I love a good gadget. Always have.
When I was thirteen, I spent my Bar Mitzvah money on an Intellivision game console. I loved it. Later came the Palm Pilot—remember those? My brother had a bag phone — you…know…doctors! Then came the iPod, and in 1994, after a particularly bad blizzard in New Jersey, I was allowed to buy a Motorola flip phone—the kind where you had to pull out the antenna by hand.
I looooove a good gadget.
So when Facebook arrived in 2006 and then the iPhone in 2007, I was all in. Sleek. Fast. Magical. And then the app store in 2008! Suddenly all your music, messages, photos, and the internet could be in your pocket all day, every day. Within a couple of years, the world changed.
And then came one small feature with outsized power: the Facebook “Like” button. What began as a simple way to say “I see you” quickly became something else — a scoreboard. A measure of worth. A 24/7 popularity contest.
The daily accounting of “how many likes” were received. Not just for teenagers, but for all of us.
What started as a feature became a habit. Swipe. Block. Friend. Unfriend. Follow. Unfollow. Not to sound too old here, but before 2007, no one ever asked me how many friends I had or how many people I follow. That used to sound kind of weird. Why would I follow someone?
The anonymity of online interaction was strange and wonderful; a dopamine thrill when a friend or even a stranger liked something you posted.
But the anonymity of the online world quickly turned dark, as it still does, as anyone can say anything to anyone about anything at any time.
As Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation:
“Before 2010, the phone was a tool. After 2010, it became a platform — a place where you perform, watch others perform, and get performance feedback in real time.”
We learned to cancel online, and then we carried that reflex into real life. What began as clicks and swipes soon began to shape our souls.
As Haidt says plainly: “Social media turns people into brands and conversation into performance.” When life becomes performance, there’s no room for complexity. No room for growth. No room for the kind of relationship that can weather disagreement. As author Thomas Chatterton Williams writes, “…certainty is the enemy of thinking.”
We’ve seen the results. Friendships ending over one post. Families not speaking because of one election. People walking away from communities — even this community — over a single moment.
Some doors do need to close. Some boundaries are holy. But too often, we’ve confused boundaries with barriers. And we close doors so quickly, often without a second thought.
As we enter into this sacred night of Yom Kippur, we continue our exploration of the many doors we encounter in our lives. As we began Rosh Hashanah, we introduced our theme: Through a New Door: Welcoming What Comes Next.
We explored the doors of uncertainty and possibility and how Judaism invites us through a door of faith and covenant. On Rosh Hashanah morning we imagined the next 60 years and beyond for Temple Shalom and imagined choosing a shared future. Tonight, we explore The Door We Closed: Facing What We Left Behind.
There is a feature in some apps I have that lets me cancel subscriptions I no longer need or use with one click. One button, and poof — cancelled. So easy! Who knew cancelling could be so satisfying? That instinct — to cancel — isn’t entirely new.
It even appears briefly in the 1991 movie New Jack City. But it took off as a real social dynamic online in the early 2010s, in response to public figures being called out for offensive behavior. By 2018, the term “cancel culture” had entered mainstream conversation.
At its best, canceling began as a form of accountability: a way for people without power to say, “Enough.” But somewhere along the way, it became something else. A habit or a reflex or a system of instant judgment. Cancel culture tells us that people are either good or bad. Full stop.
One wrong sentence, one wrong vote, one bad take and we know all we need to know. It trades complexity for certainty, process for performance, teshuvah for exile.
And it’s not just celebrities or politicians. We cancel each other. We cancel conversations. We cancel relationships. We even start to cancel parts of ourselves. In some strange way, it feels good, because it feels clear. It feels righteous.
But it’s not actually new.
The desire to divide the world cleanly, to sort people into categories, to shut the door on nuance — it’s ancient. In fact, there’s an entire book of the Bible about a man who tries to live that way. A man who cannot tolerate the idea that people can change. A man who tries to cancel a whole city — and ends up spiraling when God won’t go along with it.
His name is Jonah.
God sends Jonah to the great city of Nineveh with a simple mission: warn them. Give them a chance to change.
But Jonah doesn’t go, not because he’s afraid, but because he already knows what’s going to happen. He knows that if Nineveh hears the warning and repents, God will forgive them — and he can’t handle that. Jonah wants the world to be clear-cut. He wants the guilty punished and the righteous rewarded. So he runs away. When God forgives Nineveh anyway, Jonah explodes:
“I knew it! I knew You were compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and full of kindness!”
It’s not a compliment. It’s an accusation. Jonah doesn’t want complexity. He wants certainty.
He wants to decide who’s in and who’s out. He closes the door. On Nineveh. On God. Even on himself.
And God responds — not with a bolt of lightning, but with compassion. God says to Jonah, and to us: Do not cancel so quickly. See people as I see them — in their nuance, their struggle, their change.
Jonah sees the binary in others because he sees the binary in himself. But God knows we are more than that. God knows we are capable of nuance and subtlety and change. God knows we are more than any one moment of our lives.
God knows that we come to Kol Nidre every year to be acknowledged for the dynamism of character and person that we are; to be loved for the beauty and messiness and the mistakes and cracks and everything that cancel culture and binary thinking reject: the truth that we are fully godly creations, in all our messiness and complexity.
And already tonight we have prayed these words:
Ki anu amecha v’atah Eloheinu…
We are Your people, and You are our God.
We are Your children — and You are our parent.
We are Your clay — and You are our potter.
We are Your flock — and You are our shepherd.
We are not one label. We are not one metaphor. Not one identity. But many. Each one of these is incomplete on its own. Each entirely true. All held together in sacred relationship.
Ki Anu Amecha isn’t a prayer of perfection. It’s a prayer of complexity. It says: You are allowed to be many things. In progress. In process. In contradiction. And you are still held. Still seen. Still sacred.
If that’s what we ask of God — God, can you see us in all these many different forms — and God can say “yes, of course! I see you in all your complexity and beauty and I see you as sacred!” — then how can we offer any less to one another? How can we be so sure of the rightness of ourselves and so sure of the errors of others?
Kol Nidre asks us to put aside the quick judgements, the immediate assumptions, and the incomplete analyses about one another. It invites us to move from either/or to both/and.
Perhaps tonight, in addition to the litany of sins we already admitted to from our prayerbook, perhaps we can add:
“For the sin of cancelling without thought;
for the sin of swiping past inconvenient complexity;
for the sin of muting opposing voices in our lives;
for the sin of closing doors too soon…”
Because Kol Nidre reminds us: To be Jewish is to resist the false comfort of certainty and to live instead with the sacred complexity of compassion.” We might close doors, but God always keeps them open. The gates are still open. The path is still before us.
Let’s not miss this moment.
Let’s not let the world flatten us.
Let’s choose a different way.
And open a door to new possibilities. Amen.
