Kol Nidre 5785/2024 Devar Torah
by Rabbi Ariann Weitzman
Every night before bed I make sure there are no dishes in the sink, the counters are wiped down, and the most obvious clutter is sorted. I make sure I know where the kids’ lunch boxes have landed so I don’t have to search for them tomorrow. I go upstairs and straighten up the bathroom vanity just a bit, pick up the laundry my kids have thrown on the floor, set my alarm clock. 
These are tiny gifts to future me.
Small acts of kindness done by a tired, possibly even grumpy, person, in service to another also maybe tired person who will exist tomorrow, so that that future version of me wakes up with a little more spaciousness and calm to start her day.
It feels good when I’ve been kind to me.
The theme Rabbi Elliott and I chose for this year is kindness, because we have felt so much that our world needs a lot more of it, because Judaism provides rich and deep teachings about the virtue of kindness, as well as so many opportunities to enact kindness in the world by performing mitzvot and working on our own soul-traits.
We could all be kinder to others, there is always room for improvement.
I try really hard to remember each day that I am able to exist and to function in large part because of the kindnesses done to me by others - people who have cared for me physically, emotionally, spiritually, from infancy until now. It’s easy to take this truth for granted.
But we likewise could be a lot kinder to ourselves. And paradoxically, our ability to grow in this season of teshuvah, repentance, rests in part on how kind and compassionate we are able to be to ourselves.
I would suggest that our liturgy today holds two ideas in tension:
We have missed the mark profoundly and need help finding a way back to the right path because it is so difficult to do the right thing; that’s on one hand.
And on the other hand, we are not inherently sinful beings, we are essentially good, and the path back could not be more straightforward, because the universe is built on a foundation of compassion and kindness.
On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we repeat the words, “Adonai, Adonai, El Rachum v’Chanun, Erekh apayim v’rav hesed v’emet, etc.” Adonai, Adonai, God gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and truth. (Although on this Yom Kippur, we will save these words until Ne’ilah in deference to Shabbat.)
The tradition ascribes two related qualities to God: God has hesed, lovingkindness, which our tradition understands as a free-flowing infinite source of kindness, without which the very existence of the universe would be in danger. Chesed has an additional meaning of faithfulness or loyalty.
And the other term is rakhamim, compassion, related to the word rekhem, womb. Compassion is kindness amped up with an even greater degree of empathy. Compassion is the kindness or love of a parent for a child.1
Pirkei Avot, the ancient rabbinic life manual, has this to offer:
Rabbi Shimon said:
Be careful with your prayer.
And when you pray, do not make your prayers routine, but a plea for compassion and kindness from God, for it is said: “God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in kindness…” (Joel 2:13)
and finally, do not judge yourself to be a wicked person. (Avot 2:13)
Rabbi Shimon teaches that prayer, at its core, is a reminder to the self that we have access to infinite care, kindness, and compassion. We should be careful and diligent in prayer precisely because it serves as that kind of reminder.
In Jewish tradition, that infinite kindness is our Creator, and we are made in the image of the Creator. We are capable of acting out of good impulses and acting out of bad impulses, but we are not essentially wicked.
If we are not essentially wicked, if we can see ourselves as created in the image of God, then we are capable of returning to the right path, and being welcomed back to the right path with compassion.
Read this way, Rabbi Shimon is prescribing prayer as an inoculation against low self-worth, against defeatism, against the inner voice that says we are not capable of change.
The words of prayer themselves might serve as this inoculation for some people. But any of us who engage in regular prayer, or regular meditation, may resonate with the idea that prayer helps us connect with our self-compassion.
For me, the way that prayer and meditation do this is by helping me feel a little less ego, and a little less in control. Prayer, especially as a regular practice, helps to erase the distinctions between you and me, between us and everyone, between humanity and everything that exists.
In prayer, I connect to an infinite source of care, kindness, and compassion, of which I am just a little, but fully worthy, part.
If this doesn’t resonate for you, that’s okay. Let’s get to the nuts and bolts of self-compassion.
What gets in the way of being kind to ourselves? When it comes to the little kindnesses I can do for myself before bedtime, the only barriers are energy and attention and whether I get distracted by the laundry that needs to be folded or responding to an e-mail.
But when it comes to really being kind to ourselves? When it comes to believing that we are worthy of care, and capable of change?
Shame often prevents us from kindness and compassion to ourselves.
Yom Kippur can feel like a holiday that primes us for shame. But guilt is different from shame.
Guilt is: I made a mistake
Shame is: I am a mistake
Yom Kippur should wake us up to guilt, but not to shame.
As Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski writes,
“Guilt is a distressful sensation resulting from the awareness that one has done something wrong. Healthy guilt can lead to teshuvah, to making amends for the wrong and to take preventative measures to avoid a recurrence. Shame, on the other hand, is a sensation that one is somehow bad.”
Guilt and shame are different in their orientations. Guilt is a sign of empathy toward others - I know my actions hurt another, I can put myself in their shoes, I have an interest in acting for the good of others. Shame is focused inward, on how we are blameworthy and feeling awful, and not on the impact of our behavior on others.
Shame is a fundamentally un-kind stance. It keeps us from both the compassion needed to empathize with the ones we may have hurt and the compassion for ourselves to trust that we can change. Contemporary psychology affirms this understanding. People who are more prone to shame and less prone to self-compassion have a harder time avoiding future moral transgressions. Kindness and compassion toward the self, born out of a sense of self-worth, is a key ingredient to self-improvement.
We know that being stuck in shame doesn’t help us change, but that doesn’t make it any easier to work through it. Shame is a universal human emotion, encoded in our DNA, built into the functioning of human societies, appearing even in our earliest Creation stories.
Adam and Eve ate of the fruit and then suddenly realized they were naked, and they rushed to clothe themselves because they had discovered the feeling of shame.
In fact, shame can be a necessary, temporary push toward good behavior. Have you ever wondered about a person, Have they no shame? A little shame can help the world go round, but anything more than just a little gets in the way of being our best selves.
Shame can also come from being exposed to shaming messages about ourselves - maybe those messages came from parents, or schoolyard bullies, or lovers, or advertising, but we absorb them nonetheless, and they too often become our inner voice, repeated over and over to ourselves.
Perhaps we can’t eliminate shame, but when shame gets in the way of self-compassion, we can innoculate ourselves against it. We can remind ourselves of Rabbi Shimon’s teaching: Remember, do not judge yourselves from a place of shame. You are not a wicked person. Remember, you were created with compassion and kindness.
And if you were created with compassion and kindness, you are a person who is worthy of compassion and kindness, even from yourself.
Sociologist and philosopher Erich Fromm writes,
If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue—and not a vice—to love myself, since I am a human being too. There is no concept of [humanity] in which I myself am not included…. The…biblical " Love [your] neighbor as [yourself]!" implies that…love for and understanding of one's own self cannot be separated from respect and love and understanding for another individual. The love for my own self is inseparably connected with the love for any other being.2
Some would argue that loving your neighbors as yourself requires that you love yourself. That’s not how our tradition has tended to interpret this verse.
Instead, we’ve re-interpreted it in the negative - what is hateful to you, don’t do to another. Or, we interpret it as theoretical. If this action feels loving to you, that’s what you should do for another. Or we have parsed the logistics of loving: these specific actions are loving, do that.
But the verse implies beyond that, if we are capable of being loving, if we are capable of being kind, if we are capable of showing care to our neighbor, friend, family member, then we are capable of being loving, kind, and caring to ourselves. And we might parse the commandment into two separate commands, each a separate task: Love your neighbor, Love yourself.
Anne Lamott, author and spiritual teacher, writes about mercy, which she defines as “radical kindness.” She says, “Probably the most radical part of it all is that it begins with kindness to yourself in the same measure with which you would be very, very kind to others. Sort of automatically — [we] are warm and friendly to other people…. And yet with ourselves, we tend to be harsh. And we tend to be easily exasperated with ourselves. [T]he radical part of kindness is … stroking your own shoulder and stopping… bad self-talk.”3
The flip side of seeing ourselves as not wicked is to see ourselves as worthy of love, kindness, compassion, and mercy.
And we are worthy of mercy, both from others and from ourselves. So much of what goes wrong in our lives, and so much of what goes right in our lives, is out of our control.
It is our nature to take the blame, to feel at fault, and even to take the credit far more often than we really deserve.
Compassion could be understood as recognizing the suffering in others and doing what we can to alleviate that suffering. We, too, are worthy of our own compassion.
Self-compassion is an understanding that we are suffering, too, and that we are worthy of relief from that suffering. We can know that we are worthy of our own self-compassion precisely because we know how to feel awful for the things that have gone wrong, where we played a part in their going wrong.
And the kindness that we can do for ourselves today, as on all days, is to atone for the part we played, to commit to trying better, and to let it go.
G’mar Chatimah Tovah
May we be sealed for a good and kind year to come
1. Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis takes this definition a step further and more literally. Rakhamim is the compassion felt for what is literally still in the rekhem, womb. It’s not about the love of a real child standing before us, who can be difficult or test our limits, but a compassion for the fetus she awaits in joy. I would stretch the metaphor even further - in the context of defining God, rakhamim is God’s compassion for the world as it could be, even before the world came to be; chesed is God’s kindness in keeping the world afloat, even when it’s not as it should be. https://www.jewishpress.com/in-print/from-the-paper/chesed-and-rachamim-in-our-lives-part-two/2018/01/26/
2. The Art of Loving