Redux of “Vidui in Honor of My Mother, My Husband’s Closed Starbucks Store, and Our Aching World.” (If you are a subscriber who read the original post, please feel free to ignore!)
Dear Lovely People Who Have Asked Me to Share What I Read Aloud on Yom Kippur:
The expanded version of this essaylette can be found here. Below is the excerpt I pulled and read from the pulpit (bimah) last week, to help set our intention and mindset (kavanah) as we communally entered into the Big Confessional Prayer known as Vidui. I’ve scattered in a couple images from my community’s services below, with special thanks to Lauren Reeves and Kathy Kaberon for the pics.
During the prayer known as Vidui, we rise and symbolically beat our chests while confessing to an alphabetical series of sins. Two and a half years ago, when my mother died unexpectedly, I learned that the Vidui is also recited at the end of life. If it’s too late for the person dying to recite it, then someone recites it for them.
The end-of-life Vidui, or deathbed confession, is personal rather than communal. It acknowledges the imperfections of the dying person and seeks a final reconciliation with God.
For the not-dying who hear the Vidui on Yom Kippur, the prayer reminds the living to not wait until the end in order to live.
In a song simply titled “Change,” the great Tracy Chapman writes, “If you knew that you would die today / You saw the face of God and love / Would you change?” Tracy sings that last line twice, for emphasis. Hearing the question posed once is not enough.
Would you change?
I’ve long struggled with simplistic ideas about change, and I’ve sometimes had a hard time with the physical beating of the chest.
As Rabbi London shared during our Kol Nidre service last night, there is a way to think about this breast-beating not so much as beating our chests but knocking on them, gently, to open.
For breast cancer survivors, even the act of gently knocking on our imperfect chests is weighted with meaning. Long after the scars are healed, we feel vulnerable.
Therefore, I’ve found that the best way to go about it is to tap ever so lovingly, berating neither ourselves nor the universe. Though sometimes, if I’m being honest, berating the universe helps.
But sometimes too, if we’re open to it, wound is where the light gets in.
We all are wounded. The question is not whether we’re broken but how we treat the tears in the fabric of our being—and of course for “our being” I could substitute here “our country” too.
That’s the moment we are living in. As Jews, we do not run from what is broken. Instead, we are called to mend.
In the face of death, we are commanded to live.
At my mother’s funeral, we played a song whose lyrics my mother had once given me in the form of a little book, a prayer book really, titled “I Hope You Dance.” When I play that song in my car on my way to stare at the lake two and a half years later, it still brings me to my knees—one line gets me every time: “May you never take one single breath for granted.”
That’s a tall order. Most days, most breaths, we take for granted. We’re human. It’s what we do.
So here’s my prayer as we stand at the threshold that Vidui presents us this particular year:
May we find even just a few intentional breaths over the next few days to not take for granted.
May we learn, before we die, not to take the fact of our breathing for granted.
May we love ourselves in and for our brokenness.
And may we love each other for the ways we can, together, help repair.
In 5786, a year fraught with uncertainty, with both personal and communal safety and well-being up in the air, when we have a choice to sit it out or dance, as the poem says, I hope we dance.