Yom Kippur Message from Rabbi Danny Nevins

We approach Yom Kippur 5785 seeking strength in our liturgy and in our community. For me, these yearnings are most powerfully expressed in the haunting prayer, Ochilah l'Eil, I await God. This paragraph – a medley of verses from Psalms and Proverbs – appears on both Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur in the reader’s repetition of the Musaf service. It serves as a reshut, a poem in which the leader asks God’s permission and guidance as they represent the congregation. This task is made explicit when the poet explains that they stand “amidst the congregation,” (for this reason the poem is not said in the silent Amidah, when we pray alone). 

 

I am especially moved by the words taken from Proverbs 16:1. לאדם מערכי לב, ומה' מענה לשון, “Mortals may arrange their thoughts, but what they say depends on God.” (JPS trans., 2023). I understand this verse to mean that while a person struggles to organize their thoughts, the final expression, if coherent and true, comes from God. This is the experience of communal prayer with our poetic liturgy--not necessarily to understand the perplexities that trouble us, and not necessarily to transcend the sorrows that afflict us, but to become a channel for divine wisdom, forgiveness, and blessing.

 

A remarkable feature of this prayer is that it captures both the deeply personal and internal experience of organizing one’s thoughts before speaking, at the same time that it highlights the communal embeddedness of the speaker. Standing amidst the people, the leader of prayer finds their voice, their strength, and is able to address the Holy One. 

 

The congregation strengthens the leader, and the leader elevates the righteousness of the congregation. This is true not only in leading prayer, but also when teaching Torah. At the end of his magnum opus, Beit Yosef (HM 426:2), Rabbi Yosef Karo uses the same expression, Ochilah La’Eil, to express hope that his halakhic commentary will allow many Jews to grow in wisdom and righteousness, as indeed it has.

 

The Days of Awe are most effective when they stimulate us in both ways–our internal awakening, and our communal engagement. And while we all hope to achieve this state of exalted consciousness in moments of tranquility, the truth is that the power of spiritual community is felt most acutely when facing misfortune.

 

I witnessed this same dynamic in school this week as our students and staff commemorated the first anniversary of the October 7 atrocities by Hamas against Israel, and the year of war that has followed. The waves of horrific news have both weakened and strengthened us. As individuals we may feel despair, but when we come together as a community and reiterate our commitments to building a secure and peaceful future for Israel and its neighbors, then we feel renewed strength, and even the glimmer of hope. May God inscribe and seal us all for a year of life, health, and peace.

 

[Adapted from Rabbi Nevins’s essay in Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart, Izzun Books, 2024]