Yom Kippur Ne'ilah 5783
So – here we are at Neilah: this is the service tradition calls ‘Closing’, which makes sense (it’s the end of this marathon day we’ve had, 25 hours) : so it’s Closing Time, and we put in our last orders (so to speak), our last pleas, our last requests, And because it’s closing time, the energy is changing, we are moving from the solemnity of Yizkor, which looks back on the past year and those we have lost, and all that has gone with them, and we are moving into the new cycle of life that is opening up for us once Yom Kippur is over.
So although it’s a Closing service – and this is slightly paradoxical - it is also an opening: the mood is shifting, we are looking forward now – not just to the end of the service and getting home (that, obviously) - but looking forward to a new beginning, to new life, new resolve in the weeks and months ahead. It’s like a new start this opening: as we reach the closing we capture a glimpse of the future, a glimmer of hopefulness that our annual soul searching hasn’t just been survived, but that it might have opened up something in us.
So what has opened up in us over these hours?
Perhaps it’s new courage to face something in our lives, something we have been putting off, something we’ve been meaning to do, someone we’ve been meaning to contact. We all have challenges and need new courage to face them.
Perhaps what’s opened up is a new resolve to work more attentively to let the better parts of selves shine through.
Or perhaps there’s new confidence stirring in us that in spite of our failures and flaws and mistakes, in spite of our doubts about ourself, in spite of regrets and misgivings and limitations, we can still glimpse, recognise, we can still feel the vast marvel it is to be alive . Here and now, in this fragile body we inhabit, and with all the emotional dramas we live with, and with all the mental confusion we might go through, here and now there is still so much life in us, so much we can still do with our lives, so much as yet unlived potential, so much pleasure available to us, so much good stuff inside us we can share with others - when we think of all this then yes, this might be a service to close off the old year, that closes these legendary gates of heaven, yes the Book of Life is closing, yes we hope we are sealed in it for a good life - but this closing of one page is joined seamlessly to the opening of a new page, a new chapter.
This service is the great double-sided hinge of the year. Something is reaching its end, its climax, its close - but it’s entwined with, flowing into, something that is opening up.
On RH we considered how judgments are formed – and we have been making judgments about ourselves all day today too - and on YK something is being sealed: the honesty and integrity with which we have done our work today sets the seal on who we are, but it also sets the seal on who we want to be, what we can aspire to: it faces forward, it’s an opening.
In our end is our beginning. Neilah moves us into another dimension, another intensity, a deeper communion with the future, beyond the darkness, the cold, the desolation of life – we know about all that – but at Neilah we feel there is something else afoot, something opening up. It opens up in us, and through us. And through the poetry of this service – and the liturgy is all, one way and other, an extended poem with its Book of Life and Gates of Heaven, images that live in our imaginations and that we can fill with meaning, images which add to the stock of available reality, that help us construct or conjure up deeper truths about our lives. These are images are prompts and signposts that summon us towards living more intensely, more justly, more lovingly. These are images that release us into a newer, deeper engagement with life.
Yes, we know about closing, we know about endings – sometimes it might seem that our lives are all about endings – but at Neilah, as the gates close, we intimate that life is also about beginnings, about opening up the new, about opening ourselves to the new. Neilah is about renewal : “Renew our lives as of old”, yes that’s fine, but at Neilah we say something else “Renew our lives not with the old but with what we have never experienced, renew our lives with a sense of possibilities and opportunities, Renew our lives with what we can still become, what we can still discover, what we can still offer to others. So, when the gates are closed, and we hear that great shofar call, let us remain open. We have work to do, a journey to continue. In our ending is our new beginning.
