A Case For Joy — R' Lizzi Yom Kippur 5786

This sermon was delivered at our 5786 Yom Kippur service.

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

This sermon was delivered at our 5786 Yom Kippur service. You can listen to this drash on Contact Chai Podcast or watch it on our YouTube channel.
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For my rabbinic ordination ceremony, we were asked to share one line of Jewish text to represent our rabbinic aspirations, which were printed along with our headshots and bio on the trifold pamphlet all our guests received. One line, to encapsulate our entire rabbinate. 

You can imagine, folks chose the classics like “Tzedek Tzedek, tirdof” (justice, justice you will pursue); or “Love your neighbor as yourself.” There were the slightly more obscure lines like, Teach us to number our days, so we might develop a wise heart. Know before Whom you stand. And so on and so forth.

I chose a line from Psalm 100: “Ivdu et Adonai b’simcha, bo’u l’fanav bir’nana” — serve the Holy One with joy, come before God with jubilation.”

Wow, we’re so surprised, said no one.

You can make a good case for Judaism being about a lot of things. It’s an ancient tradition famous for having multiple answers to every question. And it is about all those things, and more: it is about justice, it is about holiness, it is about oneness, love, awe, wisdom, learning. For all these reasons and more do I love this tradition with all my heart, mind and soul. But today I want to lift up joy.

https://youtu.be/aEDPpg9uoYc

Partially because  joy is in short supply these days. You heard me talk on Rosh HaShannah about heartbreak, a feature I feel is part of our emotional landscapes in some form or fashion. Over this past year I’ve heard people say things like “I just don’t even know how to be happy anymore,” or “what right I have to be happy, when X or Y or Z is happening?” And I get it. What right do I have to joy, while the safeguards protecting our democracy are being dismantled? While the climate catastrophe rages on unabated? Or while masked ICE agents are kidnapping people off the streets of Chicago, not dissimilar to what my grandmother endured in Germany in the 1930s? How can I be happy while there is still even one hostage in Gaza; or while Palestinians in Gaza are being starved and bombed? How can I feel joy when it’s possible we’re just 2 years away from the Artificial Intelligence singularity, where the machines actually take over Planet Earth? (That’s a relatively new one for me… isn’t it nice to have a growing list of things to feel anxious about?). How can I do anything other than weep, or sit in my house in fetal position? 

And this day, Yom Kippur, is a day for sacred accountability, a day for looking unflinchingly at the ways that I have contributed to all that harm and more, closer to home — my lack of patience or curiosity, how even though I don’t want to yell I end up yelling at my kids… Here in this space on this day, I should be considering what atonement and repair look like, and that’s all super serious. So how can I talk about joy?

Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel said (about 2,000 years ago, in the first book of Jewish law, the Mishna): ‘One of the two most joyous days on the Jewish calendar is Yom Kippur.” So for 2,000 years this day has been about joy? How did you not know this? And how do you reconcile the austerity we practice on this day with joy?

So let’s do some back-of-the-napkin math, like the rabbis who wrote that Mishna. If we celebrate the Exodus from Egypt in the Spring, and three months later the giving of Torah on Sinai, which we celebrate on Shavuot as we move into summer, and 40 days later the Israelites commit one of the all-time-worst sins in history — the building of the Golden Calf for which Moses broke the Tablets and had to back up the mountain for another 40 days to receive a new set — then it’s right around now that Moses would have come down the mountain with the second set of Tablets. And indeed, our tradition asserts that Moses came down the mountain that second time on Yom Kippur, his face radiant — holding the tablets that he inscribed this time. The Israelites were given a second chance.

So this day, Yom Kippur, represents God's capacious forgiveness, and a second chance for all of us, no matter what we may have done — the idea that with real repentance, teshuvah, we can come back even from the worst betrayal, of ourselves and each other. We can both forgive and be forgiven. And this is a source of immense joy, relief, hope! So we began the holiday last night with the words, “Vayomer Adonai, Salachti ki’dvarekha.” ‘And God said, I forgive them’. And the forgiveness in that case wasn’t even for the Golden Calf thing, it was for a different episode of faithlessness the Israelites displayed two books later in the Book of Numbers. I don’t need to go into it but the point is: the Israelites were constantly disappointing God and Moses, and in constant need of forgiveness. In fact, the entire story of the Torah is creation, sin, regret, repair, forgiveness. Creation, sin, regret, repair, forgiveness. Rinse, repeat. It’s the story of what it is to be human. Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav was known to say, “If you believe it can be broken, you must believe it can be repaired.” 

This past May marks 15 years of my being a rabbi, and I have to say, I never cease to be astounded by how radical and how important this foundational Jewish idea is: we can evolve, we can change, we each have a role to play in the repair of our world, and God is cheering us on as we engage in that repair, that tikkun, that teshuvah. I’ve seen it change people’s lives. Anyone who’s ever hurt a friend, or a partner, as I have, as we all have, or who’s gone through the 4th step in AA, the fearless moral inventory, and then had the hard conversations with the person or people we hurt, that opened up the space for an honest, fresh start, knows the power and catharsis in this. It is a deep source of joy. So yes, I want to talk about joy on Yom Kippur.

I also want to draw out the distinction between joy as I’m talking about it — simcha — and something like happiness. Happiness is… to quote the cast of characters from You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, happiness is finding a pencil, knowing a secret, two kinds of ice cream, climbing a tree. I feel like the grown-up version of this song for 2025 is Happiness is, running a 5K, a new season of Only Murders in the Building, watching Colbert. (You can fill in your favorite 4-syllable delight — Ben and Jerry’s; The Daily Show, John Oliver…) In other words, that kind of happiness is the delightful little moments that punctuate our lives with glee, and don’t have to do with religion or spirituality, per se, you don’t necessarily even have to work hard for it. Eating a delicious bite of chocolate cake, your morning coffee. Nothing wrong with any of that. I’m not here to knock it — we need that in life. But it’s not simcha, not joy, at least not in the religious sense of the word, the way Judaism understands it. 

To understand simcha, I’d like to pull out a book. This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared by Rabbi Alan Lew — our spiritual road map through the season of transformation that is the high holidays. Great book, highly recommend (if you haven’t already heard me say it every high holiday season for the past decade). And now I’m going to spoil it for you: like Yom Kippur itself, the book ends with joy. The culmination of this whole intense High Holiday season, if we do it right, is joy. Not happiness, but simcha.

While happiness always feels joyful, joy or simcha does not always feel like happiness (or like fun, exactly) — and a key to understanding how that can be is precisely what we’re doing here now, on this one of the two most joyful days of the year, 17 hours into a 25 hour fast. This innui nefesh, self-affliction, this feeling of discomfort, is built into Yom Kippur on a conceptual, cerebral level to help us reckon with the possibility of our non-existence in the world. But on a purely physical level, we have to feel our bodies in a way we are not used to and overwhelmingly do not like. We feel hungry, we feel thirsty, we feel exposed, vulnerable, irritable. We are used to covering over, medicating, masking our discomfort, and today instead we feel it. We feel all of it. Or, we’re invited to feel all of it.

By stripping away all our usual defenses — food, make-up, nice-clothes, by not working, working, working — we can be really present, and the discomfort in our bodies actually helps get us there. And if we do this right we’ll feel ourselves go from our baseline last night — our baseline mood, our baseline level of anxiety, whatever baseline is for you — we’ll feel ourselves go from there, to settling in; we’ll feel lows, we’ll feel highs; we’ll feel impulses and desires arise and then fall away; we’ll realize how temporary every feeling is if we just let ourselves feel each one in its fullness, and let it pass. And after we’ve gone on this journey of cracking ourselves open in this way, we’ll return to our everyday lives, but we’ll realize, it’s at a slightly higher baseline — one informed by deep, sustained physical, emotional and spiritual attention. 

That combination of physical, emotional and spiritual attention and presence, has a word in Hebrew, and it’s simcha, joy. You can’t feel it while being distracted, while scrolling. And we’re more likely to feel it when we’re in a group. And it can feel like a lot of things, including discomfort. You might say the spiritual technology of the entire high holiday season is getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

And developing more comfort with discomfort seems like a pretty important spiritual practice for living in our world, no?

The high holidays begin not with the joyful noise of Rosh HaShannah but seven weeks before with the holiday of Tisha B’Av, which we observe with another 25 hour fast, just like Yom Kippur — except instead of having an atmosphere of potential and hope, the day has an atmosphere of despondency and sadness, the opposite end of the emotional spectrum — both because of historical events it commemorates, and also because of the despair at seeing all the ways that we human beings have not changed one iota from the time of the Babylonianian and Roman Empires, with their brutal demonstrations of might and power, and the havoc that wreaks on every day people. We sit on the floor, and weep for our world. But at the end of the day of Tisha B’Av, we get up off the floor and then have seven weeks, that lead into the new year. Three weeks in we begin to hear the sound of the shofar every day, and do even more serious introspection, so that when we show up at Rosh HaShannah, and pass before God, like a sheep passes before her shepherd to be inspected, and when we hear that shofar sound 100 times in all of its pathos and grandeur, we’re present for it — in mind, body and spirit. Forget for a moment everything I said last week about Abraham failing his tests — the one test he repeatedly aces is that he shows up. He says “hineni!” I’m here, I’m ready, I’m present. What is this world asking of me today? That’s the invitation of Rosh HaShannah — to become radically present in your life. A birthday, for each one of us, to wake up to our lives. 

And then there’s this sacred 10 day window in between that birth day and today, the day we read our own obituaries. Rabbi Lew calls this period a k’fitzat ha’derekh, a shortening of the way, a collapsing of the totality of our lives into a window short enough to really look at it, to ask ourselves if the way we are living this life is the way we want to live, and the way we want to be remembered. And if not, to let this day be the kick in the pants that each one of us needs, so we don’t have to wait for a diagnosis or a tragedy to look at our life and take it by the reins. Those moments of insight, of clarity, that stop you in your tracks and take your breath away, that’s religious joy. That’s simcha.

There’s a story about a chassidic rebbe who was born in Germany and trained in Austria and emigrated to the US fleeing the Nazis. He watched in horror from America as much of his family, and whole Chassidic dynasties were wiped out in the Holocaust. Yet after the war, for decades he would travel back to Europe, including to Germany, to sing and teach Torah. Inevitably, people would ask him, “How can you go back there and give concerts? Don’t you hate them after what they did to you and your family?” And to anyone who asked that question, he would respond, “I have only one soul. If I had two souls, I would gladly devote one of them to hating the Germans full-time. But I only have one soul, and I’m not going to waste it on hating.”

We have one soul. To quote our beloved Celia Strauss, life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it. Who will live and who will die? We don’t know. But we get one soul. And with it we can give in to anger and hatred and resentment, nursing our victimhood, holding onto a hot coal imagining how one day we’ll throw it at the person we imagine teaching a lesson to, all the while, it’s just burning a hole in our own hand, burning a deep mark into our one precious soul. Joy looks like feeling all that rage and deciding in a knowing moment, to drop the coal. Joy is the full body feeling of hunger, thirst and the catharsis of that first bite of food after the fast; the realization that you have been written into the Book of Life, for now at least, and you get to choose what to do next. How to speak to your children, your spouse, your parents. How to move through life with greater attention, patience, curiosity, forgiveness. How to not miss an opportunity to dance, or sing, or protest or volunteer or help make a shiva minyan. This is simcha.

This season of training in full body presence culminates 5 days from now, when we go outside and sit in a temporary hut called a Sukkah, with neither a finished roof or finished walls, and feel the elements on our skin. 

The Torah says, “You shall rejoice in your festival, with your children, your servants, the Levite (which is to say the person who has no land of their own), the stranger, the orphan. You shall hold a festival for your God for seven days, and you shall have nothing but joy.   

וְשָׂמַחְתָּ֖ בְּחַגֶּ֑ךָ וְהָיִ֖יתָ אַ֥ךְ שָׂמֵֽחַ׃

Complete, full-body presence. Joy. This commandment of dwelling in the sukkah, of shaking the lulav and etrog in all 6 directions — honoring our ancestors, honoring the elements of earth, wind, fire, water, spirit, and God all around — and critically, these are things that can only be done with our bodies. You can’t think a lulav into shaking or think your way into a Sukkah. While all the holidays on the Jewish calendar are to be observed with joy (that’s why we say “Chag Sameah!” — have a joyful holiday), there is an extra measure of joy connected to Sukkot, that’s why it’s referred to as zman simchateinu, the time of our joy, in our prayers. Rabbi Lew writes, “Perhaps this special joy is the joy of being stripped naked, the joy of being flush with life, the joy of having nothing between our skin and the wind and the starlight, nothing between us and the world. We have spent the past many weeks acknowledging our brokenness, allowing ourselves to see what we won’t usually look at, embracing the emptiness at the core of our experience, reducing our lives to a series of impulses that rise up and then fall away again. And we have even let the denial of our death slip a little; we entertain the possibility that we might die.

So, we sit in a “house” that calls attention to the fact that it gives us no real shelter. It is not really a house — it’s a parody of a house… And it exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house, no building of wood and stone can ever afford us protection from the disorder lurking all around us. And we know this. We never really believed in this illusion. So in the sukkah, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security, we let go of this need — to control everything, to feel safe in all moments — and suddenly we are feeling our life, following our life, doing its dance, one step after another. 

Lew writes, “This joy is not fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, can be the source of deep joy.”

Joy — a friend recently shared with me — is the matriarch of a family of emotions who won’t show up in any house unless all her children are welcome. Jealousy, rage, grief, despair, anger, embarrassment — real simcha, makes room for everything, and the result is a deep connectedness to the self, to others and to God (not in this case, the character of God) but the lifeforce sustaining and bolstering us even in the presence of so much suffering. That’s simcha, that’s Jewish joy

And this we share with so many other groups who have known suffering and oppression — our queer brothers and sisters, black writers and thinkers, and so many more — who insist on our collective redemption requiring our joy. Like Miriam the prophet, leaving everything behind to cross into the darkness and across the Red Sea, not knowing if the Israelites would make it; but bringing one thing: her tambourine. Of course we can feel grief about world as it is — there is much to grieve. But when we envision the future that we want to build, I know I want joy to be in that future. We cannot build a future that includes joy if we don’t create and protect spaces for joyful full-body holistic Jewish presence, right now. 

When I decided to become a rabbi, my hope was that my contribution, my tikkun, could be to help give Jews a reason to give Judaism a second chance. I realized that so many Jews had given up on our tradition, because they had never experienced it this way, never knew that our tradition wants to be a space for us in all of us in our messiness, and I felt I could play a role in helping people experience Judaism that way. That’s why Mishkan is a space for serving God with joy, Ivdu et Adonai b’simcha, however you understand God, and whatever joy looks like for you right now.  Because we do God and the world we're trying to save no favors by being mopey, cynical, sour pusses, complaining about the way things are from the comfort of our couch. Of course we need spaces like therapy and with friends where we can express those things. But those are not actually what will power the revolution we need, whether of kindness, sustainability, justice, radical imagination, or simply honoring the humanity in one another. We need to see each other in our fullness, to believe in the best in ourselves and each other, to say hineni for one another, to show up, with our whole, full, imperfect, in-process selves. And only in spaces that allow us that fullness, that simcha, can that be possible. 

I pray that you are all inscribed for life, health and simcha in this year to come, and I look forward to laughing, crying and singing and dancing with you all here at Mishkan, come what may.