sermon

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

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!