Yom Kippur sermon two

Yom Kippur Morning 2013

Rabbi Mordecai Yosef Leiner (1801-1854), the Ishbitzer Rebbe, was a radical, idiosyncratic and indeed iconoclastic thinker and Hasidic teacher. He was the most novel thinker to emerge from the most radical school of hasidic thought, that of Kotzk-Przysuch, sometimes referred to as 'the Polish-School'

The Ishibitzer was a colleague-disciple of Kotzker Rebbe, more often known as Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787-1859). Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk was in turn the disciple of Simcha Bunim of Peshisha (1765-1827). Together these three great teachers provided leadership to this most innovative of hassidic communities. After the deaths of the Ishbitzer in 1854 and Rabbi Mendel in 1859, the radicalism of their movement ceased and it became like any other hasidic dynasty. Indeed by the middle of the 19^th century the early light and fire of the hasidic movement had largely gone out.

But for a while, maybe as much as sixty years, the hasidic school of Kotzk-Przysuch was radical indeed. Somewhat anti-nominal these three leaders, and their hasidim were concerned more with the deeper meanings of the halakhah than with a minute details of its extremities. They were also radical in liturgical terms as well making alterations to the siddur and attempting to really pray the prayers (a concern shared by other early hasidic groups as well).

There teachings are challenging, not so much because they are intellectually difficult but because of what the implications are. It is not by chance that many of the sayings of these three teachers are recorded in both Liberal and Reform prayer books. But their teachings are not just challenging, they also reflect the personal challenges these three teachers faced, ones that were reflected in contemporary and latter western philosophy and philosophers, such as Soren Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and latter the existentialist.

All three, Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshisha, the Kotzker, and the Ishbitzer face problems of Jewish life and Judaism which are all too recognisable to us today. Rabbi Simcha Bunim, for example, was trained as a pharmacist, wore western dress and even attended treater performances. He was very concerned with how an authentic and meaningful Jewish life could be continued in the modern-world, his successor the Kotzker was also concerned with authenticity although in his writings his concern with authenticity has been transformed into a burning concern with אמת truth. For Rabbi Menachem Morgensztern anything short of the complete truth was falsehood and tantamount to idolatry.

What we have of the writings of all three of these teachers is from their students, they wrote nothing first had themselves. While the records of Simcha Bunim and the Kotzker are short and in a simply (very easily accessible style) those of the Ishbitzer recorded in the two volumes of the Mei HaShiloach are couched in complex language and though the prism of kabbalah and kabbalistic metaphor. Although unsurprisingly in the hands of the Ishbitzer familiar kabbalistic concepts take on new (and sometimes radically different meanings).  

This is the most palpable feeling I took away from studying some of his writings, the sense of the 'shock of the old'.

In his re-reading of Biblical Narratives, characters who are normally presented negatively, Esau, Zimri (whom you may remember was stabbed though the loans by Pinchas) and indeed others.

Such a radical re-taling of Biblical narratives from an unusual perspective is both useful and I would say necessary because familiarity the feeling that we remember what the Bible says, or what we think it says.

Can blind us to what it actually has to say to us, here and now. Familiarity does indeed bread contempt.

On Rosh HaShanah we are unlikely to hear the radical theological challenge of the Akadah, because we have hard it read so many times and know before we even start that in the end God will intervene and Isaac will not be sacrificed.

Today's Torah reading(s) also offer the challenge of familiarity parts of readings at least will be familiar, or even very familiarly from the liturgy both traditional parts and, indeed new parts in Liberal and Reform prayer books. Parts might even be familiar from popular culture such as the opening monolog of Transporting.

But wether our reading is familiar or less familiar it still carries a powerful and radical message. One addressed both to the individual, but also to the community to which that individual (that we belong). A message of the conditionality of the covenant, but a message that reassures that not only is power to act within our hands it is within our very being.

God begins his address to the Israelites, though Moses by saying, You (in the plural) and then listing the types of people, in summary Everyone was there. Then there is a rather unusual verse:

 And not only with you do I make this sworn covenant, but with those who are standing here with us       today before the Eternal One our God, and equally with those who are not here with us today.

The classical commentators ask, reasonably enough if everyone was standing before God, who are these others? And one of the answers offered is that they are future generations, us included.

 Just as during Passover and the Sader the individual is meant to feel 'as if', they personally had been redeemed from Egypt.

 

Here too, the individual can (maybe even should) feel as if the choice of entering into the covenant, or not had been set before them.

 No, it is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it.

 

And as Simcha Bunim and the Kotzker would have argued it is a personal and personally authentic covenant.

On the subject of Teshuvah (repentance) the Ishbitzer was again unusual in his thinking he did not really think of sins as a problem. For him what was the real problem was the belief that once you had sinned that was that. Indeed for the Ishbitzer this was Adam Harisson's sin. Not eating from the tree, not blaming eve but the belief that once he had sinned that was it.

Again as our reading this Yom Kippur reminded us, the ability for returning is within us all.

 Gamar Hatimah Tovah.