Love Breaks the Line (Yom Kippur 5784)

I am reaching for a narrative -

For a story -

A story of this time.

Of this moment -

Which feels more full of cynicism

Of critics and empty content

Of noise

We are searching for the line that is to be written about our moment

And We are fighting to be the ones to write it

We are Joseph in the pit -

Deciding if it is a dungeon or a womb

We are Jonah in the belly

Debating if we want to stay inside, stay isolated, protected

We are standing at the Tower of Babel

Declaring our allegiance to idols

Building towards false truths

“Wasting our time and spending our scarce attention -

Chipping away at trust”

Why does our tradition give us these stories?

Joseph dies in exile-

Jonah’s story ends in frustration.

The generation of Babel is scattered and confused.

And we too, are lost - frustrated, unsure of who or what to trust..

We’ve lost the line -

The narrative we wish to write.

We have chosen the belly of the whale over the den of the lion -

We stay out of Nineveh -

Too much to be asked of us - too much to confront - to speak the language of the prophets is to admit that we are idealistic

We fear our hope will be weaponized against us

“you naive people - just wait until the world proves you wrong.”

Cynicism protects us from the worst of humanity - after all, it is just working out as we wrote already

I understand the impulse to cynicism, certainly -

And the pull is strong

The pit saves you from the worst forces of humanity - but keeps you from the best of it, also

And The danger in reading these stories is to confuse their purpose

Perhaps, we might decide, Jonah was justified in running away -

Perhaps the citizens of babel had altruistic goals of progress

That there was no hubris - only attempts at human’s perfection

But we write another story instead

One where the tower is destroyed

One where Joseph leaves the pit

And Jonah fulfills his mission

And I believe that it is the narrative Torah wants us to read

The line that we can chose to write

It is the line of love -

I do not wish to sound naive

Or to serve platitudes

Afterall, it seems “nice” “easy” to say that the answer is love

But when I tell you that Torah begins and ends with Love

It is not because it is “cute” that the last letter of Torah is a lamed and the first, a bet, spelling “lev”

Meaning Heart -

Represented by the loving actions of God at Torah’s beginning and end -

That God provides dignity to Adam and Eve

And stays with Moses as he is dying -

A reminder that we, too, can act in God’s loving ways -

That the whole of Torah, indeed, that in Judaism, love is ever-present, and fundamental

That love is the throughline

Love is the line

It is the antidote to cynicism

It is the obsession to fight for justice

To preserve human dignity

To escape isolation and isolationism

This is not romantic love -

It is not “eros” - passion, infatuation

It is not even an emotion, rather it is a verb-

An action -

Of a discovery, an embrace of belovedness -

Of our need to be together

To care for each other, to be responsible for one another

And, it is, as sociologist Erich Fromm, suggests, the “Answer to the Problem of Human Existence”

That problem -

Put differently in Genesis - lo tov l’hiyot adam l’vado- that it is not good for humanity to be alone

“[The awareness of [human] as a separate entity, is where life begins, Fromm writes -

[he is] Aware of the shortness of his lifespan, aware, he continues, "of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him,

[and the] awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison.

He would become insane, Fromm asserts, could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with [others], with the world outside.”

The way out of the prison - out of the pit

The way to overcome the sense of separateness, is, simply put - to love.

I say simply, not because of ease -

To achieve union is a challenge. To desire the needs of the other as much as your own

It not a feeling - it is easy to feel. And too easy to be distracted into the next emotion.

Rather, Love must be an action -

Byron Sherwin teaches, “love is doing. Love is not a prelude to action but action itself. Love is expressed as deed.”

As Sihk lawyer and activist Valerie Kaur writes, “Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. Love as labor can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love.”

Love is the line -

Perhaps this - this is why love is commanded in our texts

Not as a demand - or coercion by a lonely God

But from a God who understands isolation - and who does not want the same for her creation

You MUST love - and if you can not love another human, God whispers - practice on me -

Here is your freedom, God says -

Use it to love.

Here is your power-

Please, use it to love.

This is the covenant that God asks us to engage in -

To bethroth ourselves to,

Our Sages understood this -

When they likened Sinai to a marriage ceremony

To be Jewish - to be bound up in a community - is to give love

Classically, yes- to love God - but always, the Rabbis tell us -

Is not through religious fervor, but through acts of chesed - of lovingkindness towards the other

Love is what the covenant looks like when it moves from the top of the mountain on to earth

The lived embodiments of the covenant of love -

“These are care, responsibility, respect and knowledge,” Fromm tells us.

“the active concern for the other” - And desire for their growth

As scholar Byron Sherwin wrote, “Love can never be possessive, obsessive, or an exercise of control of the other. Rather love means wanting the one we love to have the opportunity to realize [their] potential.”

And..“[It] entails not only passion but commitment and responsibility…articulated in deeds that transcend the self.”

Love is how our law becomes holy -

You shall be holy -

You shall love -

Love your neighbor as yourself

Love the stranger

Love the other

Act out of love - not fear

Repent out of love- not fear.

Love chesed -

Love.

It is not a saccharine song but a desperate plea

Love each other

Let yourselves be bound up in love.

---

And Love is what Jonah was missing -

He ran away - evaded his call to tell the citizens of Nineveh of the possibility of Teshuvah

Afterall - Teshuvah -reprence what could be more demonstrative of the force of love -

To fail and fail and fail again and then still be worthy of forgiveness

What philosopher Martha Nussbaum suggests when she writes, “It’s a form of human love to accept our complicated, messy humanity and not run away from it.”

But - Instead - Jonah runs - and ends up alone in the belly of the whale-

Symbolic of his lack of love of the other

And his misunderstanding of the demands of covenant - which he thinks is all about law and not about love

When the Ninevites do repent, “Jonah is intensely angry and disappointed; he wanted “justice” to be done, not mercy.”

He rejects their growth -

Jonah does not care -

He does not feel responsible

He is not willing to be in covenant with them.

Perhaps - we read Jonah on this day, in particular

Not because it is a story of repentance

But it is a story of failed love

Of an individual who separates himself from humanity

And ends up alone - without sustenance, under a withered vine

-----

Just so, when we build towers -

Place idols of achievement and progress before the covenantal commitments

We lose sight of each other -

Of love.

We become more fragmented - Babel, Jonathan Haidt writes, is a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community.”

And in our scattering - we become more isolated,

We lose sight of each other -

When we can not know each other -

When we can not see the face of the other

We can not love.

Love is the line -

----

I want to end by telling a story of Joseph -

Who ultimately does leave the pit

Who puts his faith in humanity again

Who allows his brothers who failed him to repent

He loves them - so he lets them grow

And, at the end of his father’s life -

The midrash tells us -

He acts out of love -

Despite his wealth, and success -

When he travels to visit his father on his deathbed, He prepares his own chariot

Doing the work that presumably, a servant should do

In acting out of love -

All Joseph remembers is love - and his status no longer matters.

The Midrash tells us “אַהֲבָה מְקַלְקֶלֶת אֶת הַשּׁוּרָה”

Love breaks the line -

Meaning - love disrupts the expected order of things.

In our own time - love means we care about people that society tells us don’t matter

Love means we embrace the innate equality of every human being whose life is precious

This on its own would be a profound reading of Joseph’s actions -

But the Midrash goes one step further

Generations later -

After Joseph has died

The Israelites are trying to escape Egypt

And the fickle Pharaoh decides to chase them -

And he, too, like Joseph the Torah text says, prepares his own chariot

Because hate, too, “מְקַלְקֶלֶת אֶת הַשּׁוּרָה”

Hate disrupts the expected order -

The rabbis bring this textual link to demonstrate, yes, the power of love and the power of hate to inspire action

But also to show us the true power that love can have

Because ultimately - it is Joseph's actions of love in his life that thwart the hateful deeds of Pharaoh generations later -

Love - they write - stands in the place of hate -

It counteracts it - in ways we can not know in our lifetime

It can save an entire people

Love breaks the line

Our covenant relies on this kind of transgenerational love -

Why each day we ask God to “zocheir chasdei avot” to remember the loving actions of

the ancestors - because it’s not just about our deeds, but their love.

The love transcends. The love thwarts the plans of Pharaohs.

Love breaks the line.

Love is the antidote to cynicism. It has the ability to erode cynicism both now and in the future. That’s zecher chasdei avot v’imahot.

We must live in this generation with love -

Love breaks the line that others try to write

We need to write our story as a love story

“We will need tales of forgiveness…tales in which [we hold] half a locket.” novelist Richard Powers writes.

“Love, in its unaccountable weirdness, [must[ hope to overcome a culture of individualism built on denying our millions of kinships and dependencies. That is our central drama now. It’s the future's one inescapable story, and we are the characters.”

This is the story we must write -

To treat the pit as the womb where love is birthed again and again

To leave the belly of the whale and shout our care and connection

To be in covenant with each other

As Jews, as citizens, as Micah -

To assert a New Jewish narrative where love is the line

To co-create with our partners in covenant

Laboring with love To advance the human project

We must live as though we belong to each other

We must love as though our deeds will matter for the next moment

We must let ourselves be bound up in love.