Rabbi Kanter’s Message on Erev Yom Kippur
[This drashah was given on October 11, 2024]
According to a midrashic collection, Vayikra Rabba, wherever King David tried to walk, his feet would lead him to a holy place. David said: ‘Ribono shel Olam, every day I would plan my route and say: I am going to this place or to that home. But then my feet would bring me to a beit knesset, synagogue or a beit midrash, a study hall.’”
The Sefat Emet understands this midrash in a beautiful way. He says that King David did not actually wind up in a beit knesset or beit midrash every time he headed out for a walk. Rather, he was able to find or reveal holiness wherever his feet took him, such that whatever place he was in became holy. There is holiness to be found wherever we go, even in the most unlikely places, if we have the eyes to see it. (With thanks to Hazzan Jenna Greenberg on Parshat B’chukotai)
This past June, we spent shabbat with my brother, Rabbi Rafi Kanter, and his family, when his shul in New Bedford, MA honored him shortly before his retirement. In attendance at that shabbat morning service were various pastors and ministers who he had worked with over the years.
After the service at the kiddush, one of the pastors stood up to speak. He said how delighted he was to be at the synagogue for the service and for the celebration. Reason number one: I have some things I’d like to share about Rabbi Rafi Kanter and am glad to have the opportunity to do so. Reason number two – and I hope its ok – I’ll be using the comments on the torah portion that I learned today, as my sermon for church tomorrow morning. And then he went on to talk about my brother.
Like the Sfat Emet’s teaching about King David, this pastor was not afraid to embrace holiness or inspiration wherever he found it. But often that is not the case. There is a tendency to fear people who are different from us, or to be suspicious of outsiders and what they say. If you read Jewish history, it makes sense that Jews might fall prey to this tendency, given what Jews have suffered at the hands of others. But that is not the torah’s approach. The essential teaching of the torah is “welcome the stranger, because you know the heart of the stranger, having been one yourself.’
The book of Jonah, that we will read tomorrow afternoon, takes it a step further. God calls Jonah, an Israelite prophet, to go to the people of Nineveh in Assyria, and tell them they must repent their evil deeds. But Jonah doesn’t want to have anything to do with these strangers, the Ninevites, so he tries to run away from God, and from the mission God has given him.
A professor of mine, Dr. Steven Copeland of Hebrew College, noticed something striking: The 4 letters that make up Jonah’s name, yud vav nun hey, are the same 4 letters that make up the word Nineveh, nun yud vav hey. Jonah, and the people he wants nothing to do with, are literally made from the same stuff.
Having the same letters make up the names of both is the Bible’s way of saying: Jonah, it’s not just that you and your fellow human beings are made from the same mold. It is more than that: your fellow human beings have a claim on you; you are responsible for them. Jonah and the Ninevites are all human beings, called by God to become a higher, better version of themselves: Jonah, by journeying to Nineveh and proclaiming the need for the city to repent, and the Ninevites through answering that challenge, and choosing to undertake a process of teshuva.
After being swallowed and subsequently spit out from the big fish, Jonah stops trying to run away and reluctantly fulfills his mission, but he still doesn’t really understand what he’s being taught, and what it means to be ‘his brother’s keeper.’ Whereas the non-Israelite Ninevites repent immediately and commit to real, radical change, Jonah, still doesn’t understand the ‘duty of care’ toward others that God is trying to teach him. And the story ends with a question of if he ever will, a question that we are supposed to answer with what we learn on Yom Kippur, and with the way we live our lives.
In the book of Jonah, as in many other places in the Bible, non-Israelites model the very behavior that Israelites need to learn. It’s the Ninevites who model for Jonah what repentance is, it’s the non-Israelite sailors who do right by trying to save Jonah’s life, its Moses’s Midianite father-in-law who teaches him how to prevent leadership burn-out, and it is Ruth the Moabite who models loyalty, love and kindness toward her Israelite mother-in-law Naomi. The Zohar, the foundational text of Jewish mysticism, does something similar, where, in a conversation between two rabbis who are being transported by a donkey driver, it turns out that it’s the unlikely outsider, the donkey driver, who teaches the rabbis, rather than the other way around.
The unmistakable message of this pattern? As Heschel said: No one has a monopoly on holiness. The Bible wants us to be on guard that we don’t become so insular that we think we can only learn from our own, or from those we expect to have something to teach us. Lest we become arrogant or self-satisfied, the torah encourages us toward humility: to open our eyes and ears to the Torah we can learn from our non-Jewish friends and families, or from those who might seem less likely sources of wisdom.
I learned that lesson once again from the Islamic Speakers Bureau of Arizona, a non-profit committed to educating the larger community about Islam and fighting stereotypes and discrimination against Muslims. After Havdalah this past Saturday night, Michael and I went to the ISBA’s Bridge Builder Awards dinner where I was given an award for interfaith educational work I had been involved with. But as Michael pointed out, the truly remarkable part of that evening was that, after all that has happened in the middle east, and with war continuing – nonetheless, the Islamic Speakers Bureau chose to publicly honor a rabbi. Given the timing and current geopolitical situation, the choice to do that would have been unthinkable for some. The Speakers Bureau could have easily made a safer choice and honored a Christian or a Buddhist, but they didn’t.
They recognized someone who they could have guessed had very different perspectives on the war from theirs. They modeled an approach that says it is possible to learn from someone, even if you don’t agree with them, even if you don’t see the world in the same way.
One of the challenges of this season of Teshuva is its reminder that our lens on life is often too narrow, and being a Jew requires us to understand in the words of Pirkei Avot, “Eizeh hu chacham ha-lomed m’kol adam,” true wisdom lies in the one who can learn from everyone. When we are under attack by emboldened antisemites as we are now, our tendency is to turn inward, and to only learn from our own. But as the torah takes pains to teach us, the opposite is true and is critical to our spiritual health: we need to have the humility to engage sources of wisdom wherever we find them, and live up to the foundational ethos of our torah: the stranger is not to be feared but rather welcomed, because you know the heart of the stranger, having been strangers yourself. May we reach for that kind of openness in the year to come, and every year thereafter. So may it be.