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. ↩︎

Friday, November 10, 2023

What appears, in the opening verses of this week’s parasha, Chayei Sarah, to describe a routine real estate transaction, turns out to be a statement of religious significance for us and our connection to Eretz Yisrael, our Biblical homeland.

The passage concerns Abraham who, having just become a widower (at the ripe old age of 137) with the death of Sarah (not far behind, at 127), must negotiate the purchase of a suitable burial plot from the local landowners, a people known as the Hittites, who trace their origins to what today is Turkey.

By the earliest period of Israelite history–we’re talking about 3,500 years ago, give or take–the Hittites had already become a dominant Near Eastern civilization, ruling over large swaths of the territory of today’s Middle East, including Canaan, or what we think of as Eretz Yisrael, the Biblical Land of Israel.

The passage describes a detailed negotiation between the bereaved Abraham and a man named Ephron, son of Tzohar, the designated representative of the Hittites.  After exchanging formalities and explaining Abraham’s unfortunate circumstances, extensive bargaining ensues around the terms under which a burial plot may be purchased.

The language of their negotiation is polite, even obsequious, filled with formal entreaties and honorific titles.  

Abraham begins modestly:  גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב אָנֹכִ֖י עִמָּכֶ֑ם — “I am a stranger and sojourner among you.”  No mention of his wealth, his storied exploits, his Divine election, or his and Sarah’s status as patriarch and matriarch of a fledgling nation.  For the purpose of buying land, he’s just a “stranger and a sojourner.”  

The Hittites reply:  “Hear us, my lord!  You are the elect of God among us.”  From there, the negotiation proceeds like a ritualistic dance, right down to the way Abraham bows before the landowning citizens of the Hittite nation.  When they finally agree upon a figure, the price is steep and each shekel carefully counted.

After twenty verses–the entire 23rd chapter of Genesis!–the episode concludes on a perfunctory note, with Abraham officially acquiring the Cave of Machpelah in what is today the West Bank city of Hebron, as a permanent burial site for Sarah (and, later, for Abraham himself, and their posterity).  It is, to this day, a sacred site of pilgrimage for religious Jews (and a frequent hotbed of unrest between Palestinians and Haredi Jews who reside in Hebron).  

This kind of elaborate negotiation may in fact be familiar to anyone who’s ever bought anything in the bustling souks and bazaars of the Middle East.  My friend and teacher Rabbi Les Gutterman once shared a story originally told by Rabbi Mordechai Waxman (of blessed memory), who had

visited Athens where he was invited out to dinner.  On the way, he saw a vendor selling flowers and so he stopped to buy some for his hosts.  He asked how much they were and the vendor said, “Twenty-six drachmas.”  He started to reach into his pocket and take out the money when the vendor said, “No, no, no.  You don’t understand how it is done.  I am supposed to say, ‘Twenty-six drachmas’ and you are supposed to say, ‘No way.  The most I will give you for these poor flowers is five drachmas.’  And I am supposed to say, ‘You are taking bread away from my children, but I will come down to twenty-three drachmas.’  And you are supposed to say, ‘No way.  The most I will give you for such poor, half-wilted flowers is ten drachmas.’  And I am supposed to say, ‘You are a merciless negotiator and these flowers really cost me much, much more than this, but I will give them to you for eighteen drachmas.’  And so we are supposed to go back and forth until we finally agree on thirteen drachmas.’

Rabbi Waxman said that he stood corrected and started to pay the thirteen drachmas.  The man said, “No, thank you.  From my students, I don’t take money.” And he gave him the flowers for free.

So, back to Abraham and the delicate matter of buying a burial plot.  Why such painstaking detail?  Why such length?  Why such formality?  Does the passage exist merely to to convey helpful tips for the next time we find ourselves bargaining in the Middle East?  Are we, like Rabbi Waxman, just hapless students in the marketplace of life, with Torah our humble guidebook, filled with practical wisdom for the naïve traveler?  Or is there more to it?

This evening I’d like to offer a couple of takeaways from this passage which illuminate its importance: first, in Jewish history, and second, in the Jewish psyche.  

The first takeaway comes from Avraham Ibn Ezra, the great 12th Century Spanish Sage.  He said that the thrust of this passage is “to make known the special status of Eretz Yisrael, surpassing all other lands, both for the living and the dead, as well as to fulfill God’s promise of a permanent inheritance for Abraham [and his posterity].”  

Ibn Ezra speaks to the centrality of Eretz Yisrael in Jewish life, Jewish history, and Jewish memory, a statement made all the more powerful–and ironic–given that Ibn Ezra, like generations of Jews before and after him, lived and worked exclusively in the Diaspora.  But even in Jewish dispersion–perhaps all the more so in Jewish dispersion–Israel has played a central role in our spiritual lives, both, as Ibn Ezra himself notes, for the living, and the dead.  

Even nowadays, Jews around the world make plans to be buried in Israel.  Here at WRT, we have, over the years, assisted a number of congregants with this request for their loved ones.  In fact, one estimate has it that over 60% of El Al planes carry a dead body to be buried in Eretz Yisrael.  

An article published a little over two weeks ago in the New York Times highlighted “seven Jewish New Yorkers whose lifelong desires were being fulfilled. They were in seven coffins in the cargo hold of an El Al flight to Israel, where they would be buried.”  Some Jews cling to an old belief that the soil of Eretz Yisrael absolves one of earthly sin–which is why, even here, outside Israel, many are buried with a satchel of soil from the Holy Land in the casket, or sprinkled in the grave.  Others simply view burial in Eretz Yisrael as a final homecoming. 

Because that’s what Israel is for the Jew:  Home.  Even for those of us who have never lived there, even if we’ve never even visited.  

Today, our home is under siege, and not just from Hamas.  Even after 75 years of internationally recognized statehood, Israel’s legitimacy is being challenged like never before.  I, like you, am sick and tired of inflammatory and derogatory claims hurled by anti-Israel activists in the public square, on college campuses, on social media, all part of a concerted effort to delegitimize the legitimate homeland of the Jewish People.  

Words like “settler colonialism,” in particular, get under my skin.  “Settler colonialism” is a smear intended to depict Israel as a society illegitimately established by European imperialists seeking to displace or dominate an indigenous population, when in actuality Zionism began as an anti-colonialist liberation movement seeking to bring a displaced indigenous population back home after 2,000 years of forced exile.  

In fact, in Israel’s pre-State years, Jewish patrons like Baron Edmond de Rothschild, emulating Abraham, purchased land in Eretz Yisrael directly from the Ottoman Empire (that is, before the Ottomans began banning land purchases by Jews and Christians alike). The vaunted Jewish National Fund got its start with land purchases from the Ottoman Empire.   

Later, Zionism would become a great force against British colonialism, throwing off the shackles of imperial rule to establish independent statehood in 1948.  So you can understand why the portrayal of Zionism as a “settler-colonialist” movement sets my teeth on edge.  

First and foremost, the episode at the outset of the parasha, in which Abraham acquires a burial plot in Eretz Yisrael, is intended to establish the legitimate claim of our people to this land.  He pays for the territory fair and square.  It passes to him and his posterity from its original owners without conditions and without contest.  The Torah wants to underscore that our people had a legal and inviolable claim to this place.  

And this leads us to the second takeaway, which is about the Jewish psyche, observable in how Abraham introduces himself at the outset of the parasha.  גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב אָנֹכִ֖י עִמָּכֶ֑ם, he says:  “I am a stranger and sojourner among you.”

In one of his celebrated public lectures, the great 20th Century Modern Orthodox Rabbi, scholar, and author, Rav Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, unpacked the paradox of Abraham’s dual title:  גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב in Hebrew.  He translates ger as stranger, but toshav he understands not merely as a “sojourner” but as a “resident.”  This is a totally valid translation.  Soloveitchik said:  

Avraham’s definition of his dual status, we believe, describes with profound accuracy the historical position of the Jew who resides in a predominantly non-Jewish society. He was the resident [תושב-toshav], like other inhabitants of Canaan, sharing with them a concern for the welfare of society, digging wells and contributing to the progress of the country in loyalty to its government and institutions. Here, Avraham was clearly a fellow citizen, a patriot among compatriots, joining others in advancing the common welfare.

However, there was another aspect, the spiritual, in which Avraham regarded himself as a stranger [גר-ger]….  His was a different faith and he was governed by perceptions, truths, and observances which set him apart from the larger faith community. In this regard, Avraham and his descendants would always remain “strangers” (Reflections of the Rav, Chapter 16, emphasis mine).

Through Rav Soloveitchik’s observation, we see how our passage reveals a deeper truth about Jews and Jewish identity throughout the ages… especially, now, in the post-1948 era of Jewish Statehood, of Jewish sovereignty and Jewish self-determination.  

For the vast majority of Jewish history we have lived, at best, like Abraham:  dual-status Jews, part resident, part alien.  For much of our history we could not obtain citizenship in the many far-flung lands and empires in which we put down roots.  In such cases, we adhered to the Talmudic dictum דינא דמלכותא דינא (dina d’malkhuta dina), “The law of the land is the law,” a statement of intent to become law-abiding citizens wherever we found ourselves, contributing, as Soloveitchik observes, “to the progress of the country in loyalty to its government and institutions,” including here in America.  Following the law of the land as a matter of Jewish principle also provided us with a preemptive response to the oft-leveled antisemitic charge of “dual loyalties.”  

Given the appalling rise in antisemitism right here, right now, in reaction to Israel’s defensive war against Hamas, many of us feel acutely aware of that part of the Jewish condition known as ger: the stranger, the foreigner.  It accounts for why so many of us feel particularly abandoned and alone at this time, and, yes, betrayed.  We think:  “How can you treat me this way when I, and my parents, and my grandparents, and even perhaps my great-grandparents, were all born in this country and have been nothing less than exemplary, loyal, patriotic, citizens?”  How, indeed. 

In the Torah, the words “ger v’toshav,” “stranger and resident,” are written with a maqaf, a hyphen, between them, underscoring that for the Jew, our two identities are inextricably linked: at some level, we are always strangers, even when we have resided in a place for a very long time, abiding by the law and contributing to the social welfare.  We have never been able to shed our identity as “strangers” in the eyes of others, even when we no longer see it ourselves.  

1948 was supposed to have changed that.  This, then, is the true meaning of Israel: that we would have a place where we can be toshav and no longer ger:  a place to call home.  A place that would change not only Jewish history but also the Jewish psyche.  A home: not just for the dead but for the living, for the living, thriving Jew; for the living, thriving Jewish people.  1948 severed the hyphen between ger and toshav and allowed us to live out the destiny to which Abraham only alluded, the destiny to which God had called him:

Lhiyot am chofshi b’artzeinu

Eretz Tzion vYerushalayim

“To be a free people in our land:

The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

Shabbat Shalom

Delivered October 13, 2023 | 28-29 Tishrei 5784

Said the Kotzker Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Morgenstern of Kotzk, Poland, the direct ancestor (it so happens) of our own dear friend, colleague and neighbor, Rabbi Jonathan Morgenstern of Young Israel of Scarsdale:

אין שלם מלב שבור

There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.  

It is a paradox, and yet it is true:  we grow more whole when our hearts break, because we grow in compassion, empathy, wisdom, and understanding.  When Leonard Cohen sang, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in,” he conveyed a truth about the human heart as much as about the world.  

So much has grown up in the cracks of our broken hearts—mine as much as yours—ever since Hamas terrorists attacked Israel last Shabbat, Saturday, October 7th, on the Festival of Simchat Torah.  Through our brokenness we have become more empathic, more emotionally and spiritually connected across great geographical distance.  Israelis (and Diaspora Jews) have, by and large, set aside enough differences that have been tearing us apart from within for the last year, in order to stand together, behind a wartime unity government:  a development that we welcome, even if brought about through broken-heartedness. 

It is not easy to teach Torah with a broken heart.  It’s not easy to do anything with a broken heart.  But Judaism does not summon us to do easy things.  Judaism demands that we do hard things, holy things.  And when it comes to a Jewish understanding of morality, the Torah provides eternally relevant precepts.  So we must learn, teach, and live Torah, even with our broken hearts.  

As it so happens, the shedding of innocent blood is one of the first topics that the Torah takes up.  When, in this week’s parasha, Bereshit, the very first portion of the Torah, Cain slays his brother Abel, the Torah reports:   

וַיֹּ֖אמֶר מֶ֣ה עָשִׂ֑יתָ ק֚וֹל דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ צֹעֲקִ֥ים אֵלַ֖י מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה׃

And God said, What have you done?  Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground!¹

In Judaism, to shed innocent blood is a gross affront to God.  Even in a world where human justice and compassion are in short supply, the Divine demand for justice and compassion is unrelenting.

Whole families, whole communities, snuffed out in an orgy of violence. 1,300 Israelis murdered. Human beings targeted simply because they were Jews living in the world’s only Jewish State. Children butchered in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. Revelers at a desert party gunned down in cold blood. 

Our Israeli family members, maimed, tortured, raped—the young, the old, the defenseless and disabled.  Jews kidnapped and paraded through the streets of Gaza while onlookers cheered.  Some living, terrified; others, already beaten and bullet-hole-ridden corpses.  

You know all this and yet we must repeat it, again and again, for the world to hear, to hear that our brothers’ blood, our sisters’ blood, cries out to God—and to us—from the ground!

Picture Adam and Eve, helpless parents clutching each other when they learn that their boy was slaughtered in an open field, and you will know the heart of every Israeli, every Jew, every person with an even rudimentary grasp of basic morality and human decency.

Unfortunately, just five days in, we’re already seeing plenty of folks taking up airtime without a rudimentary grasp of basic morality:

Do not stand for the sophistry of those who want to convince you that the situation is “complicated.”

Do not accept the specious argument that Hamas cares about the lives of Palestinians living in Gaza or the West Bank, or about a two-state solution, or about 1967 borders, or about human rights or freedom—buzzwords and phrases that their defenders casually throw around as they try to turn the conversation away from the unavoidable fact.  To wit:  Hamas has been crystal clear, in word and in deed, about their motives:  to murder and terrorize as many Jews as they can, to shed as much Jewish blood as they can.  Not only Israeli blood but Jewish blood, targeting us wherever we live.

Do not stay silent when pundits on TV, and your so-called “friends” whom you follow on social media, and your college and high-school classmates, and your elected officials, engage in “both sides-ism,” moral relativism, or rationalize the murder of Jews as the legitimate tactics of a desperate and deprived Palestinian people—which, by and large, they are—or blame Israel for the entirety of Palestinian suffering, or try to link this vicious program on the “occupation.”  

No.  

There is no moral justification for murder, full stop. 

Hamas has announced its intention to avenge “Al Aqsa,” the chief Islamic shrine in Jerusalem, meaning that Hamas sees this as an Islamic Holy War against the Jews and the Jewish State:  not against the IDF in the West Bank, or the blockade of Gaza overseen jointly by Israel and its strategic ally Egypt, a Sunni Arab dictatorship that nonetheless does not misconstrue Hamas’s intentions, correctly categorizing Hamas as a terrorist organization in league with the Muslim Brotherhood, and a direct threat to Egypt and the Middle East.  

Egypt and Israel know full well what Hamas stands for, and so does the United States, and so do we, as do all people of conscience and unclouded moral vision:  Hamas seeks a holy war that will eradicate Jews from the earth.  Their charter says as much, in writing. 

Do not be seduced by the reductionist, morally relativistic, and intellectually shoddy arguments of those who would analyze this nightmare according to a simple body count, fetishizing “proportionality,” as if morality were simply a game of tit for tat, as if it would be an acceptable outcome to allow even a single Israeli family to live in terror and trauma in their own country. Would any of us Americans ever accept such an arrangement with a virulent enemy on our borders?²

As I highlight all of these talking points that we are hearing from those with broken moral compasses, I also want to take a moment to highlight the bravery and moral clarity of other leaders.  We applaud the strong and outspoken support of the Biden administration, including the unwavering moral clarity of the President, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Earlier this week I spoke with our own New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand who has been an outspoken, compassionate, and supportive ally and who has pledged ongoing support for Israel and for the New York Jewish community, including Westchester Reform Temple.  Her words, sent by email just a few hours ago, show us what moral clarity looks like.  She writes:

This was a very difficult and tragic week in the wake of Hamas’ attack against Israel and the evil atrocities committed against innocent men, women and children. I strongly condemn this unprovoked terrorist attack and stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel and the Jewish community in this moment of tragedy. We share your sorrow and your grief.

We also share your resolve. I will be working hard to make sure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself and support efforts to safely recover hostages, including American citizens, who are being held by Hamas.

Let me make something clear: the United States will support Israel in its efforts to defend itself and its people. This a moment to show the world and our adversaries that the bond between the United States and Israel is unwavering and unbreakable.   

I want to thank the Senator’s Senior Adviser and Senior Counsel, our congregant Patti Lubin, who is here with us tonight, as well as our congregant, Westchester District Attorney Mimi Rocah, also here in the sanctuary, both of whom have been allies and friends to us all.

And, just this afternoon, I engaged in conversation with a Harvard student who grew up at WRT.  He is a student leader who helps to run a Speakers’ Forum, bringing in noted public intellectuals to hold forth on the Harvard campus about pertinent issues.  To his dismay, a majority of the student board of the Forum could not agree to publish a simple statement unanimously condemning Hamas’s terror, even as the draft also acknowledged the human cost of this war to innocent life, Israeli and Palestinian alike.  As an act of principled protest, he and two fellow student leaders resigned from the Forum this afternoon.  

We offer deepest gratitude to all those leaders whose words and deeds are lighting the way. You practice what we preach. You live the values the Torah teaches.  

So let us return to Torah:

ק֚וֹל דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ צֹעֲקִ֥ים אֵלַ֖י מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה׃

Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!

The definitive midrash on this verse, Bereshit Rabbah 22:9, quoted by Rashi, observes that the word for blood, usually the Hebrew דם, “dam,” is presented here in the plural, דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ, “d’mei achicha,” literally, “your brother’s bloods cry out to me from the ground,” affirming that when Cain slew Abel he also destroyed all possible descendants.  The blood of all potential life was also on the hands of the murderer.

So the Talmud says, and so we must affirm, that to destroy one life is to destroy an entire world. 

And, conversely, to save a life is to save an entire world.³ 

So let us give thanks for all those Israelis and their allies—the soldiers, civilians, medical workers, volunteers, donors, parents, children, and friends—who have been heroically saving lives, even, for some, at the cost of their own lives.  From the moment that gunmen burst into their homes, many of them fending off attackers with whatever makeshift weapons they could find around their house, some with only their bare hands. 

Let us give thanks for the brave men and women of the IDF who have been tasked with the unthinkable:  to save the lives of those taken hostage while minimizing the loss of innocent lives trapped in the Gaza Strip (despite the cheap price that Hamas places on Palestinian lives). 

And let us do now what we must, to save lives, the paramount mitzvah of the Jewish tradition.

Our WRT website, wrtemple.org, maintains a regularly updated list of organizations for which we encourage your robust support, placing a priority on those that are saving lives and providing care for Israelis in harm’s way.  

WRT’s Rabbis’ Discretionary Fund provides tens of thousands of dollars of tzedakah each year to support our partner organizations in Israel, and, this year, we will be directing our tzedakah foremost toward those charities that are saving lives and healing wounds (physical and emotional), including the many incredible Israeli medical facilities and emergency services that work tirelessly to save lives without regard for nationality or creed:  Jewish and Muslim lives, Israeli and Palestinian lives alike.  

Even as our brothers’ and sisters’ bloods cry out to us from the ground, we must never tarnish our humanity by losing our ability to care about, and for, noncombatant Palestinian lives that have been, and will be, taken and injured in the war. 

Dear friends:

Our hearts are broken.  Our spirits are not.

Our hearts are broken.  Our resolve is not.

Our hearts are broken.  Our ability to show compassion is not.

Our hearts are broken.

But our People, the People of Israel, the Jewish People—We—are not.  

Am Yisrael Chai

1. Genesis 4:10. ↩︎
2. The article “Fighting a Just War Against Hamas Justly” by Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman is as relevant today as when it was written in 2009. ↩︎
3. Sanhedrin 37a. ↩︎

Rabbi Jonathan Blake, Westchester Reform Temple

For me, this Yom Kippur service began way back on a bright spring afternoon while driving home from a cemetery on Long Island, listening to WQXR Classical Radio. 

Fittingly for a post-funeral drive, on came the familiar strains of Mozart’s Requiem, the Catholic Mass for the dead, an undisputed masterwork that the master left unfinished at the time of his death at the age of 35.  A little “light traveling music.”

As it turns out, this recording of the Requiem jarred me right up in my seat:  it was, first of all, fast: too fast, I thought; dance-like, even.  Gone was the usual sense of gravity and grief, and, in its place, a vigor and something like mischief.  

No surprise, this new recording has attracted its fair share of detractors and defenders, with one critic in the former camp describing it as “brusque and perfunctory,” and another in the latter praising its “immediacy” and “intensity.”  

In any case, I was able to track down the recording, which was released in March and features a performance by a small (26-piece) period instrument ensemble called Les Concert des Nations, comprised of players from different countries, and a small (24-voice) choir from Spain¹ under the direction of the Catalan maestro and virtuoso string player Jordi Savall.

The liner notes feature an essay by the 81-year-old conductor, a bit of which I’d like to share with you now:

“The course of my whole life would undoubtedly have been very different,” he begins, “if, one October evening in 1955, I had not been fortunate enough to hear a live rehearsal of Mozart’s Requiem. 

“A few months earlier, on 1st August, I had turned 14, and luck would have it that my teacher… decided to prepare the work with the choir of the local Schola Cantorum. That evening I was on my way to the Conservatoire to attend my usual counterpoint and harmony lessons with him; for some reason, I didn’t receive the message telling me that classes had been cancelled due to a rehearsal of the Requiem.

“So I discreetly sat in on the rehearsal at the back of the hall, where the choir… was accompanied by just an organ and a string quartet. From the very first notes, I was totally fascinated by the incredible beauty of the work and the expressive power of the melodies, by every movement, by the originality of the various themes and the perfection of the counterpoint and the richness of the modulations. By the time the final bars sounded, I had been profoundly moved by this extraordinary experience, which transported me to a dimension I had never experienced before. 

“As I walked home, I said to myself that if music could touch a person’s soul so powerfully, I wanted to be a musician.

“A few days later, I went to Barcelona to buy a second-hand cello. On my way home, I tried to play a little and, after the first few moments of hesitation, I suddenly felt a great affinity with the instrument. The fingers of my left hand positioned themselves and moved easily and deftly on the neck of the instrument, while, with little effort, my right hand was quickly able to control the quality of the sound with the bow. In short, I had the wonderful feeling of being able to sing again and I felt completely at home! 

It was then that I understood the unique feeling described by Mark Twain when he said that ‘The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.’”² 

I read this story of the 14-year old Jordi Savall hearing Mozart’s Requiem for the first time, picking up his first cello, dragging the bow across the strings, hesitantly at first, then with greater confidence and ease; in time feeling the instrument vibrating in tandem with his body; developing the muscle memory to know where to put his fingers on the neck; his hands, ears, head and heart gradually falling into alignment; learning, by doing, how to make it sing—and I remembered a time in my life where, for lack of a better way of putting it, it all came together.  

It was early fall, 1992, the beginning of my sophomore year of college, and I had just turned nineteen.  Most of my classmates had spent freshman year figuring out the answers to important questions like these: 

• Rounding to the nearest 30 minutes, what is the minimum amount of sleep that I need in order not to come off like an idiot on my chemistry midterm?

And,

• Expressed as a percentage, how much of my monthly budget can I reasonably spend on (the admittedly excellent) slices from Antonio’s?

Meanwhile, I was turning myself into knots over this question:  

What am I going to do with my life? 

I may not have been the most fun to be around, but I was definitely going to be the first of my roommates to figure out my career path.

I had spent most of freshman year second-guessing my plans to major in geology and pursue a career in environmental science.  An exploratory dinner conversation with a hydrogeologist (that is, a person who tracks groundwater for a living) was (I know this will shock you) dry as a bone, and a field trip to unearth clamshells for a course in invertebrate paleontology, left me cold, especially the part where I found myself knee-deep in thick Cape Cod muck at 7 AM wondering how I would ever survive a career with so. much. dirt.  

Long story short, I began to contemplate alternative pathways for my life that felt like a better fit. 

Monday, September 28th, 1992—Rosh Ha-Shanah—was a quintessential New England early fall day:  bright sunshine, crisp breeze, temperatures in the mid-sixties.  As sunlight streamed through Johnson Chapel, the ecumenical space where Amherst and Smith College Hillel chapters join forces for the High Holidays, I sat in a pew about seven rows back and, some time during the chanting of the Unetaneh Tokef, a realization struck me.  I’m sure it didn’t take the form of words at the time, but, to me, it felt like the universe saying:  “You’re supposed to be up there on that bimah.”  

In that moment, many pieces of my life came together:  my love of Judaism, my desire to share it with others, to share its message of hope and its profound insights into the human condition in word and in song, in art and ritual, to teach and to learn, to shape lives in a direction of meaning:  these are some of the vibrations that resonated within me during that service.

Within days I had changed my major to English literature and set an appointment with the Hillel director, Rabbi Yechiael Lander (still alive and well at 96 years old!), to talk about my aspirations.  From the very first, he encouraged and supported my path and assured me that becoming a rabbi was a wonderful profession for a nice Jewish boy.

I feel blessed that, for me, “the day you find out why” happened when I was 19 and turned out to have spoken true and clear.  I have also come to believe that a “calling” is not reserved for clergy and does not require any special connection to God or spirituality.  

Each of us has a calling, maybe more than one.  Probably more than one!  Each of us can respond to an urging that comes from either within or without:  a way through life in which we can participate with purpose and presence in the unfolding of the world.

To hear the call, to feel the urge, to respond with our innermost being:  these are not privileges reserved for people of the cloth; any person in any clothing can discover what resonates with one’s soul.  

“Calling” is also not to be equated with career.  The two may overlap entirely, or partially, or not at all.  We know people who practice medicine, law, economics, psychotherapy; who are teachers and cooks and copywriters, athletes and entrepreneurs and countless other ways through the world, each of whom experienced a day they found out why.  

We also know people who who “found out why” the day a child, or grandchild, or pet, or another grown person came into their lives, transforming one another through relationship; people who “found out why” when they studied with a teacher, or read a book, or heard a song, or saw a work of art that changed the direction of their life; people who heard the call in the solitude of a mountain hike and people who heard the call in the crowd.  

Every moment of calling is about recognizing a connection with something greater than ourselves.  Some people would call that something “Nature,” others, “The Universe,” still others, “God.” 

Maestro Savall heard the call when he picked up a cello and felt a sudden affinity for the instrument.  The bow in his hands passed over the strings and instantly the vibrations of the strings passed through his hand into his body.  

It is like this, I think, for many of us:  a moment, hard to put into words, but perceptible nonetheless, when the vibrations of the universe resonate at the same frequency as the vibrations within us.  If this was you—as you sit here today and reflect—can you think of such a moment?

But what of those of us who haven’t felt the vibrations, who haven’t heard the call, who haven’t lived “the day you find out why?”  

And what about those who have felt the vibrations, but doubted them when others pooh-poohed them?  Maybe they told you your purpose was invalid, not worthy—especially if untethered to a paycheck.

Or what of those who once heard the call, but then things changed?  I know so many people who describe their greatest fear, or their greatest sorrow, as “lack of purpose.”  Many of them have suffered the loss of a person or profession that infused their lives with beauty or goodness, energy or meaning or all of these.  A brilliant surgeon debilitated by neuropathy, where the physical pain pales next to the injury to vocation (and sense of self-worth); a parent who has buried a child; a business owner who built the operation from scratch and had to close down during the pandemic.  

And what about those for whom the call stopped sounding, the vibrations stopped vibrating?  Last year, the New York Times featured a podcast interview with Dan White, Jr., a former church pastor who was diagnosed with symptoms of PTSD brought on by the stress of managing his congregation in a climate of growing political rancor, increasingly vindictive criticism directed at church leaders, and just plain burnout.  He noticed that he was not alone; he would meet pastor after pastor whose love for the church remained undiminished but who found the role they were asked to fulfill in the lives of others to be unlivable for themselves, and decided to call it quits.  Now Pastor White spends his days coaching and helping other pastors through their challenges.³  This “Great Pastor Resignation” mirrors recent trends in the Jewish clergy world as well; and, just as clergy are not unique in the ability to have a calling, so too are they not unique in their ability to hear the call no longer, to have it snuffed out.  

Things change.  The “day you find out why” turns out just to be one day, a day that mattered when it mattered, but not a day that should dictate all the days of your life.      

In 1958, the journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote a letter to his friend Hume Logan in response to a request for life advice.  What he wrote in that letter offers wisdom far beyond the author’s 22 years.  

It also illustrates why Thompson became an icon of the counterculture.  In the letter, he takes direct aim at the conventional advice that a person should set goals and follow them, telling his friend instead that the real question is “whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal.”

“[T]he tragedy of life,” he goes on to say, “is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man.”  He illustrates:

When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you….  As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway….  So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.”⁴

What Thompson is saying is that, until or unless we love where we’re going, we should spend our time floating rather than swimming.    

This is a great truth of existence:  The universe is in constant flux, and we along with it.  In the Vedic tradition, the great source of Eastern spirituality that flourished in the Indian subcontinent around the same time that the Torah was taking shape in Eretz Yisrael, we learn of the flow, the never-ending cycle of existence: Creation, Maintenance, and Destruction.  

Naturally resistant to change, we human beings often seek security in the maintenance of the status quo when in fact Nature insistently prods us toward destruction or creation: of the self, our goals, our way through the world.  Indeed, both are necessary for evolution: destruction clears the way for creation of the new; and the natural order of things is that destruction begins the moment after creation.  Life is meant to be dynamic.  Life is fluid, so why not your purpose?  Maybe we’re spending all this time swimming toward a goal, when, all along, we should have been figuring out how to float. 

So here we are, having floated all this way to the Yom Kippur message that I hope you will carry with you.  It comes to us from Avraham Yitzhak Kook, the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of pre-State Israel, and one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of his age, or any age.  

Rav Kook teaches:

“The primary role of Teshuva… is for a person to return to oneself, to the root of one’s own soul.”⁵

For Rav Kook, Teshuva should not be translated the way we usually do, as “repentance,” a “word that conjures up a negative sense of feeling sorry and broken for our misdeeds or moral shortcomings.” For Kook, Rabbi Aaron Goldscheider explains, “Teshuva is empowering and invigorating. Teshuva is a return to our true selves – bringing ourselves back to center.”⁶

Rav Kook affirms:  “Teshuva is when the soul feels the healthiest.”⁷

The essence of Yom Kippur is not the fasting, the beating of the chest, the confession of transgression.  We do not come here today to indulge in self-flagellation, to wallow in guilt or pity, “to put on sackcloth and ashes and bow our heads like a reed,” as the Prophet said.⁸  The essence of today is Teshuva:  to nurture our souls back to health and vitality.  To bring ourselves back to the center.  To stop swimming for a day and remember what it feels like to float.  

And if we’re still seeking the way, if we’re still hoping to “find out why” we’re here in the first place, consider this approach: instead of casting about, waiting for our purpose to announce itself, waiting to hear the call, we can just float in the direction of serving others.  There’s a world of need out there; countless ways to serve; countless ways to connect to something greater than yourself.  Who knows?  Maybe some other fellow seekers will find their purpose for the first time when they meet you.

“The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.’”   

Well, maybe, Mark Twain, but maybe not.  Maybe it’s not just two days.  It could be thousands.  Who can say?  Who knows when you’ll find out?  Maybe it’ll be tomorrow, or the tomorrow after that.  Who knows?  One of these days might just turn out to be the most important day of your life.

1. Capella Nacional de Catalunya. ↩︎
2. You can read Savall’s essay, and explore the recording, online at https://www.highresaudio.com/en/album/view/e84q8a/jordi-savall-w-a-mozart-requiem-in-d-minor-k-626. ↩︎
3. See/listen to “A Pastor Ripped Apart by our Divided Country,” recording and transcript available at New York Times (online edition), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/opinion/a-pastor-burned-out-by-our-divided-country.html. ↩︎
4. You can find Thompson’s letter online; I recommend seeking it out among the many other fine entries in the book Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, ed. Shaun Usher.  Edinburgh/London: Canongate UK, 2016. ↩︎
5. Orot Ha-Teshuva, 15:10. ↩︎
6. Rabbi Aaron Goldscheider, “Reimagining Repentance,” as cited on the website of the Orthodox Union, https://www.ou.org/holidays/reimagining-repentance/. ↩︎
7. Ibid, 5:1. ↩︎
8. Isaiah 58:5, which is taken from the Haftarah for the morning of Yom Kippur. ↩︎

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Rabbi Jonathan Blake, Westchester Reform Temple

Did you know that, with the newest iPhone software, you can undo a text message for up to two minutes after sending it?

Now, don’t take out your phones.  Trust me.  It works.  But, it’s not foolproof.  For starters, it notifies the recipient that your message was recalled.  And, it can’t prevent the recipient from seeing the message when it first comes through.  So, actually, it’s pretty useless.

The desire to hit “undo” strikes me as fundamental to human nature and fundamental to this Day of Atonement.  Aren’t we all here because of things we wish we could undo?

Unfortunately, in real life, all sorts of things can’t be undone.  Yom Kippur things.  Words that can’t be unsaid, promises that can’t be unbroken, feelings that can’t be unhurt.

And so we arrive at Kol Nidre: 

….כל נדרי ואסרי Kol Nidre ve’esarei …

All vows and oaths… that we have undertaken are hereby undone….  Our vows are not vows; our pledges are not pledges; our oaths are not oaths.

The Kol Nidre prayer is a preemptive “undo” button:  it’s a Medieval legal formula designed to annul, to undo, any vows that we might take upon ourselves from now until next Yom Kippur.  Most prayers plead with God.  This prayer pleads with us to think carefully about our future actions, to stop ourselves before we do something we’ll regret.  Something we can’t undo.  

I offer this interpretation because we have arrived at what I have come to think of as a “Kol Nidre moment,” a point beyond which there is no going back, for which there may exist no opportunity to “undo.”  

Many of you remember where you were, 50 years ago this day on the Hebrew calendar, October 5-6, 1973, when the Yom Kippur War broke out.  It is not uncommon these days to hear Israelis comparing this moment to that moment. Many have concluded that this moment is no less existentially consequential.

For the last 37 weeks, every Saturday night, including last night, mass protests have filled Israel’s streets.  To give you a sense of scale, if Israel were the US, its population of about 9.5 million scaled to our population of about 330 million, this would be like 10 million people taking to the streets in every major American city, week in and week out.

What has generated such a maelstrom of civic unrest is the pervasive sense that Israel is on the brink of decisions that have no undo option, no Kol Nidre to avert fundamental changes to the nature of Israeli democracy and Israeli society.

I want to make it clear that what I share with you tonight will not be a foreign policy talk but rather a family conversation.  When we talk about Israel, we aren’t having a “foreign policy” discussion, because, for us, Israel isn’t “foreign.”  Israel, for us, is home, identity, mishpacha.  As my friend and colleague Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh recently put it:  “Talking about Israel is like talking about your Momma.”¹ 

Here’s the crux of what’s happening:  in late 2022, after four elections that failed to establish a government, Israel’s citizens democratically elected a government that, because of the way in which coalition politics works, is comprised of one big right-wing party, Likud, plus five smaller parties, all of which are considerably more right-wing, most of which don’t really care whether or not Israel remains a democracy, even after 75 years of democracy.  The simplest (and, forgive me, oversimplified) explanation for this lurch to the far right stems from the uncomfortable fact that only these parties, and their ideologically extreme leaders, will offer Prime Minister Netanyahu, currently under multiple indictments, the political protection he seeks.  The moderates simply won’t join a coalition with Bibi.      

In February, I visited Israel for the first time in four years.  Among the highlights of my trip was a chance to catch up over coffee and pastry at a charming Tel Aviv café with the Zaidenberg family, natives of Israel, who had affiliated at WRT for several years before moving to Switzerland and then back to Tel Aviv with their children and grandchildren.  Amnon Zaidenberg, a soft-spoken and sensible financial executive, greeted me with a warm embrace before launching into this speech: 

“I have watched this country grow for nearly 70 of its 75 years, have served my homeland in uniform, and I am telling you, Jonathan, you have arrived at the most critical juncture in Israel’s history.”

And then, without taking a breath, he leaned in and said, “So, what are you going to tell your congregation?”  

I said, “Nice to see you too.  How’s the danish here?”  

For two hours we all sat and talked.  I heard their anxiety, their heartbreak, and, to a lesser but still discernible extent, their hope.    

That Saturday night I attended a mass demonstration in downtown Tel Aviv, marching with a delegation of over 200 Reform Rabbis.  I had tried to coordinate a meet-up with the Zaidenbergs, but our bus got snared in traffic and we had to walk about a mile to join a group already 170,000 strong.  All of a sudden, in the middle of the crowd, I turn around and Amnon, Zafy, their son Itay, who was in my first Confirmation class at WRT and who is now married with a baby girl, their son Amit, at whose Bar Mitzvah I officiated, and Amit’s girlfriend, are standing three inches from me, grinning.  

I said, “How’d you find me?”  They pointed to the giant banner overhead, which read, “The Reform Movement Stands for Judaism and Democracy,” and said, “We followed the sign.”

There we were:  standing in a throng where virtually every adult has served in the IDF.  We marched with military reservists and high-tech executives.  We marched with people old enough to remember Israel’s founding, many with children and grandchildren.  We marched with Jews who call themselves “Orthodox,” and Jews who think of themselves as secular, but who also believe that living in Israel is a fundamental demonstration of Jewish commitment.  We marched with LGBTQ Israelis in their alarm about homophobia espoused by several government ministers, and alongside Jews of color, whose families come from Ethiopia and Yemen, Africa and India, in their distress over the uptick in racist rhetoric and policy positions.  We marched alongside thousands who love the Jewish State, care about the rights of Palestinians, and are worried about the possibility of government annexation of the West Bank.  We marched with several hundred women dressed in red cloaks and white bonnets, like Margaret Atwood’s Handmaids, decrying proposals that would force women to dress according to Ultra-Orthodox modesty codes and sit in the back of the bus on public transportation.

And Reform and Conservative clergy cannot just stand on the sidelines.  There are crucial issues at stake for us and our communities, too; issues that, for us–for all of us–are personal, not political, including the right to have the marriages we solemnize, the conversions we oversee, and the synagogues we lead and attend, recognized by the world’s only Jewish State.  Do you have someone in your family who converted to Judaism under non-Othordox supervision?  Think about what this could mean for that person’s right of return, or the Jewish status of their children.    

However disparate the protesters’ concerns may seem on the surface, they all converge at one flashpoint issue:  the government’s determination to overhaul the way that the Israeli Supreme Court functions, with the intention to strip it of significant authority.

It’s easy to argue that there are two sides to this story, that each side has a legitimate grievance.  Those in favor of a “judicial overhaul” argue that Israel’s Supreme Court enjoys power above and beyond that of high courts in other Western democracies.  They will tell you that the makeup of Israel’s Supreme Court, predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish justices, does not correlate to the demography of present-day Israel and therefore cannot truly represent the will of Israel’s citizens.  Members of the Knesset who support the overhaul “say that as elected representatives, they have a democratic mandate to govern without being hobbled by the court, which they portray as a bastion of the left-leaning elite.”²     

Such arguments merit public debate but hide the coalition’s intention:  to undermine the only real institutional check that Israel has on its legislature, the only balance that Israel has to halt the government from summarily passing whatever laws it likes with a simple majority of 61 Knesset votes, removing the essential process of judicial review that can question a law’s validity.  

Meanwhile, the government has given false assurances of plans to provide new and better guardrails for a future Supreme Court, details left “TBD.”  And it has disregarded pleas for compromise with the opposition, despite the tireless efforts of President Isaac Herzog to broker one.  

No wonder the opposition does not trust the coalition.  Reneging on promises again and again is like reciting Kol Nidre with no intention of changing one’s ways. 

And so we have 37 consecutive weeks of angry but non-violent protests, a mixed multitude chanting this easy-to-translate word: “DEMOKRATIA.”  

A number of rabbis serving in Israeli congregations have brought the protest movement to the heart of their synagogues:  next to the holy ark, at the front of their sanctuaries, they have affixed Megillat Yisrael, Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which says, in part:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture…..

For Israel and those who love Israel, these are holy words, deserving of their place next to the Holy Torah.  They also make clear that Israel, like every democracy, is, as my friend and teacher Rabbi Jan Katzew puts it, “a state of ideals, not an ideal state.”  We of all people should appreciate how fragile democracy can be.

A few months later, I returned to Israel, this time joining a delegation of a dozen American rabbis brought together by the American Israel Education Foundation, an educational charity affiliated with AIPAC:  Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform, lovers and outspoken supporters of Israel all.  Since February, the pro-democracy movement had grown dramatically.  Our attempt to board a return flight was nearly thwarted by a mass protest that shut down the arrivals terminal of Ben Gurion Airport.  

Everywhere we went, we interacted with leaders from across the spectrum of Israeli life:  diplomats and ambassadors, journalists and politicians, military experts and hi-tech entrepreneurs, religious leaders and civil rights activists, Jews and Palestinians.  Conversations swirled around open-ended questions like these:  

• How far will this go?
• If Israel’s democracy is weakened or altered beyond recognition, what will happen to the millions of Israelis (and others across the world) who no longer feel at home in Israel?
• What will these potentially sweeping changes inside Israel mean for those neighboring Arab countries, who have begun to normalize relations with the Jewish State after decades of treating Israel like a pariah?  Will this government disregard those regional advances that are reshaping the Middle East?
• And, even as we fear that these changes inside Israel will bode dangerously for religious minorities, the LGBTQ community, women, and non-Orthodox Jews, what will they mean for Palestinians living in the territories that many in the government believe is land rightfully claimed by Israel?

At least for now, no one I know has the answers.  

But this is no time for sitting on our hands, paralyzed in worry. 

Kol Nidre is, when all is said and done, a prayer of hope—a Hatikvah prayer, if you will—because it forces us to think about how the coming year could be different.  If despair is, as has been said, “the belief that tomorrow must be the same as today,” then Kol Nidre says the opposite: tomorrow could be different.  We can’t undo what is done, but we can choose a different way before it’s too late.  

And what can we do?  The advice I can offer is not my own; I sourced it from Israelis:  friends, colleagues, and the people I met on these recent trips.

Not surprisingly, opinions ran the gamut; this is the Jewish State we’re talking about.

But taken together, they offer direction and hope, tikvah.  Here are some takeaways:

First, this is no time to abandon Israel.  The words came back time and again, resoundingly:  “We need you now more than ever.”  And, “Continue to love Israel no matter what you think of the government.”  And, most of all, “We are family.”  

Second, do not withhold support.  This advice is directed to individuals, organizations, and the US government.  All talk of conditioning aid should be off the table.  “We are not allowed to forget the existential threats,” says my friend Gilad Kariv, a Reform Rabbi and member of Knesset who sits in the opposition Labor Party.  “We need to understand that there are a few red lines that we cannot cross.  Conditioning foreign aid is one of those bright red lines.”  Each one of us can contact our Members of Congress to remind them to support critical financial aid to Israel which ensures its safety and security. 

At the same time, Israel needs to hear from our elected officials that if Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State is at risk, then Israel’s security and the US-Israel relationship are also at risk, along with the strategic and economic gains, actual and potential, brought about by the Abraham Accords.

Third, stay up to date on the situation.  Please do not rely solely on your rabbis and cantors, well intentioned and informed though we try to be, to be your Israeli news station.  And, for heaven’s sake, please stop getting your Israel news exclusively from American media or, worse, from social media!  On your way out of the sanctuary, you’ll find a resource sheet that directs you to reliable news sources, most of them Israeli, that also present a diverse array of opinions and which are consistent with the values of WRT and the Reform Movement.

And finally, connect.  Reach out to friends and family in Israel.  Call, text, email them to let them know you’ve been thinking about them.  Haven’t spoken in ages?  The day after Yom Kippur is the perfect time to pick up the phone.  And make plans to visit.  Cantor Kleinman and I are excited to lead our next congregational trip to Israel in December, for which registration is, alas, already closed.  The good news is that we’re already planning our next congregational trip for 2025.  We need you with us.  There is no reason why we can’t bring 50, 60, 80, 100 congregants to Israel for the trip of a lifetime, every time.  

Especially if you’ve never visited Israel, will you make this trip a priority?  Don’t worry.  It’s just something to consider. I’m not asking you to take a vow.    

….כל נדרי ואסרי Kol Nidre ve’esarei …

Kol Nidre insists: the future is not predetermined; our choices matter.  And even as the fate of the Israeli Supreme Court hangs in the balance, in the Heavenly Supreme Court, our deeds will dictate our fate.  

I pray that, in the year to come, we will all follow the sign:  the one that proclaims, “The Reform Movement Stands for Judaism and Democracy.”  

I pray that Israel’s leaders will negotiate a way to preserve these twin pillars of identity that have distinguished Israel as a light unto the nations for 75 years.  

I pray that our congregation and the American Jewish community will make known to Israel our love, our concern, and our investment in an Israel that is vibrantly Jewish, pluralistic, and that honors the Divine Image in all its people.

We cannot undo what cannot be undone.  But there is much we still can do.     

On this Kol Nidre, this night of nights, we can pause, and pray, and, with God’s help, choose our way. 

1. Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh, spoken at the RE-Charging Reform Conference in New York City, May 30-31, 2023. ↩︎
2. Associated Press, “Netanyahu’s Judicial Overhaul Faces First Legal Challenge in Israeli Supreme Court,” September 12, 2023, 10:27 AM EDT.
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