Teaching Torah about a catastrophic year (First day of Rosh HaShanah 5785 / 2024)

First day of Rosh HaShanah 5785 / 2024:

Teaching Torah about a catastrophic year

Rabbi Robert Scheinberg

United Synagogue of Hoboken

So a rabbi applies for a position at a synagogue and is invited to an “audition shabbat” to meet the community and give a sermon.   The week before, the chair of the search committee calls and says:  “I’m just curious what you’re planning to talk about when you come for your audition shabbat.” 

And the rabbi says:  “I was going to speak about the centrality of Shabbat in living a Jewish life today.”

and the search committee chair says:  “Rabbi, let me give you some advice.  People in this synagogue don’t observe Shabbat. They will feel judged and uncomfortable if you talk about shabbat.”
And the rabbi says:  “Well, ok.  I guess I could speak about how Judaism has a system for affirming the holiness of everyday actions like eating, which is the system of Kashrut-” 

And the search committee chair breaks in.  “Sorry to interrupt, rabbi - basically none of the people in this community keep kosher. I recommend you choose a different topic.”

The rabbi thinks for a moment and says, “Well, this week’s Torah portion talks about the people of Israel at Mount Sinai and God reveals to them the ten commandments.  And I could talk about how we experience God’s commanding voice today.”
The search committee chair says:   “God’s commanding voice?  I really don’t see our community going for that.”
The rabbi says:   “So let me ask you. I shouldn’t talk about shabbat. I shouldn’t talk about kashrut, I shouldn’t talk about God or commandments - what SHOULD I talk about?” 

And with exasperation, the chair of the committee says: “Why can’t you just talk about Judaism!?”

This is one of the oldest rabbi jokes of all time.  But I relate to the rabbi in the story because people don’t necessarily agree on what it means to “talk about Judaism” - and all the more so in this catastrophic year.
Future generations of Jews will hear the number 2023 and it will conjure up a sense of dread and vicarious pain, alongside other years throughout Jewish history like 1096, 1903, 1938.
From murder, to kidnapping, to rape, to torture, to mutilation of the deceased, to destruction, there is scarcely a type of violence that did not take place on October 7, against Israelis and people of more than 25 different nationalities, with the Hamas perpetrators vowing to repeat these murderous actions again and again if given the opportunity.

And of the hundreds of people here today (and the many more on Zoom), there’s really only one thing that I can guarantee that all of us here have in common — which is that each person here is going to be disappointed with at least some part of what I am going to say today. 

My words cannot possibly be adequate to the magnitude of the tragedy.  And also -- we each are looking for so many different things. Some of us are looking for validation of the terrible pain our relatives and friends have endured this year. Some are seeking an affirmation of the depth of our connection to Israel. Some are looking for talking points to defend Israel--  while some are looking for validation for their fears and concerns about various decisions by Israel’s leaders. Some are focused on the resurgence of antisemitism in the United States, while others question the extent of that resurgence. And there’s so much anger in this room for which we’re seeking affirmation - anger at Hamas, at Hezbollah, at Iran, at various political figures in the United States, at various political figures in Israel; at university leaders, at university students, at the media, at Jewish communal leaders.  And there are some people who are wondering, why all this focus on Israel, and why can’t the rabbi just talk about Judaism.   Even if I wanted to do it all, I couldn’t.  

My colleague and friend Rabbi Beth Naditch told the story about how on Monday October 9 of last year, she went to a vigil in solidarity with Israel in Boston Common, just as there were vigils all around the Jewish world including here in Hoboken.  That night there was a huge showing from the Jewish community of Boston, and also from many political leaders, most of whom were not Jewish, and some of whom spoke at the event.

And at one point one of these political leaders said in the course of his remarks, “And there’s a local family here in Lexington MA who knows a soldier who was impacted on October 7!״ This made many of the Jews in the crowd glance at each other quizzically:  Oh, this political leader thinks there’s just one family in the Boston area who has a direct connection with this tragedy?!  

The next speaker happened to have been a politician who was Jewish, who began  by saying, “Let me see a show of hands. How many of you in this crowd of 4000 have a direct connection with someone who was affected by the tragedy in Israel from this week?”  And just about every single person raised their hand. 

Of those in Boston Common that night, some were connected to people who were victims or survivors at the Nova festival or the Gaza border communities, or friends and family of victims or survivors.  Many more had family members or friends in Israel who were called  up for military service.  And even more had close connections with at least with someone in Israel who took shelter in a safe room that terrible day -- which was almost everyone in Israel (including members of our synagogue and our synagogue staff who were visiting Israel last October 7.)  Many of the political leaders on the dais were visibly startled.  Until that moment they didn’t seem to fully understand: there’s such a thing as Am Yisrael -  the PEOPLE of Israel.  For a huge percentage of American Jews, this was not something that happened halfway around the world in some remote location. This is something that happened to cousins and siblings and friends and college roommates and teachers and colleagues and people with whom there is a direct connection.
This helps to explain how and why the Jewish community in the United States and around the world has been responding as it has. It’s not only that Israel is the place where our people was born and the place we face in prayer -- and it’s not only that for as long as there have been Jews, Jews have had a special relationship with the land of Israel, a yearning for the land of Israel, a sense of existential homelessness and precariousness and repeated victimization whenever we were NOT in the land of Israel.  It’s not only that Israel is today the world’s largest Jewish community, and the mutual bonds of concern among the Jewish people have been central to the Jewish people for our entire history and are alluded to every single page of the Mahzor you are holding.  

But it’s also that the people who experienced this horrifying trauma, that seems like it belongs to a completely different era of Jewish history, are people to whom so many of us are so deeply connected.   And that helps to explain why so many people from our community have traveled to Israel since October 7 to visit friends and family -- several have gone more than once. 
It’s why many of the times when this room has been most full this year have been gatherings focused on Israel and its people:  gatherings in memory of those who were murdered, talks by scholars and activists, and political scientists and poets, and talks by October 7 survivors - survivors of the massacre of Kibbutz Beeri who spoke in Hoboken last fall, a survivor of the Nova Festival massacre who spoke at our synagogue in the spring, and Liron Hacohen who survived the massacre at Kfar Aza who will be our guest speaker this coming Sunday.   It’s why we have a chair on our bimah designated for Omri Miran, who was kidnapped in front of his family from their home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, and his picture has been on this chair since last October.  In our not very large community, he’s one among at least three hostages who were held in Gaza with whom people from our community have a direct connection.  The others are Omer Neutra, a high school friend of many young people in our community, for whose health we pray every day, and Hersh Goldberg-Polin z”l, may his memory be for a blessing, and for whose family we pray desperately for comfort.  (And we’ll have more to say about Hersh z”l and his family tomorrow.)  The niece of one of our synagogue’s educators, Roni Eshel z”l, was murdered on October 7.   There is no one in our synagogue community who is more than 2 degrees of separation from several people who were killed or abducted on that day.  All this helps to explain why for so many Jews in Israel and around the world it still feels like we’re mid-trauma, no matter how much time has passed. 

And this complex tragedy has so many parts that cascade upon each other, with another element being what started to happen immediately in the United States on October 8, with the massacres still going on, before any Israeli reprisals had even begun, when we started to witness gatherings in the United States applauding what had been done.  The crowd in Times Square chanting “700! 700!” which was thought to be the Israeli death toll at that point.  The Cornell professor who described the events as "exhilarating.”  The justification of any violence against Israelis because after all, Israelis are all to be classified as European colonizers (interestingly, including the Israelis who came to Israel fleeing religious persecution in places like Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Ethiopia).  The reluctance of international organizations that exist for the purpose of speaking up against sexual violence to speak up against the systematic sexual violence perpetrated on October 7 for many months. And the delegitimization of the whole idea of Israel and the suggestion that “Zionism” is actually a uniquely evil concept equivalent to racism. For many of us, all this has also been a theme of this year.

A few weeks ago, a high school student from our community told me that he had certainly heard the word  Zionism before, and knew it had something to do with Israel, but he would not have been able to give a definition of it. But then after October 7th he saw how the word “Zionism” was used on social media and he concluded:  “Zionism” must be a name for whatever group is like the parallel to Hamas, but on the pro-Israel side.   (Fortunately, he quickly learned that this is a completely wrong conclusion for a long long list of reasons, even though he correctly understood how a lot of people use that word on social media.)  In fact, Zionists are a broad spectrum who agree really on only one thing, which is the legitimacy of a Jewish national presence in the land of Israel.  For example, the word “Zionist” applies to people like Vivian Silver of blessed memory,  co-founder of the organization “Women Wage Peace” with over 50,000 Israeli and Palestinian women as members, who would  go to the Gaza border to drive Palestinian residents of Gaza to medical appointments in Israel, who was murdered in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri and burned beyond recognition.  (In fact, it was believed she had been kidnapped to Gaza, before forensic evidence of her remains were discovered in her burned-out home.)  74 year old peace activist Vivian Silver was murdered because she was a Jew and a Zionist.
There are so many dimensions of the October 7 catastrophe that I have not even touched upon, because time simply does not permit the full catalogue of all the diverse dimensions of fear, anger, and trauma; resurgent antisemitism; resurgent Jewish extremism; the humanitarian crisis in Gaza; controversies over hostage negotiations; human shields; the family fissures, the collapsed friendships, and broken coalitions; and of course the anxiety and heartache over the last 72 hours - which one of my mentors described as the most terrifying night he experienced in Israel since the 1990s.

I’m a rabbi, not a journalist, not a pundit, not a lobbyist. My fundamental role is to teach Torah, to try to find at least something from the Torah that can nurture us even at such difficult moments. And I have three thoughts to share from the three biblical readings we did today.
From the Torah, today we read the tragic and complicated story of Abraham's blended family.  In addition to Abraham and Sarah and their new son Isaac, Abraham has a son named Ishmael from another relationship with Hagar, who is also a member of the household. Sarah see something that Ishmael has done;  exactly what it is is not clear,  but it's enough for Sarah to say that Ishmael and Hagar should be removed from the household because of the threat that Ishmael poses to Isaac. Abraham is terribly troubled by this, but God says:  listen to Sarah - and Abraham does. And sends Hagar and Ishmael away. They get lost, they run out of water, Hagar and Ishmael both cry bitterly, and God hears Ishmael’s cries,and opens Hagar’s eyes and she sees a well of water with which she sustains her son. He recovers, grows up, and becomes the leader of a great nation - exactly as God had promised both of his parents Hagar and Abraham. 

So that’s the story.  And we could ask the question - who's right and who’s wrong in this story?  And: who does God care about most in this story? 

It's not easy to answer this question. We could look at who God talks to in the story.  God talks to Abraham, and God also talks to Hagar.  Actually the longest conversation in the story is with Hagar. 

We could look at who God listens to in the story.  God listens to Ishmael, and God also tells Abraham to listen to Sarah.   

The story doesn't refer to Ishmael by name, always calling him “the son of Hagar.”  But the story does include not one but two promises from God that Ishmael will become the father of a great nation. 

The story is ambiguous about its single most important detail - what was it that Sarah saw between Ishmael and Isaac that got her so upset?  If we assume it’s something benign, we probably side with Hagar and Ishmael. And if we assume it’s something terrible, we probably side with Abraham and Sarah.

How we read this story might differ from year to year.  There’s almost nothing that every reader of the story could agree on.  Except for one thing:   in this story,  God cares about everybody. It sounds obvious but it needs to be said:  God is the God of everyone.

Frankly, as I picture how I might be reacting if I personally had lost close friends and relatives on October 7, I think it would probably demand superhuman levels of empathy for me to have the suffering of civilians in Gaza at the top of my mind right now. 

And similarly, if I imagine myself as a civilian in Gaza who had lost relatives in the bombardments, I think it would demand similar superhuman levels of empathy for me to empathize deeply with the suffering perpetrated on October 7. 

But my hope would be in either case that even if my own suffering got in the way of my empathy for the other, I would at least acknowledge that God does care for the suffering of every innocent person, and that it’s the ideal that we do so also.  Everything we learn on this topic from the totality of Jewish traditional writings -- from the Torah, to the Talmud, to the Passover Haggadah among other sources -- is that we are never supposed to be indifferent to the suffering of innocent people.  

That's the reason why over the course of this entire agonizing year in our prayers, in addition to praying for the welfare of Israel at a time of crisis and praying for the hostages, we've been praying for the welfare of civilians in Gaza.  It’s why among the charitable donations we have made in response to this crisis have included reputable organizations like World Central Kitchen that do relief work for civilians in Gaza just as they have done relief work in Israel.  And it’s why I, and so many of us, dream of freedom and dignity for civilians in Gaza, who have suffered so much under the thumb of Hamas these last 17 years of tyranny (with yet more suffering before that point)  and are now suffering in a war that Hamas chose, and that overwhelmingly they did not choose.   And we know that -- as challenging as it sounds and as impossibly remote as it sounds today -- a truly safe future for people in Israel is interconnected with a truly safe future for people in Gaza. 

And second, from the Prophets: we read in the Haftarah today about Hannah, desperate for a child, coming to the shrine in Shiloh and offering her heartfelt prayer, but the prophet Eli looks at her and thinks she’s drunk, and berates her for being drunk, until she defends herself and only then Eli understands. Eli had summed up Hannah without even speaking with her, assuming the worst about her, and surprisingly enough, a conversation actually brings them together. Frankly, that's the Jewish way - For thousands of years, Jews have managed to build relationships with people with whom we passionately disagree -- raising up mahloket le-shem shamayim, disagreement for the sake of heaven, into a high value.  

The rejectionist approach of which we have seen so many examples this year --  I refuse to sit on a panel with a Zionist, or I can’t be your friend if you’re a Zionist, or you can’t enter this part of the university campus if you’re a Zionist - it’s a dramatic understatement to describe this as the antithesis of the Jewish way, or the American way. 

Being in relationship with those with whom we disagree even vehemently has never been so difficult. That’s one of the reasons why last month we invited Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger and Noor Awad to speak here about their Jewish and Arab coexistence work in Israel. Trust me -- Just about every person who was here found something serious to not like about one or both of the presentations.  And they each talked about the anger that they have received from their own side:  Noor talked about how he was doxxed by Palestinians who were upset with his activism and interest in coexistence with Jews, and Rav Hanan talked about how many of his neighbors in the Jewish West Bank  community of Alon Shvut are appalled that he spend so much time in dialogue with Palestinians.  It was remarkable to have them model compassionate listening for us, and to see why they continue to prioritize this work even though they have friends and neighbors who discourage it.
There are plenty of people with whom dialogue is impossible -- and it doesn’t make much sense to pursue a conversation that will just go in circles after you’ve gone a few rounds. 

And it doesn’t make sense to pursue a conversation with someone who doesn’t want to have a conversation with you, or who just wants to talk and doesn’t want to listen.  But there might be at least one person in your life with whom you disagree about something, who WOULD welcome a conversation with you - to whom you COULD listen deeply and compassionately and who would be willing to listen deeply and compassionately to you - and whose perspective, when you really dig in, might be just slightly different from what you are assuming it is. (Actually that’s a good strategy not just for Israel issues, but for any contentious issue - of which, believe it or not, this country has a handful that have nothing to do with the Middle East.)

And the third insight is probably the hardest of all. this comes from the special psalm for the high holiday season,  Psalm 27, which concludes with a prayer for hope:   

קוה את ה' חזק ויאמץ לבך וקוה אל ה'

Have hope in Adonai;  keep your heart strong, and have hope in Adonai. 

The psalm tells us to have hope.  Well, that’s easier said than done. What does hope mean, even in the best of times?  And how is it possible to be hopeful at all, during a year that will go down in history together with 1096 and 1903 and 1938? 

Clearly, one thing that  hope does not mean is confidence that everything is going to work out just fine. My friend and colleague Rabbi Shai Held has written about hope as a religious concept, and especially about how hope is different from optimism. Some people have the capacity always to assume that everything is going to work out for the best -- and not only is this different from hope, but it seems diametrically opposed to hope.  The person who thinks that everything will turn out for the best is not taking seriously the genuine problems and crises and dangers in our world.  The literary theorist Terry Eagleton goes so far as to say that optimism is in fact “the enemy of  hope.”  and that’s in part because optimism is a belief that things will get better on their own.   But, as Rabbi Held says,  “wanting things to change without commiting to help making them change is wishing, not hoping.”  When we use the word “hope”, we’re acknowledging that we’re in a quandary but that the outcome depends at least to some degree on us. It's not surprising that this psalm implores the person twice to have hope because it's not easy

and it needs to be reaffirmed each day. 

One of the bright spots on our synagogue calendar this past year was our community’s opportunity to  study Israeli poetry with master poetry educator Rahel Korazim, who is the editor of an entire book of Hebrew poems written since October 7th.  To close today I would like to read a poem by an early childhood educator, Avital Liman, who last October volunteered to work with some of the thousands upon thousands of Israelis who were displaced from the Gaza envelope and from the Galilee,  many of whom arrived at hotels on the Dead Sea. This is the true story in poetic form  of her interaction with one young displaced resident:  

As we conclude a year of such devastation, we pray desperately that the coming year 5785 be a better one.  May it help us be steadfast in the face of those who seek to do us harm; may it help us to stretch our empathy; may it bring us reason for hope; may it remind us to seek connection with each other day after day after day.

And in the words of the Rosh HaShanah Amidah we are about to recite, we beseech God:

ובכן תן כבוד ה’ לעמך  Give honor to Your people, 

תהילה ליראיך Give praise to those who revere You, 

 ותקוה לדורשיך And to those who seek you, grant hope.