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Yom Kippur 5767 A Whack on the Side of the Head
Rabbi
Samuel M. Cohon
L’shana Tova,
and g’mar chatimah tovah. On Monday last week I was working on my Sukkah when an odd thing happened. I moved into a new home last year, and so a new Sukkah design was necessary for this coming Sukkot festival, which begins this coming Friday night. My father, whom you all know by now, was helping me build the Sukkah. It sounds like an Old Jewish joke—how many rabbis does it take to build a sukkah? Or how many cantors? Or both—but there we were, my dad and I, working on our construction. Using our extensive engineering backgrounds—that is, none—we created a design that was heavily dependent on 2’x4’s and carriage bolts, and, in theory, would be easy to assemble, reasonably durable, and last for years. Of course, assembling it for the first time might be a bit challenging… We were making pretty good progress towards building the frame, and were crouched down drilling holes for the next set of bolts, when suddenly a 2’ X 4’ we’d installed on the first corner came loose. Before either of us could react, the eight foot long board fell suddenly from its full height towards the ground, where I was situated. Fortunately, it struck me in a very hard place—my head. There was a resounding crack, and I immediately began thinking that it likely had fractured my skull. We were both shocked, and my dad was mortified. I chose to engage fully with my inner hypochondriac and, once assured that my skull seemed to be intact, started to worry about concussions, brain hemorrhage, and permanent injury. Important thoughts ran through my woozy mind at such a traumatic moment: what kind of idiot leaves an unsecured 2 X 4 in range of his own head? Does a Sukkah construction injury qualify a rabbi for workman’s comp? And, with apologies to my friend Ken Goodman, has anything good ever come from Jewish carpenters? In any case, after applying ice, I decided not to go to the hospital, mostly out of fear that they would take x-rays of my head and discover… nothing. Who needs that kind of confirmation of what everyone suspected all along? Still, it was a shocking moment. But while I had a slight tenderness for a day or two, the bottom line was that in spite of being walloped in the head by a large piece of wood traveling at high velocity, I seem now to be no worse for the experience. I do have trouble remembering my own children’s names in the proper order… but then, that was always true. So, I survived the great sukkah attack of 5767. But if being brained by a 2 X 4 didn’t kill me, it did provoke some thought. In 1983 Roger van Oech wrote a book called “A Whack on the Side of the Head”, which focused on how to be more creative in life. His starting point was the same one that my sukkah accomplished the other day: sometimes, in order to find new ways and approaches to problems and challenges, we need a “whack on the side of the head” to break us out of our patterns of habit and tradition, our long history of failed or frustrated efforts. As he puts it, “Discovery consists of looking at
the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different!
That sounds fairly easy. However,
mental locks, which are attitudes
that "lock" your thinking into the status quo and keep you
thinking "more of the same," block that process. So how do you open "mental locks?" Through the strategic use of whacks on the side of
the head. Whacks force you to do something different and they
open mental locks in one of two
ways: First, we need the ability to unlearn what we already
"know." And second, sometimes, nothing short of a "whack
on the side of the head" can shake you out of routine patterns and
force you to re-think your problems and stimulate you to ask new questions
that may lead you to other answers. This is not to recommend that you all go out and start pounding on your craniums with pieces of lumber. But it is to suggest that sometimes—say, once a year at least—we all need a little shock to the system. Yom Kippur is precisely that sort of whack on the side of the head. It is a full-on attempt to shake us from complacency, to compel us to re-think the failed habits and reactive mindsets that keep us from changing for the better. When we take 24 or 25 hours to fast, pray, atone, apologize, look at our lives, we are trying to break the patterns of the past year in one highly concentrated day. We are seeking the spiritual whack on the side of the head that can bring us to real growth and positive change. We are embracing the creativity that can move us from fear to faith, from hatred to love, from the negative atmosphere of failure to the positive embrace of goodness and holiness. Even the terminology reflects our desire to break the mental locks of bad habits and failed relationships: at Kol Nidrei we see the gates of repentance—that is, of change and potential growth and new happiness—as being open. But by Ne’ilah tomorrow night—which literally means the “locking of the gates”—those very gates of repentance, the ways in which we can reexamine our lives and seek new and creative paths to wholeness and happiness, will be closing, and the mental locks will be clicking shut again. So tonight we have the opportunity to use this whack on the side of head, this shock to our systems, to find new ways to live in the coming year. On this Kol Nidrei eve, and throughout this Yom Kippur, may we each embrace a new way of seeing, and a new way of being. May we, each of us, all of us, come to see that past failures are not necessarily predictors of future failures. And then this whack on the head of Yom Kippur—and our own lives—will have purpose, meaning, and blessing. May you have an easy fast, and a G’mar Chatimah Tovah—may you be sealed in the Book of Life for a good year of creative change.
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