Yom Kippur Sermon, 5785: Finding God in Our Anger

Earlier this week, I called my aunt for a listening ear. I felt depleted and discouraged that I already felt burnt out right at the beginning of the High Holiday season. As I was telling her what was going on, she responded, “You sound angry.” I realized that, yes, I was angry, and I began to list all the things I was angry about. The more I gave voice to my anger, the more emotionally present I became. I realized that I was suffering because, beneath the surface, I had not acknowledged a deep fury—one that expanded far beyond any single person and encompassed the entire world.

This year has been very hard for me—as a rabbi, as a Jew, as a woman, as a parent of little ones, and as someone with a chronic illness. I know that many of you have faced numerous challenges as well. By the end of last year’s High Holidays, I was completely spent and ready to collapse into a week of recuperation. What followed was incomprehensible—for an entire day, I couldn’t face the Simchat Torah Massacre. I didn’t read the news, I didn’t call my people. In the days that followed, my body rebelled against the stress of my new reality. I have managed chronic pain and fatigue throughout my life well enough to mask it most of the time. But after October 7th, every few weeks, my body rebelled. For days at a time, I couldn’t exercise, barely focus, and could eat nothing besides broth and my few safe foods.

It’s hard to have a physical fallout that is so connected to psychological inputs. Do I treat the body or the mind? I am very fortunate—and grateful—that I received proper care for both, and I am relieved to say that my health has much improved since then. Yet, there are still some things I’m untangling, and anger is one of them.

Each of us has a very personal relationship with anger, and the way we express it often traces back to how we were raised and conditioned by society. We teach our children to control their tantrums, not to hit and yell but instead to use their words. We teach women and people of color not to show anger if they want to be heard or remain safe. Some of us are taught how to use anger to intimidate and get what we need, and we struggle with a hot temper.

Remember the song we sang last Rosh Hashanah, with a line taken from Pirkei Avot: “Who is wise? One who learns from every person.” Well, the next question from this mishna is, “Who is mighty?” And the rabbis respond, quoting Proverbs: "One who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and one who rules their spirit is greater than one who takes a city."

The rabbis knew that anger is a forceful emotion that we must learn to control if we want to be great, and that it takes strength to master because anger demands to be released. If you refuse it, you must suppress your own emotional truth. I don’t know about you, but sometimes it takes all my energy just to not get upset about frustrating stuff in my everyday life, to just keep focusing on what I need to get done.

I used to turn my anger inward. Even when I knew someone had wronged me, I rarely expressed anger toward them because I had internalized the idea that my anger was unattractive, unproductive, and unsafe. We can create separateness and aloneness when we make our differences and feelings known. So I developed ways to keep a lid on my self-expression to protect the relational web of my family and friends.

Instead, I would look at myself and focus on my own agency. Yes, I would acknowledge to myself, I am angry about something—but I have a choice. I am a free agent. So instead of feeling angry, Ariel, let’s focus on what we can do to address the source of that anger and improve our situation.

Sounds productive, right? Well, it is productive. But it is also unfeeling. Instead of experiencing the fullness of my emotional life, I was stepping outside my body and jumping to analysis, problem-solving, and planning. The problem with this is that anger needs to be felt, and it needs to move through us in order for us to be well. If we don’t feel it, we don’t experience it, and then we can’t really hear what our anger is trying to tell us.

Maya Angelou once said,

If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone or too sick to be angry. You should be angry. You must not be bitter. ...So use that anger, yes. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.

At our annual retreat this past May, my sister Kendra led us in a chant that she wrote, inviting us to express frustration and rage. It goes:

If I want to yell, I can yell.
If I want to scream, I can scream.
Everyone deserves to hear me. Everyone deserves to hear me.”

And I remember when she received, with delight, the enthusiastic howls of the whole campout. We have a consistent need to talk our anger out—to yell and scream whatever is swirling within us.

What is swirling in me is this: I am furious at the Israeli government and military, and I am furious at Hamas and its funders. I am angry that Jews are being targeted and ostracized because of longstanding prejudice and misinformation that fuel hatred and division. I am angry that my body sometimes doesn’t feel as strong as my soul, and that sometimes my soul gets so distracted that I forget why I am here.

Many of you have shared your anger and pain with me over the past year. Anger at violent people who kill and injure, who manipulate the vulnerable to gain power. That children can access guns and shoot other children, that we can be denied autonomy over our own bodies. Anger at the cycles of violence that tear at the fabric of human dignity, dehumanizing entire groups of people. I share your anger at the weight of history—decades, even centuries of trauma, displacement, and struggle—that continues to be exploited to justify present-day suffering.

And then there are the long-smoldering angers that have been part of this community’s work since the beginning. Anger that human actors are poisoning the water we drink, the air we breathe. Fury at the patriarchy, at capitalism for advancing inequality, toxic behavior, and climate change. Anger that we were sold a lie that recycling would make a difference, when the only thing that will curb nature’s current course is a complete overhaul of our energy, agricultural, and transportation systems. The thought that even that might not be enough infuriates me. I am constantly frustrated that, in a world full of complex narratives, it has become so easy to weaponize information and shape it to fit preconceived notions rather than promote nuanced understanding and constructive action.

So that is a lot to be angry about, and there are a lot of people implicated in these words. So then I am angry at human ineptitude—that our power has exceeded our wisdom on how to wield it.

And that leads me to a final recipient of my anger: God.

Because that’s what it comes down to—why are there hurricanes and floods and sickness? Why are humans the way we are? Why does trauma too often lead to the same kind of violence? Why isn’t it easier to turn pain into healing?

Our earliest stories tell the tale of a great flood that wipes out all but one family, of the first brothers turning against each other, the stronger killing the weaker. This world has always held tragedy, violence, suffering, and injustice, and we cannot be held accountable for that. We don’t have control over the weather, and we don’t really have control over others. When our liturgy asks us to take responsibility for the collective sins of humankind, what exactly are we claiming we can do about it? Our tradition teaches that there is only one truly in control, and that one is God.

A story is told of Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev that once, on Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the year when all sins are confessed, the seamstress, one of the most devout members of the community, was absent. Concerned, the rabbi left the synagogue and went to the seamstress’s home. To his surprise, he found the seamstress looking at a piece of paper before her on the table.

“What’s the matter?” asked Levi Yitzhak.
“Oh, everything’s fine,” replied the seamstress. “As I was getting ready to attend the service, I made a list with two columns. At the top of one, I wrote my name, and at the top of the other, I wrote, ‘God of all the Universe.’ Then, one by one, I began to list my sins: ‘Cheated Goldman out of a pair of trousers.’ And in God’s column, I noted God’s omission: ‘Little girl died of pneumonia.’ Then the next sin, ‘Lost my temper with my children,’ and in God’s column, ‘Watched famine unfold in another country.’” And so it went.

The seamstress showed the rabbi the completed list. “And for every sin I had committed during the past year, God had done one too. So I said to God, ‘Look, we each have the same number of sins. If you let me off, I’ll let You off!’”

The rabbi’s face grew red, and he scolded her: “You fool! You let God off the hook?”

As Jews, it is our birthright to call God to account. When we refuse to express our outrage at the state of the world, at our suffering, at our powerlessness, at our fallibility—then we are letting God off the hook. Abraham our forefather demands better of God, as he argues the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, asking 

Will You sweep away the innocent along with the guilty?. . . Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly?” (Genesis 18:23-35)

How can you justify your actions, God?

It honestly can feel therapeutic, and nevermind rabbinic, to direct my righteous anger towards God. 

But there is a problem. I don’t really believe in a God that concedes to Abraham’s arguments, or the God who sends hurricanes or could have prevented the Holocaust. I believe in something I have come to call God, but it is less like a mind and more a great oneness, a life force flowing through all of us, the same force that the Earth breathes in and out. This Oneness is why people across the world come up with the same inventions at the same time. It is why science has shown that  practices like prayer and Reiki can help the sick recover, even though we don’t understand why. It is what we feel when we witness the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one. There is something beyond us that connects us all, and that we can communicate through in mysterious ways. 

I experience God the most when I close my eyes on a mountain and feel the wind whisper to me. When I fast and my physical demands fade away, leaving my soul raw and open. When I wake up from a dream and know that I’ve been visiting with my Zadie, my grandfather, who died years ago. This is the way I naturally connect with God - through nature, peacefulness, memories. 

I recently reread an interview of my Zadie, who was a beloved rabbi whose shul I grew up in. I was very close to him. The interviewer asked him about his journey to become a rabbi, and he responded with this childhood story: 

I came home one day and I heard my mother screaming. It was so atypical. My mother didn’t scream at my father’s funeral. I rushed into the room in the kitchen and there she was sitting at the table, which I will never forget, with her head on the table and beating with her hand rhythmically. I was frightened; I didn’t know what had happened, and she pointed to a piece of paper. It was a letter from her nephew—this was in 1945; the war was just over—and he was in what was then Palestine. He had escaped from Europe and he wrote her the details of how her brother and her brother’s family—forty-two people—had died. The Germans had put them into a wooden synagogue in this shtetl and set fire to the synagogue and, as they tried to escape, they machine-gunned them. I don’t know if they died from the fire or if they died from bullets.

That just triggered a rage in me. I was furious and, at that time, the only way that you could really get revenge was like my cousin, Marsha. She did it by becoming a Hebrew teacher; I did it by becoming a rabbi.

I heard my Zadie express anger from the pulpit many times. He knew how to draw clarity from it and call in others for action. His anger at the horror of the holocaust and his family’s loss led to a deep knowing of his purpose in life. But perhaps because of the magnitude of loss he experienced as a young person, he questioned an all-powerful God pulling the strings behind the curtain. 

I’m not sure he ever figured out who or what exactly he was angry at - but he kept holding them to account.  He taught me that we are connected to something greater, and our Jewish heritage holds this source responsible for injustice and suffering. He taught me to cry out when the pain is too much and lay claim to what we all deserve: peace. wholeness. love. 

When you are angry with an understanding of what it means, it can grow your soul. It can clarify your next step, your purpose in life. The prophets speak so often out of anger, begging the world to change. 

We too are responsible for the injustices tied to us - as Jews, Americans, as global citizens. To be part of a community is to inherit not only its successes but also its flaws—and with that comes the moral imperative to work toward healing and justice. We must lay claim to our own actions. The work is hard, and the journey long, but it is our responsibility to begin it. To educate ourselves on differing perspectives; to petition our government; to vote mindfully and speak out in the name of truth and peace. 

I invite each of you to move in your anger this Yom Kippur. Move with your anger, move through your anger. Reach into the shadows and unleash that part of you asking to come alive. Let your anger sprout and  bloom, changing shape and color as it unfolds. Maybe speak to a sympathetic listener, or maybe to just yourself. Or maybe, like me, you want to hold a larger force accountable. And try speaking your anger to Godself.  To nature herself. To the Holy potential of this universe. Holding the natural order of things to account for your and our suffering. 

As the holocaust survivor Paul Celan calls this giving voice to the shadow, and he invites us through his poetry:

Speak, You Too

Speak, you too,
speak last,
have your say.

Speak —
But do not split the No from the Yes.
Give your saying also meaning:
give it its shadow.

Give it enough shadow,
give it as much
as you know to be parceled out between your
midnight and midday and midnight.

Look around:
see how it all comes alive—
At death! Alive!
Speaks true, who speaks shadows.

I will speak to you, God what is your work to do. To God, whom I understand as a Holy Oneness that flows through all of creation. All night and morning I have dwelled on what I must change in myself. Now, while the gates are open, I demand that you must account for your failings. 

The brokenness in this world you created is too much. We need you to guide us on a better path than this one. Your Torah is failing us, You are failing us. You’ve let our homeland, where your House once stood, stew in oppression and violence and hatred between your children, and now devolve into catastrophe and terror. The earth you created is drowning us, choking us, sending us kneeling for mercy. This body you blessed me with, that sings out the beauty of life and birthed children into this world, cannot hold the pain of it all. 

This is your Al Chet, Holy One. Redeem yourself in my eyes, in our eyes. Teach us the ways of peace and healing. Realize your justice in our generation, so that our children will inherit a good life, a peaceful life. Help us restore the abundance of the earth so that all may thrive.  

And I say to all of you, my community - yes, we live in a world full of brokenness, but we are not powerless in the face of it. Each of us holds within ourselves the ability to change, to heal, and to act, and perhaps you need to start with anger.  To help you feel your deep connection to the world. The anger we feel can be fuel for our passion, our drive to make a difference.

May we remember that we are active participants in the unfolding of our lives. We are here to create and bless this world we were born into. May this be the year we rise into our fullest selves, harnessing our inner strength to bring about the change we so deeply seek.

And if you feel so called, you can tell whatever you do or do not believe in that your prayers are demands now. The Holy Oneness must receive your before the gates close – receive you with compassion, with respect, and offer you hope for a better future. 

And let us say, Amen.