Gmar chatima tovah.
I want to begin with a confession that has little to do with the ones we’ve been making all day. It is a confession about love.
When we are young, we believe in the perfect other: somewhere out there, we are sure, the person who will complete us exists. Someone who will understand us without our having to explain, who will know what we need and give it without us having to ask, will never bore us, never disappoint us, never let us down. We fall in love with that idea. And for a while, when we first fall in love with an actual human being, we mistake them for it. We see only the greatest hits.
And then, if we are lucky enough, brave enough… we marry. And in marriage we slowly learn the truth: that the person we love is, well, not perfect. Sometimes, let’s be honest, they are not even lovable. They carry habits that will drive us quietly out of our minds for the next forty, fifty, sometimes sixty years.
And here is the astonishing thing maturity asks of us: we learn all of this and we stay anyway. We keep working on it. On the space in between reality and dream. We learn that disappointment is not the end of love. It is the doorway into REAL love.
One of my uncles, a dashing musical artistic man, a great entrepreneur, never married but had several love-of-my-life relationships. They only lasted until she wanted to take it, as they say, to the next level. He would promptly finish it right then and there. As a child, after meeting a few of the loves-of-his-life, I eventually asked him why he didn’t marry Theresa, the one I liked most.
And he told me, with total seriousness, no wink in it at all: “I don’t like to see the love of my life in compromising positions, like in the bathroom, without makeup.” Then I understood: my adored uncle could not bear to see his love as a real, unglamorous, embodied human being. He wanted the illusion, not a real person. And so he kept every love of his life perfect — by closing the door to reality.
The writer Alain de Botton put it bluntly: none of us, in the end, marries the right person. We marry a person — and then we spend the rest of marriage learning to love the real human being we actually found. To choose a partner, he says, is really to choose a particular set of problems that you are willing to live with for the rest of your life. Because everyone arrives with a set. There is no person without problems. There is only the question of which problems you would rather have, which problems can you say – yes, and… I keep demanding our mutual growth.
Now — some of you were in this room last night, when I said something close to the opposite. I talked about Kol Nidrei as permission to let go. I told you about a woman who left a marriage. And this morning I am telling you to stay. So let me say the difference out loud, because I think the difference is fundamental.
Leaving a marriage that has died and leaving a marriage that is merely hard are not the same act, and telling them apart is the hardest spiritual work most of us will ever do. Kol Nidrei releases us from vows we made to a fantasy, because the point is to uphold a covenant we made to something real.
Last night was about the dream you swore to, and the shackles those dreams put around growth.
This morning is about the person actually in front of you, your ezer knegdo, the helpmate that will bring growth to you and to themselves in the process. We put down the dream so that our hands are free for reality.
That is not a romantic thing to say. But I have come to believe it is one of the most important spiritual truths there is, and not only about marriage. Because the same childhood dream that wrecks so many relationships also warps the way we love almost everything larger than ourselves. We do it to our synagogues. We do it to our leaders and our movements. And we do it, most of all, to Israel.
I fell in love with Israel before I fully understood Israel. Like many Jews, I first encountered Israel through its greatest hits: the ancient homeland, Jerusalem, the Western Wall, the Hebrew language resurrected after centuries, the desert made to bloom, the Holocaust survivors and Mizrachi Jews arriving on ships and boats, the kibbutz, the soldiers, the technological miracles, the Entebbe rescue, the Six-Day War — all that improbable, miraculous story of a tiny Jewish country surviving against enemies vastly larger than itself.
And I will say it plainly: the creation of the State of Israel is one of the most extraordinary stories in recent history. Our people, scattered for nearly two thousand years, kept the memory of one land, prayed toward one city, preserved one language in prayer and in study, and somehow returned to build a functioning, sovereign state in the very place from which their ancestors had been exiled. There is something hopelessly romantic about it.
Which is exactly the problem.
Because Israel is not a romance. Israel is a country. And countries are made of people. And people, just in case you haven’t been paying attention, are, God-help-us, messy and difficult and exasperatingly frustrating.
The Israeli writer Amos Oz said it in a 2016 interview: “Dreams fulfilled are imperfect.” Amos Oz loved Israel his whole life, and he insisted that our disappointment in it is not a verdict on Israel’s failures.
It is a verdict on the nature of dreams: the only way to keep a dream perfect and shining and flawless is to never once try to live it out. Because the moment you build it, the moment it happens, with people being rude and traffic jams and politicians being corrupt and bureaucracy and army… it stops being perfect, because now it is real. Israel is not disappointing because it is a bad dream. Israel is disappointing in the precise way that every dream is, the very moment it comes true.
And here I have to be honest with you about my own heart — because it is Yom Kippur, and honesty is the whole assignment: I am a Zionist. But if I began as a star-eyed Zionist, now I am a Zionist because powerlessness did not work out so well for the Jewish people over the last two thousand years. I have read that history. And so I prefer, with my eyes and my heart fully open, the problems that come with the Jews having a country to the problems the Jews had when they did not have one. That is a choice.
It is exactly the choice de Botton was describing: not a choice between problems and no problems, but a choice of which problems. And I know which set I prefer. I prefer the problems of a people that can defend its own pregnant mothers, children and elderly to the problems of a people that could not.
But… and this is the part the romance never prepared us for: choosing a set of problems means actually carrying them. It means loving a real country and not a poster on a teenager’s wall. A country that, like every nation that has ever held power, must make agonizing decisions, and sometimes makes them badly, and must be argued with, and fought, and wept over, and held to the highest standard precisely by the people who love it most. Mature love is not resignation, it is the covenant that keeps demanding we do better.
Loving Israel like an adult does not mean defending its every act as if it were flawless. Because that is not love – that is infatuation. Just like storming out of a marriage at the first heartbreak, disappointment, or disconnect because it is not the utopia we dreamed.
This response, that the imperfect deserves no love at all, is a child’s response. A child demands the perfect parent or none at all: I hate you! they scream, banging the door. (Or so they tell me…)
The adult stays, and looks clearly, and keeps working on it, on the space between dream and reality.
Yom Kippur works exactly the same way. You would never guess it from the fasting and the white and the prayers, but our tradition insists, almost defiantly, that Yom Kippur is one of the two most joyful days in the entire Jewish year. The Mishnah says so outright: there were no days as good for Israel as the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur, it tells us, the daughters of Jerusalem would go out and dance in the vineyards, and matches were made, and lives were joined. Yom Kippur — wait for it — is a wedding day. Why? Why would the most solemn day of the year be a day of love?
Because of what happened on this date, long ago. Go back to the story. At Sinai, God and Israel are, in effect, married: The Torah is our ketubah, our written love commitment. And then, almost at once, before the ink is dry, before the honeymoon even began, Israel betrays it with a shiny Golden Calf. No marriage that I know of would survive this, a partner straying during the wedding party. Moshe shatters the tablets on the ground, the marriage looks finished. And yet – Moshe climbs back up the mountain, pleads, and on the tenth of Tishrei, on this day, on Yom Kippur – Moshe comes back down with a second set of tablets and words that echo throughout Jewish history to this very day — ה ה אֵ ל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן — the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy: Ad-nai Ad-nai compassionate gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love. Every time the ark is opened and we rise and chant them again, we are standing back at that mountain, all of us Moshe, re-enacting the exact moment the marriage was saved.
So this is what Yom Kippur actually is. It is the anniversary of the day God took Israel back. It is the day the marriage did not end. The second tablets are the tablets of a covenant that has already survived its worst betrayal.
They are the covenant of a love that has looked clearly at the very worst in the beloved and chosen, anyway, that this is not dead, but alive, worthy to be kept, worthy to make us grow. It is a realistic marriage, one with no more illusions, one that lasts.
And every single year, we do it again. We stand here all day and we say it out loud: ashamnu, bagadnu — we have failed, we have betrayed, we have fallen short. We hold up all of our flaws; we hide nothing; and then we ask to be taken back. And God? God does not love a utopian ideal of Israel, a flawless people that exists only in somebody’s distorted imagination. God loves this real and exasperating people, this stiff-necked one, this disappointing one — and stays, and keeps working on us. It is this love that the prophet Hosea heard God promise to a people who had been anything but faithful: וְאֵרַשְׂתִּיךְ לִי לְעוֹלָם — v’erastich li l’olam, “I will betroth you to Me forever.” Not “I did.” I will. Forever. Again. Still.
Do you see what this day is trying to teach us? It is teaching us how to love without utopia. It is the master class in it. Because the same wisdom that lets God stay married to us is the wisdom we need for every real love in our lives. For the spouse who is not perfect and never will be. For the child who turned out different than what we imagined. For this wonderful community — which will disappoint you, too, if you give it long enough. For the Jewish people, this maddening, arguing, glorious family of ours. For Israel, this dream that came true, and therefore, like every dream that comes true, arrived with problems attached. And, hardest of all, love for ourselves, because the deepest teshuvah is not the fantasy of finally becoming the flawless person we always meant to be. There is no such person. Teshuvah is choosing to stay in the relationship with the real, imperfect self we actually are, and to keep working: one more year, and then another, and then one more, always reaching to become more perfect, always reaching, the way a people reaches for a more perfect union: never arriving, always binding ourselves closer.
There is no such thing as utopia. Not in a marriage, not in a country, not in a soul. What there is, what this day offers us, what it has always offered us, is something better, because it is real. Not a romance but a covenant.
A love that has seen the worst, and stayed, and is still, after everything, willing to turn to the imperfect beloved and say: forever. Again. Still.
G’mar chatimah tovah. May we all be sealed, the real us, the imperfect us, for a good year.