Rosh Hashanah Morning
If you go to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, there you will fine a large, ancient, black granite monument standing ten feet high. Commissioned by the Egyptian king Merneptah, who ruled in the early 1200s BCE, this stele was found by a British archeologist in the late 19th century. And if you go to look at it, you can read its twenty-seventh line:
Canaan is captive with all woe,
Ashkelon is conquered.
Gezer seized
Yanoam made nonexistent
Israel is wasted, its seed no more.
These words could be from today: give it a little hip hop beat and we could imagine them on a TikTok or a chant by protesters. But it isn’t; it’s from the very beginning of our people. In fact, this is the earliest written record of Israel’s existence, some 3200 years ago, and it describes Israel as utterly wiped out, ruined, destroyed for all time. But as historian Jacob Wright points out, just ten years after Merneptah’s rule, Egypt would be in retreat, its empire crumbled. Meanwhile, Israel gathers today to commemorate the New Year in Ashkelon and Gezer, and even in Wilmington Delaware. Somehow, we are here, our People Israel is still here, a living breathing people, diverse in perspective, ethnicity, creativity, and voice, while King Merneptah’s stele sits in a museum. To quote Lord Byron: ‘look upon my works and despair!’ indeed.
For some of us, that might be enough to say. In every generation, going back to the beginning of our history, they tried to destroy us, and in every generation they failed. Am Yisrael Chai. Off to the oneg, let’s eat. But I don’t think that is enough, especially in this moment in history. It would be a remarkable understatement to say that we as a People stand at a crossroads. Of course, the whole world is: buffeted by the economic and political tumult of the last decade at least, the rise of extremism on the Left and the Right, the fallout from the global pandemic in every aspect of life, climate change, the way social media has magnified the problems of our world, and now the rise of AI which is not very intelligent, to be fair, more Google on steroids, but is increasingly being seen as a way to replace millions of people in the workforce, or be used to manipulate public perception in a variety of ways, further destabilizing the world. All of that is more than just background noise, to be sure.
But for us as well, there is a sense that the enterprise of 20th Century North American Judaism—with the blending of a kind of liberal Universalism on the one hand with a commitment to our People and our People’s historical values on the other, seems to have given way. For one, the rise of antisemitism, which has been on the upsurge even before this past year, has given us all pause. It was not that long ago that walking right into the synagogue building on Friday night or Shabbat morning services or Sunday mornings for religious school was perfectly natural, without a guard, never mind a police officer. It is hard to imagine a return to those days anytime soon. The various attacks on Jewish individuals and institutions since 2016 and even before, have left many of us wondering if our safest days were behind us. And that was before October 7th. Since then, I feel our People has been trapped in a silent scream, traumatized, paralyzed by the violence done to our people that day, and the violence that has come as a result ever since. Adding to that trauma is the response by so many of our allies, those with whom we’ve marched and rallied for what we thought were universal ideals, who not only haven’t stood in solidarity with us, but don’t even seem to understand the question.
Are they antisemites? I don’t know how to answer that question. I do know that incidents were going up before last October and have only increased since then. I also know that antisemitism has become political; perhaps it always was, with people on both the left and the right using the word—and their image of Jew hatred—for their own purposes. Scoring points, fundraising, running political candidates, and shouting down opponents. As “the Jew” becomes a mirror reflecting back to society all their ills and anxieties: communists and capitalists, colonizers and ‘woke’ libs and everything in between, the question of what we’ve been doing and whether it’s been worthwhile, casts a shadow over all of us. It’s hard to engage in dialogue or find nuance or places of common ground when everyone is screaming.
Meanwhile, within the Jewish community, the conversation gets fraught. Because there’s really a billion different conversations. Two Jews, three opinions is charming when discussing bialys; less so when we’re trying to figure out who we are and what we’re about, and coming from a place of profound pain.
So I’d like to take a different approach. I want to go back to that ancient stele, that 10-foot black granite monument, sound and fury signifying nothing. Because there is a lesson for us in there beyond Am Yisrael Chai and simple platitudes. We often think or believe that there is something special about the Jewish people that has allowed us to survive all these genocidal attempts against us. How did we as a people survive while all the ancient empires fell? What is that special characteristic? I have an answer, and it’s not going to exactly be what you’d expect. We have survived as a people willing to learn from the past and change our story.
I know, I know. Our story is an eternal one, going all the way back to Sinai, and I will defend that idea as long as I’m up here. AND, that story has never been words, pardon the pun, carved in stone. It has always been dependent on all of us. The tablets of the commandments were less important at Sinai than Israel being willing to take on God’s covenant and fulfill it, to say, “all that God has said we will do.” Perhaps in every generation someone arose to try to end us, but in every generation we have chosen to reimagine ourselves and therefore our path forward, to reimagine what it means when we say, “all that God has said we will do”.
It is clear that we need a new story, a new narrative, as a people. But what should that story be?
So what should that story be? How do we create it?
I’m not a philosopher nor a prophet: I cannot predict the future, and this moment is very much in flux. What I am is a rabbi, and a rabbi’s job is to teach the tradition and make it relevant to today. Therefore, predictably and perhaps ironically, I’d argue we look back to the stories of the past. We are intertextual, this Jewish people. That is, we don’t just tell stories and write new ones, but we refer back to the old stories, the old texts, and make them new again, sometimes reimagining them, but those texts remain critical to who we are. In doing so, we’re reminded that our people have faced challenges before, and so we can derive inspiration from those experiences. No, our biblical or Talmudic ancestors did not face Climate Change or AI, at least as we experience them today, but challenges nonetheless that speak to our own generation. Our new story, therefore, must be rooted in the stories that came before: Torah and Talmud, Midrash and poetry, philosophy and commentary. We are not just a People of the Book, we are a People of Words, and while the words used by past generations may not be the exact right ones, we turn to them for help giving ourselves a voice. We begin with text from the days of Creation, in Genesis, and a response by the Rabbis of the Talmud, in Tractate Sanhedrin:
And God created humankind in the divine image,
creating it in the image of God—
creating them male and female. —Gen. 1:27
The Mishna teaches: And this serves to tell of the greatness of the Holy One, Blessed be, as when a person stamps several coins with one seal, they are all similar to each other. But the supreme sovereign of sovereigns, the Holy One, Blessed be, stamped all people with the seal of the First Person, as are all their descendants, and not one of them is similar to another.
–Talmud Bavli Sanhedrin 38a
The Genesis text speaks to our nature as human beings, as people. We are taught here that we are distinctly different from all other aspects of creation, we are created in God’s tzelem, in God’s image: we may not fly like birds or are swift like cheetahs or can swim like fish, and we may not calculate like AI, and to be sure, we are frail, vulnerable, mortal, but we are in God’s image, we are creations of inherent value. More than that, the rabbis want us to understand that our being created in God’s image means that diversity is inherent, and not incidental, and that that diversity is infinite. That we were all created b’tzelem Elohim, in God’s image, and that we can be still radically different from one another—physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually—without that being a kind of ‘deviation’ from being in the God’s tzelem. Think about how powerful and radical and potent this teaching is. That doesn’t just speak to the sacredness of human life, but the sacredness of difference as well, including our own. So much of Jewish life right now and throughout our history is a challenge to conform to societal expectations and norms, to submit in some way or another to an idealized Universalism, which seeks to scrape all difference aside. Here, Torah and midrash combine to say that doing so, subverting our differences and diversity, minimizing our radiant glory, is actually an act of chilul hashem, an act of profanity.
What should this mean? First, it means that we have an obligation to prevent spaces from being empty of diversity, including diversity of perspective. Jewish history, as Rabbi Danny Schiff writes, is defined by our vulnerability, a vulnerability which is the hallmark of human existence. That history of vulnerability and uniqueness in the world calls us to action, to speak out for the voiceless, but also speak up for ourselves, and affirm our difference in the world. While there may have been a time in our history where emphasizing what we shared was helpful for our safety, we must be willing to speak up and assert our place at the table, as well as those whose voices have been muted due to no fault of their own. And that attempts to minimize diversity or hold people’s differences against them are acts of sacrilege, a violation of what we hold dear as Jews and as Americans. It means setting a different kind of boundary, one that protects against attempts at homogenization, exclusion and universalism by force, be it force of arms or force of words. That means more difficult conversations and uncomfortable moments, more humility, more effort to find nuance—not necessarily common ground, but understanding and appreciation. It will be more difficult than just being in a room with people we agree with all the time, but I will take that over screaming at one another.
How do we do that? What should lead us forward in this way? Let us turn to the beginning of Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, a text we probably know better than we think:
Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in [the administration of] justice, raise many disciples and make a fence round the Torah. —Pirkei Avot 1:1
You know this text, if not from Hebrew School than any b’nai mitzvah you’ve ever attended, as the Torah is about to be passed from one generation to the next in a given family. We accept this text as a kind of oral history of the Jewish people and the Torah, an unbroken chain of transmission l’dor va’dor, now here’s your kiddush cup, kid. What we don’t fully appreciate is how these two sentences reframed our narrative as a people. The text redefines what revelation is and what it means; moving it from being exclusively the purview of priests and prophets, to something more democratic and more egalitarian; anyone can participate in revelation because the process is no longer spontaneous but rather engagement with texts and teachers. It makes all of us participants in revelation, all of us seekers of understanding, even if it is ‘dimly perceived”. This is all to say that whatever our future is as a People, it needs to be rooted in Torah as a national narrative and as a basis and inspiration for our behavior. And I don’t mean just the parts we like; we cannot resort to becoming Thomas Jefferson, sitting at the kitchen table with the Bible and a pair of scissors and cutting out the verses we prefer to make our own Scripture. It’s all there, even the parts we find difficult and challenging and perhaps even odious. Good. Let’s struggle with it. Let’s embrace Torah and really engage in it, putting it, as Rabbi Eric Yoffie put so many years ago, in the center of our identities. Judaism isn’t an abstract set of ideas, and trying to reduce it to such means we’ll always end up with pablum, that Judaism means whatever we want it to mean. But a Judaism that informs our decision-making, our choices, our treatment of others, one that is learned with intensity and intentionality, that is what allows us to better embrace and engage in the diversity of God’s world. While I am not suggesting a return to Orthodoxy by any stretch of the imagination, we owe it to ourselves to be lifelong learners, not for the sake of entertainment but so that we can better appreciate that our rituals and practices neither merely as symbols or vessels to be filled with meaning from the outside, nor as obstacles to engagement with the greater world, but as they ways in which we make and affirm meaning. For example, lighting Shabbat Candles is not just a fun activity for kids or something to do when we feel like it as a kind of aesthetic endeavor, but also a reminder that we are not supposed to spend all our time toiling in productivity—that our lives are more than our work for sustenance. Tzedakah is not just charitable giving, but a way of looking at the world, recognizing that there are those in need due to no fault of their own, and doing what we can to respond to that need with kindness. Mitzvot are not just good things to do, they are a way of seeing ourselves as obligated to the world around us and holding ourselves accountable to our communities. Indeed, to put Torah at the center means to remove ourselves from that place and, without doing ourselves a disservice, affirm our commitment to those we encounter. To put it another way, to reduce our tendency to see ourselves as the only main character in the story.
This approach is emphasized in that second sentence, the words of the Great Assembly: as we pursue justice, we must be discerning and careful, making sure that it is justice for all, sustainable and embracing. We must raise up disciples, affirming the value of being Jewish to our children, as well as to those who would join us, be they coming from the outside, or having been disaffected in some way, and welcomed whole-heartedly. And we must be protective of our learning and practice so that it isn’t used to justify whatever behavior or idea that anyone wants, creating a Judaism that is unrecognizable and unprincipled; that is, it cannot be a veneer of Judaism that justifies what we find odious and despicable as a community.
What happens when we read these texts in relationship with each other? My instinct is that we find the essentiality and importance of sacred community—a gathering of people in shared purpose, seeking to establish a place of safety, dignity and acceptance not only for its own sake but for the sake of our mission as a people. Last night I spoke about our Beth Emeth story, or rather, stories, and invited a diverse selection of congregants to share their own experiences. So much of what we talked about was the importance of having a place, a group, a congregation that allows us to learn and lift up our values, share in our traditions, to seek protection against the storms that buffet us while recommitting ourselves to our values. There is no doubt that this year has been difficult, demoralizing, stressful, even traumatic, and our journey through this year’s tumult has been lonely. As Rabbi Avi Strausberg wrote: “The pain and grief someone suffers over their own situation, alone, in isolation, can break a person.” It turns out that Sting, in his song off The Soul Cages, had it backwards: we go crazy with grief one by one, but we come to healing and strength together. The story of Judaism’s future is a story of finding and embracing community to heal and find shared purpose.
From these building blocks, we’re able to start writing a new Jewish narrative, one rooted in the affirmation of human dignity and diversity, and roots our behavior in ancient wisdom, not slavishly, but with honor and love. It means that our narrative remains unbroken, not entirely new, but not only a rehashing of the old either. I can’t fully write the story yet, none of us can—we must do it together. But it seems to me that if we do so rooted in Torah, in the affirmation of the diversity of humanity while also affirming our obligation to one another, if we commit to the practices of our people and welcome any who would join with us, we would find a balm, a comfort for the ills of dehumanization of today, and find what is holy in our shared experience again.
At least, I hope so. I don’t know what this new Jewish story will be, exactly. But I know that our story is not done; we will write and continue to rewrite, learn and continue to relearn, reveal and continue to teach. And I believe we will do so, together, and affirm something stronger than any monument buried under the sands. Our people lives on. May it always be so. Amen.