Twist or Stick - A Neilah Sermon

Twist or Stick Here’s a sermon brought to you by the card game blackjack, or vingt-et-un, or twenty-one or Esrim V’Achat. Oh and Covid. I’ll get back to the Covid thing. Let me do the card game first. In the card game, you get dealt two cards and the aim is to get near to, but not over, 21. The key question is ‘stick or twist?’ Do you want another card – it will give you more points, but you could go bust? Now, if you have a great hand, I don’t know, 19, 20 or that magical 21 already in your hand, you stick, of course you stick. But what if the score’s lower? Not really low, I mean, you have two cards in your hand and you’ve a score of four or five, that’s easy too. But what if your score is 13, 14, 15 something pretty poor, by the standards of the game, but there’s a risk in turning over another card. If you have 13, then any 9, 10, J, Q or K will bust you out of the round. That’s a lot of cards to dodge. Just in case you are concerned, I’m not much of a card player, certainly not for cash, so here’s the same story from a more Jewish perspective. The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin, tells the story of the Romans at the walls of Jerusalem. The Biriyonim who are defending the city are fighting off the Romans and, in bid to raise the spirits of the defenders, announce that anyone seeking any kind of compromise with the Romans will be killed. That’s sticking. Our hand may not look so great right now, but we’re not twisting. We’re sticking with what we know, we’re sticking with what we have. And one rabbi, trapped inside the besieged city, Yochanan Ben Zakkai, looks at the starving masses in the city and he looks at the mighty Roman garrisons arrayed beyond the walls, and he twists. He pretends to be dead, gets himself smuggled out of the city and brough before the Roman General and starts negotiating for a future for Jerusalem that will look very different from the cards he began the round holding. This twist or stick thing cuts right to the central moment Rabbinic Judaism. The first Temple, home of the Priestly system of worship and singular centre of the Jewish people, was destroyed and the children of Israel went into exile until, some 70 years later they were allowed to return. And then they returned, and rebuilt a Second Temple, on the model of the first, with the same system of Priestly worship and the same centrality in Jewish life. That’s sticking. But when the Second Temple was destroyed, Judaism transformed. The priestly thing went from being the very essence of Jewish worship to a few small pieces here and there. And instead of Jerusalem being a singular centre of Jewish life – here we are, in a shul – or watching on line – while a Rabbi and a Chazan pray about Teshuvah with not a sacrificial animal in sight. And the paragon of this ability to twist, and to transform and survive, and thrive, is this Rabbi who smuggled himself out of the doomed city. In one of the tellings of the story of Yohanan Ben Zakkai’s escape, the Midrash continues with a story of him walking through the rubble of the destroyed Temple with a colleague, Rabbi Yehoshua. Yehoshua looks at the Temple lying in ruins and says despairingly, “The place that brought Teshuvah for the sins of the people Israel is destroyed!” Yehoshua thinks we’ve gone bust. But Yohannan ben Zakkai replies, 'We can still gain atonement through deeds of loving-kindness. The world” [he continued, citing the verse from Psalms,] “is built upon mercy," Olam Hesed Yibanei. No, we’ve not gone bust, we’re still in the game, we twisted and we are still playing. Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai is prepared to see a wholesale transformation of religious life from a pre-occupation with sacrifices; a religious formalism, going through the motions, to a religious life centred on acts of kindness and Teshuvah affected through an internal process of reflection and questing for personal improvement. And here we are. Getting on for two thousand years later. Let me turn to Covid. While the rates are as high today as they were back in those early days, it’s Yom Kippur, a time to reflect on where we want to be when we can get back out again; specifically, is this a time to stick or twist? What were the cards we were carrying before … all this? I reread something I handed out on the seats this time last year – when everything was still normal, or a whole lot more normal than all this. It’s from the essayist Jia Tolentino; [My local] fast-casual chopped-salad chain feels less like a place to eat and more like a refuelling station: a line of 40 people can be processed in 10 minutes, as customer after customer orders a kale caesar as if their purpose in life is to send emails for 16 hours a day with a brief break to snort down a bowl of nutrients. The neatness of this process obscures its circularity. The ideal chopped-salad customer needs to eat his $12 salad in 10 minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a $12 salad in the first place. So, as we get out of this, when we get a chance, are we going back to that? Or whatever version it was we had of chopped salad. That’s the question. It’s not really a question about cards, For some great – and all we want to do is return to how it was before; a bit like the Children of Israel after the destruction of the first Temple. For some of us, we’ve been kept away from what they knew, given the chance they were back rebuilding exactly what they had lost. For some it was a complete shambolic mess before all this, and we’ve been trying to twist into something new for a while. But, I suspect, for most of us there was something middling going on. Let me play with the card-game analogy a bit. Let’s make it a bit more like poker. Suppose instead of just adding to the cards in our hand, we get to decide which ones we want to keep and which we want to trade in; which to hold and which to twist. And now imagine a hand of many cards, imagine one card for each facet of our lives. And now imagine that each card isn’t a bearer of a score out of ten – life’s too complex for that. Imagine instead each card portrays our reality in one particular area of our lives. How am I as a father? One card. As a professional colleague? Another card. As a custodian of the resources of the planet? Another card. What would the cards say about my emotional state – the times I anger, the times I lack courage? What would they say about my ability to work for justice, the things I did, and the things I didn’t do? That’s a pretty big deck of cards. But suppose as you shuffle through them, a couple really stand out, there are a couple you really want to trade in. What would be those cards? If our states of existence really permitted us to shuffle through our deck and find a couple of cards to trade in, which ones would you get rid of? What does your Jewish card look like? Have you given this magisterial tradition that is your inheritance a chance, this last year, this last decade? Do you want to twist that? It might help with a bunch of other stuff – that, at least is how it’s supposed to work. It might make you a better descendant, a better ancestor, a person more resilient to the ebbs and flows of lockdown. But if you are going to stick with the Judaism card, that’s OK too. Just take two cards, I’ll give you a maximum of three. And look at them in your mind’s eye. And twist. As you turn these cards in, what are you going to do to make their replacements better, brighter and stronger. That’s the question for the next hour or so. We’re about to go into Neilah and as we prepare to close the gates on this extraordinary Yom Kippur, I encourage you to ponder your two cards, three at the maximum. You can twist. We can all twist. Change is possible. It’s just going to take a little pondering and courage and commitment. But it’s worth it. After all our very lives are at stake. May this year be sealed, for us all, for good.