Return in Joy (Kol Nidrei 5786)

Return in Joy
Rabbi Rachael Houser, Kol Nidrei 5786

Happy Yom Kippur.

Wait – what did Rabbi Houser just say?

What are they teaching at rabbinical schools these days? Don’t they know that you don’t say ‘Happy Yom Kippur?’ What’s there to be happy about? Going hungry all day and crying about our sins?

Oh, let’s give her a break, it’s her first High Holy Day sermon at Central, she’s probably just nervous.

Actually it’s exactly what I meant to say, based on the texts and teachings of this holiday. Happy Yom Kippur. No trick, no joke, no punchline. Does that come as a surprise? I was surprised, too – to read the Talmudic rabbis say, "Happy is the one whose transgression is forgiven.” And this line: “Yom Kippur [is a delight] because it has forgiveness and pardon, and because it is the day on which the second Tablets were given.”

In other words, there is joy in expiation, in being given another chance.

I have a more personal kind of joy around this holiday, and that may be because I’m coming at this holiday from a different place than many of us here tonight.

I converted to Judaism from Catholicism. So I know a thing or two about sin, confession, and guilt from every direction. In the religion of my childhood, guilt was expressed as solely an individual process. You go to confession alone to tell the priest your sins and swear your intent to never repeat them again. Your penance—that’s Catholic-speak for teshuvah, by the way—is typically a repetition of prayers. A rosary, a handful of Hail Marys, a slew of Our Fathers, which you recite by yourself. For a few shining minutes, you walk out of church sinless and perfect, until you make your next inevitable mistake, and then the balance sheet begins anew. To keep track of all your sins and make sure you’ve made proper atonement for them, you either need to attend frequent confession or keep an excellent record, leaving nothing out for the next time you find yourself in the confessional booth.

As a teenager, I became terrified of my cosmic debt. Some nights I would stay up for hours, exhausted but unable to consider myself truly forgiven unless I completed the prayers perfectly. I could never escape the conviction that my repentance was never good enough. But repentance—and whether or not I was doing it right—wasn’t the only thing about Catholicism that kept me up nights. I felt that I wasn’t living up to my values, the person I truly felt I was capable of being, as a Catholic. I became very suspicious of my own motives, because I could never truly be sure that I performed any act of kindness for its own sake, rather than an attempt to secure admission to heaven. When I left the church in college after lots of soul-searching, I wanted to find a religion that felt more aligned with who I am and how I operate in the world.

Imagine my relief, as I began my journey to convert to Judaism, when Yom Kippur was one of the first holidays I celebrated. Here was a day when repentance was a team sport, and we kicked it off with the Kol Nidre liturgy, a communal acknowledgment of having missed the mark and striving to do better. The first time I ever attended a Kol Nidre service, I wept. Kol Nidre silenced the voices in my head that had convinced me I could never settle the score. I learned that it wasn’t solely my responsibility to think of every mistake I’d ever made and make amends for it. In Judaism, we do that as one congregation, one people, all at the same time. We take responsibility not just for ourselves but for each other. I was no longer alone. So yes, that Yom Kippur was one of the happiest days of my life.

I came to my Jewish transformation in joy. I didn’t make teshuvah for my Catholic past, but I adhered more closely to the true definition of this word: return. There is a Jewish teaching that converts are born with Jewish souls. I can’t say for sure, but I know that I made a return to what was always in me, to my truest and most authentic self, when I became a Jew. Full of happiness, free of fear. My journey taught me that teshuvah is more than making amends. It is a true return to a clean slate, to who you want to be—and that return is a hopeful one. And the lesson I learned that first Yom Kippur is one I’d imagine you can relate to, because it is not just a holiday for beating ourselves up out of remorse, even when we do it together. Yom Kippur—and the teshuvah we perform on it—is an occasion for joy.

There’s a story I want to tell you about a Biblical convert to Judaism who also found her way to joy after teshuvah – return. No, I’m not talking about the well-known Ruth, but the lesser-known Osnat, who is not exactly a famous figure in Genesis, though her husband, Joseph, IS – and yes, I mean that Joseph, of “Technicolor Dreamcoat” fame.

In this midrash, Osnat is the daughter of the Egyptian high priest, and she has everything: beauty, wealth, power, and arrogance to match. She selfishly isolates herself from her family and community, living alone in a tower, dressing up in the finest silks and worshiping idols made of gold. When her father informs her that she’s going to marry Joseph, she throws a tantrum – refusing to wed some Canaanite upstart.

But when she actually meets Joseph, they both fall in love at first sight. And yet: Joseph laments that he cannot agree to the marriage. He cannot be with someone who invests so much of herself in things that don’t matter – idols and clothing – not when he believes in a God that cares more about what is in one’s heart. Heartbroken, Osnat undertakes her very own ritual of Yom Kippur. She dresses in sackcloth and ashes, abstains from food and drink, and confesses all her sins of idol worship before God. She sees in Joseph’s religion a pathway to becoming a better version of herself, a braver and more compassionate Osnat.

God dispatches an angel to visit Osnat who tells her that her prayers have been heard by “an exceedingly beautiful daughter of the Most High,” an angelic figure in heaven who has petitioned to God on Osnat’s behalf so that she might be forgiven and transformed into the kind of person she wants to be. And that beautiful daughter of God is called Repentance. The angel tells her that Repentance is “a maiden pure and laughing always,” and that she has been cheering Osnat on from heaven as she reflects on her mistakes and how she wants to improve going forward. Thanks to the Angel of Repentance intervening on her behalf, God accepts Osnat’s prayer. Osnat has done the hard work of teshuvah, and now she gets to experience the joy of forgiveness. The change is immediate—when Osnat runs down from her tower, her family hardly recognizes her. Joseph can sense her transformation and proposes to her on the spot. And Osnat, who used to live alone and disconnected in her tower, finds not only a loving marriage with Joseph, but a place in the Israelite community, befriending Joseph’s brothers and father and taking a leadership role in the tribe.

What does this midrash tell us? That someone who isolated herself ultimately found community. That someone fixated on too many shiny things found joy in something simpler, truer, more lasting. That someone willing to change was given the chance – by an angel called Repentance. That we all have that angel cheering us on, offering us a chance to restart, reset, do it differently.

The description of the Angel of Repentance runs counter to what we’d imagine teshuvah looks like and feels like. She’s a laughing and lighthearted intercessor. She cheerleads for us at the throne of God while we do the hard work on earth of working to earn forgiveness and return to our best selves. Osnat’s teshuvah—both the amends she makes and the return to who she wants to be—is accomplished in great joy. And this Yom Kippur, so can yours. Because you’ve done it before. You know what it feels like.

You have seen what happens when your teshuvah works. When you know you’ve messed up, reflect on the pain you’ve caused and strategize how to avoid doing so again.

When we’ve apologized to the person we’ve wronged, we know how it feels when they forgive us. There’s relief, gratitude, even exhilaration—that’s where the joy comes in. The work we undertake today in this Repentance Lightning Round of Yom Kippur is hard work, but ultimately you might find yourself walking away tomorrow night feeling lighter.

The dread of Yom Kippur has long been tempered with the happiness inherent in teshuvah. Our sources are full of the language of levity around atonement: Before the recitation of Kol Nidre, we sing from Psalm 97, “Or zarua latzadik ul’yishrei lev simcha—light is sown for the righteous, and happiness, simcha, for the upright of heart.” We set the tone for Kol Nidre, for all of Yom Kippur, with the idea that happiness is sown like seeds. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel taught that there were no happier days for the people of Israel than the 15th of Av and Yom Kippur, for on both days, maidens in Jerusalem would dress in white and go dancing in vineyards. The Gemara explains Rabban Shimon’s teaching: because Yom Kippur is a day of slicha and mechila, pardon and forgiveness. A hint for how we ought to feel about this holiday can even be found in the name: Yom Kippurim, the Day of Atonements, is a yom k’Purim, a day like Purim, the most cheerful of all the Jewish holidays. If we are supposed to treat today like Purim—full of festive mischief—and the 15th of Av—full of hope and possibility—then the groundwork has been laid for us to think of Yom Kippur in a different way.

But how can we do it? How can we reframe Yom Kippur and the process of teshuvah? We are about to undertake a day of beating ourselves up. Between the ashamnus and al cheit shechatanu lefanechas, how do we find the joy? For this, we turn to one more teacher: Maimonides. Maimonides taught that the true measure of repentance would be for a sinner to encounter the same situation that led them to sin in the first place, but to have learned from the experience and thus avoid making the same mistake twice.

Teshuvah is a return, a return to our best selves. For these hours to come, could each of us think about the kind of person we know we can be. Our purest, most authentic selves. The kind of people whom we know, faced with the mistakes of our past, would never commit the same wrong again, just as Maimonides proposed. What is that person like? Kind? Patient? Understanding? What gifts do we already possess, in the core of who we are, which help us avoid all the different ways we hurt each other?

On Yom Kippur, we list plenty of ways that we fail each other. But as we make teshuvah as a group, let’s take the best version of ourselves and hold them in our minds. What will it take to be that person, to return? How will we feel when we get there?

Make no mistake—this journey is not an easy one. Sometimes finding happiness and letting ourselves experience it is a challenge, especially on a day like today that we have come to associate with dread and judgement. But what I learned on my first Yom Kippur remains true today: we are not alone on this path. All of us are trying. All of us are returning. And the story of Osnat tells us that we have an angel in the heavens who always has been and always will be cheering us on, insisting that it’s possible. If we spend the day dreaming of the person we know we can be in 5786 and planning how we’ll get there—believing in each other’s ability to do the same—then what a simcha. What a joyful holiday this will be, indeed.