Dr. Elliott Malamet
“I’m quitting,” he tells you, as he pretends to throw the cigarettes in the garbage but then pockets them when you’re not looking. “I am paying attention” she protests, as she scrolls through her phone while also chopping vegetables. “It’s just a joke,” he says, after making yet another one at your expense in public in front of others.
One way that moderns are certainly not special is in our ability to inflict harm through how we speak, the things we do, and our amnesia regarding the things that we should have done. In this respect, we are just another generation in a long history of human beings who have tried, often elusively, to be good. But we stumble about, rationalizing our behaviours; making promises we cannot keep; speaking about one another with recklessness; excusing the pain we cause.
Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher and legal scholar of the 12th century, offers a particularly poignant example in his Laws of Repentance of the way we betray not just other people, but our own stated intentions. Citing a rather obscure Jewish law from antiquity, which states that a person who has come into contact with certain kinds of creeping creatures or insects, becomes tamei(spiritually impure) and requires immersion in a mikvah (ritual bath) in order to become “purified,” he offers a trenchant observation on both human self-deception and religious hypocrisy:
“Anyone who confesses verbally [before God] without resolving in his heart to abandon [sin] can be compared to one who immerses himself [in a mikvah] with a lizard in his hand. His immersion will be of no avail until he casts away the lizard.”
If we stand up on Yom Kippur and mumble our prayers while remaining utterly detached or distracted from any real self-examination, than we undermine the process of introspection from the start. All our lives are an exercise in “casting away the lizard.”
We say we are going to do change, we even claim we are in the midst of making that change, but all the while our behaviour and our body language betray our underlying ambivalence and denial. Ethics and becoming the best version of ourselves, Maimonides offers, is not a game. Don’t pretend to repent; to commit to the long hard road of developing into a kinder, more attuned person; to promise to undo actions that are ruining your life and those around you—including the people who love you the most—while the smokes are still in your pocket, the phone is still occupying all of your attention, and the insults continue to flow freely from your mouth in the guise of humour.
So it turns out that Yom Kippur is not really that interested in religion, if by that we mean the stereotypical version of what people take for Judaism – the punctilious keeping of rituals and the appeasing of the great deity in the sky.
Instead, the central focus of Yom Kippur is on language, both the words we utter with our lips, and the way our body is always sending out signals (which we call body language). How do we communicate? Do we use speech responsibly and sensitively? In an idle or mindless way? Harshly and in a damaging or defamatory fashion? Do we look at people eye to eye, or from "up above," in a flippant or contemptuous stance? When we vow to change, do we mean it, or are we simply mouthing promises that we have little or no intention of keeping?
The liturgy of the Yom Kippur confession, known in Hebrew as the vidui, cuts right to the heart of the many creative ways that we employ our bodies to dismiss and demean others. It literally mentions our lips and mouths several times (uttering words that are empty silence fillers or gossipy daggers or insincere promises); our eyes (which voyeuristically pry into things that are not our business or look down on others); our raised throats and stiff necks (signifying arrogance and stubbornness).
The authors of the Yom Kippur liturgy were utterly uninterested in fake piety or solemn platitudes. They wanted to get right to the down and dirty, the myriad of ways that we signal our social position and our self-importance, and hide our insecurities by playing them out on family and strangers alike. The insight of those rabbis, long before the cowardly use of social media to regularly castigate and embarrass others, was that we need to be cognizant and hyper vigilant about just how regular the habit and comprehensive our ability to degrade the gift of speech, one comment at a time.
Here is one sentence that really sticks with me and that I have taught on Yom Kippur itself for many years. The vidui states:
For the sin we have committed before You (God) through a narrow eye. צרות עין
What is a “narrow eye,” and how does it allude to something that all of us encounter almost daily? Imaging the following.
You and your partner have both had a very long and tiring—and possibly frustrating–day. It is 7 pm and you cannot afford, or are simply fed up with, yet again having something delivered.
Someone will have to make dinner.
You step up and put together a meal, despite the fact that you just want to crash on the couch. You reach into the freezer and cook what is available (let’s say salmon) and you add cauliflower and green beans. Your partner does not lift a finger to help you, but swoops to the table when it is ready, glances at the food, and says only one thing: “I don’t like green beans.”
‘The narrow eye” refers to the deflating penchant we all have to focus only on things we do not like, to “narrow our eyes,” so to speak, and pay attention only to what does not suit us, instead of feeling grateful for the incredible blessings all around us. After all, you didn’t volunteer to make dinner. And you are complaining??!!
The metaphor of the “narrow eye” alludes to those who suck the life out of the room and crush our spirits with their constant criticisms and lack of appreciation. So the vidui asks us to consider everyone who makes an effort, large or small, on our behalf. And, if after having said that sentence, and many others like it on the Day of Atonement, it occurs to us that there are some important course corrections to be made in our behaviours, then Yom Kippur will have done part of its job, which is to change forever our way of speaking, and restore us to dignity and grace.
Thank you,
I enjoyed learning about a “narrow eye” and will look for it in myself. Great lesson – we should be encouraging, generous of eye, and uncritical of others. I liked the example about making a meal with string beans. It certainly is important to focus on the efforts, even small ones, others make for us.
Likewise, should one have “narrow eyes in the mirror,” complain about oneself by going over and over his faults?
The Chofetz Chaim once belittled himself when on a train. Another person sat next to him and started talking about how great the Chofetz Chaim was, not knowing it was him sitting there. The man got angry at the Chofetz Chaim for the way he spoke poorly about himself, trying to be humble, and the two argued.
Later the Chofetz Chaim gave a shiur and his fellow traveler was in the audience. The man came up afterward and humbly apologized, saying he did not know the Rabbi’s identity. But the Chofetz Chaim said, “No, I have to apologize to you. I did not know until today that I am also not supposed to speak lashon harah about myself.”
Yes, there are many wonderful things to learn, and chances to change ourselves on Yom Kippur like the lesson of the “narrow eye.” Still we should not have a narrow eye toward ourselves in our thoughts, feelings, makeup. Does the Yom Kippur liturgy encourage this? What we repeatedly profess and plea all day certainly must imprint on us.