Yom Kippur Kol Nidre: Doubt

SERMON   Yom Kippur Kol Nidrei   October 11, 2024

Rabbi David Edleson   Temple Sinai   South Burlington

Tonight, we gather as Jews have done for millennia as a community to confess our wrongdoings and ask God’s forgiveness. 

But this year, I am finding it hard to ask God’s forgiveness, when part of me feels it is God that should be asking ours.  The covenant that God would protect us, that the sun would not harm us by day nor the moon by night, has been broken so many times, and October 7 is just the latest in a long line of God being Missing in Action.

How many times have Jews come together in the darkness of Kol Nidrei evening  with a sense of worry, of forboding, of wondering just how bad it will get?  Will we be here next year? 

The High Holy Days and Yom Kippur should be times to renew our faith, but this year, I feel more drawn to talk about doubt.

I want to talk about doubt, but not as a bad thing, but as a very good thing, a vital part of a healthy spiritual life. 

Doubt seems to have a bad reputation, especially in spiritual spaces.  Doubt is paralyzing. Doubt just shows you’re resistant to the bliss and ease of belief.   Doubt is the killer of spirit.  We need affirmation and positivity!

I saw a TV ad that showed a person whose head and upper body were encased in a cloud with just their legs sticking out, first walking out in the woods, then in a business meeting. Here’s what the voice over said -

 Ah-oh!  Seems someone is clouded by doubt.  It can leave you unable to think. Thankfully, with the hold of our insightful guidance, you can clear away the doubt and experience the joy of certainty.    California Psychics:   The Joy of Certainty 

The Joy of Certainty. 

So many of us seem to want that.  To know.   For certain.   What to do. 

Everyone – rabbis, life-coaches, gurus, preaches, ads, yoga teachers, health experts, devoted atheists, snake-tonic salespeople…  politicians all tell us what we should think and feel and do with great certainty.  Maybe it’s the relentless enthusiasm and positivity that gets to me, but I am coming to think that perfect faith and certainty are quite a danger. 

Certainty seems to cut us off from the idea – the very important idea- that we might be wrong,

I think that doubt is an essential part of growth.  If we don’t doubt our assumptions, our habits, how will we grow and change?   If we aren’t able to question even our deeply held beliefs, then aren’t we stuck? 

Yom Kippur is about t’shuvah, or making a turn to a more righteous life.  How can we turn back onto the right path if we are sure we are going the right way?

It is a tradition to read the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur afternoon.  I haven’t done it here in a few years, and won’t be this year, because I felt we had said most of what there was to say about it and a few years of letting it rest would give it new life.   However,  out of habit, I read it again a week or so ago, and some of it struck me very differently after the events of the past year.

Jonah’s running away from the responsibility to speak up to people who don’t want to hear you  -  I get that.

Jonah pulling the covers over his head and crashing in a deep sleep while all hell broke loose outside -  I get that.

Jonah in the fish, alone in the dark, deep below the surface – I couldn’t help but think of those hostages kidnapped into the belly of the beast - the tunnels of Gaza. 

Jonah finding the courage to say to all the sailors on the boat looking at him with suspicion – I am a Jew!  -  I get that.  I need more of that.

But as the great Bible commentor Aviva Zornberg pointed out, Jonah always speaks with certainty.  He is very definitive, while all the other characters are much less certain.   They say things like, “maybe”  or “who knows?”  And these doubting characters are the ones who actually who change, who do t’shuvah. 

Zornberg writes, “Perhaps” is a peculiarly Jewish response to the mystery of God’s ways… “Who knows?” speaks of humility and hope, and a sense of the incalculable element in the relation of God and human beings.

This Yom Kippur, as we say our confessions, I will add a few that came to me from my reading of Jonah.  One will be “For the sin we have sinned against You by being certain where doubt was needed.” 

We can’t know God’s plan.  That is a key part of Yom Kippur. “Who by fire?  Who by water?  Who rich? Who poor?  This attitude of not-knowing is a key to a certain kind of tempered hope. Zornberg points out that this kind of hope allows us to dream while also being very aware of the possibility of disappointment.

The great early 19th Century Chassidic teacher the Ishbitzer Rebbe, Mordechai Yosef Leiner, teaches that certainty is a form of idolatry.  Certainty is when we project ourselves onto God and the world.   Making decisions from certainty might not allow us to see the evidence that we need to change course or allow us to entertain other ideas to see a more complex reality.

Assuming we need certainty will also paralyze us when we don't have it.

Reform Judaism is born of doubt and skepticism.  Our founders questioned all the assumptions and sacred-cows they grew up immersed in.  Their doubts made way for what we call today liberal Judaism, from Reform to Modern Orthodox.  They carved a path between perfect faith and cynicism, as other liberal religious movements have done. 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, the former chief rabbi of Britain, and a Modern Orthodox Jew put it this way:

The place of doubt in Judaism is very interesting because most people define faith as certainty. I define faith as the courage to live with uncertainty.

We face an unknown and unknowable future. That means that every single course of action we take, every commitment has its underside of doubt. It's the ability to acknowledge that doubt and yet say, nonetheless, I will take a risk.

That is what faith is. Not the absence of doubt, but the ability to recognize doubt, live with it and still take the risk of commitment.

Doubt makes us available for the profound disruption, but profound joy of changing our minds about something that matters. 

Doubt makes us question “the Great Leader” who tells us what to think and do, and doubt allows us to question what we read and hear.  I recently heard someone say, “If everybody is saying it, it must be true.”  We need much more doubt, not more certainty when it comes to our public discourse.    

And doubt is what makes it possible to  experience a miracle.  Think about it.  If you are sure it is going to happen, it’s not a miracle.  When Sarah is told she is preggo at 90, she laughs.  That seems to me like the most reasonable response.

And if you doubt the existence of God,  I say, ‘Thank God! It is so hard to be around people who are certain about that.”  Doubting the existence of God is a healthy result of a functioning sense of history and a well-crenulated cerebral cortex.  I don’t know of anyone, or at least anyone I trust, who is religious but doesn’t have doubts.   

However, certainty that there is no God feels to me like, well, certainty, and I think it is much healthier to stay in the questions.  And I hope whatever your beliefs, or lack of beliefs are about God they don’t prevent you from experiencing the fullness of the divine, the fullness of love, and the fullness of the miracle that is simply being alive and aware on this little planet in this vast cosmos.

There is a profound joy in learning to be comfortable holding contradictions, in sitting with not-knowing, in holding both/and instead of either/or.   There is a great joy in just wondering about something.  There is WONDER in being open to surprises, of internalizing the great power and humility of that great, and to me a religious symbol, the question mark

There is wonder, and there is humility, and there is growth. 

But doubt and change – t’shuvah – can also make us feel very alone.  As humans, we need community to feel safe and held.  We evolved to survive in cooperative groups, so to lose your group is existentially threatening.  And as Americans, we are already dealing with an epidemic of loneliness because we spend so much time in our homes, on our phones, on our screens, in our little atomized worlds where almost everyone agrees with us.  We live in little worlds of certainty, but those worlds can be very lonely underneath because while we are agreed with, we aren’t really known.

To know someone is to know their doubts, much more than their certainties.

The movie DOUBT, based on the play DOUBT: A PARABLE by John Patrick Shanley, starts off with a sermon delivered by the late great actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Father Flynn.   Trigger warning for ex-Catholics and Jews who carry inquisition trauma:   he’s Catholic.  And I also changed one word for context.

Here is what Father Flynn says to his congregation:

What do you do when you’re not sure?  That’s the topic of my sermon today.   You look for God’s direction and can’t find it.  Last year, when President Kennedy was assassinated, who among us did not experience the most profound disorientation.  Despair.   “What now?   Which way?   What do I say to my kids?   What do I tell myself?”  It was a time of people sitting together, bound together by a common feeling of hopelessness.  But think of that!   Your bond with your fellow beings was your despair. 

 It was a public experience, shared by everyone in our society.  It was awful, but we were in it together!......

And when such a person, as they must, howls to the sky, to God:  “Help me!”  What if no answer comes?  Silence.  

I want to tell you a story.  A cargo ship sank, and all her crew was drowned.  Only this one sailor survived.  He made a raft of some spars; and, being of a nautical discipline, turned his eyes to the Heavens and read the stars.  He set a course for his home, and exhausted, fell asleep.  Clouds rolled in and blanketed the sky.   For the next twenty nights, as he floated on the vast ocean, he could no longer see the stars.   He thought he was on course, but there was no way to be certain.  As the days rolled on, and he wasted away with fevers, thirst and starvation, he began to have doubts.  Had he set his course right?   Was he still going on towards his home?  Or was he horribly lost and doomed to a terrible death?  No way to know.  The message of the constellations – had he imagined it because of his desperate circumstance?  

Or had he seen Truth once, and now had to hold on to it without further reassurance? 

That was his dilemma on a voyage without apparent end.

There are those of you in temple today who know exactly the crisis of faith I describe.   I want to say to you, Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.   When you are lost you are not alone. 

This year has left us at sea with a great storm raging.  We feel lost.  We feel confused.  We feel angry.  We have lots and lots of questions.   But we are not alone.  We are all human beings on this lifeboat. To be human and honest is to live with doubt. 

On Monday, the anniversary of October 7, I was so saddened by the memories of the day, but what tore my heart in two was seeing news coverage like on Vermont Edition that instead of focusing on the events of October 7, or on the rise in antisemitism since then, or on the threat of Iran and its terror proxies pose to the entire region and the world, instead of any of those, it focused only on criticizing Israel and legitimizing the violent tactics of Hammas and Hezbollah.  I don’t know why I expected otherwise, but it was like a slap in the face.  On that day of all days. 

So like Jews have done so many times in so many places, I am here tonight  with a sense of worry, of forboding, of wondering just how bad it will get? 

And I worry about how much all this hate and fear is hardening my heart.

In this new year, as we gather to hold one another and this community, may we have the humility to doubt, to not believe everything we think. 

May we have the strength to sit with contradictions and paradox, and from time to time, may our doubts be dispelled by moments of Wonder and Amazement.  

May we whatever it is we call holy helps us to heal and soften our hearts, and for those who are people of faith, may your doubts lead you to an ever deeper wrestling with God and may you receive the blessing that comes from wrestling with angels.

Together, all of us, as our people have done, will help one another, doubts and all,  get through the parted seas to shore.