Sermons

Ne'ilah 5786

I’m not ready.  I appreciate the irony that we’re entering the final hours of such a long day, and yet now – now I’m not ready for it to end.  I don’t know about you, but I still have more prayers that need praying, more internal work that needs working out…  And among all the beautiful Jewish melodies echoing in my brain today, right now there’s a secular song playing on repeat in my head, perhaps because an encounter with mortality is part of what makes Scotty McCreery sing about not being ready for something to end.

He sings about his final moments with his granddad, with the family gathered round his bedside and grandpa sensing angels in the room.  Scotty McCreery is from the American South, so he sings, “with so much left to say I prayed, ‘Lord I ain't finished - just give us five more minutes.”  This becomes the refrain of the song, but it isn’t only as death approaches that he wants more time: McCreery looks back to younger days, remembering long childhood afternoons when he wasn’t ready to come in from playing, late teenage nights when he didn’t want to say goodbye to his girlfriend yet, and even a moment alone with his coach after his final match playing for his college football team, with the devastating realisation that “next time to get in here, I'll have to buy a ticket.”  

For me, I’d be singing about the final orchestra concert before I left for university, or being little and pleading with my dad for just one more story before bedtime – and as you look back, your specifics might be different too – but the feeling is only too familiar. Reaching the end of something precious makes him long for just a little longer before he has to let it go, and so he sings…

Time rolls by the clock don't stop
I wish I had a few more drops of the good stuff, the good times
Ah, but they just keep on flyin'
Right on by like it ain't nothin'
I wish I had me a pause button
Moments like those, Lord knows I'd hit it
And give myself five more minutes
Yeah, sometimes this ol' life will leave you wishin'
That you had five more minutes

In those precious moments, who wouldn’t wish for a pause button? – for a chance to hold onto the sweetness just a little longer, now that its ending finally makes us realise the blessing that we’ve had?

Yizkor gives us a particularly powerful reminder of what the liturgy has been telling us all day – that life is short, so we should get on with the things that really matter – and then Neilah comes around and gives us an opportunity to press pause.  Neilah grants our wish for “a few more drops of the good stuff”: it gives us not just five more minutes, but a whole (if short-ish) service to channel the urgency that an upcoming ending makes us feel.  So how will you use this gift of extra time?  What will be your personal prayer?  At this time of the locking of the gates, with the ending coming soon, what will you take one more chance to say?

Offering this final service as the heavenly gates are closing, perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that we also have a liturgical equivalent of asking for “five more minutes.”  A liturgical poem from the 6th Century, by a poet known as Elazar haKallir, opens with the plea: “פְּתַח לָֽנוּ שַֽׁעַר, בְּעֵת נְעִילַת שַֽׁעַר, כִּי פָנָה יוֹם. Open the gate for us, as the gate is closing, for the day is ending.”  With the end in sight, we feel anew that ‘Time rolls by, the clock won’t stop’ – yet still we plead for the gate to stay open just a little longer, to let our prayers through before the day truly ends.

This time, however, we have good reason for optimism, as the liturgy of Neilah encourages us to have faith in the transformative power of this day.  But we also now know better than to waste an opportunity, so as we prepare to enter Neilah, we hold together our yearning and our hope; and – trusting that G-d will listen – we ask for just a few more minutes, for the gate to stay open as we pray again, as we sing together, פְּתַח לָֽנוּ שַֽׁעַר, בְּעֵת נְעִילַת שַֽׁעַר, כִּי פָנָה יוֹם.

Five More Minutes: https://youtu.be/SAXn-qcfEJA?si=SBnAEjqQDgRuE7nO
P’tach Lanu Shaar: https://youtu.be/B3vIfhAp1f8?si=U9C_rpw_ZkiUuRPX