Ne'ilah: Leaving the Closing Gates Open

These are some of the thoughts I shared this morning at a shiva minyan, and I'm sharing them here as a brief kavannah as we go into Yom Kippur.

The Ne’ilah service, the last service before Yom Kippur ends, has this aspect of racing against the time, against the setting sun, against the ever- narrowing space between two approaching gates, before they are locked - to still catch the plane before the gate at the airport is closed.

We ask ourselves: Have our words been meaningful? Has our teshuva, our repentance, found favor, reached the heart of those we wanted to reach? Have we meditated thoroughly enough on what we wanted to think about during those intense 25 hours? And how do we feel towards those who we hoped might ask us for forgiveness? Are we keeping the gates ajar for them?

The urgency of the Ne’ilah service is powerful. We still want to make it in time, slip through to a place that promises resolution, stability. And yet, doesn’t life teach us, too, that so much is always happening in the space between open and closed gates, in the limbo? Doesn’t our religion emphasize that there is always time to make amends, to return? And a successful return can only happen when there is an open space, when there are open minds, open arms.

The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai writes in Open Closed Open:

I want a god who is like a window I can open / so I’ll see the sky even when I’m inside. / I want a god who is like a door that opens out, not in, / but God is like a revolving door, which turns, turns on its hinges / in and out, whirling and turning / without a beginning, without an end.

Ne’ilah - Yom Kippur in general - forces us to look back as if not much time is left – have we given all that which we’re able to? Simultaneously it is a time of not knowing what the future will bring, not knowing how that which we have shared and repented and released and searched and found and forgiven – and not found, not received, not forgiven - will shape the next year of our lives, whirling, and turning.

May we all be sealed in the book of life. Gmar chatima tova!