Gmar chatimah tovah.
Kol Nidrei is here. This is the time when Jews all over the world, with all levels of observance, feel the pull back to our spiritual homes. Why?
Yom Kippur is unabashedly transformative. Rabbi DovBer Pinson says that the power of this day calls us toward fundamental transformation. And we call that transformation teshuvah. Now, most people mistranslate teshuvah as “repentance.” Pinson says that is unfortunate, because “return” is the Hebrew root. Teshuvah means a return from the places where we have become strangers to ourselves, a return from the distractions and dispersed awareness and, in the very same motion, a turning toward our deepest selves. Yom Kippur empowers us to return to our essence, to reclaim who we truly are, and to live forward from that place.
Notice what that is not. It is not “be a better person by tomorrow night.” It is not a checklist of your flaws with the boxes waiting. It is a homecoming.
My friend Jeremy Zwelling, zichrono livracha, had an interesting habit. He liked to ask people whether they thought they had fulfilled their destiny. Sit with that question for a moment.
Now that is a deep conversation over coffee. Jeremy asked it of people in their seventies, or past that — people far enough along the road to have some kind of answer.
And I think it is the most Yom Kippur question I have ever heard, for all ages, because it is the question sitting underneath this entire holiday. Yom Kippur does not actually ask whether you have been good. We don’t have someone coming to town and checking twice if you’ve been nice. I’m going to say out loud: if you are here or on zoom, fasting if you are able, today and tomorrow, you are good. Evil people don’t do any of it.
The question is whether the life you are living is the one that is actually yours. The call of this day is that we need to live a meaningful life, in all the ways that matter.
Sometimes that means hanging on. And sometimes it means letting go.
Now, hanging on, persevering, we know that energy well. For hanging on we have a whole vocabulary, a whole literature, movies, a whole set of heroes. Compare, please, that with the energy of letting go, or ye’ush, in Hebrew. For that one we do not have much of a vocabulary nor heroes.
The Hebrew word for perseverance is hatmadah, from the root of tamid, always. Judaism supports this value without embarrassment.
My friend Rachel’s family had always prized persistence — so much so that in seventh grade she was given an award for it at school. An actual certificate. For not quitting.
And why wouldn’t we prize it? A combination of working and failing and dreaming, and working and failing and dreaming, created computers, helped us cure certain cancers, even sent us to the moon.
The State of Israel was founded after centuries of dreaming and built by people who worked a land full of swamps and malaria. We know that dreams often come true only after substantial effort. Take rabbi Akiva, for instance.
He was illiterate at the age of forty. Forty. An age at which most people have quietly closed the door on the person they were going to be. He was a shepherd. But he wanted to be a rabbi. And he stood at a well and looked at a stone with a groove worn into it by dripping water, and he said: if what is soft can carve something hard, then Torah can carve my heart and my mind. And he began to learn the alef-bet. At forty.
And got to be THE Rabbi Akiva. He got to be such a hero that his death will be remembered tomorrow. So our tradition is on record. Firmly, clearly, in favor of not quitting.
And then there is my friend Rachel, persistence-award-receiving Rachel. At a certain point, for all sorts of reasons, her marriage was unsolvable. Unrescuable. They had tried years of couples therapy, different therapists, strategies for communication and whatnot. Nothing helped, and yet she stayed. Because quitting felt like a failure of terrifying proportions. So she held on. That seventh-grade certificate was doing its work forty years later.
Until another friend, seeing how miserable she was in the never-quit camp, reframed the whole thing for her. “Rachel,” she said, “certainly getting divorced is ending your marriage. But in terminating your marriage, what you are really doing is refusing to quit on the rest of your life.”
Refusing to quit on the rest of your life.
I want us to sit with that sentence for a second, because it does not soften what happened.
It does not pretend the marriage was fine, or that the divorce was not every bit as painful as it was. It does not say she was wrong to get married, or that the years of therapy were foolish. It simply moves the question.
Her friend did not ask, why would you think you are a quitter? Her friend asked, what exactly are you being loyal to?
Because it turns out there are two different things a person can be loyal to. The vow, or the life. And we do not always get to have both. And the difficult part is that from the inside, holding on and being stuck can feel exactly the same. They have the same texture. They use the same muscles.
Hatmadah, persistence, and being trapped and stuck… look identical from underneath. The only difference is whether the thing you are holding on to is still alive.
In May of 2012, a twenty-four-year-old Israeli named Nadav Ben-Yehuda was three hundred meters below the summit of Mount Everest. Three hundred meters. An hour, maybe two, if the mountain lets you. He was about to become the youngest Israeli ever to stand on top of the world.
On the way up he had already passed two bodies. Not old bodies — people in that season’s gear, people who had been on the same ropes he was climbing, who had run out of strength and folded into themselves and died there. Everyone going up had stepped over them.
And then, in an ice crack below the summit, he saw a man in a hat he recognized. Aydin Irmak, a Turkish climber he knew from base camp. They had played cards. Irmak was unconscious. No gloves. No oxygen. No helmet. In Nadav’s own words: he was waiting for the end. Other climbers were walking past him without lifting a finger.
Nadav tied him to his own harness and turned around.
The descent took nine hours. Irmak was heavy. He would surface into consciousness and scream from the pain and go under again. Nadav’s oxygen mask broke. He took the glove off his right hand to fix it, and got a frostbite so serious that the doctors thought they would have to amputate his fingers. But they didn’t.
Nadav said afterward: I was faced with a choice — to be the youngest Israeli to climb Everest, which would be great for my career, or to try to take a climber off the mountain. I chose the second option.
Three hundred meters. After years of training. After all the money and all the preparation and the entire story he had been telling about himself about who he was going to be.
And here is what I want to say about that, because I don’t think this is about sacrifice. I think this is about clarity. Nadav did not fail. He got within three hundred meters of the top of the world and discovered that the summit was not what he had come for.
We all suffer from what the economists call the sunk cost fallacy, the idea that because we have already invested so much down this path, we just have to keep going. The years. The tuition. The house. The training. The thing we told everyone we were going to be.
But remember: the sunk cost is sunk. We do not have to sink the rest of our lives along with it.
And often it is not even a “cost.” It is our past. The decisions and the experiences that have made us who we are. Even if they weren’t good, they likely helped us to learn and to grow. Nadav did not waste his months of training: they were precisely what made it possible for him to carry a grown man down a mountain in the dark. The climb was not wasted. It turned out to be preparation for something he had never applied for.
Ye’ush, letting go, is not something our tradition takes lightly. But it is also very Jewish. Kol Nidrei is here to remind us to stop and listen, and recalibrate, and see what needs to stay and what needs to be let go.
Kol Nidrei is really a legal formula, not even a prayer —in the Lev Shalem version, pre-emptively annulling our vows of the future. In other versions, it’s about the past vows. We say it three times, with the Torah scrolls out of the ark, to make sure we all know what we are doing.
The rabbis were really frightened of vows, and they had good legal reasons. But I want to suggest tonight that there is also a spiritual reason: know when to let go, and know when to keep going.
A vow, if you think about it, really represents a dream. It is a sentence we said out loud about the person we were going to be. I will always. I will never. I will finish this. I will not be the kind of person who. Some of those are holy and we should keep them and this whole day is here to help us keep them.
And some of them are twenty or thirty or forty years old and belong to a person who no longer exists. And they still hold us. Because we swore.
I am not being abstract. I myself lived it: I was going to be a chemist. It took me two years and becoming sick at 19 to figure out that I actually wanted to change to Hebrew Language and Literature. My mother asked the eternal question: from that you’ll make a living?
But here I am. So, not abstract at all. Because we all tell ourselves vows, images, dreams that we are unwilling to let go. There’s the reconciliation you have been waiting for from someone who is not going to offer it, and you swore you will not make the first move. There’s the version of your body, maybe a size, maybe a number on the scale, that you are committed to since you were nineteen. There’s the grudge you took an oath about. There is a vision of a completely perfect marriage, or of a completely perfect life for your child, or the perfect car that you will get one day, or the perfect career… And when you think of those you go to a place where you become hard as a cage with five different locks and you won’t budge no matter what. Those are also oaths, vows, renunciations, formulas of obligations, pledges that were never even said out loud, but bind us anyway.
Kol Nidrei says: those are dissolved. Not forgiven: there was no sin to begin with. They are dissolved. Batlin u’mevutalin. Lo sheririn v’lo kayamin. Void and cancelled. Not firm and not established. As though they had never bound you at all.
Because for many of us, some of these vows, some of these dreams, are simply not going to be realized. Not because we failed. Because we changed, or the world changed, or because reaching the summit turned out not to be the thing you needed – but saving a life did. Because when I wanted to be a chemist it was out of love for my dead father, but I became a rabbi out of love for my own people.
Kol Nidrei gives us a framework through which we can let go, and feel open to embracing new dreams — new, deep commitments, eyes wide open.
Kol Nidrei sets us free from previous visions of ourselves and allows us to move forward with new visions, knowing that we may not get it exactly right, but that we are trying.
Which brings me back to DovBer Pinson, and to why I think letting go belongs on this night and not on some other night of the year.
Teshuvah is return. And if teshuvah is return to your essence, then whatever you need to put down tonight is, by definition, not your essence. It is a costume. It is the old vow. It is the route that you picked up when you were seventeen with the information you had at seventeen. Those things were never who you are now. They were the road. And you are allowed to put down the road.
Jeremy’s question: did you fulfill your destiny? is asking something gentle and considerably hard. Are you living your own life, or are you living somebody’s old idea of it — including your own old idea of it?
Tonight, for the space of this one night, nothing you ever swore is binding. Not one of them. You are standing here unbound.
So from that free place, I want to ask you two things:
What will you leave here, tonight, on the floor of this room, for the first time in a very long time?
And: What will you pick back up deliberately, with your eyes open, because it is genuinely yours?
G’mar chatimah tovah. May we embrace unabashed transformation.