Speak at the Rock

Yom Kippur

During the Yamim Noraim I often wonder if I will be able to really connect during the long Rosh Hashanah and the very long Yom Kippur services. I wonder if in the midst of confessing my sins from my machzor and singing heartfelt, solemn songs about the breaches I’ve allowed to distance myself from my Creator, I sometimes feel hopeless that my Yom Kippur is passing in vain. I know that this my chance to scrape my slate clean, to be like an angel, to genuinely regret my sins, to long for closeness with my Creator. And yet many times I am plagued by discomfort and desires to see how many pages are left in the machzor. How can I do it right? Sometimes our heart is hardened like a rock, insensitive to the elements around us. Some people say that a heart of gold is the most important thing, but as shiny as it is, gold is still a rock as any other. A heart of gold is a heart of stone. Moshe Rabbeinu was punished for striking the rock. The overt force that he used for breaking it was not the ideal method. All God told him to do was to speak at the rock and it would have obediently spout forth a gush of water. The words that he used killed a man while standing, surely they possessed the power to cleave open this hard, solid thing and miraculously issue forth a stream. Our machzorim and our mouths are full of words. If we could just speak at the rock which has become our heart we will be able to release life-giving water. While we strike our hearts repeatedly during the service, hoping that the force will shatter them, all we need to do is to speak to them and they should part.

How hard we have to hit to break it depends on what we've done with ourselves in the past year. Depending on the severity level of impurity to which a man has exposed himself, he will have to be cleansed in one of the following ways. If his sins are light, then he can go through the gentle cycle of the mikvah to clean himself. God enacts minimal force to return him to a pure state. If his sins are moderate and he has experienced heavier transgression build-up, God ups the ante to libun to remove all that crusty chametz. Some pain is required to return him to a pure state. But if his sins are severe to the point that they have soiled him from the inside out and he has become tamey, he must be broken before he is once again fit for use.

But of course he has some say in this matter. To some degree he can choose which type of cleansing process he must experience. Is he the willful returner or the stubborn returner?

Let us first discuss the willful returner. He is the one who seeks to go through the process of teshuva so as to become once again close to his Creator. He actively decides to do teshuva, realizing his error and seeking out God's direction and cooperating with Him, and his teshuva is much easier. He wants to regret his sins, confess them to his Creator, take measures against doing them again, and commit to rectifying his behavior and thoughts. It is like a man running down the street being aided by the wind. Since God and he are in the same mindset, they are partners in teshuva and he can accomplish what he needs with relative ease. He readily agrees that he must be broken and so he can accomplish his teshuva with minimal discomfort, if any. And God responds in kind, helping him soften up to minimize the force needed to remove his illusions of control over his world.

And then there is the stubborn returner. He is the one who delays his teshuva repeatedly, telling himself that he can do it later, that he has time, that his sins have justifiable motivations. He feels bad about doing them, but he gives in to his weaknesses, he loses hope, courage, or focus, and sometimes his patience. He fights against teshuva every step of the way, acting half-heartedly or kicking and screaming and rebelling. His teshuva has to be performed for him against his will. The worst case of the stubborn returner is the one who doesn't even realize that he sins and has estranged himself from God. Whereas if he is just stubborn, more force is required to shake him from his path, but if he is completely oblivious to his sins, he needs a great deal of Divine intervention to get his attention. How do you inform someone that he is in a cage if he doesn't even believe that cages exist? In his obstinacy he fails to comprehend the truth he learns and the messages he receives. His view of the world must be flipped over, which is not often a pleasant experience.

A man must see himself as being fit for use in the service of his Creator, like a knife or a havdalah candle or a clay vessel. A human being is (generally) a functional, stable structure. He lives day in day out with nominal control of his behavior. He continues relatively unchanged through the varying events of his days. He is cyclical. He settles into a behavior and thought pattern in which he forgets that God is running the show. Every day, but specifically during the Yamim Nora'im, he can choose to lose this illusion, or it can be snatched away from him, but either way it must go.

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