Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
Jews do not accept suffering that can be alleviated or wrong that can be put right as the will of G-d. We accept only what we cannot change. What we can heal, we must. So, disproportionately, Jews are to be found as teachers fighting ignorance, doctors fighting disease, economists fighting poverty and lawyers fighting injustice. Judaism has given rise, not in one generation but in more than a hundred, to an unrivaled succession of prophets, priests, philosophers, poets, masters of halakhah and aggadah, commentators, codifiers, rationalists, mystics, sages and saints, people who gave the Divine presence its local habitation and name, and taught us to make gentle the life of this world. Judaism has consistently asked great things of our people, and in so doing, helped make them great. On Yom Kippur, G-d is calling us to greatness.
That greatness is not conventional. We do not need to be rich or successful or famous or powerful to find favor in the eyes of G-d and our fellows. All we need is chein, graciousness, chessed, kindness, rachamim, compassion, tzedek, righteousness and integrity, and mishpat, what Albert Einstein called the “almost fanatical love of justice” that made him thank his stars that he was a Jew.
To be a Jew is to seek to heal some of the wounds of the world, to search out the lonely and distressed and bring them comfort, to love and forgive as G-d loves and forgives, to study G-d’s Torah until it is engraved in our minds, to keep G-d’s commands so that they etch our lives with the charisma of holiness, to bring G-d’s presence into the shared spaces of our common life, and to continue the story of our ancestors, writing our chapter in the book of Jewish life.
“Wherever you find G-d’s greatness,” said Rabbi Yohanan, “there you will find His humility.” And wherever you find true humility, there you will find greatness. That is what Yom Kippur is about: finding the courage to let go of the need for self-esteem that fuels our passion for self-justification, our blustering claim that we are in the right when in truth we know we are often in the wrong. Most national literatures, ancient and modern, record a people’s triumphs. Jewish literature records our failures, moral and spiritual. No people has been so laceratingly honest in charting its shortcomings. In Tanakh there is no one without sin. Believing as we do that even the greatest are merely human, we also know that even the merely human – us – can also be great. And greatness begins in the humility of recognizing our failings and faults.
The greatness to which G-d is calling us, here, now is “not in heaven nor across the sea” but in our hearts, minds and lives, in our homes and families, our work and its interactions, the tenor and texture of our relationships, the way we act and speak and listen and spend our time. The question G-d asks us on this day is not, “Are you perfect?” but “Can you grow?”
There are three barriers to growth. One is self-righteousness, the belief that we are already great. A second is false humility, the belief that we can never be great. The third is learned helplessness, the belief that we can’t change the world because we can’t change ourselves. All three are false. We are not yet great but we are summoned to greatness, and we can change. We can live lives of moral beauty and spiritual depth. We can open our eyes to the presence of G-d around us, incline our inner ear to the voice of G-d within us. We can bring blessings into other people’s lives. And now, in absolute humility, we turn to G-d, pleading with Him to seal us in the book of life so that we can fulfil the task He has set us, to be His ambassadors to humankind.
