Maybe it’s not the mistake, but the moment after the mistake that counts.
Adam’s Hiding
In the first sin of the Torah, after Adam and Chava eat of the forbidden fruit, what do they do? They hide from God who is wandering about the garden, looking to connect. Filled with shame, they turn away from that connection. God, still wanting to engage with them despite their sin, calls out: ayeka, “where are you,” as if saying: Don’t run away. Talk to me. They respond, but only begrudgingly, not trusting, not coming clean, still hiding in some way (Genesis 3).
Our Hiding
As humans, we will always make mistakes. But perhaps the bigger problem than our mistakes is the shame and self hatred we feel afterwards that make us hide and turn away from connection. It is the feeling we get of wanting to run away and disappear, to crawl under a table, to sink into the floor or to go down to the basement of the ship like Yonah and sleep there, alone and hidden under the covers, or the urge to cover our face with our hands so we won’t be seen. I’d better not show myself, reveal the truth of my own badness.
Not on Yom Kippur
I believe that Yom Kippur offers us a corrective experience to this automatic hiding response of shame. On Yom Kippur, we openly list our faults, mistakes and imperfections, again and again through the day. And this sharing of our flaws is framed on either side, at the beginning and end of Yom Kippur, by the 13 divine attributes of mercy, by God’s proclamation of continual love and grace and compassion for us.
It’s as if on Yom Kippur we are Adam emerging out of our hiding places. We hear God calling in the garden and instead of our usual shameful shrinking and turning away, we stand up and say the truth – I’m here, but I’m kind of a mess in this and that way. We don’t hide it now. We say it out loud. We let it be seen in the light of day, given some air. We don’t let shame take over and say – this means you are all bad and no one wants you. We don’t turn away from ourselves but claim ourselves, even in our brokenness.
Received in Love
And to our great surprise and delight, God loves us anyway. Those 13 attributes, sung out again and again at the beginning of Yom Kippur and at the end, together, on either side, form a divine embrace, a loving container to hold us. Hashem, Hashem, kel rachum vechanun. God of compassion and grace, abundant in loving kindness and truth. In the light of God’s truth, we step out into our truth, admit our brokenness and are received with love. (It seems that God, too, has a corrective experience with us here, loving us instead of punishing us like Adam and Chavah.)
Maybe take a moment to let that sink in, imagining yourself as Adam, first hiding in the garden, and then, hearing God’s invitation to connect, emerging and standing, perhaps a little shaky and bent over at first, unsure how you will be received, aware of the ways you are still very much broken and unevolved, the things you keep doing wrong, aware of those and yet still allowing yourself to stand there before God, still responding to God’s call, trusting that it is ok to share those imperfections, and slowly beginning to feel in your body that it is indeed ok, that God sees you exactly as you are and still wants to connect. Letting yourself absorb some of this divine embrace, perhaps like a warm blanket wrapped around you. While before you were covered up in shame and hiding, now you are covered by a blanket of love (see Proverbs 10:12)..
Connection, Not Perfection
Maybe every Yom Kippur, we are engaged in a tikkun, a repair, of Adam’s post-sin hiding. We step forward into connection with God as we are, in our mess. Sometimes we think we can’t connect to God until we are better. We say – tomorrow when I am healed, I’ll talk to God. I only want to show God the cleaned up version of me, dressed in my finest. But God comes searching in the garden for us especially in our distress, in our brokenness, when we are still in tattered rags, as if God sees us hiding and shrinking in our shame and wants to draw us out, to help us stand up. It turns out it is not perfection that God wants from us, but connection. We’ve spent our lives chasing perfection, desperate to do it all right so we could earn the love that it turns out we already have without earning. We thought we had to do it all perfectly, but God just wants to be with us as we are.
God Stood With Him There
I think this idea is beautifully expressed in the phrase which we repeat again and again just before the 13 attributes – Vayityatzev imo sham (Exodus 34:5). And God stood with him there. God stood with Moshe there after the sin of the golden calf. There, exactly as he was, ba’asher hu sham, exactly as the nation was at that moment, torn and guilty.
What would it feel like to allow God to stand with you sham, there, in your place of greatest brokenness? In those moments when the urge is to hide and turn away, when there is the creep of self loathing and collapse, can we instead open a door, even a tiny window, and let God into the space of our distress, even, especially, if we don’t feel worthy? We never lose that divine invitation, like a whisper on the breeze, calling: Will you please come out and play with me? I don’t care what you did wrong. Just come out and play with me.
God stood with him there. The word for stood, vayityatzev, has the connotation of great stillness, like a matzevah, a statue. God is steady with you, silent and listening, attentive and calm through the storm of your intensity, through the storm of your human failings and painful yearnings to be different – you, sputtering and crying, God still and present, believing in you.
Hashem, Hashem – Steadfast
Hashem Hashem, those first two words of the 13 attributes, are traditionally understood as a way of expressing precisely this divine steadfastness. Hashem. Hashem – God of mercy, both before and after a sin, exactly the same (Rashi on Exodus 34:6). Hashem before, and Hashem after. No matter what we do, God stays steady with us, like two feet planted firmly on the ground, Hashem, Hashem, not going anywhere. We spill our guts about everything we have not done right, the ugliest parts of ourselves, and God stands there, the same as ever, saying – It’s ok. I’m right here, still here with you. Sometimes we are so ashamed, we want to crawl into a hole, we abandon ourselves, we turn away from ourselves, but God just stands there and says – it’s ok, I hear what you are sharing and I am still here.
Can you take that steadfastness, that grace, that love into your heart? Can you feel your own divine capacity to be that steadfast and loving, your own divine capacity to offer that grace to yourself and others, to be God’s loving steadfast presence in this world? The next time you feel that you have failed at something, can you love yourself through that failure? Can you allow God to love you through that failure? Hashem, Hashem. Staying with you through the falls and the mistakes, through the heartache and the shame, staying with you sham, there, exactly where you are. That’s where God is, wherever you are. You don’t have to try to be somewhere else, somewhere better, to connect to God. Just be where you are and let God in.
This Love Also Changes Us
In this season, we don’t just talk about staying where we are, though; we talk of change, transformation, improvement, healing. And the thing is, that this loving steadfastness of God, it actually helps us change in a way that shame and hiding cannot. When we emerge from our hiding and let our deepest flaws see the light of day and feel God’s presence nonetheless still with us, then something alchemical happens. There is an effortless shift. It turns out God’s love is the cleansing agent, the healing agent that we needed. Rabbi Akiva says it is as if we are immersing ourselves in the mikvah of God (Mishnah Yoma 8:9). We let the healing waters of God’s grace hold us and love us as we are, and in that holding, we are somehow mysteriously transformed into something new. Maybe this is what the gemera means when it says that the day of Yom Kippur itself atones (Yoma 85b); once we relax into that loving container, there is an effortless cleansing and shifting that happens on its own. We are inexplicably healed by love. .
The Return to the Garden
Circling back to Adam, we might think of his trajectory this way: that it was his hiding – that first step away from connection – that ultimately led to his being exiled from the Garden and from God’s intimate presence. That is what happens. When our reaction to our own failings is to hide in shame, we set up a spiral of increasing disconnection and exile from presence, from presence with ourselves, with God and with others. Yom Kippur offers us a return, a teshuva, a return to this Garden of connection by standing before God and owning who we are and letting God see us and love us again, claiming ourselves and reconnecting. This is how we repair the connection that was severed in that Garden long ago, this is how we return to the Garden, transformed now into the Holy of Holies, that inner sanctum of intimacy with the divine that the High Priest enters only on Yom Kippur. We return to that level of intimacy – to the Garden of Eden and to the Holy of Holies – by allowing God to stand with us where we are, even in our shameful places, not turning away like Adam, but letting God stand with us there, connecting from that place, returning through our mistakes to that original place of intimacy. This is the work of redemption and repair that brings healing to each of us and to the world – a world which began in that Garden and is ever yearning to return to it.
Photo by Alex Andrews at Pexels
