god

Grasshoppers and Giants: Sermon for Yom Kippur, 5787

~ rabbiblake ~ 1 Comment

September 21, 2026

Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

The bad report reached me an hour before Shabbat services on April 17th, the Sabbath bookended by Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, a few days before, and Yom Ha-Atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, just after.  

That afternoon, posters advertising the Scarsdale High School Israeli Culture Club’s Yom Ha-Atzma’ut celebration had been torn down and stuffed into urinals in boys’ bathrooms where they were further desecrated. Images then circulated on social media, fueling an all-too-familiar cycle of mutually assured outrage. 

And precisely because incidents like this have become all too familiar, we’d do well to give some thought to how we should respond.  What would constitute the best possible Jewish response to such provocation?  

Problems like the one I have described are not solvable with enhanced security measures. Just five weeks before the incident in our village, a jihadist sympathizer rammed his truck into a prominent Reform Temple in West Bloomfield, Michigan and stormed the building, rifle in hand. Only one person, the attacker, died that day. Temple Israel had drilled nightmare scenarios like this for years, as have many synagogues, including the one you’re sitting in now.  

But concrete barriers can’t stop students from harassing other students. Guns and metal detectors have no effect against the spread of hate on social media. And lockdown drills won’t teach basic empathy and respect.

There is Torah for every experience, and the Torah that came to mind in this instance comes from the Book of Numbers. The story goes like this. As the Israelites prepare to cross over the River Jordan and enter the promised land, twelve spies enter Canaan, one from each tribe, to scout out the territory and its inhabitants. After forty days they return and report that, as promised, the land flows with milk and honey; its fruit is lush and abundant. However, the inhabitants are powerful and their cities fortified.  Breathlessly recounting their exploits to Moses and Aaron, the spies bring back what the Torah calls “dibat-ha’aretz ra’ah” (Num. 14:37), “a bad report about the land,” and the rumors they spread became more extreme and grotesque in the retelling. “The land we traversed… devours its settlers,” they say. “We saw the Nephilim there,” they say, referring to a legendary race of giants. And then these damning words: “We looked like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we must have appeared to them” (Num. 13:33).

The Israelites, hearing the bad report, weep inconsolably. They turn against Moses and Aaron, begging to return to Egypt, cursing their leaders and the God who delivered them from slavery only to meet an untimely end in the jaws of giants.

God punishes the faithless spies, and all whose hearts turned against entering the promised land, with a self-fulfilling prophecy: They will not in fact enter Canaan but wander forty years – one year for each day that the spies scouted the land – until their “carcasses drop in the wilderness,” as the curse is memorably preserved (Num. 14:32).

I first learned this story from Professor Julius Lester.  As a student at Amherst I occasionally attended Hillel services down the road at UMass where Lester, then faculty in the Judaic Studies department, regularly served as a lay chazzan. He would daven the prayers in a baritone rich with gospel flavor.  

In the 60’s, Julius Lester had been a folk singer and activist inside the Black Power movement. His first book, published in 1968, was called Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! He was a gifted writer, a radio show host, a guitar and banjo player, and a man who had once been accused, publicly and painfully, of antisemitism.

An encounter with Rabbi Yechiael Lander, who would eventually be my Hillel rabbi up the road, changed the course of Lester’s life. They began to meet regularly for coffee and conversation. Lester shared that at the age of seven, he learned that his maternal great-grandfather, Adolph Altschul, was a Jewish immigrant from Germany, who married a freed slave. 

In 1982, with Rabbi Lander presiding, Lester converted to Judaism.

Many years later, I learned from him this Torah about the spies who are suffering from a bad case of what Lester called “grasshopper syndrome.” “It seems axiomatic,” he said, “that how we see ourselves determines how we see others. If I am a grasshopper to myself, then others will appear as giants to me.” 

“Frequently,” he noted, “Jews see themselves as grasshoppers and thereby transform ‘goyim’ [his word, not mine] into giants.”

“Psychologically,” he continued, “how much of contemporary black anti-Semitism is nothing more than blacks seeing themselves as grasshoppers and making giants out of Jews?” (Lester, “Seeing Ourselves as Grasshoppers,” National Havurah Committee, 1989).

Six years after his conversion to Judaism, Lester’s public criticism of black antisemitism led to a painful rupture with his colleagues in the Afro-American Studies Department. The Department of Judaic Studies took him in.

Lester had the courage to turn the question on his own community of origin. Yom Kippur demands we do the same. How much of what we Jews face today is a confrontation with actual giants, and how much is grasshopper syndrome, making giants out of others? 

Jewish tradition gives us a useful scale for calibrating our response to provocation. On one side of the scale, we can respond with din, the Hebrew word meaning justice. To respond with din in a court setting means that discipline is not withheld from those who deserve it, and that the punishment fits the crime. Justice is served. On the other side of the scale, Jewish tradition places rachamim which means compassion – the ability to respond with mercy, recognizing that even wrongdoers must nevertheless be regarded as human beings with human limitations and human failings.  

Even God, the Talmud tells us – and this is one of those quintessential Yom Kippur teachings – wrestles with which impulse to follow in response to our transgressions. The Talmud asks, with fantastic audacity, “When God prays, what does God pray?” The answer the Rabbis give:  

May it be My will that My mercy will overcome My anger…

May I conduct myself toward My children… with the quality of rachamim, and may I approach them in a way that goes beyond the letter of the law (Bavli, Berakhot 7a).

Jewish tradition never casts aside the need for din, justice. But if God’s own prayer is a plea to temper anger with compassion, it is surely our obligation as well. Although, let’s admit it: it’s hard to summon rachamim when we are provoked.   

When I heard that bad report from Scarsdale High School, I understood our community’s rage because I felt it too. But the Talmud imagines God taking a breath before acting. In this case, productive conversations already underway with the school board, administration, village leadership, and community-at-large had to compete with threats of lawsuits, demands for resignations, and public shaming of family members implicated in the affair. Such responses, I fear, display din without rachamim. They risk turning a legitimate demand for accountability into a counterproductive cycle that diminishes us. 

In all this I heard an echo of the spies’ lament: “We looked like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we must have appeared to them.” 

Are we facing giants, or are we making them?

The question becomes harder, and more urgent, as we move from Scarsdale to New York, from a high school bathroom to City Hall. There, a new mayor has made relentless hostility to Israel a signature of his public voice. And he is not alone. This summer’s Senate primary in Michigan suggests a rising generation of political figures singularly fixated on the Jewish State: the one country whose very legitimacy is treated as an open question.

The concern is real. I share it. You don’t need me to catalog it from the bimah; many of you carried it into this room today.

And still, on this day of self-examination, we should ask: Is the mayor a giant, or have we made him one? 

The coming years will turn on our answer. This moment demands the discipline to discern a threat from a provocation, an armed terrorist from a rhetorical flamethrower.

That discipline is not only a public responsibility. It is a profoundly personal one. Every person in this room understands “grasshopper syndrome” because at one time or another every one of us has experienced it. It’s not just a Jewish communal pathology. It’s a human tendency.    

Even Moses speaks about himself as incapable of the very thing God calls him to do.

“I am not a man of words” (Ex. 4:10).  

“I am slow of speech, slow of tongue” (Ibid).
“Who am I to go to Pharaoh?” (Ex. 3:11).

“Please, send somebody else” (Ex. 4:13).

Notice what the Torah says and what it does not say. The Pharaoh is real. The Pharaoh is powerful. The Pharaoh held the life or death of his subjects in his hand. It also doesn’t say that Moses’s speech impediment isn’t real. The point is not merely that Moses is afraid; who wouldn’t be? The point is that he seems to have constructed an entire identity out of his deficiency: I am not someone who can do this. 

And yet the man who said, “I am not a man of words” ends his life giving the longest and most eloquent speech in all of Torah, the Book of Deuteronomy, whose Hebrew name – Devarim – simply means, “words.” Moses overcame his grasshopper syndrome to emerge our greatest leader, the man whose words would change the world.

We live in a world full of Pharaohs. They are real. They are powerful. If you feel adrift in a world that reels all around you, you are not alone. But the catastrophic conclusions we make about ourselves, our own capacity, our own agency, too often become self-fulfilling. I lost my job becomes I am unemployable. I feel alone in my marriage becomes I am unlovable.  I failed at something becomes I am a failure.  

Johannes Brahms destroyed so much of the music he composed as a young man that scholars estimate he burned more of his manuscripts than he ever allowed to be published. Twenty string quartets went up in flames before he published his Opus 51. Explaining why it took him over twenty years to complete a first symphony, he said, of composing in Beethoven’s shadow, “You have no idea how it feels to hear behind you the tramp of such a giant.”    

There’s the pain we inflict on ourselves, knowingly or not; there’s also the pain life inflicts on us. The call from the doctor that changes everything, even how time is measured: no longer month to month, year to year, planning the vacation, but day to day, minute to minute, waiting for test results. It’s all real; it’s all hard; and the question that matters is this: how can we remain the authors of our lives and not just characters in a narrative we did not write? 

Yom Kippur reminds us that agency remains even when circumstances are beyond our control.

For, yes, on the one hand, it says:

בְּרֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה יִכָּתֵבוּן, וּבְיוֹם צוֹם כִּפּוּר יֵחָתֵמוּן…

מִי יִחְיֶה וּמִי יָמוּת….

On Rosh HaShanah, it is written; on Yom Kippur, it is sealed – …who shall live and who shall die (“Unetaneh Tokef,” Machzor).  

Written. Sealed. Life. Death. It sounds like a fixed decree.  

But if that were truly the case, we’d read the decree on Yom Kippur morning, and go home to weep, because where is the agency in a fixed decree? How do we write our own story when the book is already written?

But the book isn’t already written, and that’s the whole point of Yom Kippur.  

The spies heard factual data and forged it into a fixed decree. We looked like grasshoppers in our own eyes. Their takeaway: I am not someone who can do this.  

God responded to their grasshopper syndrome in kind: With an outlook like that, you can never enter the promised land. The Mishnah refers to the punishment as a decree:  נִגְזַר עַל אֲבוֹתֵינוּ שֶׁלֹּא יִכָּנְסוּ לָאָרֶץ – It was decreed upon our ancestors that they would not enter the land (M. Ta’anit 4:6).

But Yom Kippur insists the decree is not fixed, not sealed, that teshuvah, tefillah, tzedakah ma’avirin et ro’a ha-g’zeirah, that our teshuvah – the re-aiming of our gaze, our tefillah – our sincere reflection and spiritual intention, and our tzedakah – our righteous and empathic action – that all these, together, can temper the harshness of any would-be decree. It is not forever fixed. We are still fixing it. 

Our story has an epilogue. Two spies, it so happens, broke ranks. Caleb and Joshua received the same data about the land but did not lie down inside a decree. “Caleb hushed the people before Moses and said, ‘Aloh na’aleh! Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for,” as it says in Hebrew, “yachol nuchal lah,” “we can, for sure, do this” (Num. 13:30).  

Caleb is the hero this moment needs. By refusing to turn a report into a decree, he went forward. In the face of giants, Caleb stood firm.  

People convinced of their own essential smallness will cower, lash out, fail to act from a posture of self-confident dignity. Caleb’s assertion, “we can, for sure, do this,” isn’t bravado. It’s hard-won self-confidence. It’s the stance of someone who has accepted the tough reality of the situation and has also internalized God’s charge to the Jewish people: to enter the land promised on oath to our ancestors, to claim our destiny. 

Caleb is a hero, but he’s not a superhero. When God explains why Caleb, of all that generation, will enter the land, God names one thing: ר֤וּחַ אַחֶ֙רֶת֙ עִמּ֔וֹ – “a different spirit was with him” (Num. 14:24).  

That’s all. Caleb had a different ruach, a different spirit: a different way of looking at things, or, more to the point, a different way of looking at himself. His fellow spies looked in the mirror and saw grasshoppers. Caleb saw a leader. Caleb saw a human being, a Jew, no less, fully capable of overcoming the obstacles ahead, relying, above all, on a pure heart, a willing spirit, and his trust in God’s promise. And so he said:  “Aloh na’aleh – Let’s do this. Let us by all means go up.”

What would “going up” look like for us, this new year? 

It would begin on the inside. With a mindset. A stance. A posture of self-confident Jewish dignity. It would look like showing up for your Jewish community, your WRT family, because we’re all in this together. It would mean asking not, “What are they doing to us?” but rather, “What am I building?” 

Wear that Star of David near your heart – it’s called a Magen David, a Shield of David! – a reminder of your resolve. Run for the school board instead of berating it. Fund the institutions that will outlast the provocation. Buy the cookies for the Israeli Culture Club’s next event. Small acts that will register as major empowerments – both in here, and out there.     

The next provocation that comes to our community will be our proving-ground.  When it comes – and it will come – I hope you’ll remember Professor Lester, and ask yourself: “Will I answer as a grasshopper or with a different spirit?”

Let’s do this. Let’s go up.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah: May God seal us in the Book of Life — not as passive characters, but as partners in writing what comes next.

What Are We Doing Here? Sermon for Kol Nidre 5787

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September 20, 2026

Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

I can tell from the sheepish look how the conversation is going to go even before the office door closes behind us. “I really don’t know why I’m here, rabbi,” it begins. “I’m not religious.” “And I don’t believe in God.”

I answer: “Now that that’s out of the way, what brings you here?”

I imagine some of you feel something like this every time this season rolls around. Maybe you think to yourself, “Why do I do this? I don’t even believe in organized religion.”

But, here we are.

So now that that’s out of the way, can we talk about what brings us here?

This is a love letter to all of us who are wondering what we’re doing here. (And, no worries, I love all of you who aren’t wondering, too.) But for all the wonderers and the wanderers: come in, get comfortable. Maybe you don’t believe in God. Or organized religion. Or even disorganized religion. Or maybe you don’t know what you believe. You’re not alone. Trust me. Just look around. 

And let me be bolder still: you’re in luck. Because while Judaism is religious, it is really so much more than what modern people usually mean when they say “religion.”  

Tonight, on the holiest night of the year, let’s come up with a better way of understanding what we’re doing here.

What are we doing here?

In the narrowest sense, we’re here for Kol Nidre. I know people – you probably do too – who become dues-paying members of a synagogue for this one service, this one prayer.

Kol Nidre actually argues against Judaism as a religion. If Judaism were just a religion, you’d expect a prayer to headline the holiest night of the year; if a belief system, a creed, a profession of faith.

But Kol Nidre isn’t a prayer. For starters, there’s no Baruch Ata Adonai – no mention of God at all. It’s not in Hebrew. It’s in Aramaic, the ancient Jewish vernacular – the language of commerce and contracts – and, fittingly, Kol Nidre is a dry legal instrument that annuls vows.

Kol Nidre first appears in the literature as a formula for invalidating vows taken over the past year. In the 9th Century, Natronai Gaon, head of the Rabbinic Academy of Sura in Babylonia, condemned it as a dangerous legal practice. An entire congregation cannot have its vows collectively annulled this way, he argued; such matters must be weighed case by case. His successor Amram Gaon called the recitation of Kol Nidre a minhag shtut, a “foolish custom.” For centuries, authority after authority agreed.

Then something happened. In 12th Century France, some of the greatest legal minds of the age declined to condemn and instead repaired the text, changing it from past tense to future, so that Kol Nidre preemptively releases vows made between this Yom Kippur and the next. They gave technical explanations, but I suspect the real reason: they knew the people would never give it up.

Kol Nidre also created an optics problem for us: Gentile onlookers concluded that a Jew’s oath couldn’t be trusted, a pretext Christian communities used to force Jews to swear special oaths in court. This, despite the fact that Kol Nidre only ever could annul vows between people and God. It could never cancel a promise owed to another person — no debt, no contract, no obligation, no injury. 

In 1839, Samson Raphael Hirsch, father of Modern Orthodoxy, abolished Kol Nidre from his first congregation but it reentered the service not long after. Our Movement originally cut the text of Kol Nidre from the machzor, but, and this is truly astonishing, the melody stayed: the Union Prayer Book kept a service called Kol Nidre in which the ancient chant was played on the organ, the words gone, the tune untouchable. Gates of Repentance eventually restored the full text because the people wanted it back.

The real story of Kol Nidre is this: the authorities opposed it for a thousand years – restricting it, revising it, removing it. But the Jewish people refused to give it up. They packed the synagogue for it. They named the holiest night of the year after it. And they did so, manifestly, not because of its content, but because of the melody and the moment, the experience of standing together as a People as the sun sets, with the Torah scrolls brought forth from the holy ark and the ancient chant rising from the depths.

What begins its strange and strangely durable life as a dusty legal technicality ends up, instead, as a magnificent window into the genius of Judaism. Kol Nidre teaches us that Judaism is not merely a religion, but a civilization – in which the common folk may ultimately prevail over even the greatest Rabbis who ever lived. Not a belief system, but a conversation – one in which every voice adds its unique Torah to the treasure-house of accumulated Jewish wisdom. Not a faith, but an invitation to awe – to feel the sacred within the dross of our frail and fleeting existence.

A civilization.

A conversation.

An invitation.

Three answers, I think, to the question we carried in here tonight: What are we doing here?

So another question. Have you ever heard of a game called Methodist Geography?

No, because, that’s not a thing.

Methodists are united by creed and church. Methodism is a religion. Methodists don’t play Methodist Geography.

Judaism, in contrast, is a civilization. Other religious traditions have rich cultures and communities, of course. But Jewish belonging has a particular thickness to it: we are united by peoplehood, a shared sense that a fellow Jew is mishpoche, family. Jewish Geography is our favorite pastime. Someone who wants to know what synagogue you belong to is most likely not trying to size up your theology. It’s about the people. Especially now that even Jalen Brunson’s got game. 

Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, architect of Reconstructionist Judaism, built his entire body of teaching on exactly this idea in his 1934 book, Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life.

Rather than work within the traditional conception — God revealed the Torah to Moses at Sinai and gave it to the People of Israel — Kaplan inverted the flowchart: Judaism begins with the People of Israel, who wrote the Torah to capture their experience of the Divine, and to express the claims that experience makes on our lives.

So yes, we’re a religious civilization, but religion is only one piece of our identity. What makes Judaism Judaism also comes from our shared languages and culture, our folkways and our food-ways; our ethics and our arguments; our Nobel prizes and our genetic disorders; our pride when a fellow Jew succeeds and our shame when a fellow Jew does something disgraceful; our sense of shared history and shared destiny; our neuroses and psychic fixations; our music, literature, and art; and our humor – especially the inside jokes. Ordering pastrami on white bread with mayonnaise at the deli may be kosher, but it sure isn’t Jewish.

I think if we all related to Judaism as a civilization, we’d have a lot less Jewish guilt, a lot less “I’m not a good Jew,” and a lot more comfort and joy in Jewish settings. No one in this room is “less Jewish” for what you do or do not believe.

Judaism-as-civilization also rebuts the argument that we can divorce Judaism from Israel. If Judaism were just a religion, sure – one could be Jewish with no connection to Israel whatsoever. But we’re more than what we pray or believe: we are an Am, a people, the collective expression of just under sixteen million Jews, nearly half of whom live in Israel – a civilization within the civilization. Our civilization has carried the land in its history and memory for three thousand years: in our calendar and customs, our poetry and yearning.

Israel is not the whole of Judaism, of course. But neither can we tell the story of Judaism while pretending that Israel is irrelevant to our peoplehood.

You may fall in and out of love with Israel. You may be proud of Israel, worry over Israel, kvell over Israel, weep for Israel, argue about Israel at the break-fast tomorrow. Go ahead, it’s okay. Because in the Jewish civilization, arguing is not the opposite of belonging; it is often a form of belonging. 

And that takes us to our second insight: that Judaism is a conversation – one in which every voice adds its unique Torah.

Kol Nidre itself, you will recall, is Exhibit A: the people defied their Rabbis and kept it right where they wanted it.

You came here tonight to be part of that conversation – a conversation about, well, everything. The Talmud is a conversation spanning centuries, among hundreds upon hundreds of rabbis who lived lands and generations apart: a great unfolding of arguments, as dense as kugel, as layered as baklava, as deep as the profoundest questions of philosophy, cosmology, psychology, law and life.

“Judaism,” my friend and rabbi Larry Hoffman likes to say, “is a conversation in a register that does justice to the human condition.”

I was thinking about that line this summer as I walked through Auschwitz with Cantor Kleinman, fifty members of our WRT family, and four educators: two Israeli and two Polish. Judaism is a conversation in a register that does justice to the human condition.

Here we stood, on a late June day in the heat wave blanketing Europe, in that most inhuman place, where the Nazis murdered a million of our people, and a hundred thousand others – Poles, Roma, Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war – either through a slow death of forced labor, disease, and starvation at Auschwitz, or a terrifyingly abrupt end in the gas chambers and crematoria of Birkenau just up the road. And I thought about what Judaism had to say to us who came to bear witness.

For some who entered the camps, piety – the specifically religious part of Judaism – sustained them. I thought of Eli Sharabi, an Israeli abducted by Hamas on October 7th, whose 491 days in captivity in the foul tunnels of Gaza inform his memoir, Hostage. When I interviewed him on this bimah last December, he told us that – never having thought of himself as religious – he and his fellow captives drew strength from making kiddush on Friday nights with what little water their captors provided. 

His story reminds us that ritual and prayer can hold the hearts and souls of the suffering when all other words fail or fall away.

The moment came for Cantor Kleinman and me to lead a short service of memorial. Standing, sweltering, seeking the meager shade of a cattle car preserved in the vast expanse of the extermination camp, we found ourselves craving and creating ritual.  The moment needed our attention. It needed Kaddish.  It needed a melody older than our grief.  

It did not need many words, and I did not have many.  What I had was this:

Judaism didn’t come into the world to make us more observant, or make us more fervent believers. Judaism came into the world to help us become more fully human. More human, so that we could see the brokenness and be the repair, so that we could stand in the darkness and be a light.

Hillel gave us six words that Auschwitz turned into a commandment: Bamakom she-ein anashim, hishtadel lihyot ish. “In a place where no one is a human being, strive to be human” (Pirkei Avot, 2:5). 

Auschwitz tells us, with unbearable force, why Jewish safety and sovereignty matter, why the world needs Israel. Yet just as much Auschwitz teaches, with terrible clarity, why the world needs Judaism: a conversation that insists on the sacredness of every human life.

As the world becomes, day by day, more inhuman, can we be a force for this humanizing holiness? Can we once again live inside that conversation that does justice to the human condition? That is the real work of this day. 

I’ll let you in on a secret.  Getting to that conversation requires that we first stop talking long enough to pay attention: to notice, in silence, the person in front of us, the lives surrounding us, the world holding us.

Which brings us to the third answer.

Judaism is, above all, an invitation to awe. And I want you to hear it from one of its greatest proponents. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel fled Warsaw just weeks before the Nazi invasion, rescued by the President of Hebrew Union College, our seminary. His mother and three of his sisters were not saved. This man, an ember plucked from the flames, is the one who spent the rest of his life teaching that the ground note of Jewish existence is amazement.

For Heschel, amazement isn’t a reaction to the unusual; it’s the baseline posture Judaism invites us to adopt toward all of existence, the mundane no less than the magnificent.

Awe is what we feel gazing out from the mountaintop. But it’s also there in a perfect scoop of gelato. In the look from your loved one that means something only the two of you know. In waking up after a good night’s sleep. In the sound of your grandchild’s laughter. For Heschel, the capacity “to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures” is “one of the goals of the Jewish way of living” (God in Search of Man, 1955, p. 49).

If you are capable of being astonished, you are already on the starting line of a Jewish life. Everything else flows from awe: the ability to see another human being not as an object to be exploited but as an image of the holy; the willingness to live in covenant with creation, as partners in mending a broken world; the bravery to show up amidst that brokenness and still carry ourselves with gratitude for the mystery and majesty of it all.

We stand at every moment, in this too-short life, in a world where heart-stopping beauty and heart-rending pain intersect. Judaism invites us to stop, regularly, to answer the world with the only response it deserves: our awe.

These are, after all, Days of Awe, Yamim Nora’im. Our tradition named them after an experience, not a belief. No one will leave this sanctuary having signed a creed. Everyone can leave having felt something true: what forty generations have felt when the melody of Kol Nidre begins.   

We would – if we stopped and took notice – make not just these ten days in September, but every day after, days of awe, lowercase. Let the way we see and treat each human being, each image of the Divine, be our living and breathing Judaism. Let our conversation do justice to the human condition and our deeds give honor to the civilization of the Jewish people. And even when no one else is acting like a human being, let our Judaism remind us to strive to be as human as we can be.

So the next time you find yourself at my door, and you feel the old disclaimer coming on – “I’m not religious, but…” – just come into my office. Because now you know: that was never the question. You are a cherished part of a civilization. You are an essential voice in the conversation. You are invited tonight, and every day you draw breath, to live in awe. 

And that is what we’re doing here.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah.

ON GOD’S MOUNTAIN, THERE IS VISION: Sermon for Rosh Ha-Shanah Morning, 5787

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Delivered September 12, 2026, Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

He found himself staring into the sky: moments before, blue as a daydream, now thick with smoke and ash. It flooded his nostrils, seared his throat, stung his eyes. He willed his arms to move but found them bound to his side. His body had gone to stone. Every muscle froze except his eyes which darted back and forth in search of a face. His vision blurred in the haze. The sky turned red and black, sheets of fire and soot, floating down, rising up in plumes, smoldering embers scattered on the ground, the glint of metal piercing the air, the ringing in his ears, the fear that pinned him down.

This he knew: if he ever made it out of this alive, nothing would ever be the same.

He heard a voice. It sounded like father muttering to himself, talking himself down the way mother did when father was being headstrong, impatient, impervious to reason. “Abraham, Abraham.” The knife clattered to the ground. Father’s fists unclenched. Isaac’s stayed balled up, a knot of tendon, muscle, and bone.

He remained immobilized, bound in place, eyes closed tight, ears straining to stifle the sound – father’s footfalls crunching this way and that, a high shrieking noise, desperate and inhuman, that seemed to go on for hours, and then nothing. Nothing, but a still, small voice, a low murmuring sound. Father breathing, slow and heavy.

Isaac blinked his stinging eyes and squinted to survey the ruin: the broken stones and fuming cinders, the blood soaking into the gravel, the smell of the ram upon the altar, its mangled body turning black as it went up into the sky as a burnt offering, father low to the ground, hunched over, the wreckage of a man.

They would not walk on together after this. How could they?

They stood together for a moment, father and son, atop Mount Moriah. Before turning his back and trudging off, Abraham would give this place a new name, this ground zero where, in a few terrible hours, everything changed.

וַיִּקְרָ֧א אַבְרָהָ֛ם שֵֽׁם־הַמָּק֥וֹם הַה֖וּא יְהֹוָ֣ה ׀ יִרְאֶ֑ה אֲשֶׁר֙ יֵאָמֵ֣ר הַיּ֔וֹם בְּהַ֥ר יְהֹוָ֖ה יֵרָאֶֽה׃

Abraham named that site Adonai-yireh – the place where God sees – of which it is said, even today, “On God’s mountain there is vision” (Gen. 22:14).

Adonai yireh, the place where God sees. 

Today, on this Rosh Ha-Shanah morning that marks the 25th yahrzeit of 9/11, and nearly three years since October 7th, we try to see; we look back with Jewish eyes.

Today we undertake a “spiritual eye exam”: not to test our eyesight, but to examine what we’ve chosen to look at, and what we’ve closed our eyes to. What, since 9/11, have we failed to see? And what, since October 7th, might we choose to envision differently? How, especially now, might we move from Moriah – the mountain of trauma – to Adonai-yireh, the vista of vision? How can we transform suffering to seeing, wound to witness?

Three days after 9/11, at Friday night services, a hundred members of our WRT community came up to the bimah to bensch gomel, the tradition of reciting a prayer for those who’ve survived a brush with death. Some of you were there, had seen it all and lived to tell: the fire and the ash; the towers disintegrating into heaps of twisted metal and shards of glass; the bodies, broken and plummeting. Paralysis was momentary. Unbound from Ground Zero, that unholy altar, survivors picked themselves up and began to run, block after block, through smoke and debris.

And we witnessed along with them, on our TV screens, these images none of us can ever unsee. We saw this as well: the feet of first responders surging into the flames, hands sifting through the rubble; the posters of the missing; the strangers turned supporters; the flags and banners on the balconies, the city that refused to surrender to fear. On 9/11 we saw the worst of humanity; in the hours and days that followed we saw the very best.

And yet much, still, we did not see, not clearly, not at the time. We may have heard reports of cheers erupting from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, of candy strewn across the streets of Gaza City and Nablus, presaging the gleeful scenes immediately following the butchery and kidnappings of October 7th. But we failed to see how the masterminds of 9/11 rooted their rationale in a seething, unquenchable hatred of the Jews.

The fires at Ground Zero were still burning when the old conspiracy theories began to spread like wildfire: the same tropes recycled across centuries of European history, repackaged by the Nazis and the Soviets, that Jews control governments, finance, and media; that Israel manipulates world events.

Bin Laden said as much himself. In his 2002 “Letter to America” justifying 9/11, he rails against “the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.” The antisemitism is not incidental; it’s structural.

And it is the connective tissue between 9/11 and 10/7. The 1988 charter of Hamas opens by quoting the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood: “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” It goes on to cite, as evidence, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious Russian forgery published in 1903 as “proof” of a Jewish plot to rule the world. On October 7th, Hamas did what its charter promised: it murdered and maimed Jews in the name of God, and launched a war not only against the State of Israel as a political entity, but against the Jews as a People.

The language did not evolve between 9/11 and 10/7 because it didn’t have to. Jews control money, media, and governments; the destruction of Israel is a divine imperative. The same conspiracy theories, the same theological claims, have been there all along. 

But our eyes did not clearly see the antisemitism at the heart of jihadism: an ideology that is neither synonymous with Islam nor shared by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims, but that is deadly when wielded by well-funded, armed, and organized fundamentalists.

And we did not teach our children to recognize it.  

Thunderstruck by 9/11, most of us who lived through it inadvertently did what trauma survivors tend to do: avoid bringing up memories that re-inflict pain and anxiety, and, especially, avoid inflicting what we felt on our children and grandchildren. Nevertheless we failed to teach a generation to recognize the ideological vocabulary of jihadism and its inherent strain of antisemitism – and were consequently shocked when that vocabulary, that virus, reappeared, seemingly everywhere, in forms we should have recognized.

Like those of you who came up to the bimah after 9/11, Isaac himself survived a near brush with death. He may have come down from Mount Moriah to tell the tale; the ram may have gone to its sacrificial death in his place; but Isaac would never again be the same.

Torah depicts the grown-up Isaac as quiet, passive, aloof. How could anyone have the words for such an unspeakable trauma? After the Akedah, his binding and near-sacrifice, Isaac lives a life estranged from his father and family of origin. In older age, Isaac goes blind. A perceptive midrash proposes that when Abraham raised the knife above his throat, the angels wept, and their burning tears fell into Isaac’s eyes, precipitating his eventual blindness (Bereshit Rabbah 65:10).

We too have fallen victim to post-traumatic blindness. There are the things we did not see about our enemies. But there are also the things we did not see about ourselves: failures not so much of seeing, then, but of vision.

9/11 shattered Americans’ trust in the basic promise of safety and invincibility from foreign terror, much the same way that October 7th shattered Israelis’ – and world Jewry’s – confidence that never again was, more or less, a fait accompli. Here in the States, sixty years after Pearl Harbor, we took it as an article of faith that a large-scale attack on American soil was a thing of the past. Pre-October 7th Israel surely understood better the threat of foreign attack, and yet found itself totally unprepared for a mass-scale invasion from Gaza.

Trauma makes every society yearn for guarantees of safety. Just forty-five days after 9/11, Congress approved vastly expanded government surveillance powers. Following October 7th, the Knesset approved similar emergency provisions. These measures promised protection while exacting steep costs in personal liberty and privacy.  This in turn has emboldened those with ulterior motives to exploit those measures for antidemocratic ends.

The world we live in today – from the procedures we willingly, if uncomfortably, accept at airports and, yes, especially, synagogues, to the capture of our online activity that we routinely shrug off as a feature of living in the age of “big data” – is fully a post-9/11, post-October-7th reality. We made our choices, mind you, not blindly, but simply doing the best with what we had at the time.

The current Israeli and American military campaigns against Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime reflect a hard-won clarity about the threats these forces pose.  Their willingness to carry out more 9/11s and more October 7ths is sufficient rationale to declare jihadism a persistent and intolerable threat to the West.

But there’s a difference between seeing and vision. You can see a problem clearly, name the harm it causes, and still lack the vision to deal with it effectively. One long-term response to 9/11 – 20 years of US military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan – was premised on the idea that we could remake the Middle East through overwhelming use of force and a relative paucity of political planning and sustained diplomacy. Israel and the US may well be living a version of the same lesson in Gaza and Iran right now.

Rosh Ha-Shanah, the new year, invites us to grapple with substantive questions. In what, and in whom, do we put our faith? What are the limits of firepower and surveillance in dealing with our adversaries?  When will we earnestly reckon with the limits of strength and the necessity of imagination?

We see more clearly today that wars may be won or lost on the field of combat, but the much harder task of winning the peace – of imagining, building, and sustaining a durable peace – is one that happens only through the work of negotiation and compromise, sacrifice and mutual accountability.

A century ago, well before the establishment of the State of Israel, Religious Zionists debated exactly this matter: how to achieve enduring Jewish sovereignty in our ancestral homeland – seeing that military force would be necessary to subdue our enemies – while also acknowledging that military force alone could never sustain Jewish statehood, long-term. 

Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, who would later become Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv, wrote an essay way back in 1929, when violent skirmishes between Arabs and Jews erupted in the Holy Land. It is called “The Sword and the Book.”

“Truly,” he wrote, “the Holy One never likes wars. On the contrary, SHALOM is God’s name…. [T]he war against the sword is fought by the book.… The book of paper and parchment will endure longer than all the swords made from many kinds of metal;… all will be beaten and scattered to the wind, and the book shall reign alone” (Amiel, “The Sword and the Book,” Derashot El Ami volume 3, Ha-Ivri, Jerusalem, 1929, as cited in Chaim Seidler-Feller, “A Zionism for the Future,” Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, Fall/Winter 2025).

The exercise of raw power does not constitute a vision for lasting peace and prosperity.  War is, at best, a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Encouragingly, political imagination and moral vision are ingrained in our heritage, both as Jews and as Americans. Two hundred fifty years ago, the Framers of American independence appealed to “unalienable rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” insisting that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Seventy-eight years ago, the Israeli Declaration of Independence affirmed that the Jewish spirit found first expression in “the eternal Book of Books,” and that the newborn State of Israel would “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….”

We stand now on a precipice, seeing the way in which the traumas of 9/11 and 10/7 have molded our present reality, but still impaired when it comes to a vision of American and Jewish destiny about which we can feel both physically secure and morally proud.

What would this vision require of us?  

What security arrangements would be necessary?

What political arrangements?

What obligations on the part of Palestinians?

What on the part of Israelis?

What accountability should be expected, and how would it be enforced?

This Rosh Ha-Shanah – twenty-five years after 9/11, three years after October 7th, 7 ½ months after the last hostage came home from Gaza – let’s come down from the mountain of trauma, turn away from our blindness, toward seeing, and, ultimately, to vision. Turn from the sword, and pick up the Book. Or, if we must – given the painful reality of this moment in Jewish history – hold the sword in one hand and the book in the other.  

There is, it turns out, a message still waiting for us in our Book of Books.  For if you want to know whether healing is possible after Moriah, don’t take my word for it:  Torah tells us where Isaac went. 

He never did return to the mountain. Shaken and alone, estranged from father and family, Isaac eventually made his way somewhere else.

We next meet Isaac two full chapters and many years after the Akedah.  He has relocated to an oasis in the Negev called Be’er Lahai Ro’i, meaning, The Well of the Living One Who Sees Me (Gen. 24:62).  

This is Hagar’s well. The well named by the Egyptian maidservant who lived in Isaac’s childhood home, the mother of his estranged brother Ishmael, the woman whose progeny would give rise — both sacred Jewish and sacred Muslim traditions hold — to the Arab peoples of the land, the woman who fled that same household in her own anguish, the only woman in the entire Torah to give God a name of her own: El Ro’i, the God Who Sees Me (Gen. 16:13-14). 

The mountain of trauma bears Abraham’s name for God.  The well of healing bears the name given by Hagar. 

And Isaac — bound, scarred, bewildered — left the mountain and chose the well. 

It was there, lifting his eyes, that Isaac saw a caravan approaching, bearing Rebecca; there, that she lifted her eyes and saw him; there that he loved, and there that he was comforted (Gen. 24:63-67).  The survivor of the altar made his home at the living well of being seen.   

We need to find our way home to that same well.  The well of healing and strength that we Americans found in one another after 9/11.  That we Jews, that we as a WRT family, found in one another after October 7th.  That we feel when we hold and are held in our times of loss and grief, when we experience human connection and the blessing of community. 

I earnestly hope we can find our way to the kind of seeing we managed in those terrible and beautiful days after 9/11, when we, in our collective hurt, our collective need to hold and be held, were able to see past every difference, across color and creed, political party and point of view, and simply see one another. 

Torah offers us a glimpse of this. When Abraham died, Isaac and Ishmael, the estranged sons of Sarah and Hagar, stood side by side and buried their father together (Gen. 25:9). 

I earnestly hope that we, too, will some day find a way to that vision, where the traumatized children of Abraham and Sarah, and the traumatized children of Abraham and Hagar – the Jewish children of Isaac, and the Muslim children of Ishmael – will see one another in our shared humanity, our shared hurt, our shared hope, and live side by side, at long last, by the Well of the Living One Who Sees.  

I do not know if we can see that far.  

But, by God, we can lift our eyes, and try.

Shanah Tovah. 

Persistence in Resistance to Tyranny: Sermon for Shabbat Va’era, 5786

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Delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

Friday, January 16, 2026

Shabbat Shalom!

My remarks tonight take up the theme of “persistence in resistance to tyranny” and are composed in line with what the 20th-century Christian theologian (and outspoken critic of the Nazis) Karl Barth once said: that “a sermon should have the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.”  

Wherever you get your news—and I hope you’re getting it from as many different and credible sources as you can—one could easily conclude that we live in unprecedented times, for the sheer volume and diversity of soul-wrenching issues before us.  How, then, to choose among this week’s headlines alone, from Mississippi to Minnesota to Iran?  I could take up any one in depth and keep you here until Tu Bishevat or, try something novel: take up all of them together and make my point in 10 minutes.  You will be relieved to learn that I have endeavored in the direction of the latter.

I begin with a challenge to my own claim that we are living in unprecedented times, a statement which, given the nature of time and change, could be accurately claimed at any moment in human history.  But I refute it in the spirit of Kohelet, whose opening chapter of the Book also known as Ecclesiastes, memorably records:

Only that shall happen

That has happened,

Only that occur

That has occurred;

There is nothing new

Beneath the sun!

(Eccl. 1:9)

“Nothing new beneath the sun,” indeed.  For what we witness this week—from Mississippi to Minnesota to Iran—has been seen before, and that takes us to the verses we have heard from the Torah reading for this Shabbat, Parashat Va’era.  To set the stage, Va’era marks the stunning turning point in the narrative of Israelite bondage, when God responds to the suffering of the slaves and, with Moses as messenger, begins their liberation.

To Moses God declares, “Say, therefore, to the Israelites: I am Adonai. I will deliver you from the hardship of the Egyptians and save you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary judgments.  I will take you to be My people, and I will be your God….  I will bring you to the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and give it to you for an inheritance, I, Adonai” (Ex. 6:5-8).

It is what happens immediately after this inspirational charge that particularly interests us now:  

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר מֹשֶׁ֛ה כֵּ֖ן אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל וְלֹ֤א שָֽׁמְעוּ֙ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֔ה מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה׃

“But when Moses told this to the Israelites, they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by brutal slavery.”  Or, literally, “they would not listen to Moses, out of shortness of breath and brutal slavery.” (Ex. 6:9).  Tyranny takes your breath away.  It suffocates the body and stifles the spirit.  

Consider what this passage teaches us about the natural response of people to oppression and brutality; the effect on body and breath, flesh and spirit, of trauma and terror, whether brought upon human beings by literal tyrants, or lone wolf terrorists, or states acting with unrestricted power to menace the weak with not only the threat but also the use of violence against the defenseless.  

In a sense, the arsonist who incinerated a Reform Temple with its Torah scrolls in Jackson, Mississippi, the arsonist who tried the same in this week in Germany, the armed ICE officers who have maimed and killed civilians, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guardsmen who mowed down protesters by the thousands on the other side of the world, may have acted from starkly different motivations in different settings and circumstances, but the intended effect on their victims, and on us who sympathize with their victims, is one and the same:  to make it impossible to breathe.  To crush not just body but spirit.

Moreover, we learn from Torah—in the very next verse—that the effect is often contagious, afflicting not just the masses but also their Moses.  “The Israelites would not listen to me,” he says to God in panic; “how then should Pharaoh heed me, me—who gets tongue-tied!” (Ibid, v. 10)  

This, too, strikes a chord as old as time: even leaders, in the face of unrelenting brutality, may, for a time, lose heart, lose hope, lose their way.  It happened to Moses.  It happened, it seems important to note on this weekend of all weekends, to MLK.  In his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, King recounts a personal crisis during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in January 1956, after receiving a late-night threatening phone call amid ongoing violence and intimidation. Sitting alone at his kitchen table, King poured out his despair:

“I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

In some sermons where he retold this experience, he phrased it similarly: “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right… But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now, I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. Now, I am afraid… And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.”  It’s a mutually reinforcing cycle of despair.  That’s what tyranny does to the spirit, to freedom movements everywhere. 

King’s hour of despair had its own precedents: Moses, of course, but also Frederick Douglass, who spoke of his brutal treatment under the slave-breaker Edward Covey:

“Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), p. 63)

After the 1892 lynching of three close friends in Memphis, and facing death threats that forced her to flee to the North, the great activist and journalist Ida B. Wells Barnett said:  “I felt like one banished from home and friends… The shock was so great that for weeks I could neither eat nor sleep.”  In her diaries, Wells recounts periods of deep discouragement and loneliness in her solitary quest, feeling the burden of apathy and inadequate support from the Black community and allies.  

“There is nothing new under the sun.”

Of course the Torah portion, and, moreover, the Jewish story, does not end with Moses in retreat or defeat.  Because our God does not back down from a setback; does not give up in the face of human error and evil, no matter how great or how grave.  Our God does something extraordinary in the next verse:  God summons for Moses a lifeline:  Aaron, his brother, his mouthpiece, his ally and supporter. He adds breath to the short of breath.  God reminds Moses—and us—that in the face of terror and tyranny, we never need go it alone, no matter how lonely the work may feel.  And so, arm in arm, and breath adding to breath, the brothers press on, and the great and violent confrontation with Pharaoh begins that will, by the end of next week’s portion, lead to liberation.

I read today’s passage and think about the passage of time and travail for our people and for hurting people everywhere.  People short of breath and crushed in spirit.  I wonder what this passage meant to the Jews living in Babylonian exile, or under Roman occupation, to our ancestors expelled from Spain or forced into the ghettoes and the camps.  

I wonder, too, what message this passage might offer us, in today’s frightening America, in this strange and fractured world that has just crossed over the threshold of 2026 to welcome a year shrouded in anxiety and uncertainty.

I wonder, and I remember that, through it all, ours is a God who does not give up on humanity, and that we are a people who don’t give up on God’s children, either.

Shabbat Shalom

God’s in Charge: Parashat Chayei Sarah, 5786

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Sermon Delivered at Greater Centennial A.M.E. Zion Church, Mount Vernon, New York

Sunday November 9th, 2025

The following joke was funny between 1976 and 1996 and only for a select audience, so you could say that this is very “inside baseball” but here goes.  

A man goes to his rabbi and says, “Rabbi, I don’t know what to do.  The first game of the World Series is next Tuesday and it’s the same night as Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement).” 

The rabbi says, “Well, isn’t that why they invented the VCR?”

And the man says, “You can tape Yom Kippur??!”

Like I said – very inside baseball.  But, naturally, since the Dodgers’ big win last Sunday, baseball has been on my mind. Throughout the season and postseason, and even after the Series, I’ve heard a lot of talk about the so-called “inevitability” of the Dodgers winning.  Sportscasters and fans united around this theme of inevitability, which stems from the club’s star power (including Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman), its unmatched payroll (over $300 million!), and its back-to-back dominance after their 2024 title.  Despite a grueling back-and-forth seven-game tug of war, and a nailbiter finish, immediately the “i” word started coming up again.  A New York Post column by Joel Sherman cemented their status, opening with: “They were inevitable. Indomitable. And now indisputably historic” (November 2, 2025).

Inevitable comes from the Latin, meaning “unavoidable.”  Something is fated, predestined, meant to be.  In Yiddish we have a similar word, bashert — when an outcome is more than random chance but rather, inevitable.  Bashert is typically used to describe a person’s soulmate, life partner, the perfect match, the right one. You can refer to that special person as your bashert, your meant-to-be.  And the classic Bible story illustrating bashert is found in the reading from Genesis that Jewish communities all over the world are studying this week.  

In Genesis Chapter 24, Abraham sends his trusted household servant, Eliezer, in search of a wife for his son Isaac, who apparently cannot be trusted to find a wife on his own.  Abraham, like many an anxious Jewish parent, can’t stand thinking about his beloved son spending his poor life alone, so he needs to get him “all boo’d up” and commissions Eliezer to find Isaac’s bashert.  

But how to find just the right one?  The servant travels off to Abraham’s native land and pleads for God to get involved:  “O Lord,” he prays, “God of my master Abraham, grant me good fortune this day, and deal graciously with my master Abraham.  Here I stand by the well, as the daughters of the townspeople come out to draw water.  Let the maiden to whom I say, ‘Please, lower your jar that I may drink,’ and who replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels’—let her be the one whom You have decreed for Your servant Isaac. Thereby shall I know that You have dealt graciously with my master” (Gen. 24:12-14).

Eliezer knows he has spotted the right one NOT when he meets the hottest girl in all the land, or the richest, but rather when Rebekah emerges at the well and sees a tired stranger and his thirsty flock, and stops to give them drink, camels and all.  Do you know how long it takes to water an entire flock of camels?  Did you know that a single camel can store enough water to survive for six or seven months in the Sahara desert without drinking?  But I digress.  

What identifies Rebekah as the right one for Isaac is her kindness, her generosity, her inner beauty: her compassion, patience, and strength of character.  Eliezer takes her back to Canaan to meet her groom.  When Isaac sees her, he is floored, because she is also hot.  But honestly, Rebekah’s qualities, inner and outer, matter less than the fact that God has preordained her to be Isaac’s bashert.  Even her father, Laban, sees it plain as day:  “The matter has been decreed by the Lord,” he admits; “we have nothing good or bad to say about it” (Gen. 24:50).  

When I studied this passage in seminary, our professor of classical Bible commentary, Rabbi Dr. Ed Goldman, would ask us rabbis-in-training:  “And what does this story show us?”  Like generations of rabbinical students before us, we had heard his answer so many times that we could respond in unison:  “The inevitable, inexorable, unfolding of the Divine Will.”  

Put another way:  we human beings like to think we’re in charge, but make no mistake: God’s in charge.  “The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.”  Inevitable — it’s unavoidable.  And “inexorable” — also from the Latin, meaning, “it can’t be prayed or swayed away.”  “Thy will be done.”  If God wants something done, it’s gonna get done.  God’s in charge.

Dr. Goldman saw this theme all over the Book of Genesis and in fact called it the theme of the Bible itself.  The creation of the world?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  Adam and Eve eating the fruit, getting kicked out of the Garden, and starting the journey of humanity on the wrong side of Eden?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  Jacob dreaming a ladder connecting Earth and Heaven?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams and freeing himself from the prison-house?  The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  A band of Israelite slaves escaping Pharaoh’s tyranny?  Not prayer, not good planning, not even Moses’s clarion leadership but–say it with me–The inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will.  

I have to admit that the older I get, the more I find affirming that, despite all our human toil and travail, at the end of the day, God’s in charge, and what God has in store for us, no human being can hinder.  The great masters all arrived at this same conclusion:

  • Isaiah 14:27: “For the LORD Almighty has purposed, and who can thwart God? God’s hand is stretched out, and who can turn it back?”
  • Proverbs 19:21: “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”
  • Job 42:2: “I know that You can do all things; no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.”

God’s in charge! 

Many years ago I was summoned to the hospital bed of a beloved member of my congregation for the recitation of Vidui, the traditional deathbed confessional, the Jewish version of “last rites.”  I took Don’s hand and we prayed:

“I acknowledge before You, Lord my God and God of my ancestors, that my recovery and my death are in Your hands. May it be Your will that You heal me with total recovery, but, if I die, may my death be an atonement for all the errors, iniquities, and willful sins that I have committed…”

And so on like that, until Don shut his eyes and his breathing became very slow.  I embraced his grieving family and said, “I’m going to part company now, but you can call me when he passes and we’ll prepare for what comes next.”  

The next morning the phone rang.  It was Don.  “Still here, Rabbi,” he said.  He would go on to enjoy another five good years.  The inevitable, inexorable, unfolding of the Divine Will.  God’s in charge.  

It’s useful wisdom to keep handy these days after Election Day, through all the storm and stress we have made of our current political situation, and the seemingly endless array of flawed leaders we have entrusted with tremendous authority.  It’s useful, when voters elect the person we fear or detest, to remind ourselves: Elected officials come and go; even kings and queens are made of flesh and blood; but God’s in charge.

It’s especially useful wisdom to keep handy when things don’t go our way.  Rabbi Jonathan Slater, a great teacher of Jewish wisdom and spirituality who lives here in Westchester, taught me that when things don’t go our way, the best we can do is say: “That was unexpected! I wonder what will happen next?”  And get ready to move forward on whatever path God has set for us.

Now I could end here and you would say:  “That was unexpected!  I wonder what will happen next?”  But bear with me.  There’s one more thought coming.  Because even in a world where God’s in charge, we human beings still have a lot of work to do, and our actions really do matter.  

Almost two thousand years ago, the earliest Rabbis recognized this paradox of our existence.  They put it this way:   

Everything is foreseen, yet freedom of choice is granted.  

And they added:  The world is judged with goodness.  And everything is in accordance with the bulk of [one’s] deeds (Pirkei Avot, 3:15).

In other words, God’s in charge… but God needs us to take charge, too.  Human beings were brought into this world not randomly, not to suffer the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it (Hamlet, III:1), but rather, to make a difference.  

Given that so much of life attests to the “inevitable, inexorable unfolding of the Divine Will,” we still have choices about how to respond, and our choices matter.  

When bad things happen in our lives, we often ask, “Why?” “Why is this happening to me?” when instead we could ask, “Now what?  Now what must I do?  Who  must I become?” “How would God wish for me to show up, given what has happened?” 

It is true: much of life is inevitable–unavoidable; inexorable–cannot be prayed away.  But life is about more than just what happens to us; it is also about what we choose to make happen in our lives and in a world that desperately needs more good deeds, more love, more compassion and more justice.

So back to the Dodgers.  Was their big win inevitable?  Listen to what sports writer Hannah Keyser had to say:

“Ultimately, the series crowned a credible champ not just because the Dodgers were favored for months, but because, in the end, they had to scratch and claw their way to the top. Just because their victory was projected doesn’t mean it was easy or predictable (The Guardian, November 2nd, 2025, emphasis added).”

The last word goes to an old saying.  No one knows who first said it; it may have been a Catholic Saint because it ended up in the Catechism; but you can also find it in the Reform Jewish prayer book. 

Remember these words well, and may God bless us as we strive to join righteously and joyfully in the inevitable, inexorable unfolding the Divine Will:

Pray as though everything depended on God.

Act as though everything depended on you.

Amen.

How We Get Across: Pesach 5785

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Sermon for Shabbat / Chag Pesach (Day 7), 5785, Friday April 18, 2025

Delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

In life as in literature, crossing a body of water often heralds a moment of transformation.  

The Greeks whispered of the River Styx that formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld, where the ghostly ferryman Charon would transport the souls of the dead on their voyage to the hereafter.  

In 49 BCE, Julius Caesar and his army crossed the Rubicon, a shallow river in Northeastern Italy that protected Rome from Civil War.  His crossing was considered an act of insurrection.  There he declared, alea iacta est:  “The die is cast.”

We remember George Washington crossing the frozen Delaware the night after Christmas, 1776, in his surprise attack on Hessian forces in Trenton, New Jersey.

The runaway slave Eliza crosses the frozen Ohio River at the heart of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s own verse:

So over the roaring rushing flood,

From block to block she sprang,

And ever her cry for God’s good help

Above the waters rang.

And God did hear that mother’s cry,

For never an ice-block sank;

While the cruel trader and his men

Stood wondering on the bank.

A good man saw on the further side,

And gave her his helping hand;

So poor Eliza, with her boy,

Stood safe upon the land.

All of us Jewish Americans find a water crossing at the heart of our family’s story, whether in persecuted flight across the Atlantic or as pioneers or entrepreneurs; the huddled and the hopeful.

And of course water crossings figure prominently in the Hebrew Bible:  Noah’s ark-bound journey from a world doomed to a world reborn; Jonah’s aborted flight across the Mediterranean to escape the prophet’s call; Joshua’s triumphal march across the Jordan River, carrying the Ark of the Covenant.  The Bible even tells us that before he started making house calls at Passover, Elijah’s final earthly act was to roll up his cloak and touch the waters of the Jordan River with it; the waters divide to the right and the left and Elijah crosses over on dry ground, together with his apprentice Elisha (cf. II Kings 2:11-15).

This last scene, of course, echoes the greatest water crossing of them all, in the Bible and indeed in all of literature: the Torah reading for this seventh day of Pesach, the crossing of the Red Sea.  A moment of transformation: entering the water as slaves, the people emerge free men and women on the other shore.  

Of course, they had no choice, no way to retreat.  With the Egyptian army in hot pursuit, the Israelites arrive at the water’s edge.  Then, the Torah tells us, the Divine pillar of cloud and fire positioned itself behind the Israelites, in front of the Egyptians, forming a barrier that prevented the Egyptians from moving forward.  But it also presumably prevented the Israelites from moving backward (Cf. Ex. 14:19-20).

Here, the famous midrash inserts brave Nachshon ben Amminadav, who entered the Sea unbidden (Mechilta d’Rabbi Yishmael, 14:22).  The waters reach his ankles; the Sea continues to rage.  He goes in up to his knees, his waist, his chest… the Sea closing in over him.  Only when the water reaches his nostrils does the Red Sea part and our people enter on dry land.  Presumably the Rabbis who wrote this legend wanted to instill a lesson of faith, faith in the face of an insuperable obstacle, but I say Nachshon had no choice:  with fire and cloud and an army behind him and nothing but open Sea ahead of him, where could he turn?  I am reminded in an uncomfortable way of those terrible images of the World Trade Center jumpers on 9/11, those helpless victims, with cloud and fire billowing behind them and nothing but the open blue of sky in front of them.

Life hands us experiences over which we have no choice.  Time moves in only one direction and we must walk forward, sometimes into a Sea of grief and sadness.  And I do not know why it is so, but there are years in our life that take more than they give, so that over time each of us becomes threaded into a common web of human experience, the kinship of bereavement, the universal society of every generation that must lay to rest the people we love.

I have walked alongside many—maybe even you and your family—in that Sea of grief and I always emerge with cause to marvel at the faith to keep moving forward, whether by choice or consequence.  And I do not know why it is so, but instead of drowning in tears I have always found that just the courage to enter the Sea causes the waters to part a little bit, that by going through the process of bereavement, an encounter with death becomes a little bit easier to bear.  

Jewish tradition recognizes that human grieving passes through stages and therefore our reckoning with it must also take the form of a journey of stages.  Even before a person enters shiva, one is called Onen, a state in which one remains from the time of death until the time of burial when shiva properly begins.  

Rabbi Maurice Lamm whose book The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning provides the definitive writing on the subject, observes: 

“The onen is a person in deep distress, a person yanked out of normal life and abruptly catapulted into the midst of inexpressible grief. He is disoriented, his attitudes are disarranged, his emotions out of gear. The shock of death paralyzes his consciousness and blocks out all regular patterns of orderly thinking. ‘The deceased lies before him,’ as the sages said and, psychologically, he is reliving the moment of death every instant during this period.”

The Onen is like Nachshon before entering the Sea, trembling on the water’s edge.  

But then the ritual begins:  the family is gathered; a rabbi or cantor or caring officiant summoned; the funeral arranged, the loved one’s story told, the act of k’riah performed, tearing a black ribbon or piece of clothing so that grief finds its way from inside the heart to outside the breast, a badge of love and loss, of honor and hope.  

Sometimes when I walk with a bereaved family down the long aisle of our sanctuary, a sea of mourners and friends on either side, I think of the Israelites marching through the Red Sea and I feel comforted.  It happens again, when leaving the grave, custom invites those gathered there to form two rows in order to allow the mourning family to pass between them and feel their shelter and support.  How like the Israelites passing through the Sea, I sometimes think, and what a necessary miracle of faith to place one foot in front of the other, in that awful moment of leaving a loved one to rest.  

Oftentimes in the rituals of bereavement I share words of the 23rd Psalm, as we will in tomorrow morning’s Yizkor service.  Even before the famous line, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” we read a little epigram:  “Mizmor L’David:  A Psalm of David.”  According to Jewish tradition, the Psalm was written by King David.

My friend Rabbi Les Gutterman has observed that “kings, now as then, have many privileges and prerogatives.  One they have never enjoyed is exemption from sorrow.  Death has a passkey into every home in the community including the royal palace.”  King David buried his son Absalom.  “Thus he says, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.’  One must walk through that valley.  We cannot run.  Bereavement sometimes comes quickly.  Healing is always a slow process.”  Shakespeare said it well:  “What wound did ever did heal but by degrees?” (Othello, II:iii).

Like the Nachshon and the Sea, the Psalmist cannot escape the Valley of the Shadow. It has an entrance no one can avoid.  The only way across the Valley, the only way across the Sea, is through.  And on the other side, we emerge transformed.  We discover that love does not die; people do; and that our loved ones may leave our world but in so many ways they never leave us, for we have been changed by them; and who we are—the way we think, the way we talk, the way we act, the way we move through the world—integrates the memories, the gifts, the holiness and the love that our dear ones gave to us.  And that is why we have Yizkor, not only to remind ourselves not only of how our loved ones lived, but also to acknowledge and even celebrate how we have been transformed by their lives.

When the Israelites came to the Sea, the guiding presence of God’s pillar of cloud and fire retreated from in front of them, to behind them, leaving nothing but the Sea before them.  

Rather than as an abandonment from on high, it is possible to understand this maneuver as a tender demonstration of God’s love.  I think the Torah wants us to know that God had their backs, as it were.  The only way across was through.  They walked into the Sea—a Promised Land before them, God’s gentle presence behind them.  

So May our Shepherd in dark valleys transform our cherished memories into sources of healing and lasting blessing.   Amen.

CALVES TO THE LEFT OF ME, HEIFERS TO THE RIGHT

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Sermon for SHABBAT KI TISA / SHUSHAN PURIM 5785 – Friday, March 14, 2025

Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York

The old Purim custom of drowning out the name of Haman comes to mind as I speak to you this evening about Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate and protest-movement leader whose name has dominated the press, especially the Jewish press, over the last week.  

As with Haman, I wish I could have stamped out the name Mahmoud Khalil, denied him media attention, prevented him from becoming a cause celebre, deprived his admirers a martyr to lionize, but rabbis do not get to choose the headlines any more than we get to choose parashat ha-shavua, the Torah portion of the week, so let’s consider ours for a moment and then return to the curious case of Mr. Khallil.

The portion Ki Tisa frames the most ignominious episode in the story of the Israelite people:  their dalliance with idolatry in the form of a golden calf.  Moses has disappeared up Mount Sinai while God inscribes for him the Law on two tablets of stone.  As days wear on into weeks, the people at the foot of the mountain grow anxious and restless and press Moses’s surrogate, his brother Aaron, saying:

ק֣וּם ׀ עֲשֵׂה־לָ֣נוּ אֱלֹהִ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֤ר יֵֽלְכוּ֙ לְפָנֵ֔ינוּ כִּי־זֶ֣ה ׀ מֹשֶׁ֣ה הָאִ֗ישׁ אֲשֶׁ֤ר הֶֽעֱלָ֙נוּ֙ מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם לֹ֥א יָדַ֖עְנוּ מֶה־הָ֥יָה לֽוֹ׃

“Get up and make us a god who will go before us, for this man, Moses, who brought us out of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him” (Ex. 32:1).

Aaron—disturbingly, without hesitation—complies.  The men cast off their gold and Aaron casts it into an icon well known in both Egyptian and Canaanite society—the bull or calf associated with power and fertility.  The people cavort around their sacred cow, offering sacrifices, feasting and dancing, and even exclaiming, 

… אֵ֤לֶּה אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙ יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר הֶעֱל֖וּךָ מֵאֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם׃

“This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (Ex. 32:4, cf. also 32:8).

Needless to say, things do not go well for these Israelites, and to this day the phrase “golden calf” can refer to any form of idolatry, overt or covert.  On this matter, I found the Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on idolatry illuminating: “Gross, or overt, idolatry consists of explicit acts of reverence addressed to a person or an object—the sun, the king, an animal, a statue…. A person becomes guilty of a more subtle idolatry, however, when, although overt acts of adoration are avoided, he attaches to a creature [or any thing, or even an idea] the confidence, loyalty, and devotion that properly belong only to the Creator.”

Because we are human, we are all susceptible to these “more subtle” idolatries.  And in this era of bitter partisanship, I worry that we are especially susceptible to the fetishes of our respective political camps.  

On the left we have an idolatry that worships powerlessness and victimhood as virtues, that, in its most extreme expressions, justifies and even glorifies any act of terror, any rhetoric of violence, no matter how depraved, making the condemnable commendable—so long as it is espoused or perpetrated in the name of a group perceived to be “oppressed.”  

In this form of idolatry, recent headliners like Luigi Mangione, who stands accused of murdering a healthcare executive in cold blood, and Mahmoud Khalil, the protestor at the center of this week’s news, become golden calves—icons worshipped as gods, paragons of the right and the good.

Lest we pile on the left to the exclusion of other idolatries, let it be known that the right has its fair share of golden calves as well, including the fetishization of order and authority, of traditional notions of masculinity and strength, of so-called “traditional family values,” of racial purity and historical narratives that play fast and loose with the truth.  Take, for instance, the myth of the “Southern Gentleman” as a model of chivalry which of course obfuscates the brutal truth of slavery and the aims of the Confederacy, for starters.

It seems to me that the idolatries of both the left and the right have collided in the curious case of Mahmoud Khalil, leading me to conclude that both are wrong.  I have found company in an article by Yale Law professor Jed Rubenfeld, published this Wednesday by The Free Press.  It is called “Both Right and Left Are Wrong About Mahmoud Khalil,” followed by the subtitle, “Anyone who says the law is obvious here is not telling the truth.”

To recap the facts of the case as we know them:  Khalil, having recently graduated from Columbia University, played a leading role in the virulent anti-Israel protests there, acting as spokesperson and negotiator for a group called CUAD—Columbia University Apartheid Divest—which describes itself as “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” and which, since October 7th, has mobilized the erection of the encampments and the takeover of several buildings on campus.  “Khalil was suspended from Columbia last April for his participation in the protests, but the school reversed his suspension the next day. Arrested on March 8, Khalil is currently being detained in Louisiana. On March 10, a federal judge in New York stayed his deportation pending a hearing.”

Rubenfeld continues:

The administration has not yet definitively stated its legal grounds for deporting Khalil, but a federal statute, the Immigration and Nationality Act, says that aliens—even those who, like Khalil, have green cards—can be deported if they “espouse or endorse terrorist activity.” It also permits deportation on the basis of an alien’s beliefs or statements if the Secretary of State determines that the alien’s continued presence here “would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest.”

The rest of the article is a difficult but rewarding read, and I commend it to you.  The thrust of the piece is that if Khalil were a US citizen, the matter would be more or less straightforward, as Rubenfeld makes clear:  “Political opinion, no matter how abhorrent, is protected speech in America.  Expressing support for even the sickest terrorist butchers, like Hamas, is protected speech.”  

“But,”—and this is critical—“he’s not a citizen. His green card makes him a lawful permanent resident, but he’s still an alien. Thus the real question is whether, or when, or to what extent aliens have the same constitutional rights as citizens. Unfortunately for both left and right,” Rubenfeld advises, “the answer is complicated.”

I’ve made the whole article available as a handout which you can take as you leave the sanctuary this evening.  The point I wish to emphasize is how our golden calves, our idolatries—our ideological sacred cows and shibboleths, amplified by the most extreme voices in our respective echo chambers—blind us from seeing “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”  

In the case of Khalil, loud voices on both the left and the right have adopted predictable positions in line with their ideological fixations.  The right, enamored with the perceived strength of the current administration in its standing up to antisemitic bullying, sees in Khalil a Jew-hating provocateur and terrorist sympathizer who is simply getting what he had coming to him.  

The left—not only reflexively sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but also reflexively antagonistic to anything the current administration says or does—sees in Khalil an avatar of resistance to an administration that overreaches in silencing its opponents.  

Both camps are participating in the shared preoccupation du jour, what my friend Rabbi Jeff Salkin calls “aerobic offense” — working ourselves up into a frenzy over the latest outrage, day after day. Both have fallen into a seductive, whirling dance around their own camp’s ideological golden calf: the core beliefs that dominate each one’s echo chamber and which keep each camp from apprehending the whole truth.  

One of my favorite Jewish authors and public intellectuals, Jay Michaelson, responding to the fracas over Khalil, has this to add:

“On the Left, rushing to pull the fascist fire alarm every single time will lead to a boy-who-cried-wolf exhaustion on the one hand, and a flattening of anti-democratic offenses on the other.  On the Right, supporting the deportation of an unpopular (to the Right) individual is, to me self-evidently, extremely unwise and imprudent, not to mention anti-democratic and illiberal.”

Seeking truth, in all its messiness and complexity, is, I suppose, perennially unpopular, especially compared to the cheap satisfactions of “being right” or sticking it to one’s ideological opponents.  

Were either camp to distance themselves from the golden calves of their own dogmas, the left might take a moment to reflect that making a hero of a virulent antisemite who harassed and intimidated Jews on their own campus is bad, not just for the Jews but for all people; and the right would be wise to recognize that depriving anyone of due process—even a green-card holder—is bad news for every American, not only their ideological opponents.  Capital-T Truth encompasses both of these small-t truths.

And so, the Talmud affirms:  חוֹתָמוֹ שֶׁל הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא ״אֱמֶת״ — “The seal of the Holy One is Truth” (Shabbat 55a). God’s essence, God’s name—so to speak—is Truth:  the ultimate and all-encompassing reality, which necessarily embraces ideological complexity and even contradiction.  

It may be easier to stay within our camps and dance around our golden calves.  We did it back then and do it today.  But the One whose seal is Truth summons us back to the mountain where true Torah is found.

Shabbat Shalom!

THE YIZKOR WE NEED THIS PESACH

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7th Day Pesach 5784

An article by Rabbi Shlomo Brody published last week in Tablet magazine reviews the historical development of the Yizkor memorial service.  As I read it, I remembered, vaguely, that I had written a term paper on this very subject for a liturgy course in rabbinical school.  My area of academic concentration was Medieval Jewish literature which, despite every reasonable conjecture to the contrary, has proved relevant to my work as a congregational rabbi on more than one occasion.  

I spent my HUC days poring over martyrdom texts written by Ashkenazi Jews between the 11th and 15th centuries.  As a tradition that values human life above nearly all else, Judaism generally frowns on martyrdom, with a few notable exceptions.  

The first arises after the failed Bar Kochba rebellion in the 2nd Century, when a self-styled Messiah (Shimon Bar Koziba, a.k.a. “Bar Kochba,” meaning “son of a star”) leads a doomed rebellion of Jews against the Roman Empire—the second failed revolt against Rome in 60 years—and a group of prominent leaders and teachers of Torah, most famously Rabbi Akiva, is rounded up by the Romans and executed to public spectacle.  These martyrs are recalled in the Yom Kippur afternoon service, in a liturgy known as “Eleh Ezkra,” “These do I remember,” or as it’s called in English, “the Martyrology.”  Judaism praises these martyrs for accepting death rather than desecrating the name of God, or so the reasoning goes.  

The other exception arises starting in 1096, when Ashkenazi Jews (that is, Jews of the Rhineland, straddling modern-day France and Germany) were brutally attacked by Christian Crusaders on their way to “liberate” the Holy Land from Muslim “infidels.”  In response to this trauma, Jewish writers wrote commemorative verses for martyrs who took their own lives rather than submit to the Christian marauders who inflicted physical, sexual, and emotional torment on their victims the likes of which none of us had seen in our lifetimes before October 7th, 2023.  

During this period, numerous piyyutim, or devotional poems, were composed, lauding the martyrs, castigating the assailants, and testifying to the sanctification of God’s name for which these pious Jews had died. (To this day, the traditional term for martyrdom is Kiddush Ha-Shem, which means “sanctification of the Name.”) Similar poems proliferate after Jews are put to death (often by burning at the stake, sometimes whole communities at a time) for alleged crimes like murdering Christian children to use their blood for making matzo (the notorious “blood libel”).  

A paucity of reliable eyewitness testimony or other contemporaneous artifacts suggests that the proportion of Jews who chose martyrdom over forced conversion or worse was actually very small; but in literature, if not in life, their numbers are exaggerated to match their esteem.  

In Germany, a controversial custom arose in the wake of the attacks:  writing down the names of the dead in a Memorbücher, or “Memory Book,” called Sefer Zikaron in Hebrew.  As Brody points out, “The list of names was introduced with the prayerful wish: ‘May God remember [Yizkor Elohim].’ Alongside the martyrs, communal leaders or benefactors were listed. These names would then be read aloud in the community. Reading the book turned into a communal ritual.” 

Several prominent rabbis initially opposed this practice, questioning its theological efficacy (could a prayer really effect divine mercy for the soul of the dead?) and even likening the practice to a kind of idolatry:  worship of the dead.  As often happens to rabbis in congregational life (I told you this stuff was relevant), the traumatized community’s need for a collective memorial practice overrode the rabbis’ theological objections, and became a cherished part of Jewish life, with names of the dead often inscribed on the walls of synagogues and in books of remembrance, and read aloud before Kaddish (all customs practiced at WRT).  

In times of collective grief, new prayers were composed to commemorate the slain. One, called Av Ha-Rachamim (“Father of Mercy”), “beseeches God to remember ‘the pious, upright, and blameless, the holy communities, who laid down their lives for the sanctification of [the] Name.’  It further calls on God to take revenge for their spilled blood” (Ibid) and exact vengeance on their enemies. The prayer gained further traction when, in the middle of the fourteenth century, pogroms broke out against Jewish communities in the wake of the Black Plague.  

When, in the middle of the 17th Century, the Cossack warlord Bogdan Chmielnizki led a massacre of tens of thousands of Polish Jews, another new martyrdom prayer entered the liturgy:  El Malei Rachamim, “The God of Abundant Compassion,” a prayer asking God to shelter the souls of the righteous beneath the wings of the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) and to bind up their souls in the bonds of life everlasting”—words that are recited today at every Jewish funeral, but which began as a response to communal trauma.

Taken together, these prayers and poems and lists of the dead gradually coalesce into the Jewish practice of Yizkor, the memorial service that will eventually be adopted into the liturgy for Yom Kippur and the Shalosh Regalim, the three pilgrimage Festivals of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot.  So we offer Yizkor prayers four times a year.  (By “we,” I mean Ashkenazi Jews; to this day, Sepharadim do not have a communal Yizkor, because the precipitating catastrophes for this liturgy did not happen in Sephardic lands.)  

And, for the most part, our Yizkor, though a communal experience, is centered around the emotional and spiritual needs of the individual mourner.  You will find in our Siddur a wide array of poems, both traditional and modern, and formulas for saying Yizkor, with the emphasis on personal bereavement.

And yet, today is also the first Yizkor since the last Yizkor, which was recited collectively throughout the Jewish world on October 7th and 8th, 2023—on the Festivals of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah—the conclusion of Sukkot.  

One of the great ironies of human life is that we experience mourning as the loneliest of ordeals when in fact it is the most universal.  It is a cruel trick of Nature that the human psyche has evolved to respond to the death of a loved one as uniquely shattering.  “No one can know my pain,” we think; “no one understands what this feels like.”  This was not just someone’s husband, wife, parent, child, or friend:  this one was mine, and now, I am utterly alone.  Such is the force of death and such the devastation of loss.  And still, the force of death is a mirror image of the force of life even as grief is reflected love. 

Judaism, in its compassionate wisdom, saw fit to merge the intensely personal experience of grief with the intensely Jewish need to be in community, and vice versa.  Yizkor: what began as collective remembrance in the face of unfathomable communal trauma also became the sacred container for every individual bereavement.  In so doing, Yizkor makes plain its meaning:  you are not alone.

We need Yizkor this year, more than ever.  We need to be together in our grief and heartbreak, for the trauma of October 7th and the trauma of every day since.  By way of giving us some space for memory—alone and together—I will share this poem by the Adi Keissar, an acclaimed Israeli poet whose family arrived as refugees from Yemen beginning in 1882 on her father’s side, and, on her mother’s side, in the wake of the expulsion of Yemen’s Jews in the 1950’s.

I’m not sure

if I could go back to life this time

A morning run, bike trip, party

without the face of the dead

haunting me

I’m not sure

if I could come back alive this time

An empty baby bed, a blanket

coloured red.

What I’m sure of

Automatic weapons, fire and smoke

shattered windows and a broken door

sirens going up and down

ashes and wreckage

The world is burning

and I am the flames

The hours blended

also, the days

At night came the dreams

and the mosquitos

to suck my skin

As from a hidden signal

swirled around me

all night

buzzed in the darkness

asked for my blood.

All through the night

the air stood still

between me and the world

not going in and not coming out

In the morning I opened a window

the sun was shining in the sky

the silence filled the empty streets

I’m not sure

if I could ever hear silence

that doesn’t hide a disaster within.

אוקטובר\ עדי קיסר

אֲנִי לֹא בְּטוּחָהּ

שֶׁאַצְלִיחַ הַפַּעַם לַחְזֹר לַחַיִּים

רִיצַת בֹּקֶר, טִיּוּל אוֹפַנַּיִם, מְסִבָּה

מִבְּלִי שֶׁיָּבוֹאוּ אֵלַי פְּנֵי הַמֵּתִים

אֲנִי לֹא בְּטוּחָה

שֶׁאַצְלִיחַ הַפַּעַם לַחְזֹר בַּחַיִּים

מִטַּת תִּינוֹק רֵיקָה, שְׂמִיכָה,

בְּצֶבַע אָדֹם.

בְּמָה אֲנִי בְּטוּחָה:

בַּיְּרִיּוֹת עַל אוֹטוֹמָט, בְּאֵשׁ וּבֶעָשָׁן

בְּחַלּוֹנוֹת מְנֻפָּצִים וּבְדֶלֶת שְׁבוּרָה

בְּאַזְעָקוֹת עוֹלוֹת וְיוֹרְדוֹת

בְּאֵפֶר וּבַהֲרִיסוֹת

הָעוֹלָם בּוֹעֵר

וַאֲנִי הַלֶּהָבוֹת.

הַשָּׁעוֹת נִדְבְּקוּ זוֹ בָּזוּ

גַּם הַיָּמִים

וּבַלַּיְלָה הִגִּיעוּ הַחֲלוֹמוֹת

וְהַיַּתּוּשִׁים

לִמְצֹץ אֶת עוֹרִי

כְּמוֹ מִתּוֹךְ אוֹת סָמוּי

כָּל הַלַּיְלָה

זִמְזְמוּ בַּחֹשֶׁךְ

בִּקְּשׁוּ אֶת דָּמִי.

כָּל הַלַּיְלָה עָמַד הָאֲוִיר

תָּלוּי בֵּינִי וּבֵין הָעוֹלָם

לֹא נִכְנַס וְלֹא יוֹצֵא.

בַּבֹּקֶר פָּתַחְתִּי חַלּוֹן

הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ זָרְחָה בַּשָּׁמַיִם

הַשֶּׁקֶט עָמַד בָּרְחוֹבוֹת הָרֵיקִים

אֲנִי לֹא בְּטוּחָה

שֶׁאַצְלִיחַ פַּעַם לִשְׁמֹעַ שֶׁקֶט

שֶׁלֹּא מַחְבִּיא בְּתוֹכוֹ אָסוֹן.

Shabbat Va’era 5784: “Ordinary Egyptians”

~ rabbiblake ~ Leave a comment

Sermon delivered at Westchester Reform Temple, Friday, January 12, 2024

In late February 2020, Kelly and I joined ten other couples, all rabbis and their spouses or partners, on a nine-day trip to Egypt.  It seems hard to fathom even now.  We visited just days before pandemic lockdown, openly as a Jewish group, with an Israeli travel company, meeting with most of the remaining Jews left in Cairo and learning about Egypt’s efforts to cultivate Jewish and, specifically, Israeli tourism, by pouring millions of dollars into the restoration of historic synagogues. 

At the time of our visit, there were eight officially recorded Jewish residents of Cairo.  In 1948, upon the establishment of the State of Israel, Egypt had between 75,000 and 80,000 Jews, most of whom were expelled beginning in the 1950’s after the establishment of the State of Israel, a fate similar to that of most Jews from Arab lands.  

For these reasons—to say nothing of blood and frogs and lice, oh my!—I approached the trip with hesitation bordering on trepidation.  Little did we know we had more to fear from an invisible virus than from other threats either real or imagined, like terrorism, or mummies’ tombs.  Still, for this rabbi, the very mention of “Egypt” called up all sorts of associations, most of them bad.  Is any other place on earth called “the house of bondage?”  I recalled the Torah’s admonitions never to go back to Egypt (see, for instance, Deuteronomy 28:68), where our people were ruthlessly enslaved at mortar and brick.  But, I figured, a chance like this doesn’t come around every day, so Kelly and I boarded a plane and we were off.

What we discovered in Egypt dispelled my anxieties and opened my eyes.  We encountered a complex, vibrant, and wounded society, still reeling from the failed Arab Spring of a decade prior, which precipitated the overthrow of the despot Hosni Mubarak, and the subsequent coup d’etat that ousted his successor Mohammed Morsi, who had violently suppressed the protest movement, followed by the rise to power of his rival, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.  

Even now, under el-Sisi, Egypt remains a repressive autocracy: a military dictatorship with a third of its people living in crushing poverty.  We also experienced a society of generous hospitality, kindness, an openness to tourists—yes, Jewish tourists—and, at least where it counts, between government officials, a longstanding partnership between Egyptians and Israelis, particularly where security matters are concerned.  Egypt has remained Israel’s most steadfast and important regional partner, with whom a stable peace has been preserved for forty-five years.

My time in Egypt certainly informed how I think about Egyptians, who feature at the center of this week’s Torah reading, Parashat Va’era (the second portion in the Book of Exodus), and who, at the same time, are de-centered from that narrative, in that the story is told from the Israelites’ perspective.  

This parasha depicts the first seven plagues against Egypt, a contest of escalating violence between the God of the Hebrews and the Pharaoh, his court, and all the gods of Egypt, with the objective of freeing the captive Israelites from Pharaoh’s ruthless terror regime.  Unmentioned but surely present were the countless Egyptians enduring a horrific bombardment which brings to their territory widespread destruction of property, the death of cattle and livestock, a shortage of food and potable water, outbreaks of vermin and disease; a terrifying rain of fiery hail; and that’s just this week’s parasha.  Next week will come the locusts and the darkness and the death of the firstborn.   

In any case, I have thought a lot, in recent days, about these ordinary Egyptians, and have taken a liberty Rabbis tend to take:  to read the Torah not only at the level of p’shat, the plain sense of the text, but also at the level of d’rash, or, midrash, imagining the story in between the lines of the text.  

I wondered what the Egyptian masses in between the lines of our story felt about the unrelenting assault on home and property and health and life.  Terror, certainly.  But what else?  Bewilderment?  Impotence?  Rage?  

And if rage, at whom?  Did they blame Pharaoh and his courtiers for getting them into this mess in the first place?  Did they blame Pharaoh for his stated aim to commit genocide against the Hebrews, issuing a policy of drowning their children in the Nile?  

Did they blame their own taskmasters for brutalizing the Hebrew slaves? Or did they believe they were just following orders?  I imagine that the vast majority of Egyptians lived far from Israelite settlements, and did not see themselves as complicit in any way with their suffering, any more than the average Israelite saw him or herself as complicit in the hell of plagues inflicted on their enemy.  And yet the average Egyptian surely suffered inordinately while Pharaoh and his company enjoyed the luxury of palace life.  

Did the Egyptians blame the Hebrews for settling in their land under Joseph, generations earlier?

When Moses demands, again and again, “Let my people go,” and Pharaoh refuses, again and again, his heart hardening to the plight of the captives, how did that play on the “Egyptian street?”  From what I saw of Egyptian archaeology in February of 2020 I can confidently say that ancient Egypt was not an open society; the Pharaoh ruled supreme as a living god among the people.  I’m sure public protest was not tolerated in Egypt, so it’s hard to know how ordinary Egyptians felt about Hebrew slavery at all, given that they were no less subjects to Pharaoh’s iron-fisted rule, whose lives mattered little to their autocratic tyrant.

I imagine that these ordinary Egyptians, embittered by life and indoctrinated by their state-sponsored belief system to worship death, probably carried a deep and pervasive sense of victimhood.  

I wonder all this about the Egyptians, and my questions continue to go unanswered.  The text gives us only what it gives: the words on the page, and the blank spaces in between to ask questions and imagine the untold stories.  We call this midrash.

But there are other Jewish texts—important texts—both within Torah and beyond it, that invite us to recognize that—despite the fact that the Egyptians were our enemies, and despite the fact that for us to demand freedom from captivity and terror was just both in cause and in means—even the use of force—the Egyptians, nevertheless, were human beings, and suffering human beings at that.  

Even in the hell of war, Judaism does not give us license to dehumanize the enemy.  Even one’s enemy is a human being made in the image of God.

When the Ten Plagues are recounted at the Pesach Seder, we spill a drop of wine in acknowledgment that the fruit of our joy, the cup of our liberation, is diminished by the suffering of the Egyptians.

The Talmud affirms that God does not rejoice in the defeat of the enemy and even portrays God as chastising the angels for wanting to sing while the Egyptians were drowning in the Sea (Talmud Bavli, Megillah 10b).

And the Torah’s own directive:  

לֹא־תְתַעֵ֣ב מִצְרִ֔י כִּי־גֵ֖ר הָיִ֥יתָ בְאַרְצֽוֹ׃…

…You shall not abhor an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land (Deut. 23:7b).

I would be remiss not to conclude, on this holiday weekend Shabbat, with words by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.  On the subject of loving our enemies, a notion deeply embedded in Christian thought but not emphasized in Judaism (and in some ways at odds with it), King delivered a sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama on November 17th, 1957, that offers food for thought for this Jewish setting at this Jewish moment.  

“In the final analysis,” King said, “love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems.”

“Oh God,” he prayed, “help us in our lives and in all of our attitudes, to work out this controlling force of love, this controlling power that can solve every problem that we confront in all areas.”

Amen.