Ricardo Levins Morales’ Kol Nidre Teaching
The following sermon was delivered by Ricardo Levins Morales at Kol Nidre services on 10 Tishrei 5785| Friday October 11, 2024. Follow Ricardo’s work here.
Image by Ricardo Levins Morales.
Rabbi Ariana asked me a few days ago if I was “set for Friday,” meaning, was I prepared for speaking with you here today. I responded with something pleasant and vague, but my internal answer was a resounding NO! I was not raised with a religious or ritual practice and so I don't have an intuitive understanding of how to engage with it. Some would describe my type as a “non-observant Jew.” I would say, in response, that I am a Jew, and I observe things. I suspect that's why Rabbi Arianna invited me.
Kol Nidre is attached to its share of controversies and open questions. When we speak of nullifying contracts, does it refer to past commitments, undermine future ones, not include legal contracts? Is it about promises made to others? Only those made to God? Only those to ourselves? Jews are known to argumentative – feel free to disagree.
But that tangle of questions gives me some freedom to follow threads that call to me.
The idea of commitments, in general, hits home for me. I internalized early on that my word, once given, is as solid as iron or stone. I have taken pride in my rigidity. I don't commit to anything unless I have thought about it thoroughly and am confident I can and will follow through. And once I commit, nothing can move me. I have worn that rigidity as a badge of pride.
On a summers, day 53 years ago, I was sitting on a lawn on Chicago's south side with my friend Suzy. She ran her hand across the peach fuzz on my cheek, which I flattered myself by describing it to myself as a beard. “Never shave it,” she said. “OK, I won't.” I never have. When I reconnected with her, decades later, she released me from my pledge. But what was in play on that summer day a half century ago was not a meaningful commitment to her, but to the idea of commitment; a moment of whimsical bonding fossilized into a dogma.
Rigidity is a hedge against uncertainty. However fickle the world may be, we tell ourselves, I at least am reliable. Unbend-able. A rock in the storm. But it's a false promise. It is precisely because the world changes that we must also. Only with attentiveness and flexibility can we navigate an uncertain and shifting world
That is the tightrope I find myself on. My mistake was to confuse the leaves with roots – leaves are fleeting. Roots are foundational. A deciduous tree grows leaves during the warm part of the year, with which to take in the light of the sun. It combines light with air, water and minerals to manufacture the sugars it uses to function and grow. But leaves are no longer the right tools when winter arrives and the trees go largely dormant. In the winter, the world in which maintaining all those leaves made sense, is no longer there. So the leaves are let go. I want to talk about letting go.
Attentiveness is key to practicing flexibility in a changing world. Attentiveness and acceptance – but we'll get to that. I think of my father. He was asked once about some act of defiance, some stand he took, an act of solidarity and practical support for someone being targeted by police repression. He did such things as a matter of course. He was asked how he'd mustered the courage, and what factors he'd weighed to make that choice, to take that risk. He shrugged and said he'd made his choice when he was sex years old. The choice of which side he was on. So there was nothing to weigh. I don't even want to call that a commitment. It's a decision to be in the world a certain way. Throughout his life, his commitments arose from that deep root of self.
Contracts, vows, promises, treaties, legislation, court rulings, are negotiated – or individual - conspiracies to defy change. To make it so that new conditions in a new and changing environment are not relevant. “A contract is a contract.” They are also instruments of accountability: I commit, therefore you can trust. And we all can recognize them also as instruments of oppression. Like an apartment lease that demands excessive rent, a treaty that deprives a people of their homeland, or a contract that guarantees profits to a private prison corporation. Some online “agreements” include the phrase “these terms are subject to change at any time without notice.” A contract can be a trap. That one just pisses me off!
One account of the origins of Kol Nidre, has it as a nullification of forced conversions. Whatever coerced commitments Jews had to make in the face of threats, could be annulled with a clear conscience. I don't know, of course. But the idea of abandoning what doesn't make sense anymore, appeals to me. Even if I'm not very good at it. When it comes to breaking chains of oppression, count me in!
But that quickly brings me to a precipice. Because it turns out (I am making assumptions here, based on my personal experience), that most of the oppressive commitments we are entangled in, are, in fact, ones made to ourselves. They are not signed, not written, not spoken out loud... and not questioned. Many were designed long before we were born. Gifted to us by patriarchy, white supremacy, individualism, trauma. They bind us in commitments that don't make sense for the world we live in. That never did. Others have been gifted to us by solidarity, resistance, compassion. These are worth honoring with attention, and intention. These are worth bringing into the sunlight so they are not on automatic renewal, but are regularly recommitted to because they make sense.
So now Kol Nidre is making sense to me as an annual inventory of unnoticed contracts. Those that never served us, those that once did but no longer do, those that we want to hold close, and those that are waiting to be articulated.
A tree that refuses to concede that summer is over, is ill prepared for what comes next. That's denial, and it rarely works out well. Denial, we could say, is our contract with a dead past that we cling to so we won't have to mourn its demise.
So what is your relationship with climate change? Does it feel like a betrayal? We had a deal, after all! We were promised a world that would go on and on and on, generation after generation after generation. And however much we messed things up - with greed, extraction, wars – we could at least count on the vastness of the Amazon forests, the endlessness of the Pacific Ocean, the untouchable frozen wilderness of the polar regions. That promise has been broken, and with it our hearts. But most of us have not moved on. We know we should do something, but the chasm between how we know things should be, and the way they actually are, can leave us frozen like deer in the headlights.
You step outside on a beautiful day, a mild, slightly cool breeze blowing. Clear blue sky. And it's the middle of February. You're in a place that should be in winter's deep freeze. What goes through your mind? If on such a day, my body clenches in anxiety, because this isn't how it's supposed to be. If I feel guilt for taking pleasure in the sun on my face, and the chatter of birds, then I'm in denial. The birds in the trees are not agonizing about the end of the world. They are responding to the world that is.
If I greet each day with “No! This is not the world I signed up for!” it means I walk through every day in denial, unable to commit body and soul to the world because I demand a different version. I reject the reality around me. I refuse to truly arrive.
I've come to embrace the Buddhists concept of acceptance. It doesn't mean that I'm cool with how things are, just that I know that this is the world that is. It's the starting place for whatever comes next. That transition - the journey from denial to acceptance - is called grieving. It's the bridge that we must cross to be fully, humanly, present. It requires letting go. It hurts. Believe me, I know. I've spent my entire life fleeing from grief. But it's the hurt that accompanies healing. That opens pathways.
Pain, in any case, is not the end of the world. Just part of it. The choreography of injury and healing, healing and injury is the fabric of our lives. And the substance of growth. We strive to learn how to manage it gracefully. And we inevitably fail. And therefore atonement. And therefore self-forgiveness. And therefore generosity with ourselves and others. Failure might be a malfunction at the scale of personal experience, but at the scale of life itself, it is an integral and necessary aspect of being in the world. So we make constant adjustments, repairs, and changes of direction. And still our failures and our successes remain inseparably entwined.
In a couple of weeks I'll be traveling to Syracuse New York, where a gallery has a show of my art, and at which I've been invited to speak. I said I would go. Making commitments, arrangements, and plans with others, is an effective way to organize our lives. We're all here tonight due to a series of agreements, and commitments (to ourselves or others). It allows us to coordinate activities and achieve greater outcomes. I feel no need to erase any of that. But I'm intrigued by the idea of Kol Nidre as a time for cleaning out my commitments closet. To examine, sort, shred, keep, or update, according to their connection (or lack of) to underlying root principles. It doesn't feel irresponsible. Quite the opposite.
Attentiveness and flexibility. Remember them? Keys to navigating a changing world? Well they are made possible by the most powerful navigational instrument at our disposal: curiosity. When we're in denial, chained to a past that no longer makes sense, it suppresses our curiosity. We don't want to know what we'll find if we open our eyes or ears or mind – that the world has changed! We haven't yet grieved, so we're not ready to explore a world in which a loved one really did die, a beloved place was paved over, a cherished opportunity snatched away.
I see curiosity as a superpower. I'm currently learning what I can about past mass extinctions and global climate shifts, since that is the present we find ourselves in. It turns out there are many points of leverage. There are reasons some species and ecosystems rebound while others decline, rich lessons from coral reefs, mangroves and salmon runs about adaptation, migration and change. Curiosity turns paralysis into action. Dread into possibility.
Action begins with an actor. That's us. Freeing ourselves to act in the world requires letting go of what prevents it. Letting go of chains that keep us disconnected from a world that has moved on. Rejecting even the shackles we we agreed to wear. Tonight is our commitment – yes, I just can't get away from that language – to catch up.
Leaves are transitory. We need them to navigate the world, but they have their season. Roots are what connects us to our amazing world, and through it, to each other, and to our deep, chosen purpose. And in the end, all we have to offer is ourselves.