On all other holy days, we read a story with a message.

On Pesach, we retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt.

On Shavuot, we read the 10 commandments and the experience of receiving revelation at Sinai.

On Rosh Hashanah, the central texts speak to us of Abraham and Isaac, life and death, without any direct relation to the holiday at all.

On most holy days, the Torah’s description of the required sacrifice is left to the second Torah reading, the Maftir.

Yet on Yom Kippur, the text provides no narrative, no tale to tell, no lesson to learn. Only a description of the ritual of the High Priest and the two goats, one sacrificed to God, the other cast out with the sins of the people, to wander into the wilderness and meet an unknown fate.

For those of us who cannot imagine a return to the practice of animal sacrifice, this Torah reading may strike us as irrelevant. We may pass it over, in anticipation of Isaiah’s stirring words in the haftarah, “Is this the fast that I have chosen?”

The Rabbis who established the cycle of Torah readings lived after the end of animal sacrifice in the temple. On this, the holiest day of the year, when we are considering the weighty issues of life and death, those rabbis must have had a deeper purpose than reminding us of what was once the practice in temple times.

What is the essence of the Yom Kippur sacrifice?

The Yom Kippur reading begins with the words:

Adonai spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, who died when they drew too close to the presence of the Lord. The Lord said to Moses:

Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come at will into the Shrine, behind the curtain, in the front of the cover that is upon the ark, lest he die.

God speaks to Moses, as is the usual case. But the portion does not begin with the ritual itself. It doesn’t even begin with words. It begins by telling us the circumstances of Aaron’s life. He has just lost his two sons in a mysterious accident. Aaron is the High Priest. He is also a bereaved father.

How did the two young men die? All the text says here is that they drew too close to the presence of the Lord. They crossed a sacred boundary. Whether out of a love of God, or arrogant pride, they suffered the consequences of their own action.

As a result, God instructs Moses, Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come at will—lest he die. In case Aaron is tempted to follow his sons’ example, Moses is to warn him: do not cross this boundary. Do not act out of your own will. Do not follow your emotions—whether in sorrow or in anger or out of a desire to follow them into oblivion.

Or perhaps, this is simply a warning to the High Priest to remember the boundary between his holy service and his personal desires, as his sons did not. Remember what you are called to do. Be careful how you do it.

Aaron is called to do the holy work of making atonement for all the children of Israel. In the process, he must atone for his own sins, then for the sins of his household, including his two sons for whom he is grieving, and only then can he accept responsibility for atoning for the nation.

In our own day, the work of atonement is so much more democratic. Each of us makes confession for our own sins. And at the same time, we speak on behalf of our entire community, saying, “We have sinned,” rather than “I have sinned.”

What is the essence of the Yom Kippur sacrifice, and how does it apply to us today? When we read this passage on Yom Kippur, the charge to Aaron applies to all of us. Be careful how you approach holy work. Remember the boundary between your personal desires and what you are called to do. Even when your emotions are valid and proper, guard them as Aaron guarded his own will.

Sacrifice is not giving up, but acknowledging our obligation to serve. Sacrifice is not giving away something valuable. The sacrifice comes from the act of submission itself.

Even the High Priest must submit his will for the greater good.

This past summer, Rabbi David Hartman spoke to a large gathering of rabbis in Jerusalem about being “metzuveh.” From the same Hebrew root as mitzvah, my first impulse was to translate the word as “being commanded.” As he spoke, I felt a strong and righteous resistance to this notion. After all, I do not believe in a Commanding God. I do not feel the weight of halacha, Jewish law, pressing on me. I assumed that his charge was more properly directed to a limited group of rabbis, not the Reform and Reconstructionists among us.

But as we studied more, I realized that he wasn’t speaking about mitzvah as commandment, or in a narrow sense of “following Torah law.” He was talking about something I myself teach. The importance of obligation.

In our Hebrew School, whatever chance I get, I stress to our teachers and students alike: that mitzvah means “Jewish obligation.”

But isn’t mitzvah a good deed? Shouldn’t we teach our children to do good in the world? Yes, we need to do “good deeds.” You can make the Yiddish pronunciation, mitzvah, a good deed. We should all do mitzvahs.

But mitz-vah, mitz-vot, are those things that call us to duty. Visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, comforting mourners. Rejoicing with a bride and groom, welcoming a baby into the covenant, coming to the synagogue on Yom Kippur. We may have to go out of our way to do them. We may not feel like doing them. We might not even agree with them. But we do them out of obligation. In that way we are metzuveh.

Obligation, like Aaron’s sacrifice, requires submission.

Like sacrifice, being metzuveh is not giving up something we value; it’s submitting the ego for the greater good.

Even Isaiah’s words in the haftarah reading reinforce this theme. We usually remember his call to “let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke, to share your bread with the hungry and to take the wretched poor into your home.” But at the beginning of the haftarah, the prophet chastises the people for their self-centeredness, saying: 

“Stubbornly they follow the ways of their hearts.” (Isaiah 57:17) Just as Aaron may not enter the shrine at will, so we must take care not to follow our own desires blindly.

But you may ask, to whom are we submitting ourselves?

Is it possible to be obligated, when you don’t sense a Supreme Being who is calling the shots?

To whom are we obligated, if not to a Commanding God?

As a Reconstructionist Jew, I understand that I am metzuveh, obligated, not because God commands it of me, but because it is a path to godliness.  The Jewish religious tradition is full of various names for God, reflecting myriad ways of believing in God, talking about God, and seeking an intimate connection to God. Therefore, it is neither heresy nor hypocrisy to speak of a God who works through human beings rather than commands us. As Mordecai Kaplan once wrote (Religion of Ethical Nationhood, p.111)

“If the idea of God is not based on the belief in [divine revelation and supernatural] miracles, then let it be based on each person’s need to be needed and therefore to be involved with some self-discipline and self-perpetuating society.” 

Kaplan teaches that, in the name of such a God, we are obligated to practice self-discipline and submission to the greater good. This God calls to us through the authority of time-honored practice and general acceptance. This God speaks to that part of us that is “hard-wired” for cooperation.

We all practice these mitzvot for the common good. Signing a petition, bringing food to Family Table, driving an elderly neighbor to the synagogue. These are all acts of submission, of doing what needs to be done, even if we would choose not to. They may not appear to be great feats of spiritual discipline or world-changing heroics. But when we live up to an obligation, by contracting our own egos, we bring Godliness into the world.

You may have heard the famous story of Reb Zusya, who is puzzling about how he will face the King of Kings when he departs this world. He worries, not that he will be asked, why were you not like Moses, but why were you not Zusya? When we compare ourselves to the great ones of our world, whether Moses or Gandhi, Martin Luther King or activist Dr. Paul Farmer (see Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains), we flatter ourselves to believe that we should be like them. Each of them is an example of service. Not of celebrating their own talents and victories, but submitting to the mundane tasks that others choose not to do. They were successful, not because they did what came easily to them, or what their emotional temperament led them to do, but because they did what was difficult—submitting the ego. 

This is the reason I define mitzvah as Jewish obligation, rather than commandment. A commandment implies a commander. But we can be obligated by so much:  family, community, the forces of history and culture and values.

Perhaps more than the tension between the individual and a commanding God, each one of us confronts daily the tension between the individual and the needs of the community.

Judaism is a tradition that thrives in community, challenging our modern, individualistic society.

Yet the Talmud is filled with examples of this tension. In one case, a rabbi calls heaven and earth to witness that the law is on his side. A heavenly voice speaks to the assembled rabbis to support Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus’ ruling. And yet, the decision rests with the majority, based on the biblical verse “lo bashamayim hi—it is not in heaven.” Everyday decisions cannot depend on heavenly voices. They must be determined through a communal process.

In community we all give up behavioral autonomy for the sake of the social order. We may be asked to wear a kippah during worship, though we may not choose that as our personal practice. We may find ourselves using a different siddur than our own personal preference. The community’s commitment to keeping kashrut limits what food we can bring into the synagogue—or the community may permit certain foods that we ourselves would not allow.  In choosing to participate in a particular community, we submit to the will of the group. But we should not confuse submission with giving up independence of thought..

Another example from the Talmud (Eduyot 1:5) acknowledges the importance of the individual. The mishna asks why we follow the practice that the minority opinion must always be included beside the majority opinion, even though the law follows the majority. The answer is that we must respect the truth as articulated by the individual, and the credibility of the process, as determined by a majority vote. And who knows? Someday, the majority may vote differently and the law will change.

This statement goes to the heart of our approach to mitzvah. Mitzvah is not a rigid, ancient rule to which we must submit our minds as well as our hearts. No, mitzvah is dynamic and fluid, open to new understandings of truth. 

We should rightly suspect a call for submission and obligation that robs us of our critical faculties. True submission opens our hearts. But it is possible to have an open heart and a critical mind

Mordecai Kaplan phrased it this way: "God exercises sovereignty through us, and to delegate to others alive or dead the responsibility for our own ethical decisions is to refuse to contribute our share to establishing God's Kingdom; to act thus is to act irresponsibly and disloyally.  Obedience to a code, no matter how ancient and sanctified it may be, is not enough."

If he is so committed to personal responsibility and so open to revisiting sacred text, why does Kaplan speak of “contributing our share to establishing God’s Kingdom?”  So often we shy away from religious language, because it stirs up our resistance to others who lay claim to God, religion and, by extension truth. This past summer, when I was teaching a group of camp counselors the prayer for Israel, they expressed their discomfort with the language, because it was so “religious.” It made me so sad that they felt so distant from religious language.  In fact, it is imperative that progressives of all faiths reclaim religious language, in the same way that political progressives have reclaimed patriotic symbols. We need to stand up to those who identify God exclusively with those who claim to be following God.

The mistake that some defenders of a particular faith, or a particular interpretation of that faith make, is that in their own certainty, they are committing idolatry. Rather than submitting to God, they narrowly interpret sacred texts, deify values, and trivialize truth. Only when we open our hearts to the possibility that others may also know truth, do we achieve true submission.

On Yom Kippur, we imagine ourselves in the position of the High Priest, each one of us praying that we do this holy work without endangering ourselves or harming those we love. By observing mitzvot, and placing ourselves lovingly within the bounds of our people and its tradition, we may find that sacrifice and submission give us more than they appear to demand.

In the amidah:of Yom Kippur, we pray:

Renew our inner being so that we may observe your mitzvot and open our hearts so that we may love and revere you

But we could easily change the words around, and pray, enable us to observe your mitzvot in order to renew our inner being, and teach us to love and revere you, so that we may open our hearts.

At the end of every Jewish service, we chant aleinu leshabe’ach la’adon hakol—it is up to us, aleinu, to offer praise to the Source of all. Another translation suggests,

It is up to us

to hallow Creation,

to respond to Life

with the fullness of our lives.

It is up to us

to meet the World,

to embrace the Whole

even as we wrestle

with its parts.

It is up to us

to repair the World

and to bind our lives to Truth.

Va’anachnu kor’im umishtachavim umodim

Therefore we bend the knee and bow,

acknowledging the sovereign who rules

above all those who rule, the blessed Holy One.

On Yom Kippur we not only say these words, but we perform them, as Aaron did in ancient times. We bend our knees and prostrate ourselves on the floor. Not to a God who demands certainty, but a God who urges us to seek out truth. Not to a God who commands, but a God who calls us to our sacred obligations. Not to a God who loves one religion or one people, but a God who calls all people to holy service.

May this day bring us all an experience of holiness. May it be a day that touches our souls and opens our hearts without closing our minds.