Revealed
Rabbi Noa Kushner
Kol Nidrei, 5782
September 15th, 2021
Revealed
1. The Question
Before Covid, we used to host a lot of groups of Israeli visitors in our home.
It was usually a group of about twenty five people, sometimes students, sometimes people through an organization. But every time they were there more or less to experience and try to understand ‘Jewish life in the US.’
Thankfully, they always asked me real questions, sometimes probing questions.
And I would do my best to explain things like, why we are called, “The Kitchen,” why we are not part of a denomination, and the kinds of holiness we’re trying to elicit in this world.
But invariably, a question would arise that would make everyone uncomfortable.
Now, when we go to Israel leading our groups, as in, god willing, when we go to Israel / Palestine this summer, we ask all kinds of questions.
But when our Israeli counterparts come here, it’s their turn to ask.
And the one thing they always ask is,
The one thing I cannot answer is
How, in the richest country, in the richest city, there can be so much blatant poverty, people desperate, with nothing, out in the open, blocks and blocks, areas blanketed with startling destitution? Their faces are distraught, confused.
They just saw it out the bus window.
They actually don’t understand.
And now, the room falls silent. Because they are seeing what we
have made invisible to ourselves.
They don’t have a choice.
They saw with their own eyes and now they cannot unsee.
And they trust me and they are in my house and I am supposed to
say something —
But I cannot explain it away.
2. Coffee Shop
It was just recently that I was standing on a corner near my street
waiting to meet a colleague,
And this person was late so I ended up waiting on that corner for a while.
Now there is a man outside of our coffee shop who I see most every time I go that direction, he sits there and asks for help.
Some days he looks better than others
But this day I experienced him differently
See, usually I see him briefly, when I am on my way and I give him something or I mumble an apology that I don’t have anything
Sometimes I am ashamed to admit I am in a rush and do nothing at all
But on this day I was standing across from him for like 20 minutes And, after we said hello, and engaged in a little small talk
I then had the experience of witnessing him greet, kindly, each
person as they went by —
“Hi Sunshine”
“Hi Champ”
“Hello Youngster”
Only to be ignored again and again, his request for help left unsaid,
again and again.
No one looked at him.
Most people looked down,
A few looked past
And I imagined their hearts beating a tiny bit faster from the energy it took to avoid any kind of interaction whatsoever.
To say I was increasingly uncomfortable would be an understatement.
No amount of looking at my phone could make this go away.
See, I was witnessing what it is like for a human being to be made invisible.
A willingness of everyone else, without reflection, without pause, to deny the basic reality of a breathing person next to them —
Who was there but somehow, no longer there at all.
3. Invisible
A lot of people have become invisible to us.
In fact, we’ve become accustomed to a whole class of people living on our streets, as if they’re an anonymous feature of our city, like a permanent skyscraper or seasonal, like the fog.
Their faceless presence an incontrovertible fact.
Something that requires our adjustment and not our dismay.
Instead, we steel ourselves when we go down the street,
And put blinders on when we drive around,
As if just recognizing these people as people is breaking some kind of taboo.
See, because once we recognize a poor person as a person —
We must then confront our own shame at how we’ve been running our city and living our lives.
So we close our eyes,
Re-attaching ourselves to the idea
That our financial standing points, somehow, to the fact we somehow deserve our security.
That our financial standing means we don’t need anyone and he shouldn’t either.
That the idea of our needing each other itself is altogether suspect
And that we all must be self reliant —
and good luck to those who don’t make it the cut.
And it is this way of thinking, this unchallenged dogma that we are each alone
And that our safety depends, strangely, on our being self sufficient
This dogma is what’s threatened when we encounter someone on the street.
Not just because there’s a person who needs something, needs us —
But because our flimsy dogma of self protection is absolutely shredded in the face of another’s pain.
In that moment we understand the utter failure of the “every man for himself” approach to the world.
It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for anyone. It starves us all.
Not just because there is not just someone else who needs us Because we need — we need each other.
You see, in making yet another person invisible, we have become invisible ourselves.
4. Out of Sight
A long time ago in our family story We also made a person invisible.
Long ago, we were also worried there wasn’t enough to go around — In this case it wasn’t money like today but love,
Our ancestors, brothers, were worried there wasn’t enough of their father’s love.
Back then there were twelve brothers Joseph was the odd one out.
And it wasn’t even because of the pretty coat their father Jacob gave only him,
(although, let’s face it, all the brothers secretly wanted that coat)
It was the way Jacob used the coat to shower Joseph, and only Joseph, with love, as if their souls were tied together. (1)
Maybe that’s why
One day when the brothers were together
And Joseph just showed up a few days later, as he always did, out of sync
Wearing that coat, always in the coat —
Maybe that’s why something had to give.
Something had to be done.
And so they pushed him down, down, into a pit, away, out of sight.
It wasn’t hard, he was just one person
and I don’t know about you
but it makes me kind of wonder why all ten of them had to do it.
Not to mention, at least from Torah, Joseph didn’t even put up a fight,
Almost as if if he wasn’t in his body.
He didn’t say a word or maybe Torah just didn’t record what he said, we really
don’t know.
He might have cried out, it’s hard to say, no one seems to remember (2)
All we know is that after it was done
The brothers just sat and ate together as they always did.
They didn’t hear a thing or if they did, they just moved away, (3)
Maybe their hearts beating just a bit faster.
And just then, a caravan came by, traders
And it just seemed easier to sell Joseph away.
There’s no record of what Joseph said or didn’t say when the traders took him from the pit
If he tried to grab onto anyone’s clothes —
If he asked a question or cried or just gave in limp and lifeless.
All we know is he just disappeared down, down the road, sold, away, out of sight.
“Maybe,” they thought to themselves, "He wanted to go —
I mean, he was already pretty much gone by then, you know?”
5. We are the Brothers
We usually like to imagine ourselves as Joseph, talented and beloved and well accessorized and victimized —
But it seems to me we’re really more like the brothers these days
The brothers who, through force or commerce
Push Joseph out of their frame of vision
Reinforcing the idea that there is not enough to go around
As if by making him invisible, they will then be more safe, more secure,
and more loved
As if by making him invisible, no harm will come to them.
6. Silence
After that day and after those events
As my teacher Avivah Zornberg points out
A great and expansive silence settles on these brothers and this family. (4)
Twenty two years of silence.
An uneasy stasis.
No one mentions the real events of that day —
The original violence now superseded by the accumulating, crushing weight of the secret that followed it.
The Torah doesn’t talk about it
But I have to wonder
Did Joseph’s memory ever get invoked?
Were there times when one of the brothers slipped and mentioned the taboo name?
Or did they have to look away, their hearts beating faster when the thought of him — their irrefutable connection to him — crossed their minds?
7. Angels
Recently, scholars decided to reveal a hidden angel, obscured behind a layer of paint in a famous painting by Vermeer, “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window.”
While the angel had long been acknowledged as fact, thanks to x-ray technology
And while changing paintings is a controversial, fraught topic among experts
Technicians recently agreed that the paint that was used to cover this angel
Was not applied by the artist himself, as previously thought. (5)
What I’m saying is,
They now believe someone else painted over the now hidden angel long after the artist finished the work
“A distortion by a a foreign hand” (6)
And so, they are carefully removing the invasive paint
Revealing the divinity that was always there
Always intended to be there by the artist
And indeed — now when we look at this painting along with others by Vermeer
We see that very same angel, a cupid actually, is in two other similar paintings and it seems obvious that the
“Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window”
Is not a girl standing in front of a giant blank wall but instead Is and has always been standing
In no small way
Under heaven.
8. תְּשׁוּבָה redux
When we think of תְּשׁוּבָה
What we usually translate awkwardly
as “turning” or “returning” or “repentance” or “making amends”
“Righting a wrong!”
Or “Getting Back with the Program!”
When we think of תְּשׁוּבָה
Too often we imagine fixing something:
Like taking medication, or dressing a wound
Giving something broken some extra attention
Like a supplement in some kind of moral smoothie
Surely having the power to boost us into a righteous state once again.
But Rav Kook teaches that ְשׁוּבָהתּ is not something we add or take on to make ourselves better.
It’s not a tune-up, not a splint.
No — ְשׁוּבָהתּ is nothing less than a removal of all the lies we tell ourselves
תְּשׁוּבָה is our admission that our current view of the world and
ourselves is obstructed, clouded
What I’m saying is
is accessing the life-energy of existence itself תְּשׁוּבָה
Revealing the truth that
We are not separate, self sufficient beings at all,
not separate from heaven and not separate rom each other (7)
Instead
We need and depend on each other
Fundamentally, utterly, indisputably, and completely
This is the truth we have turned away with all kinds of lies
And this is the truth ְשׁוּבָהתּ reveals
And so you see, once we start from this place, this truth
Of needing and being needed
It is literally a different way of being in the world.
The old silences are impossible
We hear too much, we cry too much Everything is changed
And the angels are all out in the open.
9. GLIDE and Spiritual Restitution
Many of you know, The Kitchen has an ongoing relationship with GLIDE
There’s an incredible group of dedicated Kitchen-ites who go with regularity
And I am proud and I have and I will continue to encourage all of us to find our places there —
But with our conversation about social restitution, civic restitution I also want us to talk about our spiritual restitution.
What I am saying is that our ְשׁוּבָהתּ is not on the side
What I am saying is that our ability to stop pretending we’re independent and separate
Has everything to do with if and how we take part in the GLIDE community.
When we asked what she needed,
Juliana DiPietro, the head of Harm Reduction at GLIDE said,
“I’ve lived in large cities, I’ve lived in a lot of places.
The disparities are wider here than anywhere.
The amount of people walking by other people,
not seeing,
not seeing who is sitting on sidewalk,
not seeing who is getting beat up,
not seeing who is in the midst of assault, it is beyond words.
If I could offer one thing, it would be for more people to be alive to another’s pain
and not to deaden yourself.
To allow yourself to see and be seen."
I promise to give a list of things we can do (!)
But this Kol Nidrei
Without a complete תְּשׁוּבָה
Where we understand we are not separate at all
Without a 1:1 תְּשׁוּבָה
A face to face תְּשׁוּבָה
The kind of ְשׁוּבָהתּ where our world view shifts so fundamentally, it is no longer possible for us to keep acting in the the old, self protective ways
Without a ְשׁוּבָהתּ that hangs the old lies out to dry
That removes our masks
Our city will not change.
I promise I will give you things to do — be patient!
But I have come to believe that this social crisis, this economic crisis
This crisis of unimaginable disparity
Is so pervasive and so, accepted
It requires our spiritual attention
It requires us to reveal all the lies we’ve been telling ourselves for so long.
10. Cries Heard
After twenty two years
Cracks begin to show in the calibrated silence of Joseph’s family.
That is to say, when, twenty two years later, Joseph’s brothers are falsely framed as thieves,
When false accusations come their way
The brothers are not offended or insulted at the mistake.
Rather, their confessions start pouring out Not based not on the present but the past
They start confessing their old crime, the one that’s been suppressed covered up all these years.
And in a moment of what I’ll call Torah Karma —
The brothers believe, no, they know
They’re being paid back for what they did to Joseph when they were young
As the rabbis say,
“The debtor has come to collect the debt."8
You see
It seems to dawn on the brothers, finally
— perhaps, on that day long ago, Joseph did cry out9 (!)
“Of course,” say the rabbis:
“Is it possible that Joseph saw himself being sold and was silent?! No. He threw
himself at the feet of each one and begged for compassion.”10
Joseph did cry out, it’s just that they only now hear it.
You see, I know, as you know,
A cry cannot remain unheard forever
It is not possible.
It ricochets around the world until it is heard.
So that now, twenty two years later
The brothers begin to hear and understand
That just as they could not suppress his cries —
Neither could they suppress the truth
They were and had always been connected to him,
and he to them
Fundamentally, utterly, indisputably, completely connected to each other.
11. Judah Doesn’t Have a Plan
The Hasidim ask:
How do you know when you have been forgiven for a sin? When you don’t do it again. (11)
And indeed, Judah, one of Joseph’s brothers
Twenty two years later
After hearing those cries
When presented with a similar set of circumstances
A situation where he could save himself but yet hurt another brother,
This time Benjamin
Rather than abandoning Benjamin
This time Judah steps forward and risks his life for Benjamin.
But, we notice, in fact, according to the Sfat Emet
When Judah steps forward and risks his life
Making this big, long speech
In front of a person he thinks is a government official but is actually Joseph, his long lost brother
In that speech
“[Judah] just starts talking, he offers nothing new in his words, nor does he have a good claim...” (!) (12)
In other words
It’s pretty clear
He’s got nothing! No great argument! No plan! He doesn’t have a plan at all!
In fact, all Judah’s got is the knowledge that he cannot keep going on as he has been another moment.
All Judah knows is
That the costs of the lie of self sufficiency
His father’s anguish, his brother’s life
As Avivah Zornberg teaches,
Not only is it too much to bear —
It was always too much to bear. (13)
And this is the truth that comes through.
And then something happens —
when Judah speaks, giving his long speech, beginning his תְּשׁוּבָה
Joseph cannot withhold himself any longer,
he can no longer hide
And as Judah moves closer to who he is
The Sfat Emet teaches
Joseph meets him there
Joseph meets him there in that place of truth.
Maybe, in our ְשׁוּבָהתּ, like Judah, we also don’t need a master plan with everything all figured out
Maybe we just need to refuse to act as if we are separate and disconnected —
Maybe we just refuse to sustain that anguish another day
Maybe this will be enough to allow us to act, to get us in the door
12. GLIDE, 2
See, once we understand we’re not doing favors by going to GLIDE We’re not polishing up the ol’ moral resume
Once we understand we’re reinforcing the connections between us in our fair city
Seeing and being seen
Helping to create human infrastructure
We might then join GLIDE’s Organizer Wes Saver and our
Organizational partner at The Kitchen, Avital Raff to involve
ourselves in the legislative process
And push our city to get more people housed
We might join the call for the city to continue to acquire hotels and ensure they remain or become permanent housing.
Keep all the Shelter in Place hotels operational and filled, without vacancies.
Or we might join a campaign to address racist policing practices in our city
To curtail pretext stops over things like broken tail-lights
Talk about people being invisible
We’re setting up calls so you can get involved
Or we might take a shift as many have already done.
George Gundry, who runs the Kitchen at GLIDE
Whom many Kitchen-ites know, says he needs 2-3 people who can come
Tuesdays and Thursdays for 6 AM or 9 AM shifts
A link will go out after the holiday or you can add your name or any and all of it when you leave tonight.
You don’t need all the answers, you just have to be ready to see other and be seen. You just have to give us your name.
13. Don’t Steal From Yourself
Finally, a last story.
Rabbi Yehiel Meir went to his teacher in Kotzk for Sukkot.
When he came home, his father in law asked him, “Well, did the students there receive Torah differently than anywhere else?”
“Why, yes!” said the son-in-law.
“What do you mean?” The father-in-law asked.
“Well, for example,” said Rabbi Yehiel, “How do you here interpret, the commandment, ’Do not steal?’”
“Simple. That you should not steal from another,” answered the father-in-law. “That’s perfectly clear.”
“But in Kotzk,” Rabbi Yehiel replied, “Not only do they not steal from one another, they also teach, ‘Don’t steal from yourself.’”
You see, for all these years, not only had the brothers stolen from Joseph
Joseph had stolen from himself.
He had accepted a version of himself as invisible,
the one imposed on him so long ago
He had left the shocked and betrayed young person that he was Somewhere back in that pit, somewhere on the caravan. (14)
He had kept the pact of silence, just like his brothers, for years
But now that one brother broke the pact
Not only does Joseph cry
Sobbing so entirely and completely that his cries are heard all over town, all the way to the Pharaoh’s palace (15)
Not only does Joseph cry
I am convinced
Now he could, for the first time, hear himself crying, from long ago That is, those cries that had ricocheted, homeless,
around the world for so long
finally found their place
And I believe Joseph caught those lost cries in his throat.
And then, in his moment of ְשׁוּבָהתּ, he hurled them back into the room with great force
And as loud and as painful as they were to hear, his cries didn’t destroy anyone.
Everyone heard his cries this time and so, helped to carry them:
Joseph heard them,
His brothers heard them
The Pharaoh heard them
I believe Jacob, his father, heard them from his place
Truth itself heard them
And God, weeping, heard them too.
Footnotes
See Genנַפְשׁ֖וֹ קְשׁוּרָ֥ה בְנַפְשֽׁוֹ“ ,44:30”
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep, p. 300. I am indebted to my teacher for her reading of Ramban.
See Chizkuni to Gen. 37:25
See Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep, Chapter 10: “The Pit and the Rope,” especially p. 297-301
Catherine Hickley, “A Vermeer Restoration Reveals a God of Desire,” NY Times, September 9, .2021
6 “It was clear the top layer of paint wasn’t by Vermeer. It was a distortion by a foreign hand against the intention of the artist.” Stephan Koja, director of the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden, Germany.
See: Abraham Isaac Kook, The Lights of Penitence, trans. Ben Zion Bokser. Also, Song of Teshuva, Rav Moshe Weinberger (Commentary on Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook's Oros HaTeshuva). w/ thanks to Mikey Lebrett for this source via Safaria.
Bereisheet Rabbah 92:9
See Zornberg, p. 300 and Gen. 42:21
Bereisheet Rabbah 91:8 to 42:21
Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Vol. 2: 253
Vayigash, 1:246, 1:248, 1:249. Green, ed., trans. Sfat Emet, The Language of Truth, p. 69, via Avivah Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep, p. 307
Zornberg, p. 306-7.
Zornberg, p. 297, 303-304.
Genesis 45:2
