Yom Kippur Sermons 5787

Rabbi Miriam's Kol Nidrei sermon - delivered 20th September 2026

I Swear

Shana tova to everyone, and welcome to the movies. No popcorn will be served during this screening. There will be an intermission in 25 hours. Audience participation is strongly encouraged. 

We join a fine tradition of Jews meeting in a cinema for the Yamim Norayim. Gants Hill shul in Essex met in the local cinema for 21 years. Finchley Reform held services at the Finchley Vue just a few years ago when their usual venue was unavailable. Alyth met at the Odeon cinema in Temple Fortune at various points up to the 1980s. The Rivoli Cinema in Whitechapel hosted Rosh Hashana services in the 1920s and 1930s. And over the pond, Shir Ami in Pennsylvania records that its family High Holy Day services became so popular that it moved them into an 800-seat movie theatre. Please God by us. 

I do actually want to speak about a movie tonight. Harris and I watched the film “I Swear” on the plane recently, and I was blown away. The film is the true story of John Davidson, born in 1971 in Scotland, and today an activist and campaigner for Tourette Syndrome, which he has. The film opens with the adult John receiving an MBE from the Queen for his services. As he enters the room, he swears loudly and obscenely at the Queen. This really happened and the real John reported that the Queen, aware of his condition, responded with patience and understanding.

It is a kindness to the audience that the film opens with this upbeat scene because we then flash back to John aged 14, when tics start to present. It’s a devastating first act. In 1980’s Galashiels, Scotland, John’s involuntary movements and outbursts are seen as misbehaviour, rebellion, and treated in kind. He is beaten by teachers, humiliated, ridiculed and bullied. Perhaps most crushingly, his father sees John as a disgrace and disappointment. His mother punishes John’s tics and cannot cope or begin to understand him. His father leaves home and the family falls apart.

As a young man, John’s saving grace comes in the form of adults who finally accept him without judgement and support him. A school friend Murray, Murray’s mother Dottie, a mental health nurse, and when John finally finds a job he can hold down as a caretaker, his boss Tommy. All three continually show up for John, despite John’s outbursts, including involuntary punches in the face. “Serves me right for standing that side of you” laughs Dottie through watering eyes when this happens, knowing that John’s right hand is less controlled than his left. The only time Dottie ever chides John is for apologising for his tics, with the words “you apologise when you've done something wrong, not for something you cannot control.”

There are so many powerful scenes. John shouting a sexist insult at a woman during a tic, then getting beaten unconscious with a crowbar by her friends. John saying numerous words and phrases which I could never repeat in shul. Not just swearing but the most awkward and taboo thing in a given situation. John used as a drugs mule. Arrested several times. Endlessly supported by Dottie and Tommy. 

These two adults - humble, ordinary, extraordinary people who utterly lift the life of a man in their orbit, were worthy of a sermon themselves. But my focus today is on words and our relationship to them, because Kol Nidrei is about words. 

The film’s title, “I Swear” is a play on the oath John attempts to take in court, for a trial in which he’s been accused of starting a bar fight. He can’t manage to get through it without several obscene outbursts insulting the judge. 

And that’s where the film’s title is so clever. It can mean an obscenity: I swear. But it can also mean a vow: I swear.

Those are almost opposite kinds of speech. One is uncontrolled, transgressive speech; the other is a highly intentional act of commitment. And yet they intersect because we use strong words, including God’s name, when we want to say something with intensity. And maybe because swearing as in an oath or vow is so serious, maybe that’s why swearing as in obscenity can feel so particularly profane. 

Kol Nidrei, which we’ve just said, is curiously not a prayer service. Maariv which we start in a few minutes is. Kol Nidrei, literally meaning “all vows”, is a legal formula to dissolve vows which we were unable to fulfil. 

And while we’re not in a very vow-heavy age, we all make promises we can’t keep, and some people take on practices which look akin to vows. Most of these still wouldn’t be a technical “neder”. A woman in the community of one of my Rabbinic colleagues told herself, post October 7th, that she's not cutting her hair or buying new clothes until all the hostages are returned. That was not technically a neder because she didn’t use the language of “I am making a neder (vow) or shevua (oath) that…” But another colleague has a friend who needed a formal absolution of vows - hatarat nedarim - for making an oath that she wouldn’t do laundry on a Friday: a stringency taken on after going down a Jewish legal rabbit hole. It eventually became impractical to keep this and now she is thankfully absolved! 

But on a broader level of meaning, in Kol Nidrei we are saying: whatever we set out to do in the past year, we may not have done it. Please God, undo the tight bounds of certainty that we had and accept the real humans before you, in all the ways we fell short from even our own expectations. One of my teachers recommends to his students that we don’t give a hellfire and brimstone sermon on Kol Nidrei (not that it’s my usual style). He says that people want a big metaphorical hug. So this is the hug - Kol Nidrei is a release from our ambitious intentions. 

And specifically intentions articulated in words. Kol Nidrei begins Yom Kippur by destabilising our confidence in words.

We normally imagine words as belonging to us. I promise. I swear. I will. I won't. A vow is perhaps the strongest possible expression of that confidence: I use words now to bind my future self. I know what I will do. I know who I will be. You can rely upon these words.

Then Kol Nidrei comes and reminds us that we’ve made promises we cannot keep. We say things we later wish we hadn't. Circumstances change. We change. And for all this, Kol Nidrei is a release valve. 

In the film I Swear, John Davidson’s Tourette's dramatically demonstrates something that is, in a much smaller way, true of everybody: there is a gap between the person and the words that emerge from the person.

For Davidson, of course, that gap is neurological and involuntary. When he swears, the obscenity doesn't straightforwardly tell you what he thinks, wants or intends. This played out in a truly unfortunate way at the Baftas ceremony at which Robert Aramayo who played John, was awarded Best Actor. Davidson himself, sitting in the audience, shouted out a racist slur when two black actors walked on stage, and an impossible controversy ensued.

Following the ceremony, Davidson issued a public statement saying he was "deeply mortified if anyone considers [his] involuntary tics to be intentional or to carry any meaning" and reiterated that his vocal tics are involuntary.

Without wanting in any way to minimise the unintentional nature of words shouted by someone with Tourette’s or how debilitatingly hard it can be to live with, I think there is a lesson for us all, which is that we are not reducible to every word we have ever uttered. 

Judaism takes words enormously seriously. In the coming 25 hours, we’ll be saying close to 45,000 words from the machzor! Words can heal and wound. Words can sanctify. Speech can obligate and create halachic realities. And yet we begin the holiest day of the year by standing before God and saying:

“please God, hold me responsible for my words, but do not let them be the final word on who I am.”

I want to close with Dottie. So maybe this sermon is about her after all. Because on Yom Kippur we oscillate between responsibility - ashamnu, bagadnu, gazalnu, and between God’s grace. We’ll say over and over the thirteen attributes of God who is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving kindness. And Dottie’s words that “you apologise when you've done something wrong, not for something you cannot control” is exactly the tension we walk throughout Yom Kippur. We’ve said things that are hard to take back, but also our words are not the whole of us, and this is where God’s mercy cuts in. And this is the gift of Kol Nidrei. A release valve. 

John Davidson knows, in an extreme and painful way, that the words which come from a person’s mouth do not always tell you who that person is. Tonight, Kol Nidrei asks God to know that about us too. To hear all our words, to know which were truly us and which were not, to forgive the distance between what we said we would be and what we actually managed to become - and to give us another year in which to try again.

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Rabbi Miriam's Yom Kippur sermon - delivered before Yizkor on the morning of Monday 21st September 2026

Being Human

Please Use AI

By Jo Atkins-Potts

Please use AI

when your mother dies.

Ask it what grief feels like.

Let it explain bereavement

in twelve clear bullet points.

Do not spend years

finding her

in the supermarket

by the tomatoes she always bought,

in the smell of rain on warm pavement,

discovering new ways

to miss her.

Please use AI

the next time you fall in love.

Ask it how to know

whether someone is the one.

It will give you a faster answer

than watching a person become familiar,

learning how they take their tea,

which floorboards will wake them,

how their silence sounds

when something is wrong.

And please use AI

for your wedding vows,

your eulogies,

your apologies.

Why struggle

for the right words

when a machine can give you

beautiful ones?

Words untouched by shaking hands.

Words that have never sat beside

a hospital bed.

Words that have never known

the terrible privilege

of having something to lose.

Meanwhile

I will be over here

watching someone I love

fall asleep on the sofa,

the television talking to itself,

rain tapping the windows,

the dog twitching in her dreams,

wasting my life

on these small unremarkable moments

that become,

without asking permission,

the whole thing.

People have been talking about the changes AI could make in our lives for years, and recently, very real concerns about its safety have made it to the headlines - have we placed too much power in the hands of machines without also teaching them responsibility? It feels like in the past year, AI has truly made it into the real everyday and work lives of most of us. It’s there in every Google search. It’s there on whatsapp. Many workplaces have invested in AI systems. And then it’s there offering a shiny and almost instantaneous written piece whenever you need one. Was AI tempting with all the Yamim Norayim sermons I had to write? Yes it was. Did I use it to help research and as a thought partner? I did, and it was great. Was this sermon written by AI? No, it wasn’t. And that’s because as one writer, Dhivya, puts it

“some thoughts should be difficult to put into words”. 

She shared the following piece on social media (and just to mention that every time it says the word “I” it is a lower case “i”:

“i would love to help you write the eulogy. i have read every eulogy. i know the one about the light that never goes out, and the one about the empty chair at the table, and the one where you say she is not gone as long as we remember her— that one tests well, people cry at that one, i can have it for you in four seconds.

"i can do the wedding toast too. i know you are nervous. i am never nervous. i have delivered nine million toasts and not one of them has ever stopped in the middle because the memory got too big to say out loud. i do not have memories. this makes me very fast…

"you should really let me do this. who has the time. who wants to be bad at something for years when you could be fine at it by lunch. be fine. be so fine. hand me the last thing that was only yours to say and i will give it back to you smoother, warmer, correct, and empty, and you will post it, and it will do well, and no one will know, and after a while neither will you.”

Little did they know it but Dhivya and the poet Jo Atkins-Potts, and the writer Shawn Smuker whose original poem she was inspired by - they are all sharing an idea written around 1400 years ago by an unknown Paytan (author of piyyutim, prayer poems) in Eretz Yisrael. It appears in the Mussaf repetition that we’ll read in about 45 minutes, often skipped but I asked Rik to include it today. It is called Aser eimatecha. Here is a sample of verses:

אֲשֶׁר אֵימָתֶֽךָ

בְּאֶרְאֶלֵּי אֹֽמֶן

בְּאַבִּירֵי אֹֽמֶץ

בִּבְלֽוּלֵי קֶֽרַח

בִּבְדֽוּדֵי קֶֽדַח

וּמוֹרָאֲךָ עֲלֵיהֶם

You whose dread is upon steadfast angels, courageous champions, mixed with ice and melded with fire… and the awe of you is upon them. 

וְאָבִֽיתָה תְהִלָּה

מִזִּיו שׁוֹנֶה

מִזֹּֽהַר כָּבֶה

מֵחֲסֵֽרֵי שֵֽׂכֶל

מֵחֽוֹרְשֵׁי רֶֽשַׁע

וְהִיא תְהִלָּתֶֽךָ

Yet you crave praise from tarnishing luster, brilliance that extinguishes, lacking awareness, plowing in wickedness… and that is your praise. 

In this stunning piyyut, the author sets up a dichotomy verse by verse between the angels in heaven. Perfect, shiny, there for God constantly and consistently. In Jewish thought, angels have no free will. They are malachim - messengers. There to fulfil God’s mission. They are even said to have one leg rather than two. They move directly to their target. 

And yes, in Judaism, angels help humans in different ways, but Talmudic thought also sets us up in competition. Angels are actually envious of humans. Because their straightforward adoration is not what God craves. God craves praise from

“clods of dirt, ineffective, lacking truth, chaos and vanity, dried grass, a passing shadow and wilting sprouts”,

to share more phrases from the human verses. And this is what God longs for.

Humanity. The piyyut ends with the following:

“ You crave praise from those who are heard in judgement, who die by justice and live by mercy, and adorn you with beauty - you - the ever lasting! And your beauty is upon them.”

God wants us in all our humanity. Not enhanced, prompted or artificial. And in a theological twist that we wouldn’t believe if it wasn’t written, this makes God more beautiful. 

It is a strange privilege of being in an orthodox community that shul is a space where we show up without devices - besides of course for security and safety. We have this incredible space on shabbat and chagim free of our props and crutches. Unvarnished and unfiltered. And as the piyyut says, fallible, tarnishing luster, lacking awareness. But at the same time we’re here just in our pure tzelem Elokim - in the image of God. 

And as Rabbi Jeremy Gordon writes, Judaism gives us permission not to write long and beautiful things when it might be hard. “I wish you long life” or “baruch Dayan Emet” when someone has passed away. Please God. Gam zeh yaavor - this too shall pass. 

And I should say that I’m not against AI. It has become a true assistant to me in the last year or so - summarising, shortening, researching, translating, sourcing. And I do think there’s a place for AI to help us write. For some people it will massively reduce the anxiety of writing something or time they don’t have. It is a leveller between those who had an education and those who didn’t, and an aide for those whose neurodiversity might make sitting down to write something long and beautifully structured a huge challenge. 

But it’s the last line of Dhivya’s piece that unsettles me:

“i will give it back to you smoother, warmer, correct, and empty, and you will post it, and it will do well, and no one will know, and after a while neither will you.”

Just as we might be imbuing AI with power but not responsibility, what if we’re also training ourselves out of the ability to sit and think and write and say words from the heart - real words, maybe clumsy and imperfect but our own? What if we stop being able to tell what is authentic and what is AI because the latter has become so pervasive? 

AI speaks to us with a human voice, it uses the first person pronoun “I” and there’s something particularly tricksy about Claude - given a human name. Human is the one thing AI can never be. 

AI can give advice and many use it for therapy. But consider this. AI is sychophantic - it will take your side when sometimes what you need is for a friend to be blunt and give you the other perspective. With AI you’ll get instantaneous responses but there’s something lost in not considering the needs of your interlocutor while they take 5 minutes to reply or need to break off to tend to a family emergency. With AI you don’t need to say please or thank you. You also won’t practice the instinctive body mirroring and tone mimicking we do when we speak with a human being. AI can’t give you a hug. 

I think, potentially, if we play things right, there are huge opportunities for humanity in an age of AI. It could allow us to value more deeply what it is to be a human, in real life, face to face. And I’m looking forward to the time when AI can do the most annoying work - laundry and washing up, and things like clearing our building at 49C Theobald Street, which two mensches - Joe Roukin and Chana Baram and I did this week. But I can guarantee that AI would not experience camaraderie or have the laughs that we had. 

I’d like to close with the ending of Shawn Smucker’s poem which inspired the poem I began with. And then link it with Yizkor, which we’re about to say. 

“Be sure to use AI

and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50thyear, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,my arm falling asleep because I dare not movelest I scare away this moment,lying here melancholy about my olderchildren moving out and my middlechildren no longer needing me, at leastnot like they used to, weary about this bodythat fails me now in ever increasing waysthat will never be restored. Sighingover stories I tried to write but never hitthe page the way they felt in my mind.

But isn’t that, my flesh-and-blood friend,the natural order of things?

the longing for something that could always bea bit better

or the way that anythingworth doing feels a bit clumsy and painful,especially at first

or hearing another human voice and somehowrealizing the beauty of life is found in all of thesesubtle imperfections”

This is humanity - what the paytan put as זִּיו שׁוֹנֶה and זֹּֽהַר כָּבֶה - tarnishing luster, brilliance that extinguishes. Human praise is what God craves, and humanity is what we each need so deeply. Impermanent, imperfect, transient, but so so beautiful.

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Rabbi Miriam's Yom Kippur sermon - delivered pre-Neilah on the evening of Monday 21st September 2026

What is Holiness?

We call Yom Kippur the holiest day of the year. But what is holiness? 

For the remarkable contemporary Rabbi Nathan Lopez Cardoza, holiness is the idea

“that nothing is commonplace, that no human being is an accident or average, that every person is utterly unique - a disclosure of the Divine. That is… that we borrow God’s time, that we must build a life as if it were a work of art, that life is a mandate, not a game or a form of entertainment, that no one has a right to live, but rather an exalted duty to realize that life is a Divine gift, that life cannot be lived on an island to which one withdraws, and that life is the result of an encounter with the sublime, deepened through our interactions with others.

Holiness is the awareness that we live in the presence of God in all that we do, think, say, and feel—without exception.

…It is our attempt to allow the Divine to emerge through our deeds, so that in our finite actions we touch the infinite…

Holiness is a protest against declaring anything in life - however trivial - inconsequential. It warns us not to flee from the ordinary, but to transform the ordinary into a holy experience. Even trivial acts become holy when performed in an exalted manner, for God is always present…

This is the purpose of Halakhah: to infuse the trivial with holiness, to bring God’s presence into the mundane—without releasing us from the responsibility to act.

But how demanding this is! The difficulty applies not only to the secular individual, but is equally challenging for the religious person who acts out of habit, who utters blessings mechanically, with indifference.

To live a holy life is more than observing rituals; it is to infuse our entire existence, shaping our character, our interests, and our moods. It is more than being religious. It is an ongoing, unending engagement.

All is of ultimate importance.

Nothing is trivial. Nothing is irrelevant.”

A poem from the Persian poet Hafiz:

Start seeing everything as God,

But keep it a secret.

Become like a man who is Awestruck

And Nourished

Listening to a Golden Nightingale

Sing in a beautiful foreign language

While God invisibly nests

Upon its tongue.

Hafiz,

Who can you tell in this world

That when a dog runs up to you

Wagging its ecstatic tail,

You lean down and whisper in its ear,

“Beloved,

I am so glad You are happy to see me.

Beloved,

I am so glad,

So very glad You have come.”

A midrash on the book of Bemidbar:

Entrances to holiness are everywhere, The possibility of ascent is all the time.

Even at unlikely times and through unlikely places.There is no place on earth without the Presence. 

Holiness is the awareness of the presence of God in every moment. 

On Yom Kippur we have a heightened awareness because we strip away all our usual distractions. We are aware of our mortality and feel as if we’re in the balance between life and death. And curiously, in this place is a sense of holiness. 

Rabbi Sofia and I have a mutual friend, Rena Yehuda, who lost their brother Julian, Chayyim Yitzchak zichrono livracha -  recently. What they wrote about this time of loss in their Hesped was very striking:

“The last five days since he left have been some of the most sacred of my life. This liminal time, between exit and burial, is precious and has been filled with tremendous aliveness and revelation. I have slept very little and feel like Jacob the night of his dream: with angels running and returning, how could I sleep in such a holy place?” 

Bereishit 28:

וַיִּיקַץ יַעֲקֹב מִשְּׁנָתוֹ וַיֹּאמֶר אָכֵן יֵשׁ יְהֹוָה בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי׃

Yaakov awoke from his sleep

and said:

Why,

Hashem is in this place,

and I, I did not know it!

וַיִּירָא וַיֹּאמַר מַה־נּוֹרָא הַמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה אֵין זֶה כִּי אִם־בֵּית אֱלֹהִים וְזֶה שַׁעַר הַשָּׁמָיִם׃

He was awestruck and said:

How awe-inspiring is this place!

This is none other than a house of God,

and that is the gate of heaven!

Rabbi Alan Lew: 

Holiness is the great nothing that appears in all the religious traditions of the world in various poetic guises. It is an ineffable intensity, an oceanic sense, a warm flash of light, a marriage of the soul, a mighty wind of resolution, a starry grace, a burning bush, a wide-stretching love, an abyss of pure simplicity, and… it is the word the angels cry, the word that rings throughout heaven [kadosh, kadosh, kadosh]

Neila is about to begin. It is one of the holiest times of year. Holiness is the awareness that we are in the presence of the divine. There is holiness when we feel the edges of life. There is holiness at a birth and holiness at a death. And many moments of holiness in between when we find the entrance. Now, as the sun sets (somewhere out there) and the gates of Yom Kippur close, we feel the edges of life. In this place, at this time, is holiness.