Our theme for the month of October is the practice of listening deeply.
Today’s service honors the wisdom of the Jewish High Holy Days and introduces us to Tashlich and the ritual of casting past missteps symbolically into flowing water to let them go and commit to a renewed path. We consider listening deeply to ourselves as a practice of letting go of what has been holding us back from wholeness.
Wayne Cochran introduces this morning’s sermon with his story, “Tashlich.”
Tashlich
A religious custom that follows the afternoon Rosh HaShanah service
based on the line in the Book of Micah:
“God will hurl all our sins into the depths of the sea.”
By Wayne Cochran
In Judaism we do not try to erase our transgressions from memory. Neither do we consume ourselves by repeatedly regarding them. However, particularly in the month of self-examination known as Ellul, which leads up to the High Holy Days, we may decide we have to build up parts of our character to prevent our misconducts from happening again. On Rosh HaShanah, which is the Jewish New Year and a joyous holiday both, we thoughtfully recall, but do not dwell on our mistaken behaviors. In observing the Tashlich custom, we symbolically toss bread crumbs representing the sins of commission and omission we have authored during the past year into naturally flowing water and calmly watch as they pass from our lives. We consciously intend to act differently, better in the new year.
Although Tashlich prepares our minds for Yom Kippur, which is the Day of Atonement, participation in a communal ritual that causes tossed bread crumbs to absorb water as they sink is not an atonement. Figuratively speaking, breaking on our knees the ethically faulty arrows in each of our quivers—the arrows that will always miss the mark—would not be an atonement. Only asking for forgiveness and making amends is atonement.
Tashlich!
It is the afternoon of Rosh HaShanah. I pray for the guidance I will need to grow from my shortcomings. Then I wonder: Could this be the year of my walking in light my prayerbook says has been sown for the righteous? And who are those people anyway? Or could this be the year I, who have been told he is a purposeful, caring spirit, live more fittingly in fact?
As I ready myself to scatter a fistful of bread crumbs as far as I can through the air, I marvel about the innocence of the bending child with pigtails who drops bread crumbs out of her hands into the Hudson. What is she letting go of?
To the End that All Souls Shall Grow into Harmony
Rev. Joe Cleveland
October 6, 2024
I want to invite us to dwell on the image that Wayne ends his lovely reflection on the Jewish practice of Tashlich with. He has us imagine being by the side of a river with a group of others there to practice Tashlich. We’re ready to throw the bread crumbs on the water, symbolizing our letting go of things we did that we regret, symbolizing our commitment to living in a new or renewed way that is more in harmony with the people we believe we are supposed to be. There we are, a group of people by the river. I imagine the sound of water flowing by. I imagine a pleasantly sunny day, such as we have been blessed to have so many of lately. I imagine wind in the leaves, some of which are just beginning to turn yellow and orange and red. I imagine the people standing nearby, crumbs of bread in their hands, and the motion of their arms casting that bread on the water. And Wayne concludes:
As I ready myself to scatter a fistful of Italian-herb croutons as far as I can through the air, I marvel about the innocence of the bending child with pigtails who drops bread crumbs out of her hands into the river. What is she letting go of?
I am very moved by this ritual. I grew up Catholic, so I have had a lot of experience with many rituals, but as I understand it, we didn’t have a ritual of renewal like this around confession or atonement.
The Jewish High Holy days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, are fascinating to me. Maybe because the closest equivalent I have in my own experience growing up Catholic is the practice of the sacrament of confession.
Yom Kippur and the subject of atonement always makes me think about the practice of confession when I was a Catholic kid. I remember learning what would happen when you step into the confessional. You ask the priest to bless you, you report how long it has been since your last confession, and then the priest will ask what you have to confess. You’ll confess a sin or two, and then the priest will absolve you. The whole thing is mostly just words, nothing as poetic as heading down to a river. Instead, you go into a dimly lit little space, sometimes an actual box, and no one can see your face and you can’t see clearly who the priest is, though you know who it is. I remember showing up for my time in the box, and I say the thing: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession.” And the priest asks me what I have to confess. And to myself I’m thinking, not really anything. I’m a bit stuck on the word sin. I could have made my room a little neater, maybe? I do my chores, I do my schoolwork – what have I done that really could qualify as a sin? Sinning seems like its a really big deal, and nothing in my 10-year-old life really seemed to be on that scale. I might not have had pigtails, but you’d have been wondering what that rosy-cheeked boy could be confessing.
Maybe like me, you are getting hung up on some particular words here. Sin. Confession. Atonement.
Religious language—words like sin, atonement, confession, repentance, revival—these words come with baggage for many of us. The bags they come with are different for each of us. For lots of us, these words have been used to make us feel less than, used to exclude and even harm us. For others of us, I suspect that the language feels irrational or extreme. We might not think of ourselves as cherubic pigtailed kids, but what could we really have to do with those sorts of things? What are we giving ourselves to if we give ourselves to words like that?
We react against the idea of Original Sin — that doctrine helps us make a mistake: It helps us to confuse doing something bad with being bad.
“We declare that every person is inherently worthy”
One of the people Unitarian Universalism has its roots in was a man named Charles Chauncy. He lived in the 18th-century. You might have heard the name Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards preached “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” in 1741. In 1742, Charles Chauncy preached “Enthusiasm described and caution’d against.” Chauncy was so proud of this sermon that mailed his sermon to a fellow clergyman accompanied with a letter he wrote to this other preacher. In the letter, Chauncy writes:
I doubt not, you verily think, GOD sent you hither; and that your preaching here is by immediate commission from him: But others must be excus’d, if they han’t the same tho’t of the matter.
And:
[…] that you are misled in the tho’t of being sent by GOD, in an extraordinary manner, to this place, is, the mischief you are like to do here. What good you may have been the means of elsewhere; I know not: But I am well assured, instead of good, you will be the occasion of much hurt, to the interest of religion in these churches. Your manner in speaking, as well as what you say, seems rather calculated, at least at some times, to disturb the imagination, than inform the judgment: And I am fully perswaded, you too often mistake the mechanical operations of violent voice and action, for impressions of another kind.
I don’t think that Chauncy is misled in his judgment of this other pastor. I suspect he has a valid point here. I think there is at least one person I would point to today and make the same statement. “I am fully persuaded you too often mistake the mechanical operations of violent voice and action for impressions of another kind.” We are wise to guard against those of whom we might say with Chauncy:
while you think yourselves to be spiritual men, or prophets: You are nothing better than Enthusiasts; your being acted by the SPIRIT, immediately guided and influenced by him, is meer pretence; you have no good reason to believe any such thing.
I am having some fun saying these sentences of Chauncy’s out loud. And, I think we can sometimes guard too much against enthusiasm. My American Heritage Dictionary says that an archaic meaning of enthusiasm is “Ecstasy arising from supposed possession by a god.” I think it’s the feeling of possession that I get nervous about. Possession means that I don’t have control. Ecstasy and enthusiasm aren’t really rational things either. A person should be able to think for themselves. A person should be free to determine for themselves who they are and who they will become. And it’s ok to give ourselves to an experience now and then.
That’s what a ritual like Tashlich does. It gives us an experience of something rather than just the idea of something.
And maybe one of the things that I want to help people do is to have a different experience of some of these religious words than you may have had in the past.
Another place that Unitarian Universalism has roots is in a man named Hosea Ballou. Ballou was “a relatively uneducated, gospel preacher who felt his faith more than learned it,” but he was also someone who valued the use of reason. I think of him as someone who combined an enthusiasm that might have made Chauncy nervous with a rationality that Chauncy would have valued. Combining his felt faith in a loving God with his ability to reason led Ballou to put together what my friend and UU historian Mark Harris calls “the greatest theological work in Universalist history.” That work is called A Treatise on Atonement.
Ballou believes that sin is a real thing. It’s even part of a loving God’s plan for his creation. But he argued against the idea of “original sin”—a kind of infinite sin humans bear. Ballou thought humans are finite beings and so the ways we make mistakes, that is finite, too. God is a loving God, and everyone is going to be “saved”. God’s purpose for humanity happiness, and when we get out of harmony with our fellow humans or when we get out of harmony with creation—that’s what sin is. And Ballou proclaimed that when we’re out of harmony, we experience the awfulness of it right away, in our life. Sin in part of the divine plan. When we miss the mark, when we hurt others, when we are out of relationship, we can feel that. Our experience of life and the condition of our living is different when we act in ways that are out of harmony with creation and with our fellow humans. Ballou argued that when we sin, we are punished right away, right then. And I think this is because we are all part of one creation. Ballou doesn’t use the word “interdependent,” but our happiness is connected with the happiness of others. “The main object in all that we do is happiness,” says Ballou, “and “knowing that his own happiness is connected with the happiness of his fellow-men, which induces him to do justly and to deal mercifully with all men, he is no more selfish than he ought to be.”
This is part of how Ballou understands human nature. There is the possibility of acting in ways that get out of harmony—harmony: I like that image for understanding what our goal in living is, or, Ballou would have said, harmony is the goal of God’s creation. We can get out of harmony, and we have the capacity to recognize that. We can hear it, if we listen. We can hear those dissonances, we can hear those instances when we are not contributing to the thriving of the whole.
Ballou is talking about virtue. For Ballou, as my friend Mark paraphrases: “Virtue is always conceived of in terms of relationship, and not in terms of self.”
We declare every person is inherently worthy. And what matters is the relationships you have with other people, the way that you are connected. Because we are all connected, interconnected, interdependent. We are part of one creation, Ballou would say. And the goal of it all, the purpose God has for God’s creation is happiness for all of us. For everyone. Everybody is worthy. There are no stratifications of more or less worthiness. I imagine that the Unitarians of Ballou’s time might have enjoyed some stratifications because they had access to power and held important positions in society. They lived on Beacon Hill, and that might be hard to give up.
And this brings me to maybe the fundamental thing that I want to say: If virtue is about relationship, then virtue isn’t something that one has. It doesn’t make sense, as I’m thinking of it, to say that someone is virtuous. Virtue is something that you do. We can act with more or less virtue. That doctrine of Original Sin? It encourages us to make the error that if we’ve done something that is bad then we are bad. And that’s a mistake. You are inherently worthy. You’ve done something that doesn’t feel harmonious? You can listen to that. And we can change.
This is making me think about something that ran across in a book about human history and the evolution of human society. The anthropologist and archeologist authors of the book say it is odd to wonder whether human beings are inherently good or evil. They point out that we would ask this question about no other animal. Are dogs inherently evil or good? The question doesn’t make sense. Humans are not stained with original sin. It is possible for us to interact in ways that are more or less helpful or hurtful. The question “are humans inherently good or evil” misleads us. We can act in ways that promote happiness and we can act in ways that promote suffering. There’s a rabbi who says if you believe you can hurt, then you have to believe that you can heal.
I think that the term atonement is incredibly helpful as a way to understand what we’re working toward. We can break relationships. We can act in hurtful ways, in selfish ways. And when we do, the goal, the best thing, is to return to being at one with each other. At-one-ment. Our happiness is dependent on the happiness of others. Ballou talked about how he could never except to be fully happy if others are suffering.
In the tradition of Yom Kippur, the goal is the act of tshuvah. The rabbi Danya Ruttenberg explains that “The Hebrew word that is often translated as ‘repentance’ is tshuvah, which literally means ‘returning.’ […] In a spiritual context, teshuvah is about coming back to where we are supposed to be, returning to the person we know we’re capable of being—coming home, in humility and with intentionality, to behave as the person we’d like to believe we are.” [Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair] The return is to being again at one.
I don’t know what a young pigtailed kid might be letting go of as they participate in Tashlich, but maybe they feel they did something that was not as harmonious as it could have been. I hope that one thing we can let go of is the way we can confuse acting badly with being somehow fundamentally or inherently bad. I think Ballou would say that our ability to recognize when we are out of relationship, that’s actually evidence of our inherent worthiness. We have that ability, that gift. We can hear and feel the disharmony. A misdeed doesn’t define who we are. We have the freedom to respond to those moments of disharmony in ways that move us into greater harmony. There is always the possibility of a fuller, richer oneness, a fuller, richer harmony.
And I hope that we can also let go of at least some of the baggage that some religious language has for us. I hope we can have a new experience of a word like atonement. There are other possibilities. And, after all, every Sunday we say — what do we say we are about? We say:
“To the end that all souls shall grow into harmony…”
Let us be ever more harmonious.
May we be ever more at one.
Amen.
Resources
- “Enthusiasm described and caution’d against. A sermon preach’d at the Old Brick Meeting-House in Boston, the Lord’s Day after the commencement, 1742. : With a letter to the Reverend Mr. James Davenport. / By Charles Chauncy, D.D. one of the Pastors of the First Church in said town. ; [Twenty lines from Luther].” In the digital collection Evans Early American Imprint Collection. https://name.umdl.umich.edu/n03978.0001.001. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed October 5, 2024.
- “Hosea Ballou’s “Treatise” at 200.” UUHS Lecture at UUA General Assembly. Fort Worth, Texas. by Mark W. Harris, Minister First Parish of Watertown, Massachusetts. June 2005. https://uuhhs.org/research-resources/hosea-ballous-treatise-at-200-general-assembly-lecture/
- Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language. Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2012.
- Danya Ruttenberg. On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World.
- David Graeber and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Picador, 2023 (2021).
Topics: Atonement, Judaism, Listening, Rosh Hashanah, Sin, Universalism, UU History, Yom Kippur