Years ago, when he was 7 years old, my son Micah couldn’t sleep. (He’s now 19.) After a fitful hour of tossing and turning, he finally came downstairs and lay down on the sofa. And of course he was asleep within seconds. Half an hour later I picked him up to carry him back upstairs to his bed. At age 7, Micah was reaching the point where I could no longer comfortably carry him. But, perhaps sensing precisely that this was likely one of my last opportunities to carry the sleeping child who for the last seven years has been my youngest (his younger brother was about to be born), I made an extra effort to carry him instead of asking him to walk up on his own. We made it to the top of the stairs, and I put him in his bed.

There is something about sleeping children: we look at them and see innocence, we pick them up and feel protective and intimate. I remember moments when my children were babies and toddlers, holding them in a rocking chair, willing myself to remember the feeling of the moment, sensing just how ephemeral it was. To hold a child, to carry a sleeping toddler to bed, is one of the great tender moments of life, overflowing with a feeling of generosity. We sense the holy in such moments.

I find myself thinking about children, and about carrying, on this Yom Kippur.

Being Carried on Yom Kippur

When we think of children and holidays, we usually think of Passover. Of course, Passover is a child-centered holiday, with its games and questions, its special foods and many meals. The youngest child asks the Four Questions; the cleverest child negotiates the best deal for returning the afikomen. Many a Jewish parent has carried a sleeping child from the couch to the bedroom at the end of the seder.

Not so Yom Kippur. Unlike Passover, Yom Kippur is a quintessentially non-child-centered holiday. Parents of young children are challenged to figure out what to do with their kids on Yom Kippur, because Yom Kippur is made for adults: there is no meal, there are no stories, no games, no question-and-answer. Even when the grownups aren’t in shul, fasting makes them low-energy and not particularly available to children. Likewise the substance of Yom Kippur is for grownups. The concept of teshuva can be a hard one for children to connect with. To think about teshuva requires a long view, an ability to be self-reflective, to take in the scope of one’s actions in the past year, and to judge oneself. While children can grasp the idea of being sorry and granting forgiveness, the fullness of the idea of teshuva isn’t something to expect of a 7-year old.

Yet on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur our metaphors are frequently parental: k’rachem av al banim, ken terachem aleinu: As a parent has mercy on their children, so may You have mercy on us. Or the many times we say avinu malkeinu, our parent, our sovereign. Or consider Rabbi Akiva’s famous words at the end of the Mishnah in Yoma: “Who purifies you? Your parent in heaven!” This is language unique to the High Holidays. At Pesach we refer to the Divine as God, and ourselves as God’s servants. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, alongside the image of God as sovereign and ruler, the liturgy evokes a different relationship, that of parent and child.

The language of carrying is also central on these days. In our selichot prayers we repeatedly refer to God the way God describes Godself: nosei avon, the one who carries sin. We draw this language from two accounts in the Torah: the Holy One’s forgiveness after the sin of the Golden Calf, and the Divine’s second act of forgiveness after the sin of the spies. In both instances, God refers to Godself as the one who carries sin.

The language of carrying is also evoked in the verse from Micah that we read in our Haftarah Yom Kippur afternoon (appended to the story of Jonah), and in the central sacrificial act of Yom Kippur, the confession of Israel’s sins on the head of the se’ir l’azazel, the scapegoat: “The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place.”

A Lesson From Cain

The midrash reminds us of the earliest episode when this language is used. It comes in the story of Cain. Just after Cain has killed his brother Abel, God famously asks him, “Where is Abel your brother?” Cain responds, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” God tells Cain that his brother’s blood is crying out from the earth, and condemns Cain to be a wander, na v’nad, in the midst of the earth.

But, says the midrash, Cain prays.

Rabbi Eliezer said: See how great is the power of prayer. If it cannot transform everything, it at least transforms half. Cain stood over Abel his brother and killed him. The decree went out against him: “Na v’nad, a wanderer you will be in the earth.” Immediately Cain stood and confessed before the Holy Blessed One, saying, “My sin is too great to carry.” He said, Master of the Universe, you carry the entire world, but my sin you will not carry? Did you not write, ‘[I] bear sin and pass over wrongdoing?’ Forgive my sin, for it is great!” Immediately Cain found mercy before the Holy Blessed One, who took away the Na part of the decree, for it is written, “And he lived in the land of Nod.” From here you learn how great is prayer before the Holy Blessed One. (Deuteronomy Rabbah 8:1)

Cain’s plaintive words in this midrash are striking. Helpless, overcome, he cries out to God: My sin is too great to bear. The burden is too heavy. I can’t carry it. And then he reminds God that the Holy One is the ultimate carrier: the one who is sovel, who bears the burdens of the world; the one who is nosei avon, who carries sin away. Cain does not ask God to carry him: just the opposite, Cain will have to carry himself. But God agrees to carry his sin, to lessen the severity of the decree. Cain will not have to carry the burden of both his own life and the sin he has committed. God grants forgiveness, God carries away Cain’s sin, and his burden is eased.

This is an adult moment. Cain’s forgiveness does not mean he recovers his childlike innocence. The very next verse of the story tells us as much: “And Cain knew his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Hanoch.” Immediately after his forgiveness, Cain finds a place to live, the land of Nod, and engages in the most basic definition of biological maturity, reproduction. He then has a son whose name signifies education. Cain does not become a child again. He becomes an adult, doing adult things, taking adult responsibilities. He finds a place to live. He has a child. He teaches his child. In just a few verses, Cain transforms from the teenager who kills his brother and shirks responsibility into a responsible adult who has children and educates them.

Yet the touchstone for this assumption of adulthood is an ironic twist. In order to become a fully responsible adult, Cain first has to surrender himself to God. He has to let go of the power he thinks he has–the power he has just proven, the power to kill–and acknowledge that in the presence of God, in the presence of ultimate consciousness, he is powerless. In surrendering his power, Cain in effect becomes a small child again: the small child who is powerless, who is utterly dependent. The small child who cannot fight off sleep. The small child who needs us to carry him. This powerless small child is precisely the being that evokes our sympathy, our rachmanus, our tender love.

Cain is not a child, and his moment of returning to a child’s state is not permanent, but temporary. Through this moment of throwing himself on God’s mercy, of acknowledging his powerlessness, Cain is transformed. He is forgiven. He is redeemed. He grows up. By allowing God to carry his sin, and by begging God to carry it, Cain becomes capable of carrying himself.

Yom Kippur: Allowing Ourselves to Be Carried

There’s a famous Christian poem about a person having a dream of walking on the beach, looking back on the footprints of the journey. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, those of God and the person walking. Sometimes there was only one. As the poem famously puts it, “During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”

I think sometimes we have too easily resisted this kind of language in Judaism. We’ve been more  fond of intellectual arguments and text-heavy formulations of symbolism and signification. We often tend to over-intellectualize the experience of the High Holidays. In doing so, we can miss the core experience, the basic move that this time is about. It is about allowing ourselves to be carried.

Yom Kippur is about enabling God to forgive us of our sins, those accretions that build up in our adult lives of power and separate us from our Divine essence. The halakhah defines an adult as  a bar da’at, one who has the capacity to know. The old maxim goes that knowledge is power, but it is not simply an aphorism. To know is to be powerful. That’s what it means to be an adult, to have agency and to exercise it. But as the story of Cain poignantly illustrates, our knowledge, our power, the very thing that makes us tzelem elohim, images of the Divine, can be used to dominate, to control, even to kill. That is the inherent dilemma of power. The corruptions that knowledge and power engender, those are our sins.

The great possibility of teshuva on Yom Kippur is to acknowledge those corruptions, and then to allow the Creator to carry them away. It is about returning, for a moment, to being a child–not with a child’s innocence, but with a child’s capacity for surrendering. It is about giving up our illusions of certainty, liberating ourselves from the false trappings of our knowledge and power, and allowing ourselves to be ultimately powerless–on this day, this Shabbat shabbaton.

A few weeks after that night he couldn’t sleep, I took Micah and Jonah to their first night baseball game. Jonah caught a foul ball. Our beloved team (go Tigers!) held off the White Sox. We stayed until the end. When we got home after 11 p.m., Micah threw himself on the couch and began to fall asleep. This time I looked at him and knew that I couldn’t carry him. He was too big now, and I was no weightlifter. I had to rouse him and help him walk up the stairs on his own two feet.

As we experience this Yom Kippur, I pray that we can all find the emotional and spiritual place where we can let ourselves be carried. Where we can stop being adults so fearful of losing power, and remember what it is to be a child who trusts in their parents to carry them.

My father, may he rest in peace, used to say that there were two vistas, two views on the road, which made him feel like he was coming home. One was driving south on US-23 towards Ann Arbor, where he lived most of his adult life, as the road slopes down towards the Huron River yielding a view of downtown and the University of Michigan. The other was heading east on Highway 1 in Israel, coming up the hill towards Jerusalem.

Though my parents and my older brothers lived for a year in Israel before I was born, and though my Dad visited many other times, that year was the only time he spent extended time living in the country. Yet there was something about driving up that hill that made him feel like he was coming home.

My guess is you likely have some views that evoke similar feelings in you: a landscape on a highway, a smell as you cross a threshold. If my social media feed is any indicator, my Dad was not alone in feeling like arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, much less making that ascent up Highway 1, aroused deep feelings of homecoming–despite the fact that he didn’t actually live there.

Earlier this week, the Israeli religious singer Ishay Ribo played a concert at Madison Square Garden. Tens of thousands attended, with many expressing a feeling of solidarity and strength in being together in the midst of this profoundly difficult year. On the day after the concert, a friend of mine, who is a rabbi living in Israel, shared on Facebook that, as much as he was glad that people went to the concert, if they really cared about Israel they should be going not to 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, but making aliyah: “Bring Them Home isn’t just a slogan for the hostages,” he wrote. A lot of Israelis commented on his post, saying that they were grateful he had said what they were thinking. A few pointed out that not everyone has the means to be able to make the move.

To me, what the post most illuminated was the very deep animating tension of the idea of home in Jewish life. “Ki tavo el ha’aretz,” “When you come into the Land,” are the opening words of the Torah portion of Ki Tavo (Deut. 26:1-29:8). The land, of course, is Canaan–the land of Israel. It’s home. And yet, even just those words–“When you come into the land,” and the fact that the name of the land changes from Canaan to Israel, reflect tensions built into the very narrative of Jewish history we tell ourselves: Abraham came from a different land into this one; this people came out of Egypt into this land. It is as though the Torah wants us to be simultaneously at home and not fully at home. Perhaps that’s why it constantly reminds us to be mindful of our experience as strangers in a foreign land.

One of the great and necessary innovations of the ancient Rabbis, which was deepened and amplified by the Hasidic masters, was articulating a way of simultaneously longing for our ancestral homeland and being spiritually at home wherever we are. Ashrei yoshvei veitecha, Happy are those who dwell in Your house (Ps. 145:1), which we say three times a day in the traditional liturgy, can refer both to the beit hamikdash, the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, and, simultaneously, to the spot where you are right now as you read this. It is, I believe, not either/or but both/and.

This tension has been the incredible–and incredibly difficult–challenge and invitation of Jewish life and spiritual practice for virtually our entire existence as a people: to sense the Divine presence and long for it; to accept the moment as it is while also seeking to mend and improve it; to be at home and not-at-home, all at the same time. It is the challenge and invitation embodied in the sukkah, the ultimate destination of our spiritual journey of this season. May our practices help us to enter and live within it with strength, wisdom, and compassion.