Kol Nidrei Sermon 5787

Tonight let’s meet Channa. 

Channa was a young literature teacher in Jerusalem, twenty-four years old, teaching seventeen-year-olds Scottish ballads and Hebrew poetry. She loved it. 

She was good at it. And one year, during an oral exam, one of her students, a shy girl, a slower reader, stumbled on a poem and answered the question wrong. Channa failed her.

The girl’s mother called that night, begging her to change the grade. 

Channa said no. It’s my professional decision, she told her. 

Decades later, no longer a teacher, with grandchildren of her own, Channa finally understood what she hadn’t been able to see at age twenty-four. She was arrogant, she’d been looking for young versions of herself in that classroom, without ever realizing what she was doing. 

So before Yom Kippur one year, she decided to find that student and apologize.

There was just one problem. She couldn’t remember her name.

So she did the only thing she could think of. She wrote a Facebook post telling the whole story, hoping the student, or someone who knew her, might see it. She imagined something small. 

A private message. Maybe coffee.

What she got instead was a firestorm. Thousands of shares. 

People calling her brave. People calling her a fraud, an attention-seeker, someone performing an apology instead of feeling one. 

Old students of other teachers started posting their own decades-old wounds in the comments. Channa hadn’t asked for any of that. 

She’d asked for one small private door to walk through, and instead found herself standing in the middle of a stadium.

I have my own much smaller version of Channa’s classroom.

Years ago, I was leading High Holy Day services for kids, a big room, a pack of rowdy seven and eight year olds, a handful of teenage teachers I was responsible for, and me trying very hard to look like the responsible adult in charge. 

A teen teacher brought a boy over to check in to his group, and told me his name. Forrest.

Now, I want you to understand, this was Minnesota. I had Trevors. I had Kirks. I had approximately four hundred Drews and Dereks. I had never, not once, met a kid named Forrest. 

We did not grow Forrests in that particular soil. 

So when I heard the name, I did the thing you do when something sounds invented. I’m honestly not sure if I said something out loud or just let my face do the talking, but I know I rolled my eyes. 

I know there was a beat where I clearly didn’t believe it.

And the teen teacher, a kid herself, maybe seventeen, looked right at me and said, “No, for real. His name is Forrest.”

I sent Forrest off to his group. The day went on. 

I don’t remember another thing about that morning. I don’t know if Forrest noticed. I don’t know if he’s thought about it once in the years since, or if he’s never thought about it at all, because why would he, he was seven, and I was just some adult at the front of a room he probably forgot by lunchtime.

But I remember it. I remember the look on that teen teacher’s face when she corrected me. She’d just watched me do the exact thing I never should have done in front of a kid who was trusting me to be safe.

I will never find Forrest  … I have the name and nothing else. No last name. No way to know whose son he was, what shul that was, what year. There is no Facebook post I could write that would reach him. 

This one just stays in my personal history, heavy on my conscience.

Guess what happened in Channah’s case. 

Weeks after her post, after all that noise, she got a message. 

Two words, from the student herself, now in her fifties. 

I forgive you. Channa wrote back right away, asked for a phone number, imagined they’d finally talk, meet for coffee, close the loop properly.

The student never answered again.

Channa called it a lesson. Good enough closure, she said, is something we have to learn to accept. Life is not an American movie. She didn’t get the redemption scene. She got a few words and then silence, and she had to decide that those words were enough to count as real.

So what do you do with a wrong you can’t deliver an apology for? Not because you’re avoiding it, but because there’s genuinely no door left to knock on?

I think you tell the story on Kol Nidrei. I think that’s actually most of what this night is for.

There’s another way people apologized, a few years back, at a train station in Jerusalem. 

Two old train cars were turned into confession booths. 

One labeled Sorry. The other, Not Sorry. 

Strangers walked in alone and said into a microphone whatever was true.

Some said what you’d expect on this night. Regret over a friendship, a missed visit, a chance not taken. 

But just as many walked into the other car and said, flatly, I’m not sorry. Most of what I do, I don’t regret, even when it caused harm, because that’s life.

I don’t think those people were worse than the ones in the other car. I think they were just being honest about where they actually stood. And there’s something for us in that too. 

Some of what’s true tonight, for some of us, is not sorry. Not yet. 

Maybe not for a while. That’s not a failure of this holiday. That’s just an honest starting point.

Which brings me to one more small story, this one from the Israeli writer Etgar Keret. 

He’s in a taxi with his almost-four-year-old son. The boy accidentally kicks over an ashtray. The driver screams at the child. 

Keret screams back, how dare you yell at my child. He tells the man to shut up and drive. The driver does.

His son asks what happened. Ashamed of his own yelling, Keret leans forward and tells the driver he’s sorry for shouting. 

His son, satisfied, says: now the man has to say sorry too.

Keret tries to explain that saying sorry might be the hardest thing a person can do, that you can’t force it out of someone. 

His son isn’t buying it. He needs to say sorry, the boy says.

Then, at a stoplight, the driver pulls the hand brake, turns around, looks the boy in the eye, and after a long second, finally says I’m sorry, and means it.

Those are three different shapes of the same truth. Channa did everything right and still only got two words and silence. I did something small and wrong and will never get to ask for the words at all. The driver needed an entire ride across town and a four-year-old’s stubbornness before he could finally say I’m sorry.

Tonight, we untie ourselves from vows we made and couldn’t keep. 

We say words some of us don’t fully feel yet. 

Some of us are standing in the Sorry car. Some of us, honestly, are standing in the Not Sorry car, at least about one thing. 

And some of us are carrying a Forrest. A small wrong with no name attached, no door to knock on, nowhere left to send the apology.

Here’s what I hope we can take with us tonight. We don’t have to find the perfect ending. We don’t need a phone number, a coffee date, a movie-like redemption scene. 

Channa learned that mediocre enough closure still counts as closure. 

I want to share something about that word, mediocre.

It comes from Latin. Medius, middle. Ocris, a rugged, rocky mountain.

Mediocre originally meant halfway up the mountain.

Not at the bottom. Not at the summit. Somewhere in the middle, on the rocks, breathing hard, still climbing.

That is exactly where Yom Kippur finds us. Every single year.

Our tradition never pretended otherwise. Think about the central prayer we chanted tonight. 

Kol Nidrei doesn’t celebrate the vows we kept. It releases us from the ones we are going to break. Our ancestors knew, before the year even began, that we would fall short. 

So they wrote it into the liturgy and asked us to sing it three times, as ultimate proof that we will have failures in the year ahead.

And the rabbis knew about Forrest, too. Not his name, but his story.

The Rambam teaches that if you wronged someone and they are gone, if there is no door left to knock on, you do not simply give up. You gather ten people. You stand together. And you say it out loud: I did wrong to this person.

Ten people. A minyan. A room like this one.

Our tradition understood a thousand years ago what Channa learned from a Facebook post. Sometimes the apology cannot reach the person. But it still has to leave your body. It still has to be spoken where others can hear it and hold it with us.

So tonight, with all of you as my minyan, I am going to do what I wish I did many decades ago.

Forrest, wherever you are … Whoever you grew up to be. I am sorry. You told me your name, and I should have believed you. You deserved an adult who looked at you with welcome, and acceptance. I did not do that and I’m sorry.

That’s it. That’s the whole apology. I hope in some realm of the universe it reaches him.

It is mediocre but it is good enough.

So here is my blessing for all of us on this holy night.

May we have the courage to say the words, even to an empty chair, even in a big room where the ones we’ve hurt are not present.

May we have the patience to wait in the Not Sorry car until you are ready to honestly walk into the other one.

May we have the stubbornness of a four year old who knows when someone owes someone an apology.

And may we have the grace of Channa, who took two words and silence and decided they were enough.

We will not reach the top of the mountain tonight. No one ever has.

But we are halfway up. We are on the rocks. We are climbing together.

And for this night, for this year, for this imperfect, beautiful, mediocre human life,

that is more than good enough.

May the power of Yom Kippur bring healing and closure to your soul wherever it’s needed.