Lost and Found on Yom Kippur
Sermon Kol Nidrei Eve 5782
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
G’mar Chatimah Tovah. The wonderful poet Samuel Menashe wrote,
Always
When I was a boy
I lost things—
I am still
Forgetful—
Yet I daresay
All will be found
One day.
As an oft-absentminded person, I certainly hope the poet is right. If I don’t put my keys on a certain peg in the house, I will inevitably lose them, and I live in constant fear of putting my phone down somewhere and spending precious minutes or hours searching for it. And of course, I have often searched the whole synagogue building for sunglasses that were perched atop my own head the whole time. I can lose anything, and live in constant fear of that fact.
Losing things is a challenge. If you have ever witnessed a sensitive small child—especially your own child—lose a precious object, say a teddy bear or blanket or doll or new ball, well, you cannot forget the impassioned, tragic hysteria that follows. Losing items or objects is something we get more used to over time, as we mature. But I’m not sure we ever quite overcome that sense of loss when we recall a favorite sweater or pen or earring or photograph or any object we have come to care deeply about. In fact, the Buddhists might have it right on this subject: they preach that attachment to things is a human failure, and that removing the emotion we associate with object or items is an important goal in living a good life. Christian monks and nuns, when they take their vows of poverty, give up all that they have, too. There’s an advantage to this: you can’t lose things when you don’t have any. When you have nothing, you have nothing left to lose. What is it Kris Kristofferson wrote? “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” Not having stuff means you are free of tangible items to lose.
That doesn’t really work for us, however. We Jews lack that concept of ending attachment to all items, and there aren’t any Jewish monasteries or convents. So of course, with our long history of communal loss, we are perhaps more sensitive to the concept of losing what we have than others might be.
But if we look beyond the physical items that we might lose—eyeglasses, hats, purses, wallets, iphones—we can come to comprehend just what a large place loss plays in our lives.
Because boy, this year, we lost a lot, and just when it looked like we were going to find it all again the Delta Variant came along and we are again afraid of losing what we had started to recover. In the past year, since last Yom Kippur, we have lost so much: time with loved ones, celebrations, group mourning, theater and concerts and sports events in person, graduations, bar mitzvahs, weddings, travel, hugs, kisses, watching our kids grow and mature.
And our children and grandchildren—what about what they have lost?
I have a son, Gabe, who graduated college without ceremony or family or friends or, mostly, gifts. I have a daughter whose freshman and theoretical sophomore years of college were essentially obliterated. I’ve told you about weddings postponed, funerals and unveilings moved, Seders Zoomed instead of celebrated, family holiday gatherings cancelled. You could all tell me about the same kinds of things, losses experienced over the past year, can’t you?
Perhaps the worst is the students who lost most of a year of education and are looking at online experiences again this time. The statistics on academic performance aren’t so happy: by all accounts kids have accomplished between 40% and 60% of the progress they would have been expected to achieve in a typical year. It wasn’t a lost year—our own Beit Simcha Religious School students’ accomplishments demonstrate that, including our four students who were confirmed last May in our first Confirmation class—but it wasn’t a banner educational year, by any stretch of the imagination.
And in a very different sense, we have lost other things this year. We have, to some degree or another, lost a bit of our Judaism.
Some of us couldn’t or didn’t attend services at all last year. Now, to be totally honest, some years I see people I know well at Rosh HaShanah and I expect that I will have seen them most recently at the previous Yom Kippur—that is, from shofar call to shofar call they are, well, a bit lost to attendance at shul. But this year that wasn’t really what was going on at all. No, this time, when I didn’t see people from one High Holy Days to the next, or even from well before the High Holy Days until now, there was a quite different reason. And the idea of having lost something valuable, a piece of community, that was a shared experience for many of us.
We became, in a very real way, lost Jews. We are, in a real way now, lost Jews. We are lost Jews because we have all lost something precious this past year.
But tonight we all have the opportunity to begin to look for it.
There is a legend in the Talmud of a large stone that was situated in the main courtyard of the Temple in Jerusalem. It was called even ha- to’in “the stone of losses.” The Tractate Baba Metziah tells us “Anyone who lost something would go there, and anyone who found something would go there. The person who found something would stand by the stone and announce what was found, and the person who lost something would go there and describe the lost object and so reclaim it.” [Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 28B]
This Stone of Losses was the one place in the world where you could go to find something valuable that was lost. For example, you could stand on one side and call out, “I lost my cloak,” or “My calf escaped, and I am looking for it.” And someone on the other side of the Stone of Losses would call out that he had such an object; then you would say, “The cloak was grey with a blue design” or “the calf had one white foreleg.” And once identified properly, you would get your property back, and recover what you had lost.
Different Jewish texts apply slightly differing names to this stone: sometimes it’s even hato’in, with a tet, “the error stone,” probably because the loss was a mistake; or even hato’in (with a taf), literally “the wanderers’ stone” – since stray animals were often recovered there. While commonly translated as “the stone of losses,” it was also known as its opposite, “the finders’ stone,” for of course when you got your property back you were no longer a loser, but a finder.
So where do we go to find this Stone of Losses now?
The truth is that all of us have lost something important this past year. Some of us have lost faith in the future. Some of us have lost hope in our children, or our parents, or our friends. Some of us have lost trust in our spouses. Some of us have lost our optimism in our society. Some of us have lost the ability to believe in others. Some of us have lost confidence in ourselves.
Some of us have lost the ability to pray. Some of us have lost the ability to care. Some of us have lost touch with the most special parts of ourselves.
Some of us have lost our connection to God. Some of us have lost our connection to our family or friends.
Some of us just feel lost…
What is it that you lost in the past year? Or, perhaps, what is that you lost recently, or even years ago that you would like to recover?
What would you call out for if you came to that Stone of Losses in the courtyard of the great Temple in Jerusalem?
Would it be something concrete—say, that you lost your sense of smell? Or the opportunity to celebrate a milestone birthday with family and friends? Or that trip of a lifetime you’ve been planning for years? Or the chance to see your grandchild walk for the first time?—or would it be something quite different?
What is it that you have lost?
There was a wonderful cartoon called Bloom County that ran for many years, written and drawn by a man with the unlikely name of Berkeley Breathed. In one strip a leading character, Milo, comes up to the counter of a Lost-and-Found in a Sears department store. “Excuse me,” he says, “I’ve lost my youthful idealism.”
“I beg your pardon?” says the bowtied clerk.
“My youthful idealism,” Milo repeats, “I had it once but recently I’ve lost sight of it. Now I fear it’s been lost completely. I thought you might have it.” [here in the lost and found]
“Oh, well, actually…” the man stutters.
“And what about my sense of optimism? Lately I’ve lost that too,” Milo continues.
“Well, I’m afraid I’ve got neither of those things--” the clerk starts to answer.
“Oh, boy,” says Milo, getting huffy, “Now I’ve lost my patience. I don’t suppose you’ve found THAT either.”
“Well, no…” mumbles the poor clerk.
“That’s just great!” Milo is shouting now, “Now I’ve lost my temper! So unless you’ve found that I’ll be off you inept oaf! Good day!!”
The flummoxed clerk calls out plaintively, “P-please! Hasn’t anybody lost something tangible?!”
And another leading character, Opus, answers from the front of the line “Excuse me. I’ve lost my marbles.”
Indeed.
What they needed in that comic strip of yesteryear was a kind of spiritual lost and found, a place to go to recover those elusive, ethereal, indefinable things that we have lost but we just aren’t going to find at the Sears’ Lost and Found.
What they needed was a Stone of Losses.
So what have you lost in the past year? And where did you go to look for it?
There is the story of the drunk who is searching for his keys under a lamppost. A guy comes by and says, “Did you drop them here?” And the drunk says, “No, but the light is better here.”
Maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong place for what we have lost.
In truth, the right place to look for what you have lost is right here, and right now—on Yom Kippur, at our own Stone of Losses.
When I was preparing for tonight I thought of a beautiful poem written by a teacher of mine, Tet Carmi, a great Israeli poet and translator and man of letters. It is called “The Stone of Losses” and comes from the book of the same name. I have had this book for some years, and love it, and looked for it in the place where I always keep my favorite Jewish poetry collections. But of course, when I looked for it and then searched for it and frantically sought it I discovered it was not there; I had lost the book—that is, I lost the book called the Stone of Losses. How appropriate…
Fortunately, after much searching, it reemerged in an unexpected location—the bookcase where I had put it away carefully, expecting to find it again someday. And it turns out that the poem retells the story of the Stone of Losses in a somewhat different way.
I search
for what I have not lost.
For you, of course.
I would stop
if I knew how.
I would stand
at the Stone of Losses
and proclaim,
shouting:
Forgive me.
I’ve troubled you for nothing.
All the identifying marks I gave you…
were never mine.
I swear by my life,
by this stone in the heart of Jerusalem,
I won’t do it again.
I take it all back.
Be kind to me;
I didn’t mean to mock you.
I know there are people here
--wretched, ill-fated—
who have lost their worlds
in moments of truth.
And I search
for what I have not lost…
“At the Stone of Losses”, by T. Carmi
Kol Nidrei Eve marks the beginning of a quest, a search for t’shuvah, repentance. Most of all, tonight, we are each looking for something precious that we have lost. Only you know what it is that you lost and would like to reclaim—what it is that you need to reclaim, in order to return to the best that is within you, in order to make Teshuvah to the person you are meant to be.
The good news, as Thoreau once said, is that “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
What you have lost is not far away across the sea, not high up on a mountain, not deep inside a cave. What you have lost is actually within you. It is your best, truest self, the part of you that you wish you could be all the time. That is what we seek to find on this Yom HaKippurim, this Day of Atonement: that is the place we must look.
Yom Kippur is our even ha’to’in, our own Stone of Losses, our Stone of Error, our Stone of finding. It is our moral lodestone, the magnetically charged rock that draws everything to it; the rock of our return. This is the time and place where we can begin to come back and find what we have lost. The best in our value system; the best in ourselves; the best in our hearts.
As Carmi’s poem makes clear, what we have lost is not really lost. It is close at hand, because it is within each of us. It always was. We just forgot how to find it.
Now we know where to look.
God, our own Rock, Tzur Yisrael, our Stone of Losses, tonight we seek to find those things we have lost in the past year.
Help us to recover our optimism about life.
Help us find our best selves.
Help us reclaim our childlike wonder.
Help us turn again to our spouses, our children, our parents, our siblings, our friends.
Help us reignite our idealism.
Help us rediscover what we once loved, and can love again.
Help us return to what we are at heart: good, caring, loving, creative, generous.
Help us find You.
Tonight we begin by admitting what we have lost. If we can do that, honestly and completely, then I promise that over the next day we will find it. And our Stone of Losses will become a Stone of Finding. And our teshuvah will be complete.
May you find what you have lost. And may your prayers be answered tonight, and in the days of return to come.