Yom Kippur Morning sermon 5786, Malkhut
A Humble Human’s Address to the Divine Angelic Court
by Emily Herzlin
(For a larger print version, click here)
I want to begin by extending a tremendous thank you to all of you in this courtroom today, O Divine Angels of Judgment and Mercy, for this opportunity to address you, the Heavenly Court. Angels here in person, or joining in over the holy livestream, I wish you good morning, or good afternoon, or good ambiguous moment in this timeless celestial plane in which we are gathered here today.
It is truly awesome to be standing before you. You have to understand that up until a few years ago, I–like many liberal Jews–assumed you angels were only a Christian thing, and you really weren’t in my frame of reference. But as I’ve learned, you–angels, m’lachim, messengers–play a huge role in Judaism. Some of you act as the prosecutors or the defense attorneys for our human souls in the court of judgment today; some of you appear to announce good news; some of you provide protection, or halt bad behavior, or facilitate ethical behavior. Sometimes you angels are invisible to us humans and sometimes you take the form of humans. You angels are capable of radical, miraculous things.
I realize that I and all other human beings like me on this day of atonement have only become like you angels temporarily. Our dressing in white, our fasting and abstaining from other life-related practices are spiritual technology that elevate us in the direction of your angelic experience. And we get close! We are even allowed to say the quiet part of the Shema out loud today, a level of praise that is typically only reserved for the purest of celestial beings. Still, we aren’t actually angels today, that’s all you.
I am sure that today in particular is an especially full day on the docket here in the Court of the Angels, what with God’s sealing judgment on every single sheep of the human flock and all. So, let me get right to it.
I have come here before you to tell you something about what it’s like to be a human being right now. Let me give you a snapshot:
This past Fourth of July, my 3-year-old son couldn’t sleep. He shot up in his crib trembling, breathing fast. I tried to explain to him that it was a holiday, that people on the block were having a party outside, that the loud noises were fireworks, that he was safe inside. I even tried to show him the pretty lights through the window, but he couldn’t understand. He wanted me to stop the loud booming noises. I couldn’t. We snuggled in bed together. I felt the cortisol coursing through my body in response to his. Through a sliver of window between the curtains I could see flashes of yellow and green streaks. My anger surged with them into the night. My agitated thoughts churned through images of the parents of children in Gaza under rocketfire, parents of children in Israel huddling in bomb shelters, how they cannot tell their children that they are safe, how I couldn’t make them safe, either. I thought of the poem, No Explosions, by Palestinian poet Naomi Shihab Nye:
To enjoy
fireworks
you would have
to have lived
a different kind
of life.
I have lived a different kind of life. I do live a different kind of life. And that night I hated the neighbors. I hated the fireworks. I hated that I couldn’t stop them. All I could do was hold my child close and hope he fell asleep.
O Exalted Angels, I tell this story not because it is the worst thing that’s happened this past year, of course it is not. I tell it because it is representative of the venomous cocktail of moral outrage mixed with perceived powerlessness that so many of us are experiencing, atrocity after hourly atrocity. We protest, call our reps, sign petitions, boycott, listen empathically, donate what we can. And then we go grocery shopping, take care of our sick kid, write tomorrow’s lesson plan, go apple picking. Meanwhile we know that the atrocities continue while we live our lives. We compartmentalize in order to function. We say we are okay.
We are not okay.
Human souls are carrying with us varying degrees of moral injury. This affliction is one often experienced by combat veterans, as well as healthcare workers, but in this moment, my sense is that many of us humans are hurting, to varying degrees of severity, from moral injury. This affliction occurs when the human heart knows the right thing, but institutional constraints make it impossible. According to Rita Nakashima Brock, a leading scholar in the field of moral injury: moral emotions, such as guilt, shame, remorse, and outrage at others, result in broken trust, poor health, social isolation, and in extreme cases, self-harm.
I first heard the term “moral injury” in the late 2010s when I was working as a meditation teacher at a major New York City hospital. When the building where I worked went completely cashless–a discriminatory practice towards undocumented immigrants–there was nothing I could do to change it. When Black women patients told me their care team was ignoring their pain, there was nothing I could do to change it.
Every day I would do my job, knowing that the industry where I worked was discriminating, racist, ableist, the list goes on. I would try to do my work the best I could, put what good I could out there into the world. But I was having trouble sleeping, anxiety attacks, my temper got shorter. Burned out from healthcare, I sought a career change, one where I believed I would be able to escape the pain of moral distress.
Well, there is no escaping moral distress. Whether our hearts are awake or asleep, our neshamot, our human souls, know and feel the effects of the times we are living through–how much we wish we could change, and how little it seems sometimes that we actually can.
We Jews understand that our inner work of prayer and repentance is not enough–we know we must combine it with the outer work of enacting justice. As the Talmud teaches, “Whoever is able to protest against the wrongdoings of the world and does not do so is punished for the wrongdoings of the world.”
O Angels of Judgment, I ask you: what happens when human beings cannot effectively fulfill acts of justice? When the wrongdoings we must protest against are as innumerable as the stars in the heavens? Just as you Divine Angels tremble on this day, I tremble with fear on this day, knowing that my efforts this past year to right the injustices I see around me have been drops in the bucket at best, negligent at worst, and either way, obviously ineffective. With no disrespect intended, I am not as afraid of being judged by this heavenly court as I am of what seems like an inevitable consequence of all this defeat: that our neshamot, our souls, will become irreversibly saturated and weighed down by despair and complacency.
I keep thinking of an image from the Talmud describing the post-mortem punishment for one who was excommunicated: a huge boulder is placed on top of their coffin, so that when the Messianic Age arrives, they will be forever trapped in their coffin, unable to rise up and experience the world-to-come. I fear that the effects of prolonged moral injury are cutting us off from engagement with the community, and that our neshamot are becoming so weighed down that even in times of hope, we won’t be able to rise up when we are called to do so.
We cannot allow this to happen. Angels of Mercy, we need your help.
It is said that the human soul is extracted from the pure radiance of divine emanation. It is a divine spark that has been placed into a physical form. At our root, human beings are always connected to the Divine, just as you Angels are. The harm we cause and the harm we experience is part of the human package. But that concentrated drop of divine emanation, that divine spark within each of us, remains protected.
One of you Angels sitting among this assembly today knows all about that, don’t you? The one human in the Jewish tradition who literally became an angel. I myself was surprised to learn that it wasn’t Moses, it was Enoch, Hanoch, the great grandfather of Noah, who the Torah says “walked with God and was not.” I learned that the Jewish mystics interpreted this to mean that the human being Enoch was so righteous and pure that he became an angel, and was given the badass, Marvel-esque name, Metatron. Metatron is considered to be the highest of all the angels, higher than all y’all other angels here, (no offense), precisely due to his original circumstances as a human being. He lived in the messiness of humankind, and he found a way to not only stay connected to the radiance of his neshama, but to let it fill his being.
I understand that, having started out as a human, Metatron serves two roles in this assembly that only an angel with his level of compassion for human beings could fulfill: 1) as the head defense attorney today for all of our human souls, and 2) as a scribe, writing down the merits of human beings. His job is to maintain balance in the court of God’s opinion, while the prosecuting angel, Ha-Satan, tells God about all the bad stuff, of which there is plenty. O Angels of Judgment, if I’m being honest, I am not so worried about Ha-Satan convincing God. I am much more worried about Ha-Satan convincing human beings to give up, to let him place boulders on our neshamot.
I humbly approach this court today with three requests.
First: every morning we pray, “Elohai neshama shenatata bi tehorah hi. My God, the soul you have placed in me, it is pure.” We humans need you Angels of Mercy to turn our gaze, over and over and over again, as many times as it takes, towards the part of our being, the divine spark within us, that is pure, that is protected from despair. Practically speaking, we need you to read to us from Metatron’s scroll of good-things-about-humans. To whisper them into our ears more often. Or shout them! It’s noisy down here! We need your help to open our eyes so we see the goodness already happening in front of our faces! The teen baking bread for food insecure neighbors. The elder risking arrest protesting ICE. The exhausted parent organizing a queer affinity group. The home baker posting her award-winning challah on slack to bring joy to others. The teens collecting pet food and making pet beds to donate to hungry animals, collecting baby supplies for migrants in Queens. It is said that the energy of a mitzvah performed by a human being creates an angel-advocate whose role is to tell God good things about humans. I pray that us humans may in the future do a better job of hearing the voices of our angel-advocates. But in the meantime, our neshamot need the extra help.
My second request: just as you Angels are able to see the goodness of human beings, you also have the ability to witness and be with our pain. You wept when Abraham bound Isaac. You wept at the destruction of the Temple. There is a midrash that Metatron himself became so overwhelmed by witnessing God’s weeping at the destruction of the Temple that he pleaded with God to let him weep instead. God’s response to Metatron was, “If you don’t let me cry now, then I will go to a place where you do not have the ability to enter and I will cry.” Maybe Metatron’s human origins made it harder for him to hold space for grief than the other angels in his cohort. This has always been difficult for us humans, and it is especially hard when there is so much grief to hold. Human beings need to be able to mourn and grieve for the suffering of the world without shame, without stuffing it down inside our bodies. We need to behold it with honesty, and let it be beheld, to join with others in our grief and pain, to release the weight of it. We need your help, O Weeping Angels, to remember, from your example, that grief is holy, and cannot extinguish the spark of divine radiance instilled within the human soul, just as it does not distance the angels from the Holy Blessed One. I ask for you to help us see that the pain and brokenness we feel is not bad–it means that we are awake. For we would not feel this pain if it were not for the goodness and purity of our neshamot–which are in anguish at how far we are from Olam HaBa, the world to come.
My third and final request. It’s a big one. On this day ripe with possibility, when the gates are open and heaven is listening, I come before this heavenly court, with a proposal for a change to the cosmological order.
I hereby request, that effective this Yom Kippur, at the close of the gates at Neilah, human beings be permitted to retain a portion of our angelhood from this day: for us to remember that we human beings are rooted in goodness and moral clarity; to know that though we feel the pain of moral injury, our essential Divine Spark is protected and stands strong in the midst of it all; to remember that we are, at all times, messengers of God’s Divine will, not just through spectacular miracles, but through every single good thing we think, say, and do; to know that our choices made in alignment with our values are felt up in the heavens, and reverberate goodness throughout the earth, even if we on the earthly plane cannot see it in the moment from where we are standing. To help us remember that both despite and because of the pain of being human in this moment we are holy, powerful, wise, and ready.
So. Dear Angels. What do we say?