HOGWARTS OR B.R.A.C.H.A.?

KOL NIDRE 5768

This past Sunday, I witnessed one of the most remarkable lessons I have ever seen taught in a Religious School. Our Fourth Grade teacher, Ilana Steele, had decorated her classroom with silver tinsel and had hung moons and stars from the ceiling. On the table was a boiling cauldron of dry ice and all of the kids were wearing plastic glasses with round rims. The kids were dressed like Harry Potter and had been transported to Hogwarts Academy. The setting was amazing. The kids loved it; several of them were still wearing their glasses during Tashlich later that afternoon.

If that were all, it would have been a fun setting. But Ilana took the lesson further. She renamed Hogwarts and called it B.R.A.C.H.A., the Beginning Reflect And Consider How Academy. It was as if Harry Potter was learning Talmud.

Harry Potter is a great story. If you have not at least heard of Harry Potter, you probably have been searching for nargles during the last few years. It’s a story we have all heard before, just told in various ways. A young boy has a miraculous birth, is unaware of his origins and is given a mission by a wise mentor while still a lad. The mentor dies and leaves the boy – it’s always a boy – to fulfill the mission, and the boy redeems the world when he overcomes the evil forces that seek to destroy him.

This has been a common story for millennia. Whether that boy is Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter or King Arthur, the story is essentially the same; it is a cultural archetype.

The Harry Potter archetype is, of course, a very Jewish theme as well. While we shy away from the miraculous birth story, since it has such strong Christian overtones, we do have these stories in our tradition. Men such as Moses, Samuel, Sampson and even David are salvific figures, overcoming long odds to redeem our people.

The Fourth Grade teacher placed the Harry Potter story within the context of teshuvah, repentance, the very theme of the High Holidays. She asked the question: how do we overcome our yetzer hara, our evil inclination? She used several concepts from the Harry Potter series as the basis of teshuvah, of overcoming our evil inclination and achieving teshuvah, repentance. Three of these concepts are Transfiguration, Legilimency and the Pensieve.

In Harry’s very first lesson in Transfiguration, Professor Minerva McGonagall told the class that “Transfiguration is some of the most complex and dangerous magic you will learn at Hogwarts. Anyone messing around in my class will leave and not come back. You have been warned.” Transfiguration involves changing one object into another. It could be as simple as elongating a person’s ears or as complex as transfiguring a teenage boy into a ferret.

But in Jewish terms, tranfiguation involves prayer. Through prayer, and especially through the Ashamnu prayer, which Cantor Frommer chanted tonight – and which we will pray several times over the next 24 hours, we can begin to transfigure ourselves. Through prayer, we can overcome that which holds us back.

When I spoke about the sin of xenophobia on Erev Rosh Hashanah, I spoke of our relationship with our Muslim brothers and sisters. Wednesday night, a group of us met with members of the Mosque in peace and friendship; it was an amazing evening and one that broke down many walls of suspicion that had arisen between us. There is indeed a long way to go but we have begun the process of transfiguring our relationship with the Islamic world.

We started with the letter “x” in a prayer. But we can start with any letter, in English or in Hebrew in this acrostic masterpiece. And prayer will play a major role in this transfiguration of our relationship with the Muslim world. We can begin to transfigure ourselves with regards to arrogance, to lying, to theft – to a whole host of sins. Take your pick and meditate upon it. But on Yom Kippur, the process of transfiguration through prayer is essential; without transfiguration, our time spent together is useless.

Interestingly, we confess our sins in the plural. If it said, “I am arrogant; I am a liar; I am a thief,” we probably would not put any credence into the prayer. Instead, by couching our litany of sins in the plural, we know that even if we do not think that we did this particular sin, somebody among us might have – so we are giving that person cover to confess. And perhaps we did commit a sin and just don’t realize it. By reciting this litany in the plural, we confess sins that we don’t even realize that we have committed. The atonement process begins before we even know that there is a need to atone.

We do not make individual declarations in Jewish tradition; there is no private confession before a Priest, nor do we stand up and scream out our sins in public. When we confess our prayers in the plural, we are sure to cover our own sins and help others confess theirs, in a positive and life-affirming setting.

Parents always tell children to express themselves. We are not mind readers. Unless of course, we practice Legilimency. According to Harry’s Potter’s least favorite professor, Severus Snape, “The mind is not a book to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by any invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing. It is true, however, that those who have mastered Legilimency are able, under certain conditions, to delve into the minds of their victims and to interpret their findings correctly.”

As Harry Potter matured, he realized that he shared many character traits with the Dark Lord, the very embodiment of evil in the wizarding world. The Dark Lord, Lord Valdemort, often invaded Harry’s dreams. These dreams left him sweating and screaming, his jagged facial scar burning.

As he learned about the nature of these dreams, Harry gradually came to assume the personage of Valdemort; as Valdemort attacked somebody, not only did Harry witness it, Harry WAS Valdemort; he became the attacker. Certainly, he only dreamt of the event. Yet, he was also a participant. He was practicing Legilimency; he was looking into the Dark Lord’s mind and, unfortunately, becoming one with him.

In real life, we can see many examples of trying to be a mind reader. I only need to remind you of Idaho Senator Larry Craig. Senator Craig was arrested in a Minneapolis airport bathroom after he propositioned an undercover male police officer. Originally, he quietly pled guilty to the charge. But when the sordid affair came to light, he vigorously denied both the proposition – and being gay. In his words, “I am not gay. I have never been gay”. But really, what does it matter if he is or is not a homosexual? Yet we all assume he is gay – as if we could read his mind – and as if being gay were a crime.

Because of his repeated denials, and because of his recorded concerning gay rights in the Senate, and because as a rigid conservative fundamentalist, he has blasted the gay rights movement as a matter of party policy, many believe that Senator Larry Craig is indeed gay. He doth protest too much. The more that somebody attacks something, the more that person is attracted to that very same thing. Do goes the saying. But we cannot read his mind so we don’t know for sure. And if he had not been arrested, it really would have been none of our business.

This has happened time and again with the opponents of gay rights. People like Senator Craig, Congressman Mark Foley, who propositioned male House pages and Reverend Ted Haggard of Jesus Camp fame, who also was found to have had a homosexual relationship. While we are not wizards, it is not difficult to practice Legilimency in these cases. It is easy to see that often the thing that we hate most about others is what we hate the most about ourselves.

Now if one is an opponent of gay rights, whether for political or religious reasons, it is not a sin. But it is sinful, an abuse of the yetzer hara, to persecute gays and lesbians. And as I said, the greater the persecution of homosexuals, the greater the chance that the persecutor has latent homosexual tendencies or is indeed gay. It’s not necessarily true – but it does happen a lot. In other words: that which we loathe most is that which also attracts us most.

Like Harry Potter, the victim and the persecutor become one and the same. That is what happens when we project our own insecurities and prejudices onto others.

In the Mishnah, and in our Machzor, we read the following:

For transgressions between human beings and God, Yom Kippur atones. But between one human being and another, Yom Kippur does not provide atonement until one asks for forgiveness from the other.

I cannot read your mind, nor can you read mine. So we have to tell each other how we have wronged each other and then, only after asking forgiveness from one another, can we go before God. Now, our rabbis realized that this was very difficult so they created a formula, which we read earlier, which provides blanket coverage so we can assume that we have asked forgiveness of each other – and we have been forgiven in exchange. It’s not ideal but it recognizes human nature. It allows us to move forward.

The third idea from the Harry Potter story taught in the Fourth Grade last Sunday was the Pensieve. One of J.K. Rowling’s most complex devises for using memory is the pensieve. The idea of the pensieve is that a person can literally remove a memory stored in his or her brain and deposit it in the pensieve, a watery basin, for later viewing – by oneself or by others. This of course is completely foreign to our way of thinking.

But is it?

Moses Maimonides wrote:

What constitutes teshuvah (repentance)? That a sinner should abandon his or her sins and remove them from his or hear thoughts, resolving in that person’s heart never to commit them again.

What if we could put all of our sinful thoughts, our yetzer hara, into a pensieve, and choose never to encounter them again? All of our 23 sins of the Ashamnu, all of the sins listed in the Torah, all of the sins stated by the rabbis, all of the sins foisted upon us by society – and all of those sins which we choose to commit, even though we know better: what if all that temptation would just go away? Could it be as simple as taking a magic wand and pulling a strand from our temples; we would not have to come to Temple! It would certainly be easier than transfiguring that litany of sins into blessings.

Maimonides developed a four-part system of teshuvah, of repentance, that acts as our Jewish pensieve. The first step is to recognize that one had sinned. We need to identify and take responsibility for the action. The second is to express regret for the action. The third step is to apologize to oneself, to another or to God. The fourth and most difficult step is to commit to making a change in behavior. This process is both painful and rewarding. But if we are successful, we will rise above the ordinary wizard and transfigure our lives for the better. We will stop being ferrets and start becoming human once again.

I can imagine that Senator Craig would have welcomed a pensieve, a place to store his homophobic thoughts and homophiliac propositioning? Wouldn’t it be nice if he could simply have removed the evil from his brain and locked it away in a pensieve before entering that bathroom airport? I’m not speaking of his gay tendencies, mind you, just his unhealthy and illegal response to these tendencies.

But the world, alas, does not work that easily. Today, on Yom Kippur, we need to put our negative behaviors into the Maimonidean pensieve and lock them away. Of course, we can’t change everything at once. So let us resolve to change just one behavior today that we find personally distasteful. We can take one small step. What behavior do you find personally distasteful in others or in yourself? And how will you eliminate that behavior in your own life? How will you extract that negative behavior and subject it to the Maimonidean pensieve of admission, regret, forgiveness and permanent change?

SPOILER ALERT

The final idea of my talk, one which our Fourth Grade teacher did not include in her lesson, is the lesson of the horcruxes. Lord Valdemort desired immortality and so, before his confrontation with the infant Harry, had divided his soul and placed parts of it in seven different bodies, including a ring, a serpent and a tiara. These objects were called horcruxes. So if the Dark Lord died, parts of his soul would live on – and he would be reborn. And he was.

Harry’s mission, assigned by his mentor, the Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore, who, faithful to archetype died in Book Six, was to destroy the horcruxes. Once they were destroyed, he could destroy Valdemort, the personification of evil in the world. Of course, he completed his task and saved the world. That is how the final book ends.

But Harry and his friends are mortified that Valdemort would destroy his soul for the sake of power. That was the essential difference between Harry Valdemort; Harry prized his soul. But Harry’s greatest realization came when he realized that he too was a horcrux! He possessed parts of the Dark Lord, parts of that evil soul resided within him.

And he knew that he had to eradicate this horcrux within himself in order to defeat the yetzer hara, the evil inherent in the Dark Lord. When he did that, he was whole and could move forward with his life. It almost cost him his very life – but that is the price we pay to conquer our greatest fears.

So we too need to eliminate the horcruxes from our lives, those evil parts of us, installed there by others or placed there by ourselves, so that we can move on. We need to acknowledge our shortcomings and not project them onto others. We need to stop scapegoating those who are not like us and start bringing the other back from the wilderness. We need to recognize that our childhood traumas, our tragic life experiences, our fears and our failures, are in our past. We need to put them into our Maimonidean pensieves to become whole again.

We can then live in concert with the demands of Judaism, a life of mitzvah and not sin, a life of light and not darkness, a life of good and not evil. We can then live in concert with the demands of our society, to judge each and every person on his or her merit, and not by color, gender, economic status or sexual orientation. We can then live in concert with our planet, aware of her fragility and responsive to her needs. We can then live in concert with our fellow Jews, always propelling each other forward instead of pushing each other away. We can then live in concert with our families, bringing out the Divine in each other instead of casting spells that petrify progress. And we can then live in concert with ourselves, expelling our horcruxes, subjecting our sins to the Maimonidean pensieve and transfiguring our lives through prayer and Divine service.

May we so transfigure our lives so that prayer becomes vital. May we peer inside our souls so that we can extract the evil and place it in a locked-away place, far removed from our hearts. And may we ultimately remove that which holds us back so that we can move forward, in love and in peace, to realize our Brit, our covenant with God, to be L’or Goyyim, a light to the nations, a model of how to conquer and control the yetzer hara. And may that journey begin now. Amen.