Delivered October 2, 2025

Imagine you wake up at the same time every day, make the same breakfast, drive the same route, do the same work, come home, same dinner, same bedtime, rinse and repeat. Then one morning a pipe bursts. Your kitchen floods. Everything is a mess, and your routine is hopelessly disrupted. You call plumbers; you have to eat out; you can’t do your kids’ drop-off; your plans crumble. The chaos jolts you out of your rhythms, and you start to notice things differently. You see what you take for granted; you ask for help; you reconsider priorities.

Similarly, Yom Kippur bursts our life’s patterns. So much of what we do by habit during the rest of the year is altered today—from speaking Baruch Shem Kvod Malchuto aloud, to fasting, to fixating on our own mortality. On this day, God orchestrates a “flood” in our internal life, forcing us to attend to what really matters.

The liturgy today takes us to dark places, describing in excruciating detail the many ways that we could have, and probably did, go off the rails over the past year. We stand for long intervals of time, beating our chests, naming every imaginable human frailty. And then we do it again, and again, and again. We grapple with the imagery of God weighing our lives in the balance over the past 10 days, and deciding before havdalah, whether we will live or whether we will die. And if we die, in what manner. 

And then there’s the Torah reading that picks up after the sudden, shocking deaths of Aaron‘s sons, Nadav and Avihu, and asks Aaron to go on as normal, to resume his priestly duties with precision and dispassion. 

Not to mention the haftarah, with its disdain for the Israelites’ insincere attempts at atonement. 

The eye of the needle we are hoping to thread with our teshuvah is very thin indeed. 

Back in July, I attended the funeral of my teacher Judith Kates’ beloved husband Bill. Now Bill was the kind of person about whom everybody felt like they were his best friend. He managed to find time and authentic attention for each person: not just skimming the surface, but allowing a depth of connection to blossom with each encounter. It didn’t take a burst pipe to get him to pay attention to what matters. 

One of his friends, speaking at the funeral, said something which is still with me months later: the unbearable was always part of the conversation. The friend meant this as the highest compliment. He was talking about how Bill had the capacity to face what most of us avoid. The unbearable was always part of the conversation.

Yom Kippur, more than any other holiday, forces us to confront the unbearable. The restrictions of this long day give us no way to distract ourselves from hard truths: no food, no electronics, no idle chitchat. Our purpose today is clear, almost too clear. There is no escaping the unbearable on Yom Kippur.

The menu of unbearable things is unusually robust this year: for the US, for the world, and for the Jewish people as a whole. Without breaking a sweat, I’m sure any one of us could come up with a fistful of unbearables: war in Ukraine, soon to enter its fourth year; spiraling violence, including the attack on the Mormon church in Michigan this week that left five dead and the church badly damaged and the attack just this morning in Manchester England, whose details are not yet known; the dysfunctional American leadership that squanders the privilege of their position to engage in callous brinksmanship, playing Russian roulette with our lives; the indiscriminate crackdown on immigrants in the US and elsewhere; and of course, perhaps the most unbearable for many of us in this room: the catastrophic war in Gaza that has the Jewish community on the defensive both internally and on the global stage.

Judging by the tone of the Rosh Hashanah sermons from other rabbis that have been forwarded to me in the past ten days, it seems that many of us feel the urgency of the conflict in Israel and Gaza. I know our community is not uniform in its point of view about the crisis, nor should it be. And as I write this, just days before unplugging for the holiday, it’s impossible to predict whether the Trump-Netanyahu peace plan on the table will actually settle things down or serve as yet another spark to further ignite an already terrifying conflagration. I genuinely don’t know what will happen next and if it will be to the good. Nobody does. But taking to heart Bill Kates’s practice of allowing the unbearable to be part of the conversation, what feels important is that we allow ourselves to talk about it, even if we don’t have all the answers, even if it feels almost unbearable.

And as I am your no-longer-quite-so-new rabbi, you should know who I am and where I struggle. You should know what I find unbearable. We should be able to have this conversation, despite how much it hurts, despite it revealing some tensions. We should address it, knowing that we will be called upon to be there for each other in community even where we disagree. As I said last night, our task is to make a heart of many rooms. Let me show you around some of the rooms of my heart.

Like many rabbis, I find myself paralyzed at the crossroads of loving Israel and feeling deep misgivings about the direction of Israeli policy. I believe without question in Israel’s right to exist, just as I believe in Israel’s responsibility to be the embodiment of Jewish values. I say all this with a good deal of humility, knowing that I don’t live there and don’t face the rammings, bombings, and daily rocket attacks (which had been going on long before October 7). 

The devastation of Hamas’s barbaric attack, and the ongoing hostage situation, now 727 days in, is impossible to overstate. In those first horrific days and months, I was blind with rage and pain. No amount of warfare would have felt like too much. Yet as the war grinds on, I have come to feel that it is no longer serving a purpose. In fact, it seems more and more that the war in Gaza is making Jews less safe everywhere, and is doing nothing to bring home the remaining hostages. 

Meanwhile Gaza is in ruins and another generation of Palestinians is in the position of seeing Israelis and Jews as oppressors—and their advocates are forcefully making that case to the world at large. Whether or not this is objectively accurate is of no consequence when, aided and abetted by simple-minded but extremely effective propaganda and slogans, Israel’s detractors are growing ever more strident with their conviction that the very existence of the Jewish state is untenable.

These lines from the Haftarah: 

הֲכָזֶה יִהְיֶה צוֹם אֶבְחָרֵהוּ
Have I chosen a fast like this?

are impossible to hear without thinking of the starvation taking hold in Gaza. 

The words:

וְעַל חֵטְא שֶׁחָטָאנוּ לְפָנֶיךָ בְּאִמּוּץ הַלֵּב
And for the sin we have committed before you by hardening our hearts

are impossible to hear without thinking of how easy it is to turn away from the suffering of hostage families and Gazans alike.

The words: 

אֵין דָּבָר נֶעְלָם מִמֶּךָּ וְאֵין נִסְתָּר מִנֶּגֶד עֵינֶיךָ
There is nothing hidden from You, and there is nothing secret in Your eyes

are impossible to hear without wondering how all this will turn out, or even what’s true amidst the swirl of impassioned polemics. 

Having encountered each of these phrases and many more that trouble me over the course of this solemn day of soul searching, I wonder—and perhaps you do too—where to draw courage from as we navigate so much that is unbearable. 

One resource is teshuvah itself, the reason for the season, so to say. Breishit Rabbah, a collection of Midrashic literature from the fifth century, teaches in the name of Rabbi Abahu bar Ze’ira: ”Great is teshuvah, for it existed in the world before Creation.” What this says to me is that the work of teshuvah is foundational. It’s part of the makeup of this world; the work of teshuvah is eternal, woven into the fabric of all creation. Human beings are made to sin, to regret, to try to make it right. That we, as Jews, choose to make it a core practice in our lives and to surface it in particular at this season is reinforced by its origin story in our tradition.

Another resource takes us back to that funeral I attended over the summer. The unbearable was always part of the conversation. Part of what made Bill Kates so special was his ability to accompany the people he cared about into the realm of the unbearable. Indeed we can bear so much more when we bear it together in relationship and in community. The conversation is more than just talking together. It is the way we meet one another with care, bring out one another’s deepest concerns, hold one another’s needs with gentleness and curiosity. The conversation is a million invisible threads that weave us together in our vulnerability and our striving toward wholeness. 

As we confront the too many unbearables of the current moment, let us do so in conversation and in community. Let us allow the stark Yom Kippur liturgy, with its insistence on the first person plural—Ashamnu—WE have been guilty; al Chet shechatanu, for the sins which WE have committed—let’s allow that sense of “we” to do its work on us and forge us into a collective. Let us hold each other, regardless of our individual political orientations, in the crucible of teshuvah and hold ourselves accountable for discerning how we can most be of use in this tragic but redeemable world. 

Shanah tovah.