Rabbi Ari LEv: The Possibility of Truth and the Practice of Viddui [1]
Kol Nidre 5782
September 15, 2021
View the video here.
Human beings really struggle to tell the truth.
According to one midrash, this struggle predates our very existence. [2]
When the Holy Blessed One was creating the first human being on the sixth day of Creation, the angels above got together to discuss how they felt about the idea.
Some of the angels said, "Let them be created," while others urged, "Don't create them."
The angels of Hesed and Tzedek, kindness and justice, were in favor of creating humans - since we would perform acts of kindness and pursue justice.
But the angels of Emet and Shalom, truth and peace, were against the idea, since we would be a bunch of quarrelsome liars.
Let me first say, they were all correct.
So it's the early part of the sixth day of Creation, and the angels above are in gridlock about whether we humans are worthy of existence.
Hesed and Tzedek think we will have a net positive impact. And Truth and Peace think it's not even worth it for us to exist at all.
מֶה עָשָׂה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא
So what did the Holy Blessed One do?
נָטַל אֱמֶת וְהִשְׁלִיכוֹ לָאָרֶץ,
In a flash, the Holy One lifted up Truth and threw it to the ground, as if shattering the very concept itself. Turning this once monolithic force into seeds, about which the psalms write, "Let truth sprout from the earth."
All of the angels called out in concern, "Holy One, what are you doing? Don't you care about the order of the universe? Let truth rise up from the earth!"
In this midst of this holy struggle, the Holy One went on to create the first human being.
This is certainly one of our more complex and revealing origin stories.
Why?
Why does The Holy Blessed One throw Truth to the ground before creating human beings?
I truly can't wait to hear the answers you come up with!
Literally in the midrash, and existentially in our lives, truth stands in the way of human existence.
As if to say, "It's us or truth." And in response the Holy Blessed One, as an act of kindness, banishes Truth to the earth.
Perhaps the Holy One is saying, "I'm done with truth. This is your problem now."
Truth, says this midrash, no longer exists as a single entity on high. Quite literally, lo bashamayim hi, it is not in the heavens above.
If it exists at all, it exists in the human heart, as an expression of the Ineffable.
The Holy One may be yodea ta'alumot, the knower of secrets, but telling the truth is our human responsibility.
The image of the Divine kicking Truth out of the Creation party is a bit of a relief to me.
I never quite know what to make of the truth.
And a bit shocking, because I think of truth as a core Jewish tenet.
After all, it is in the Ten Commandments.
Nestled right there on the list, snug between Don't Steal and Don't Covet: לֹֽא־תַעֲנֶ֥ה בְרֵעֲךָ֖ עֵ֥ד שָֽׁקֶר [3]
Thou shall not bear false witness. AKA, Don't Lie!
Was this included in the Ten Commandments precisely because God shattered Truth in order to make us?
And we have been lying ever since.
---
I still remember the first lie I ever told.
I was eight or nine years old. I had stolen a few $20 bills out of my older brother's wallet.
When my dad asked me directly, I denied it. But then I couldn't sleep. I remember sitting up late at night with my dad, perched on the edge of the bathtub desperate to come clean but too ashamed to know how.
After about three sleepless nights, I finally told my dad. He was largely relieved, forgiving me instantly. And he was disappointed in me, not so much that I had taken the money, but that it had been so difficult to tell him the truth.
---
I am not a liar.
But I am also not particularly good at telling the truth.
At least not as defined in a court of law, "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
It seems like it is part of human nature to lie. We lie for all sorts of reasons.
We lie in order to feel heard.
When telling a story I have a habit of exaggerating, embellishing details, for the sake of dramatic effect. Sometimes it is conscious but, more often, I barely realize it is happening. Some of the time I stop and correct myself, but usually I let it go.
The exaggeration is accurate in that it conveys how I felt at the time. Often it is motivated by a fear that the real details and facts would not adequately communicate my experience.
I like to blame this tendency on my status as a middle child. Nothing like a little exaggeration to really feel heard.
We lie for convenience.
Last Wednesday morning I was riding my bike to Rosh Hashanah services and someone asked to borrow my cell phone. In a rush, I said I didn't have it on me, when actually I did. I wished I had said, "My phone is off for religious observance." That would have been true. Instead I spent the rest of my bike ride thinking about how I had lied on Rosh Hashanah.
We lie to keep ourselves safe, physically and emotionally.
Sometimes we initiate the lie but sometimes we more passively consent to it.
For example, I don't always correct people when they misgender me or my family, most notably when people mistake my children for my siblings, which happens more often than you would believe. I nod and smile, as though affirming that which is certainly not true.
Sometimes I do this to avoid causing the person shame. And sometimes I don't disclose the truth to avoid my own shame.
I recently explained to my seven-year-old the idea of being "stealth," familiar to many queer and trans people. The idea that we have agency over when and how we choose to disclose our identities, and we are not obligated to reveal the whole truth about ourselves if it does not feel safe.
Jews actually have a long history of this kind of lying as a survival strategy.
I am thinking of the Marranos or Conversos, Spanish and Portuguese Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula who converted or were forced to convert to Christianity during the Middle Ages, yet continued to practice Judaism in secrecy. Sometimes renaming holidays, or embedding Shabbat candlesticks inside ceramic teapots.
It has been a profound honor to provide spiritual care for the Kol Tzedek members who have come to realize that their ancestors must have been practicing Judaism in secrecy. Only now understanding why for all these years their grandmother lit candles on Friday nights without any rhyme or reason.
In her brilliant essay "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" in a collection called On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Adrienne Rich writes,
"In the struggle for survival we tell lies. To bosses, to prison guards, the police, men who have power over us, who legally own us and our children..."
Lying is a means of self-preservation.
---
What is the biggest lie you have ever told?
We lie for the sake of something greater than ourselves.
In the book Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation, my teacher, Rabbi Benay Lappe, recounts the story of her own sacred lie, quoting,
"Three days before ordination, the dean called me into his office at 9:00 p.m. and told me that an anonymous caller had phoned the Seminary to inform them that I was a lesbian. He said that if I told him it was true, I would not be ordained. 'What do you have to say?' he demanded." [4]
She thought for a long moment. Considered everything that had brought her to this moment. And then, to paraphrase her words, she said "no" in the name of a higher "yes."
She said no, so that she could build her entire rabbinate in service of developing queer rabbis in the future who would be able to tell the truth about who they were. Rabbis like me.
If only all lies had a higher, holier purpose in service of a greater truth, the way Rabbi Lappe's did.
Sometimes we lie just to move the day along.
We lie to save face. Saying a phone call ran long, rather than admitting I simply didn't leave enough travel time.
We lie to ease transitions with our kids. Like when I tell them that the mayor said we have used up our share of city water and we have to turn off the sprinkler on a hot summer day and come inside for dinner.
We lie to avoid waiting on a long lie. Or to save a little money. Sometimes we lie just because we can. To keep things interesting.
Now, this lying is technically all biblically prohibited. After all, the Torah says in black and white, "Thou shalt not lie!"
But then the Talmud, which is a fangirl of complexity, acknowledges that sometimes lying is OK, even preferable.
We learn that a talmid chacham, a wise, learned engaged Jew, is permitted to lie in four circumstances. [5]
First, Masechta - A wise person can lie about what tractate of the Talmud they are studying lest someone ask them a question they are not prepared to answer.
Second, Ushpiza - A wise person can lie about who hosted them on their travels, lest that person be inundated with requests for hospitality.
Third, Bi'a - A wise person can lie about why they are late to synagogue if it is because they were having sex. Take note!
And finally, the Rambam adds, a wise person can lie if it creates shalom between people.
I don't know about you, but this is certainly not the list I expected. Usually the only reason we violate Torah is to save a life.
Even more interesting to me than the four circumstances in which a person is permitted to lie is the location of this teaching in the canon.
This teaching comes in a section of laws dealing with stolen and lost property, hilchot gezela v'aveda.
Not all lies are consequential in and of themselves. Some are merely circumstantial.
But the cumulative impact on me as a person from telling all these lies is that I become habituated to telling lies.
And in the process, I fear I have lost a piece of myself.
In the words of Adrienne Rich,
"To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious...The unconscious wants truth."
When we get too comfortable with the ways we bend reality, it impacts us individually and collectively. It corrodes our sense of self and our shared reality.
Over the past five years, we have witnessed how dangerous and destabilizing it is to question the existence and value of the truth. It is a core tactic of authoritarian regimes to dissolve the boundaries between truth and lie, fact and fiction.
On January 9, 2021, just three days after the attacks on Capitol Hill, Timothy Snyder published an article in the New York Times entitled "The American Abyss." [6] With clarity and conviction, he writes,
"Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.
"Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves.
"If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.
"Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around."
Which takes me back to the first lie I ever told.
What stands out 30 years later is not the money that I stole from my brother's wallet, but the three sleepless nights that followed as I struggled to confess to my slow-to-anger and quick-to-forgive father. I can honestly still feel the anxiety and shame that kept me up at night.
The unconscious wants truth. Even as we human beings struggle to tell it.
---
Yom Kippur is the antidote to all the lies we have told.
Built into the cycle of the year and the liturgy of this day is a mechanism for cleansing us of all these lies.
It is called Viddui, often translated as confession.
Confession as an essential step in transformation. To know it so clearly in our hearts that we can name it, that we are willing to say it, and in so doing, to let it go.
---
There are three kinds of Viddui that I am aware of.
The first is the final Viddui. Typically recited on one's deathbed. This confession is the Jewish equivalent of one's last words, in which one offers and receives forgiveness for anything that has happened in their lifetime and then says the first six words of the Shema.
The second is the personal Viddui one can recite at any point to do teshuvah, to make repair in a relationship with oneself, with the Divine, or with another human being.
And the third is the communal Viddui that we recite five times in the Selichot service on Yom Kippur, as we take collective responsibility for the ways we have missed the mark.
In truth, Yom Kippur embodies them all.
Telling the truth with as much clarity and compassion as possible is a necessary part of all teshuvah, all healing and repair.
For this reason, the practice of Viddui is one of the core spiritual practices of Yom Kippur.
On Yom Kippur we have the opportunity to recite the Amidah five times.
Each Amidah includes a private personal Viddui, a confession.
Then, each Amidah is immediately followed by a communal Selichot service, which includes a public communal Viddui.
In each of theses Vidduis we speak in the royal We, granting each other cover, so that we have the courage to actually tell the truth to our collective slow-to-anger and quick-to-forgive parent.
And then finally as the gates are closing at the conclusion of the Neilah service, we will urgently call out one the first six words of the Shema, as if it is our final Viddui.
I want to dwell for a moment on the personal Viddui, because I think it is instructive for how we might approach the entire practice of confession and the journey of Yom Kippur.
In his teachings about teshuvah, Maimonides explains that when a person strays from their path -- whether intentionally or unknowingly -- and does teshuvah and realigns after having missed the mark, they are obligated to articulate with words the ways they missed the mark with spacious presence,
because, "Any time a person misses any mark, it impacts their core self and it unsettles their spirit.
"[To restore alignment] they must articulate with awareness the ways they missed the mark..." [7]
This is the essence of Viddui. Articulating with awareness the ways we have missed the mark so that we can come back into alignment with ourselves, with the Divine, and with other people.
This practice of confession is the central component of teshuvah.
So how do we do it?
Maimonides offers us the following, rather straight-forward formula:
"We say, 'Please, Ineffable One, I have missed the mark, done wrong, transgressed in Your presence.
"'I have done such and such a thing and I regret and feel shame for my actions, and forever more I will not return to it.'"
(Fear not, I will put them in the chat at the end so you have them!)
Oh how my eight-year-old self could have used these ancient words on a notecard.
Words that predate prayer as we know it.
Maimonides actually borrows these words from the High Priest. He would say these very same words when he placed his hands on the bull inside the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur some 2500 years ago. [8]
The depth of continuity embodied in this Viddui is astounding.
To imagine ourselves uttering the same words that the High Priest would say when the Temple still stood. To consider that we are still connected to that same power of atonement because the Viddui was and is, the central act of Yom Kippur.
Maimonides' choice to take the very words the High Priest spoke and put them into the mouths of every single person on Yom Kippur transforms the very nature of Yom Kippur.
It transforms the centralized practice of a holiday experienced through the conduit of the High Priest, and renders it democratically accessible for every person in every place.
As a result, it places every individual person during their Viddui in the spiritual location of the Holy of Holies, as close to the Divine as our tradition can imagine.
In a few minutes, when I invite you to rise in body or spirit for the first of our five Selichot services, know that it is nothing short of an invitation into the Holy of Holies.
---
Viddui is the essential gateway to real and lasting teshuvah, the bridge one has to cross for anything else to be possible. But there is a lot of work to do before one can get to that bridge.
Long before it is a public declaration, Viddui is an internal reckoning.
Which is why the vast majority of the work of teshuvah happens outside of the Viddui itself.
This is why we began the work of teshuvah in Elul.
And why I think every Viddui is preceded by the silence of an Amidah.
And why we have five chances on this one day.
And why in fact we can recite a small Viddui every day of the year in our weekday Amidah.
To create time and space within our own hearts in order to be able to articulate with awareness that which feels most true for us.
It is akin to what Resmaa Menakem describes in his book My Grandmother's Hands as "Soul scribing."
Learning to tell the truth about our own experiences, to know ourselves fully, our beauty, our goodness, and our potential for growth.
---
Now, it is not surprising we tell so many lies. It is really hard to muster the energy, courage, and time that real honesty requires.
So our tradition wisely sets aside one day of the year. This day.
Yom Kippur is the one day of the year when we cleanse ourselves of all the lies we have told.
It is the day we come clean and begin again, lest we lose even more of ourselves.
We have 25 hours ahead of us.
Most of us have been taught that these hours are for beating our hearts into repentance, confessing over and over again for what we have done collectively.
This year I invite you to consider that these confessions are not only for the sake of absolution or admission.
They are for the sake of developing self-awareness and remembering how to tell the truth.
Don't take my word for it.
Let me tell you one of my most beloved stories of Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, an 18th century Hasidic rebbe.
One Yom Kippur, Levi Yitzhak encounters a Jew sitting on a park bench during the break between Mussaf and Minchah, the morning and afternoon services. The Jew has a ham sandwich in one hand and a lit pipe in the other.
Levi Yitzhak says, "Hello, my friend. Are you Jewish?"
The Jew says: "Yes, Rabbi."
Levi Yitzhak replies: "Barukh Hashem! Do you know that it's Yom Kippur?"
The Jew answers, "Yes! I know that."
Levi Yitzhak responds: "Gut yontif! Do you know that Torah forbids smoking on yontif?"
"Yes! I know," the Jew says.
Levi Yitzhak goes on: "Do you know that eating ham is forbidden in the Torah?"
"Yes!" replies the Jew.
Levi Yitzhak turns his face to heaven and exultantly cries out:
"Ribbono shel olam, Master of the Universe, see how honest your people are!"
The point of Yom Kippur is radical honesty, with ourselves, in community.
Even more than food or water, I invite us this year to fast today from lying, perhaps from words altogether. Most of the words we are about to recite in our communal Viddui are in fact about our misuse of words.
For the wrong we have done before you...
B'dibur peh - through the words we have spoken.
For the wrong we have done before you...
B'tifshut peh - through foolish talk.
For the wrong we have done before you...
B'chachash u'v'chazav - by denying and by lying.
For the wrong we have done before you...
B'latzon u'v'lashon harah - through harmful speech.
Take these confessions seriously, your words matter.
Taking the time to tell the truth on this sacred day returns us to ourselves.
Throughout these Days of Awe we call out to the Holy One:
Adonai, Adonai...
Rav hesed v'emet / Abundant in kindness and truthfulness.
May we extend this same call to ourselves.
Here we are, permitted to pray in a room full of liars. May truth flourish in our midst.
I invoke the words of Adrienne Rich one final time:
"There is nothing simple or easy about the idea [of truth]. There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth' -- truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity...
"It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.
"It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me.
That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us."
This Yom Kippur, as we each inhabit our own Holy of Holies, in the presence of community, may we have the courage to search our own hearts
and extend the possibility of truth between us.
And may we each be sealed for life. G'mar Hatimah Tovah.
[1] The title for this sermon comes from Adrienne Rich's incredible collection of essays On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Much gratitude to my editors and hevrutas in this exploration: Rabbis Benay Lappe, Mónica Gomery, Avi Killip, Jordan Braunig, and Sharon Cohen Anisfeld. Thank you also to Shosh Ruskin, editor-in-chief of every sermon I write.
[2] Genesis Rabbah 8:5.
[3] Exodus 20:13.
[4] Lappe, Benay. Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation, p. 241.
[5] See B.T. Bava Metzia 24a and Rambam Mishneh Torah, Sefer Nezikin: Hilchot Gezela v'Aveda, 14:13.
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html.
[7] Rambam, Sefer Mada: Hilchot Teshuva, 1:1.
[8] Yoma 3:8, 36b.
September 15, 2021
View the video here.
Human beings really struggle to tell the truth.
According to one midrash, this struggle predates our very existence. [2]
When the Holy Blessed One was creating the first human being on the sixth day of Creation, the angels above got together to discuss how they felt about the idea.
Some of the angels said, "Let them be created," while others urged, "Don't create them."
The angels of Hesed and Tzedek, kindness and justice, were in favor of creating humans - since we would perform acts of kindness and pursue justice.
But the angels of Emet and Shalom, truth and peace, were against the idea, since we would be a bunch of quarrelsome liars.
Let me first say, they were all correct.
So it's the early part of the sixth day of Creation, and the angels above are in gridlock about whether we humans are worthy of existence.
Hesed and Tzedek think we will have a net positive impact. And Truth and Peace think it's not even worth it for us to exist at all.
מֶה עָשָׂה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא
So what did the Holy Blessed One do?
נָטַל אֱמֶת וְהִשְׁלִיכוֹ לָאָרֶץ,
In a flash, the Holy One lifted up Truth and threw it to the ground, as if shattering the very concept itself. Turning this once monolithic force into seeds, about which the psalms write, "Let truth sprout from the earth."
All of the angels called out in concern, "Holy One, what are you doing? Don't you care about the order of the universe? Let truth rise up from the earth!"
In this midst of this holy struggle, the Holy One went on to create the first human being.
This is certainly one of our more complex and revealing origin stories.
Why?
Why does The Holy Blessed One throw Truth to the ground before creating human beings?
I truly can't wait to hear the answers you come up with!
Literally in the midrash, and existentially in our lives, truth stands in the way of human existence.
As if to say, "It's us or truth." And in response the Holy Blessed One, as an act of kindness, banishes Truth to the earth.
Perhaps the Holy One is saying, "I'm done with truth. This is your problem now."
Truth, says this midrash, no longer exists as a single entity on high. Quite literally, lo bashamayim hi, it is not in the heavens above.
If it exists at all, it exists in the human heart, as an expression of the Ineffable.
The Holy One may be yodea ta'alumot, the knower of secrets, but telling the truth is our human responsibility.
The image of the Divine kicking Truth out of the Creation party is a bit of a relief to me.
I never quite know what to make of the truth.
And a bit shocking, because I think of truth as a core Jewish tenet.
After all, it is in the Ten Commandments.
Nestled right there on the list, snug between Don't Steal and Don't Covet: לֹֽא־תַעֲנֶ֥ה בְרֵעֲךָ֖ עֵ֥ד שָֽׁקֶר [3]
Thou shall not bear false witness. AKA, Don't Lie!
Was this included in the Ten Commandments precisely because God shattered Truth in order to make us?
And we have been lying ever since.
---
I still remember the first lie I ever told.
I was eight or nine years old. I had stolen a few $20 bills out of my older brother's wallet.
When my dad asked me directly, I denied it. But then I couldn't sleep. I remember sitting up late at night with my dad, perched on the edge of the bathtub desperate to come clean but too ashamed to know how.
After about three sleepless nights, I finally told my dad. He was largely relieved, forgiving me instantly. And he was disappointed in me, not so much that I had taken the money, but that it had been so difficult to tell him the truth.
---
I am not a liar.
But I am also not particularly good at telling the truth.
At least not as defined in a court of law, "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."
It seems like it is part of human nature to lie. We lie for all sorts of reasons.
We lie in order to feel heard.
When telling a story I have a habit of exaggerating, embellishing details, for the sake of dramatic effect. Sometimes it is conscious but, more often, I barely realize it is happening. Some of the time I stop and correct myself, but usually I let it go.
The exaggeration is accurate in that it conveys how I felt at the time. Often it is motivated by a fear that the real details and facts would not adequately communicate my experience.
I like to blame this tendency on my status as a middle child. Nothing like a little exaggeration to really feel heard.
We lie for convenience.
Last Wednesday morning I was riding my bike to Rosh Hashanah services and someone asked to borrow my cell phone. In a rush, I said I didn't have it on me, when actually I did. I wished I had said, "My phone is off for religious observance." That would have been true. Instead I spent the rest of my bike ride thinking about how I had lied on Rosh Hashanah.
We lie to keep ourselves safe, physically and emotionally.
Sometimes we initiate the lie but sometimes we more passively consent to it.
For example, I don't always correct people when they misgender me or my family, most notably when people mistake my children for my siblings, which happens more often than you would believe. I nod and smile, as though affirming that which is certainly not true.
Sometimes I do this to avoid causing the person shame. And sometimes I don't disclose the truth to avoid my own shame.
I recently explained to my seven-year-old the idea of being "stealth," familiar to many queer and trans people. The idea that we have agency over when and how we choose to disclose our identities, and we are not obligated to reveal the whole truth about ourselves if it does not feel safe.
Jews actually have a long history of this kind of lying as a survival strategy.
I am thinking of the Marranos or Conversos, Spanish and Portuguese Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula who converted or were forced to convert to Christianity during the Middle Ages, yet continued to practice Judaism in secrecy. Sometimes renaming holidays, or embedding Shabbat candlesticks inside ceramic teapots.
It has been a profound honor to provide spiritual care for the Kol Tzedek members who have come to realize that their ancestors must have been practicing Judaism in secrecy. Only now understanding why for all these years their grandmother lit candles on Friday nights without any rhyme or reason.
In her brilliant essay "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" in a collection called On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Adrienne Rich writes,
"In the struggle for survival we tell lies. To bosses, to prison guards, the police, men who have power over us, who legally own us and our children..."
Lying is a means of self-preservation.
---
What is the biggest lie you have ever told?
We lie for the sake of something greater than ourselves.
In the book Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation, my teacher, Rabbi Benay Lappe, recounts the story of her own sacred lie, quoting,
"Three days before ordination, the dean called me into his office at 9:00 p.m. and told me that an anonymous caller had phoned the Seminary to inform them that I was a lesbian. He said that if I told him it was true, I would not be ordained. 'What do you have to say?' he demanded." [4]
She thought for a long moment. Considered everything that had brought her to this moment. And then, to paraphrase her words, she said "no" in the name of a higher "yes."
She said no, so that she could build her entire rabbinate in service of developing queer rabbis in the future who would be able to tell the truth about who they were. Rabbis like me.
If only all lies had a higher, holier purpose in service of a greater truth, the way Rabbi Lappe's did.
Sometimes we lie just to move the day along.
We lie to save face. Saying a phone call ran long, rather than admitting I simply didn't leave enough travel time.
We lie to ease transitions with our kids. Like when I tell them that the mayor said we have used up our share of city water and we have to turn off the sprinkler on a hot summer day and come inside for dinner.
We lie to avoid waiting on a long lie. Or to save a little money. Sometimes we lie just because we can. To keep things interesting.
Now, this lying is technically all biblically prohibited. After all, the Torah says in black and white, "Thou shalt not lie!"
But then the Talmud, which is a fangirl of complexity, acknowledges that sometimes lying is OK, even preferable.
We learn that a talmid chacham, a wise, learned engaged Jew, is permitted to lie in four circumstances. [5]
First, Masechta - A wise person can lie about what tractate of the Talmud they are studying lest someone ask them a question they are not prepared to answer.
Second, Ushpiza - A wise person can lie about who hosted them on their travels, lest that person be inundated with requests for hospitality.
Third, Bi'a - A wise person can lie about why they are late to synagogue if it is because they were having sex. Take note!
And finally, the Rambam adds, a wise person can lie if it creates shalom between people.
I don't know about you, but this is certainly not the list I expected. Usually the only reason we violate Torah is to save a life.
Even more interesting to me than the four circumstances in which a person is permitted to lie is the location of this teaching in the canon.
This teaching comes in a section of laws dealing with stolen and lost property, hilchot gezela v'aveda.
Not all lies are consequential in and of themselves. Some are merely circumstantial.
But the cumulative impact on me as a person from telling all these lies is that I become habituated to telling lies.
And in the process, I fear I have lost a piece of myself.
In the words of Adrienne Rich,
"To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious...The unconscious wants truth."
When we get too comfortable with the ways we bend reality, it impacts us individually and collectively. It corrodes our sense of self and our shared reality.
Over the past five years, we have witnessed how dangerous and destabilizing it is to question the existence and value of the truth. It is a core tactic of authoritarian regimes to dissolve the boundaries between truth and lie, fact and fiction.
On January 9, 2021, just three days after the attacks on Capitol Hill, Timothy Snyder published an article in the New York Times entitled "The American Abyss." [6] With clarity and conviction, he writes,
"Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.
"Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves.
"If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.
"Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around."
Which takes me back to the first lie I ever told.
What stands out 30 years later is not the money that I stole from my brother's wallet, but the three sleepless nights that followed as I struggled to confess to my slow-to-anger and quick-to-forgive father. I can honestly still feel the anxiety and shame that kept me up at night.
The unconscious wants truth. Even as we human beings struggle to tell it.
---
Yom Kippur is the antidote to all the lies we have told.
Built into the cycle of the year and the liturgy of this day is a mechanism for cleansing us of all these lies.
It is called Viddui, often translated as confession.
Confession as an essential step in transformation. To know it so clearly in our hearts that we can name it, that we are willing to say it, and in so doing, to let it go.
---
There are three kinds of Viddui that I am aware of.
The first is the final Viddui. Typically recited on one's deathbed. This confession is the Jewish equivalent of one's last words, in which one offers and receives forgiveness for anything that has happened in their lifetime and then says the first six words of the Shema.
The second is the personal Viddui one can recite at any point to do teshuvah, to make repair in a relationship with oneself, with the Divine, or with another human being.
And the third is the communal Viddui that we recite five times in the Selichot service on Yom Kippur, as we take collective responsibility for the ways we have missed the mark.
In truth, Yom Kippur embodies them all.
Telling the truth with as much clarity and compassion as possible is a necessary part of all teshuvah, all healing and repair.
For this reason, the practice of Viddui is one of the core spiritual practices of Yom Kippur.
On Yom Kippur we have the opportunity to recite the Amidah five times.
Each Amidah includes a private personal Viddui, a confession.
Then, each Amidah is immediately followed by a communal Selichot service, which includes a public communal Viddui.
In each of theses Vidduis we speak in the royal We, granting each other cover, so that we have the courage to actually tell the truth to our collective slow-to-anger and quick-to-forgive parent.
And then finally as the gates are closing at the conclusion of the Neilah service, we will urgently call out one the first six words of the Shema, as if it is our final Viddui.
I want to dwell for a moment on the personal Viddui, because I think it is instructive for how we might approach the entire practice of confession and the journey of Yom Kippur.
In his teachings about teshuvah, Maimonides explains that when a person strays from their path -- whether intentionally or unknowingly -- and does teshuvah and realigns after having missed the mark, they are obligated to articulate with words the ways they missed the mark with spacious presence,
because, "Any time a person misses any mark, it impacts their core self and it unsettles their spirit.
"[To restore alignment] they must articulate with awareness the ways they missed the mark..." [7]
This is the essence of Viddui. Articulating with awareness the ways we have missed the mark so that we can come back into alignment with ourselves, with the Divine, and with other people.
This practice of confession is the central component of teshuvah.
So how do we do it?
Maimonides offers us the following, rather straight-forward formula:
"We say, 'Please, Ineffable One, I have missed the mark, done wrong, transgressed in Your presence.
"'I have done such and such a thing and I regret and feel shame for my actions, and forever more I will not return to it.'"
(Fear not, I will put them in the chat at the end so you have them!)
Oh how my eight-year-old self could have used these ancient words on a notecard.
Words that predate prayer as we know it.
Maimonides actually borrows these words from the High Priest. He would say these very same words when he placed his hands on the bull inside the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur some 2500 years ago. [8]
The depth of continuity embodied in this Viddui is astounding.
To imagine ourselves uttering the same words that the High Priest would say when the Temple still stood. To consider that we are still connected to that same power of atonement because the Viddui was and is, the central act of Yom Kippur.
Maimonides' choice to take the very words the High Priest spoke and put them into the mouths of every single person on Yom Kippur transforms the very nature of Yom Kippur.
It transforms the centralized practice of a holiday experienced through the conduit of the High Priest, and renders it democratically accessible for every person in every place.
As a result, it places every individual person during their Viddui in the spiritual location of the Holy of Holies, as close to the Divine as our tradition can imagine.
In a few minutes, when I invite you to rise in body or spirit for the first of our five Selichot services, know that it is nothing short of an invitation into the Holy of Holies.
---
Viddui is the essential gateway to real and lasting teshuvah, the bridge one has to cross for anything else to be possible. But there is a lot of work to do before one can get to that bridge.
Long before it is a public declaration, Viddui is an internal reckoning.
Which is why the vast majority of the work of teshuvah happens outside of the Viddui itself.
This is why we began the work of teshuvah in Elul.
And why I think every Viddui is preceded by the silence of an Amidah.
And why we have five chances on this one day.
And why in fact we can recite a small Viddui every day of the year in our weekday Amidah.
To create time and space within our own hearts in order to be able to articulate with awareness that which feels most true for us.
It is akin to what Resmaa Menakem describes in his book My Grandmother's Hands as "Soul scribing."
Learning to tell the truth about our own experiences, to know ourselves fully, our beauty, our goodness, and our potential for growth.
---
Now, it is not surprising we tell so many lies. It is really hard to muster the energy, courage, and time that real honesty requires.
So our tradition wisely sets aside one day of the year. This day.
Yom Kippur is the one day of the year when we cleanse ourselves of all the lies we have told.
It is the day we come clean and begin again, lest we lose even more of ourselves.
We have 25 hours ahead of us.
Most of us have been taught that these hours are for beating our hearts into repentance, confessing over and over again for what we have done collectively.
This year I invite you to consider that these confessions are not only for the sake of absolution or admission.
They are for the sake of developing self-awareness and remembering how to tell the truth.
Don't take my word for it.
Let me tell you one of my most beloved stories of Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, an 18th century Hasidic rebbe.
One Yom Kippur, Levi Yitzhak encounters a Jew sitting on a park bench during the break between Mussaf and Minchah, the morning and afternoon services. The Jew has a ham sandwich in one hand and a lit pipe in the other.
Levi Yitzhak says, "Hello, my friend. Are you Jewish?"
The Jew says: "Yes, Rabbi."
Levi Yitzhak replies: "Barukh Hashem! Do you know that it's Yom Kippur?"
The Jew answers, "Yes! I know that."
Levi Yitzhak responds: "Gut yontif! Do you know that Torah forbids smoking on yontif?"
"Yes! I know," the Jew says.
Levi Yitzhak goes on: "Do you know that eating ham is forbidden in the Torah?"
"Yes!" replies the Jew.
Levi Yitzhak turns his face to heaven and exultantly cries out:
"Ribbono shel olam, Master of the Universe, see how honest your people are!"
The point of Yom Kippur is radical honesty, with ourselves, in community.
Even more than food or water, I invite us this year to fast today from lying, perhaps from words altogether. Most of the words we are about to recite in our communal Viddui are in fact about our misuse of words.
For the wrong we have done before you...
B'dibur peh - through the words we have spoken.
For the wrong we have done before you...
B'tifshut peh - through foolish talk.
For the wrong we have done before you...
B'chachash u'v'chazav - by denying and by lying.
For the wrong we have done before you...
B'latzon u'v'lashon harah - through harmful speech.
Take these confessions seriously, your words matter.
Taking the time to tell the truth on this sacred day returns us to ourselves.
Throughout these Days of Awe we call out to the Holy One:
Adonai, Adonai...
Rav hesed v'emet / Abundant in kindness and truthfulness.
May we extend this same call to ourselves.
Here we are, permitted to pray in a room full of liars. May truth flourish in our midst.
I invoke the words of Adrienne Rich one final time:
"There is nothing simple or easy about the idea [of truth]. There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth' -- truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity...
"It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.
"It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me.
That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us."
This Yom Kippur, as we each inhabit our own Holy of Holies, in the presence of community, may we have the courage to search our own hearts
and extend the possibility of truth between us.
And may we each be sealed for life. G'mar Hatimah Tovah.
[1] The title for this sermon comes from Adrienne Rich's incredible collection of essays On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Much gratitude to my editors and hevrutas in this exploration: Rabbis Benay Lappe, Mónica Gomery, Avi Killip, Jordan Braunig, and Sharon Cohen Anisfeld. Thank you also to Shosh Ruskin, editor-in-chief of every sermon I write.
[2] Genesis Rabbah 8:5.
[3] Exodus 20:13.
[4] Lappe, Benay. Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation, p. 241.
[5] See B.T. Bava Metzia 24a and Rambam Mishneh Torah, Sefer Nezikin: Hilchot Gezela v'Aveda, 14:13.
[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trump-coup.html.
[7] Rambam, Sefer Mada: Hilchot Teshuva, 1:1.
[8] Yoma 3:8, 36b.