Amazing Grace in a Graceless Time -- Kol Nidrei 5787

In March of 1748, a British slave trader named John Newton was returning to England from West Africa aboard a merchant ship called the Greyhound. 

Off the coast of Ireland, the Greyhound was caught in a violent storm. The vessel began taking on water, and Newton was convinced he was going to die. Although he had long since abandoned the religious faith in which he had been raised, he cried out for God to save him.

Miraculously, the ship survived. Newton would remember that night for the rest of his life as the beginning of his return to faith. He eventually became an Anglican minister and an abolitionist, and wrote the words to one of the most famous hymns in the English language: "Amazing Grace."

At the heart of the hymn is a simple claim: God’s goodness is not reserved for those who deserve it. That is grace -- kindness offered not as a reward, but as a gift.

Of course, grace may be easier to sing about than to practice. And these days, it can feel as though we are living in a particularly graceless time. 

We have seemingly become quicker to outrage, and slower to forgiveness, more interested in being right than maintaining relationships. We more readily bear grudges and even seek vengeance. 

Lord knows I don’t need to tell you how prevalent this gracelessness has become in our politics. And don’t even get me started on social media. 

But perhaps more troublingly, I increasingly see it in our more intimate relationships – among parents and children, between spouses, among siblings and friends.

And if I can be honest, I experience it in my own work as a rabbi. I love being a rabbi, and I love being your rabbi. I would not trade it for anything. 

But I also carry more anxiety about this work than I usually let on. I try to write and speak intentionally and thoughtfully, knowing that in a large and diverse community like ours, not every word will land the same way for everyone. 

Still, sometimes people are hurt by something I say. Sometimes they’re hurt by something I do not say -- or do not say soon enough or strongly enough. Sometimes it seems as though people forget that no one, not even a rabbi, is perfect; and no one can be everything to everyone all the time. 

I’m not asking for an exemption from criticism. On the contrary – I am mindful of the fact that a synagogue touches the most tender parts of our lives, and we turn to our rabbis in moments of crisis, celebration, conviction, and confusion. I want to meet you in those moments and to be worthy of the trust you place in me. It pains me deeply when I let any of you down; and so when you feel I've missed the mark, I need to hear it. 

Yet too often, I don’t hear it, at least not directly from the person I’ve disappointed. Instead, some grow disaffected, disengage, or even disaffiliate over these disappointments or differences. Tragically, relationships that might have been repaired or even strengthened can be burned beyond recognition in the crucible of resentment.

And I know this dynamic from the other side as well. When I am hurt or disappointed, I can do the same thing to someone else, reducing them to the hurt they caused me, severing or at least straining the relationship.

I suspect I am not alone. To be in relationship is eventually to disappoint and to be disappointed. 

But these days, we seem increasingly inclined to treat disappointment as revelation: Now I see who you really are. Sometimes that judgment is right. A single act can expose a pattern we had refused to acknowledge. But sometimes a hurtful word is not the sum total of the human being who spoke it. A failure can be real and consequential without being the only truth about a person or a relationship.

Several years ago, I read a book by the psychologist Michael McCullough called Beyond Revenge. McCullough argues that our ancestors didn’t always think of revenge and forgiveness as moral categories. Long before we thought about holding grudges or extending grace as behaviors that were right or wrong, good or bad, they were simply how humans evolved to respond to two different kinds of threats to our survival.

We evolved to hold grudges for a reason. If someone harms me, getting angry or retaliating imposes a cost. It tells the other person, and anyone watching, that I am not an easy target – making them think twice before doing something that might hurt me again.

But vengeance solves one survival problem by creating another. Human beings evolved in small, interdependent groups. Our ancestors needed relatives, allies, caregivers, and friends to raise children, confront danger, survive illness, and endure old age. Those relationships were too valuable to discard whenever one person disappointed or harmed another. So human beings evolved another capacity: the ability to inhibit vengeance when a relationship remained valuable and the risk of renewed harm had diminished. 

Grace, in this sense, is not the collapse of our defenses. It is another form of protection -- protection for the relationships upon which our lives depend.

Holding a grudge or taking revenge help us prevent possible harm in the future. Grace, on the other hand, helps us survive together right now.

The Torah's origin story for Yom Kippur is about what happens when both of these survival systems -- grace and vengeance -- are activated at once.

Weeks after being liberated from Egypt, only days after entering into covenant with God at Sinai, the Israelites panic in Moses's absence. They fashion a Golden Calf, bow before it, and proclaim, "This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt."

God sees the betrayal and says to Moses: "Now let Me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy them, and make of you a great nation."

God's response is understandable. Israel has violated the heart of the covenant almost immediately after accepting it. God follows the survival logic of vengeance: betrayal must be made costly, the threat eliminated, the failed covenantal partner replaced by someone more reliable.

But Moses implores God to relent. Why, he asks, should the Egyptians say that God liberated the Israelites only to murder them in the wilderness? Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Remember the promises You made to them.

Notice what Moses does not say. He does not claim that the people are innocent. Instead, he asks God not to let the people's wrongdoing become the whole story of the relationship. Moses widens the frame. Yes, there is this terrible act. But there is also a history, a promise, a relationship, and a possible future. The breach is real. But the relationship is bigger than the breach.

And God relents.

Then Moses descends the mountain and sees what God saw.

The Torah uses the same words to describe Moses's response that it had used for God's: va-yihar af -- his anger blazed. Moses smashes the tablets of the covenant at the foot of the mountain. He destroys the calf, grinds it into powder, scatters it over water, and makes the people drink the mixture. He summons the Levites and commands them to slaughter the idolaters. Three thousand people die. The man who had just persuaded God not to destroy Israel now participates in the destruction himself.

Yet after his rage subsides, Moses returns to God and once again intercedes for the people. "Forgive their sin," he pleads. 

As you can see, this is not a neat morality tale in which anger is wicked and forgiveness is easy. The Torah does not permit Moses -- or us -- to advocate for mercy only from the safety of a mountaintop. It places Moses inside the anger from which he had asked God to turn. It is one thing to tell someone else not to be so angry. It is another to feel that anger ourselves and nevertheless ask whether destruction must be the only possible outcome.

Then Moses makes a strange and audacious request: "Make known to me Your ways, that I may know You."

Why does Moses ask this now, in the aftermath of the Golden Calf episode? 

I hear Moses asking a leader's desperate question: How, God, did You do what I could not? Show me how, even after everything that happened, You were able to forgive.

God then passes before Moses and proclaims the words our tradition calls the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy. The ancient rabbis made this passage a central part of the High Holy Day liturgy, especially on Yom Kippur, when we return to these words again and again:

Adonai, Adonai, El rahum v'chanun, erekh apayim, v'rav hesed ve-emet / The Infinite, the Infinite, a compassionate and gracious God; slow to anger, abundant in love and loyalty;

Notzer hesed la’alafim, nosei avon va-pesha v’hata’ah v’nakeh / extending love to thousands; forgiving and absolving iniquity, transgression, and sin.

Rahum: “I am compassionate,” God says. “I am able to see more than the betrayal. I look at what happened and see a frightened, fragile people who have barely emerged from slavery, who panic when their leader disappears, and who reach for something they can see and touch.”

Erekh apayim: “I am slow to anger.” It's not that God never gets angry. It’s that God takes time between injury and reaction. Another way of translating the phrase is “patient.” Not every offense is a deliberate betrayal, and not every betrayal requires the same response. God takes the time to tell the difference before reacting.

V'rav hesed: “I am abundant in love.” Hesed is covenantal love -- the kind of love that remains committed to a relationship even and especially when that commitment is tested. 

Ve-emet: “And I am loyal.” Emet is often translated as “truth,” but here it is better understood as faithfulness -- being true to one's word. Moses has asked God to remember the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God remains true to those promises even when Israel has been false.

Then God reveals how God translates those character traits into concrete action: notzer hesed la-alafim, nosei avon va-fesha v’hata’ah v’nakeh -- “Because I am compassionate, gracious, patient, abundant in love, and loyal,” God is saying, “I extend love to thousands, forgiving and absolving iniquity, transgression, and sin.”

Moses asks to know God. God answers not by revealing a face or form, but by describing a way of acting. It's as though God is saying, “You want to know who I really am? Know Me by what I do when the covenant is broken.” 

And at the heart of this list of Divine attributes is perhaps God’s most definitive characteristic: V'hanun. God says, “I am gracious. I am kind even to those who may not deserve kindness.”

Why is God’s grace the key to unlocking the whole passage? Let’s look again at the order of events in the Golden Calf story: God relents from annihilating Israel before the people have confessed, before they have apologized. The people have not even begun to repent. What God grants first is a future in which reckoning, repair, and renewed covenant can become possible.

The High Holy Day liturgy makes the same audacious move. Near the beginning of our service tonight, after Kol Nidrei and before we have recited a single confession, we repeat three times God's answer to Moses after the sin of the spies: Vayomer Adonai: salahti kidvarekha -- “And God said: I have forgiven, as you have asked.” God does not say, “I may forgive” or “I will forgive.” God says salahti: “I have already forgiven.”

These are among the first words the Yom Kippur liturgy places in our mouths. We do not enter this day as defendants waiting to learn whether we will have earned a pardon by the time the gates close. We begin secure -- even joyful -- in the knowledge that God has already forgiven us.

This is the point at which some of us may begin to shift uneasily. Isn't forgiveness supposed to come after repentance? Why would God forgive someone who has not acknowledged the harm, apologized, made restitution, or changed? And more importantly, why should I? Doesn't anything else simply let the person off the hook?

That objection is both deeply understandable, and deeply Jewish. Our tradition teaches that when we deceive, humiliate, exploit, or injure another person, we are obligated to apologize, make restitution, demonstrate that they have changed, and seek forgiveness; and the injured party is under no obligation to forgive the person who has harmed them until the wrongdoer has sincerely taken these steps. God cannot and does not forgive on behalf of the person who was harmed. 

But what if the apology never comes? What if the other person never changes? 

Must the offender’s refusal keep me yoked forever to the injury they caused? If my only path out depends entirely upon their teshuvah, then the person who harmed me retains a disturbing amount of power over my future.

Grace opens another possibility. I don’t have to deny the wrongdoing. I don’t have to forever forget the injury or lower my guard against it happening again. But I can still refuse to make bearing the grudge or exacting vengeance on the wrongdoer the organizing principle of my life. I can unclench my jaw, take a deep breath, and lower the temperature. I can remember that the person who harmed me may be carrying burdens I cannot see and may be trying to do the best they can under circumstances I do not fully understand. I can remember that both they — and I — are imperfect, and afford them some of the gentleness that I might want for myself. And ultimately, I can decide that what they did will remain part of my story without permitting it to author every chapter that follows. 

That kind of grace cannot be demanded from outside or imposed on someone else's timetable. For some injuries, it may take years. For some, it may never be possible. But when it is possible, it is an expression of the freedom with which we human beings are uniquely and inherently endowed, an aspect of our having been created in the image of a God who is above all fundamentally and absolutely free.

Perhaps this is what Moses learns when God says shortly after the Golden Calf episode, “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious.” God's response to injury is not dictated by the injury alone. Rather, God’s absolute freedom means that God can act from covenant, compassion, and kindness, not only from woundedness. And thank God God can and does possess and exercise that freedom, for without it, I think that none of us would survive God’s judgment.

Yet grace does not necessarily mean that the relationship simply goes back to the way it was before the injury occurred. After the Golden Calf is destroyed, Moses goes back up the mountain. There, God instructs him to carve a second set of tablets. The first tablets are not repaired. Innocence is not restored. The second tablets are carved after rage, violence, consequence, and intercession.

According to rabbinic tradition, Moses descended from Sinai carrying those second tablets on Yom Kippur. In other words, this day is sacred not because it celebrates an untouched covenant among flawless partners. On the contrary, Yom Kippur is the anniversary of a relationship surviving its worst betrayal.

We sometimes say that Yom Kippur gives us a clean slate. The Torah's image is close to that, but a bit more honest -- there are shattered tablets and replacement tablets. What happened cannot be undone. But it also does not have to be the end of the story.

Even the Yom Kippur liturgy follows that sequence. Before Kol Nidrei, we declare that we are permitted to pray with avaryanim -- sinners. We do not make communal belonging a reward granted for complete repentance. We grant one another a place to stand even while repentance is still incomplete. That act of grace, that gesture of belonging, is what makes repentance and change possible. 

And note that even though the grammar of that declaration might tempt us to hear, "I am permitted to pray with them," it also invites us to recognize that all of us are likely also someone else's "them." Each of us falls short of someone else's hopes and standards. A community reserved only for people who have never disappointed one another would be an empty room.

At the same time, grace is not the same as restored trust. It is not permission for continued harm. Trust must be re-earned. Safety may require distance. Some relationships cannot and should not continue. And no one else gets to impose forgiveness upon the injured or dictate its timetable.

But relationships worth preserving cannot be preserved by accountability alone. Every marriage, friendship, family, congregation, and community is composed of imperfect people who will sometimes fail one another. 

That does not mean pretending no harm was done. It means refusing to allow every failure to have the final word, which is precisely why, wherever safety and integrity permit, we all need as many openings as possible for return, for repair, and perhaps even for reconciliation. 

Which brings us back to the words we will recite repeatedly throughout Yom Kippur:

Adonai, Adonai, El rahum v'chanun, erekh apayim, v'rav hesed ve-emet.

The Talmud imagines God wrapping Godself in a tallit like a prayer leader and teaching Moses this litany of Divine attributes. Whenever Israel sins, God says, ya'asu lefanai ka-seder ha-zeh -- "Let them enact this order before Me, and I will forgive them."

Notice the verb the Talmud uses: ya'asu, let them enact this. The Thirteen Attributes are something we are supposed to do, not merely something we are supposed to say. These are not magic words we intone to persuade God to have mercy on us. Rather, they are a pattern of moral action we are called to remember, emulate, and practice ourselves, toward one another.

The familiar myth of “Amazing Grace” is that a slave trader encounters God's grace in a storm, abandons the slave trade, becomes a minister, writes a famous hymn, and devotes the rest of his life to abolition. It is a powerful story. But it also turns out to be only partially true.

After surviving the storm and turning back toward God, Newton returned to the slave trade. Over the next five years, he served first as an officer on a slave ship and then as captain on three more slave-trading voyages. He left the sea only after suffering a medical crisis. He became a minister a decade later. And when he wrote "Amazing Grace" in late 1772, he still had not publicly denounced the slave trade.

That took another sixteen years. In 1788, forty years after the storm, Newton finally published a forceful account of the horrors he had witnessed and helped perpetrate, becoming an important ally of the British abolitionist movement.

When we hear, "I once was lost, but now am found," it is easy to imagine that "now" as a single instant. In Newton's life, that "now" took decades. Grace did not transform him automatically, and his long delay remains part of his moral record. Grace did not do his teshuvah for him. It did not erase his past, excuse his complicity and involvement in that crime against humanity, or entitle him to the forgiveness of the people he helped enslave.

What grace gave Newton, why he declared grace to be “amazing,” was the ability to forge a future in which he could become someone different than what he had been, even though he was not yet deserving of that opportunity. For far too long, he failed to live up to the possibility promised by that gift. But it also provided him the opportunity to ensure that his worst acts were not his final ones.

The same is true for us. God is not gracious towards us on Yom Kippur because our work is done. On the contrary, God grants us grace so our work can begin. And in that spirit, we are invited on this day to cultivate and practice that same possibility-opening, relationship-saving, life-giving grace toward others.

On this Yom Kippur, may the One who is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in covenantal love, help us cultivate those qualities within ourselves.

May we have the courage to name what has been broken, the strength to protect those who are vulnerable, the humility to repair what we have damaged, and the generosity to forgive what can be forgiven.

May we have the wisdom to distinguish a relationship that is unsafe from one that is wounded, and the freedom to refuse to let vengeance decide everything that happens next.

May our families, friendships, congregations, communities, and societies become sturdy enough to tell the truth without abandoning one another, to demand repair without foreclosing return, to survive the fact that they are made up of imperfect people.

And may the God who is gracious even when we are undeserving teach us to offer what grace we can, to receive it with humility, and to use the futures we are given to become different.

So may it be God's will. Amen.