"This Thing Is Not in Heaven"

The following d'var torah was delivered on Yom Kippur morning at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan.

We often translate Yom Kippur as the Day of Atonement. When I was a kid, I didn’t know what the word “atonement” meant, and I was taught that it means “making up for your mistakes.” And so from an early age, I learned that Yom Kippur is a day about our mistakes, our shortcomings, our sins. Look at our High Holiday prayer book: We pound on our chests during the Ashamnu prayer, as we quite literally beat ourselves up over all that we’ve done wrong this year. We come to synagogue and we find ourselves neck-deep a litany of our own guilt—pages upon pages of “The sin we have committed against you,” and “Our alphabet of woes.” “Dear God,” we exclaim, “forgive us, for we stand guilty before you.”

I’d like to suggest that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the true message of Yom Kippur is not one of guilt, but rather one of hope. On Yom Kippur morning, we open the Torah and read what is for me the message of the High Holiday season: “Lo vashamayim hi—this thing is not in heaven.” This thing—this hard work of self-examination, this striving to be our best selves, this beautiful, challenging, ambiguous work of transforming ourselves and transforming our broken world—this thing is not in heaven. Lo vashamayim hi is the Torah’s way of saying “Yes we can.” “Yes, life is a challenge, and yes, we choose to accept it, and yes, it is going to be hard, and yes, we can do it.”

While the ancient Egyptians had their priests and the ancient Greeks had their oracles to communicate between the people and the gods, the ancient Israelites declared Lo vashamayim hi—this thing is not in heaven. When the age old feelings of doubt and guilt creep up and cloud our vision, when we feel immobilized by old habits and stuck in our ways, the words of our tradition burst forth and remind us Lo vashamayim hi—this thing is not in heaven. Your relationship with whatever you believe God to be, your sense of self-worth, your ability to be the best You that you can be—these things are not in heaven. “No,” the Torah declares, “they are right here—in your mouth and in your heart, and you can do them.”

Don’t get me wrong: saying "lo vashamayim hi," declaring that “this thing is not in heaven” does not imply that life is going to be easy. As I’m sure almost all of us have experienced, it’s a lot easier to promise that this year I’m going to be more patient or more attentive than it is to actually do so. We leave the walls of the synagogue on Yom Kippur afternoon and fall back into our old habits. Lo vashamayim hi asserts that we can face life’s challenges not by setting unrealistic, sky-high goals, but rather by taking everyday, concrete steps. In her book The Creative Habit, dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp gives the following example. Tharp writes:

“I begin each day of my life with a ritual. I wake up at 5:30 am, put on my workout clothes, walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym, where I work out for two hours.

“The ritual is not the stretching and the weight training each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go, I have completed the ritual.”

Tharp’s example shows that it’s not the workout that’s the hard part—it’s the getting out of bed. For most of us, myself included, working out two-hours-a-day is a goal that is way up in heaven. Similarly, to always be humble, or to never be angry—these goals are way up in heaven, unreachable even for the most emotionally aware people among us. We shouldn’t strive to never be angry. Rather, we should work, day by day, to cultivate the ability to recognize when our anger is arising in us, where it’s coming from, and to decide, moment by moment, if anger is the feeling we want to express right now. This kind of goal is not way up in heaven—lo vashamayim hi. “No, it is are right here, in your mouth and in your heart, and you can do them.”

Here’s what no one ever taught me as a child. The word “Kippur” doesn’t just mean “atonement.” It also means “forgiveness.” Yom Kippur—the Day of Forgiveness. Yom Kippur—not the day upon which we set unrealistic goals and then beat ourselves up when we don’t meet them, but rather the day upon which we forgive ourselves for being human. My hope for all of us, as we begin this new year of 5774, is that before the sun goes down tonight, as you’re asking others for forgiveness, that you’ll also make the space to forgive yourself. Because this thing—this beautiful, challenging, transformative work of forgiveness—this thing is not in heaven.