not that the kohanim are actually
blessing the people.
What we're doing,
you'll see me say this prayer in just a minute.
What we're doing is channeling this ancient
blessing that's been passed down
generation to generation to generation.
It's like ringing a doorbell that God wakes up
to every morning.
The tradition is that the kohanim raised their
hands with their fingers spread and that the light
of divinity shines directly between the fingers.
So some people have a tradition to look away
because we're not supposed to look at God's
face.
And the idea is that as the kohanim, as the priests
channel this blessing God's presence is
actually coming directly
through. Maybe it kind of thrills you to look.
You'll see that I put my tallit over my head
with the tzitzit
the strings wrapped around my fingers
bringing in all of these different
traditions, calling up all of this ancient
history to offer this
ancient blessing that is so simple. About favor
and peace and goodness in our lives.
So I invite you during this blessing to
consider closing your eyes,
putting your hands over your hearts,
seeing if you can feel the warmth of having
this ancient blessing
trickle down even today in this somewhat
untraditional
way but knowing that it connects us to the
very beginnings of
Jewish prayer.
In the book of life and blessing and peace
and good livelihood,
may we be remembered and sealed by you.
We, all of your
people, the house of Israel and all people for
a good life and for
peace.
If you were seated before we invite you to
stand up for one last
pleading connection,
Avinu malkeinu.
Patah sha'arei shamayim Itefilateinu -
Open wide the gates for our prayers
to come through, to pierce them.
We're just gonna do the Avinu malkeinu right at the end.
Honeinu v'aneinu ki ein Kanu ma'asim.
We closed the ark.
In many ways,
as we go into this shema,
this is a moment of transition into everything
that's to come in
the new year and in our new selves.
This shema that we do, that first line once,
that second line three
times.
And that last line seven times is just exactly
the same as the
shema you say at bedside,
right
as someone is transitioning out of this life
and into the next.
And rather than experiencing that in this
moment with sadness in this moment,
we recognize that we are here.
You are here and we have the opportunity to
really live.
Let's use it for blessing.
So much of this moment
havdallah is just holding on with all of our senses
to everything that we've just been through
in this past day and so seeing by the light of
the fire, smelling,
touching and tasting. If you don't already
have a glass of wine or
something tasty to bring you into the
corporeal world here at the
end of Yom Kippur bringing you back into
the world of tasting and touching and
smelling and and singing more and and really
reveling in all of the senses that make
being alive such a gift.
Um,
so take a moment
now. Get yourself, get your- if you've got a havdallah candle,
go grab it.
Um,
if you've got a glass of wine,
go grab it. If you, if you got like two individual
birthday candles that you have laying around
from the last
you know,
birthday you had in your house,
you can hold them together and make a
havdallah candle.
All you need is two wicks together,
really symbolizing a kind of unity out of out of
separateness that Judaism is all about trying
to remind us that we're part of,
um and so we're gonna bless.
We're gonna bless all these different senses
and bring ourselves in to the new
year and our new selves,
which is- with as much consciousness and presence
and love as we can bring to this moment.
Take a sip of that wine or whatever it is
you are drinking,
Once you have,
you can extinguish the flame in that
cup.
When everyone with a flame,
if you want to take a moment to put it out by
whatever means.
That's Yom Kippur.
Cut.