Once upon a time there was a tribe of fierce warriors. They had a legendary sacred place that inspired awe in the warriors and fear in the hearts of their opponents. They were nearly invincible. Then, one day, something terrible happened.

A traitor took a powerful object from the enemy tribe, and secretly buried it in the warriors’ sacred space. It was as if someone had stuck a dagger in the tribal heart. Their sacred space was tainted by impurity. The warriors, and their sacred space, were cursed. As long as this, this, this… poison was polluting their sacred space, they would be powerless against their enemies.

There was only one thing to do. The tribe dedicated a year’s harvest to finding and removing the dangerous enemy icon; and then devoted five times as much in an elaborate ritual to remove the power from the object. Only then was the pollution obliterated, and the warriors’ strength returned to them. The story sounds like it comes from tribal Africa, the wilds of the Amazon, or “A Thousand and One Nights”. Actually, it comes from the Bronx.

A couple of years ago, a construction worker, a disgruntled Red Sox fan, buried a David Ortiz jersey in the new Yankee Stadium. Ortiz, for the few of you whose lives don’t revolve around baseball, is one of the Red Sox players Yankees most love to hate. He bats .313 against the Yankees, has an RBI in nearly every game, and almost single-handedly knocked the Yankees out of the American League Champion Series in 2004. An Ortiz jersey buried in Yankee Stadium would drive every Yankee fan nuts. Now, if Ortiz himself were buried there, that might be another story. But the jersey had to go, simple as that.

So the Yankees spent, wait for it, $33,000 to dig the jersey out of the concrete where it was buried. And the jersey was then sold at auction for, wait for it, $175,100. As an aside, imagine the relief of the guy who bid “only” $175,000 when the other guy upped him by $100 bucks. Think about what he didn’t have to explain to his wife that night! “Some of G-d’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers!” And I imagine the other guy, who actually bought the thing, saying to his wife, “Guess what I got – for just $100 bucks!”

But all joking aside, purity and impurity are not a laughing matter. Purity and impurity were absolutely central to the worldview of our biblical and rabbinic ancestors. In fact, the word “Pharisee,” describing the group in ancient Israel that eventually became the rabbinic movement, comes from the Hebrew expression for those who separate themselves from everyone else in order to remain ritually pure.

For us, purity and impurity don’t seem like everyday issues. But they are with us nonetheless, and not just in Yankee stadium. Think, for example, of what you feel when you find out your computer is badly infected with a virus. How you feel violated by its presence, furious at the geek who saddled you with the thing, scared of how much will be tainted by it, desperate to just get it out of the machine.

These feelings parallel those of cancer victims who, when offered different treatment options, simply say, “I want it out of me. Now.” And learning to live with cancer, many say, is harder than being diagnosed with it in the first place, because it means accepting what seems like an ongoing pollution of ones body. The feeling of pollution is not limited to the physical, or to the virtual. It is profoundly a part of our moral lives. When Lady Macbeth is driven to madness by guilt, she imagines her hands covered in the blood of King Duncan, for whose murder she is responsible. When she then declares, “Out, damn’d spot. Out I say,” she is making a desperate plea for purification.

Indeed, it may well be that moral pollution is the most painful type we experience, and the most common. Perhaps that is why Yom Kippur appeals so strongly even to those who are not otherwise engaged in Jewish practice. To atone and be “at one”, to be relieved of the tension between the way we are and the way we should be, to be declared pure before G-d, is a primal need.

Purity and impurity are ideas that come from such a deep, primitive place in our consciousness that they are among the very few concepts where childish speech is considered perfectly acceptable among adults. Consider the sentence, “I saw some creepy crawlers in my apartment, and they gave me the heebie jeebies, so now every time I go in there, it feels like I have cooties.” How weird that every one of us knows exactly what those words mean.

Why do we feel the issue of purity so profoundly? Why do we react to it so viscerally? Because the desire to be pure reflects our deepest sense of self, linked intimately to the very purpose of our existence on earth. This is reflected in an ancient midrash: G-d speaks to us, saying, “Behold, I am pure. My dwelling place is pure. My angels are pure. And the divine spark, the piece of myself I have entrusted to you, is pure. See to it that when you give it back to me, it is just as pure as when I gave it to you.”

Our lives are intended to be lives of sacred trust. We have been entrusted with a divine gift. Protecting it, keeping it pure, until it is time for us to leave this earth, is what life is all about. And in one sense, it seems like we are failing miserably. That pure spark of the divine is overlaid with layer after layer of schmutz, selfishness, jealousy, pettiness, the whole list of ashamnu and al chet.

If we are to fulfill our divinely appointed task, we have to constantly transcend ourselves. We can never rest on our laurels, never become creatures of habit, never be so jaded as to forget that more is constantly being demanded of us. The thing that kills purity is an acceptance of sameness, a lack of striving. In a sense, the opposite of purity is complacency. Imagining we are good enough, when we in fact need to radically transcend the way we are.

The great existential philosopher Lev Shestov once wrote, “G-d always demands of us the impossible, and it is in this that the chief difference between G-d and man consists.” The great dividing line in human society is between those who imagine that they are somehow sufficient, and those who know they are not. Purity results from the illumination of G-d’s Presence, says R. Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (Derech Hashem). To be pure is to be bathed

in the light of the Divine. To seek purity is to seek divine illumination.

It is no coincidence that on Yom Kippur, the Kohen Gadol went through no less than 5 ritual washings in an attempt to be sufficiently pure to enter the Holy of Holies. Nor is it a coincidence that when he would emerge from the Holy of Holies and bless the people, his prayer was that the people would be “lifnei hashem titharu” – purified before the Lord.

The Temple is gone, the High Priest is no more. Instead of rituals of immersion and sacrifice, we offer the service of the heart, that is to say, our prayers. And at the center of our prayers is the wish, “V’taher libeynu lovdecha be’emet.” “Purify our hearts, so we may serve You in truth.” We need purity in our speech, purity in the work of our hands, but above all purity of the heart.

All of us serve G-d more or less. But to serve G-d “be’emet,” “in truth” requires unadulterated devotion, consistency, mindfulness, wholeness, How often do we feel like that about anything? Serving G-d “be’emet” is not simply an act of will, in the same way that love is not an act of will. It’s not something we can simply decide to do. We have to pray to G-d for help, and for guidance. Purify our hearts, G-d, and then we will be able to serve you in truth.

On Rosh Hashanah, I shared my dreams for community and wisdom. My dream tonight is that in the years to come, our congregation as a whole experiences that kind of purity which would allow us to serve G-d “be’emet.”

What would serving G-d “be’emet” look like? Well, I can tell you what it doesn’t look like. Not serving G-d b’emet has many different facets. First, it means not serving G-d completely. Everything becomes half-hearted. The pollution is such that no matter what we are doing, we should be doing something else. If we are at work, we go about it half-heartedly, because we really would rather be playing. But if we are at play, we play half-heartedly because we really should be working. No matter what we are doing, working or playing, we should be doing it with a whole heart, and with whole-hearted devotion to Hashem, who is the Source of the strength that allows us to do whatever it is we are doing.

Second, if we aren’t serving G-d “be’emet”, we aren’t serving G-d with elegance. Serving G-d should be exquisite, like a Japanese tea ceremony, or a riff by Jerry Garcia, or Kirk Gibson’s home run. The philosopher Rebecca Goldstein has pointed out that, “One of the interesting aspects of law-heavy Judaism…is that it infuses the most quotidian acts of life with mindfulness.” And mindful acts carry with them an unspoken, but breathtaking, elegance.

Third, serving G-d poorly is bland. Serving G-d be’emet should be ecstatic. It is a peak experience, not a mindless routine. A while back, I had an appointment with my spiritual director. Problem was, I was in East Brunswick, and she was in Princeton. I hit every red light and every stop sign between East Brunswick and Princeton. Trust me, that’s a lot of lights and a lot of stop signs. After more than an hour of nerve-grinding frustration, I finally got to my appointment fifteen minutes late. I threw myself down into a chair, and grunted with exasperation, “Why did G-d make stop signs?” To which my spiritual director calmly replied, “Perhaps, Robert, G-d wants you to stop.”

It took less than an instant to realize how right she was. First of all, it’s pretty stupid to get upset about traffic in a place where road rage is considered a national pastime, and where it seems you always have to drive north in order to drive south. But far more important was the waste – the sin, actually – of devoting so much of my mental and spiritual energy into something so trivial.

All that time on the road, instead of cursing inanimate objects – a useless activity if ever there was one – I could have been thinking of something constructive. How to be a better husband? How to be a better father? How to be a better spiritual leader? Perhaps even better, all that time on the road I could have been thinking of G-d, and how better to serve G-d. Perhaps better still, all that time I could have been mentally silent, waiting prayerfully, and with great joy and anticipation, to hear whatever it was that G-d wanted to tell me that day.

Instead, I filled my mind with utterly useless blather. I allowed my spirit to be polluted. I allowed my dreams to become diminished and dimmed. As K.D. Lang wrote, “Wash, wash me clean – mend my wounded seams/Cleanse my tarnished dreams.” If we become pure, G-d will remove the tarnish on our dreams.

Ever since that meeting with my spiritual director, I have come to appreciate the gift of stop signs. Sometimes we just need to stop, and remember that what purity is all about is living our lives with integrity – not just in terms of an annual checklist where we more or less measure up, but as a reflection of the vibrant experience of our lives every day, every minute, every second. It’s not about steering our lives in vague agreement with some general moral outlines, or just “being ourselves.” Sometimes, we’re jerks, and being ourselves is no metziah. Purity is about not squandering each and every moment of the precious and limited time that Hashem has granted us to finally become truly human, a mensch, and instead striving for the highest levels of moral and spiritual awareness that we can reach.

But it seems so hard. Remember the old trick, “Don’t think of a pink elephant?” Teachers used to use it to show the power of suggestion. Here’s an adult version: Don’t think of your property taxes. Don’t think of your mortgage. Don’t think of the $60k in college costs you need to pay for each of the next four years. Don’t think of the adult children that are about to move back in with you. Don’t think of all the lay-offs at your work place.

Right now, I’m the one that’s polluting your mind with anxiety. You’ll be happy to know that I’m going to stop. But what are you going to do with the voice that you carry around inside you, the voice that forces you to think about these things endlessly – as if things will get worse if you don’t obsess about them, and better if you do – neither of which is true. We need to be freed from this compulsive internal monologue. And the way to do it is to focus on the purity within us. What we need to remember is found in the talmudic prayer we say every day when we rise: Kel-kai, neshama shenatata bi t’horah hi. “My G-d, the soul that you have given me is pure.” (Berachot 60b). When our consciousness is filled with the awareness that the soul we have been given, however briefly, is endlessly pure, the joy fills us so much that there is no room for road rage, or any other trivial, mundane concerns. My wife Ruth-Ann describes it as the joyous feeling you have when you get to cuddle and bounce someone else’s baby.

Judaism is a religion of great physicality. That’s why, for instance, you can’t have a virtual minyan. You can be linked in to a real minyan, but at the end of the day there need to be 10 real people standing in the same place. In Judaism, we are intimately linked to our body, and it is rarely considered a great goal to become bodiless. But be that as it may, it behooves us to be constantly aware: we are notonly our bodies.

Seeking purity is a way of grappling with the fact that, as commentator Jay Michaelson points out, “the body does not cater to our desires. It decays, it becomes dirty … it sometimes breaks.” And, I would add, sooner or later it stops working altogether. There is, however, something within us that does not decay, does not become dirty, does not break, and never stops, ever. We should get to know that part of ourselves intimately, as intimately as we know our bodies.