Never in my life have these Days of Awe so lived up to the literal meaning of their name:  ימים נוראים, Yamim Nora’im, “Terrible days.”  Since I began composing these remarks, the war, still convulsing Gaza, has spread to Lebanon and deep into the heart of Israel.  

As for our hearts, there too has lodged an ugly and unhealed wound called October 7th.  The late Israeli poet Hayim Gouri was right.  In a poem written in the 1950s that doubles as a midrash, a Rabbinic story that explains a Biblical text, Gouri took up the subject of the Binding of Isaac.  The poem is called “Inheritance.”

“The ram came last of all,” it begins.

And Abraham
did not know that it came to answer the
boy’s question – first of his strength
when his day was on the wane.

The old man raised his head. Seeing
that it was no dream and that the angel
stood there – the knife slipped from his hand.

The boy, released from his bonds,
saw his father’s back.

Isaac, as the story goes, was not
sacrificed. He lived for many years,
saw what pleasure had to offer,
until his eyesight dimmed.

But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring.
They are born with a knife in their hearts.¹

We are the children of Isaac, born perpetually with a knife in our hearts.

Still, this agonizing today will some day be a yesterday.  Our work on these Yamim Nora’im is to consider what it will mean to be the “Jews of October 8th,” the Jews of tomorrow, and to journey in that direction.

We’ve already begun this journey.  Over the past ten days, we’ve gathered together, ached together, prayed together, sung together, sought healing and hope together.  

Today we do the deep introspective work, the work of Kippur.  And we affirm that we can change.

The journey we take begins in trauma and ends in empathy.  It begins in suffering and ends in love.  

We take this journey as members of a specific People who carry specific traumas.  We also begin with the awareness that suffering is the common ground not just of Jewish experience but of human existence.  We know too well that the world provides no upper limit to the pain that can be inflicted on a life; that Nature may not be intentionally cruel but is, at best, monumentally indifferent.  

Suffering is the one constant, the inescapable fact, the binding thread, the covenant we make with life:  by being alive, we suffer.  

We cannot change this fact.  We can choose only how we will respond.  And there are many ways to respond.  

One instinctive response is to seek safety.  October 7th exposed all the many ways we are unsafe:  Jews, violated in their homes by Hamas in Israel’s south; Jews, displaced from their homes by Hezbollah in Israel’s north; Jews, unsafe on college campuses, unsafe in workplaces that dictate sensitivity and safety for all minorities except for us, the ones subjected to the greatest preponderance of hate crimes.  And of course our hostages:  still unsafe, still in mortal peril, even now.

So we build stronger bunkers.  We buy bigger guns.  We gravitate to politicians who promise to keep us safe.  We tell our children to stay alert but stand tall; don’t run away and don’t back down but also don’t engage and don’t lose your cool; and for heaven’s sake, please be safe. 

We also respond with force.  We rain fury down on those who would abuse, kidnap, and murder us.  We strike not just reactively but preemptively.  We fight like hell.  

And weeks go by, and months, and a year and more, and one day, we wake up and realize: we still hurt, something awful.  The knife is still there, lodged even deeper in the heart.

And we are tired of our tears; and tired of the tears of all the innocent children, and all the mothers crying for the dead and the maimed and the missing, and we wonder:  why has all this pain not gone away?  

We are learning—again and again—life’s most unyielding lesson:  that we cannot protect ourselves from pain, and loss, and death.  

We can, however, protect ourselves from the death of love.

Rabbi Shai Held, a gifted teacher and friend who lives up the street from me and who presented at WRT as scholar-in-residence a few years ago, recently published an exceptional book called Judaism is About Love.  It “challenges the conventional wisdom that has shaped the history of the West”:  that “Christianity is the religion of love, and Judaism the religion of law.”²  It instead places love and empathy as the foundation-stones of Jewish thought, belief, and practice. 

Moving from suffering to love is neither easy nor linear.  Suffering by its nature tends to pull us away from love, away from connection.   In Kabbalistic thought, suffering is how we experience separation from God, the all-binding force of existence.

As Rav Shai (as he likes to be called) observes, “Trauma can lead us to retreat into ourselves, to withdraw from community and companionship, to feel so defeated that we grow incapable of intimacy and connection; few things can be as isolating as intense loss.”³  

What’s more, love cannot—at least not in any direct way—make us physically safer.  Love cannot dissolve our hurt.  It cannot extract the knife from the heart.  

What love can do is grow the heart around the knife, so that we can experience more than just the hurt.  With love we can feel not only what we’re going through, but also what others are going through.  And, in time, that is how we heal.  

So we’ve come here to take this journey:  from suffering to love, trauma to empathy, isolation to connection.  It is very much a Yom Kippur journey.

Our model for the journey can be found by studying one of the most fascinating characters in all of Jewish literature, and that is the character of God.  In our literature, composed by Judaism’s great geniuses, God arises from that mysterious nexus of human intelligence, imagination, inspiration, and lived experience—the same nexus out of which God shows up in our lives.   

And in our literature—as in our lives—God often shows up as a sweeping force of love.  One passage stands out.  We’ve already repeated it several times these High Holidays, including every time we have approached the Ark to read Torah.  

יְהֹוָה יְהֹוָה אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת: נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִים נֹשֵׂא עָו‍ֹן וָפֶשַׁע וְחַטָּאָה וְנַקֵּה

“Adonai, Adonai—God compassionate and gracious, endlessly patient, loving, and true, showing mercy to the thousandth generation; forgiving evil, defiance, and wrongdoing; granting pardon.”  

A God of empathy, compassion, forgiveness.  A God of love.

This oft-repeated verse in the machzor is lifted straight out of the Torah, from Exodus, Chapter 34.⁴  This is how God describes the Divine nature to Moses, God’s character in God’s own words.

But God had to make a difficult spiritual journey to get to this state of Being, and that journey begins in trauma.  Specifically, the trauma of the Golden Calf:  when, in the very instant of closest connection to the Israelites, the giving of the Law at Sinai, the entrance of our People into the Divine Covenant, God sends Moses down the mountain to confront a terrible betrayal.  The people have made a god of gold, a false and unholy god, an obscenity—this, but weeks after their miraculous deliverance from Egypt—and God gets very, very upset.⁵  

This is not the first time God has been wounded:  in response to primordial human evil, waywardness, and violence, God reacts in wrath and regret, sending an all-destroying Flood.⁶  Moments after the Exodus from Egypt, the Israelites vex God with complaints about the limited dinner menu in the wilderness.  God does not take kindly to their kvetching.⁷  

But, for God, the Golden Calf is personal.  A knife in the heart of the Divine.  God threatens to destroy the people, one and all, and start over with Moses alone.  It is Moses who has to intervene and talk God off the ledge, petitioning for clemency, appealing to the better angels of God’s nature.  

And, then, something miraculous happens:  God changes, grows, evolves.  Out of pain, God responds with grace.  Out of suffering, God summons love.  

יְהֹוָה יְהֹוָה אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת: נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִים נֹשֵׂא עָו‍ֹן וָפֶשַׁע וְחַטָּאָה וְנַקֵּה

“Adonai, Adonai—God compassionate and gracious, endlessly patient, loving, and true, showing mercy to the thousandth generation; forgiving evil, defiance, and wrongdoing; granting pardon.”

And in this moment, the Torah is teaching us not only an essential truth about God’s character, but also an essential principle for living a life of purpose, beauty, and joy:  that suffering need not consign us to a lifetime of anger and resentment, fear and torment, but rather, can lead us to greater empathy, when we recognize in our suffering the common ground of our humanity, and respond with love.  

As Rav Shai puts it:        

….[Y]ou want to be a religious person, learn to be present for other people when they are in pain….  [I]f we are serious about the spiritual life, we have to learn to care more and more deeply about other people and to be there for them when they are in need.  …[T]his is extremely important, and… it can be very hard work.  Keep at it; learning to be more and more present with people who need comfort and support is the task of a lifetime. It is the heart of the religious life.⁸ 

I want you to know that, in years to come, when I think about the past year, I will of course remember the pain and suffering.  But I also will remember the incredible love.  The way we showed up to find, and, even more, to give, comfort and support.  

I will remember all the times that you, our WRT family, responded to our shared suffering not with rage or fear, but with empathy and commitment.  I will remember standing arm-in-arm on October 10th, 2023, here in our sanctuary, as full then as it is today, singing Hatikvah, anthem of undying hope.  I will remember the Jewish Scarsdale High School students who teamed up with Muslim and Christian students to mobilize humanitarian relief for Israeli and Gazan children.  I will remember Shabbat services, lighting blue candles, pews full, voices loud in prayer and song.  I will remember the rally in DC, and, just as much, the aroma of corned beef sandwiches on the bus (which, by the way, is a smell that evokes a lot of love for me).

I will remember ECC children singing their first Jewish songs and celebrating their first Jewish Holidays, and, even though that’s something I get to enjoy every year, it moved me more this year, healing a bit of my own sorrow with a generous dose of love.

I will remember how we welcomed the Hostage Families Forum to WRT, twelve Israelis with mothers, fathers, siblings and children in Gaza, and responded to their presentation not with probing questions, but tearful hugs.  

I will remember the Caring Community luncheons, and the conversations with concerned parents with kids on campus, and the amazing college students who journeyed from anxiety and anger to commitment and compassion, modeling peaceful and constructive engagement with fellow students, faculty, and school administrations in the face of harassment, insults, and rage-filled screaming.  

One of many such students who grew up at WRT, Ryan Silberfein, now a senior at Michigan, spent last year on a journey that led her not only to get involved, but to become president of Michigan Hillel, and one of the country’s most passionate, articulate, and thoughtful spokespersons on behalf of Jewish students on college campuses everywhere.

I look at our students, at our children, and my fear and rage and hurt soften, and love increases.  And this, my WRT family, is what I want you to know more than anything else, on this great day of Kippur—a day, by the way, that the Rabbis of old characterized as the most love-filled day of the Jewish year:  that Judaism is about love, and that we have to live and give a Judaism of love to the world.  

I know this from Rav Shai, and from our rich tradition of texts; I know it from being a rabbi, of course.  But more to the point, I know it from my life as Jew.  Because, for me, Judaism has always been about love.  

Judaism is my grandmother Sally’s Kamishbroit, “crazy bread,” which is kind of like what would happen if a cookie had a baby with a jelly roll, and yes, I know it’s Yom Kippur and we’re fasting; deal with it.

Judaism is learning the four questions and dropping pocket change in the blue JNF tzedakah box; and practicing Torah trope with my childhood Cantor, David Green, of Keneseth Israel (KI) in Allentown, and Bar Mitzvah lessons with Bernie Lewine who was kind, and ancient (and kind).  It is goofing off with Josh Axelrod in Monday night Confirmation class at KI and Shabbat dinners at Amherst College Hillel.  It’s waving a lulav in all the directions of Nature’s bounty, and getting just tipsy enough on Purim that I need to be very careful whether or not my microphone is on.  

Judaism is meeting a young woman named Kelly McCormick in, of all places, the Shabbat morning choir at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and, a few years later, standing with her under a chuppah.  

And Judaism is Mel Brooks and Jerry Seinfeld, Joan Rivers and Sarah Silverman, the Marx Brothers and Lenny Bruce, Adam Sandler and Alex Edelman; Judaism is laughing so hard you cry.  It is Albert Einstein and Jonas Salk, Louis Brandeis and RBG, Jascha Heifetz and Irving Berlin, Paul Simon and Carole King, Amy Winehouse and Leonard Cohen… and did you really think I would forget Bob Dylan?

-=-=-=-

I cannot paper over the truth:  this was a devastating year.  I expect that suffering will not cease, but may increase, in this new year.  Expanding war may push us beyond what we think we can bear.  Surging anti-Semitism may push us to new levels of concern.  For our people, for innocent people trapped in the hell of war, for those of us who love Israel and who also love justice and peace, for all who worry about the future of America and the future of humanity—these are yamim nora’im, terrible days.

And Judaism is about love.  So the question is:  what kind of Judaism will we live in 5785?  Will it be a Judaism of fear and sadness, rage and resentment?  Or might we grow our hearts around the knife, and live a Judaism of love?  A Judaism that our children and grandchildren will love?  A Judaism that invites us into the Omnipresence of a God of love?

With so much out of our hands, this one choice is still ours.

1. Translation: T. Carmi, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. ↩︎
2. From the publisher. See https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374192440/judaismisaboutlove. ↩︎
3. Held, Shai. Judaism is About Love. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. p. 282. ↩︎
4. Exodus 34:6-7. ↩︎
5. Exodus 32:7ff. ↩︎
6. Genesis 6:5ff. ↩︎
7. Exodus 16:2ff. ↩︎
8. Held, p. 259. ↩︎

You are probably familiar with a celebrated New Yorker cover from March 29, 1976.  Entitled View of the World from 9th Avenue, it parodies a provincial Manhattanite’s perception of life beyond the Hudson River, a worldview in which Zabar’s looms larger than Asia.  

Which I totally get, by the way.  Can you even get a good bagel anywhere over there?

But back to 9th Avenue.  Brownstones rich in architectural detail, minimalist office buildings, storefronts and parking garages crowd the foreground, with cars humming by and pedestrians dotting the sidewalks.  Just beyond the Hudson lies everything else:  Jersey, Kansas City, Texas, Nebraska, Chicago, Mexico, Canada, some mountains and prairies, a Pacific Ocean about the width of the Hudson, and a few vague blobs indicating China, Russia, and Japan floating on the horizon.  It’s a perfect cartoon, which spawned countless imitations, and put famed illustrator Saul Steinberg—as it were—on the map.  

It also neatly encapsulates the idea of a “mental map,” the way in which our perspectives—whether cultural, familial, or intensely personal—influence, and shape, how we understand the world.  We superimpose our own experiences and assumptions on the world, in order to make the foreign familiar.  

Put another way:  we see the world not as it is, but as we are.  

My interest in mental maps grew this year as I observed artists and musicians, writers and athletes from around the globe lining up to castigate Israel—and not just folks from Arab countries.  I mean people from way outside Israel’s “neighborhood.”  

There’s the roster of performers boycotting Israel while accepting concert dates in countries with seriously checkered human rights records.  And the Irish women’s basketball team that refused to shake hands with the Israeli team at the EuroBasket qualifiers this summer.  And the attempt to disbar Israel from the Eurovision song contest, led by all the countries of Scandinavia, and, again, Ireland.  And the proposals by French lawmakers to sanction Israel at the Olympics.  And South Africa’s efforts to tarnish Israel among the community of nations with charges of “genocide” and “apartheid.”  

These critics offer little nuance in their understanding of the Middle East and the tangled Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  How many have read beyond the headlines?  Studied the history?  Met with Israelis and Palestinians?  Visited the region?    

Such is the power of mental maps:  we see the world not as it is, but as we are.  

And so, for many in Ireland, Gaza looks like Belfast, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict looks like The Troubles, the violent conflict that consumed Northern Ireland for thirty years and whose aftershocks still reverberate, decades later.

Many Americans’ perceptions of the world are shaped by our country’s treatment of people of color.  For them, the actual contours of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict recede like hazy blobs into the background of a mental map drawn from the compounded traumas of slavery, Jim Crow, urban blight, “separate but equal,” police brutality, mass incarceration.

And what kind of mental maps are now taking shape in impressionable young minds on college campuses?  No doubt the topics receiving heightened focus in academia today—racism, settler-colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism—all favor the promotion of activism over critical reasoning. These preoccupations take center-stage while global Islamofascism is sidestepped, its danger downplayed.  

In all of these scenarios, sentiment tends to favor the group perceived as lacking power; to wield power is preemptively deemed immoral.  Oppressed populations, meanwhile, are given a free pass to pursue their liberation by any means possible, no matter how depraved.

In the case of the Middle East, what emerges is a mental map in which Palestine exemplifies the fight of a “virtuous, oppressed, indigenous population” against a “white, privileged, European colonizer.”  Scratch just beneath the surface, and its erroneousness reveals itself. 

The Israel of today, for starters, is more than 60% Sephardi and Mizrachi, meaning a majority of Israelis trace their ancestry to Jews who came as refugees forcibly expelled from Arab-majority lands:  speaking Arabic, practicing Arab-world customs, indistinguishable by skin color from Palestinian Arabs.  Israelis react with disbelief when they hear themselves characterized as “White European Settler-Colonialists”—just think of how that must land with Israel’s nearly 170,000 Jews whose families come from Ethiopia.

But such is the power of mental maps:  we see the world not as it is, but as we are.  

We should also hold accountable the Western press for foisting upon the world a distorted mental map which insists on presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the most important story in the world.  

More than ten years ago, journalist and author Matti Friedman pointed out that his former employer, the Associated Press, had more correspondents covering Israel and the Palestinian territories than were stationed in China, Russia, India, or all 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined.¹  

Our mental maps continue to imitate what medieval Christian maps depicted:  the world as a circular landmass with Jerusalem smack dab in the middle, the Holy City as the navel of the earth.  

As a result, millions across the world are up in arms about Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon without a scintilla of outrage over the half a million human beings who perished in the Tigray War which consumed Ethiopia just two years ago; or the more than a half a million dead in the Syrian Civil War of the last decade; or the more than 150,000 killed in war in Yemen, also lying in freshly dug graves, coupled with another almost quarter-million dead of famine; or, for that matter, the dead of the Russian-Ukrainian War, now into seven figures after thirty months of fighting….  To say nothing of countries like the Central African Republic, from which WRT resettled two refugee sisters five years ago.  (And as a happy sidebar, we just learned that they passed their American citizenship test yesterday.)  A war has raged there since 2012, with zero media coverage.  

Our mental maps have failed us, damaging our ability to separate facts from feelings, information from propaganda, reality from imagination.  

And perhaps we have failed, too.  For it is not enough—especially on Kol Nidre, this night of introspection and self-examination, of judgment and self-judgment—to look outside ourselves, to blame the world for all our woes.  

And yes, there’s plenty of blame to go around.  But we also need to ask:  what kind of maps do we, the Jewish community, carry around in our minds?  How do we see the world, and how could seeing things differently create different outcomes for us?  How could a different Jewish mental map illuminate a different way forward?  

What I have discovered, overwhelmingly, over the past year, is that when we Jews look at October 7th, we see the Shoah.  

This is understandable, of course.  October 7th was in fact the worst attack on Jewish lives since the Holocaust.  It evoked the horror of the Nazi einsatzgruppen, roving killing squads sent out across Europe to round up and murder Jews, years before the Final Solution, with its trains and gas chambers and crematoria.  Further, Hamas shares a Nazi-like ideology that calls for the total obliteration of Jews and Israel.

Our trauma summons old ghosts.  We have been wounded, scarred, burned, tortured, and taken captive.  On Yom Kippur only a year ago we thought that the litany of doom presented in the Unetaneh Tokef prayer was a relic of antiquity:  “who by fire and who by water, who by sword and who by beast, who by strangling and who by stoning, who in fullness of days and who before their time.”  This year we learned viscerally that “who shall live and who shall die” refers to us.  One could argue that at no time in the last eight decades have we been more vulnerable—not in Munich in ‘72, or Yom Kippur in ‘73, or Lebanon in ‘82, or Pittsburgh in 2018. 

And yet, even with all this, even now, one key factor differentiates the Jews of 1945 from the Jews of 2024, and that is power.  Even after October 7th—especially after October 7th—we must remember that we have political, economic, and military power previously unimagined in Jewish history.  

Much of this is attributable to the oath that the Jewish People swore after the Shoah.  “Never Again” meant not only that we would not allow the Jews to be genocided out of existence; it also meant that we would never again submit to the condition of powerlessness.  Powerlessness may be our history, but it would not be our destiny.  

And if October 7th was a devastating blow to our sense of invincibility, then every day after has served to remind us that we Jews will not tolerate a condition of perpetual victimhood.  

And rightly so.  What I propose this evening is that we, the Jewish community, now have an opportunity to draw for ourselves and our children a better mental map.  One that does not erase the fact of antisemitism, pervasive and pernicious as it obviously is, one that cannot make us invulnerable, but also one that does not forever relegate us within the boundaries of victimhood.  

We need a new Jewish mental map:  one that embraces Jewish power, that is not ashamed of it, that uses it ethically and wisely, that leverages it for good.

This may seem counterintuitive, especially for anyone who reflexively associates powerlessness with virtue, power with vice.  

We would also acknowledge that, especially ever since our people lost political sovereignty with Rome’s brutal conquests of Judea two thousand years ago, we Jews have had an ambivalent relationship with power.  We are not used to it, and neither is the world.  

Consider that while sixty-four countries have religious symbols on their flags—almost all of them crosses and crescents—only one flag comes emblazoned with a six-pointed star.  And that only this one country—a seventy-six-year old newcomer born after 2,000 years of statelessness—has its right to exist unrelentingly challenged.   

Consider also our unqualified success here in America, a country that has offered us security, unprecedented freedom from state intervention in our religious affairs, and prosperity on a scale unseen in the history of Jewish civilization.   

I have, in fact, met many American Jews who, for all of these reasons—to say nothing of the burdensome responsibilities and agonizing choices that come with wielding state power—cannot wrap their heads around why Jews would want or need it at all.   

Still, half the world’s Jews do not live here; they live there.  And Israelis’ mental maps are so very different from our own:  shaped by different narratives, different histories, different priorities and different perils.  They and we belong to the same family, the same mishpacha.  What affects Israel is not a matter of “foreign policy” for us American Jews.  We are all in this together. 

The new mental map that we could begin to draw at this moment, one that embraces Jewish power, might start with the recognition that the trauma of our present chapter in Jewish history is twofold:  

There is the acute trauma of October 7th; but there is also the trauma of every day since.  A midrash, a Rabbinic legend, considers the Biblical patriarch Jacob on the night he made camp all alone on the banks of the river, anxiously awaiting the dawn, when he would confront his long-estranged brother Esau.  The twins had last seen each other as adolescents, Jacob absconding to a foreign land with Esau’s birthright and blessing, Esau left behind to stew in a murderous rage.²  

At this moment, the Torah reports that Jacob felt both fear (יראה, yir’ah in Hebrew) and distress (the Hebrew word צרה, tzarah).  “Are these not the same?” asked the Rabbis.  The meaning, says Rabbi Judah bar Ilai, is that Jacob was experiencing two different kinds of fear:  Jacob feared that Esau would slay him; and he felt distress that he would be forced to slay his brother.³  

This is the dilemma with which every Israeli lives, a dilemma that arises only when we have power:  not only do we have to fear those who would slay us, but we must also now fear having to slay another.

Speaking to a group of rabbis this summer in Jerusalem at a seminar sponsored by the Shalom Hartman Institute, the always brilliant author Yossi Klein Halevi distilled the dilemma down to its essence:  

“Power means that you have forfeited your innocence,” he said.  “On October 7th we were victims, but not on October 8th.  Starting October 8th… all parts of Israeli society made a collective decision to go to war, not to allow the disastrous perception of Jewish victimhood to stand.  To use our power.  …One of the responsibilities of power is that you have to give up the identity of victim.  You can’t have it both ways.”⁴

This comports with what Halevi’s frequent dialogue partner Rabbi Donniel Hartman wrote more than fifteen years ago, during another Israeli incursion into Gaza:  

The competition between Israelis and Palestinians over who is the bigger victim “is a competition which Israel cannot, nor I hope, ever win. I welcome Israel’s power, and pray that we will always lose in the competition over relative victim-hood when it comes to wars that are forced upon us.”⁵

We need a mental map that rejects Jewish victimhood, and embraces Jewish power:  both its benefits and its burdens.

In today’s terms, this means that, no matter how cruel and crafty the enemy, no matter how malignant the designs of Hamas or Hezbollah or the Islamic Republic of Iran that sponsors them—Israel, the Jewish State—the Jews’ state, our state—still must take responsibility for conduct in war and, yes, for damage and deaths incurred in war, combatant and noncombatant alike.  

In other words, Jewish power must coexist with Jewish morality.  This notion is as old as Judaism itself.  Ruth Wisse, in her landmark book Jews and Power, observed that the Biblical Prophets “linked a nation’s potency to its moral strength.”⁶  The Torah commands even the King of Israel to keep a copy of the sacred scroll of Law by the royal throne, and to read from it every day.⁷ 

At all times, even in war—I would argue, especially in war—Jewish power must be regulated by Jewish moral concerns which insist on the pursuit of justice and the practice of compassion.  This is not to say that we should not fight wars, only that we should fight just wars in just ways and accept responsibility at all times for the excruciating price that war exacts.  This includes maximizing humanitarian aid for all caught in the crossfire, and committing to leveraging Jewish power toward  just and permanent political solutions to our violent conflicts, which will inevitably require difficult compromises and sacrifices.  Welcome to having power.   

Let us also not forget that Jewish power extends beyond the IDF and the Mossad, nuclear deterrence and American military assistance.  We Jews may be small but in number (and often in physical stature 😊), but we are mighty.  Jewish power includes our collective ability to organize, to lobby our elected officials, to change the outcome of elections, to rally and command the attention of Washington and Jerusalem, to demand accountability from our college presidents and administrations.  We Jews can maximize opportunity and liberty, prosperity and education, minimize suffering and tyranny, poverty and ignorance.     

Yom Kippur comes to tell us not that we are powerless, that “who shall live and who shall die” is entirely out of our hands, but rather that we have power, power we must use wisely and well:  power to change our fate, power to change our moral trajectory, power to change our lives, power to change the world.  We have powerful tools to change outcomes in the new year:  Teshuvah, tefilah, tzedakah, repentance, prayer, and charity.  And also:  our voices, our votes, our values.  

CODA

I wonder: if God had a mental map of the universe, what would it look like?  

What would loom large in how God imagines the world unfolding, and what would vanish into the background?  

I like to think that God’s mental map consists of but two words—the keystone of tomorrow morning’s Torah reading, maybe of the entire Torah. 

ובחרת בחיים – U’vacharta ba-chayim: “Choose Life.”⁸  

As the Torah reaches its conclusion, this is what it wants us to know about God’s vision for the Jewish people, the human family, and, indeed, the world:  Choose life.  Seize the considerable power you do have, as a Jew, as a living being, as a vital, conscious, morally capable and morally culpable creature—and choose life.  

At every moment we can choose from infinite paths.  Some lead to suffering, others to fulfillment.  U’vacharta ba-chayim.  Choose life.  

This is a choice available only to those with power. The martyrs who accepted death at the hands of the Romans, the Crusaders, the Inquisition, the Cossacks and the Nazis—they had no power, no agency to choose. 

But we who carry the memory of slavery and exile, we who wear the scars of destruction and dispersion, persecution and pogroms, now find ourselves with the greatest power of all:  to choose life, and thus choose to become God’s instruments of redemption in a fragile and hurting world.  

You can attribute this extraordinary reversal of fortune to fate or the random vicissitudes of time; to Jewish chutzpah or the hand of the Divine; but you cannot just shrug it off.  We are yet living in the greatest epoch in the history of the Jewish people, and for that we must give thanks. Let this era in Jewish history be remembered not for our victimhood, but our heroism. Let it be remembered that in one of the most harrowing chapters in our story, we chose life, for ourselves and others. 

Baruch ata, Adonai, she-kocho u’g’vurato malei olam⁹:

Blessed are you, Eternal Source of Life, whose power and potential fill the world.

Amen.

1.  Matti Friedman, “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth,” Tablet, August 26, 2014. ↩︎
2. See Genesis 28:15 and surrounding verses for context. ↩︎
3. Bereshit Rabbah 76:2. ↩︎
4. “For Heaven’s Sake” (Podcast), July 10, 2024. ↩︎
5. Donniel Hartman, “Fighting a Just War Against Hamas Justly,” January 13, 2009. ↩︎
6. Ruth Wisse, Jews and Power.  New York: Schocken Books, 2020.  p. 13. ↩︎
7. Deuteronomy 17:18-19. ↩︎
8. Deuteronomy 30:19. ↩︎
9. This blessing is traditionally recited upon hearing thunder. ↩︎