KEHILAT
NOTES 9/25/04
Yom
Kippur
Machzor – order of service for Yom Kippur. It goes all evening and the next day. Ordinarily Jews pray 3 times a day, 4 on Shabbat, and 5 on Yom Kippur.
“May we not require the gifts of human hands, but only the gifts of your holy hands.” – quote from a prayer.
Mikhael:
At the synagogue you go through the whole book. And you don’t sit, you stand. We read maybe 200 of these 800 pages last night and today. A lot of it is repetition, like the Amidah. I thought of it, what’s the point? I think the point of it is it needs to be something cemented into us, that’s part of us. It needs to be real to us. There’s a time when God says come let us reason together, and gives us an opportunity like He did to Jonah, a second chance.
This is a time that instead of our bodies controlling us, our soul should control us. David commanded his soul. This is the day we do that. He said the Viduy, a prayer of confession. Some synagogues allow people to come up front and confess their sins.
Talmud says that when we speak, our teeth should act as gates to control what comes out.
The ship is my body and the soul is Jonah. All my talents, abilities, and charisma, are servants on the ship. Sometimes the ship takes me places I’m not supposed to be going. I rely on my servants to get me there. But then I get thrown out of the ship. Tarshish means Riches and Jaffa means Beauty. Maybe not Beauty and Riches in the sense we understand, but pride.
The forgiver of our sins is Adonai. He understands, and we don’t. We judge people and put them in boxes. The first few years of my involvement in Hebraic thinking my prayer was to take religion out of me. This included the deeds of the Nicolaitans, setting up professional clergy. It should be God and I in this universe. God and Jonah, God and Moshe – each one of us alone. Then I can hear His voice, and not those of the others who are judging, or our conscience which includes the voices of our ancestors and the churches. I think I’m not very religious any more. Sometimes I push the envelope, being shocking just to prove I’m not religious.
God has a completely different view of it. Based on things you’ve seen in Tanya and Kabbalah, you’ve got to prune trees or burn fields to take the roughness off who we are.
Jonah never would have made it to Nineveh if he had not gotten on that ship and then inside the whale.
Sometimes I’ll read something from Torah, and see we don’t fit anywhere. The greatest frustration for me is that it’s so simple, but it’s so difficult for 99% of the people out there. Why is that?
Al-Chet or Viduy, the prayers covering sins, did any jump out at someone that they didn’t understand?
For me the one that I didn’t understand was the first one, the sins committed under duress. You’d think you would be free, not accountable. You’re sitting in front of four Islamic fascists with swords, and they ask you to say something bad about Bush.
Sometimes we get into compromising situations that create the duress because we weren’t careful. Many of these “accidents” can be avoided by setting limitations to avoid that temptation or situation. Has anyone committed a sin and said “I can’t help it?” Maybe had a little too much to drink… Have I tried making fences around this so that I will not transgress? If I’m an alcoholic then not going to the bar in the first place should be a fence. Or not hanging around people who would take me there.
That’s what the Talmud is, a book of fences. It’s different for each person. We all have to create our own fences about particular things.
Have I made fences so that I won’t transgress? Have I set up a penalty system against myself? If I do get into one of these situations, is God putting forth a challenge to me to form us and mold us?
Baseless hatred #42 destroyed the Second Temple.
#31 haughty eyes – Talmud says the eyes are a window to the soul. Do I communicate warmth and care to people through my eyes? Have I avoided interacting with certain people because they were not important enough? It’s a look, when you look into someone’s eyes you can see that. Rolling your eyes at things someone says.
Sometimes we can harm others without even saying a word. Talmud says something against staring into someone else’s home or yard. That would be prying eyes. Did I gawk at an accident on the freeway?
If you read through Torah without any idea of the mercy (Chesed) of God, you can get pretty afraid.
(He read article to us by Rabbi Menachem Sheerson, 4 Meanings of Sin)
We should all have Midrash Rabbah. Living Torah by Kaplan (5 volumes) is good. Miam Loez is excellent. These are things that every serious person should have in their library.
Within the Tanakh itself there are different views of sin.
Wisdom: Prov. 13:21 evil pursues iniquity.
Prophets: Ezek. 18:20 the soul that sins shall die.
Torah says you can atone for sin.
God says that Teshuvah (repentance) is the bottom line.
Difference between sin and iniquity: Sin is a mistake we do, maybe even accidentally. Iniquity is when you willfully take it into your heart, in the face of God, and say this is how you will live.
Our responsibility is to do Tikkun Olam (repair) in this universe. Then everything can find their divine purpose in creation. Everything has a divine spark, and we can help release that. As when I did the ritual slaughter of that sheep a few weeks ago, by saying the prayer over it, the sheep immediately became calm. Then its divine spark was released to its true purpose.
If we eat a pig, the divine spark within it will never be released to its purpose. That’s because a pig was not created to be eaten.
Does the Earth have a soul? God says that if we stay quiet, the rocks and trees with come forth with praise. Within them is the life of God, who is in everything that’s living. We don’t worship those things – we worship our Creator. We are told in Torah to bring respect to the life of all these other things.
If I eat a piece of pig, then the spark of divinity, or purpose, cannot reach the elevated place that God created it to be. Everything is good, but that doesn’t mean it’s good to eat.
Antiochus, from the story of Hanukkah in Maccabees, offered a pig on the altar of God. The pig didn’t serve its divine purpose, and there was no connection with God made in a good way by that.
Forbidden means “bound”.
Tzaddiks are born that way. They’re an exotic group of people who don’t know the other side of life. They have never tasted the horrors of sin. They can become self-righteous, judgmental, controlling, Nicolaitans. That’s what burned most of us out on religion, I think.
The rest of us are Bal-Chuva, those who return. We are trying. There can be an incredible love of God among these.
If you took all your sins and all my sins and weighed them out against each other, they’d be about equal. I’m not special, I don’t want to be special. I’m chosen by God, as we all are in the house of Israel, and I’m chosen to teach. But there’s no division.
The Bal-Chuva has tasted the forbidden, and knows the difference between that and the things of God. He can tap into the free will part of God.
Transgression is God’s tool to bring people into a deeper relation with Him. That is so contrary to religion. Sin is a tool that should not be judged. It should be accepted as a tool that brings someone to where God wants him to be. I can think of the most horrible things I’ve ever done, and seen how God took me out of that and brought me where he wanted me to be. Remember the story of Joseph. God meant it for good.
Deut 29:29 the deeper things of God are not man’s to know.
Baruch Hashem
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WEEK: Sukkhot (no transcription)