The Sound at the Edge of the Woods

Kol Nidre 5787

When I was a teenager living outside Philadelphia, two friends and I took a Sunday trip to the Jersey shore. On the drive home, we decided it would be fun to hike in some woods we were passing.

We pulled into a park with trails and parked the car. We hiked to a pond and went swimming, and emerged covered in silt and a few leeches. We stumbled across old fire rings and smeared the charcoal across our faces. When it rained, we danced through it, laughing and shouting. We were free and as wild as the woods.

Then the light started changing, and we got tired of being wet. We wanted to get back to the car, so we stepped off the main trail onto what looked like a shortcut. As the trail slowly petered out into brush, I led us on. Eventually, surrounded by forest, my friends questioned whether we were going the right way. I had led us confidently deep into the woods of Jersey, and we were completely lost. Daylight faded. We began to freak out.

My phone had one bar of service and was running low on battery, so I called the most level-headed person I could think of. Dad.

When I explained our situation, he got alarmed, which is not what I wanted. "You need to build a shelter," he said. "And a fire." Then he got off the phone to find the number for the New Jersey park rangers.

I remember looking around in the twilight thinking: build with what? Everything is wet. We have no ax. The lighter, which had been essential for our activities earlier, was useless now.

Somehow, we got a ranger on the phone. To our dismay, he could not track our phone and find us, like police did in the movies. Instead he asked what we could hear. Did we hear cars? No. He said, keep listening.

What happened next I will never forget. The ranger turned on his siren and drove the perimeter of the woods, around and around the park, on the phone with us until we heard him. I remember the moment we heard the siren, quiet, in the distance. But sound in a thick forest hits the trunks and scatters. The siren's sound echoed faint and came at us from everywhere at once.

We would walk a few feet, together, toward what we thought was the sound, and stop. We listened, and consulted. All three of us, standing in wet brush in the dark, holding our breath, turning our heads. Was it this way? Is it louder here?

The beginning was agonizingly slow. Every few seconds we had to stop and reorient. About a half an hour later, we stumbled out of the brush onto a dirt path. I can still feel the ecstatic shot through my legs when they hit the trail. We all began sprinting toward the siren. The louder it got, the faster we ran. Oh, the beauty of red and blue flashing through the leaves as we came crashing out into headlights.

Three soaked teenagers. Covered in ticks, twelve on my legs alone. Dirt and charcoal smeared across our faces and bodies. The ranger did not want to let us into his nice clean pickup. But we climbed in without hesitation, without a thought for the reprimands waiting for us. We had followed the sound to our rescue, and now we were going home.

Many seasons of my life since, I have found myself back in that state: a lost teen in the woods, unprepared for what I got myself into. Part child part adult, drawing on every tool she had, relying on others to help find the way out with hesitant and desperate steps.

Did I mention I was wearing flip flops?

The woods have changed since then. The questions have not. They find me in ordinary moments: are we still wandering around, just trying to find a way home? What am I — what are you — actually doing here?

I am lugging a box of art supplies up a staircase, or asking someone for money, and suddenly something feels discordant: the specificity of what I am actually doing against the enormity of what I care about. I look at my children, knowing what the earth has in store for them, and I do not know how to bear the grief. We are here for a defined length of life. Anyone I love could be gone tomorrow. And yet I must somehow sustain caring about my small piece of a vast, uncertain world.

The Gemara asks what happens to someone walking through the wilderness who no longer knows which day is Shabbat. Rav Huna answers, מוֹנֶה שֵׁשֶׁת יָמִים וּמְקַדֵּשׁ יוֹם אֶחָד, moneh shesheth yamim u'mekadesh yom echad, "he counts six days and sanctifies one." The rabbis imagined someone just like us: lost in the wilderness, not sure what day it is. They did not say, wait until you are certain. They said, count six days, and make one holy. Do the next faithful thing without the map.

Doubt is not something we need to fix. Instead, we stay connected while uncertain. Stay with doubt long enough for it to lead us somewhere.

The staying is חֶשְׁבּוֹן הַנֶּפֶשׁ, cheshbon ha-nefesh, an accounting of the soul. We examine who we are in the concentric circles of our lives: inside our own skin, inside our families, inside this community, inside a world we did not make and do not control. We ask why. We wonder what it means, and whether we still make sense inside what we believe.

I sometimes wonder if, at the close of my life, I will look back and see how each question, each uncertainty, each pull toward mystery guided by steps and refined my place in the world. It would be nice to be blessed with such clarity. But in my experience, the answers to who we are and what our purpose is arrive in pieces. When we think of all we have done and everyone we have loved. At the moment a friend shares a hidden feeling, yearning to be seen. When we marvel at a ninetieth birthday, or at the birth of a child, and feel the arc of a life present in the room. These moments buoy us through the toss and turn of the storms that make us small. These memories connect us to others. They connect us to God.

An earlier version of this dvar wrapped this up with a vision of Ma'alot as the sound at the edge of the forest, helping us find our purpose, calling the lost ones home. So much of our work reaches people who are disconnected from Jewish life and are not finding a way back — so this is a powerful image, and it fits us. Music, nature, a fire going, playing at the edge of the woods, calling people back to their Judaism. Urging them on with each step through the brush.

But it is not as neat as that. Because the guidance that we ask for in our lives and on this holiest of days, is not a single point of sound. It is echos through time, reaching us in pieces, pointing in infinite directions. The largeness of our reality, the unknowability of it, humbles me immensely. No person, organization, no religion can claim to answer such vast lostness, such loneliness, the sheer volume of unmet people.

Yom Kippur asks us to stop pretending we know the way. That is why we begin with Kol Nidre, annulling our vows, relinquishing a certainty that the world demands of us. When we sing it all together, we acknowledge that none of us really know the way.

Doing תְּשׁוּבָה, teshuvah, is a series of מַעֲלוֹת, ma’alot, steps. Look at the ground you’ve traveled, the decisions that brought you here, and then take one more step up the mountain towards holiness and connection. Reach for a three thousand year old wisdom tradition that somehow, knows the terrain of this moment.

Ma’alot is a place where, little by little, we piece together a new map of what it means to be Jewish today. To experience how breath, movement, silence, rest can help us reach deeper knowing, how song can bring us beyond speech to a new horizon. Where we discover more of what it means to be human.

This Yom Kippur, find yourself in the trees exactly as you are. Soaked. Covered in bugs. Charcoal on your face. Don't try to find a way out just yet. First stop. Get quiet. Turn your head and listen. And take one step toward the sound.

May you be inscribed in the Book of Life, and sealed for a good year.

כְּתִיבָה וַחֲתִימָה טוֹבָה