In Jerusalem, in the cramped streets of Meah Shearim, stands a unique synagogue. Established by the remnants of the Ukrainian Jewish community of Bratzlav, the shul resembles its neighbors, save for one detail: next to the ark, stands a solitary chair. Carved of wood and upholstered, over two hundred years old, the chair belonged to the group’s founder, Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav. Nachman had pretty good Yichus, or family connections. His grandfather was the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. He was an unusually gifted teacher and teller of stories. His fables were shot through with psychological complexity and penetrating insight.

It was shortly before Rosh HaShanah in 1808 when the shochet, the ritual slaughterer of Teplik, brought Reb Nachman the beautiful chair he had carved from wood. It featured ornate details of birds and flowers, as lacey and fragile as a paper cut. Nachman’s followers considered it the throne of their rebbe.

Nachman contracted tuberculosis and died in 1810 at the age of thirty-eight. His followers never elected another leader, choosing instead to eternally follow Nachman’s teachings. When the Nazis came to the Ukraine, Nachman’s followers took the chair apart, piece by piece, promising to meet up in Jerusalem at the war’s end. Miraculously, every person who had taken a piece of the chair survived the war. The rebuilt chair stands next to the ark in the Bratzlaver synagogue in Meah Shearim, a visible reminder of Nachman’s continuing influence.

Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, but it is also Yom HaDin - a day of judgment. As God pores over the books of life and death, as the fate of every living thing hangs in the balance. We pray to God, Malkeinu, our ruler who judges according to justice, but we also address God also as Avinu, our parent, hoping for God’s rachmanus, God’s mercy. Indeed, we pray that the rabbi’s of the Talmud were right when they said, in response to the question, “what does God pray?” that God prays the following: “When I sit in judgment of humanity, may my attribute of mercy always overcome my attribute of strict justice.”

Yet, on the day of judgment, it’s not only God’s judgment that counts, but also our own. For the issue of judgment extends to the way we are to judge ourselves and others.

Reb Nachman of Bratzlav taught:

 “Judge one and all generously, leaning strongly toward the good, even if you think they are as sinful as can be. Always look for that place, however small, where there is no sin (and everyone, after all, has such a place) And by telling them, by showing them, that this is who they are, we can help them change their lives. Even the person you think is completely rotten (and he agrees!)—how is it possible that at some time in his life he has not done some good deed, some mitzvah? Your job is to help him look for it, to seek it out, and then to judge him that way.

Then, indeed, as it states in the Psalms, you will “look at his place” and find that the wicked one is no longer there—not because he has died or disappeared, but because, with your help, he will no longer be in the place where you first saw him. By seeking out that goodness, you allowed him to change. You helped teshuvah take its course.”

On this day of judgment, Reb Nachman suggests we should give others the benefit of the doubt, seeking in them even the most minute quantity of goodness. Interpreting a phrase from the Psalms, Reb Nachman says the Psalm doesn’t mean that wicked people will vanish on account of their wickedness -- rather, that they will undergo a fundamental shift and will cease to exist as they were. They will become different people, no longer enmeshed in the place they were but capable of rising to a new level.

On Yom Kippur, one of the ways we are judged is by the way we judge others. And, in truth, our evaluations of each other are not always kind, generous or fair; we rarely give each other the benefit of the doubt; we seems to operate under the principle that if we keep our expectations low, we won’t ever be disappointed.

And that strategy comes with a cost: Concentrating on others’ faults instead of their strengths destroys our faith in humanity: It leads us to see people as inherently and irredeemably corrupt. This tradition, inherited from Machievelli, Hobbes, and Nietzche, has its roots in the Christian doctrine of original sin. Psychology holds out even less promise; as Freud put it, homo homini lupus - we are to each other as wolves.

          Nachman, in contrast, reminds us that each of us has, at the very least, a small nekudah, a brilliant point, of goodness. Finding it in others will keep us from despair for the world, allowing, instead, the possibility of hope.

Had Reb Nachman taught us only that even the worst among us has a little bit of good, Dayenu, it would have been enough: but there is more. Reb Nachman goes on to make a radical claim: that our effort to find the good in others can, in fact, move them closer to Teshuvah. How can that be? How can my personal assessment affect another person?  The assertion calls to mind the old joke: how many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: One, but it has to want to change. Isn’t the desire to change the starting point for teshuvah? How can our positive assessment of others achieve that?

An answer may lie in the experience of Michael Weisser. Michael was a cantor in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he became friends with our congregant, Audrie Berman. You may have met Michael; he lived in Milwaukee a few years back and was a regular at Shabbat morning services in the library. He’s now a rabbi serving a small congregation in New York.

When he arrived in Lincoln, Michael began to get harassing phone calls from a local white supremacist. The first call said: "You will be sorry you ever moved in [to that house], Jew boy!"

Two days later, the Weissers received a thick brown packet in the mail with a card on top that read, "The KKK is watching you, Scum." The stack of flyers and brochures included ugly caricatures of Jews, Blacks and "Race Traitors" being shot and hanged, and spelled out other threatening messages, including "Your time is up!" and "The Holohoax was nothing compared to what's going to happen to you."

The Weissers called the police, who said the hate mail looked like the work of Larry Trapp, who was the state leader, or "Grand Dragon" of the Ku Klux Klan. An avowed Neo nazi, Trapp was suspected of leading skinheads and Klansmen who had been terrorizing black, Vietnamese and Jewish families in Nebraska and Iowa.

Although Trapp, forty-four, was diabetic and in a wheelchair, he was a major Midwestern link in the national white supremacist movement. He was, in fact, responsible for the fire-bombings of several African-Americans" homes around Lincoln and for what he called "Operation Gooks," the burning of the Indochinese Refugee Assistance Center in Omaha. At the time, he was making plans to bomb B'nai Jeshurun, the synagogue where Weisser was the spiritual leader.

When Trapp started a white supremacist series on a local-access cable channel, Cantor Weisser was incensed. He called the number for the hotline of the KKK and listened to Trapp's harsh voice spewing out a racist diatribe on the answering machine.

Michael called several times just to keep the line busy, but then began to leave his own messages. "Larry," he said. "Why do you hate me? You don't even know me, so how can you hate me?"

Another time he said, "Larry, do you know that the first laws Hitler's Nazis passed were against people like yourself who had physical deformities, physical handicaps? Do you realize you would have been among the first to die under Hitler? Why do you love the Nazis so much?"

One day, when Michael was leaving a message, Trapp, who was feeling increasingly annoyed by the calls, picked up the phone and shouted, "What the----do you want?"

I just want to talk to you," said Michael.

"You are harassing me," said Trapp. "What do you want? Make it quick."

Michael said. "Well, I was thinking you might need a hand with something, and I wondered if I could help. I know you're in a wheelchair and I thought maybe I could take you to the grocery store or something."

Trapp couldn't think of anything to say. Finally, he cleared his throat and, when he spoke, his voice sounded different.

"That's okay," he said. "That's nice of you, but I’ve got that covered. Thanks anyway. But don't call this number anymore."

"Before Trapp could hang up, Michael replied, "I'll be in touch."

Michael's continued calls were making Trapp feel confused.

One evening, the Weissers' phone rang. "I want to get out," Trapp said, "but I don't know how."

Michael suggested that he and Julie go over to Trapp's apartment to talk in person and "break bread together." Trapp hesitated, then agreed.

As they were preparing to leave, Julie started running around, looking for a gift, and decided on a silver friendship ring of intertwined strands that Michael never wore.

"Good choice," said Michael. "I've always thought all those strands could represent all the different kinds of people on this earth." To Julie, it was a symbol of how "somebody's life can be all twisted up and become very beautiful."

When the door to Trapp's apartment creaked open, Michael and Julie saw the bearded Larry Trapp in his wheelchair. An automatic weapon was slung over the doorknob and a Nazi flag hung on the wall. Michael took Trapp's hand, and Trapp winced as if hit by a jolt of electricity. Then he broke into tears.

He looked down at his two silver swastika rings. "Here," he said, yanking them off his fingers and putting them in Michael's hand. "I can't wear these anymore. Will you take them away?" Michael and Julie looked at each other in stunned silence.

"Larry, we brought you a ring, too," Julie said, kneeling beside him and sliding the ring onto his finger. Larry began to sob. "I'm so sorry for all the things I've done," he said. Michael and Julie put their arms around Larry and hugged him. Overwhelmed by emotion, they started crying, too.

On November 16^th, Trapp resigned from the Klan and soon quit all his other racist organizations. Later, he wrote apologies to the many people he had threatened or abused. "I wasted the first forty years of my life and caused harm to other people," Larry said. "Now I’ve learned we're one race and one race only."

On New Year's Eve, Trapp learned he had less than a year to live. That night, the Weissers invited him to move into their home. They converted their living room into his bedroom. As his health deteriorated, Julie quit her job to care for him. She fed him, waited on him, sometimes all through the night, emptying pans of vomit.

Having a remorseful, dying Klansman in their home was disruptive to the whole family, which included three teenagers, a dog and a cat, but everyone pitched in. Once Trapp said to Julie, "You and Michael are doing for me what my parents should have done. You're taking care of me."

On June 5^th, Larry Trapp converted to Judaism in ceremonies at B'nai Jeshurun, the very synagogue he previously had planned to blow up. Three months later, on September 6^th, he died in the Weisser home, with Michael and Julie beside him, holding his hands.

At Larry's funeral, Michael Weisser said, "Those of us who remain behind ask the question, 'O Lord, what is man? We are like a breath, like a shadow that passes away....' And yet, somehow, we know there is more to our lives than what first meets the eye."

The story of the Weissers relationship with Larry Trapp is amazing and it’s true. But don’t get me wrong; I don’t think I could have done what the Weissers did. Befriending neo-Nazis is an extreme example of what I am talking about. It merits its own TV show, extreme teshuvah.

Yet, their experience suggests, as Nachman suggests, when we search out the Nekudat Tov, the little point of goodness, in others, even those who seem be completely irredeemable, miracles can happen. If the story of the Weissers tells us nothing else, it’s that every person has the potential to do Teshuvah; sometimes, it just takes another person to notice and help out.

If all Reb Nachman had to teach us was every person, even the most seemingly evil, has a nekudat Tov, a spot of goodness, and that we have the capacity to find and nurture that spot of goodness and to enable the person to reach toward Teshuvah, Dayeinu, Dayeinu! But Reb Nachman isn’t done with us yet. Having focused on the ethics of judging others, he now turns the tables.

“So now my clever friend, ” Nachman writes, “now that you know how to treat the wicked and find some bit of good in them—now go and do it for yourself as well! You know what I have taught you: “Take great care, be happy always! Stay far, far away from sadness and depression.” I’ve said it to you more than once. I know what happens when you start examining yourself. “No goodness at all,” you find, “just full of sin.” Watch out for despair, my friend, which wants to push you down. That is why I said, “Now go do it for yourself as well.” You, too, must have done some good for someone, some time. Now go look for it, just the smallest bit: a dot of goodness.

That should be enough to give you back your life, to bring you back your joy. By seeking out that little bit, even in yourself, and judging yourself that way, you show yourself that this is who you are. You can change your whole life this way and bring yourself to teshuvah.

It’s that first little dot of goodness that’s the hardest one to find (or the hardest to admit you find!) The next ones will come a little easier, each one following another. And you know what? These little dots of goodness in yourself—after a while you will find that you can sing them! Join them one to another, and they become your niggun, your wordless melody. You fashion that niggun by rescuing your own good spirit from all that darkness and depression. The niggun brings you back to life—and then you can start to pray.”

Having turned the tables, Nachman gets to the heart of the matter. He knows that the Yetzer HaRa, the evil inclination, does it’s best work in getting us to stray from the path of righteousness when it convinces us that we are unworthy, undeserving, bad people. The yetzer recognizes that as hard as we can be on others, we can be exponentially more critical of ourselves. The yetzer whispers in the ear that I am broken, worthless, a sham and a fraud. That I might as well give up, because there's no way I can live up to any of my aspirations. Reb Nachman offers a corrective to that insidious poison: schooling oneself in the art of seeing good in oneself, just as one works at seeing good in others.

In these final hours of the Days of Awe, Nachman’s teaching provides an alternative to the prevailing notion that we have to love ourselves before we love others. While that may be true for some, for others the reverse is true: to learn to love ourselves it is best to start that work by trying to love others first. With enough practice, we can then turn our sights on our own Yom Kippur work. Then, God willing, we will be able to recognize our best qualities, and learn to judge ourselves with the rachmanus, compassion and patience we would want others to use when judging us.

If we can do that, then the cycle is complete. For the inner intention we bring to the act of judging ourselves and others is ultimately the place we are going to meet God. If we approach teshuvah harshly, then God will respond in kind, and our inner work will become bitter and painful. But if we approach Teshuvah gently and sweetly, trying (as Reb Nachman urges) to see ourselves as kindly and compassionately as we see others, then we will meet the corresponding face of God: God's endless love and limitless compassion for all of us created in the divine image, trying as best we can to live up to who we know we can be.

For in the end, the answer to the Talmudic question about God’s prayer lies in our hands. At Kol Nidre, God’s attributes of Justice and Mercy are balanced before us; the rest is up to us.