Pillars of Salt: Who We Were and Who We Will Become - Yom Kippur 5778

What is to be learned from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah? The most literal reading recounts a story of G!ds wrath and the destruction of two evil cities.

For review, G!d decides to destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. No, not because of their sexual proclivities. In fact, according to the Jewish tradition the true sin of ‘Midat Sdom’ or ‘Sodomy' is the failure to graciously welcome strangers. After the cities are condemned to destruction, G!d sends angels to save Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family. A riot forms as the citizens of Sodom congregate to abuse the angels because they were believed to be foreigners. Lot, his wife, and two daughters, leave the city under the cover of darkness and are warned not to turn back and witness the utter destruction behind them. But Lot’s wife cannot resist; she looks back, and is turned into a pillar of salt. To this day, there stands a bizarre rock formation by the Dead Sea said to be her remains, with what seems to be a face looking longfully backwards - over her shoulder from where she came.

Many women throughout the Torah are left anonymous, including Lot’s wife and daughters. The Talmudic rabbis, however, give Lot’s wife a name - ‘Idit’ which means ‘rich soil.’ They also give her a back story. Idit was born and raised in Sodom. She lived there with her parents, her husband Lot, and her four daughters. Her two eldest had already married local men and the younger two were still single.

Why this prohibition against looking back? What is so dangerous about reflection, nostalgia, and hesitation? On this day of Yom Kippur, we stand in the liminal space between the past year and the one to come, contemplating our life most fully by practicing death in a sense. But let us return again to Idit, imagining her plight with fresh eyes.

The rabbinic tradition says that she turned back to look because she could not resist searching the crumbling cityscape for her two eldest married daughters, consumed in the destruction of Sodom. Can you imagine it? A mother fleeing everything she knew, leaving her home, her family of origin, and worst of all, two of her four daughters. Of course she was unable to restrain herself from looking back. Of course she was unable to move on. The problem was that in becoming frozen, not only did her life end, but, her in her absence, she was unable to continue onward with her remaining family. She abandoned her two living daughters in the midst of their own grief. In the verses that follow, those daughters, attempting to fill the hole Idit left in her family, sleep with their father in a perverse attempt to fill her abdicated role.

Is ‘the pillar of salt’ a warning of a life unlived or a monument to the excruciating pain of an unbearable loss? Of course the answer is both.

Thankfully most of us will never mourn the the loss of a child. The pain of such a loss is almost unspeakable. It is the epitome of loss. I want to suggest tonight that Idit’s pillar is, in fact, not about her personal loss, but a larger mythical paradigm representing every loss that we bear. There are parts of us that are so stuck in the past that we cannot turn our backs on them and move forward.

There are elements of all of us that are frozen in time. Unable to be metabolized. Unable to bend. Resistant to change. Ossified limbs that we promise ourselves each year we will do teshuvah for but fail to repeatedly. Sometimes, we think that we have moved on, and are finally charting new territory, but then realize that we are back stuck in the same old pattern just with a new job, new friends, or a new partner. As Jon Kabat Zinn writes, “Wherever you Go, There you Are.”

Can I tell you a secret? Do you know what the biggest impediment is to my teshuvah? Really? Hidden under my fears of failure, my laziness, my busyness, and all of my other excuses? I am terrified that I will be wildly successful. I am petrified that if I change, I’ll lose who I was.

If were to prioritise my partner the way I aspire to, I worry that would compromise my success in work. I really followed my dreams, I worry that my parents and teachers would no longer respect me. I worry If I really forgave someone who hurt me, I would caught flat footed and unable to defend myself from being hurt again. I worry that if I stopped letting others down that they would demand even more from me. If became the sort of man I tell myself that I aspire to become, I worry if I would no longer find enjoyment in my life. Oy... And if I did change and abandoned my own smallness, what would The World demand of me next? These are not hollow fears. No - in truth they might well come to fruition if I took the steps I aspire towards.

I see now that in my life, all change requires loss. Not just in some shallow “every rose has its thorn” sort of loss. Profound loss. To really change, I need to open myself to losing parts parts of my identity - and to know that I am going to need to do that again and again. To love another in a full and complete way, one needs to allow themselves to open up to another precious being who will undoubtedly die.

You know what, the Buddha was totally right. All attachment does in fact lead to suffering. The Jewish retort is just that - YES AND it’s worth it. Love is worth the loss it brings. Having children are is worth the losses incumbent in becoming a parent. Friendships are worth the betrayals. Not in every case, but often enough.

The most heartbreaking part is that many of these old patterns used to serve us. We learned them because we needed to to protect ourselves. From the bruises and abuses of childhood. From the loneliness and awkwardness of adolescence. From the “slings and arrows” of everyday life. We learned our habits, patterns, and addictions because we found that they were the best ways to protect ourselves from something that we feared was far worse. We humans are incredibly creative and resilient in meeting our emotional needs.

The problem is that as time passes, we are often still stuck in old patterns that were necessary to protect us from the world of our childhood and young adulthood, but hold us back from becoming an adult who lives a life of integrity and vibrancy.

What can happen on Yom Kippur, you ask?? Twelve years ago I experienced a Kol Nidrei that rocked my life. I deeply wanted to let go of it all. To let go of all of my assumptions of who I was, the roles I played in my family dynamics, they ways I was trapped in my stories, and the image I had created on Facebook. I prayed and I cried, and meant every word in the prayerbook.

When services ended and I walked out into the street, I suddenly panicked. I didn’t know where to go. I knew that I had planned to sleep that night at my parents’ home, but saw that just because it was my plan, didn’t mean that I actually needed to do it. I was graduating college in the coming spring and suddenly my life felt open in a new and destabilizing way. I contemplated breaking up with my girlfriend. I thought about my friendships and which served me and which didn’t. Eventually I decided to go home to my parents’ house that night. I stayed in that place of flux until Neila - the final service of Yom Kippur, which is when things began to solidify. I began considering Rabbinical school in earnest -- a decision that changed the course of my life forever My girlfriend and I broke up within two weeks. I picked a few new friendships to cultivate and let go of a quite a few relationships that in honesty, were oriented around gossiping and looking down on others. Each of these changes felt so difficult for me. They were each like a little death, leaving the safety of the known for something unfamiliar and new.

Yom Kippur is such a powerful day to practice newness because, today, we are practicing death. By engaging in rituals and states of being associated with death, we are able to better bypass our ambivalence and to face the losses that are the very fabric of change. Because many of us would rather die than change, Yom Kippur allows us to ritualize our death and from that point, move forward. The psychoanalyst Stephanie Brody writes in her book “Entering Night Country,” that “Awareness of death is an facilitating elixir for change.” The Talmud calls us to “Contemplate the day of your death to stimulate teshuvah.” I think that Yom Kippur creates urgency but also helps us see that the loss associated with change cannot be avoided in a full life and will ultimately be experienced now or later.

Today it is traditional to wear a Kittel. This white robe not only symbolizes purity, but also death. A Kittel is a Jewish death shroud, first worn at a person’s wedding, then on each Yom Kippur and finally during our burial. Food, drink and sex, some of the most life affirming creative acts that we relish, are forbidden on Yom Kippur. This discomfort give us just a taste of what it would mean to not be be as driven or gratified by our physical needs. Then there is the imagery of a Book of Life. As I have said in previous years, The Book of Life is a biography of each of us and everything that we have done. It is also our obituary. It’s a time to reflect on the story of where our life is going and where it has been. What do you want the moral of your Book of Life to be?

Finally we have the Neila Service - the final service of Yom Kippur. At its conclusion, we recite the Shema out loud. Unlike every other day of the year when we whisper the words Baruch Shem Kavod Malchuto LaOlam Va’ed (Blessed be God’s Name, Whose Glorious Kingdom is for ever and ever.), here we sing it loudly and forcefully. These were the last words of our patriarch Jacob - for whose name, Israel, or those who wrestle with G!d, we are all named. When we call out those words, we are proclaiming the completion of the process of preparing to die. We will all die. We don’t want to. But the more we honestly engage with loss in our lives, the more willing we can become to let destructive patterns and relationships go.

The internal shift of Yom Kippur can move us from fear to excitement. My teacher Shoshanah Cooper taught me that fear is the combination of excitement plus ego. We are terrified of things when we have both arousal and the possibility of ego-loss. Over the course of Yom Kippur,we can begin to identify and chip away at those sturdy but inflexible pillars of ego. What is left is the excitement . That is why Neila can get so ecstatic. Because once we have shed our ego, all that is left behind our fear is the thrill of embarking on a new life.

We do not do this work only for ourselves. We must to learn to confront our fears and do teshuvah for the good of our world. If we are unwilling to face our past, we will never be able to become advocates for those with less power than us in our society, because this involves being willing to loose some of our privilege. Similarly, without confronting our fears we also will be unable to make the life changes necessary for the environmental sustainability of our planet. And if we don’t share our own personal voice, power, and resources in these ways, we are abdicating the future to someone else who will need to play both our role and their own.

Friends, every person on the planet has their own poisonous, sulfuric salt-pillars that testify to their scars, losses, and fears. These are our ego’s constructs of who we are and why we are. Many have served us well in the past. It is not a problem to have an identity and a history. The problem is when these patterns paralyze our future.

Remember, the Talmudic rabbis named her Idit - “nourishing soil.” They knew, that salt poisons our fields and water supply. By naming giving her the name Idit, of all the other possible names, they highlight to us the consequences of our her actions. What will it take to let go of our ego-pillars? Prayers, community, and courage. It also requires tears: tears are the melting of edifices of salt, the release of our past, and the relief that follows.