Encircled by the Cages We Keep (Yom Kippur and Haazinu 5780)

At this season the Jewish community is focused on teshuvah -- translated often as repentance, it literally means to turn or return. We return to the highest goals we have for our behavior, we return to our community, we return to our friends and families. Each of these returns is a stop along the path we set for ourselves in the Jewish new year that has just begun. Those moves bring changes that transform our lives. Even the Yom Kippur liturgy echoes this thought ("Teshuvah . . . transforms our fate"). 

One colleague talks about her parents loving to needlepoint. In anticipation of Yom Kippur, they needlepointed the saying, "Teshuvah Changes Things." They proudly displayed the completed framed needlepoint on the mantle. It was gone
the next day. They asked their partner, "Did you see what happened to my needlepoint." "Yes. I took it down.' "But I thought you valued Teshuvah," the needlepointer exclaimed. "Teshuvah is just fine. It's change I can't stand!" 

Probing our relationship to change is vital to this season. As another colleague, Rabbi Erica Asch, teaches, "These holidays are not a time to change others. Instead, we must focus on changing ourselves." She observes that incremental are both achievable and impactful. Making a 180-degree turn seems impossible. But a turn of even 3 or 4 degrees if we hold to it long enough will dramatically change the path of our lives. 

In some ways, the ancient Israelite wilderness journey with its slow, methodical, forty-year trajectory amplifies this aspect of teshuvah. In fact, in the Torah portion we read this week both before and after Yom Kippur and again this coming Shabbat rehearses aspects of that forty-year journey. The Eternal found us wandering in an empty wilderness, then encircled us for protection. (Deuteronomy 32:10). 

So a story about being encircled.* It is about a gift from the government of China to the United States about sixty years ago. The gift was Mohini a rare white tiger donated to the National Zoo in Washington DC. Mohini was beloved by the crowds that came to witness her strength and beauty. Most of her time in the zoo was spent pacing around her 12 x 12-foot cage. The cage was complete with iron bars and a cement floor.

Mohini was so popular, the National Zoo started a huge building project to create a large, natural habitat for her. This new habitat was designed to give Mohini room to roam in more free and open space. But when Mohini was transferred from her small cage to the open habitat, Mohini headed straight to a corner. From that corner, she paced off the same confined small pattern that she walked in her cage. For the rest of her life, Mohini stuck to her caged routine even though a large, natural habitat awaited her. There were no physical barriers, only the cage she had kept in her mind. 

We are, at times, seeming to act just like Mohini. We become so comfortable with the well-worn path of our life that despite its limitations or the fact that we might regret many of the steps we take along it, we hold to the pattern.

Yom Kippur comes to remind us it is never too late to change, to step outside the well-worn path we set by our conduct last year, to return to the more powerful challenges and higher goals we set for ourselves. 

As we each consider how to step beyond the well-worn path of last year, how to break free from the cages that we keep, I encourage each of us to take more steps in the year that just began in these ways:

• Give thanks a little bit more -- for having choices, for friendships, for little kindnesses, and for simple blessings.
• Forgive a little bit more -- because carrying resentment or anger is like a backpack filled with heavy stones only slowing us down. Expand forgiveness to include not only forgiving others but also forgiving ourselves.
• Step outside our comfort zone a little bit more -- Anne Frank once wrote: “How wonderful it is that nobody has to wait, but can start right now to gradually change the world.” To change our world takes but a single step beyond the boundaries we impose on ourselves.

May we be liberated from our cages and sealed for a good, sweet year.

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* I am grateful to Rabba Sara Hurwitz for highlighting the Mohini story in the High Holy Day context with her 2012 blog post for Craig Taubman’s touching, annual “Jewels of Elul” collection for the month before the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Link to Rabba Hurwitz 1 Elul 5772