Vivie Mayer:
Look, I think there's a whole "as if" that we do with all of the holidays. On Pesach, we see ourselves as if we really came out of Egypt ourselves and on Shavuot as if we are standing at Sinai, and so we could say on Yom Kippur, we are standing together in community as if we've been completely cleansed.

Deborah Waxman:
I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. It's been a while. We took a kind of unintentional hiatus from recording the podcast. I had a wonderful year last year sharing the podcast with an amazing co-host, Rabbi Sandra Lawson, and going forward, Sandra might come and visit us, but I'm going to keep on as the primary host of Hashivenu. We are fast approaching the high holidays and this feels always like a great opportunity to stop and pause and reflect on some of the themes of the high holidays, and for this episode, I'm so happy to welcome, welcome back Rabbi Vivie Mayer.
Vivie is returning. Vivie was the guest on Hashivenu for the very second episode that we recorded. Also on the themes of the High Holidays, back in 2017, we spoke really expansively about the themes of Teshuvah. I've asked her back because we have a slightly narrower focus that I think I know we will find very interesting and I hope you will find interesting and meaningful too. So Rabbi Vivie Mayer just recently stepped down as a longtime full-time faculty member at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and prior to that, she was a congregational rabbi in Connecticut at Congregation Benet Israel. She is now living in Israel and teaching and building a life there. Vivie, thank you so much for being here.

Vivie Mayer:
It's my great pleasure to be here.

Deborah Waxman:
So I have been very fixated on and a little obsessed by the Avodah service, which is part of the Yom Kippur afternoon or Musaf service late in the day, later in the day on Yom Kippur, and it is not a part of ritual observance that I grew up with. It's something that I encountered in my adulthood and I really want to unpack it. I'm finding it has a ton of resonance for me at this period in my life and as we're moving through the world in these very intense times, and I really wanted to do it in conversation and especially in conversation with you, Vivie. So thank you so much for joining with me around this mini obsession and I wondered if you would help us set the landscape for our listeners, especially for people who, like me when I was younger, are not so familiar with the Avodah service.

Vivie Mayer:
Okay. Well, a lot of people who do go to shul, who do go to synagogue on Yom Kippur miss the Avodah service because exactly what you said. It's in a traditional service, it would be something like 1:00 or 2:00, everybody's going home to rest. So it's only the diehards that would stick it through and get you to be part of it. So what I can say about it, so the Avodah service is a liturgical reenactment of a service that the rabbis imagine in the Mishnah as they look back to temple times and imagine what was done in the temple as a way of bringing collective atonement to the people of Israel.

Deborah Waxman:
So it was always Yom Kippur, a continuous thread, it's the atonement.

Vivie Mayer:
Yes, yes. So the continuous thread is that there was once upon a time an atonement service that we first read about as being enacted in the Mishkan, which is the traveling temple that stood in the middle of the camp in the desert, and it was a way of cleansing the Mishkan from the absorbed guilt and sin, that the Mishkan's purpose was to be a place of atonement, and everybody brought their offerings to the Mishkan and then later through the temple in Jerusalem, and the idea was that it's absorbing all of these sin offerings, guilt offerings, and how do you clean the absorber of everything? I think sometimes of the Cat in the Hat where there's the pink bathtub ring.

Deborah Waxman:
Yeah.

Vivie Mayer:
And they wipe the bathtub ring and then the bathtub is clean, but then it's on the mother's dress and then they shake out the mother's dress and then the dress is clean, but then it's all over the walls, and then they keep trying to clean and it doesn't go away. It just spreads and spreads until at the end of the book, there's this magical moment where he calls these little elfy people and they snap and it all goes away.

Deborah Waxman:
So the Avodah services, I love this.

Vivie Mayer:
It's a way of looking at it of how do we have this... It's the weight of everything that's accumulated. So it happens in a person where we have the weight, it accumulates and accumulates and Yom Kippur is this great time of release, but what Yom Kippur is really enacting and celebrating is collective release. So the collective absorption is so much heavier and needs a different kind of ritual and it's focused and centered on the temple. That's one piece of the Avodah is that it's very, it's in the center of the center of the center because you go into the Holy of Holies of the temple, but there's this other aspect of the Avodah that is that it's in the outside, outside, outside because you're also taking the goat of-

Deborah Waxman:
The scapegoat.

Vivie Mayer:
You take the scapegoat, the se'ir la'azazel, and send it to the edge, edge, edge of either the Midbar, the desert, the wilderness or the edge, edge, edge of Jerusalem over the cliffs of Jerusalem. So there's something that is at the deep center and at the widest edge.

Deborah Waxman:
You're exactly getting to why I'm so fascinated by this year is the paradox that is so embedded into it. I think when I first encountered it, it just felt like, all right, but what does this have to do with us? It felt so remote to me, and now at this stage of my life, at this stage of what's going on in the world, the paradox, both of that which is the means to our own purification can get soiled, the paradox inherent in that and that the Holy of Holies is imagined by some to be the navel of the universe, this most concentrated inner place, but then it also extends outward to the furthest extremes. That tension, that pulsation, that paradox, that's exactly what is drawing me in. You went right to the heart of it.

Vivie Mayer:
And speaking to that with the center and the outside, there's this aspect of the Avodah service where the high priest does three atonements, and the first one is for himself and his family and then the second one is for all of the house of Aaron, which means all of the kohanim, all of the priests who all serve in that intermediary and atoning role, and then the third atonement is for all of Israel. So it's like you've got to first clean or atone the center most and then your tribe or family and then the whole people so that there also is this inside-outside.

Deborah Waxman:
Right. And I think that there's paradox there too because even as they are concentric circles, I think the point of them is that they are all interconnected and that whatever distinctions between them ultimately get dissolved in a claim of interdependence within this larger system. So for me, that feels like also some of the tension, some of the paradox that I find really compelling as well.
I hope for our listeners, if we haven't been clear, just to recap and maybe we have, but just to recap, the Avodah service is basically a narration of what we just both described and discussed at the same time of the high priest entering into the Holy of Holies three times and making sacrifices in the service of the cleansing that Vivie was discussing, and then each time coming out and seeking this forgiveness. Vivie, do you want to talk about how the community responded?

Vivie Mayer:
Yeah. So before I describe that piece, I want to talk about how we don't have the temple and we don't have the goats and we don't have atonement through blood. We don't have any of that, and what we do have is the words of, it's Leviticus 16. So we have that passage that describes it and we have the words of the Mishnah which describes it in greater detail. So it's a little bit like the Hasidic story of there were miracles in the forest and now we don't remember the place, we don't remember the miracles, we don't remember the fire, but we do remember the story that there was such a thing. So that's where we are with the Avodah service.
So our service is all words with a high point of bowing in full prostration, but the high point of our service, which they do connect in the Mishnah description, is the verse 16:30, and I'm reading from Everett Fox's translation. "For on this day, atonement is to be effected for you, to purify you from all your sins. Before the presence of YHVH, you will become pure." In Hebrew, [foreign language 00:12:16]. Anyway, so the pasuk ends, the verse ends with this phrase, [foreign language 00:12:24].
You will become pure and that becomes the effecting of the atonement of the Avodah service where the high priest makes a confession over whatever the particular sacrifice is of the three times and says, I've sinned, I've transgressed, and God is going to forgive us for on this day, atonement is to be affected for you, to purify you before the presence of YHVH and at that moment, the mention of God's name, all of the congregation bows down onto the ground and while the high priest is saying, is pronouncing that the Tetragrammaton actually pronouncing it, the people are calling out [foreign language 00:13:25], blessed is the name of God's kingdom forever and ever.

Deborah Waxman:
And this was the only time that God's name was said aloud, these three times.

Vivie Mayer:
In public, right, or at least that's what they say. I wasn't there, but yeah, so the name is pronounced and then the pasuk is concluded with the word [foreign language 00:13:52]. So they are hearing it as an actualization. The atonement is happening in that verse. So I feel like-

Deborah Waxman:
Just to pause. I try to imagine it, the crowd falls flat on its face in awe, both of the name and of that reality that you just described, and so just the humility and the gratitude, I think, that is present in that moment and voiced through praising God's glory, that's very moving to me, that moment, the efficacy and then the response to it.

Vivie Mayer:
Yes, and what we have now that we don't have in the temple is, so the rabbis were saying, what do we do with this worship? They said, we don't have the service, but we have the day, and they say [foreign language 00:15:13], it's the essence of the day that affects this atonement, and so in this verse of 23:30, it starts [foreign language 00:15:26]. You could translate it on this day as Everett Fox translates.

Deborah Waxman:
But you could say through.

Vivie Mayer:
Through this day, with this day, exactly, with the bet. [foreign language 00:15:38]. It is with this day that we are affecting atonement.

Deborah Waxman:
One of the things that we learn in rabbinical school is that every act of translation is an act of interpretation, and that little preposition really could be translated in so many different ways, and this is an instance of where that translation has hugely different significance.

Vivie Mayer:
And I think if I could bring in a big theological challenge or question was how is there going to be atonement once the temple is destroyed because the temple was the place of blood sacrifice, and as much as we are happy to have outgrown that, there was a real question of can sin really be expiated, and the answer is yes, because there's Yom Kippur.

Deborah Waxman:
Right. I think I am so struck, there's an associated teaching that at the end, everyone is joyous. When this ritual is over according to the rabbi's account in the Mishnah, the people get up and they are joyful and the high priest comes out and his face is shining with so much light that medieval poets wrote poems about it, and then I love this image. They all accompany the high priest home and he hasn't been home for a week. He's been secluded in the temple studying to prepare for this, and they have complete certainty that it has worked.
There's so much, and so the end of Yom Kippur, which many of us experience as one of depletion and of just endurance according to the Mishnah, our ancestors experienced it as joy. Probably they were tired and thirsty as well, but they had such joy because of their conviction that this worked, and I have some holy envy of that conviction and we live with so much more uncertainty. The world is different not only because the temple doesn't stand, but all that it offered up for them also isn't there and we have to-

Vivie Mayer:
To live into that reality of being, of having a clean slate as if it's true. Look, I think there's a whole as if that we do with all of the holidays. So on Pesach, we see ourselves as if we really came out of Egypt ourselves, and on Shavuot, as if we are standing at Sinai, and so we could say on Yom Kippur, we are standing together in community as if we've been completely cleansed, and that's part of the connection between Sukkot and Yom Kippur is that in that absolute cleansing and absence of sin, that's when we go and do the seven-day feast of Thanksgiving.

Deborah Waxman:
z'man simkhatenu, the season of our joy and the harvest of all of that. I think that for me, that's the invitation to really do the hard work of Yom Kippur. I definitely, it is about more than showing up in the halls of the synagogue and just listening to whatever the liturgy is, but it's the introspection and the repair and the pledge to do better, to take responsibility and to do better. That's the pathway.

Vivie Mayer:
And using the power of imagination to say, what would I be like if I were in a clean slate the same way we say, what would I be like if I had really come out of Egypt if I were truly free? I think that in doing the holidays, the power of imagination is a strong component. I wanted to mention two... First of all, there's a beautiful, I don't think it's more than five years old, a song by Ishay Ribo. Are you familiar with it?

Deborah Waxman:
Yeah. I'm so glad you... So Ishay Ribo's amazing song, Seder Ha-Avodah, which is basically the Avodah service as popular music, and if you want to listen to it, we've included a link in our episode description to the song and also to the translation so that you can unpack, and it's really fun to do it with the traditional service and his really thoughtful and powerful, the changes that he's made, the reconstruction, the re-imagination that he's done is really, really beautiful.

Vivie Mayer:
Yeah, that's reconstructionism. There you have it. That song verbatim through the mission of walks us through he disrobes, he puts on his gold clothes, he takes it off, he puts on his white clothes, he comes in, he dips his hand in the blood and he starts to sprinkle, and it's very step by step the way the Avodah service is described, and then he does this great thing with the song because in the Avodah service, there's a simple counting where he's counting one sprinkle and then seven sprinkles, and he counts one of blood. Yes, taking the blood-

Deborah Waxman:
This is of blood. This is the purification of blood.

Vivie Mayer:
To the curtain and count, I think so. I think it's the curtain or sprinkle it onto so by the Holy of Holies and saying one, one and one, one and two, one and three, one and four, one and five, one and six, one and seven. Makes me think of gym where we had to really count so you don't lose track of what you're doing. So what Ishay Ribo does in his song, the first stanza, he talks about, I'm counting my sins, 1, 2, 3, and when I count and count and count the sins, I feel the heaviness and the shame and how many things do I have to atone for, and in the second verse, when he counts one and two and three of so much hesed, so much forgiveness and so much space that you provide a hundred and thousands and just so much love. So that's a very moving twist that he does to the Mishnah.

Deborah Waxman:
The thing that is so amazing about that song is that, so Ishay Ribo is a French-Israeli musician and this is a massive hit in Israel. All the details that you were just counting off, Vivie, they can be deadening in a certain way. It's a lot of words on the page, and definitely, there are times when I've read through the Mishnah text and thought, this is so dry. Surely, this was so full of drama and what we have on the page is so very, very dry, and he really does do so much of the Mishnah. He records it, and with that gloss of the interior experience of the Kohen Gadol, of the high priest, which is not present at all in the Mishnah, there's an invitation to imagine it, but there's actually Mishnah teachings about like, well, what if the high priest is a bum?
And what are the precautions that the people have to take? What if he gets himself drunk beforehand, and so the qualifications for this position was genetic and familial and bodily perfection, not spiritual perfection, and they certainly wanted the spiritual perfection. So he does the imagining of this very serious and very spiritual and very intentional high priest, and what he does is beautiful and how the chorus comes to when the people respond and he's able to capture some of the holiness and the excitement of the people, and it was a massive hit in Israel and so you had very secular Israelis able to sing along word for word in his concerts these lines from the Mishnah about Yom Kippur practice. Everything about this story just delights me. It's just so great.

Vivie Mayer:
Yeah. The ending of that song, I love it so much because he ends with the Ashrei which also in Avodah service, that ends with [foreign language 00:25:09], how blessed is a people who has this, who has this atonement available to it and that shining face of the Kohen that you mentioned, and I wanted to say this other reconstructionist thing that I've done in high holiday services because exactly how you started and you were saying how you didn't even register this service until you were in rabbinical school and a lot of people don't.
When I was leading services for Yom Kippur, it was in Temple Emmanuel in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Rather than having the Torah reading where we read Leviticus 16 and then we go into the whole Musaf service and then in the repetition of the Musaf, then we do the Avodah. So what I wanted to do while people were still fresh in the day, to do the Avodah service while we were doing the Torah reading because it's the text of the Torah reading. So after there are six aliyot on Yom Kippur, we worked it so that at certain points in the service where you would pause and then read the confession from the siddur and people would do the bowing interdispersed with the aliyot of the Torah reading. So we were reading the Torah about the service, and then in between the aliyot, we were doing it.

Deborah Waxman:
You were acting it out. Wow.

Vivie Mayer:
Acting it out, and I think it was very powerful and we got to say that pasuk over and over again because that's the drumbeat of the service. So we're saying, [foreign language 00:27:15], and then it came at the end of the Torah reading.

Deborah Waxman:
And so they heard it and saw it in the original.

Vivie Mayer:
They really related to it-

Deborah Waxman:
And so you built to it. You built to it both in saying aloud and enacting so that when it actually was read aloud from the Torah, it really vibrated with significance.

Vivie Mayer:
Right. When it was actually read aloud from the Torah, we had already done three confessions and had already used it as liturgy, and then the Musaf was, we omitted the Avodah service from the Musaf.

Deborah Waxman:
Yeah. So did people, they got it in different ways?

Vivie Mayer:
Yes, I feel that they did and I was able to do it, or I should say [foreign language 00:28:13] to do it in another, I merited doing it another time in New Mexico, and yeah, it was very present and alive. It was acting it out.

Deborah Waxman:
That's really great. The first time I led the Avodah service in a really extended way was at my Minyan Dorshei Derekh and the reconstructionist makhzor has it interspersed throughout the Musaf service, and so you do the three concentric circles with other reflections and readings to heighten the themes, and one of the things I remember I did was a lot of other people were doing the readings. It was a great way to get people participating and also to give myself a rest because I was the main leader and the Musaf service was long and was demanding.
And so my wife, Christina, read a lot of the explanation and when we got to the line, what the people said together, I chanted, [foreign language 00:29:24], blessed is God's glorious name forever and ever. I chanted it in Hebrew and Christina read it in English simultaneously, and this was 20 plus years ago and I remember this kid was about seven or eight who was in the room when we did it and he said to his mother, I'll bet you they did that on purpose, and we were just trying to call attention to it and those things to do to make it resonate, and he said to me 10 years later, I still remember when you did that. That made such an impression on me, and I hope it was the meanings of the word and the impact of the service beyond just the shtick we did to try to heighten.

Vivie Mayer:
And yet there is a lot to be said for shtick because there are people of all kinds that need to hook in in some way, and I think shtick, that's kind of a funny word, but all the pieces of, I don't know what the word is, but there's probably another word for shtick that will actually capture it like high ritual and-

Deborah Waxman:
Yeah.

Vivie Mayer:
Pomp and circumstance.

Deborah Waxman:
It's true. It's true. Shtick is dismissive in a way I don't mean it. What I always imagine, especially in response to hearing God's name said aloud, is with the images that the Torah gives us at the giving of Torah at Sinai, that people heard lightning and they saw thunder like the synesthesia that happens. I think of such a heightened moment and that there's a multitude and things that beyond at the edge of our understanding, and a part of what we were trying to do in speaking in Hebrew and English simultaneously. We worked hard at it, we practiced it a lot, was to try to just in a quick moment without stopping everything, we absolutely were trying to heighten it.

Vivie Mayer:
And if someone remembers it 10 years later, that was successful.

Deborah Waxman:
Yeah, I think that's right. So we've been talking for a while. I think I want to ask for your thoughts on the thing that has stuck with me the most as I've been reading and thinking about this is actually after the service, that moment when the people, I love this, that it's captured, that the people accompany the high priest home. He's been away and he's returning to his home because I just think about what happens next because this is an annual ritual.
The temple gets contaminated again. We do our reflection, we make our repairs, we seek out atonement, and then we err again, and I think that here, he, and it was always and only a he, it was just at the most intense place and at the most intense time doing the most intense thing and then he goes back and surely, he was a wealthy man, but even so, the dishes have to get washed and the laundry has to get done and how we have to go back to our everyday life with the glimmerings of, and that's as true for them as it is for us. That's the point, an absolute point of continuity from then to now.

Vivie Mayer:
Yeah, reentry, reentry. Well, that reminds me of the mitzvah to go out after Yom Kippur, after you've eaten and you start building your Sukkot.

Deborah Waxman:
Yeah, yeah. Because nothing stops. Yeah. Anything you want to add? Anything you want to say as we wind down?

Vivie Mayer:
I'm aware that we did not so much talk about the scapegoat, which is such an important element and so it's part of the simultaneity of this. I think you were talking about you and Christina doing this simultaneous thing, and we talked about the circles. There's the inside and the outside, but as the service is happening inside, there is this [foreign language 00:33:51] that is accompanying the scapegoat to the edge of Jerusalem and there's supposedly, or when the scapegoat is thrown over the cliff, I know that's violent, but then there's a piece of thread in the temple that's supposed to turn from red to white.
And it says in the Mishnah, if you're seeing this, you can't see that, or even more in the temple, there are things that there's so much going on, there are multiple places of activity. If you're watching this, you can't be watching that, and surely, if you're following the goat, you can't be following what's going on inside, but there's something about the collective in this, and I think of people in the shul, you have people who are inside the service. You have people who are at the door because there's so many people come on Yom Kippur. You have people at the parking lot.
You've got people in the center, center and at the edge, edge, and everybody is making it happen, even if they don't get to be inside. So that feels important. There were people, it says they set up little Sukkot all along the path of escorting the scapegoat because it is Yom Kippur, but if the man bringing the goat across needed to eat, drink, they were there with food for just in case he needed because he's walking from the temple all the way to Mount Scopus area.

Deborah Waxman:
As he fasts. Wow. Yeah. Wow. I love that. I love that image, that it takes all of us and the collective guilt, collective expiation, and also collective building, collective-

Vivie Mayer:
And collective execution of a complicated choreography.

Deborah Waxman:
Yeah. Collective responsibility. Yeah. Yeah. That's a lovely way to end. Thank you. Thank you so much for everything, Vivie, for all the many, many conversations we've had and this one captured on tape, and I hope that this is one of the things that makes me very grateful to be a religious Jew. One of it has to do with the fact that I am invited in. I'm asked to have conversations with the prayer book or with the community about things that I wouldn't necessarily turn my own attention to.
It holds me accountable and it gets me out of my own internal preoccupations in wonderful ways, and it's also this invitation to reflect on who I am this year as I approach the high holidays. So as I said at the top, this service has just felt like the poignancy and the paradox and the complexity has really, really called to me this year, and I hope that's true and this is of use to some of you who are listening. Thank you, Vivie. Thank you so much.

Vivie Mayer:
Thank you. Thank you, Deborah.

Deborah Waxman:
Thanks to all of you for listening to my conversation with Rabbi Vivie Mayer about Yom Kippur and high holiday themes in general and about the Avodah service in particular. You can find more information about some of the things we've discussed over the course of this conversation in our episode description and also on the website for Hashivenu, which is Hashivenu.fireside.fm.
And you can find many, many more high holiday resources on reconstructingjudaism.org, on ritualwell.org, and at evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. Please, it would be so helpful if you would subscribe and rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu Jewish Teachings on Resilience. Thank you so much, Vivie, and shanah tovah umetukah, and a happy and a healthy new year.

Vivie Mayer:
Oh, amen. Shanah Tovah] to you, to everybody. Shana. (Singing).