Sermon Delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York, October 2, 2025

This Yom Kippur message began on July 31st, when Yeonsoo Go, a 20-year-old Purdue sophomore and 2024 Scarsdale High School graduate, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a routine visa hearing in Manhattan.  Handcuffed and sent to Louisiana’s Richwood Correctional Center, Soo, as she’s known, was labeled an “illegal alien” for allegedly overstaying a visa — a claim her family disputes.

Soo arrived four years ago on a religious dependent visa, accompanying her mother, Reverend Kyrie Kim, the first woman ordained in the Seoul Diocese of the Anglican Church of Korea.  Rev. Kim was expressly invited to New York to strengthen the Episcopal Church’s ties with Asian communities.  Our local interfaith clergy association, of which I’m a past president, proudly embraces Rev. Kim as one of our own.  

If you want to know the definition of “upstanding,” look up this family:  Kind, generous, invested in the community’s welfare.  They are not anti-Israel protesters or political activists.  They are not criminals, gang members, scofflaws or reprobates.  They are likely to be found helping out in a homeless shelter when not in church, school, or the neighborhood.  Our neighborhood.

So when Soo disappeared into ICE custody, our local churches and synagogues sprang into action.  Within hours, priests and pastors, rabbis and cantors, exchanged urgent messages and calls.  Soon, our local elected officials, including WRT congregant, New York Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, were on the case.  Days passed with little word from Soo, later revealed to be held in squalid conditions.  By Sunday, with the support of our Scarsdale Village leadership including WRT congregant, Mayor Justin Arest, we had organized a community-wide vigil to take place in Chase Park on Thursday, one week after her apprehension.  By this point, we had it on good authority that members of the US Congress of both political parties were working on her release.

It finally came on Monday, five days after her detention, with a tearful family embrace upon her return to New York. 

A happy ending?  Not quite.  Soo’s case remains unresolved, with no acknowledgment of error from authorities. The trauma Soo and her family endured lingers, as does the fear this incident (and countless like it) sows among immigrants and guests to our country, regardless of their legal status.  Intentional or not, the message that comes across to millions of law-abiding people is:  You are not like us.  You are Other.  You do not belong here.   

The biggest question — Why? — looms large, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, “the cruelty is the point.”¹ 

We Jews know from cruelty.  In Torah, it first appears in Exodus, Chapter 1:  “The Egyptians worked the Israelites with cruelty.”²  The Hebrew word פרך, meaning ruthlessness, brutality, cruelty, defines our slave labor in mortar, brick, and field, and is repeated in the next verse for emphasis.³ 

Cruelty is Pharaoh’s calling card.  By chapter’s end, even forced labor proves insufficient to satisfy his malice, as he escalates to infanticide:  “Every boy born you shall throw into the Nile.”⁴  

The cruelty is the point.

Ten years ago, I traveled to Israel with a group of rabbis — Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox.  We arrived at the height of the Syrian Civil War and refugee crisis, with 1.3 million Syrians seeking asylum from the brutality of the Assad regime (which would collapse this past December) and a simultaneous resurgence of ISIS, the terrorist Islamofascist entity whose ideology mirrors that of Hamas.   

One encounter, seared in my memory:  a critically injured Syrian rebel fighter, recovering from his wounds in a hospital bed in a makeshift underground ward of Israel’s acclaimed Galilee Medical Center.  

The CEO of the hospital, Dr. Masad Barhoum, a Palestinian Arab and Israeli citizen, explained the hospital’s mission to treat all, a commitment born of Israel’s humanitarian spirit and in fulfilment of the medical profession’s Hippocratic Oath, which does not discriminate when it comes to human life and health.  

So why the basement?  Why the secrecy?  

Because if his comrades-in-arms were to learn that a devout Muslim combatant had obtained medical treatment in the Jewish State, he’d have yet another target on his back.

When confronted with the world’s worst cruelties, the Israel I know and love has time and again rushed in to help and heal, with compassion blind to the patient’s color, country, or creed.  

That is why I appreciated hearing this summer from Dr. Dan Turner, a pediatric gastroenterologist and deputy Dean of the School of Medicine at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  Through the Israel chapter of Physicians for Human Rights, Turner provides medical care to Palestinians, documents abuses, and advocates for policy changes, like ending the practice of handcuffing prisoners during medical treatment, which Turner describes as both unnecessary and cruel.

Turner’s willingness to treat an enemy injured in war, or suffering from malnutrition and disease, has earned him more than a few enemies of his own.  He has been called a traitor, a self-hating Jew, a terrorist sympathizer.  He has received death threats.    

He remains steadfast.  Listen to his own words.  For Turner, treating a patient, even an enemy, is “not about excusing their actions; it’s about maintaining our own humanity.  …Treating [our enemies] humanely doesn’t weaken us — it strengthens our moral core.”⁵  

Referencing the same Biblical Hebrew word for the cruelty of Pharaoh, Turner says:  “We can’t let fear justify פרך.”  Torah isn’t abstract; it demands action.  Every time I advocate,” he adds, “I’m reminded… : ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’⁶  That includes the neighbor across the border.”⁷

So when we see cruelty enacted as policy, cruelty for its own sake, we recoil — not in the name of a political party, not because we call ourselves Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, or any other modifier, but in the name of Judaism itself.  

When cuts to USAID are already implicated in the deaths of hundreds of thousands from complications related to treatable conditions like HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia, with the potential for millions more to die in the next five years⁸; when pictures of crying migrants are posted on social media for laughs, and refugees are barred (unless they happen to be White South Africans); when religious zealots burn down mosques or villages or olive groves in the West Bank; when the State Department denies visas for Gazan children to receive medical treatment; when hate-filled extremists on both left and right decide to air their grievances with guns and explosives; when it becomes clear that the cruelty is the point, Judaism itself is violated, and Jews, affronted.

Judaism loathes a Pharaoh: anyone who punishes the weak, the lonely, and those brave enough to stand up and speak out.  Whether the King of Babylon or the Emperor of Rome, the Pope in the Crusades or the King and Queen of Spain in the Inquisition, the Cossack warlords or the Führer of the Reich, the Soviet despots or the Mullahs of Iran, we know all too well the danger of cruelty wedded to power.    

So what lesson ought we learn from our experience with the Pharaohs of Jewish history? To watch our backs? To secure our borders? To wage war against our enemies, when life and home, sovereignty and self-determination are under siege?  All of these, of course:  complicity with terror goes against Jewish survival and Jewish morality.  Our refusal to be history’s victims comprises the essence of “Never Again.”  We must keep guard against the Pharaohs of the world. 

Yet we must also keep guard at all times against the Pharaoh within. 

The word פרך — cruelty — the defining feature of the Pharaoh — comes up a second time in the Torah, in the Book of Leviticus.  Only this time, the tables are turned.  This time, the Torah warns us not about the danger of Pharaoh’s cruelty against us, but rather about the danger of the cruelty we might inflict upon others, especially when we have the power to do so.  

Three times in the space of ten verses⁹ the Torah warns about treating a hired laborer with פרך, cruelty.  Three times it warns us not to subject a worker to the conditions of Egyptian slavery.  Any one of us, the Torah is saying, has the potential to become a Pharaoh in miniature.  

Time and again research into human psychology has borne out the same conclusion.  In the early 1960s, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a groundbreaking psychological experiment at Yale University to explore obedience to authority, inspired by the atrocities of the Holocaust and the question of how ordinary people could commit horrific acts under orders.  Participants were instructed to administer what they believed were increasingly severe electric shocks to a “learner” (played by an actor) for giving incorrect answers, with an authority figure urging them to continue despite the “learner’s” apparent distress. 

Shockingly, 65% of participants complied fully, delivering what they thought were lethal shocks, revealing the power of authority to override personal morality.  Left to our own devices, if we have power, we tend to exercise it, not restrain it.  What Milgram proved was how easily the Pharaoh within can emerge from the shadows of the human subconscious.

As Professor Turner, the Israeli physician, puts it: “[C]ruelty dehumanizes everyone — victim and perpetrator.  To fight [it], we must choose humanity, even when it’s hard.  The Torah teaches us we were slaves in Egypt [in order] to learn compassion, not to repeat oppression.”¹⁰

The Torah teaches us this, again and again and again, in a thousand different ways, because it must be said, again and again and again, in a thousand different ways.  Not just the general principle, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but the detailed, practical applications, the innumerable variations on a theme:

• When you see your enemy’s ox wandering astray, return it to him.¹¹ 

• When you see your enemy’s donkey lying helpless under its burden, raise it with him.¹²

• When a poor person resides among you, do not harden your heart; do not close your hand, but give generously.¹³

• When you lend money to the poor, exact no interest.¹⁴  

• When you reap the harvest of your land, leave the corners of your field unpicked and do not gather the fallen sheaves; leave these for the poor, the needy, the stranger.¹⁵

• When foreigners reside among you, do them no wrong; treat them as natives born among you.¹⁶

• Do not afflict a widow or an orphan.¹⁷

• Do not detest an Egyptian, for you were an alien in his land.¹⁸

• You must not remain indifferent.¹⁹

Beware the Pharaoh within.  For cruelty can seize hold of any human being, even the best of us.

Yom Kippur calls us to this awareness:  that any one of us has the power to cause hurt and harm, to be cruel.  We all do it, all the time — and worse, we do it to the people we love the most, over whom we have the power to inflict pain, because we know all their vulnerabilities.  

The Pharaoh within speaks not in ancient Egyptian but in a universal language that each of us knows all too well.  The Pharaoh within is quick with a snarky putdown, laughs at another’s weakness, withholds forgiveness, bears grudges.  The Pharaoh within mocks others on social media, abuses other drivers with unwarranted road rage, refuses to give the benefit of the doubt.  The Pharaoh within turns an indifferent eye to the plea of the needy, dismisses a coworker’s ideas, leaves messes for others to clean up.  The Pharaoh within doesn’t think twice before humiliating another person.  The Pharaoh within spreads gossip, rolls eyes at others’ earnestness, berates and belittles.  

The Pharaoh within is a real jerk!

The Rabbis had a name for this Pharaoh within.  They called it yetzer ha-ra, the “Bad Inclination” — meaning an inborn attribute, part of our human nature.  The Rabbis associated the yetzer ha-ra with appetite, ambition, desire — natural human impulses that can be destructive even as they also lead us to build and create and even procreate.  

But the dark side of the yetzer ha-ra concerned the Sages, and Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv, a leading figure of the 19th century Jewish Mussar movement which focused on character development, explained why:

“The human soul is a battlefield where the yetzer ha-ra wages war through arrogance and indifference to others’ pain. Just as one must wage war against external enemies to protect the nation, so must one uproot these traits from the heart through constant vigilance and Torah study.  Cruelty toward the weak is the yetzer ha-ra‘s greatest weapon, for it severs the soul from God’s compassion.”²⁰

We’ve come here on this Yom Kippur, this day of ultimate reckoning, feeling smaller and more helpless than ever.  Our powerlessness in the face of tyranny, our impotence in the face of large-scale cruelty, mocks us.

But we might, in this new year, yet summon the moral steel to get back to keeping the Pharaohs — within and without — from getting the best of us.

Because if there’s anything we know from the Torah’s great story of our people, it’s that even a Pharaoh is no match for the power of our God, and that as surely as a Pharaoh dwells in every human heart, so too God, the One whom our tradition names Ha-Rachaman, the Compassionate One; Yetzer Tov, the Good Inclination; and, this, the most beautiful of Divine names:

:הָרֹפֵא לִשְׁבוּרֵי לֵב וּמְחַבֵּשׁ לְעַצְּבוֹתָם

The Healer of the Broken-Hearted, Who binds their wounds.²¹

Dear God, enter our broken hearts.  

Bind our wounds, our sources of sorrow and pain.  

Let our compassion curb our capacity for cruelty.

Remind us that whenever and wherever vulnerable people are suffering, that is our business.

Open our hearts to a Torah that teaches:  You cannot remain indifferent.

We have to be the answer to the deficit of love in our shabby and hurting world.

It all starts here.  

There’s no time to lose. 

• G’mar Chatimah Tovah

1. Phrase attributed to author Adam Serwer. ↩︎
2.  Exodus 1:13. ↩︎
3. Exodus 1:14. ↩︎
4. Exodus 1:22a. ↩︎
5. Comments by Professor Turner taken from “What Matters Now to Prof. Dan Turner: Treating our enemies humanely makes us human,” What Matters Now (podcast), August 13, 2025. ↩︎
6. Leviticus 19:18. ↩︎
7. Turner, Ibid. ↩︎
8. Angela Matthew, “USAID cuts have caused more than 330,000 deaths worldwide, BU professor estimates,” published in The Washington Post, July 1, 2025, reposted online at https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/media/som/news/news-logos/BU-researcher-warns-of-367,000-deaths-from-halted-USAID-programs_.pdf. ↩︎
9. Leviticus 25:43, 25:46, and 25:53. ↩︎
10. Turner, Ibid. ↩︎
11. Exodus 23:4. ↩︎
12. Exodus 23:5. ↩︎
13. Deuteronomy 15:7. ↩︎
14. Exodus 22:25. ↩︎
15. Leviticus 23:22. ↩︎
16. Leviticus 19:33-34. ↩︎
17. Exodus 22:22. ↩︎
18. Deuteronomy 23:7. ↩︎
19. Deuteronomy 22:3.  Passages cited here encompass direct and partial citations as well as paraphrases. ↩︎
20. R. Simcha Zissel Ziv, Hokhmah u-Musar, Vol. 2. ↩︎
21. Psalms 147:3. ↩︎

Sermon Delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York, October 1, 2025

My senior year at Amherst College, I studied the Civil War with Professor David W. Blight, now a Yale historian whose biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. This summer, I found his Civil War class online as a free podcast — a reminder that we live in an age in which the boundless annals of human knowledge are only a click away.  

At the same time, objective truth is under siege.  Feelings posture as facts.  Armchair experts peddle opinions as axioms, amplified by our echo chambers.  AI, capable of crunching vast arrays of data, can “hallucinate” plausible falsehoods and convincingly pose as a person posting inflammatory garbage online.  Social media has produced a condition that philosopher Sam Harris likens to “mass psychosis.”  On Instagram and TikTok, Hamas propaganda competes for eyeballs with makeup tutorials.  It’s… a lot.  

So I appreciated that Blight published a timely op-ed this spring, taking to task a recent executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” in which he asserts:  

“The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom — in the form of curious minds — of anyone who seeks to understand our country by visiting museums or historic sites.”  

“Even if you agree with some of the executive order’s positions,” he adds, “do we want our cultural centers and repositories of America’s history to be subjected to a litmus test that requires history to be presented in the most positive terms?”  

“Many Americans do care about the country’s past,” he notes; “they can handle the truth: conflicts, tragedies, redemptions and all. They actually prefer complexity to patriotic straitjackets.”¹

I read this, and thought, “Well, can we?  Do we?”  And I recalled A Few Good Men (1992), in which Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessep roars at Tom Cruise’s Lt. Kaffee one of the iconic lines in cinematic history:  “You can’t handle the truth!” 

So the title of my sermon this evening is:  You Can’t Handle the Truth!  (Or Can You?)

Now of course no political party has a monopoly on truth — or lies.  Both sides have asked us to ignore our eyes and ears and brains, whether about our elected officials’ fitness for office, the origins of Covid, or our nation’s fraught history with indigenous peoples, slavery, civil rights, women’s rights, antisemitism, the LGBTQ  community, immigrants… you know; it’s a long list.  Truth should not be beholden to political agendas. Yet the assault on objective reality at this moment feels particularly fierce and consequential.

This, in and of itself, is nothing new — surely we are not the first generation to have reason not to believe everything the government tells us.  Consider the German-Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt, one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.  Imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933 for researching antisemitism, it is she who observed that “The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed.”  In her landmark opus The Origins of Totalitarianism from 1951, Arendt asserted that authoritarian regimes thrive when “the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”  She warned not only about a regime’s assault on truth, but also about the public unwittingly going along, gradually becoming unable to tell truth from lies.  Sound familiar?

I believe civilization’s future hinges on whether we pursue truth with rigor. So tonight, I ask not how politicians should act, but how we should respond — as Jews.

Maimonides said:  ושמע האמת ממי שאמרה, “Accept Truth from whatever source it comes,” a remark made in order to substantiate his appeal not only to traditional Jewish wisdom but also to philosophy and science.²  (Recall that Maimonides, who lived more than 800 years ago, was not only a rabbi but also a doctor, a fact that must have made his mother kvell.)

When religion and science clash, he taught, it’s our understanding of religion that needs updating — not empirical truth.  For him, pursuing truth was the ultimate religious act, glimpsing God’s “Active Intellect,” the animating force of the Universe.

This echoes U’netaneh Tokef, the signature prayer of the High Holy Days, which twice invokes emet, truth, in its opening verse: “Your throne is established in truth.  In truth, You are judge and plaintiff, counselor and witness.”  Many musical settings play up the word emet, truth, to underscore its centrality to the text and to Jewish theology.  (Fun fact: a few years back, a child born in our WRT family was given the name Emmet to honor the commanding way in which Cantor Stephen Merkel of blessed memory used to sing Emet in the U’netaneh Tokef.)  

Emet affirms order and meaning even amidst life’s chaos. When a loved one dies, we say, בָּרוּךְ דַּיַּן הָאֱמֶת, “Blessed are You, Judge of Truth,” acknowledging death as part of God’s eternal plan.  Death may just be the one true thing we know in this life. 

The Talmud puts it this way:  חוֹתָמוֹ שֶׁל הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא אֱמֶת, “The seal of the Holy One is Emet – Truth.”³  Seeking truth is a way to draw nearer to God.  It illuminates the Divine presence in the everyday workings of the world.  God and Truth, Ultimate Reality, are indistinguishable from each other.

At the same time, the truth hurts, doesn’t it?  A world in which everyone spoke the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, all the time, would be annoying at best, and — to tell the truth — unlivable.  Judaism gets this.  Sometimes, other values, good Jewish values, must take precedence.  Lying to save a life (pikuach nefesh) is not only permitted but mandated.  Tact — which is really just socially enforced lying — is almost always a good idea, especially when it will spare another person from embarrassment.  Judaism considers humiliating another person tantamount to shedding blood.⁴  It’s traumatic, so liberties should be taken with the truth in order to avoid it.   

Judaism even encourages a so-called “white lie” for the sake of marital and household harmony, what we call shalom bayit or “shalom in the home.”⁵  The social order depends to some degree on kicking truth out of the room, to make some room for compassion. 

A midrash imagines the angels debating God’s decision to create humankind.  They broke into factions, some saying: “Don’t do it!” and others saying, “Go for it!”  

“You should totally create human beings for the sake of kindness and righteousness,” went one argument, “because they will be capable of such incredible compassion and nobility.”  The other group countered, “For the sake of peace, and especially, if You care at all about truth, please, God, whatever you do, do not create people.  They will mess everything up with their fighting and lies.”

So what did the Holy One do?  God took truth and cast it to the ground, even over the objections of the angels who pointed out that “God’s very seal is truth.”⁶  (The angels were great at quoting Talmud.)  Ever since, human beings have been amazing at a lot of things, but telling the truth, or hearing the truth, have not been foremost among them.

As for why God chose to exile truth, the Talmud never says.  

Maybe because truth is our greatest struggle.         

Can we handle the truth?  Not so much.  

Illusions about ourselves or our beliefs are comforting, difficult to give up. When confronted with hard truths, we cling to our security blankets, avoid the cold, hard facts, blame others.  Combine this with the forces presently arrayed against truth — pervasive propaganda, algorithms curating everything we see and hear and read — and we risk a world in which any podcaster with a mic can sway millions with emotionally charged falsehoods. 

The problem isn’t just the powerful; it’s us, if we don’t question everything we’re fed.

This isn’t abstract.  Lives and livelihoods are at stake.  As the planet heats up, there are lots of ways to formulate thoughtful policies that acknowledge the delicate balance among industry, environment, and economy.  But denying the science will lead only to ignorant decisions.  When conspiracy theorists with no medical training dismiss accepted science, the best of our intellectual capital will be alienated and bring their skills elsewhere.  Even more, when scientific truth is denied or ignored, diseases will spread, and the vulnerable — children, the elderly, the poor — will suffer and die.  My mom’s life was saved in 1955 by the polio vaccine, available just weeks before her diagnosis.  For me — indeed, for all of us — this is personal, not political.

Judaism’s embrace of science and reason, unusual if not unique among the world’s faith traditions, further amplified by Reform Judaism’s founders, like Rabbi Abraham Geiger, is one of its greatest strengths.  In 1836, Geiger criticized teaching biblical stories as fact, advocating for a “scientific” study of texts and critical reasoning over blind dogma.⁷  It is with Geiger as my inspiration that I have, throughout my rabbinate, tried to hold fast to this maxim:  “Never teach children anything they will later have to unlearn.”  

This relentless pursuit of truth must be restored, especially in academia, where truth — and Jews — sometimes feel exiled.

Many of you share a feeling that along with truth, we Jews have been, in a sense, cast out from the same venerated institutions that generations of American Jews held up as the pinnacle of merit and achievement.

Over the last year, as a proud alum, I’ve joined the recently formed Amherst Alumni Alliance Against Antisemitism (that’s five A’s if you’re counting).  In what is either a bizarre coincidence or proof of God having a sense of humor, I am one of at least thirteen (!) practicing rabbis to have graduated from Amherst College, a fact that defies statistical probability.  (I guess something must be in the water up there because Rabbi Platcow attended UMass just down the street and look what happened to her.)  

Over the past year, I’ve enjoyed regular dialogue with the College President, the Alliance, my fellow alumni rabbis, and, best of all, a wonderful group of Jewish students making their way through the complicated post-October-7th landscape on campus, with whom I got to share a memorable Shabbat in March as the invited guest of Amherst Hillel.  

That visit bolstered my hope in the next generation of Jewish learners and leaders.  These students inspired me with their open-mindedness, their sense of belonging among the Jewish People, their love of Jewish tradition, their willingness to be “out and proud” as Zionists, and their probing thoughtfulness in negotiating the complexities of their Zionism while a brutal war in Gaza rages.  If these students represent our future, even in part, we ought to devote our energies to strengthening their resolve and their opportunities to thrive on campus as Jews and Zionists, and not fall into panic or despair.

Thanks to the concerted efforts of concerned alumni, positive steps taken at Amherst include the Board rejecting divestment from Israel, adopting clearer protest policies, holding mandatory trainings and faculty workshops on antisemitism.

But challenges remain.  Amherst has a small Jewish student body, few Jewish Studies faculty, and no Jewish Studies major.  A course on the History of Israel has not been offered since 2016.  Moreover, a narrative that pervasively frames Israel as a “settler-colonial state” can be found across curricula, including in my beloved English department.  Truth emerges through repeated testing, skepticism, and refining ideas based on evidence.  Without a robust exposure to viewpoint diversity, how can students test ideas to find truth?

Reviving “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” on our campuses shouldn’t involve government overreach or financial penalties that harm research and exploit antisemitism for partisan ends.  Instead, alumni like us can hold our institutions accountable.  We can interrogate curricula, support Jewish students, and demand rigorous debate.  What I have learned from my experience over the last year is that any one of us who cares about what’s happening on the campuses where we once studied, or where our children and grandchildren presently attend, has the ability to get involved and insist that our academic institutions focus their mission on the pursuit of truth.

Can we handle the truth?  Out there, truth is under relentless assault — in the halls of academia, where facts are twisted to fit the ideological agendas of the left; in the public square, where they are subjugated to the ideological agendas of the right; and, of course, online, where they are just twisted.

But the battle for truth begins not out there, but in here.  On Yom Kippur, as we turn inward in teshuvah, we confront hard truths about ourselves — the flaws we’d rather not bring to light, the unspoken regrets, all the ways we’ve just missed the mark.  No hiding. No excuses. Just the truth.  

So many of life and literature’s great heroic figures pursued and learned the truth, even at great personal peril:  Socrates, Galileo, Malala Yousafsai, Hester Prynne, Luke Skywalker, Elphaba.

So many tragic figures just couldn’t handle the truth, to their ultimate ruin:  King Saul, King David, King Lear (it’s a lot of kings come to think of it); Javert, Madame Bovary, Michael Corleone.

And now it’s Yom Kippur.  The day to face the truth.  It’s in the unfiltered, unflinching, inward gaze that true growth begins, paving the way for repentance, renewal, and a heart made whole. 

Then we can emerge with integrity made stronger, our deeds more aligned with our values, ready to carry the light of our truest selves into a new year and a world starving for honesty.  

After all, we can’t really expect truth out there if we won’t face the truth in here.  

When the angels saw that God, putting together all the pieces that would build a human being, had cast truth out, they protested.  “You would undermine Your byword, Your very seal?!”  

They begged God to take Truth back. They screamed into the cosmic void:

!תַּעֲלֶה אֱמֶת מִן הָאָרֶץ

Let truth rise up from the ground!

This year, let’s help our better angels make this prayer come true.  

Let’s recommit to help truth rise up from the ground.  

Let’s get off of social media and spend more time reading books. 

Let’s have some good conversations with real people where we can respectfully debate well-considered ideas and maybe even concede that none of us has all the answers.

Let’s be more willing to hear the truth even when we don’t like the source.

Let’s look in the mirror and face what we see.

Let me leave you one of the truest things I know.

It comes from my considerable experience driving to Jewish cemeteries across the tri-state area:  

When you get lost, there’s no shame in asking for directions.

O God of Truth, whose seal is truth, guide us in truth.

We have lost our way. 

Help us find our way back home.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah

1. “Trump Cannot Win His War on History,” New York Times, March 31, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/opinion/trump-war-history.html ↩︎
2. Maimonides, Introduction to Shemonah Perakim (Eight Chapters).
   ↩︎
3. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 55a. ↩︎
4.  “כׇּל הַמַּלְבִּין פְּנֵי חֲבֵירוֹ בָּרַבִּים, כְּאִילּוּ שׁוֹפֵךְ דָּמִים” – Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 58b. ↩︎
5. See Midrash Vayikra Rabbah 9:9 on Genesis 18:13. ↩︎
6. Midrash Bereshit Rabbah 8:5, translated & adapted by J. Blake. ↩︎
7. Abraham Geiger, “The Youthful Rebel,” published in Michael A. Meyer and W. Gunther Plaut, editors, The Reform Judaism Reader: North American Documents.  New York: URJ Press, 2000, p. 7. ↩︎

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!
   ↩︎
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.
   ↩︎
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. ↩︎

Shabbat Lech-Lecha 5785

Sermon delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Friday, November 8th, 2024

Dear Samson,

I wouldn’t blame you if you’d rather think about sports or music or video games or even school, anything but the Election of 2024.  

Still, I hope you’ll indulge these few words.  2024 is the last time you will be a bystander to a Presidential Election.  Today you are a sophomore at Mamaroneck High School.  In November 2028, you will (presumably) be a sophomore in college.  I also voted in my first Presidential election my sophomore year, in 1992, and I remember how thrilling it felt to participate directly in the project of American democracy.  It still thrills, whatever the outcome.  I’m excited for you to experience this in just a few years.  

Between now and then, I hope you’ll give serious thought to what it means to be an American Jew, and how you will grow into this identity, because that’s who will cast his vote in 2028. An American Jew.  

I believe it is an extraordinary privilege to be an American Jew.  It is a heritage that came to you not by choice, but which you must now affirm for yourself.  This is the essential promise you made a little over two years ago when you spoke about Jewish adulthood, maturity, responsibility, blah blah blah—all the stuff every Bar or Bat Mitzvah says, but which remains a promise only partially fulfilled until later in life, if ever.  In any case, if the history of human adolescent development is any indication, I feel confident that the next four years will prove formative for how you will choose to show up as a grownup in a reeling world.

I’m writing this letter the week of Parashat Lech-Lecha, so, naturally, I seek guidance in these words of Torah.  Our portion revolves around the figure of Abraham: his journeys, his family, his adventures and trials.  Mostly, though, this is a parasha about self-discovery, character formation, and moral courage.  

God’s first words to Abraham are Lech-Lecha which give the portion its title.  Idiomatically we translate Lech-Lecha “go forth” but the Rabbis read the words literally:  Lech, “Go,” L’cha, “unto yourself.”¹  God sent Abraham off to discover a new land, a new religion, a new people, yes, but also to discover Abraham.  After self-discovery, everything else would follow. 

You too are entering an age of self-discovery.  With adolescence comes the realization that not every adult can be trusted or believed; not every authority should be followed; politicians, professors, parents, and even well-meaning uncles who happen to be rabbis may have their own interests and agendas that are not in line with your emerging moral sensibilities, values, and priorities.  I am not recommending dismissing these voices out-of-hand because, in the main, I like to think that the grownups in your life have your best interests at heart.  But, increasingly, you’ll have to decide for yourself what is best. 

And as you do, as you make your own introspective Lech-Lecha journey, I hope you will center your heritage as an American Jew in your emerging character and as a source of moral courage.  I hope you will invest time and thought and effort to study our history, tradition, and moral priorities, which anchor our experience as American Jews.  I hope you will internalize that your Jewish heritage is not an old scroll to be dusted off and paraded around for ceremonial purposes but rather an Etz Chayim, a living tree of immense beauty, wisdom, and spiritual nourishment.  

I hope you will remember that you are part of a people whose story runs 3,000 years deep, as wide as the globe, and whose roots are planted in the soil of Eretz Yisrael, our Biblical homeland, which, for all its difficulties and dilemmas, is still home to half of your global Jewish family, whose destiny is inextricably bound up with your own, and whose thriving as a vital, secure, and democratic Jewish state—essential to the Jewish future—is up to us. 

And I hope you will remember that your American heritage has allowed your Judaism to thrive in a country founded on the precept of religious freedom for all.

Your American Jewish heritage confirms that immigration is a source of national strength and pride.  Your ancestors, all of my great-grandparents, came here because to be a Jew in Russia at the turn of the 20th century was either a dead end or a death sentence.  They came here to escape antisemitic mistreatment and violence.  Your great-grandfather, my Pop-Pop Acky (he was Grammy’s father) fought as a combat medic with the First Marines in Iwo Jima and Okinawa, believing, rightly, that there was no dissonance between being a devoted Jew and a patriotic American, no matter one’s political party. 

Your family continues to demonstrate that civic engagement is a Jewish value. Aunt Kelly spent Election Day as a poll-worker, her small contribution toward ensuring the free and fair elections that stand as the cornerstone of American Democracy.  She told me how moving it was to see parents taking their kids to vote, how a number of first-time voters, some of them advanced in age, proudly cast their ballots.  She heard tons of different languages, saw people of every skin color and cultural background, each bringing their own distinctive voices and values to their votes.  

You are an American Jew, with values rooted in these symbiotic identities.  I hope you remember that when we talk about our “values,” especially as proud American Reform Jews, we mean all of the following, in no particular order:  

• Honoring the dignity of every human being; 
• Protecting the rights of the disenfranchised:  whether of women to bodily and reproductive autonomy, or of refugees to safety and opportunity, or of the poor to health care, or of minorities to equal treatment under the law;
• Recognizing the centrality of Israel to Jews and Judaism; 
• Combating the ever-metastasizing evil of antisemitism, whether here or abroad, whether it comes from anti-Israel activists on the left, or White Nationalists on the right;
• Protecting our precious environment and natural resources; 
• Providing tzedakah for the needy;
• Curbing gun violence and saving lives; 
• Cultivating our education and critical reasoning;
• Laboring for the greater good;
• Living and loving beyond ourselves and our narrow self-interest.

If I had to boil my list down to one line, I’d choose a precept from Pirkei Avot, an almost-2,000-year-old collection of Jewish wisdom:  Ba-makom she-ein anashim, hishtadel lihiyot ish.  “In a place where no one is a mensch, be a mensch.”²  

Still, the way I see it, we Jews ought not be “one-issue” voters because Judaism is not a one-issue way of life.  Of course what we may choose to emphasize from a long list of authentic Jewish values remains a personal choice, but there is no single “best” or overriding Jewish value or priority.  We should never be demeaned for how we vote or which political party we favor, so long as we act with Jewish thoughtfulness and integrity. 

I know that to you, four years must seem, like, really, really far away.  There are a thousand math lessons and English essays and standardized tests to get through, a permit and a license, college visits and applications, prom and graduation, shows to perform, baseball stadiums to visit, and destinations far and wide to explore.  I learned this week that taking out the trash has been added to your roster of household responsibilities, so I would not wish to overwhelm you with too many other grown-up headaches.  Unfortunately for you, and for all of us, the world is an overwhelming place and often the only grown-up choice is to keep striding into the maelstrom, or, at least, down to the curb.

Abraham’s first journey, the journey of introspection, leads to his next journey—the journey of the rest of his life—a journey of moral courage.  

The ancient Rabbis explained this by way of a parable.  An ordinary person, they said, was going about his business, traveling from one place to another, when he noticed a castle in flames, and exclaimed, “Why is no one doing anything?  How can it be that there is no one to look after this palace?”  Just then, a voice called out from the highest balcony—already engulfed in the inferno—crying out, “I am the owner of the palace.”  At that moment, the midrash goes, God selected this ordinary person—Abraham by name—to begin the story of the Jewish people.³  

The Rabbis found that Abraham merited leadership because he saw the fire.  “Why is this happening?” he asked. “Why is no one doing anything?”  

What makes Abraham special is that he could see things not only for what they are, but for the way they could be.  

Sir Jonathan Sacks of blessed memory, who was the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, explains:  “Judaism begins not in wonder that the world is, but in protest that the world is not as it ought to be.  It is in that sacred discontent that Abraham’s journey begins.”⁴  

Sacred discontent is what I wish for you, dear nephew.  In the coming days and months and years you will have to wade through endless streams of comments by and about our President-Elect.  What he said, what he did, what he posted online.  I often think you are the smartest member of our family for your comprehensive disengagement with social media.  With that said, this torrent of rhetoric will be unavoidable and you will have to figure out what it all means to you.  You will have to learn how to tune out much of it without excusing the worst of it, particularly the coarse and demeaning language reserved for women, minorities, immigrants, foreigners, people with disabilities like your siblings, Jakey and Shirah, people who identify as LGBTQIA+, political opponents, and the most vulnerable in our society.    

You will have to remember that in those places where hateful speech is permitted to flourish while truth-telling books are banned, where irrational conspiracy theories are amplified while science is shunned, where policies that promote liberty are suppressed while autocratic impulses are indulged, Jews have never fared well.

There will be times when you feel powerless to make a difference.  I know I often do.  These are turbulent and precarious times and I do not know any better than anyone what will happen with Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, NATO or North Korea over these next four years; or what our poor, fractured country will do with all its festering bile and clattering discord.  Personally, I wish each of our political parties and their leaders would take a big, long Lech-Lecha journey of introspection, character re-formation, and moral courage. 

But as for our journeys:  Abraham inspires us not only to hope and pray for a better tomorrow but also to work for it, which is simply another way of saying that we should plan to show up as Jews in the world at a time when the world needs us. You, and me, and all of us. 

Most of all, Samson, you will have to remember that to be an American Jew is not only an extraordinary responsibility but also an extraordinary opportunity, to journey deep within and emerge with Abrahamic character:  morally courageous, and never too content.

May God bless you, and all of us, too.   

Uncle Jon

1. See Genesis 12:1 and Rashi, ad loc. ↩︎
2. Pirkei Avot, 2:5. ↩︎
3. Based on Bereshit Rabbah, 39:1. ↩︎
4. Sacks, “A Palace in Flames: Family Edition.” ↩︎

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. ↩︎