Lev Barad, Shabbat Shuva teaching for Ner Shalom, 2020/5781

Rosh Hashanah, like all Jewish holidays, is not so much an event, as it is an opening. Rosh Hashanah is the head of the year, the moment or point in time that holds the entirety of the new year within it. It is 48 hours when we can envision our future anew.  (If you haven’t yet imagined the coming year there’s still a bit of time left.) The High Holy Days is our chance to change everything!

Rosh Hashanah seems to be about looking forward, while Yom Kippur focuses on the past.

It may seem counterintuitive that we do them in this order rather than the reverse: Shouldn’t we clear out the past before moving into the new year?

This is where the notion of teshuva – turning, re-turning comes in.

The question is: To where shall we return?  We sometimes say that we should engage in the process of returning to ourselves. And that can be very helpful. But at a deeper level we might wonder: Isn’t this bigger than the individual? And what is the self? Am I really a self? Is there a place we might return to that is beyond some kind of conception of the self, perhaps even beyond being, and space and time?

A clue to answering this puzzle is a very important prayer, perhaps the most important prayer, that we recite during the High Holy Days:  The 13 Attributes of Mercy/Compassion, also referred to as Yod Gimel Middot - The 13 Qualities/Names of God. The 13 Attributes derives from the Book of Exodus. It is the formula for forgiveness that God tells Moses to tell the people.

The 13 Attributes of Mercy are found after the incident of the Golden Calf, when God threatened to destroy the people of Israel rather than forgive them (Exod. 32:10). According to the Talmud, Moses felt that Israel’s sin was so serious that there was no possibility of intercession on their behalf (Rosh Hashanah 17b).

At this point, God appeared to Moses and taught him the 13 Attributes, saying: “Whenever Israel sins, let them recite this [the Thirteen Attributes] in its proper order and I will forgive them.” Thus this appeal to God’s mercy reassures us that repentance is always possible and that God always awaits our return.”[1]

I want to quickly touch upon the Kabbalistic significance of the 13 Attributes prayer, wherein we say a formula reciting 13 Names of God.

According to Kabbalah, God is not the Other, not a King on a Throne, or any other external being. Rather, all of existence is an expression of God. In fact, there is a name of God that means existence: Hava-yah (Hey-Vav-Yud-Hey: which is a permutation of Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey). It literally means Was/Is/Will-Be [pause]. So God’s name, in this case, expresses an undoing of our usual sense of temporality where past precedes present which precedes the future. Now Hava-yah is a very high name of God, higher than the 10 sefirot or qualities of God as they become manifest as God expresses Itself in worlding the world: a continual emanation or manifestation into physicality of the Eyn Sof (the Indefinite Infiniteness). In fact, the first three names invoked in the 13 Attributes are in this very rarified realm: Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, or we might say “Hava-yah, Hava-yah,” and the next name of God is El which is the power of creation, and then Rachum – which is compassion (rachamim) and also womb (re-chem), and so on. This very high realm above the 10 sefirot is known as Ayin or Nothingness. Here the names call to states so high that they invoke God’s essence, will, and purpose. These realms are beyond space and time, where there is no self/ no being. And so when we call out the first three names we are putting ourselves in touch with Existence as Nothingness – with Was/Is/Will Be – beyond any conception of future and past. We call on El Rachum the womb that births existence to make the impossible possible, to birth new possibilities, to change not individual past events that importantly live on, but our entire sense of what we mean by time itself, beyond any fixed ordering of time. Indeed, this is true in Quantum Physics, and we can go into the details another time.[2] Also, according to Quantum Physics, nothingness is precisely the source of everything – the womb that births existence.[3] And so to go into the Nothingness, or No-thing-ness, is to enter the source of creation, and to rework and bring forth new configurations of space, time, and being. So we are literally, not merely figuratively, or as it were merely spiritually, being given a holy opportunity to co-create a new world with new possibilities; possibilities are not what might yet happen, they are materially present. As Rabbi Alan Lew, of blessed memory, puts it: this is real, despite the fact that we are never fully prepared.[4]

There’s one day in the entire year when the Kohen Gadol (High Priest) could enter the Holy of Holies and that is Yom Kippur. What is it that the Kohen Gadol enters? It’s what Rabbi Alan Lew calls “the charged emptiness.”[5] That is, it is place of Nothingness of No-thingness.

On Yom Kippur, each of us has a chance to go into the Great Nothingness. When we stand before the open ark and say the 13 Attributes of Compassion that is our chance, our opportunity as co-creators of the world to dedicate ourselves to helping to make a better world, a more just world. It is upon us (Aleinu), as co-creators of the world to stand with our hearts broken open and pour out our desires for healing, for justice. This is our chance, when the ark is open, and we cry out “Hava-yah, Hava-yah, El Rachum …” This prayer is a portal into the Nothingness where an infinity of things are possible. With our vision of the future in our hands we face our past during the Days of Awe, and on Yom Kippur immerse into the Nothingness – the River of Transformation – and emerge as new beings with our visions, however seemingly impossible, transformed into the possible. Or, according to Quantum Physics, when we immerse ourselves into the river that is beyond self-ness and spacetime, we emerge with our visions, our hopes, integrated into the materiality of our very being.[6] Hope, not as optimism, but as practice.[7] Or as Reb Octavia Butler tell us: God is change.[8] That is, God is enaction, and Tikkun Olam is thereby a practice of co-creating, of enacting and materializing change on behalf of justice.

This year, may we stand together around the world, each of us with our feet firmly planted on the ground and our cries reaching up higher and higher, passing through all the gates to the Highest of the High realms, helping to create a new world – new possibilities, new ways of thinking, being, and doing – in order to bring forward a Great Tikkun, a great healing that will mend the Great Heart of this aching world.

ENDNOTES

 [1] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-13-attributes-of-mercy/

 [2] At least this is the case in the agential realist interpretation of quantum physics put forward by Karen Barad. See K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke: 2007). One should always be skeptical about remarks made about “what quantum physics says” (rather than what people say about the physics). It is not at all evident what quantum physics says. There has been and continues to be serious debate within physics regarding how quantum physics is to be understood. There are many different interpretations of quantum physics and one cannot simply draw upon different interpretations and paste them together because it won’t be a coherent interpretation. Also, many of things said about what is true according to quantum physics are not rigorous philosophical accounts, even if they are said by physicists. Physicists often repeat what they are taught and as a result many false things or things that are not well thought out get repeated and stand in for “what physics says.”

 [3] See K. Barad (2012), What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice, dOCUMENTA (13) Notebook No.99.

 [4] Alan Lew, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003)

 [5] Ibid

 [6] To qualify this “according to quantum physics” (see fn. 2), I am basing this claim on Barad’s agential realist interpretation of quantum physics.

 [7] Riffing on Mariame Kaba’s powerful point about hope in dark times. As she puts it, “hope is a discipline feat,” an insight she says she got from a nun. https://www.beyond-prisons.com/home/hope-is-a-discipline-feat-mariame-kaba

 [8] See Octavia Butler’s prescient 1993 novel Parable of the Sowers.