Yom Kippur Desert Island Discs

By Rabbi Michael Pollak, for the Jewish Ethics Project

I have long thought that Israel Radio and Television have been missing a trick. Rather than mimicking our own very dear “Desert Island Discs”, where guests can choose from any piece of recorded music, the Israeli equivalent should draw on the familiarity of the Yom Tov Machzor or the Haggadah to ask guests to choose their favourite Pesach songs or their favourites from the Yamim Noraim (High Holidays) services. I have long been preparing for that phone call comes. My list is ready – every choice is drawn from the Tefilot of Yom Kippur.

In first place my selection even trumps the thunderous Marei Kohen. Despite its majestical evocation of the radiant face of the High Priest as he emerged intact from the Holy of Holies, that hymn only ranks third on my list. In second place, by the narrowest of margins is the uplifting final Kaddish of Yom Kippur which heralds – at long last – the return to food. But as the outright winner of my Desert Island Discs selection, I have chosen the rousing hymn which we sing almost immediately after Kedusha during Musaf on each of the days of Rosh Hashana and on Yom Kippur. Referred to by the inspiring opening word Vaye’etayu it is normally sung to a thumping German marching tune. The opening lines are:

And everyone will come to serve You and bless Your glorious Name,

and throughout the Isles they shall declare Your righteousness.

Its best heard as a choral piece with the multitude of voices conjuring up the vision of peoples of every faith and ethnicity streaming into Jerusalem. The unexpected universalism continues:

And peoples will seek You, who knew You not before;

and they will praise You, those who live in every part of the earth, and they will say, always, “Hashem is Great”

At the heart of the holiest day of the Jewish Calendar we give voice to a moral imperative: that this day is only complete when all of humanity has been welcomed into our capital city. In Western Culture the closest parallel is found in the Choral Movement in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its vision of universal brotherhood. Closer to home, Robert Zimmerman’s Blowin’ in the Wind shares that self-same yearning for the dignity and unity of all humanity.

Strangely, we have largely evicted statements which demand an allegiance to a common morality from our discourse around the Yom Kippur prayers. Universalism has given way to a narrow particularism, often heralded by the signpost word “profound” - a prelude to what is frequently unintelligible, and, in truth shallow. The plain meaning of these prayers has been demoted in preference to the obscure and mysterious. But the true message of the words is insistent: Judaism envisions a world in which all peoples can live together.

The hymn of Vaye’etayu is followed by repeated petition for the welfare of all of humanity. We continue to affirm the centrality of the universal in Judaism in the following prayers:

חֲמֹל עַל מַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ

Have compassion upon Your works,

וְתִשְׂמַח בְּמַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ,

and rejoice in Your works;

וּבְכֵן

And so,

תֵּן פַּחְדְּךָ ה’, אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ

grant that Your awe, Hashem, our Lord

עַל כָּל מַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ

be upon all Your works,

.וְאֵימָתְךָ עַל כָּל מַה שֶּׁבָּרָֽאתָ

And your reverence be upon all that you have created.

The centrality of Ethics and Morality in the Jewish worldview is woven throughout our prayers. We see this theme in the Thirteen Attributes of the Divine which are repeated throughout the Ten Days of Repentance until the final service of Yom Kippur. The Ne’ilah service may be heard as a type of fugue around these attributes, each voice returning to the same essential truth: that God is defined by his Moral Virtues. God is Morality. In our holiest moments, God the Almighty. God the omnipotent has to stand alongside the God of Virtue.

“We, the Jewish People, are chosen to celebrate the existence of a Creator who gives his Creation a moral purpose.”

This call to a universal moral faith is not only an invitation to believe; it is more importantly, a summons to adopt the Divine by living through His moral imperative. In his final and perhaps greatest work, Morality, Rabbi Sacks articulated this duality in the following way:

1. God has created humanity to lead an ethical life and bring kindness into the world for all of humanity

2. Only Faith is an assured pathway to the ethical life

3. Therefore a Universal Faith is the best way to bring humanity to the fulfilment of its real purpose.

This is at the core of our understanding of the nature of our identity as a people, our special election and our ultimate destiny.

In Morality Rabbi Sacks decries the failure of secular philosophy to justify any form of ethics. In this he takes his lead from, the recently deceased, Alasdair MacIntyre whom he considered to be one of the greatest intellectual influences on his own thinking. In his classic work After Virtue Macintyre is scathing about the state of contemporary ethical thought. He explains why academic philosophers are content with regurgitating failed arguments; remarking with bitter irony:

To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular.

Abandoning reason as a source of morality, Macintyre argues:

(We) are never able to seek for the good or exercise the virtues only qua individual ... we all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, a citizen of this or that city. I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation. ... I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, expectations and obligations.

This opens the door to a new approach to ethics: nations and communities are the bearers of their own morality, tested and refined through history. Rapaciousness is rewarded with intellectual and historical failure, while virtue brings enduring intellectual success and improbable survival. The morality of the Bible - as interpreted by generations of Jewish thinkers - has been challenged both in books and in the gas chambers, and it has endured.

We, the Jewish People, are chosen to celebrate the existence of a Creator who gives his Creation a moral purpose. Judaism on one leg, is Morality. That is our Divine Task throughout the year. On every Shabbat and Chag, our focus is on our Holy Task: to educate a new generation who can be entrusted to the protection of this notion of Divine Morality.

And then, after twelve months of intense introspection, Rosh Hashana arrives and we celebrate Judaism’s ultimate purpose. This is the moment of unbounded joy when all of humanity embrace the purpose of Creation, joining as one to affirm the unarguable distinction between good and evil and to do so in the name of the One God.

This, I believe, is the most powerful and satisfying moment in all our liturgy … fade speaker … play Desert Island Discs theme.