Prepared for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, 5769 (2008).
In memory of my cat Yogi, pictured here.
Tonight and tomorrow we are coming together to pray. And pray. And pray.
We’ll have words and music and silence and tears and hugs and smiles and people wanting comfort and people wanting to be left alone and breakthroughs and frustrations and self-recriminations and resolutions and…much more.
Some of the words we’ll say and hear tonight will move us in one direction or another. Listen:
We are as clay in potter’s hands.
You know the secrets of everyone alive.
You are compassionate, and you are eternal.
Who is the potter?
Who is the knower?
Who is eternally compassionate?
Good questions.
When I spoke last week about Toto – the hero of the Wizard of Oz, the d-o-g spelled backwards, the totality, the spark of God inside us – it wasn’t an abstraction for me.
I actually have a Toto inside me.
Only it’s not a dog; it’s a cat.
It’s not a he; it’s a she.
She’s not played by an actor; she’s real.
Her name isn’t Toto; it’s Yogi.
Yogi means “the one who seeks union.”
Yogi was my companion for twenty years – and I started calling her Yogi before I knew that was her true spiritual name.
Yogi, a Maine Coon, had all the cat excellences you can imagine. She was beautiful, immaculately groomed, smart, cautious in dangerous situations, agile, a keen hunter, a brave and caring mother, happy outdoors in any kind of weather, in fact she especially loved snow.
Yogi also had some excellences that every human being might want to copy.
Yogi was a peacemaker. Charles and I saw her gently and gracefully break up fights between a scrappy cat named Sissy and other cats.
Yogi was a loyal friend to the end. She had a close cat friend named Cloud, who was proud, and allowed very few people and cats to get close. When Cloud was dying of kidney disease, Yogi sat with Cloud during Cloud’s last painful days and nights.
Yogi knew how to get along with every personality. She would meet new cats and defer to them. And after a few weeks, they would step aside to let her eat their food. They would come to her to get washed. They would voluntarily leave the coveted high lookout spot in any room for her. Even the spoiled and always angry Katushka allowed Yogi to sit with her in friendship.
Yogi was one of the most amazing souls ever to grace this planet. Yogi could hold it all – Sissy’s aggression, Cloud’s pride and Cloud’s pain, Katushka’s unfocused anger. I’ve been taking courses in psychology and counseling on and off for years, and I couldn’t touch Yogi’s skills.
When Yogi was 19, which is like 110 for a cat, she was stone deaf, nearly blind, and emaciated from a thyroid condition. She had a broken leg that never healed right, and she looked a horrid matted mess because she couldn’t groom herself anymore. And she still actively played the peacemaker.
You know the stories in which people encounter a terribly beat-up looking beggar. They either help the beggar or turn the beggar away. Then the beggar turns out to be the person you would least expect to be looking that ratty, Eliyahu Hanavi, Elijah the Prophet, here to announce the coming of Mashiach. And then Eliyahu lets the people know that they either hastened or delayed Mashiach.
During Yogi’s last Pesach with us, when she was looking terribly beat-up by age and illness, something extraordinary happened, something both symbolic and real. We opened the door for Eliyahu Hanavi, and in walked Yogi. Reminding us that hope, divinity, and shalom come in the packages we might least expect.
I carry Yogi around inside me all the time. We meet regularly in my dreams. When things in my life are going well, I dream that Yogi and I are traveling together. We go through a lot of airports and train stations and bus stations, and up a lot of escalators. (How much clearer can a dream symbol get?)
But when things in my inner life aren’t going well – when I’m sick or depressed or exhausted or grieving or confused – I dream that I’ve lost Yogi along the way.
How much clearer can a dream symbol get? Yogi is my inner GPS. She lets me know when I’m on course and when I’m off course.
Yogi is the knower, the part of myself that holds my highest ideals, that monitors my progress, and reminds me when I’m off course. Yogi knows my deepest secrets, and she holds things for me that are too painful for me to acknowledge consciously. But sometimes the time is right, and Yogi the knower pushes forward images and feelings for me to look at. She knows the right course better in a way that my busy everyday self does not.
And, Lord knows, Yogi knows, it’s easy to get pushed off course. Inner and outer events that are beyond our control push us here and there.
Geopolitical events sit on the edge between terrifying challenge and challenging opportunity: Elections in Canada. Elections in the U.S. Elections in Vancouver. A new government in Israel. Collapsing world economies. Unsafe food. Global warming. Ongoing, unfocused wars. This won’t be an easy year.
Local events haven’t been easy either in the Or Shalom community. We’ve lost babies and we’ve lost young mothers. We’ve lost elders, lovers, friends, and companions, human and animal. We’ve asked ourselves where we went wrong – knowing rationally that we haven’t. We’ve been grieving, and we’ve been holding the hands of friends are who are grieving.
But who is holding us? Who is our Yogi? Who is our Toto? Who is our inner GPS?
Who is the potter?
Who is the knower?
Who is eternally compassionate?
The potter is the one we imagine ordains and shapes events, who takes our breath away with awe, and anger, and everything in between.
The knower pushes our deeply buried grief, anger, guilt, and sadness into our consciousness, insisting that we seek trusted friends and advisors who can help us, so that we are not destroyed by our pain.
The compassionate One is the inner witness to whom we cry out, the secret chamber of the heart where we confess our yearning, the safe psychic space where we admit our mistakes to ourselves. We all know we cry out, but we don’t all give credit to the witness whose presence we assume when we cry.
We are as clay in potter’s hands.
You know the secrets of everyone alive.
You are compassionate, and you are eternal.
The fast, the words, the music, the silences, the sense of shared purpose – all of these lower our conscious guard, and make it possible for the inner knower to remind us what we carry inside.
We’ll have tears and hugs and smiles and people wanting comfort and people wanting to be left alone and breakthroughs and frustrations and self-recriminations and resolutions and much more. And by the end of the day, tomorrow, we’ll let go of some of the pain that pushed us to the new resolutions. And it will feel great.
At the same time, let’s take seriously what our inner GPS, our inner Yogi, shows us today. Secrets about ourselves that we are willing to peek at – these are the seeds of our agenda for next year, our agenda for spiritual, emotional, ethical growth. These are the seeds of our mission – should we choose to accept it.
Yom Kippur comes and goes and comes back again. What do we do in between peeks (and peaks)?
We’ll go far if we just copy the flesh-and-blood Yogi – the Yogi made of ashes and clay who chose how she would respond to her spin on the potter’s wheel. We can: make peace. Sit with friends in need. Listen, hold the space, and learn. Hasten Mashiach. Stop worrying about how our hair looks.
And we’ll go farther if we remember that this real Yogi lived 120 cat years – it took her a long time and many life challenges to grow her wisdom. I know – I held her paw as she grew from skittish kitten into peace activist and matriarch.
And we’ll go even farther if we make contact with the inner Yogi – the one who knows our secrets and holds them with compassion. She will let us know when we are off course. She will wait patiently as we decide how to respond, and she will gently remind us of the inner knots we should untangle. She doesn’t just show up today, a mirage caused by thirst, low blood sugar, and the hypnotic mantra of Hebrew. She is sending us messages all the time – all we have to do is let her sit with us.
And that’s a very deep kind of prayer.
May we have the opportunity to experience deep prayer.
May we be inscribed in the Book of Life.
— Laura Duhan Kaplan, 2008
Delivered on Yom Kippur 5769
Image: “Maine Coon” by Elin Pendleton, www.dailypaintings.com