Rabbi Mishael Zion | Bronfman
Fellowships | Text and the City | Yom Kippur 2013
One
of Jewish music’s most venerable traditions is that of borrowing love songs from
popular culture and re-positioning them in a religious context. Yisrael Najara
took Turkish love songs from the alleys of Damascus and Gaza and set them to
holy words. Yehuda haLevi borrowed the imagery of Saharan shepherds and used them
to describe the longing of the forsaken Jewish people. It is told
of Rabbi Ovadiya Yosef that he can only write his
halakhic responsa if Umm
Kulthum is playing in the background. All is fair when
trying to open up the heart…
As
Yom Kippur comes round the bend each year, I find myself searching for an
alternative playlist of songs to supplement the traditional ones,
hoping to crack open my cynical heart with a surprising connection or two. As a gift for the new year, here is my list this year. While a random selection at best, it seems each
song includes its own answer to Leonard Cohen’s immutable question:
Pay
Me or Go to Jail!
Bruce Springsteen
| Pay Me My Money Down
“Repentance”
is the Latin term often used for the Hebrew word “Teshuva”. They actually mean
vastly different things. In the metaphor of repentance, atonement is achieved
by paying back. Our sins are debts, accrued throughout year. As the New Year
approaches, our debtor demands of us: “Pay me my money down!” On Yom Kippur –
unable to repay all our bad deeds – we admit bankruptcy and request a bailout
from the powers that be: another year of life.
I'll find my way back to you / If you'll be
waiting
“Teshuva” on the other hand, means returning.
It has nothing to do with the financial – it is wholly spatial. Sin is distance
– from truth, from God, from ourselves. The distance is understandable; a
logical outcome of a year of journeys. What is required now is a return. Luckily
the Jewish people have a promise: No matter where they leave to, God will be
waiting for their return. Tracy Chapman promises the same, and her words could
easily be a stand-in for a Later Prophet or a Medieval Spanish Jewish poet
singing about God and the Jewish people, recalling that old love affair one
more time…
If
you go, who will embrace me like that?
Yom
Kippur is the day of closeness, the day in which the High Priest enters the
innermost sanctum, the most intimate place in the Temple. Yet the moments of
intimacy also raise the anxiety – what happens if you leave? How will I handle
being alone again? We recall what happened with the Temple in the end… The
Israeli Idan Raichel memorialized this felling most poignantly in his Hebrew
song, “Im Telech - If you go”:
If you go / who will hug me
like that / who will me hear at the end of the day
who will comfort and soothe
/ only you know.
In
our new “theological” context, one can wonder: who has a deeper anxiety about
being left alone – man or God? Rationalists might not like that questions, but
Kabbalists, Hasidim and Heschelians have been asking it for years…
My
Entire Body: Take One
A
moment before Kol Nidrei, Sephardic Jews will recite an erotic poem of deep
desire: “To You My God, is My Desire” by Avraham Ibn Ezra.:
To you my God is my desire
/ in you is my pleasure and my love
to you is my heart and my kidneys / to you is my spirit and my soul
to you is my heart and my kidneys / to you is my spirit and my soul
One
by one they will mention each of their limbs and organs, reiterating how much
they all aspire, desire and long for God’s proximity.
At
the same time, traditional Ashkenazi Jews will also be mumbling about their
limbs and organs. But in the Ashkenazi
version, called “Tefillah Zakah”, it is to decry how each
limb has sinned this year, how each organ has betrayed the Lord. Of these two
alternatives, despite my European roots, the Sephardic embrace of life and
desire is the gate through which I hope to enter Yom Kippur this year.
My
Entire Body: Take Two
Here
is a third alternative, rebellious and heretical, but life affirming in a way
that is reminiscent of the lust for life of the High Holiday poetry. In Nina
Simone’s version of this “Hair”
classic, there is a deep spirituality to the freedom of
the body. Some might find that freedom in a release from religion. I find it by
reclaiming the divine roots of life, seeking freedom from the way society and corporations
try to define my body for me. Either way, the cry of life is the basic cry of
Yom Kippur: “I’ve Got Life!”, “Seal us in the Book of Life!”
May we be sealed in the Book of Life,
Mishael
