Psalm 27 - Home for the Holidays

By Madeline Nesse

The title of this D'var Tefilah is: "Psalm 27 - Home for the Holidays."

We add Psalm 27 to our liturgy during the month of Elul, leading up to the High Holidays and at least through Yom Kippur. It's on page 40 in the siddur, if you'd like to look at it. The familiar words that I'd like to

focus on are:

"I ask only one thing of God: to live in God's house all the

days of my life... ."

It seems fitting that this passage is something that we read in the High

Holiday season. Anyone who has ever been away at school or living far from family for some other reason and has experienced the joy and ambivalence of coming home for the holidays understands this.

There's the comfort of being able to regress - someone else will wash the clothes, cook the dinner, arrange the schedule - and maybe even lend you a car. On the other hand, there's the countervailing parental voice, saying:

"You're visiting in my house; you'll be following my rules." Coming home for the holidays is often an occasion for facing, contemplating and sharing both joys and disappointments - about grades, children, jobs, achievements, or relationships. The stuff of life, really. Even when it isn't an unequivocally happy homecoming, there tends to be an underlying sense of unconditional acceptance. Robert Frost caught this quality in the experience when he wrote:

Home is the place where,

When you have to go there,

They have to take you in.

In this season of teshuvah we are returning home - doing the painstaking work of cheshbone ha'nefesh (that is, measuring the state of our souls as against all those mitzvot) - but all the while knowing that even with our spotty records there is an underlying acceptance on the part of the God of Forgiveness and a chance to begin again.

So far so good - for us. But what about God? What might God be thinking about this vast influx of sinners traipsing home for the holidays?

In this regard, I'll share a few brief excepts from a Kol Nidre sermon by

Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig, entitled: "God is a Woman and She is Growing Older." [Thank you Mollie.] First, a disclaimer. This is not intended to be a radical theological statement - I am entirely convinced that the concept of God as a woman is just as much a metaphor as are all the traditional descriptions of God as a male and I don't mean to suggest that Aveenu Malkeinu, "Our Father, Our King," is any less appropriate than "our Mother, our Queen."

The setting is Yom Kippur evening:

"God is a woman and she is growing older.

"God is home tonight, turning the pages of her book [sefer

ha'zichronot - the book of remembrances]. 'Come home,' she wants to say to us, 'Come home.' But she won't call. For she is afraid that we will say 'No.'

"She knows that we avoid returning to her because we don't want to look into her age-worn face. She understand that it is hard for us to face a god who disappointed our childhood expectations: She did not give us everything we wanted. She did not make us triumphant in battle, successful in business and invincible to pain. We avoid going home to protect ourselves from our disappointment and to protect her. We don't want her to see the disappointment in our eyes. Yet, God knows that it is there and she would have us come home anyway."

The sermon continues with a homecoming over a glass of tea which I guess is poetic license, since it's Yom Kippur.

This is some of the conclusion:

"Yom Kippur we sit in the house of prayer, far from home; holding in our hands pages of greeting cards bound together like a book, thousands of words we ourselves have not written. Will we merely place our signatures at the bottom and drop the cards in the mail box?

"God would prefer that we come home. She is sitting and waiting for us as she has waited every Yom Kippur, waiting ever patiently until we are ready. Kol Nidrei night God will not sleep. She will leave the door open and the candles burning, waiting patiently for us to come home.

"Perhaps this Yom Kippur we will be able to look into God's aging

face and say, 'Avinu Malkeinu, our Mother our Queen, we have come home.'"

I wish you all joyous homecomings in this High Holiday season. Shabbat

Shalom.

Presented at Tifereth Israel, September 20, 2003