New Shoes (Yom Kippur Yizkor/Neilah Sermon 5773…9/26)
Yom Kippur is one long day that starts with Kol Nidre at sundown and ends with the blowing of the shofar twenty-five hours later. Traditionally, there are five services associated with this day of fasting and prayer: Evening, Morning, Musaf, Minchah (which we just finished), and the last service of the day, Neilah. Some congregations, mostly traditional ones, include the Yizkor Memorial service in the morning. Most Reform congregations have attached the Yizkor service to Minchah or Neilah. We have our Yizkor service sandwiched between the two.
Neilah –vkhgb/ What does this word mean? The Alcalay Hebrew/English dictionary translates “neilah” as “locking; shutting; bolting; closing; closure; conclusion.” So it makes perfect sense that this is the final and concluding service of Yom Kippur. The rabbis magnified these definitions when describing this Yom Kippur moment in time metaphorically. “Neilah” is the closing of the Gates of Repentance, the shutting of the Book of Life, the locking away of the old year and all of its sins.
But, there is another definition of the word “neilah” right underneath the first in the dictionary, because there are two exactly same verbs composed of nun-ayin-lamed (kgb). You may be surprised to discover that the second definition of “neilah is “wearing shoes.” I became fascinated this summer by the fact that I had never put the two definitions of “neilah” together. Frankly, I never gave the word “neilah” much thought at all. So, I was challenged to do so for us this year, for this service of closure, and remembering.
Neilah is a time of closure and locking up. There is so much locked inside of us. Can one day reveal all the secrets and all of the hurts? all of the loss and all of the pain? all of the regret and all of the sorrow? all of the memories and moments? all of those personal joys and achievements? — all that is locked inside of us that the world will never see, but we know is there?
Death is the ultimate conclusion and demands from us a closure that some of us may never be able to fully realize. How can we bolt and lock away feelings for a loved one, a friend, a human life who touched us, loved us, cared for us? Does Neilah demand that I shut my loved one away, or just find closure for life as it was with him or her, and now without him or her?
Linguistically, I think I have discovered that we are given a clue, if not the answer. Life and the Hebrew language, teach us that “neilah” is fundamentally about putting on your shoes. It is about the ability to walk from the cemetery to the house of mourning, to walk in to temple say Kaddish for the first time, as hard as that may be, to walk to the next corner or activity, to walk from life as it once was to life as it must be. “Neilah” demands that we crawl out of bed, get out from under the protective covers of our grief, and put on our slippers or sandals, shoes or boots to walk the next steps of life.
In the book, The Dovekeepers, Alice Hoffman weaves a series of stories together to paint a portrait of life after the destruction of the Temple, until the fall of Masada for a few fascinating women. In her meticulous and insightful character studies, she included one young woman’s tale of loss and life. At one point, a young woman loses the man she loves and is forced to escape into the desert. The harsh rocks of Israel’s desert destroy the young woman’s sandals, her na’alayim (ohkgb). She is given new ones thanks to the kindness of strangers. She puts on her new shoes and begins a journey longer, and more arduous and dangerous, than you or I will ever undertake. She walks all the way to the mountain of Masada, the last Jewish stronghold after the destruction of the temple. She puts one foot in front of the other and carries her history and pain to the next stop on her life’s journey, and by walking in her new shoes, she returns to life, as it would now be.
We come to remember our dead today, to pay them honor as Jews have done since the beginning of time. Who among us has not walked through deserts of despair, loss, heartache, and death, which are inevitable parts of life as we get older, especially some of us forced to grow up more quickly than others?
Our beloved, and not so beloved, dead are part of our dreams and nightmares, haunting us not just in the darkness of our grief, but also in the light of a life that must continue after death. We come to say Yizkor, the prayer of memory, to honor those who have died and to prove to ourselves that their memories are still jewels in the night sky of our collective grief. And in the true spirit of “neilah,” we seek to lock the door on our grief, to find some closure, and to muster the strength to sandal up for that long trek into tomorrow, and the many tomorrows after that, charting a new wilderness without our loved one beside us. Haven’t we come here to receive “new shoes” to enable us to continue to walk the path of life?
But, sometimes, something holds us back from putting on those shoes and moving on. How can we close the door to our past? How can we use Neilah to help us move from the old year to the new, from the old, or too recent, grief and mourning to a future that looms on the horizon just out of sight. Hoffman’s character sandals up and faces the next journey she is about to take, knowing full well that it too will be laden with loss. For we grieve for so many things in life – broken bodies and broken dreams, broken bonds and broken promises, broken hearts and broken families.
Can we really lock up feelings of grief so raw or real that we lose ourselves in them? Are we prisoners to the memories, or are the memories prisoners, forever locked up inside of us?
There are houses, where people take off their shoes whenever they enter. Moses took his sandals off of his feet because he was standing on holy ground, as the bush burned unconsumed. In the comfort of home, or the presence of God, or on a sandy resort beach, the ground, or carpet, or sand beneath our feet is warm and the soles of our feet are safe. But, we know that when we need to venture out, we find the pavement of life less friendly to our soles. We engage in “neilah” / vkhgb – protecting our soles by closing them up in shoes, old or new. And our other souls, the ones not on the bottoms of our feet, seek protection, too.
The white of High Holy days is not a sign of purity, but a colorless symbol of mourning, death, and rebirth. Both black and white are colors associated with death. Like the white burial shroud, our Torahs, and our leaders of worship, don white apparel to remind us that life in the past year has ended, and we will be reborn, and begin anew when the shofar is blown, as the sun sets and three stars shine in the sky. We will leave here with a new year filled with possibility and uncertainty.
We remove the black ribbon at the end of shiva, the immediate days of mourning after a death, as a Jew is told to get up and go outside to walk around the block, or in the suburbs, the cul de sac, leaving the safe haven of the shiva house, with its traditions of mourning, its comfort, its abundance of food, its safety and exhaustion, to take the first few steps into new life.
Neilah teaches us to put on our shoes, to choose life, to work to make it through each day amid loss and disappointment, grief and heartache. Neilah facilitates the journey we take. God is the kind stranger who gives us new shoes to trek the landscape of hills and valleys that lie ahead. And even in our loneliest times, isolated in our grief, the service of Neilah, the Kaddish, the Yizkor prayer forever remind us that we are not alone.