Sermons

Shabbat Shalom

As I sat down to write this d’var, I was struck by how much our calendar informs the extraordinary moment we find ourselves in, with the end of the war and release of the remaining living hostages. It’s a bit of a winding road so bear with me!

On the calendar- we have officially made it through the High Holiday season! We concluded the season on Tuesday with celebration of Simchat Torah- the day on which we restart the Torah reading cycle, by reading the final verses of Deuteronomy and then shifting immediately to the first few verses of Genesis. And this Shabbat, we read Bereshit “In the Beginning” in full. This Shabbat is a liturgical new beginning, and we mark it by telling the story of the ultimate new beginning- the creation of the universe and everything within it. 

Why would the liturgical new beginning come now? Why not on Rosh Hashanah, a new year? Well, when we dive a little deeper in the historic Jewish calendar, we find that Jews love new beginnings so much that we actually have 4 new years. 

For Jews of the biblical world, the first month of the year was Nisan- the month in which we celebrate Passover. It makes sense that in the ancient world, an agricultural society, they started the new year in the spring. Similarly, the 3 harvest festivals- Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot- were celebrated in that order. 

Later on, the holidays also took on new significance, commemorating important moments from the Torah- the Exodus, the reception of Torah, and the wandering in the wilderness. The Rabbis of the Mishnah, decided to keep the harvest order. The 1st day of Nisan is the New Year for the festivals. So even today, even though Sukkot is celebrated after Rosh Hashanah, it is the last festival holiday, the conclusion of last year’s festivals. We have just emerged from a moment in which Jewish time collides with itself and endings and beginnings overlap.

Then, the Rabbis of the Mishnah declared a second New Year- the 1st of Elul, the month leading up to Rosh Hashanah. This is the New Year for animal tithing. Since the destruction of the Temple and the end of animal sacrifice, this new year is not observed anymore.

Then we come to the big one that we all know- the 1st of Tishrei, Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah is not a big deal yet in the world of the Torah. It’s merely listed as a sacred day of rest and shofar blowing that occurs 10 days before Yom Kippur. It’s the Rabbis of the Mishnah, many centuries later, who declare this day to be a New Year for years. It’s a calculation of the time that has elapsed since the creation of the world. It’s used to date the age of the land itself. It’s the universal marker of time.

Finally, we have the 15th of Shevat or Tu B'Shevat, the New Year of the Trees, when fruit is just beginning to sprout on the trees in Israel. 

So, in summary, there are 4 distinct Jewish new beginnings:

-The 1st of Nisan: the New Year for the festivals

-The 1st of Elul: the New Year for tithing animals

-The 1st of Tishrei: the New Year of years

-The 15th of Shevat: the New Year of the trees

And the liturgical new beginning, the restart of Torah reading, coincides with none of them. Today is its own, separate new beginning. It doesn’t even overlap with Shavuot, the holiday that transformed from a harvest festival to a commemoration of receiving Torah. Why are we starting this particular new beginning now?

In the words of Reb Tevye, “You may ask: how did this tradition get started? I’ll tell you… I don’t know.” We really don’t know. Rabbi Gropper and I poured over some books on Wednesday and we don’t have a clear answer for how Simchat Torah came to be the day we start the Torah over. However Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld suggests a spiritual reason that I think is instructive for us. He notes, indeed, Shavuot is the commemoration of Moses coming down the mountain with the first tablets containing the 10 Commandments. But when Moses came down to the foot of the mountain, he saw the Israelites worshipping an idol and he smashed the tablets. Shavuot is the commemoration of our initial reception of Torah, but we didn’t keep it. We didn’t earn it. We can’t start reading Torah anew on Shavuot.

Moses descends again with a new set of tablets on the 10th of Tishrei- Yom Kippur, the day on which we repent our wrong doings and recommit to keeping the teachings and ways of Torah. But we don’t start reading Torah again on Yom Kippur.

It takes time to settle into that repair work, into that newfound closeness with God. We take 8 days to sit in our sukkot, to surround ourselves with nature, to gaze up at the stars, to shake the lulav and etrog in every direction, reminding us that God is all around. We let that repair work sink in. Then, we restart the reading cycle. Internal, spiritual work that allows us to accept the Torah’s teaching, is hard to calendar. It doesn’t occur on the dot. We need time and space to take in the lessons of the calendar and of the Torah, so we’ve given it to ourselves.

So, in the end, the cycle of Jewish life is not a simple, singular circle. The Jewish lifecycle looks like a clock. The four new years are the major quarters- 3, 6, 9, and 12, marking large-scale new beginnings. The many holidays are like the dashes in between those big numbers, each marking some kind of new beginning for the Jewish people throughout history and place.

The liturgical cycle is like the hour hand. It doesn’t always line up perfectly with the dashes, but it makes its way around, telling us the time, although sometimes we have to put in some study to see where the hour hand is pointing. 

And each of us, as individuals, are sitting on the minute hand. A special minute hand. This minute hand is not a straight stick, but a curly Q. It makes its way around the clock in a squiggle. Each of us is constantly undergoing a cycle of awe and reception, mistake and loss, repentance and recommitment, reflective indwelling, and starting anew. 

Which brings us back to this moment. We will need to tightly embrace that squiggling, non-simple cycle more than ever in the coming weeks, and months, and years. Because we are standing on the precipice of an extraordinary and complicated new beginning. The ceasefire and return of the remaining living hostages has brought a kind of relief and hope that I can’t quite put into words. It’s another new beginning- for Israel, for the Jewish world. We need to take time to sit in and soak up that relief and hope. It’s essential.

But, we mustn't lull ourselves into thinking that the path forward from here will be straight-forward nor a simple, singular circle. There is major repair work to be done:

There is physical repair: feeding the children and hostages who are sick and malnourished. Repairing the many Israeli homes that have been badly damaged by rocket fire. Gaza is mostly rubble.

There is political repair: Gaza needs a government that respects the sanctity and dignity of all human beings, most certainly including Israelis and Jews. The State of Israel is going to have to repair its relationships with the rest of the world.

There is psychological repair: those who are burying loved ones will have to go through the long, hard process of mourning and grief. The hostages will need intensive treatment for trauma. The entire nation will need to finally process the endless fear and instability of the last two years that will likely have lasting ramifications.

There is spiritual repair: The Jewish people have never been more divided in living memory. The question of who we are is no longer simple. 

None of this repair work will be easy and things will not simply return to how they were on October 6th, 2023. This repair work may well extend beyond any of us in this room. I don’t know any specifics of what the future holds, but it will definitely feature many moments of hope and joy and defeat and fear overlapping; ends and beginnings colliding. We’ll have to hold both.

This week, we’ll read how unformed chaos was the setting for new beginnings- new beginnings that God repeatedly labels “good.” Not perfect, not complete, but good. Essentially good, good enough to build upon. That’s our work. And when the work seems futile, and we’re struggling to see that good, we must remember that Jewish life is a curly Q. It dips down, but it circles back up too. Let’s give thanks for this moment of upswing- the return of hostages and end of war.

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech HaOlam, matir asurim. Blessed are You, God, who frees the captives.

Shabbat Shalom

Shabbat Shalom! Happy Halloween! Happy Challah-ween!

What fun to have Halloween overlap with Shabbat. Halloween does not have any Jewish origin. It might seem a bit similar to Purim- costumes, masks, candy. But really, Halloween was a pagan Celtic holiday that eventually merged with a pagan Roman holiday until the Catholic Church ultimately took it on as an opportunity to honor Christian martyrs. Eventually, you get Halloween as you’ll see it when you leave tonight. 

However, listen to this description of Halloween’s earliest origins- a Celtin holiday called Samhain (Sow-in). 

“This day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth…Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions about the future.”

Halloween is not Jewish- but we have a story from the Talmud which sounds remarkably similar. So let’s settle in for a Jewish ghost story:

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago in the land of Israel there was a man and woman who lived on a little farm on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Like everybody else in their village, they lived in close connection with the land- farming all spring and summer and harvesting in the fall to prepare those cold, dark winters when everything is harsh and life is fragile. 

But this village seemed to be suffering from a stroke of bad luck. Year after year, the summer months were marked by a drought. Year after year, the farmer and his wife spent the cold, dark winter months rationing food, huddled by the little fire, fearing the end was nigh. 

One summer, at the height of the drought, the farmer saw a poor man begging in the village. The farmer felt around in his pocket and realized that the family was down to their last dime. He weighed his options for a moment and gave away that final dime to the poor man. Perhaps this act of tzedakah would change his fortunes. 

He headed back to the farm, surveyed his dry, parched land, and then went into the house to share the details of his day with his wife. To his dismay, she was not pleased with his choices. “How could you give away our last dime!? In the middle of this drought! You know the consequences of this! How could you do this to us?!”

The couple bickered with each other the rest of the day and into the evening. Finally, the husband decided he was clearly not sleeping in their bed tonight, and he set out into the dark, lonely fields of their village. He wandered aimlessly for some time, completely alone. All was silent. He wandered his way into the village cemetery, thinking he’d visit the graves of his family and beloved, deceased rabbi. But the sun seemed to set unusually quickly. He was having trouble reading the headstones. Suddenly, complete, stifling, all-consuming darkness set in. 

Beginning to panic, realizing there’s no way he’d find his way safely back home, he laid down right where he was and closed his eyes, trying to shut out the darkness. The wind began to howl through the bare tree branches and he gave a little shudder, as he drifted off into an uneasy sleep. 

In a dazey dream, he heard two voices whispering to each other. He slowly got up, and stumbling forward, groping in the dark, he gasped as he came to a clearing and saw two brilliant, ghostly lights circling around in the air. He leapt behind a headstone and listened in.

“My friend,” one said to the other. “Let us roam about the world and hear from behind the heavenly curtain what calamity will befall the world.” The man felt a shiver run down his spine. 

“I cannot,” said the second spirit. “I am buried beneath a mat of reeds, but you go and tell me what you hear.” 

In a split, the 1st ghostly light whipped around and returned in an instant, just like magic. 

“My friend,” the trapped spirit said. “What did you hear from behind the heavenly curtain?”

“I heard that anyone who sows during the 1st rainy season, hail will strike his crops.”

The farmer’s ears perked up. For the first time the whole night, he wasn’t afraid. Could this be true? Was his fortune about to turn around? Did that act of tzedakah earlier in the day actually work?

He strained his ears to hear more, but the spirit voices began to quiet and their light began to fade. Blinking, the man opened his eyes to find the light of dawn creeping in. He picked himself off the ground and made his way home, determined to test out this theory from beyond the heavenly curtain. 

The sowing season arrived, but the man waited. “What are you doing,” his wife and neighbors cried. But he just shook his head and held firm. Sure enough the first rainy season ended, the crops began to sprout, and a massive hail storm destroyed everyone’s yield. But the farmer, with high hopes, headed out into the fields during the 2nd rainy season, and lo and behold, his crops succeeded. For the first time in years, his luck had turned around. 

Year after year, the farmer returned to the cemetery on Erev Rosh Hashanah to spend the night. And every year, without fail, the spirits would appear, roam the earth, and report their ghostly gossip, much to the farmer's chagrin. 

“So”, the Talmud asks, “do the dead know what transpires in the world of the living?” In true Jewish fashion, the Talmud gives us a delightful and lengthy argument on the matter and no clear answer.  

But Judaism is clear about tzedakah:

כֹּ֚ה אָמַ֣ר יי שִׁמְר֥וּ מִשְׁפָּ֖ט וַעֲשׂ֣וּ צְדָקָ֑ה כִּֽי־קְרוֹבָ֤ה יְשׁוּעָתִי֙ לָב֔וֹא

“Thus said GOD: Observe what is right and do what is just; For soon My salvation shall come…”

So, kick off Shabbat and November with some tzedakah, and maybe give the kids 2 pieces of candy tonight.

Shabbat Shalom

One of the little gifts of 5785 for me has been a daily Facebook video series from one of my teachers, Rabbi Reuven Greenvald, the director of the Year in Israel program at Hebrew Union College, the Reform Movement’s seminary. In the last few months, he’s embarked on a new project. Every morning he goes on an extensive run all throughout Jerusalem. Somewhere along his route, he stops, props his phone up on a trashcan, and records a word of Torah.

This summer, he made a video responding to a question someone posed to him. The question was, “how could you still pray to God when in 2,000 years God has failed to answer the Jewish people’s prayers?” It’s a heavy, but pertinent question; one that I’ve heard so many Jewish people- religious and non-religious alike- struggling with lately. In fact, we can take the question out of the realm of prayer and it still stands. How often can you be let down before you give up hope and give into despair? 

I have also been struggling with this question. There have been a lot of moments throughout this year that have tested our capacity to hope. When I stood up here last Erev Rosh Hashanah, on the brink of the first anniversary of October 7th, I was hopeful that all of the hostages would be home by now. I was hopeful that the violence would have ceased. I was hopeful that we’d be well underway in building the more peaceful tomorrow we long for. The failure to see those hopes realized naturally leads to despair, and it can make many of the prayers in our prayerbooks, like Oseh Shalom Maker of Peace, feel out of reach, contradictory, maybe even a little hollow this year. 

However, Rabbi Greenvald’s questioner notes something important for us: We are not the first Jews to live through dark and frightening times. We are not the first Jews to open our prayer books and wonder how we could possibly recite the words on the page. We know that over the last 2,000 years our ancestors faced extraordinary cruelty and more attempts than we can count to wipe us out. We know the joke: Most Jewish holidays can be summed up as “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat!” Let’s not forget why our people and our tradition survive. It’s because of our hope.

Dr. Jerome Groopman is a hematologist-oncologist who has dedicated much of his career to studying the “biology of hope.” He’s looked extensively into research and clinical trials on the placebo effect, and the results are extraordinary. Trials have shown that, in many cases, saline injections produced the same amount of endorphins and enkephalins as actual morphine; saline inhalers opened up the bronchi as effectively as real albuterol; placebo pills released as much dopamine as actual medication for Parkinson’s patients, helping to lessen the tension in their clamped muscles. These patients had hope that the “medicine” would make them feel better. And that medicinal hope by and large worked. Dr. Groopman concludes that while we can’t yet say that hope is causative, there is no question that there is a correlation between hope and improved physical outcomes and a higher quality of life.

Dr. David Arnow, a psychologist and Jewish scholar, notes, “Even without science to prove it, Jews know in their kishkas that if their ancestors had responded to their circumstances with despair instead of hope, the Jewish people would have vanished from the earth long ago.” Most of us are sitting here tonight because someone in our lineage had hope that life could be better, and the promise that awaited here was worth the risks and challenges along the journey. The founders of the State of Israel felt that hope on a national scale- that something better could still be crafted. It’s no coincidence that they selected a poem entitled Hatikva, “The Hope” as the national anthem. 

They heard the words: Kol ‘od ba-le-vav pe-ni-mah/ Nefesh Yehudi homiyah… Od lo avdah tikvatenu “As long as within the heart the Jewish soul yearns… Our hope is not yet lost.” And they truly believed them.

All of this is not to say that we’re not allowed to feel despair. Quite the contrary. Our texts provide us with numerous examples of individuals struggling to find hope- Job, Kohelet, Jonah, Moses. About 40% of the 150 Psalms are laments- poems that cry out in anguish and distress. We are allowed to feel despair. Sometimes, we need to. The person who posed this question to Rabbi Greenvald is grappling with a valid and age-old dilemma. I don’t begrudge any individual struggling with prayer right now. But as a collective, it’s not time to give up on hope. There’s another way to look at the last 2,000 years. The Jewish story is not one of endless, unanswered suffering. I see it as a long road trip. Yes, full of frightful twists and hairpin turns, flat tires in the desert, and long stretches through the darkness of night. But our forebears plodded on. How did they have the hope to do that?

They possessed a roadmap that led them to rest stops, where they could refill their depleted tanks with hope, to aid them as they journeyed through the obstacles. Those rest stops are various rituals and texts that we have handed down from generation to generation. They have passed that map along to us. It’s sitting in your laps right now. We, too, can use these rituals and texts to refill our emptied tanks with renewed hope for the future. 

There’s no better time for this journey than now. The 10 days between tonight and Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, are the key stretch of the road trip. Think of these 10 days as a journey through the Grand Canyon. It’s vast and winding; the consequences of getting lost would be steep; we will need to stay focused and motivated to get through. On top of it all, we arrive at the edge of the canyon having already put many miles on our car this year. We’ve driven through massive thunder storms and hail. The car is a little banged up, the tank's getting empty, and we haven’t been our best to the other drivers on the road, let alone to those in the car with us. 

To get through to the other end, we have to do teshuvah. We translate Teshuvah as repentance; literally, it means “turning.” It’s a prayer- process by which we crack through the hard shells we’ve built around our hearts, acknowledge our faults, ask forgiveness, and return to the Divine spark within us. Teshuvah is an inherently hopeful process. It’s an affirmation that we are capable of growth and of effecting change. As Rabbi Greenvald responded to his questioner, prayer is not a passive hope that God will show up in a sea-splitting miracle; prayer is the active hope that changes and repairs us from within. 

Teshuvah changes our capacity to make better choices and our ability to face hardship. Engaging in reflective and penitential prayers is not going to shorten the trip through the canyon or control the weather. But it will improve our outlook each day, help us to stop and see the miracles of life thriving in that canyon, and improve our relationships with our fellow travelers. There is no question that the road ahead is daunting. Teshuvah is difficult and requires raw vulnerability. That is why our tradition provides us with 5 essential rest stops throughout these 10 days that will help us, like the generations before us, restock on hope for our journey. Let’s explore those 5 ritual stops.

Stop #1: The Torah service on Rosh Hashanah morning- the Akeidah, the binding and very near sacrifice of Isaac. This story is one of the darker and more troubling stories in the Torah. The great forefather Abraham, who is supposed to be a model for us all, is commanded to kill his child, and he sets off without complaint or argument. Which makes Dr. Arnow’s interpretation of this story all the more shocking. He suggests that there are clues in this text that offer us the opportunity for a hopeful reading.

The story opens with God commanding Abraham to take his son, Isaac, and lech lecha el eretz Moriah, “go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him as a burnt sacrifice.” God spoke those famous words lech lecha before. 10 chapters earlier God told Abraham to lech lecha “go forth” along with a promise that Abraham would become a great nation and the land would be given to his seed. Abraham faced many roadblocks on his journey that must have caused him to doubt God: he suffered through famine, his wife was kidnapped, his nephew was taken hostage, and just when things seemed to settle down, his wife struggled with infertility. But, ultimately, God came through and blessed him with Isaac. So when Abraham hears the command lech lecha this time around, he has hope that this dark and terrible situation will likewise work out for the better. He didn’t know. Nothing was certain. There’s no hope in certainty. 

When they reached Mt. Moriah, Abraham said to his servants, “You stay here with the donkey, while the boy and I go further on. נִֽשְׁתַּחֲוֶ֖ה We will worship וְנָשׁ֥וּבָה and we will return. He was not certain, but in the face of unimaginable horror, Abraham had hope. We read this story to remind us that we, too, can have hope in the darkest of moments. That fuels us to drive on.

By Yom Kippur afternoon, our road trip has gotten really tough. We’re deep into the canyon, we haven’t had a snack in hours, and we’re so desperate to see the canyon open wide before us. Just when we start to lose hope that we can ever make it through at all, let alone make it through changed for the better, we reach Stop #2- the reading of the Book of Jonah.

The hope here lies in God’s transformation throughout the course of the Hebrew Bible. Let’s start God’s journey with the story of Noah and the flood. In that story, God וַיִּנָּ֣חֶם regretted ever making humans and determined to destroy the earth. Humanity did not get an opportunity to do teshuvah. Apparently, God did not believe then that people can change and grow.

But, jump ahead to the Exodus. God was understandably enraged following the Israelites’ choice to worship a golden calf, and threatened to destroy them. Moses appealed on their behalf and this time God וַיִּנָּ֣חֶם regretted plotting destruction against the Israelites. God felt badly, repented, and made a different choice. God did teshuvah! That might sound a little weird- not how a lot of people talk about God- but in fact, Judaism presents a God who makes mistakes, and then learns and grows from them. So can we.

Back to our road trip: In Jonah, we get affirmation of God’s evolution. The people of Nineveh have been engaged in wickedness and the city is set to be destroyed. But here, God affords the people the chance to do teshuvah. When they sincerely do, once again, God וַיִּנָּ֣חֶם regrets the punishment and does not carry it out. Now, not only Israelites, but all humanity are afforded the opportunity to repent, change, and grow. The wrongs of the Noah story are made right. We read the Book of Jonah on the Day of Judgement as a reminder that the judge has made this internal transformation. We, who are made in this judge’s image, should have hope that we are also capable of this journey.

We continue driving through the canyon, feeling more and more desperate and urgent. We’re nearing the end, but the walls of the canyon are closing in like giant gates. Will we make it through in time? We’ve missed the mark and we know it. The sound of the wheels grinding on the rocky path is deafening. We’re determined to do better. Rain begins falling on the windshield. Our bodies ache with exhaustion as we hit the pedal to the floor. We need one more burst of hope to push us over the edge. We need something to break through the chaos-

Stop #3: we slam on the horn- T’kiah G’dolah! The shofar rings out that long, unbroken blast reverberates through our tired bodies and our raw, exposed souls. We open our mouths to declare, “Hear the shofar! Hear its cry of freedom, its call of courage- cherish its promise of hope.” We open our eyes to see the light shining through the clearing- we’ve made it through. 

With the sound of the shofar still ringing in our ears, we look up and see an oasis right up ahead- Stop #4: 7/11 fully stocked with snacks and slurpees. We crawl forward like a newborn and take our first bites. We nourish our bodies to match our newly nourished souls. We feel that spark of energy again and we begin, for the first time in 10 days, to see beyond ourselves.

With renewed strength of body and soul, we reach our final stop: we pitch a tent. It’s not a perfect tent. It only has 3 walls and there’s holes in the roof that let rain in. But now, having learned and grown from our teshuvah journey- it’s good enough. Now, we can accept the rain. Now, we can see the rain as an opportunity to plant. Now, we know that the rain might slow our acts of restorative creation, but it won’t stop them. 

We entered this sanctuary tonight, ever aware of our deeply broken world. Perhaps, like Rabbi Greenvald’s questioner, that sad reality has left some of us feeling deeply broken too. It some way, it almost feels fated that this day has arrived in such a tense and difficult moment. These High Holy Days are our people’s embodied practice of hoping. It has sustained us for generations. I have hope that they will sustain us too. 

We’ve gone through 5 key sustaining rituals that we’ll mark together. But there are many more that I hope you will explore in the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when you are on your own. Perhaps you’d like to try the tradition of reading Psalm 27 each day. Maybe you want to try Reboot’s 10Q, a daily email reflection prompt that you’ll get to revisit next Rosh Hashanah. Maybe you want to meditate for a few minutes each day. 

Our forebears left us a roadmap of hope. We will leave this roadmap to our descendants. May the prescribed ritual stops along the route refill your tank. May you ink new ritual stops on the map. May we all hold onto the hope that we will bring about a better year this year.

Shana Tova. 

Shana Tova. For those of you whom I haven’t had the chance to meet yet, my name is Morgan and I’m the new rabbinic intern. I’m looking forward to getting to know you, and it's truly an honor to welcome in the new year with all of you.

Some of you know that last year, I was interning at Cornell Hillel, where I would spend a weekend each month. Pretty quickly, I fell into a routine. I’d spend 2-3 weeks preparing for the visit and reading all of the headlines about college campuses that I’m sure many of you read. I’d receive occasional internal updates about graffiti or a protest, and I’d feel an uneasiness growing in the pit of my stomach. Then the weekend visit would come around. 

I’d set out early Friday morning, and I’d spend the four hour drive filled with dread. The headlines of what was happening on campus would swirl in my head, and I’d imagine that I was hurtling at 60 mph into some kind of disaster zone. And I’d get stuck on these thoughts of “What if I can’t handle the chaos that I think is waiting for me there? Do I have to continue heading towards campus? Is it too late to turn around?”

As a rabbinical student, I tend to look to our Jewish texts for parallels and guidance on how I’m feeling. The Rosh Hashanah Torah portions were a gold mine for my campus-related anxiety. Listen to this excerpt of Hagar’s story, which Orthodox and Conservative congregations read in their two day observance of Rosh Hashanah:

Va-yashkem Avraham Ba’Boker, Abraham got up early in the morning, he took some bread and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar. He placed them over her shoulder, together with the child, and sent her away. And she wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba.  

Just some bread and one skin of water to get through the whole wilderness. I can just imagine Ishmael thinking to himself, “What are we doing here!? The whole desert before us and only one skin of water! We won’t make it! I won’t make it. Is it too late to turn around?”

Or how about an excerpt of what we’ll hear tomorrow: Va-yashkem Avraham Ba’Boker, Abraham got up early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for the place of which God had told him. 

Off they go, up the mountain, to kill Isaac. I can imagine Isaac saying to himself, “What are we doing here!? That’s a lot more altar wood than usual and there’s no ram! I have a bad feeling about this. I don’t know if I’m going to make it. Is it too late to turn back?”

Of course, this is all just me imagining what they were thinking. When we turn to the text in the Torah itself, we’ll find that Ishmael and Isaac actually don’t say anything as the action unfolds. They are silent throughout their ordeals. Surely they were thinking all kinds of thoughts, but the Torah doesn’t tell us what those thoughts were. As readers and listeners, we’re left sitting in Ishmael and Isaac’s silence.

Silence can be uncomfortable. How many of you have struck up a conversation about the weather just to fill a silence? For me, one of the hardest parts of my pastoral care training was learning to embrace silence in conversation with hospital patients. I would feel the urge to just keep talking or my imagination would start to run wild, just like it did imagining Isaac and Ishmael’s panic. Our early rabbis were also uncomfortable with the Torah’s depiction of Isaac as silent. They filled Isaac’s silence with an imagined monologue in which Isaac is a willing participant in this attempted sacrifice. He even insists that his father bind him tightly. The rabbis created a version of the story in which Isaac is empowered and given agency in this situation. That’s a lot less anxiety- inducing than a child being dragged unwittingly to his death.

Using our imaginations and creating new stories to fill the silence is normal and natural. And the particular ways in which we fill the silence usually reveals something important about our own state of mind. I filled Ishmael and Isaac’s silence with imagined panic and fear that mirrored my own feelings as I drove to the university. The rabbis used creativity to erase the silence and empower the disempowered to lower their own doubts and anxieties around this story.

But are we any closer to really understanding Ishmael and Isaac? Of understanding anyone whose silence we’re filling? To really understand them, we have to honor their silence and quiet ourselves. Of course, Ishamel and Isaac aren’t here to speak for themselves, so we have no choice but to rely on context and imagination for them. But members of our community, members of the many communities that we belong to, are here to speak for themselves. 

Honoring their silence means approaching them with genuine curiosity. We have to ask questions like: How are you feeling right now? What have the last few months been like for you? What do you need? And then, we have to quiet ourselves to allow space for whatever answer might come in reply. Those answers might surprise us and maybe even challenge the answers we would come up with for them if we instead try to fill their silence. This was my experience at Cornell last year.

Each month, I arrived on a campus that looked nothing like a disaster zone. There had been some isolated protests, but each month, I found a campus that was beautiful and serene. I’d wander over to the bagel shop which was always packed with a diverse array of students collaborating on group projects and giggling over stories of meeting someone cute. I’d sit down for coffee with our Reform freshmen and sophomores, voices we usually don’t hear from, and I’d listen as they shared their thoughts with me. Each month, I’d drive home on Sunday feeling confident. Despite their silence in the face of terrifying headlines: the kids are alright.

There are a myriad of ways to react to feelings of fear, anxiety, and grief. We can make statements and march and raise money. Those are all very valid and important forms of resistance. We need people to do these things. I have a lot of admiration for those who use their voices and feet to advocate. But let’s not be too quick to judge those who respond to fear, anxiety, and grief differently- quietly or even silently. That, too, can be a valid and important form of resistance.

Psychologist Dr. Madelyn Blair describes silence as, “the space—between reading and writing, between listening and understanding, between distraction and presence, between fear and complicity, between surprise and laughter, between acknowledgement and transformation.

Silence is the space where we retreat when we need time. Silence is where we allow our minds to consider possibilities, where we integrate the new into the old, where we give credence to our feelings.”

Our Jewish tradition understands this too. Psalm 65:2 states: Silence is praise to You, O God. In reflecting on this verse, the Gemara relates a story of Rav Dimi bringing a piece of wisdom from Eretz Yisrael back to his adopted land of Babylonia, “If a word is worth one coin, silence is worth two.”  

Taking the time to give space to silence is a lot easier said than done in this day and age. In so many ways, social media and digital news has been a blessing- connecting us to people and stories that we never would have encountered- but it has devalued silence. We carry the entirety of available information in our pockets. The influx of ceaseless information is overwhelming. Even when I manage to put my phone away, I’m usually still thinking about all of the news and updates I might be missing. And that’s just when we’re the receivers. We also have the ability to share our own thoughts to thousands of people in an instant. I often find myself fighting a fear that the thoughts in my head have no merit if I don’t publish them. And I catch myself filling someone’s social media silence on issues of the day with an assumption that they don’t care. 

We haven’t read any articles about Jewish students on campus who are demonstrating quiet resistance, those who, despite the protests, have continued to go about their lives and are even still enjoying their college experience. And so, it is easy to surmise there must not be any. 

But when I let our students fill their own silence, that wasn’t what many of them shared. Of course, there were students who were very upset and scared. There were students staging counter-protests, vigils, and posting regularly on social media. That mode of resistance was valid, and all of us on the Hillel staff worked to walk with those students in their particular process. But many of the Reform students were handling the moment very differently. They told me that protests are a bummer, but they choose to stay away from all of that. Their classes are interesting. Their evenings are filled with wrestling club, acappella, salsa dancing. They’ve made friends from all over the world. They love Hillel, but they wish that Hillel events would be a little more of a reprieve of the campus chaos conversation. I want to validate their mode of resistance too.

On my last visit, there was a very small encampment, made up exclusively of students, on the quad. I grabbed coffee with an Israeli-American student. We spent a long time chatting about his interest in exploring Judaism through a queer lens, the video game his computer science class was developing, and his excitement about studying abroad in Asia next year. Unable to stand the silence, I turned the conversation to the protest. He assured me that it’s less-than-ideal, but it wasn’t all-consuming for him. But the media that had been all-consuming for me for weeks had told me that that couldn’t be the true answer, so I pushed him some more. He looked at me exasperated and said that yes, the encampment is upsetting to him so he’s avoiding the quad right now. In the meantime, he was taking that energy and throwing it into building, of all things, the campus’ Jewish-Muslim Alliance. Can you believe it!? He asked me, “Can we talk about something else now?” He asked me to honor his silence. 

That student brings me back to Isaac and Ishmael. There were lingering scars from their traumatic episodes- neither boy is shown speaking to Abraham ever again, and Isaac loses his mother, Sarah, who is said to have died as soon as she heard that he had been taken up the mountain. And yet, both boys manage to not only survive these traumatic episodes, but to thrive. They go on to marry, grow families, and become the founding fathers of great nations, just as God promised. How did they go from trauma to thriving? The Torah tells us that Isaac found comfort in his wife Rebekah, though they don’t exchange a single word.

Throughout the last 12 months, our young people have been employing this sacred Jewish model of quiet resistance- going on and comforting one another with few words. Can we give them the space to continue to do so? Can we honor their silence by asking them, rather than telling them what their experience has been? Can we silence our minds enough to be open to surprise? The choice of loud or quiet resistance is not either/or. There will be times in this new year for speaking loudly and times for sitting in silence. Can we follow our children’s lead and give ourselves permission to find those moments of silence?

As the psalmist declares: Silence is praise, to You, O God.

Shana Tova