Congregation Netivot Shalom

Yom Kippur

September 25, 2004 / 10 Tishrei 5765

Diane Bernbaum

For as many years as Netivot Shalom has been holding their holiday services here at Northbrae, almost 15 years, Yom Kippur was a day that I shared with Margo Lucoff. We rarely sat together, but each year, as soon as Musaf ended, Margo and I would meet in the back lobby and amble off to my house, which fortunately is very close by. Sometimes we wouldn’t even leave here together or even make eye contact during the morning services, but it made no difference because she knew the door would be unlocked and that no matter how many others might have asked to crash at my house during break, the spot on the couch, complete with afghan and pillow, was reserved for her. We’d chide each other to actually wake up in time for Mincha and walking back to shul we would rehash the morning’s services. Margo would give me her opinion of the morning’s drash, which sometimes delighted her and sometimes left her wanting something deeper. It was a great personal sadness to me and I assume to many of you when Margo died so suddenly in July.

So this drash is dedicated to the memory of Margo Lucoff, Malka Brina Bat Zelma v’Julius, zichrona li’vracha. On all days, but especially on this one, her memory is with me and with the congregation.

This is a day of confessions, so I must confess that last year I made a mistake. I mentioned to Rabbi Kelman in passing that despite 15 years of giving drashot at this congregation, I’d never been asked to do one on Yom Tov. Of course that unintentionally opened the door to the inevitable phone call in the middle of the summer from a member of the High Holiday committee asking me to speak. After about one second of feeling honored, the horror …ok…too strong a word…the concern engulfed me. On a regular Shabbat one gets several chapters from which to glean a brilliant thought. On the holidays, with their prescribed readings, one is handed but a few verses, and verses that have been commented on in synagogues for thousands of years. I know it’s permissible to veer from the text for a holiday drash, but I’m not an abstract kind of gal. I need the text as my crutch. But this is like Michael Tilson Thomas trying to breath new life into a war horse like Beethoven’s 9th. What could I say that was new?

-At first blush, this morning’s Torah reading, which describes the ceremony Aaron is supposed to perform on Yom Kippur, is pretty bizarre. Moses is instructed to tell Aaron, his brother, the High Priest, exactly how to enter the Holy of Holies, the innermost part of the sanctuary in the Ohel Mo’ed, the Tent of Meeting. To begin with, Aaron was to do this only on Yom Kippur. Then he is told exactly how to be dressed. Aaron was then to bring with him a bull and two he-goats, one goat, to be chosen by lot, which he would sacrifice and a second which would be marked for Azazel and dispatched to the wilderness. He first was to slaughter the bull and drain its blood. Then he was to take a fire pan full of coals and two handfuls of special incense and make his way to the Holy of Holies. He then filled the sanctuary with smoke, creating a cloud to protect him while he was in the immediate area of God’s presence. He was then took the blood of the sacrificed bull and goat and sprinkled some of it on the kapporet, the sculptured lid for the Ark.

-What is Aaron doing here? Aaron is creating Sacred Space, or perhaps you would say, making space that was already sacred, even more sacred. In his day there was a literal belief that if the sanctuary were to be defiled, God would withdraw from that space. The greatest threat was from the priesthood itself since it was only the priests that were allowed into this space and were in fact commanded to be in this space. The only trouble was, they had to do it correctly. The name of the Torah portion in which we find this Yom Kippur reading is Acharei Mot, “After the Death.” This title refers to the story a few chapters before of Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s two sons. They came to make an offering to God and they did something wrong. They were over-zealous. They brought “esh zarah” “alien fire”. They didn’t follow the directions exactly as they were given and so were immediately consumed by fire.

This time Aaron wants to get it right. He’s now terribly aware of the consequences of not following God’s instructions concerning Sacred Space and so we have an entire Yom Kippur reading on how Aaron used incense, smoke and animal blood to make his space sacred.

Over time, this ancient observance of Yom Kippur disappeared out of necessity. The First and then the Second Temples were destroyed. Atonement for the sins of the people eventually replaced the purification of the Sanctuary per se as the central theme of Yom Kippur. When we first think about it, that is surely a step forward. Instead of having a designated priest sprinkle some blood and burn some incense, put our sins on the head of a goat and send it to the wilderness, we have evolved a holiday, the most holy in our tradition, on which we become introspective, we are encouraged to have an internal conversation with God, we are required to ask our family, friends and neighbors for forgiveness if we have missed the mark in our dealings with them. One would think that we have evolved psychologically and developmentally in the right direction.

But what have we perhaps lost along the way in taking away the emphasis of the holiday on the creation of Sacred Space?

What is sacred space? Like a good wife, I asked my husband for a definition. But unlike other wives, I have a husband who wrote a book on the subject. His answer was: Sacred space is where you feel yourself in the presence of a deeper reality, in the presence of God.

It seems to me we can begin to look at Sacred Space in two ways: first, space that was given to us by God as sacred and second, space which we humans imbue with a sacredness just as Aaron did with his incense and blood 3000 plus years ago.

It is not uncommon for someone to say that they only feel or especially feel a sense of the sacred when they are outdoors. For some people this is because looking at nature, even at one flower, shows that something so complex and beautiful must have been created by a Supreme Being.. For others, looking up at a thousands of stars in the sky gives one a feeling of utter insignificance, another feeling one has at times in a sacred space. For many, the outdoors envelopes one in a blanket of mystery, of awe, of the unknown, of a sense of something larger than oneself. Some cultures and religions designate places of the landscape, especially obvious ones like mountains, as sacred. Others encourage worship outdoors. Sometimes it is a particular spot on the natural landscape that is looked at as being sacred. Sometimes it is solely that being in a natural setting brings one to a spiritual frame of mind.

Last Yom Kippur, probably due to Margo’s good example, I actually got back here after the break in time to hear the reading of the book of Jonah, the core of the Mincha service. In her introduction, Wendy Rosov talked about being in Alaska, camping on uninhabited islands in the wilderness with a bunch of rabbis on a retreat where they meditated and kayaked. I was entranced. It sounded like an unattainable goal, to be able to participate in a retreat like that which combined so much that was at the core of my being: wilderness camping and Judaism. But I wasn’t a rabbi, so I thought the opportunity would never come my way. And then the unimaginable happened. Through a series of phone calls, e-mails and an offhand remark, I was invited to participate this summer, along with my husband, Ed. If you’ve been to Alaska. If you are a backpacker. If you’ve ever sat on a rock…or in your backyard…and seen the perfect sunset. Or stared out the door of your tent at the perfect sunrise. If you’ve collected rocks and shells and feathers on a beach. If you’ve even been in the middle of a body of water in a kayak, just drifting, watching the patterns of the reflections on the water. Or heard a whale breathe. If you’ve ever seen eagles soaring, looking for a salmon to catch. Or just sat quietly alone in the woods ……Then you have a glimmer of what that week was like.

On the first or second day, Sheila Weinberg, one of the rabbis with us, read to us from Genesis the story of Jacob’s dream of a ladder stretching to heaven with angels walking up and down.

Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “surely the Lord is present in this place, and I, I did not know it!” Shaken, he said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the abode of God.

From then on each day, no matter if we were davening shacharit or mincha, or just paddling around in kayaks, someone would be inspired to start chanting a line from that verse, using a melody that the hazan in our group had taught us: Ma Norah haMakom haZeh, “How awesome is this place.” It sounds so simple and so obvious. That one line found its way into our davening every day, which is saying a lot, because we would usually spend our days mostly in silence, occasionally communally chanting only a line or two of a particular prayer. Yet we were impelled to say over and over: “Ma Norah haMakom haZeh” “How awesome is this place.” We were camping on pristine islands, where the only sign of human life might be a float-plane overhead or a fishing boat on the horizon. We were truly aware of the awesomeness of God’s natural sanctuary and God’s presence, with the same sort of awe that the High Priest might have been awed with God’s presence in that far away Holy of Holies.

Sometimes we are surrounded by sacred space, but we need to be reminded to notice it. One day on our retreat in Alaska, instead of kayaking, each of us was told to find a spot on our island where we could be alone, just observing our environment. Our leader suggested perhaps we would appreciate looking at a tide pool. I plopped myself in front of a puddle of water, somewhat disappointed. In the past, successful tide pool experiences always involved starfish, sea urchins or anenomies and there were none of those things in front of me, just a puddle of water. But as I looked and looked an alternative universe began to unfold: hermit crabs and tiny fish and limpets and things whose names I didn’t even know filled me with fascination. In his book “God was in this Place and I, I did not know”, Larry Kushner talks about the burning bush, surely one of the most holy in our pantheon of Sacred Spaces. He says that the burning bush was not a miracle but a test. God wanted to find out whether or not Moses could pay attention. It was not obvious at first sight that the bush was burning and not being consumed. Even dry kindling wood takes several minutes to burn. Moses would have needed to observe it for a long time to realize that the bush was the same size as it had been before. Moses knew intuitively about sacred space what I had to be taught by looking in a tide pool.

The High Priest sprinkled his blood in an effort to sanctify the space, but what have we done to our God-given sacred space? We have dammed our rivers and let our globe warm to the point where salmon have stopped spawning and where polar bears can’t make it out to the pack ice where they usually hunt seals, because the ice has melted away from the land. We have clear-cut our forests and driven animals to extinction. We have poured poisons into our waterways until it evaporates and returns to us as acid rain.

The High Priest was more careful of his Sacred Space than we have been of ours. In Biblical days, I suspect our ancestors, surrounded by the beauty of the universe that to them may have been ordinary, a universe unimpaired by smog, global warming, and pollution, chose to make their extraordinary, their sacred, a Temple. We are faced with the reverse situation. Our ancestors found God in the man-made, and many of us must now find God in the God-made. Many people find it much easier to pray in the outdoors. My students will tell you that havdallah under the stars on a retreat weekend is the spiritual high of their teen years. And one of my colleagues, Julie Emden, always takes her students for a hike outdoors shortly before their B’nai Mitzvah to develop the divine connection.

If you remember back 5 minutes ago, you’ll remember I said sometimes we view sacred space as a place in nature where we feel the presence of God. My friends and I felt it in Alaska. Moses felt it on Mount Sinai. Jacob felt it when he fell asleep and had a dream about a ladder. I suspect many of you can think about a time when you entered a natural space and felt the presence of a deeper reality.

But sometimes Sacred Space is created by humans with a man-made structure, just as Aaron did with his incense and blood 3000 plus years ago.

We have a religion that acknowledges the sacredness of space, both man-made and G-d made, throughout the year. Tonight, we are commanded to go home, break our fast, and begin erecting a sukkah. (I must admit, the timing of this commandment is one I can never follow and our sukkah manages to get put up just as Sukkot is about to descend.) But whether we put it up on tonight, or put one up at all, or just grab a meal in a friend’s sukkah, we will be surrounding ourselves for 8 days with special, sacred space. Six or seven months from now we will do the same when we clean our homes of hametz for Pesach. To some people this custom of eliminating hametz in our lives may not make any sense, but in the light of today’s discussion, I see it as a way to take a deep breath and annually make our homes sacred space. We have an entire holiday, Hanukah, whose underlying story is the rededication, the re-sanctification of sacred space. Shavuot commemorates revelation, the meeting of God and Moses on a sacred mountaintop. And we have a holiday, Tu b’Shvat that reminds us, as I re-discovered this summer in Tebankoff Bay on Kuiu Island, that the earth itself is a Sacred Space.

The care that Aaron used to put into the Sanctuary, we now lavish on man made secular sanctuaries. Three synagogues in Berkeley, this one included, are involved in erecting new buildings. Any one who has been involved in the permit, financing, designing, building, and decorating processes has a clue to the intense work that has gone into getting these buildings erected.

-We have a wonderful opportunity with our new building to create Sacred Space, not only in how we want the physical building to look, but, as Rabbi Kelman so often reminds us, in what we will do inside, whether educating ourselves and our children, feeding the homeless or performing other acts of tikkun olam.

-We have talked about Sacred Space being God made and being man made, but there is a third way of viewing Sacred Space. When God says in Exodus: “Create for me a holy space and I will dwell within,” God is talking not only of dwelling within a particular space, but also within each of us. Some people create internal Sacred Space through prayer, some through meditation, some through therapy, some through Kosher food or organic food or vegetarian food, some through exercise. Aaron did it by sprinkling blood and burning incense. He changed not only the physical space around him, but also his internal space as well.

-During the month of Elul we recite the 27th Psalm….Achat sha-alti,me-et, Adonoi, ota avakesh. Shivti b’vet Adonoi kol y-may cha-yai. Lachazot b’noam Adonoi, ul-vaker b’hechalo.” All I ask from Adonoi, one thing I desire, is to dwell in the house of Adonoi all my days. To behold Adonoi;s pleasantness and to visit the Temple of Adonoi.”.

What is Beit Adonoi, the House of Adonoi? To some it is the magnificent earth that God gave us. It is the calving glaciers of Alaska, the stillness of the desert dunes, the pounding of the surf on the sand, the abundance of the forests For some it is literally a house we build for God, a synagogue community that is our home, a building and a group of people who use that building, a place to have a conversation with God. And for some Beit Adonoi is an internal place, and the conversation goes on internally. But whether our sacred space is within ourselves, within our synagogue or within our natural world, it is sacred to us, just as the space the High Priest created around himself was sacred for him.

My good friend Debbie has a daughter who has been critically ill and in the hospital for the last several months. But about three weeks ago Rebecca was well enough to come home from the hospital for a few days and Debbie thought she’d be able to bake some honey cakes. She went to the grocery store and bought the ingredients for the cakes, which actually never got baked and the ingredients actually are in the food barrels in the back of this room. But that was a good day and on her way home from Safeway Debbie picked me up at my office and drove me home. We had a few quiet moments together and I told her I was going to do the drash for Yom Kippur. She asked what I was talking about and when I said, “Sacred Space, Debbie looked right at me and said, “Any place you are with your family and friends becomes sacred. Treasure it. You never know what you have.”

What we generally refer to as sacred places, whether they are houses of worship, places like the sites of the burning bush or Jacob’s dream or the High Priest’s sprinkling of blood and incense, or our favorite spot outdoors, are places where we are encouraged to pay attention. They are really only gateways, places to get our foot in the door. We may find that every place is sacred if we only look.

May we all find our Sacred Space on this Yom Kippur and in the year ahead.

Gamar Hatima Tova