Yom Kippur 5766 Day 1:
Shabbat Shabbaton: A Sabbath of Sabbaths

By Dr. Evlyn Gould
October 2005

Gut Yontif. L'shanah tova.

Yom Kippur or more precisely, Yom Ha Kippurim—literally, the Day of Atonements—is considered the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar. In religious practice since the destruction of the Second Temple, this is the longest day of prayer of the year and, unlike any other festival or holy day, it includes five complete services. It is a day of reckoning during which many if not most Jews give pause to their Jewishness and it is cast, indeed, as the highest holy day of the year.

Guidelines for our practice on Yom Kippur appear in Leviticus:

"A Sabbath of complete rest shall it be for you [Shabbat shabbaton], and you shall press down your souls [ve-initem et nefshotechem…]" (Lev. 23: 26-32).

Yom Kippur is a Shabbat shabbaton, a Sabbath of complete rest, or some say, the most Shabbosdik of Shabboses, the Sabbath of all Sabbaths. Yet at the same time, it requires us to afflict, impoverish, or even torture our souls (Vinitem et nefshotechem). This seems to me to be a classic Jewish paradox. How can Yom Kippur be like Shabbat—the Shabbat of all Shabbats in fact—and yet require us to torture our souls and inflict them with real suffering, humiliations, and impoverishment?

I'm sorry but, think of it, the joys of Shabbat: the challah, the sumptuously furnished oneg, flowers, fragrances, bathing and relaxing, putting on our best Shabbos clothing, and well, mating. Ahhhhh. Shabbat is just made for celebrating plenty of earthly, bodily pleasures. [It is the out breath of all out breaths.] In fact, the exhortation on Shabbat is to seek delight for the soul and the body. But on Yom Kippur, we are asked to afflict or “press down our souls,” and we are proscribed five specific activities to help us along: We are to avoid washing, eating and drinking, anointing, engaging in sexual activity, and wearing shoes made of leather. All of these are designed to torture the soul by way of the five senses of the body as if the source of all sin for which we are atoning today were the gratification of physical cravings alone, those delightful bodily pleasures we indulge on Shabbat. So much for the challah, the fragrances, and the mating.

But we have not reached the end of this paradox. For if the practice for Yom Kippur requires us to torture our souls, why do we deny our bodies? How does the proscription of certain bodily pleasures or creature comforts participate in our soul torture? Well, on this topic, opinions differ. Some say that the body is afflicted with the five prohibitions in order to keep the soul from being at home in the body so it might withdraw from corporeality like an angel, or as it is written in the Zohar, so that it may "be awakened and wing its way Heavenward" (Hertz 523, n. 27). (Of course the theme of awakening is fundamental as the sound of the Shofar reminds us). In this line of thinking, a body that is not fed, freshened or anointed, a body grounded in the earth will not make the soul feel at home, so the soul rises and exits. In keeping with a fundamental paradigm of Western cultural beliefs, then, the body is conceived here as separate from the soul, as a housing or shell for the soul from which it must be released.

But a second line of thinking seems to suggest that we need to sequester the body’s energy so as to redirect it to spiritual purpose. We are to shape our nefesh behemite - our animal spirit - into a nefesh elochite - a divine spirit. Another way of saying this is that we are to turn the body into a soul machine (and I’m not trying to evoke James Brown here, though we may not be far from his idea of soul).

Let me explain. By withdrawing from corporeality, we subdue the energies of our body and turn it into a spiritual, spirited or thinking body. As Yehuda Halevi wrote already in the 11th Century: [so he didn’t know James Brown] "… inasmuch as the fast is consummated by humbling themselves, lowering their heads, standing, bending their knees, and singing hymns of praise, then all the physical powers abandon their natural functions and engage in spiritual functions, as though having no animal nature" (Agnon 193-94). In this thinking, it is as if we engage the body in slow and humble movements so as to harness corporeal thinking and turn it to spiritual purpose. Interestingly, this is the essential principle of any kind of sacred dance or movement. As you know dancers also fast, or eat very little, so as to remain light and attentive, adaptable and flexible, tuned into their own bio-intelligence. Likewise, listening into our own body's bio-intelligence, we too can come in touch with our body’s own unique wisdom. This body tuning puts us in touch with the formative tendency of life itself; it deadens our cultural, ethnic or national differences - the source of so many conflicts in our world - but it enhances a sense of our shared humanity and of our fragile interaction with life on this planet.

Let me illustrate this point about bio-intelligence by invoking my recent trip to Los Angeles. There as I was driving on the LA Freeway, I became thoroughly consumed by a mode of behavior I can only call "hyper vigilance." [You know, pedal to the metal, but also readied to break; eyes to the left and right but also straight ahead, reading freeway signs, looking in the mirrors….] Now this hyper vigilance on the LA Freeway illustrates my point about bodies and souls because it is absolutely antithetical to the goals of Yom Kippur. When we're hyper vigilant, we cannot hear or even pay attention to the body. Biologically speaking, hyper vigilance is related to survival. It is part of what we call "the sympathetic system": fight or flee, and it is easily direct opposite of what we're seeking on Yom Kippur.

For what we seek on Yom Kippur is to slow down and to listen in to the body's inner wisdom, a wisdom, Chochma, that physical self-deprivation helps us hear. Chochma, means wisdom, but it is also Choch--ma, a waiting, waiting to see what will arise. (It recalls the waiting we do while fishing…) While hyper-vigilance detaches us from our surroundings and our selves, locking down our tissues, making us focused, single minded (and undoubtedly more productive), it also renders us inadaptable and inflexible both physically and mentally. It leads us to want to control our surroundings, to prepare for eventualities, to feel safe and to profit from our activities by limiting them. Listening to what is emerging within, on the other hand, opens us to unexpectedness, that is, to [what Emilie Conrad, founder of Continuumovement, has called ] the very deepest sources of our own creativity.

Sadly, hyper-vigilance is not just an experience we have on the LA freeway. On the contrary, it is fast becoming our regular mode of operation, our only way of surviving in the rapidly progressing industrial and technological revolutions we are living today. With the help of our computers and cell phones, blue tooth technology and digitized information, we are now moving faster than our bodies can handle and with devastating effect. Our immune systems are breaking down, our children are becoming obese; they have difficulty concentrating and a shorter range of colors and sounds they can perceive. In short, we are forgetting to listen in to the messages our bodies and souls emit all the time. All of this testifies to our atomized, mechanized existence. We make wars as if they were video games, we view New Orleans as if it were just a place on a map with good music and good food; we’re are loosing touch, feeling less, shooting each other in public schools.

Maybe this is why the Haftarah from Isaiah, which compliments the Torah portion for the morning of Yom Kippur, redirects completely what it means to fast. "Cast ye up, cast ye up, clear the way," says Isaiah, "Take up the stumbling-block out of the way of my people. […] Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the fetters of wickedness/ To undo the bands of the yoke, And to let the oppressed go free …?" The traditional sense of this teaching is that our true fast is not our refraining from eating but our efforts to seek Justice, Tzedek. Indeed we are to feed the hungry, free the slaves, clothe the naked and respond to folks in need—to be, in other words, exactly made in the image of God. But we are also being asked to remove the fetters, the yoke, the stumbling blocks, the tensions, those false gods and idols that encourage us to abdicate our personal responsibilities and ignore those inner flows of wisdom—the flows of living Torah—that the body knows so well. It is this listening, this listening for the "emerging unexpected," this waiting, waiting, if you will, for insights from God, this resting, if you prefer, in the parasympathetic mode—that makes Yom Kippur a Shabbat of Shabbats, a day of complete rest inside and out. I want to bless us all that we remain attentive to these flows of holy wisdom moving within our own cells as we shape together the final hours of our Shabbat Shabbaton.

Gamar hatimah tova. May you receive a good seal!