Renewals: Yom Kippur 5767

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006

Although leopards do not change their spots, humans can change their character. Three acts can alter history, Torah study, sincere prayer, and kind works. These cannot rewrite the script of history, but they take the sting out of fate. By these acts, we Jews change ourselves and thereby change our world.

The Torah is our template as well as our code. Torah is the recipe for redemption and the blue print for the ideal society. The Torah study not only finds Jews observing the Sabbath, praying daily, observing kashrut and the family laws; it is a world where Torah is believed seriously. According to Torah, every act and any act that is not forbidden is permitted. This doctrine would give considerable autonomy to the Jewish Left but would be call unorthodox by the Jewish parochial right. According to this Torah, the dancing of Hassidim on the Sabbath is a greater "innovation" or violation than allowing women to carry the Torah. The former is an "acceptable sin" that is accepted in some Orthodox cultures; the latter is a new practice that violates no law at all. The Torah requires that we tell the truth, especially about Torah, and allow the factual chips to fall where they may.

Torah demands that we also not hate, that we hold no grudge, and take no vengeance. We must speak nicely and graciously on one hand, but there is no human being whose acts and words are not subject to review against Torah benchmarks. Torah provides the means to keep Jewish leaders servants of the people as opposed to exploiters of the people. Torah tells us to pray, which in Hebrew means, "evaluate oneself." As moral agents, we choose to follow the template or to reject the template. Both the Torah and repentance are not in heaven, but in our potential, to fulfill.

And Torah tells us to be nice, decent, kindly, and to love the "other," whom we see as "object," and ourselves, as "subject." As we develop empathy, we grow morally. As moral agents who make choices, we mold our world, in part, in the image of God recorded in the revealed recipe for right living, the Torah.

We ask that we be turned to Torah, and return and renew ourselves. A dysfunctional family that hated, seduced, kidnapped and lied called "The sons of Israel" became a nation in Egypt called "the sons of Israel" because they kept their language and identity in a land that was not their own. And by dint of their drive, they merited to be given the Torah that commanded self-evaluation, prayer, and the mandate to change, good works.

Because of our sins we were exiled from our land, we almost but did not give up hope.
We were exhausted, depleted and dead as dry bones, but the prophet Ezekiel convinced us that renewal was a real possibility. Because Ezekiel told the God given truth, his encouragement, like his reproof, proved prescient. Among the returning exiles was the Mordecai who maintained his identity in tough times.

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