Coping with Vulnerability—Lessons from the Ne’ila Prayer

You can now watch an abridged video version of these Torah thoughts on YouTube: https://youtu.be/npymfdeniQg?si=Gev3dErLlrQtUPDC

There is, perhaps, no other time in the Jewish calendar year that we feel as vulnerable as we do on Yom Kippur. Denied all physical pleasures, we spend the day in synagogue asking God for forgiveness and atonement for all the wrongs we had committed during the course of the past year and for a favorable judgment for the upcoming year. We spend the day beating our chests while listing all our sins in alphabetical order and we stand before God embarrassed, ashamed and vulnerable, knowing that our fate is in His hands.

While this is true on every Yom Kippur, it is especially true today. In a recent article, Yossi Klein Halevi says we are now living at the “end of the post-Holocaust era” (https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-end-of-the-post-holocaust-era). He contends that the last eight decades were defined by optimism about the Jewish future. After the Holocaust “two great centers of Jewish life emerged—a sovereign Israel, and a self-confident North American Jewry.” For Israel this meant that, thanks to our superior military capabilities, we possessed the ability to defend ourselves against our enemies, and for North American Jewry it meant that the surrounding culture would finally be rid of its Jewish obsession and Jews can now live securely in a society that fully embraced them.

In Israel, on October 7, the optimism and self-confidence were dealt a devastating blow. Our sophisticated high-tech border defense was overrun by Israel’s weakest enemy that then invaded southern Israel leaving civilians helpless to defend themselves against a savage, ruthless and heavily armed terrorist group, which then proceeded to butcher about 1,200 men, women, children and elderly, and to take another 250 into Gaza as hostages. Furthermore, the forced evacuation of over 60,000 civilians from northern Israel challenged our conviction that the Zionist enterprise has finally ended Jewish homelessness.

The atmosphere in North America began to shift several years ago, highlighted by the murder of 11 worshippers in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. Since then, synagogues throughout the country require round-the-clock security. This shift was reinforced by the events of October 7 which unleashed an unprecedented wave of antisemitism on college campuses and elsewhere, instilling in Jews a profound sense of insecurity and fear. Thus, in addition to the feelings of vulnerability that accompany us every Yom Kippur, Jews today, in both Israel and North America, are experiencing a sense of vulnerability in their everyday lives. The question is what can we learn from Yom Kippur that may help us overcome, or at least alleviate, this feeling of vulnerability?

I believe that we may gain some insight from Ne’ila—literally, “the closing of the gates”— which is the concluding prayer of Yom Kippur. As the final prayer and our last opportunity to beseech God for forgiveness, it is imbued with a sense of urgency and it is the time during which we feel the most vulnerable. Thus, the ark remains open and we stand for the entire service. Instead of asking God to “inscribe” us in the books of life, redemption, sustenance, and forgiveness, as we do in the other prayers, we ask God to “seal” us in these same books, and many communities recite selichot—the penitential prayers for divine forgiveness—followed by the mention of God’s thirteen attributes of mercy, a full seven times. Thus, one might expect the conclusion of the Ne’ila service to be a time of anxiety and stress. Yet, the custom in many synagogues is to end to service with the blowing of the shofar followed by singing and dancing to the words “Next year in Jerusalem rebuilt! The question is, how can this somber and solemn moment characterized by our sense of vulnerability at its peak, suddenly transform into a joyous celebration?

I believe the answer is twofold. First, after spending the past 25 hours in deep and genuine reflection, introspection, confession and contrition, we feel good about ourselves, confident that God will judge us favorably, and excited by the prospect that God will allow us to begin the year with a clean slate. Second, we have faith in God’s forgiveness, and that even if we are unworthy He will forgive us because He is the “King who pardons and forgives our iniquities… and makes our guilt pass away” who forgives “abundantly”, and who does “not desire the condemned man’s death” but rather that he “repent, and live”.

In other words, despite the sense of vulnerability that we have experienced throughout the day culminating in the Ne’ila prayer, and despite the uncertainty of what lies ahead, we exhibit confidence in both ourselves and in God that all will be well in the end, and we can therefore rejoice.

Thus, the Ne’ila prayer offers a key to coping with the sense of vulnerability that we, in Israel and North America, are experiencing today. Although we are living with uncertainty and feeling vulnerable in ways that we have not since the Holocaust, Ne’ila teaches us to remain confident in ourselves, in God’s willingness to forgive, and in the ultimate victory of light over darkness and good over evil.

G’mar Chatima Tova!

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