What We Carry, What We Cut - Yom Kippur 5787

Rabbi Daniel Gropper

https://vimeo.com/1229321168/7686954087?share=copy

Good Yontif.

I want to begin with a thought experiment. You know this scenario even if you've never lived it: the fire has jumped the ridge, or the storm has turned, and suddenly someone—a sheriff's deputy, a fire fighter, a neighbor—tells you that you have ten minutes. Six hundred seconds to walk through your own house and decide, out of everything you've spent a lifetime accumulating, what comes with you and what you leave behind.

What do you take? What do you leave?

People who've actually lived through this will tell you the same strange thing afterward: they can rarely explain their own choices. They didn’t take the expensive things. They didn’t even take the sentimental things you'd expect. They took what they needed most, what they could not live without —living things like pets, wallets, purses, keys, eyeglasses, cell phones, medications, and hearing aids.

One person said he had the presence of mind to grab his dirty clothes bin—simply because those were the clothes he’d actually wear.

Last March, Tamara and I didn't get ten minutes of warning. We got something slower and stranger — five days of sirens, and then a decision that had been quietly making itself the whole time: it was time to go home. Except home, just then, had exactly one road leading to it, and it wasn't the road we'd come in on.

Let me back up.

The shape of our story is familiar by now — the sirens, the missiles, the sense that the Purim celebration we planned turned instead into something closer to Yom Kippur. What I haven't told you is what came after the fear settled into something more manageable.

After a few nights of ping-ponging between our AirBnB and either the safe room in the community center next door or the large underground parking garage a few blocks away, we realized we needed to get home. Not because Tel Aviv had become unlivable, but because our dog sitter had other commitments; because Noa was home from school and wanted to see her parents; because our renovation, God help us, could not move one inch further without somebody standing in that house making decisions about grout. First-world problems, every one of them, and I want to name that plainly, because I am aware of how absurd it is to be worrying about grout while air-raid sirens are going off, and also — that is what a life is made of. Even in the middle of a war, you are still someone's parent, someone's employer, someone responsible for a house that isn't going to finish itself.

So: how do you leave Israel when the sky is closed? There was exactly one route out. A bus to Eilat. A walk across the border into Egypt. A taxi to Sharm el-Sheikh. A flight to Milan. And then, finally, home. Grateful is too small a word, and I want to hold that gratitude honestly alongside the absurdity of it — we were, again, enormously privileged to have an exit at all, however circuitous. Most people in that region, most people in this century, have not had a taxi waiting for them at the border.

And here is where the story gets interesting.

Going through security at the Sharm el-Sheikh airport, my backpack got pulled. I ran through the inventory in my head — no liquids, those were checked; no blades; nothing remotely resembling a threat. What could they possibly want?

The officer reached in and pulled out this Megillah. The same one Tamara and I had unrolled and read from while the sirens wailed over Tel Aviv — the same scroll I redeemed in Romania, the one that hadn't been read from in eighty, ninety years.

The security officer turned it over, curious, clearly unsure what he was looking at. I said the only thing my brain could produce at that moment: "Yahud, Yahud. It's Jewish. Ivrit — Hebrew.”

"For prayer?" he asked.

Now, understand — this is not an easy question to answer honestly when you are a rabbi standing in an Egyptian airport with a hundred-year-old scroll and you do not want it confiscated. "Well — sort of. Not exactly," I said, which is, I promise you, the worst possible answer to give a security officer holding an object he's trying to classify. "How old?" he asked. "About a hundred years," I told him, truthfully, and watched his expression shift from curious to concerned, because a hundred-year-old anything in that part of the world raises a very specific question: is this an antiquity, and is this man trying to smuggle an artifact out of Egypt?

That is precisely the question Tamara understood a half-second before I did. She stepped forward, and with the kind of clarity that only comes from thirty-plus years of being married to someone who talks himself into trouble, said four words: "It's not Egyptian."

That was it. That was the whole case. He rolled the scroll back up, handed it to me, I said "Shukran," he wished us a good flight, and it was over. Ninety seconds of quiet panic, resolved, because my wife realized what I hadn't: he didn't care what the scroll was; he cared where it had been.

I have not stopped thinking about that moment. What do we carry with us across borders, across decades, across catastrophe? And — the harder question — what do we decide, deliberately, to leave behind?

Many of you have something like my Megillah sitting in a drawer or a cabinet somewhere. A pair of candlesticks. A copper pot someone's grandmother carried out of Poland. A talit. A set of tefillin. A kiddush cup that's outlived three generations of the family that still drinks from it. These objects are not valuable in any market sense. They are valuable the way my scroll is valuable — because they are physical evidence that someone before you decided you were worth carrying forward for.

Yom Kippur is, among many other things, a day to take those objects out of the drawer. Not literally, necessarily — though I'd encourage it — but in the sense of remembering what they hold. And Yom Kippur asks something else of us too, something that sits right alongside all that carrying, and it is this: today is also a day for beginning to ask, “what in your soul needs to be released? What has taken up residence in your mind and your heart that doesn't spark joy — that hasn't sparked anything but weight for years — and that you have simply never given yourself permission to let go of?”

My teacher Chip Conley has spent the back half of his career studying what he calls the wisdom of midlife. He has a phrase for this that I think belongs in this sanctuary today: "the midlife edit." Chip’s argument, in short, is that for decades we've told the wrong story about aging. We've told a story about crisis, about loss, about things ending. Chip says that the arc of life we are taught to expect often looks like, "learn, earn and burn," but it doesn't have to be.

We tend to spend the first quarter of our life learning things. We learn algebra and awkwardness. We learn how to ride a bike, drive a car, navigate friendships, survive heartbreak, and occasionally do our own laundry. We gather skills, knowledge, and just enough confidence to venture into the world.

Then, when we think we're ready, we set off to earn as much as we can. We earn a living. We earn promotions. We earn worry lines, gray hair, and reading glasses. We earn frequent-flyer miles and, if we're lucky, the respect of our colleagues and the love of our family. It is also the chapter where we tend everyone else's laundry. We earn the right to take care of other people, sometimes literally: Children. Partners. Aging parents. Employees. Friends. Communities. We're washing, folding, fixing, financing, mentoring, and managing. It's a beautiful season. It's also an exhausting one, this Sandwich Generation. Our own needs are often put on the back burner.

Finally, we reach the third chapter, the burning years. The mortgage is paid off, the kids are out of the house, your own parents may have died and what's left to do but burn through that nest egg you've accumulated.

But what if it wasn't that way? What if, instead of learn, earn, burn, it was learn, earn, yearn? And what if we didn't have to wait for the last third of life to start yearning for things? What if, instead of it being this sixty year sprint to that verdant field of flowers, we were finding a way to smell them all the while, to find a way to yearn for what really matters? At its heart, I think that is what Yom Kippur is all about - to reframe the old paradigm of learn, earn, burn and to spend some time really asking ourselves, what do I yearn for?

If you're twenty-five, perhaps the question is: Which version of myself am I trying so hard to become, and is it actually mine?

If you're raising children, perhaps it's: What parts of the identity I had before parenthood are still waiting for my attention?

If you're caring for an aging parent, changing careers, entering retirement, beginning a new relationship, ending one, or simply realizing that the life you built no longer fits quite the way it once did, the questions are remarkably similar.

And if you're eighty-five, you haven't missed the opportunity. You may actually have the clearest perspective of all. There are still things to release. There are still things to learn. There are still people to forgive, and people from whom we need to ask forgiveness. There are still parts of ourselves waiting to be expressed.

At every age, there comes a moment when we have to ask: What am I carrying because it is precious? What am I carrying simply because I've been carrying it for a long time? And what am I finally ready to put down?

That reckoning doesn't always wait politely for midlife. Sometimes it arrives much earlier, when the identity you built your whole life around simply disappears.

Some of you might remember pro football player Aaron Taylor. He was a big deal in the 90s: a first-round NFL draft pick, a Super Bowl champion with the Green Bay Packers, a College Football Hall of Famer. Football gave him structure, identity, status, and self-esteem. Then, at 28, a series of injuries forced him to retire.

And when football disappeared, so did the person he thought he was.

Aaron eventually got sober and began the much harder work of rebuilding his life. He realized that he didn't just have to surrender his addiction. He had to surrender the identity he had built around being a professional athlete. He had to grieve the loss of that version of himself before he could discover another one.

Eventually, he became a television analyst and an advocate for mental health, sharing his story with the same openness and vulnerability that had once made him a role model on the football field. (from Learning to Love Midlife, pp. 135-137)

Aaron's story is not one of decline. It's a story of mastery. And it happens to be exactly the story Yom Kippur has been telling us for three thousand years. Sometimes teshuvah means not simply repairing what is broken, but letting go of the version of ourselves that can no longer carry us forward. Sometimes the act of changing our minds requires that we look honestly at the manuscript of our lives and ask what needs to be cut, or at least reframed, so the real story — the one underneath all the clutter — can finally be read clearly. That’s what Yom Kippur is for.

When you leave today, you'll receive two index cards and a watercolor marker. It’s for a ritual we do as part of our Modern Midlife Mavens program, adapted for you to do at home. (and yes, there are still spots for this year’s cohort)

On the first card, write down what you are ready to let go of: A habit. A grudge. A fear. A relationship. A story you've been telling yourself about who you are. Something that once served you but doesn't anymore.

Read aloud what you've written. Let your ears hear the words. Let someone you trust hear them too. And then place that card in a basin of water and watch the words dissolve. Let this be your own personal Tashlich.

Then take the second card. This time, use permanent ink. Write down what you want to carry forward: A new habit. A new way of thinking. A relationship you want to deepen. A value you want to live more fully. A new definition of success. Something you want to make room for.

Keep that card. Put it somewhere you'll see it. Let it become a small guide for the year ahead. 

One card asks: What am I ready to release? 

The other asks: What am I choosing to carry?

I did my own version of that exercise a few months ago, without meaning to. My index card was a hundred-year-old Megillah scroll, the airport security line in Sharm el-Sheikh became my basin of water, and in that moment, I was doing everything to keep that scroll close, not to edit it from my life because it meant so much more than just some ancient parchment. 

Here is what I think that scroll was trying to teach me in that moment, in that place. Tamara's insight — “it's not Egyptian” — was, underneath the practical genius of it, a statement of real wisdom. That scroll never belonged to Egypt. It was only passing through, just as our people have passed through Egypt, exile, war, and displacement again and again. 

Our ancestors left Egypt with matzah on their backs, because there wasn't time to let the bread rise, because you take only what matters when you have no time to waste on anything else. More than three thousand years later, I left Egypt with a scroll in my carry-on — the very same impulse, running through the very same family, showing up in an airport security line instead of a fleeing caravan of slaves. We are still, all of us, always deciding what comes with us and what gets left behind.

That is Yom Kippur's real invitation. Not simply to atone. Not simply to change your mind. Rather, to edit, to reframe. To ask, honestly, what deserves to be carried forward into the next chapter of your life — a relationship, a memory, a value, an object — and what are you willing to let go of?  

And here’s the rub. You cannot go back the way you came. None of us can. The road behind you is closed, the way it was closed for us trying to get home from Tel Aviv. Today though, here, in this place, you get to choose what you bring with you on the road that's actually open. Choose carefully. Choose the things — and the people — that are worth carrying, all the way home. Gmar chatimah tovah.