SHORT ESSAY: Dunk Your Shame In Hope (Yom Kippur)

אָמַר רַבִּי עֲקִיבָא, אַשְׁרֵיכֶם יִשְׂרָאֵל, לִפְנֵי מִי אַתֶּם מִטַּהֲרִין, וּמִי מְטַהֵר אֶתְכֶם, אֲבִיכֶם שֶׁבַּשָּׁמַיִם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר (יחזקאל לו), וְזָרַקְתִּי עֲלֵיכֶם מַיִם טְהוֹרִים וּטְהַרְתֶּם. וְאוֹמֵר (ירמיה יז), מִקְוֵה יִשְׂרָאֵל ה’, מַה מִּקְוֶה מְטַהֵר אֶת הַטְּמֵאִים, אַף הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מְטַהֵר אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל

God is our mikvah, says Rabbi Akiva in this last mishnah of tractate Yoma (8:9).  God is our cleansing agent, our healing agent.  On Yom Kippur we look at ourselves in all our messiness, and we place ourselves, naked and vulnerable and full of shame, into the healing waters of God, the only container that can truly hold us as we are, and we somehow emerge – as from a mikvah – purified and whole and renewed for the year ahead.  

Rabbi Akiva bases his mikvah analogy on a phrase in Jeremiah – מִקְוֵה יִשְׂרָאֵל ה, mikveh Yisrael Hashem, which literally means “The Lord is the Hope of Israel (Jeremiah 17:13),” but which Rabbi Akiva reads as:  “The Lord is the mikvah – the ritual bath – of Israel,” based on the double meaning of the biblical word mikveh, which can either denote “hope” or “collected body of water.”  

This is not as radical an interpretation of the phrase as it would seem at first glance, as the end of the verse speaks of God as mekor mayim hayim, “the Fount of living waters” so that an association between water and God is already very much a part of the verse.  

There is more.  The second phrase of this same verse is kol ozvekha yevoshu, which literally means “all who forsake You shall be put to shame,” and the word for shame, yevoshu, is similar to another word related to water (or lack thereof), yavesh, “dry.”  In other words, those who forsake the Fount of Living Waters become shamed, by which we mean “dried out” in some way, because of their loss of connection to these nourishing waters

Putting this all together and keeping both meanings of mikveh and yevoshu alive at once, we might say that the verse, according to Rabbi Akiva, has the following message:  Dunk your Shame in divine Hope, so that your dried out-ness, your deadness, will be re-invigorated by the waters of the living God.

Dunk your Shame in divine Hope.  Shame can lead to despair.  It can indeed be a path of dryness, of lifelessness; it can be so debilitating that it robs a person of any possibility of change or movement or healing or transformation.  Shame eats at who we are, tells us not just that we have done stupid or terrible things, but also that we are stupid and terrible, that we are worthless, that we amount to nothing and are nothing.    We can get lost and stuck in this place, overcome by hopelessness, collapsed in on ourselves by the weight of the shame we carry.

But what happens if we dunk our shame in divine hope, if we take the feeling of worthlessness that is sometimes at our core, that dries us up and shrivels us and robs us of a will to live and thrive, what happens if we dunk that feeling into a ritual bath that is full of the divine waters of hope, the hope that God is still with us, that we actually can change, that we are in fact created in God’s image and essentially good at our very core and that it is therefore always possible to uncover and return to that goodness, to that essential value, the hope that we are never a lost cause, never too damaged for repair, the hope that God still loves us and cares about us and will help us evolve and manifest, will hold us and support us in the gentle waters of divine kindness like a baby in its mother’s womb, swaddled and held until we are ready to emerge again, renewed by our contact with the eternal Fount of living waters?  

Mikveh, Hope, is a powerful healing agent, if – like an impure person in the mikvah waters – we fully immerse ourselves in it, we let ourselves be surrounded by its strength and confidence and faith in our capacity for wholeness.   Shame is the sureness that we are essentially worthless, a turning away from ourselves and the possibility of something more.  Hope is the knowledge of what we could be and the energy and vision to move in that direction.  Hope fuels change and healing.  When we fully submerge in these waters of possibility, feeling the support of a loving eternal God who believes in us, then we come more fully to believe in ourselves; the waters cleanse our view of ourselves so that we emerge not just more whole, but also seeing ourselves as more whole, cleansed of the shame that drags us into the downward spiral of despair.   Hope purifies us by allowing us to see who we are and who we could become.   

This Yom Kippur, dunk your Shame in the mikvah of divine Hope.