My youngest sister Karina lives in rural Shropshire. When we go to visit, as we did in early springtime, we go for walks and inevitably we are drawn to high places. One of my favourites is a hill above Church Stretton – an hour’s walk up Caer Caradoc and you are rewarded with an extraordinary view over a large part of the West Midlands and Shrewsbury – always dramatic and inspiring from climbing and climbing, 450 meters above the sea level.
Last year too I was in Israel for a wonderful Hebrew Union College seminar in the Negev desert. One of the most special moments was when we left the hustle and bustle of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv by bus and then drove down and down into the desert to the bleak shore of the Dead Sea 400 metres below the Mediterranean sea level.
The drama and beauty of both of these places comes from the exceptionalism of their location. As high as you could climb in Shropshire, as low as you could sink in the land of Israel.
Rabbi Brent Spodek and Professor Ziva Hassenfeld note that the two biblical stories which frame these ten days gain a large amount of their drama from the journey up and down. When Abraham takes Isaac up to the mountain on which he will be not quite sacrificed, the two of them climb and climb until they reach the point where faith will be proven by willingness to serve God, not determination to do a terrible thing. Their mountain location is, in Jewish legend, then established as the place where the Temple will be built.
Jonah, whose story we heard an hour or so ago, goes down and down as far as he can go. From Jaffa, to the ship, from the ship falling into the sea, from the sea falling into the mouth of the great fish and then further down until he finally realises that he must complete the mission on which he has been sent, to warn the people of Nineveh to change their ways.
These are literally peak and trough experiences and their dramatic locations enable us to picture the extraordinary things that are happening to their protagonists, Abraham and Isaac and Jonah.
But we, gathered here today, don’t spend most of our lives high up on the peaks of experiences or low down in the troughs of despair. We spend most of our time somewhere in the middle. Most of our lives are spent carrying on, making do, managing. We work, we feed our families, we manage our households or our businesses, we make a necessary contribution to the world, piece by piece, person by person, lesson by lesson.
Then along comes Yom Kippur – every single year. Yom Kippur is both a peak experience and a trough experience. It is a container for a daylong meditation on our life. The symbolism of Yom Kippur comes from what is on the face of it a surprising source, and is a total contrast to the festival that we will enjoy in just five days time – Sukkot.
Sukkot is so full of life – holding natural living substances in the lulav , building the Sukkah out of what we have helped to come to life in our gardens and our orchards, enjoying the blessing of life giving rains symbolised by the noise the lulav makes when we wave it – all round joy.
The symbolism of Yom Kippur by total contrast is of the possibility of death. The kittel that we traditionally wear, used for burial, the white colour symbolising the purity with which we enter and leave this world. If we are able to, the deprivation of fasting. Even this Yizkor service where we remember that none of us are immortal and that loss in life is inevitable, as we remember those whom we have loved and lost. In the middle of the day the medieval poem, Untaneh Tokef in the Musaf service, meditates on who will live and who will die, who by fire, who by water.
It is as if Yom Kippur is the ritualised way to face, what Rabbi Spodek calls the ‘contingency of life.’ That whilst we spend most of our life in the middle – neither at the top nor at the bottom, things can go either way very rapidly at any time. We know that this year and every year if we just have our eyes open to the world. We remember the citizens of Derna in Libya z’’l who died by water just a fortnight ago, the people of Lahaina in Mauai, Hawaii who died by fire less than a month ago. When we think that we will always live in the middle we need to remind ourselves that life is so precious, so quickly changeable, so contingent on things that will be beyond our own control.
Rabbi Eliezer said (Shabbat 153a): Repent one day before you die. Rabbi Eliezer’s students asked him: But does a person know the day on which he will die? He said to them: ‘All the more so this is a good piece of advice, and one should repent today lest he die tomorrow; and by following this advice one will spend his entire life in a state of returning to the best in himself.’
Yom Kippur comes every year to remind us to make that phone call, offer that support, change our bad habits, go and visit the needy, give what we can to improve lives. Do not wait until you are up on top of the mountain and can finally have a broad perspective on life. Do not delay until you are so far down that all can do is change and climb back up. Our lives in the middle cannot be counted upon. They are fragile. We have to support each other, share our time and resources with others, enable us all to be able to cope with the ups and downs of life.
This is not as it may seem a sad message. We are about to enter Neilah when the music of Yom Kippur will change to the upbeat – El Nora Alila. From Yom Kippur we are about to return into life – and at the end of Havdallah an hour from now we will make the first action to build the Sukkah. We will come soon to the peak excitement of Sukkot and the joy and dancing of Simchat Torah.
When we return again to the middle tomorrow grab hold of your control in life and do what you need to know that you have lived it as well as you can. Let’s support each other in and outside our community because we know that life is fragile.
