From a sermon I gave last year on the teshuvah (return/repentence) Jews traditionally seek around Yom Kippur...

The Zohar teaches us that the Torah, is like a beautiful woman who leads you along by showing some leg but then disappears just when you try to get close. Besides reflecting on the personal lives of Kabbalists, it's an image which reflects the reality of this day: our searches for ourselves, for God, and for each other are fundamentally linked. They bleed into one another. And these searches, if they're honest ones, are always transgressive, always threatening to what we understand ourselves and others to be. Sometimes, as in today's Torah reading, we get too close, reach too far and - like Aaron's sons - lose everything in the process.

Maybe that's why we like to talk about this process, about this reaching outward and inward to which we recommit ourselves each year, as one of teshuvah, of return. There's a deceptive safety in it. What could be easier than turning around, Little Red Riding Hood-like, and stepping back onto the path we momentarily lost? Teshuvah, as a term, can easily disguise the centrality of creation - and destruction - to the project at hand. It grants the dubious but maybe necessary confidence that there is a path there, and we were once on it. It appeals to the same instincts which have made it easier for some throughout our history, like the martyrs whose stories we will soon read, to believe that their suffering was punishment for breaking God's law than to believe that it followed no rules at all.

Or maybe the only way we know to sketch a course for the future is to fix its image in our past. How else to build a better future for ourselves and for the people and institutions we care about if not by projecting such a possibility into an imagined past, an Eden from which we fell by our choices and which with new ones we could recapture?

"O, let America be America again," wrote Langston Hughes, "The land that never has been yet." That story, with all its contradictions, is our heritage: a people forging forward to reclaim what we could never fully grip in the first place. What F. Scott Fitzgerald called "boats borne ceaselessly into the past." It's the note on which we close the ark and let the Torah pass again out of sight: "Chadaish yamainu kekedem." Make our days new, as in old.

Such a prayer - bring us a day so far back in collective memory that it's entirely new, so fresh and strange we can only understand it as ancient - is deeply rooted in our tradition. It's that of Israelites escaping Egypt for a national homeland which their ancestors left when there was not yet an Israelite nation. And it's the story of Jacob himself, who becomes Israel after fleeing from a home in which fear and resentment have crowded out compassion - at least in his own mind.

Jacob's struggle with his brother, the Talmud tells us, began in the womb, where they struggled over resources neither could imagine dividing. So once physically distant, there's little for either brother to hope or want to return to about the relationship they once had. We trip over our own words here - alienation, estrangement - words which suggest a process of losing a closeness which the text suggests was never there to be lost.

Jacob and Esau were always strangers to each other in their own home. The question facing them once they are apart then is not how to reclaim or renew what was lost but how to find something which was never present.

It's by asking that question - how to reclaim what was always missing but never present - that Jacob finds a new name. Zeh dor dorshav, mvakshai panechah Yaakov, selah, we'll chant as we carry the Torah around the room, grasping to touch it - but not with our hands. "This is a generation of seekers, who seek out your face. Jacob - selah."

None of the translators are quite sure how to work Jacob's name, which hangs between the description of seeking and the selah, a pause, a breath, in to the rest of the sentence. Is he modifying the generation - Jacob's generation - or God - Jacob's God? Again those relationships are difficult to disentangle from each other.

Jacob's selah moment comes when he stops to sleep outside for the night with his head on a rock on the way to Haran and encounters a presence he never had at home. "Behold," he says, "surely Adonai is in this place and I did not know it." Here God makes promises of progeny made to Jacob's grandfather when he too was in a liminal space, sitting at the entrance to his tent while recovering from the pain of the covenant.

Jacob becomes Israel first by seeing a presence beyond himself and then (after an interlude of sweatshop labor) by wrestling it near to death. He does not solicit blessing - he seizes it in a confrontation with something greater. It's from confrontation that he becomes Israel, and we do.

That confrontation is inseparable from another one, a greater challenge than facing down an angel of God with violence: facing his brother without it. This too is a return, a teshuvah, that is no return at all, that is an act of creation in a dark space like the one of which we are told in the book's opening that the face of God hovered over the deep. Fearful, Jacob divides his family so that should there be violence, someone will survive.

And when he faces his brother, they embrace. And Jacob transcends what Buber called the I-It relationship, in which he used his brother's animal skins to win his father's blessing - for I-Thou, clutching his brother in a revelation unspoken in the text but more urgent: Behold, there is a human being here, and I did not know it. That revelation takes Jacob longer and costs him much more to make. But it's that teshuvah, the Rabbis teach - the return to a new relationship with the other - which precedes, undergirds, and renders meaningful the return to a new relationship with God.

"What is shown to him," the Baal Shem Tov said of the good and evil we confront in the world, "is also within him." "I have seen your face," Jacob tells his brother, standing amongst the legions each brother brought to bribe or threaten the other out of aggression, "as though I have seen the face of God." Having faced down an angel and marshaled force to defend himself, Jacob manages the harder task of facing his brother and setting force aside.

We know that force has a way of reproducing itself. Moses, having felt the thrill of striking the rock, of engaging it as an it, can't bring himself to speak to it instead. Whether speaking to a brother you're afraid will strike you is easier or harder than speaking to a rock is hard to say.

"I require a You to become," Buber taught, "becoming I, I say You."

Becoming I is hard. It's a telling moment of teshuvah, and it's one that we find all too many ways to avert. One of them, the creation of the scapegoat, is illustrated all-too vividly in today's Torah readings, both in this morning's description of the scapegoat ritual and in this afternoon's designation of sexual minorities as strangers in our community. The urge here is all too common, all too comprehensible - to resolve that which discomforts by making it inhuman, by reducing Thou to It. It's the act of standing in front of a person and failing to see them, a denial at the other's humanity - and our own.

Why does it happen? Why doesn't it happen more often?

The anthropologist Katherine Newman argues that all taboos are rooted in fear of that which transgresses boundaries and subverts rules - like our understanding of what is person and what is animal. That includes fairness rules - our sense of what kind of people make it, and what kind don't, of what qualities ensure success and which help explain failure. When we confront those who defy these categories - those who suffer unjustly, who subvert our misplaced faith in the fairness of our current world - too often we cast them out of our minds and out of our tents to wander, like Hagar, in the wildnerness. When we see human beings in inhumane suffering, too often we take the course, consciously or not, of denying the humanity of those involved, be they in New Orleans or in Kashmir. It's easy to look at a person and see an it.

"If I told you that I believe in God," wrote Elie Wiesel, "I would be lying. If I told you I did not believe in God, I would be lying. If I told you that I believe in man, I would be lying. If I told you I did not believe in man, I would be lying. But one thing I do know: the Messiah has not come yet."

Yet at our best, there is that in us which recognizes the human and is stirred, which can look into the eyes of another person and see ourselves, and see a creation of God, and not turn away. When we do so, we are more fully human. We are more honestly returning.

Returning to what, then? Not to a place we've been before. Not to an old covenant with God, or a brother, or ourselves. Too often the good news and the bad news is that the place we seek was never ours to lose before.

If we return then, maybe it's not in the temporal sense of resetting course back to what it was before. Maybe it's only through the act of teshuvah that the course exists. This return, then, is the very process by which we look forward and set a path against which we can understand where we've been and map a way out of Egypt.

To do Teshuvah is to craft a new narrative of where we are going which changes our understanding of where we have been. Once Jacob chooses to become Israel and to become a partner in a robust brotherhood, he can look back on his life to that moment and see how it's deviated from such a goal, one which was out of reach from before birth. It's only once we understand ourselves as having a promised land that we recognize that we are in Egypt.

In choosing teshuvah, then, we take on the burden of seeing ourselves and our world as broken, and bind our lives to a vision of greater wholeness - and in so doing, to something greater than ourselves, and to each other. Choosing teshuvah means choosing to understand ourselves as people who would not be where we are or do what we have done - while knowing, of course, that we are and we have.

I am like dust we are called to reflect today; and yet, the world was created for me.

"The land that never has been yet - and yet must be," Langston Hughes called the nation we seek to build. What his words teach us is that we choose whether to build our expectations based on our world as it is or rebuild the world based on better expectations. Our relationships are in need of teshuvah not because they have fallen from a perfect state of grace, but because they fall short of what we choose to see as their full potential, and so we've fallen short of our full capacity for humanity. Our nation is in need of teshuvah not because it once was the full expression of our ideals, but because even never having been, it must be.

Today we survey our fundamentally linked connections to ourselves, to that which is beyond ourselves, and to each other, and in seeing what is broken, we posit a future point to reach which we can then project into the past as a place which we have always been struggling to reach.

Our mezuzot call God by the acronym Shadai, Shomer Daltot Yisrael, the guardian of the doors of Israel, because we recognize that there is sacredness in open spaces, as well as fear, that there is something sacred in passing from where we are to where we are going. But, we are taught, shadai means something else as well - it means HaOmer Shedai - the one who says, "Enough!"

Because there is sacredness is saying, "Ya basta!" in looking at a social relationship or a social contract and recognizing the absence of what could be. Not to do so would be a failure of imagination, just as it would have been to see the void, the tohu v'vohu, and not think to create a universe. So there's power, as we strike our chests, in finding names for what we have done wrong or incompletely, if it helps us find the nouns and verbs to describe the life which must be, despite never having been. It's once we've sketched that point that we can return to it without having ever been before. It's then that we become a dor dorshav, a generation of seekers.

As James Baldwin wrote, "here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now is in our hands - we have no right to assume otherwise."

Adonai, m'kor haShalom, shem'achaid kol hakailim shvurim baolam, Adonai, she'bachar bivnai adam k'mo shotfechah b'ma'asey b'reisheet u'geulah - bazman shvirut hazeh, titian lanu, kol binai adam, kol yoshvei taivail, hayecholot lirdof, ulidrosh, u'lchapais, ula'asot shalom bcol ma'asainu, bkol dakah, bkol rega, ubkol neshamah, b'tzelem elohim.

Adoshem, Source of Peace, who makes one all the broken pieces of our world, Adoshem who chose the children of man as partners in the work of creation and redemption - in this broken time, give all of us, all the children of man, all the inhabitants of the earth, the ability to seek, to pursue, to search for, and to make peace in every minute, in every moment, and in every breath, and in all of our actions in the image of G-d.