Sermon delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Tuesday, September 23, 2025 | 1 Tishrei 5786

Lately, I feel like the old Jewish waiter at the delicatessen, approaching his table of regulars and asking: “Is anything OK?”

Many of you recall the euphoria of June 1967, when Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War restored every significant Jewish holy site to Israeli control — a triumph greeted with something very much like religious ecstasy, even by the non-religious.  

Today, Jewish euphoria has evaporated, replaced by Jewish dysphoria.

Despite Israel’s stunning military successes against Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Regime, and the collapse of Syria’s Assad regime, Jews worldwide are not okay. 

Our hostages languish, starving and tortured in Hamas’s tunnels. The grinding war and human suffering in Gaza, the mental and physical toll on Israeli soldiers, Hamas’s refusal to surrender, and the global unpopularity of Israel’s government all weigh heavily on us.  

Add to this the horrifying rise in antisemitism, including the firebombing of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home on the night of Pesach and murder sprees targeting Jews in Washington, DC and Boulder, Colorado — not for any connection to Israel, but because they are Jews.  As if this weren’t enough, the prospect of a New York City mayoral candidate who espouses anti-Israel rhetoric leads one to conclude:  Everything is not okay.

In Hebrew, “Okay” is b’seder, meaning “in order,” like a Passover Seder: everything in its right place, with a cohesive narrative: “They tried to kill us; we won; let’s eat.” It’s even said—though this may be more folklore than etymology — that the word “copacetic” derives from the Hebrew ha-kol b’seder, “everything’s okay.”

Today, ha-kol lo b’seder.  Everything is not okay.  As if in the blink of an eye, we’ve awakened to a world turned upside down.  Our ancestors warned it could happen but it seemed inconceivable.  Jews, once valued for our contributions to Western society, now feel like a despised minority.  Israel, once a heroic David, is cast as the Goliath of the Middle East.

This nosedive from euphoria to dysphoria feels acute for older generations. Gen-Z Jews and younger, it should be noted, have never known a world that admired Israel, and so they may be more inured to Jewish dysphoria — a fact that only contributes to Jewish dysphoria!   

However young or old, the question for each of us, on this first day of a new year, is:  How to be a Jew, today?  

I was speaking this summer with Helene Gray, Past President of WRT, whose perspective runs through the story of her mother, Celia Kener, a Shoah survivor hidden in a barn by a righteous Polish Catholic woman during the Holocaust.  Last month, I stood under the chuppah with Celia’s grandson, Helene’s son Sam, and his bride, Betsy — a miraculous coda to a miraculous story.  

Reflecting on the astonishing ups and downs of Jewish history, Helene and I agreed:  There’s a lot more ‘oy’ than joy these days.  Things are not b’seder.

“But,” she noted, “it’s not like we’re the first Jews to face hard times.  I think we can do this.”

Because we are Jews, and we do hard things.

I am not addressing my remarks to, or about, Israel’s leaders.  I am not demanding what governments — Israel’s or America’s or any other’s — should or should not do.  I’m speaking to us, this one congregation, whose Jewish values shape how we view Israel, Gaza, antisemitism, ourselves, and this painful inflection point in Jewish history.  My message is for us, the Jewish People, especially those who call WRT home.

Like generations before us who stared into the abyss, we must refuse to let this moment in Jewish history define us as victims.  Judaism has always affirmed our capacity to change the course of our lives even when the course of Jewish history plunges into darkness.  Because, more than the “Chosen People,” we Jews are a Choosing People, charged with choosing to affirm the possibility of a better tomorrow even when today looks very much lo b’seder.   

It’s like what Professor Michael Cohen, head of the Jewish Studies department at Tulane, always says:  You know what it’s called when Jews almost die off or get exterminated, but don’t?

Living.  Thriving. 

So today, we’ll explore how we go on living and thriving and doing hard things, drawing on Jewish courage through the figure of the First Jew, Abraham, role model for Jewish courage in a world gone wrong.  Abraham’s story, as told through Torah and Midrash, offers a master class in courage, showing how Abraham surmounted ten trials, culminating in the Akedah, the binding of Isaac.

Among these tests, the Rabbis listed Abraham’s confrontation with the polytheism of his homeland, leaving home forever to follow the One God of Jewish destiny.

Their promised land offered Abraham and Sarah little respite; they faced famine and forced displacement.  At one point Abraham got tangled up in a military campaign of four kings against five (in case you thought that the Middle East got screwed up only recently).  In the course of this war, Abraham’s nephew was abducted. 

Nor was Abraham’s domestic life a walk in the park.  Time and again, fate dashed Abraham and Sarah’s dreams of raising children.  The Rabbis include among Abraham’s trials the expulsion of the maidservant Hagar from the household, together with their son Ishmael.  Only in extremely advanced age did Sarah finally, improbably, conceive.  

Oh, and I didn’t even mention that as soon as Isaac is born, God introduces this interesting new practice called a bris.¹  

So, yes, you could say that the life and times of the Very First Jews were lo b’seder.  And yet we all learn and grow and evolve more from our trials and tribulations than from when things are kol b’seder.  

Drawing on his trials, let’s consider three facets of Abraham’s courage, each applicable today.

First, we will consider Abraham the Iconoclast. 

Abraham’s journey begins when he leaves his home in Ur Kasdim, Mesopotamia, when God summoned him, Lech-Lecha, “go forth,” which literally means, “go unto yourself.”²

Abraham was to undertake a journey not only of geography but also of spirituality, a journey of the soul.  In so doing, he discovered that everything he thought he knew about the world no longer made sense.  

Bowing down before statues of wood and stone seemed to Abraham the height of religious hypocrisy.  He took an ax and smashed them to smithereens, leaving the largest one intact, into whose stony fingers he placed the handle.  When his father saw his idol shop in ruins he demanded to know who did this. 

Abraham pointed to the last statue standing — the one with the ax in its hand — and said:  “That guy.”  Terach raged back: “You know they have no power!”³  

And Abraham, I like to imagine, said:  “Gotcha, Dad.”  But this comeuppance also severed his connection to the old ways; it meant that Abraham had to leave.  The Torah then refers to him as Ivri⁴, a Hebrew word that means, “to cross over to the other side,” which the Rabbis interpreted to mean that the whole world was on one side while he was on the other,” in an ideological sense:  Abraham against the world.⁵

To be a Jew today is to summon the courage to stand against the world and refuse to bow down before the idols of our time.  To be a Jew today requires Abraham’s iconoclastic courage — to resist the idols of today: simplistic narratives published as morality plays, opinion posturing as fact, slogans that reduce complex realities to soundbites. 

That Judaism places questions, not answers, at the heart of the Seder says much about our religious priorities.  Deepen the conversation.  Probe for truth.  Let questions yield more questions.

And our countercultural nature, our willingness to sail against prevailing winds, has always come at a cost.   

When, two thousand years ago, we were told: “Worship our messiah,” the Jew said: “We will wait.”  When told: “Bow before our prophet,” the Jew said: “Our Prophets told us to hold fast to Torah, a Tree of Life.”  When told, again and again: “You have no home among us,” we sought new homes in new lands, and, at last, returned to the land of Abraham and Sarah. 

So when many now propose, to cheers and plaudits, that we have no legitimate claim to our ancestral land because others also lay claim to it; that elite academia now rewrites history to portray Jewish refugees as “settler-colonizers” and colors a complex civilizational confrontation between jihadism and democracy as “white supremacy versus indigenousness”; when media fixate on Gaza while marginalizing the suffering in Darfur, Ukraine, or Yemen, we must summon Abraham’s iconoclastic courage, and say: 

I am a Jew, and Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people.  And, whatever else happens in this awful war — may it end speedily — Israel will remain the Jewish State after it’s over. 

This may not play well in mixed company. You may face demands to defend a war over which you have no decision-making authority.  You may endure accusations of “playing the antisemitism card,” when we know it’s not a game and we’re not playing. 

What can I say?  Welcome to being a Jew.  We do hard things.

And so we turn again to Abraham, his trials and his courage, especially as Rescuer of his kin.

In a macabre foreshadowing of our present moment, the Torah reports that Abraham more than once risked his life in order to extricate family members taken hostage.  

In the war of four kings against five, Abraham’s nephew Lot was abducted.⁶  Lot was what we might call in Yiddish a nebach, a shlemazel, a person whose only luck was bad luck.  And yet Abraham took up arms to deliver him from danger. 

Years later it happened again to Lot (nebach!), this time in Sodom⁷, and again, Abraham showed up to rescue him. 

We Jews don’t give up on our hostages.  For 718 days we have demanded their release.  I can think of no holier use of this pulpit and this first day of a new year than to ask each of us to join in demanding their return, without which this war cannot end.  

On your way out of the sanctuary, please consider taking a yellow pin and wearing it until the last hostage comes home.  Drawing attention to the plight of our captives is one small, meaningful act of Abrahamic courage that will remind the world why Israel went to war in the first place.     

And this takes us to the third model of courage exemplified by Abraham: Protester.  Aggrieved by the sin and corruption of Sodom and Gomorrah, God intends to annihilate the cities, reducing them to rubble.  Once again Abraham responds not with complacency but with courage, even before the very God with whom he has just sealed a covenant of loyalty:

חָלִ֨לָה לְּךָ֜ מֵעֲשֹׂ֣ת  ׀ כַּדָּבָ֣ר הַזֶּ֗ה לְהָמִ֤ית צַדִּיק֙ עִם־רָשָׁ֔ע וְהָיָ֥ה כַצַּדִּ֖יק כָּרָשָׁ֑ע חָלִ֣לָה לָּ֔ךְ הֲשֹׁפֵט֙ כׇּל־הָאָ֔רֶץ לֹ֥א יַעֲשֶׂ֖ה מִשְׁפָּֽט׃

How dare You do such a thing, to bring death upon the innocent as well as the guilty, to treat innocent and guilty the same. How dare You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?⁸

Abraham’s courage transforms outrage into an ethical axiom:  that even in a world on fire, justice still matters.  

Argument, dispute, debate, protest:  if you’ve ever met our People, you know these predilections run deep and strong among the Jews.  Judaism not only sanctions but sanctifies argument and protest, when done for the sake of justice. 

But Abraham’s protest was rooted in his prior courage as an Iconoclast and Rescuer.  He had “skin in the game,” sacrificing again and again for his faith and his people before demanding justice for others.  Abraham’s challenge to God is rooted in deep love and loyalty, not melodramatic moralizing.

With this in mind, consider Uri Feinberg, a close friend to Kelly and me and a friend to many here at WRT, having guided several congregational trips to Israel, including our solidarity mission after October 7th.  

Throughout the war, even with no tourist groups to take around, Uri has been my guide, helping shape my perspectives on the war through his unique lens: that of a Reform Jewish Zionist educator married to Meryl, and abba to three daughters, two in the IDF reserves (having served in Iron Dome units) and his youngest presently serving in an infantry combat unit.  

I recently sent Uri a little message over WhatsApp, wishing him a Shabbat of “hope and reflection,” to which he shot back — in a classic Israeli way:  

Not sure about hope and reflection.  More like anger and action.  We seem to be going to each and every protest, march and rally.  [Uri has referred to the last hundred Saturday evenings on the streets of Tel Aviv as his “weekly date night with Meryl.”]  We go for the hostages for sure, but also, along with watching our daughters, nephews and children of friends in uniform heading out to another round of reserves, [each protest] is another space that… remind[s us] of who we really are, what we stand for as Israelis, and why we haven’t given up on our country.

Their protest, especially with children in the IDF, is the opposite of a “luxury belief.”  It’s a courageous stand with real stakes.  Unlike most protests abroad, which target Israel, their protests are with Israel, grounded in love and commitment.

Dr. Micha Goodman, in his latest book The Eighth Day⁹, urges us to look not at Israel from the “top down,” the high perch from where political leadership operates, but “from the bottom up.”¹⁰  

From a “bottom up” vantage point, we can observe a remarkable grassroots society — reservists, volunteers, and ordinary citizens — filled with love, altruism, courage, and, even — despite it all — a strange kind of unity: the insistence that Israel matters, that for Israelis, as for Abraham and Sarah, there is no other home, no other land to go back to.

This Israel, bruised but not broken, embodies the courage of Abraham:  the courage of iconoclasm, not to be cowed by her critics.  The courage of rescue, not to give up on her hostages.  The courage of protest, not to let her leaders define or diminish her people’s spirit.  

When I see Israel today, looking not at the headlines, not at the Knesset, but at the grassroots, I see a country of Abrahams and Sarahs, and I am so proud to call them our family.  

May God bless the brave — the iconoclasts, the rescuers, and the righteous protesters, one and all. 

And may God grant us the courage in this new year to do the hard things, because that’s who we are, and that’s how we prevail.

Shanah Tovah

1. See Genesis, Chapters 12-21.  It’s great reading!
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2. This line of interpretation is common in Kabbalistic and Chasidic thought. See, for example, Sfat Emet, Lech-Lecha. ↩︎
3.  Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, 38:12.
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4. Genesis 14:13. ↩︎
5. Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, 42:8. ↩︎
6. See Genesis Chapter 14, and 14:12 specifically. ↩︎
7. See Genesis Chapter 19. ↩︎
8. Genesis 18:25. ↩︎
9. The book is called היום השמיני in Hebrew. It’s not yet published in English translation. ↩︎
10. You can also hear Goodman’s perspective in an interview with Daniel Gordis on his Substack and podcast, “Israel from the Inside,” August 7th, 2025. ↩︎