NE’ILA Ne’ila, short for Ne’ilat She’arim, “the closing of the gates,” is a service nowadays unique to Yom Kippur. In ancient times a Ne’ila prayer was also said on public fasts instituted in Israel because of drought; and when the Temple stood a Ne’ila prayer was said by priests during their rota of duty. Now it exists only on Yom Kippur. There was a dispute between Rav and Rabbi Yoḥanan as to the significance of the name. One held that it meant the closing of the gates of the Temple, the other that it meant the closing of the gates of heaven (Yerushalmi, Berakhot 4:1). In truth however, the Talmud states that “though the gates of prayer may be closed the gates of tears are never closed” (Bava Metzia 59a). What gives this moment its drama and urgency is that it is the culmination of the one day that has the power to cleanse us of our sins. The sages said that in the absence of the Temple and the service of the High Priest, the day itself atones. The prayers we are about to say are the last syllables of this consecrated time. The sense of an ending is intense. The process of preparation and prayer began forty days ago on Rosh Ḥodesh Elul with the blowing of the shofar and the saying of Psalm 27. It gathered pace with the recitation of Seliḥot. It became a courtroom drama on Rosh HaShana with the shofar proclaiming that the heavenly court is in session and we are on trial for our lives. The case for the defense has been made. We have neither denied nor made excuses for our sins. We have confessed our guilt, individual and collective, and we have appealed for mercy and forgiveness. The trial is now in its closing moments. The court is about to rise. The verdict, signed, will soon be sealed. At no other time, barring exceptional circumstance, will we be as close to God as we will be for the next hour. We have fasted, prayed and had the courage to face the worst about ourselves. We have been empowered to do so by our unshakable belief that God loves, forgives, and has more faith in us than we do in ourselves. We can be better than we are, better than we were. And though we may have stumbled and fallen, God is holding out His hand to lift us, giving us the strength to recover, endure, and grow to become the person He is calling on us to be: a blessing to others, a vehicle through which His light flows into the world, an agent of hope, His partner in the work of redemption. Faith is the courage to take a risk, as Abraham and Sarah took the risk of following the Voice calling them to leave their land and birthplace to travel to an unknown destination, as the Israelites did when they began their journey into the desert, an “unsown land.” To be a Jew is to take the risk of believing that the evils of this world are not inevitable or irremediable; that we can mend some of the fractures of humanity; that we, by loving others as God loves us, can bring the Shekhina into our lives, turning a little of the prose of the human condition into poetry and song. Jews do not accept suffering that can be alleviated or wrong that can be put right as the will of God. We accept only what we cannot change. What we can heal, we must. So, disproportionately, Jews are to be found as teachers fighting ignorance, doctors fighting disease, economists fighting poverty, and lawyers fighting injustice. Judaism has given rise, not in one generation but in more than a hundred, to an unrivaled succession of prophets, priests, philosophers, poets, masters of halakha and aggada, commentators, codifiers, rationalists, mystics, sages and saints, people who gave the Divine Presence its local habitation and name, and taught us to make gentle the life of this world. Judaism has consistently asked great things of our people, and in so doing, helped make them great. Tonight, at Ne’ila, God is calling us to greatness. That greatness is not conventional. We do not need to be rich or successful or famous or powerful to find favor in the eyes of God and our fellows. All we need is ḥen, graciousness; ḥesed, kindness; raḥamim, compassion; tzedek, righteousness and integrity; and mishpat, what Albert Einstein called the “almost fanatical love of justice” that made him thank his stars he was a Jew. To be a Jew is to seek to heal some of the wounds of the world, to search out the lonely and distressed and bring them comfort, to love and forgive as God loves and forgives, to study God’s Torah until it is engraved in our minds, to keep God’s commands so that they etch our lives with the charisma of holiness, to bring God’s presence into the shared spaces of our common life, and to continue the story of our ancestors, writing our chapter in the book of Jewish life. “Wherever you find God’s greatness,” said Rabbi Yoḥanan, “there you will find His humility” (Megilla 31a). And wherever you find true humility, there you will find greatness. That is what Yom Kippur is about: finding the courage to let go of the need for self-esteem that fuels our passion for self-justification, our blustering claim that we are in the right when in truth we know we are often in the wrong. Most national literatures, ancient and modern, record a people’s triumphs. Jewish literature records our failures, moral and spiritual. No people has been so piercingly honest in charting its shortcomings. In Tanakh there is no one without sin. Believing as we do that even the greatest are merely human, we also know that even the merely human can also be great. And greatness begins in the humility of recognizing our failings and faults. The greatness to which God is calling us, here, now, is “not in heaven nor across the sea” but in our hearts, minds and lives, in our homes and families, our work and its interactions, the tenor and texture of our relationships, the way we act and speak and listen and spend our time. The question God asks us at Ne’ila is not, “Are you perfect?” but “Can you grow?” There are three barriers to growth. One is self-righteousness, the belief that we are already great. A second is false humility, the belief that we can never be great. The third is learned helplessness, the belief that we can’t change the world because we can’t change ourselves. All three are false. We are not yet great but we are summoned to greatness, and we can change. We can live lives of moral beauty and spiritual depth. We can open our eyes to the presence of God around us, incline our inner ear to the voice of God within us. We can bring blessings into other people’s lives. And now, in absolute humility, we turn to God, pleading with Him to seal us in the book of life so that we can fulfill the task He has set us, to be His ambassadors to humankind.

וְחָתְמֵֽנוּ And seal us. Throughout Ne’ila we substitute “seal” for “write,” because “On Rosh HaShana it [our verdict] is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed,” specifically at the end of the day, since at any previous point we can lodge an appeal.

אָשַֽׁמְנוּ We have sinned. At Ne’ila, here and during the Leader’s Repetition, we say only the short confession, omitting Al ḥet, “For the sin we have sinned before You.” Time is short, the day is ending, the verdict is about to be sealed, so we keep our confession short and focused.

אַתָּה נוֹתֵן יָד You give Your hand. This prayer makes the powerful point that often it is God who seeks us, not we who seek God. Sometimes we turn to Him of our own accord. But at other times He calls to us, through His prophets and sages, or through events that recall us to our identity and destiny. Nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, for instance, brought many estranged and assimilated Jews back to an identification with their people, among them some of the first Zionists. This is not to say that anti-Semitism is the work of God (God forbid) but to say that, in bad events as well as good, we can sometimes hear God calling to us, as He called to the first humans in the Garden of Eden, saying, “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). Rabbi Naḥman of Bratslav said, “If a person does not judge himself, all things judge him, and all things become messengers of God.” מָה אָֽנוּ What are we? Taken from the early morning prayers, this is a profound meditation on mortality already mentioned in the Talmud in the context of Yom Kippur (Yoma 87b). Viewed from a purely physical perspective, we are born, we live, we die, and it is as if we had never been.

אַתָּה הִבְדַּֽלְתָּ אֱנוֹשׁ You have separated man. This “on the other hand” contrasts with the previous paragraph and states the paradox of the human condition: we are dust of the earth but we have within us immortal longings. Infinitesimally small, we are also inexplicably great because we can enter into dialogue with God as we are doing now. לְמַֽעַן נֶחְדַּל מֵעֹֽשֶׁק יָדֵֽינוּ That we may end the oppression that is in our hands. Once there was a financial dispute between two men known to Rabbi Yisrael Salanter. One owed the other a large sum of money but begged to be able to repay it in installments since otherwise he and his family would be destitute. The rabbi urged the creditor to have compassion and accede to the borrower’s request, but he refused. That year the rabbi came to the creditor before Ne’ila and told him he must change his mind and act with compassion, for otherwise how could he say and mean the words “that we may end the oppression that is in our hands”?