Days of Awe
Rev. Cheryl Rubin Lloyd
September 24, 2006

Good morning. Well, here we all are, back at church again. As of yesterday, the autumnal equinox, it officially became autumn. And autumn, though it offers a beautiful array of colors, is a bittersweet time for many of us. The warmth of the summer light is cooling; the days are growing noticeably shorter and colder. The slower summer pace has now become more hectic, our children have begun yet another year of school, some of them have left home for the first time to go off to nursery school, or kindergarten, or college. The leaves are turning, but, of course, it is not just the leaves that turn—this is truly a time of turning for us also. A time when we leave behind the activities and memories, both positive and negative, of the year past, shake the lassitude of summer and look toward a “New Year.”

And for Jewish people, it really is the New Year—it is Rosh Hashanah, then Yom Kippur, when Jews go to Temple with their families and community. Jews call the solemn period from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, those 10 days, “the days of Awe.” You will also hear them referred to as the “high holy days.” It is a time of reflection—a time to think about the days past, and to remember our loved ones who are no longer with us. It is a time to begin the work of mending our relationships, to forgive one another—and ourselves—for mistakes we have made.

You will notice that I use the personal pronoun here. Though I am, of course, a Unitarian Universalist—a Unitarian Universalist minister even—I also identify with my Jewish upbringing. This was the culture of my family and my family’s history, something that for me, actually has less to do with religious practice and a great deal to do with personal, cultural identity. One of the miracles of my Unitarian Universalist faith is that I could embrace it fully without having to lose my Jewish heritage. Which, of course, also helps with the guilt…

Most UUs are familiar with these holy days. They know Yom Kippur offers an opportunity to repent their sins and seek forgiveness. In Judaism, no one is expected to be perfect, all make mistakes (or commit sin, depending on how you think of it) and all can change. An interesting point about the way Jews interpret sin is that to Jews, one has sinned when one has fallen from “right relationship.” On Yom Kippur, persons can achieve atonement for sins between God and themselves, but for sins between them and others, Yom Kippur offers no atonement. For those sins, they must ask forgiveness from all the people they have wronged. The atonement for any ill one person has done another, the Talmud says, begins with repairing the injury in full; then one seeks God’s absolution. Thus, in order to improve ourselves, we must also improve our behavior toward those around us. Jews go over their lives for the past year and try to recall how they might have harmed others—how they may have sinned. They try first to see their mistakes, then admit to them, apologize if possible, and then keep from doing them again. To many of you familiar with 12-step programs, this may sound a lot like steps 8 through 10.

Now, when we talk about mistakes, or sins, it is important also to remember that for Jews, a sin is not just a wrong that we have done. It may actually be a good that we have left undone. I have always found this prayer, recited in preparation for the Days of Awe, very moving:

We have sinned against life by failing to work for peace.
We have sinned against life by keeping silent in the face of injustice.
We have sinned against life by ignoring those who suffer in distant lands
We have sinned against life by forgetting the poor in our own midst.
We have sinned against life when we have withheld our love from those who depend on us.

One lovely thing to remember about this time is that it is a time to renew ourselves, to have a change of heart, to look forward as well as to re-evaluate the past. “I will give you a new heart; a new spirit will I replace within you.” With this divine promise the Torah captures the essence of the experience of repentance and atonement, an experience that begins with self-examination and confession, and reaches its climax in pardon and renewal.

This morning, I want to talk about a major theme of the high holy days—right relationship. Mary Sellon and Dan Smith, in their book, Practicing Right Relationship write, “We hunger for relationship. Without relationship, we perish. Without loving relationships, we rarely thrive. We long for our relationships to be positive. We want them to connect us with other people in creative, and life-giving ways. We feel a sense of appreciative awe when we truly ‘see’ someone…and are seen by them. (And I would add here, we also feel a sense of awe when we feel truly heard by someone.) Positive relationships support and nurture us. They connect us, letting us know we’re not alone. They sustain us in difficult times and add pleasure to our celebrations.”

So, what does it take to be in “right relationship?” And, of equal interest, what keeps us from getting there? I believe that being in right relationship at the very least is respecting the other person—and, while that sounds trite, it is by no means easy. For example, it’s hard to respect a person we don’t see. What I mean by that is that we are so full of what we already know about one another that we rarely really see one another at all. People, to us, become their histories. And this makes it very hard to see—or listen—to one another in the present.

A few weeks ago, when I spent the weekend with my sister, I was truly shocked when our fun evening took a slightly bitter turn. We had had some wine with dinner, and I was making some jokes, when my sister grew angry with me. She was really very heated and I asked her what was going on. This was not the first time we’d had this experience and I never had understood what the interaction was all about. This time, for some reason, she was able to tell me. “I hate it when you do that,” she said. “It brings me right back to when we were kids and you teased me all the time.” I was stunned. In the space of moments, my sister had left the present and morphed us both back almost 40 years to when she was the younger victim and I was the teasing older sister. That’s who was in the dining room that night. Not two full-grown loving sisters, but two children working out the horrendous details of sibling rivalry. I’m sure that each of you has had an experience something like that. Probably more times than you even know.

And what is really killing about all this Dr. Michael Nichols says, is that the closer the relationship, the more vulnerable we are to hearing something said as hurtful, frightening, threatening, or infuriating—even when it wasn’t meant that way. Because of the dynamics of the relationship, our expectations of the other person, or what we’ve become accustomed to in previous relationships, we get defensive, and that makes it impossible to see, to listen, and to understand what the speaker really meant to say.

Genuine listening means suspending memory, desire, and judgment—and, for a few moments at least, existing for the other person. Believe it or not, you have to learn how to do this; it doesn’t come naturally at all. It’s one of those things like being a good driver or having a sense of humor—we all think those things about ourselves. Everyone in this room thinks he or she is a good driver and has a great sense of humor. You figure the odds. We just aren’t all great listeners and even the best of us needs to get better at it. We listen out of our emotions and our mood; we listen out of our assumptions about who has the power in the conversation; we listen, as you just heard my sister did, out of our personal history. It takes effort to enlarge our listening skills and be active, receptive listeners. The reward, of course, is hugely improved relationships, better friendships, and clearer professional associations. You can find plenty of material, books, curricula, workshops—all on getting to be a better listener. They are truly worth your time if you want to revolutionize your relationships.

Of course, no conversation about the barriers to right relationship would be complete without mentioning judgment. You know what judgment is, right? It’s what happens when we take all the things you know about the way we should act, the way we should look, the kind of job we should have, and the way our spouse and children should be, and we compare all that to what we do have. And when any one of those things doesn’t match, we judge ourselves incompetent, or failures, or whatever our particular name for it is. Then, when we’re quite finished being disappointed in ourselves, we turn around and use the same technique on our spouses, our children, our friends, and our colleagues.

Here is the most comforting thing I can tell you this morning. When we continue to live among good people—associating with, say, a community like this congregation, and attempt some kind of spiritual practice, the chances are excellent that we will get better. Eventually, we’ll let go of our shoulds and be released from the trap of judging. Loving friends and good companions are the most effective cure for shoulds and judgments because they hold a mirror up to us and show us how inaccurate and dangerous those judgments of ourselves and others really are.

I find the whole notion of “letting go” to be seductive—it’s a practice that’s critical to a lot of our growth. It is also essential, for example, to the act of forgiveness, another major focus of the High Holy days and of working toward right relationship. In forgiveness, letting go is both cathartic and liberating for us. There are many definitions of forgiveness but one I like is that forgiveness is what happens when we decide that the positive value of a relationship outweighs the validity of the pain the hurt may have caused us. And when we forgive, it also means we give up all hopes for a different yesterday. We let go of our past, and the past of those who have harmed us. How hard is that?

I know of a woman who ended a 15-year relationship with a friend. Eventually, in the spirit Yom Kippur, she decided to try to get past the estrangement. She wrote a letter to express her own regrets and to talk about the hurt her friend had caused her. She took great care with the letter and felt what she’d written was gracious and honest. She told him she valued and missed his friendship. He didn’t write back and after two months, she considered the friendship over. Then he called and asked to get together. She was nervous but pleased and expected that it might be awkward; he’d do a little apologizing and she’d do a lot of forgiving — when he admitted the error of his ways. The meeting was traumatic. At first, he accused her of horrible things he believed she’d done — things that would have been understandably hard to forgive. He didn’t accept her denials. She was stunned to realize that knowing what he actually thought was much worse than not knowing. She thought he was actually crazy.

He called her again, a month later, and when she said she wouldn’t see him, he assured her that she’d want to hear what he had to say. And of course she thought there would be an apology for the accusations. Here’s what she heard: “I’ve decided I have to put all that behind me and get on with my life — so I forgive you." Again she was stunned. And speechless. She said that she tried to focus on the spirit rather than the substance of what he’d said, so she told him she accepted his forgiveness but, she was careful to add that she wasn’t admitting to things she hadn’t done. They actually went back to being friends. Later, when talking about it, she said something I thought was fairly profound in a curious kind of way. She said that what we sometimes need in order to find forgiveness is not more clarity but more "fuzziness." They had chosen "selective memory" over the temptation of holding a grudge. Enough time had elapsed for them to look back fondly on their friendship of 15 years and choose to recapture it.

Forgiveness is so powerful in relationships. It begins with the kind of introspection that is at the core of the High Holy Days. In her article on Finding Forgiveness, Susan Cohen says we start with the very basic questions: “What are my feelings? My regrets? My hopes?” These are the questions that lead us to self-understanding. When we have dealt with them, we are ready to move away from ourselves to others and to an understanding of their flaws and deficiencies. When we work at that we are rewarded with the gift of empathy. Cohen says we will come to realize that the ‘sins’ others have committed may not have been directed at us, but “…may simply be a product of their own inner mishegas.”

The spirit of the High Holy Days then is not only a spirit of atonement; it is also the spirit of empathy and hope. When we are able to bring forgiveness — both the seeking and granting of it — into our daily lives, it is possible then we will be empowered to offer it beyond that, to a world in conflict. We can return then to the prayer spoken in preparation for the Days of Awe and say with one another that we will work for peace, we will no longer keep silent in the face of injustice, we will remember those who suffer in distant lands and remember the poor in our midst. And, greatest of all, we will no longer withhold love from those who depend on us.