Yom Kippur Sermon 5768

Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman
Congregation Shaarei Shamayim
September 22, 2007

The sun began to set, and the mountains turned a deep rose color. As the bride walked down the aisle with her parents, she seemed to glow with radiance. She had always been quite attractive, but this evening she looked beautiful. Wearing a white, satin dress, her hair fell around her face in little ringlets. It was as if she had stepped out of a fairy tale. She approached the chuppah and joined her husband to be, who was simply delighted that this day had finally arrived.

Family and friends had traveled thousands of miles to share this day with the couple. The bride and groom had a wonderful relationship; they were truly compatible, loving partners. Both sets of parents were thrilled that they were getting married.

And yet, there was something wrong. There was something terribly wrong.

For as they stood under the chuppah, surrounded by close friends and relatives, one person was missing. Her absence was felt by every family member present. It was the bride’s sister, who had been excluded from standing at the chuppah. While the parents, other siblings, spouses of siblings, friends, and even a cousin gathered around the chuppah, the one sister sat several rows back among the guests.

A couple years before the sisters had had a terribly painful falling out. It was true that the older sister – the one who had been excluded – had originally created the rift, and she had deeply hurt the bride. She had been very close to her younger sister, but she was going through some life changes and was engulfed in a great deal of emotional turmoil. She felt that she needed some distance from her family. And so she told her younger sister, fairly bluntly, that she no longer wanted to spend time with her outside of family events.

As the months turned into years, the sisters grew further apart. They stopped inviting each other to parties and significant birthdays, and then the bride chose not to invite her older sister to her wedding shower. The hurt deepened and crystallized and spread throughout the family. While the bride had originally given the older sister a small role in the wedding, the older sister refused it when she found out that the bride had invited everyone in her family except her to stand around the chuppah, as well as to attend a private, special dinner the night before the wedding.

Bridal magazines have much to say about wedding dresses, cakes, and flowers, but they tend to avoid discussions of the messy, complicated, family dynamics that often emerge at weddings. So too, when we think of baby naming rituals and bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, we like to imagine joyful events that bring families together and mark sacred life passages. We even imagine funerals, especially when they mark the passing of elderly relatives who lived good lives, to be life cycle events that bring families together.

And yet, our lived experience tells us that even the most wonderful and meaningful life cycle events can be full of stress and anxiety. When tension exists, families can navigate through the difficult emotions, or even find opportunities for reconciliation; the life cycle event can become a sacred and transformative ritual. However, they also have the potential to tear families and loved ones apart, evoking bitterness that has been dormant for many years.

Not all life cycle events involve family conflict, of course, but they are times of heightened emotions. Not only do they mark the cyclical passages of our lives, but they help us to make transitions from one stage of life to another. While every funeral or brit milah is different, rituals provide some predictability and safety at times of insecurity and change. We want others to acknowledge and witness important changes and developments in our lives, and rituals provide us with a mechanism to be seen and heard, to communicate our experiences to others. Yet because rituals are so personal, they make us vulnerable, whether we are standing at the grave, being called before the Torah, walking down the aisle, immersing in the mikvah, or sitting before a bet din.

This vulnerability can create much anxiety. While we have control over many details of the ritual, because life cycle events always involve other people either in the ritual itself or in the community that witnesses it, we also give up a great deal of control – at precisely the time when we are expressing personal or even intimate parts of who we are. And given the communal nature of most life cycle rituals, the attitudes and perceptions of both those who are close to us, as well as complete strangers, shape our experience and contribute to our anxiety. Furthermore, because rituals are so symbolic, even seemingly trivial details – from the food served to the music played to the coffin used – take on a great deal of significance.

And so, when we make decisions about who is asked to speak at a funeral or who is invited to make a toast at a retirement party, our decisions speak volumes – to ourselves as well as to every person present – about what and who is important to us. These decisions make manifest whether we value reconciliation, hold grudges, treat others with respect, or act out of anger and jealousy. Life cycle events shape our future relationships with those present as well as those not present. They can provide us with the opportunity to work through relationships, to heal past wounds, and to grow closer with family members. They force us to negotiate with our families regarding a wide range of issues, from finances to the invitation list, and often these details mask very tender emotional issues that we have to confront.

No wonder our families care so much about the details of the life cycle event, both large and small. Even though we may think that our event is only about us – after all, it’s our child who is being named – the entire family usually has a significant investment in the ritual. We should not underestimate how much our parents, grandparents, children, partners, and siblings may care about the components of the event – from the location to the caterer to the clergy person chosen to perform the ritual – for most life cycle events are not just about the individual. They are family events. These seemingly insignificant details may be containers holding very real emotions.

If our family members care about the music, we can certainly understand why they also care about deeper messages of the ritual. When a bride argues that the wedding is her special day so she can include or exclude whomever she wants, she may have the power to do so, but she misunderstands that a wedding is not just her special day but a family occasion. Her decisions will profoundly communicate and shape relationships throughout the family for many years to come. This is not to say that we should give in to every request a family member makes – for indeed our needs are important, and we may have compelling reasons to make decisions that will displease our family members – but we should listen carefully to them and be mindful of their perspectives in the process.

One of the reasons that life cycle events can be times of heightened emotions is that they make manifest the truth about our relationships and awaken us to the realities of our lives. They remind us of the passing of the generations, the absence or death of important family members, and that we are getting older. They bring us in touch with people – both physically and emotionally – with whom we have significant relationships, and they evoke strong memories of past events.

When our relationships are broken, the truth can be difficult to bear, and it can be difficult to negotiate with the very people with whom we are planning the event. Take, for example, the story of a bar mitzvah child whose parents were bitterly divorced. The months of preparation leading up to his bar mitzvah were full of contentious arguments between his parents. What should the invitations say? Should the child’s step-parent come up for a blessing before the Torah? Who would sit with whom? Who would pay for what? Would the parents attend the same bar or bat mitzvah party that evening or would there be two? The parents muddled through and acted civilly towards each other the day of the bar mitzvah, but their arguments had dampened the spirit of the ritual for their son.

A different example is the story of two brothers whose father died when they were young and whose mother was dying when they were adults. One lived in close proximity to her, and he was very involved in her life. The other had a very strained relationship with her and lived far away. She hadn’t approved of whom he had married or how he had raised his children. When she was dying it became clear that she intended to give the son with whom she was closest all of her inheritance. When she was dying the estranged son came to visit and tried to seek reconciliation but was only marginally successful. Symbolically, she did not change her will. At the shiva following the funeral, the son’s resentment filled the room of mourners. While this easily could have spelled the end of the brothers’ relationship, the other brother decided that it was time for the hostilities to end. He gave his brother half of his inheritance.

We all come from families that are comprised of complex, interlocking relationships. Sometimes those relationships are strong and resilient, and sometimes they are broken and painful. As we move through the stages of our lives, we leave our childhood and enter into our teenage years, eventually leave home, separate from our families of origin, and create our own adult lives. We may marry, have children, witness the birth of nieces or nephews, and experience the death of a parent. Along the way we or members of our families may choose to mark the many changes that occur in our lives with rituals. It is these rituals that hold great potential for change within our families. More healing can happen through a life cycle event than can happen through years of phone calls, family visits, intensive discussions, or therapy, because they can force us to confront the difficult parts of our particular relationships with our siblings, parents, or children. They can transform how we see ourselves and how others see us. They can point out to us, sometimes painfully, the truth about our relationships. They can shake us from our ordinary lives and provide a glimpse of a new way of being. They can be magical, sacred, and deeply meaningful.

It is our choice, however, whether we fill our preparations with terrible arguments, whether we allow resentment and anger to saturate the ritual, whether we lash out at others during the event, whether we stoically refrain from lashing out, or whether we actively seek to set things right. Life cycle rituals have the potential to be great openings or terrible closings. They provide us with potential for reconciliation and the possibility of a severing of ties with family members. We can choose to use them as opportunities for healing or opportunities for revenge.

The bride who excluded her sister from her wedding had been extremely hurt by her sister. She had tried to mend the relationship over those past two years, but the other sister, blinded by her own needs, had not been able to engage with her. The months leading up to and following the wedding were very painful for all the family members involved. However, had the sisters been able to understand fully how the wedding would affect their relationship and their family, perhaps they could have used the wedding as an opportunity for reconciliation, despite the difficult challenges it posed. The bride would have done well to ask herself whether she was expressing her deepest values, including her commitment to her family and her respect for her parents, by excluding her sister. And her older sister would have done well to consider whether, in spite of her own hurt, the wedding provided her with an opportunity to reach out and make amends for the initial hurt she had caused her sister.

Life cycle events can happen frequently or rarely in families. While they do heighten the potential for healing among our families, Yom Kippur also provides us with a yearly opportunity for healing. While the framework of Yom Kippur is different, it too provides us opportunity for self-reflection that could lead to reconciliation. It calls on us to transcend the comfort of being self-righteous, to ask ourselves whether we in fact have acted wrongly, causing others pain and anguish. It calls on us to let go of some of our anger of past injustices done to us so that it does not consume us for years to come. And it calls on us to reach out to others – even if we believe we are right – to listen and to try to understand how the other feels.

Let us not wait until the next bat mitzvah or funeral to make amends and set things right. Let us be proactive and begin today. On this Yom Kippur, let us turn back to our best selves and to seek reconciliation within our own families.