We are so lucky, Rabbi Akiva says in a comment about Yom Kippur (Mishnah Yoma 8:9). We are so lucky, because who is the one who purifies us? God Godself. Mikveh Yisrael Hashem, says Rabbi Akiva, quoting a verse from Jeremiah (Jeremiah 17:13). Mikveh Yisrael Hashem – The mikvah of Israel is God. God is our mikveh, our purifying agent, our healing agent.
That is what is happening on Yom Kippur. We are stepping into the mikvah of God to be immersed and cleansed and transformed. We are not healed through our effort and striving and control, but on the contrary, through our willingness to let go and relax into God’s waters.
Tension in Our Body
I wonder if you can feel in your body the effects of intense striving and trying to fix and control and heal and make better. Getting a sense of the tension, the holding on tight for dear life, the hypervigilance to do it right, how you hold all that tension maybe in your shoulders or neck or in the clenching of your jaws or the ache in your forehead. And maybe, too, there is some exhaustion right underneath all of that tight holding. You have been clenching for so long, it’s like right under the tightness, there is a brittleness, a frailty, a sense of being ready to collapseat the drop of a hat, maybe a despair, the knowledge that no matter how hard you try, all that work and effort don’t quite get you there, but instead leave you more and more depleted.
Prayer Words As Water
I want you to imagine that all the many words and repeated songs of Yom Kippur are like waves of water all around you, surrounding you, embracing you, creating a mikvah, a ritual bath of sacred water for you to immerse in. Hashem, Hashem, kel rahum vehanun erekh apayim rav hesed ve’emet. Feeling the words and tunes as water, maybe picturing them dancing off the page and surrounding you, all the sounds and vibrations and many voices creating an immersive bath of God’s waters around you. Hashem Hashem kel rachum vechanun. These words of the 13 attributes tell us what those waters are made of – they are made of compassion and grace, of unconditional love and kindness, of patience and forgiveness.
Immersing
Letting yourself sink into this mikvah, into this bath of divine waters. The waters are warm and soft, gentle waters like you would use to bathe a baby. You are held so tenderly here. As with any mikvah immersion, the instruction is to relax and float, to let the waters touch every part of your aching body. What does that feel like? Letting go into this bath of God’s waters, into this kindness, this patience, this holding of grace. Letting the warmth of the water, the kindness of it, relax the tension in your muscles. You don’t have to do it all right. You don’t have to do anything at all right now. You don’t even have to support your own body weight. The water will do that. Just float and be light, let go of the heaviness of all the worry, the pressure and the urgency. It’s ok. God is holding you now. Relax and be held.
Doubled Day of Rest
Yom Kippur is a shabbat shabaton, shabbat squared, a day of unqualified, unconditional intensified rest. It’s like the normal shabbat rest taken to a whole other level, this deep soul rest of floating in God’s healing waters, not pushing so hard, not “working,” even at improvement,. Teshuva doesn’t mean forcing change. It means returning to the waters of God which make their own gentle changes. Letting go of being in charge of that change and letting God hold you and heal you with patience and compassion and love. Resting in God. Dropping your shoulders and your rush forward and simply resting in God, resting in these mikvah waters of this day of doubled rest. You don’t have to make healing happen. You just have to relax enough to let it happen. God desires your healing, too. Stop standing in the way, stop running every which way, Just get in the water and float.
Bowing All The Way
Maybe also feeling the resonance of this restful floating with the deep bow we do multiple times on Yom Kippur, bowing all the way down to the floor and surrendering, letting go of control and effort and allowing God to take over, allowing the ground itself to take over and hold us. Remembering right now what that feels like, to stretch all the way out before God, to relinquish control and to trust in something else, bigger than us, to carry us. As we prostrate and do this re-enactment of the temple service, we are told that the high priest would then pronounce God’s most mysterious ineffable name, and it is this injunction of God which would bring purification. Titharu! Be purified, he would say. Be healed. Be healed by this name. Relaxing and letting yourself receive this grace of healing, not through your own effort, but through your restful trust in the water, and not through your mind, but through your body’s visceral reverberation with God’s inexplicable healing presence. Titharu – you are purified, cleansed, healed, though God.
How Water Helps
It’s like if you are very dirty, let’s say you’ve been in a mud fight. You could work all day and night to scrub yourself clean with a brush or a rag, working at each spot on your body and clothing, putting in a lot of elbow grease. Or you could step into a bath and let the water do the work for you, effortlessly. That is what God’s healing is like, it’s like water that cleanses. Or it’s like if you have a pan that has caked on food that you work at scrubbing off, and it just won’t come off. But then if you fill the pan with water and let it soak for a while, it all comes off on its own, like magic. God is that magical substance for our internal healing. Step your whole self into the divine waters of compassion and all that dirt you’ve been scrubbing at will be healed and transformed on its own. It might take time and it will certainly take patience and love and you may have to keep coming back into the waters, but have faith that there is this magical divine healing agent in the universe. Some call it God, some call it a Higher Power and some call it Self Energy. It’s all the same divine healing substance, both inside and outside us.
God is My Salvation
“God is my light and my salvation.” Hashem ori veyishi, we say this time of year (Psalm 27:1). There is a midrash that reads ori, “my light” as referring to Rosh Hashanah and yishi, “my salvation,” as referring to Yom Kippur (Midrash Tehillim 27:3). Yom Kippur is the day we are saved by God, the day upon which God becomes yishi, my savior. I am saved from myself, saved from heading in a direction that wasn’t working for me, saved from my stuckness, from my fear and resistance and shame, from my limitations and narrowness and from my insistence on controlling it all. I am saved from everything that stops me from growing and becoming the or, the divine light, I am meant to be. And I am saved in this way by God.
We don’t talk much about being saved. It feels so one sided and passive and antiquated. It implies this powerful other who can indeed save us, remove us from our own impediments. But it feels important to know and feel there is such a force in our lives. Hashem yishi. God is my savior. When all else fails, God saves me. Again, you can understand God however you like, as inside you as well as outside you, as partly your own divine capacity. That’s all good. The important thing is to realize it isn’t your normal way of being in the world. It isn’t the part of you that tries so hard or feels urgent or anxious or fixes or controls. That can’t save us. It isn’t our very beloved but also very human parts. It is something of an entirely different order of magnitude that saves us. It is that ineffable name in the sanctuary. And it is only that other healing substance that can do it. We can’t do it any other way. Hashem yishi. God is my savior. I reach my human limitations, I reach a wall, and I know – I require this divine substance to heal me. My own efforts will simply not get me there, as sophisticated as they may be.
Can you feel the surrender and also deep relaxation of letting yourself be saved by God? As if you are picked up bodily and held aloft, as water does, saved from the normal gravitational pull that holds you down, lifted up by something beyond us.
On Yom Kippur we step into this saving divine substance, into this mikvah, a ritual bath of waters made of God’s most healing qualities. And we are healed and saved by these qualities, by God’s compassion, by God’s unconditional steadfast love that will not abandon us even when we mess up, by God’s infinite spacious grace and patience. That’s what heals us and saves us. It is God’s gentleness that saves us.
Inviting Your Hurting Parts Into the Mikvah
I ask you – who inside you needs to enter these healing waters right now? Maybe, after we create the container with the 13 attributes, this is what the al het’s are for, an internal invitation to the suffering hidden buried ones who are too ashamed to join us in God’s mikvah, but so desperately need it. We name them in order to give them some air and light, bringing them out of the dark tunnel of their shame and letting them know what kind of waters these are – not harsh or punitive as they expect and as they may have experienced in the past, but loving and patient, full of compassion and grace, deeply restful waters, capable of healing and salvation.
So checking inside– who is in need right now of such gentleness? Who is in need of being saved by divine love and compassion? What urgent or hurt places are calling out to be included and healed and saved in some way? Feeling into your body and naming them, welcoming them, anxiety, hurt, loneliness, fear, anger, restlessness, aggression. Inviting them all to float with you in these divine healing waters. They can come as they are. We are not forcing them to change. Just letting them be held and slowly healed by the divine substance of unconditional love and grace and patience.
Erekh apayim. Erekh. Long. God plays the long game. These healing waters are slow and steady, a trusting in the process. Ad yom moto tehakeh lo, until a person’s death, You, God, wait for her. Enter these waters and slow down. You may not see results immediately. God’s time is eternal time. Let yourself grow like a seed in the ground, slowly, patiently, gradually, in your own time, at your own pace. Not a forced growth, not with aggression or efficiency. In slow warm waters, your heartbeat slowing down from all the urgent racing so you can remember who you are. Taking a deep breath and letting those gentle waters hold you and all your urgent, worried, hurt parts. Just sitting and soaking, immersing, letting the waters do their slow patient work on all parts of your body and soul.
What Emerges – Your Glorious Self!
What emerges from this Yom Kippur mikvah immersion, each year perhaps a little more, as the layers of crusted over dirt and shame and fear are gradually washed off and as our wounded parts are healed more and more by God’s patient love, what emerges from these saving waters is the truth of who we are, like the high priest emerging from the Holy of Holies at the end of the Yom Kippur service – emet mah nehedar – in truth, how glorious he is, how glorious we are! Like a shiny rock that has been covered over by layers upon layers of grime, these mikvah waters wash it all off and we are stunned by what we find underneath. Emet mah nehedar. In truth, how glorious we are! How glorious is that little child in us we thought was so damaged. Like the sunlight, like a rose, like a crown, like a rainbow, like an angel. That’s who we are, our true selves emerging gradually over time or in sudden powerful lightning glimpses. Feeling into that light-filled core truth in yourself right now, and how the nourishing and cleansing divine waters help you see that and grow into it more and more. Not by your own forceful effort, but by resting in God’s gentle waters.
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