The following sermon was delivered by Rabbi Ariana Katz on erev Rosh Hashanah 5780
September 29, 2019 • 1 Tishrei 5780
Its 1998, I’m in line for the water fountain, and a boy who relentlessly picks on me during recess is standing behind me. I am drinking DEEPLY from that fountain, that “sweaty kid drinking so quickly and sucking the water in so fast that the fountain cannot keep up” kind. And it totally was the cold fountain, not the other one down the hall that is warm and gross. I’’m sure my lips were all over that little spigot, we all did it, I confess (chest tap). I’m shvitsy and parched and feeling so saited by that freezing cold water And that boy, standing behind me, a grade older, says: “move it, fat cheeks.”
Which cheeks he was referring to on my little 8 year old body I don’t know, but he got his point across and made me feel awful.
***
Earlier this month at a family simcha, the joyous b’nei mitzvah celebration of a student-turned-chosen family, someone in our extended community came up to me to chat.
She said, “can I ask an impertinent question?”
“Uh oh” said my heart.
“Sure...” said my mouth.
“Are you pregnant?” said this stranger.
Now, beloved community, that happens sometimes! Sometimes people ask questions they shouldn’t, pry into deeply personal details out of a sense of love, or a desire to connect. It happens. It shouldn’t. Especially that question, which takes into assumption so many details about a person’s desire to get pregnant, experiences of infertility or pregnancy loss, and weight.
“No,” I said to her. “Not pregnant, just chubby.”
But what happened in the hours and days following that interaction was not only an anger at the policing of my body, but the shame of being a zaftig woman--that is, the embarrassment of this body. The place I slipped into was a familiar feeling, of engaging with my body as if it is a work in progress.
This concept is perhaps one of the more damning gifts I received growing up in our society. This idea that to be “good” is to be striving to lose weight, eat “better,” work ourselves closer to the bone, conform to an idealized body. It is this constant self-examination, self-critique, and self-improvement that tires us out from being able to relish in the blessing and challenge that our lives are full of. We are too preoccupied in striving toward impossible “Worthiness.”
Roxanne Gay wrote in her book Hunger,
When you’re overweight, your body becomes a matter of public record in many respects. Your body is constantly and prominently on display. People project assumed narratives onto your body and are not at all interested in the truth of your body, whatever that truth might be. Fat, much like skin color, is something you cannot hide, no matter how dark the clothing you wear, or how diligently you avoid horizontal stripes.
Believing that my body is a work in progress means that I buy in to fat-shaming, diet-culture, and self-hatred. It means that I am not invited to make a home inside my skin. Trying to get me to believe that every body is a body that should be colonized, a flag planted in it and civilized, shrunk, normalized, whitened. It means that I am always waiting for a far off redemption, to a place that will be so different than the place I am in now, that will solve all my problems, finally. Believing my body is a work in progress means I cannot cultivate a sense of “hereness,” put down roots, pay attention to the realities of my being now.
Our family here today in melanin rich, trans-expansive, adaptive-brilliance knows all too well what I’m talking about--the burdens put on a world that asks you to be on a journey of conforming to beauty standards, to static identity, to “healing” and self improvement. Our family here today being told “you are aging,” knows all too well the burdens of being told you are invisible, undesirable, feeble.
***
Those of us here who are experiencing sickness and calling in deep healing, those of us here who are in recovery and working each day at a time, those of us who are preparing or yearning for gender affirming surgeries, and so many more stories like this, know-- your growth and progress and blossoming is not the progress I am speaking against. May all this work, all this progress, only affirm what we you have already told us is true about yourself, and may you find all you seek on this journey.
***
What if, for all of us regardless of our embodied, intellectual, emotional experiences, we were not waiting for the next solution to bring worthiness, perfection, wholeness? What if we acknowledged that wholeness as our birthright? What if we were living in the world to come now, accepting that this is what we would look like in it, not suddenly transformed into a “worthy” being, a “worthy” body?
By seeing our inherent wholeness and worthiness in this world, we will the world to come into being.
כל ישראל יש להם חלק לעלם הבא
All Yisrael have a share in the World to Come
Before studying or reciting a chapter of Pirkei Avot, the Wisdom of our Sages, there is the custom to recite this sugya from Misha Sanhedrin, 10:1:
כל ישראל יש להם חלק לעלם הבא
All Yisrael have a share in the World to Come
I want to vision a world in which each year, at this time as the seasons change and our thoughts turn inward, we do not think, “oh, I’ll be thinner next year,” “it’ll be better next year.” “Next year, I’ll deserve a share in the World to Come.” כל ישראל יש להם חלק לעלם הבא. All Yisrael have a share in the World to Come.
But we are in the season of self-examination, you might be thinking! For praying our lives will get easier! The liturgy has to say out loud how we have done bad, how we promise to be better, we are always works in progress!
You’re partially right. We will spend great swaths of time talking and reflecting on teshuvah. In its simplest form, it is the “making of a return.” In practice, it is a kind of repair. A noticing of the parts that are worn down in ourselves and our relationships and in need of mending. But things in need of repair are broken. We are not broken--we are as whole as we ever were. Perhaps our relationships, or our work in this world, or the imbalance of power is broken, but you, inherently, are not broken. We do not yearn for a different world, but for deeper connection.
It is my profound hope that we can, this season, distance the important work of teshuvah from the idea of the constant striving towards improvement, needing to earn approval. I pray we can distance any given behavior from inherent worth. Our ability to mend relationships starts with the idea that our bodies and souls started out whole.
Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, writing in the 19th/20th century, explained this concept, כל ישראל יש להם חלק לעלם הבא, All Yisrael have a share in the World to Come, from the Gemara. He wrote,
שכן שני דברים יקרים ישנם
There are two fundamental parts of the Jewish soul
סגולה, ובחירה
Within every Jewish soul is innate hereditary holiness, סגולה, and בחירה, choice.
For Rav Kook, in the genetic makeup of the Jewish soul is goodness, regardless of behavior on earth. I have come to understand this, unsurprisingly, more broadly. Within every human soul is inherent worth, intactness, holiness unearned and irrevocable. But this second category, בכירה, comes through living. Through being faced with opportunities to do good, or do right. We have, each day, each moment, chances to cultivate קדושה בכירה, earned holiness. But no matter what we do, how much we weigh, how far we can walk, how our wrinkles are hanging, or even how kind we are, our קדושה סגולה cannot change.
This is not a get off the hook, instead this is an invitation to double down. Instead of focusing on earning קדושה at all, know you are starting from that place of holiness. Wanting to achieve “worthiness” can become a distraction from the chance to notice harm we have done, our accountability to the now. We not only hurt ourselves in this pursuit.
The year stretches out before us--focus on the holiness of choice, of doing good in relationships, in our city, in this world. We should all grow, mend, strengthen, return, but not from a place of shame and the obligation to improve our very being.
When you have a choice, be generous, be kind, be compassionate--to yourself, and to others. Don’t spend another year fighting to earn your place in the world--you began here and will end here as קדושים, holy ones.
When we wait to move to Holy Land, we do not fertilize the soil we stand on here. When we wait for things to be Worthy, we miss life now. Plant now. Weed now. Build now. Don’t save your seeds and your water for when you think the redeemed self and world is finally here.
כל ישראל יש להם חלק לעלם הבא. All the God Wrestlers have a share in the World to Come, and we are building it now, living as it we were already worthy.
So maybe, maybe this is the World to Come. Where everyone in this room is whole, enough, not waiting for the next year when you promise you’ll finally earn your place. Maybe this is the year, in its freshness, earnestness, opportunity, trepidation. This is the time, we are not yearning for a far off place where everything is perfect, or figured out. What if this was it, life in all its struggles and all its perfections, and it wasn’t because you are broken or wrong.
Our companion, Rainer Marie Rilke:
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I am falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
May we be blessed this year with opportunities to take shape
May we be blessed to deepen into ourselves
May we find home in our city, our bodies, or our community
May we continue to become, to grow, to unfold