Time, Place, Person – On Sacred Encounters
I want you to take a moment and think to yourself: what is a sacred encounter you have had?
It could be a time, or a place or people – out in Nature, or a house of worship, a faraway country or your own backyard, or with a loved one or a group of people building sacred community together, or even listening to a piece of beautiful music.
What was it about that encounter that made it sacred? Special? Transcendent? Safe? Healing?
I’ve attended Shabbat services at the Oranienburger Strasse synagogue in Berlin, re-inaugurated after the Sho’ah. I’ve visited the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, attended a subversive ‘Women of the Wall’ morning minyan at the Western Wall, gazed upon the dreamlike, turquoise inside of the Al Aksa mosque (this was a long time ago, in the 1990’s), explored intricately carved Hindu temples in Bali and Buddhist shrines in Thailand decked with gleaming gold, and walked the ancient ruins of the Acropolis in Athens and Stonehenge in Salisbury. All of those places touched me, in one way or another, with transcendence.
I have had the good fortune to visit the lush green meadows of the Swiss Alps, dive in kaleidoscopic waters of the Dead Sea and even experience a frozen walk in Hickory Hill Park, where trees drip with a sparkling array of icy jewels.
I’ve been blessed to experience sacred encounters with deeply meaningful people. The wedding to my husband, the joy of sharing the bimah with my children, the ecstasy of the swell of collective song, each Neilah service with this beloved community.
This sacred intersection of time, place and people has been on my mind as I reflect on my summer Amtrak travels. While enjoying gracious hospitality, I told my hosts that there was something deeply healing to this trip. I got to spend quality time with my son, and luxuriate in the kindness and generosity of others without agendas or demands. I supped with friends, shared stories, hiked in the mountains. We even saw amber rays of sun burst forth from clouded skies over mountain ridges in what we called ‘Hallelujah moments’. Perhaps the most unexpected and thought-provoking sacred encounter was in Salt Lake City, at the Temple Square of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Over my years here in Iowa City, my family has been blessed with a close personal friendship with an amazing LDS family, Robin and Carl and their four wonderful kids. I met Robin at the Iowa City Public Library, when I led a Hanukkah story time and she wooed me with a crocheted potholder she brought me as a gift (as you know, I have a soft spot for crochet). This friendship blossomed into a broader interfaith relationship with the family’s community, and despite our differences, I am deeply impressed with the devotion, kindness and commitment to acts of service of Latter Day Saints. As an unrepentant theology nerd, I have been enriched by fascinating and deep conversations with our friends about LDS theology and the centrality of consecrated temples in their tradition. I’ve visited the historic sites in Nauvoo and knew I’d want to see Temple Square. This may strike you as peculiar, especially given the Church’s past history with the baptism of the dead of the Sho’ah, but I find that I often learn more in the encounters that are off-the-beaten track.
I had been encouraged by my friends to go. Not to convert me, but to share with me a tender nexus between our faiths. Being a rabbi is a real treat sometimes, because local LDS leadership arranged for a private VIP tour for my son and I.
The Salt Lake Temple is being renovated and will open for six months to the public before it is consecrated and made exclusive to members of the church. At the visitors’ center, a smaller scale ‘mock’ temple had been built and we were given a tour of its rooms, their symbolism and the path of spiritual progression that visiting an LDS temple is supposed to facilitate. A few striking images that remained with me was the baptismal font, mounted on the backs of twelve oxen – an enduring Biblical image (and more luxurious than our mikva’ot!), and the Sealing Room, where mirrors on opposing walls reflect one’s image infinitely: a metaphor for eternal salvation, for oneself and one’s family.
Religious scholars use a term called ‘sacred envy.’ Sacred envy is a productive feeling of complimentary jealousy that one can feel at experiencing the beauty of another religion, even if you have no intent of being part of that religion. As I stood in that Sealing Room, I could not help but be deeply moved. How powerful and healing it must be, to not have a Temple in ruin with only a retaining wall remaining, but to have actual, living, breathing temples where deep spiritual work is done that restores the losses of loved ones to eternity. Each tradition tells a deep story of sacred encounter, of that holy trifecta across time, space and person. And thankfully, on Yom Kippur, we have our own.
We no longer have a standing Temple, and for many reasons both theological and geopolitical, I am relieved. It was already in the time of the Midrash (Avot deRabbi Natan) that Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai remarked that deeds of lovingkindness replace and refine the atonement which was once performed in the Temple. At the same time, we enact through embodied ritual and sacred theater ‘zecher Beit haMikdash’, in remembrance of the Temple. The starkest, clearest and most powerful example of this is the Yom Kippur Musaf Avodah service.
Each Yom Kippur, we do something both intensely sacred and subversive. We ‘pretend-play’ the Temple service. And not just any service: the Yom Kippur service where only the High Priest enters the Holy of Holies, and only then. A sacred trifecta of time (Yom Kippur), place (the Jerusalem Temple) and person (the High Priest) re-enacted thousands of years later on a simple bimah in a faraway little synagogue among the cornfields of Iowa by a rabbi who does not have a drop of Priestly lineage in her.
Yom Kippur, as imagined by the Rabbis, rests on the premise of a holy chutzpah: the democratization of a transcendent encounter. Anyone (Kohen, Levi, Yisrael, born Jew and convert) can be a High Priest, anywhere (from the stieblach of Eastern Europe to the synagogues of the Maghreb all the way to the American Midwest) at this moment, this one day a year. We build a temple, not of gleaming grey quartz monzonite like the Salt Lake Temple, or of glowing ‘meleke’, the unique limestone indigenous to the Jerusalem hills, but in our minds and hearts. We build that Temple for everyone, equally, without reservation and without condition.
The Avodah service is weird and dramatic by contemporary standards. On an LDS Temple are carved golden letters, ‘Holiness to the Lord.’ in the Book of Leviticus, the High Priest engraves those very words on his golden diadem. The message is the same: to be holy means to be set apart and also a touch counter-cultural. We write this message on our hearts to be fearless in our uniqueness as we attempt to inhabit the spirit of the High Priest. We imagine a multisensory experience of ritual sacrifice, incense, flame, the song of Levites and the silence of the innermost space. The High Priest is both a sacred vessel and a fallible human. He prays for atonement: for himself, his household and the Jewish people. A red cord would be bound around his ankle in case he would perish when confronting the Divine, so he could be dragged out. The service leader – and anyone in the congregation who wishes to participate – falls prostrate on their face when proclaiming ‘baruch shem kavod malchuto l’olam va’ed’ – ‘blessed is the honored Name of God’s sovereignty for all eternity.’ The Avodah service is raw and real, praying for blessing and well-being, forgiveness and community; for the primary needs and deep hopes that bind a people together. It is a place of awe for the Days of Awe, but, not unlike the reflecting mirrors in the Sealing Room, or the incensed shrine of the Buddha, or in the Garden of Gethsemane or the black stone of Mekkah, the Temple is meant to be a place of spiritual healing.
We are invited into the visceral in order to refine the spiritual. Judaism has a little secret: we are admittedly panentheists; seeing, witnessing, experiencing the Divine in everything. In every Rocky Mountain peak or Iowa blade of grass. The Avodah service uses imagination to re-establish the ‘axis mundi’, the ‘world pole’ that we lost. It is like a Mandala of the mind; an extended guided meditation on atonement and at-one-ment, of finding balance in the Cosmos and radical acceptance of oneself, so that each of us can rest in the grace of ‘salachti kid’vareicha’ – ‘I have forgiven you according to My word.’
God is harder to define and easier to experience. We find God through our senses, just like the High Priest did. Open yourself up to experiencing God this Yom Kippur, to brushing up against transcendence, even if you don’t really believe it or want to believe it. Ground yourself in what you feel, taste, touch. Maybe it’s a sensation of hunger of thirst, heat or cold, the texture of your clothes and tallit, the evocation of melody and chant, the slant of the light as it pours through our windows, the touch of a hand, the weight of a hug, the blessing of kindness, the release of oneself. God is in all these things on through these things we find healing and peace, if only for these 25 hours.
Time, place, person. We are the High Priests ministering to our own lives. We can take responsibility for how we rise and seek forgiveness for when we fall. There is no other tether, no intermediary, between us and the Great Transcendent Mystery. On this day, in this moment, with this community, we journey deeper and deeper into Yom Kippur, until we are hungry and thirsty, giddy and tired, bored and revved up, or mellow with prayer, song and self. This is the sacred encounter.
May each of us reach into our inner High Priest and may each of us reach beyond to our God. May each of us witness the unfolding of our souls and the healing of our hearts – through love, and grace, and forgiveness, and catharsis, and new beginnings, and hope springing eternal even if the world tells us not to, and connection to something ancient, deep and enduring. Embrace it and be changed by it.
Godspeed and easy travels, until the Gates of Mercy close, embracing us all.
G’mar Chatimah Tovah.
