There’s this concept of gates in our tradition. In kabbalah, we learn there are 50 Gates of Binah, Wisdom. There are many, many other gates besides. And during Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, we move through the Gates of Prayer, working to get ourselves re-situated. We do the work of teshuvah, or return, and when needed, repair, to be in right relationship with ourselves, with others, and with Makom—a Hebrew name for God that means place. The place that holds all the mystery of being. That’s the name for God I’ll use today. We work to get ourselves to be in more alignment. In the right place.
But those Gates of Prayer close, as the Ne’ilah, or closing, service comes to an end on Yom Kippur, and they remain closed until next year. In a traditional way of understanding it, we are working to merit being written in the Book of Life for the year to come, so that we might be here again next year. While we here might not hold this traditional understanding of what’s happening existentially and spiritually during the Days of Awe, we maintain this emphasis in our observance of these days on returning to ourselves, to each other, and to that sense of Makom, or grounding in this world. I don’t know about you, but for me, it can sometimes feel like a ton of existential pressure, to try to get it right, or to find my way back to myself, during those 10 days.
There’s a later tradition about the closing of the Gates of Prayer that comes from a mystical text, the Zohar. The Kabbalists extend the closing of the Gates of Prayer until the 8th day of Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret — that’s today. They do this by saying that we have until Shemini Atzeret to finish up our teshuvah and Makom will still hear our prayers. If we had been given a bad decree earlier during the Days of Awe, it will be torn up, and we’ll be written in the Book of Life (Zohar Emor 44:287). While I don’t hold to this idea of correlation between what we do during these 10 days and being written for life in this new year, this idea of extension of time for the process of reflection and teshuvah is welcome. I find it heartening to imagine that the pressure put on the 10 days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur was overwhelming to our ancestors, too, and so the kabbalists extend the time the gates are open not just to the start of Sukkot, but through Sukkot until it’s very end. Shemini Atzeret itself is kind of a mysterious day. To explain it, Rashi points us to a midrash that tells us about a king who told his servants to make him a giant feast, and then on the last day asked his beloved to prepare a small feast that they could enjoy together. Shemini Atzeret is like this last, smaller feast. It’s like God is saying to us: Don’t leave the sukkah yet. Let us enjoy each others’ company a little longer.
There is a kind of softness that comes with this extension, that desire to remain together, to enjoy our time. By extending the time the Gates of Prayer are open through Shemini Atzeret, I feel like the kabbalists are also balancing the weight of judgement that we perceive so readily during the Days of Awe. Balancing judgement not just with mercy, but with love and affection and a desire for nice quality time together. Think about the time we spend in a sukkah — we feast, we sing, we invite friends and family and ancestors, it’s lively. There’s encouragement to remain in that state of enjoyment. And then, after we’ve really had a chance to close out our work of teshuvah for this year, the Gates of Prayer finally close.
When we talk about those Gates of Prayer, we’re really talking about the parts of our lives where we’ve fallen out of sorts bein adam l’Makom—between ourselves and Makom, God, Mystery, our sense of being in this world. For everything else—the ways we fall out of sorts bein adam l’khavero, between ourselves and other people—these things need to be addressed in this world, in our relationships. The Gates of Prayer offer nothing towards righting those relationships.
And that, I think, is where all those other gates really come into focus.
It’s as though Makom sits at the center of a courtyard with many gates. When we enter through a gate, we come into a place of alignment with ourselves, and with a grounded sense of being in this world. In addition to the Gates of Prayer, these are some of the other gates that are particularly meaningful for us today. Sha’arei Tzedek—the Gates of Justice, Sha’arei Rachamim—the Gates of Mercy, Sha’arei Dimah—the Gates of Tears, and Sha’arei Teshuvah—the Gates of Return.
The Gates of Justice open for us to enter through whenever we do the life-saving work of meeting people’s needs, sharing and redistributing resources, doing small and large kindnesses for each other, and working for justice at a larger scale (Midrash Tehilim 118). In our parasha this week, we are taught that every 7 years there should be a remission of debts and that we have an obligation to provide sustenance for the Levite, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger — classes of people with very little protection, very much precarity, and who relied on others to meet their basic needs. We are told that we should never harden our hearts to anyone in need but to give openly and freely according to what is needed. What stands out to me is this mix of both systemic and interpersonal ways of approaching this work of justice and redistribution. When we do this work, we enter that courtyard through the Gates of Justice.
The Gates of Mercy open to us to enter when we reach a place of realizing we can no longer do it alone and we ask for help. There is a story from a midrash on the book of Esther that tells us that Esther’s uncle, Mordechai, had other names, and one of them is Ben Kish. Hikish is the word for knock in Hebrew, and this name is a play on that — Mordechai is the one who knocked at the Gates of Mercy, and they were opened to him (Megillah 12b). There is a line in the prayer Avinu Malkeinu, כי אין בנו מעשים—My favorite teaching on this line comes from one of my chaplaincy teachers, Rabbi Mychal Springer, who says: what this really means is “we can’t do it alone.” Living is hard. And it’s getting harder all the time—this world is wild, and beautiful, yes, but terrifying. And getting harder and scarier all the time. When we acknowledge that fear, when we acknowledge that we can’t do it alone, when we ask for help from those around us, and when we cry out not knowing who or what is listening and whether or not we’ll get the help we need—when we risk being that vulnerable—we are knocking on the Gates of Mercy, and being led into that courtyard with Makom, a place of rest.
There are two other Gates that, unlike the Gates of Mercy and the Gates of Justice, which are open to us when we do particular things—knock, or do justice in the world—these gates are always open.
For many generations after the destruction of the Temple, the rabbis teach that the Gates of Prayer were permanently closed. But even in that time of great destruction and devastation, the rabbis tell us that despite the closure of the gates of prayer, the Gates of Tears are not closed, citing a verse in Psalms (Bava Metzia 59a): “God hear my prayer and hear my cry; don’t be silent to my tears” (Psalms 39:13). Tears happen so spontaneously, they are not a thing we have control over, and they express so much the movements of our hearts. This is why these gates are always open. Through our tears, the expressions of our grief and our pain, we enter through the Gates of tears.
And finally, the Gates of Return. There is a midrash on the book of Lamentations that’s one of my favorite pieces of Torah. It goes:
Prayer is like a mikveh and teshuvah (return) is like the sea. Just like a mikveh is sometimes open and other times closed, so too the gates of prayer are sometimes open and other times closed, but the sea is always open, so too with the gates of teshuvah, they are always open (Eikhah Rabbah 3:15).
This is what grace is, perhaps—the idea that there is no limitation on our ability to miss the mark and come back to each other, come back to ourselves, come back to Makom. This is why these gates are never closed, so that the opportunity to return is always open to us. Through the work we do to repair what has been broken, we will always be able to enter into these Gates of Return.
What I’m left with from all this is that, in truth, the gates are never really closed. There is always another gate to enter through. We enter through the everyday business of living: through our tears, through our grief, through our work to get things right within our selves and with each other, through our work to make this world more humane and livable and supportive for all of us, and when we acknowledge that we can’t do it ourselves and we ask for help. There is always a gate to enter through to return to ourselves, each other, and to Makom.
As we move today through Shemini Atzeret, I hope that you can keep with you some sense of the spaciousness of these Gates remaining open even as the Gates of Prayer close, and of this desire to extend our time in celebration and joy with one another. Whatever else this year might bring to us, the Gates of Return, Tears, Mercy, and Justice are always open to us, to enter through and find our ways back to where we need to be.
