High Holidays

Yom Kippur 2026/5787 for TAA

(Delivered September 21, 2026)

In June of 2024, just a few weeks before I started as your rabbi, I went to Israel alongside a group of rabbinical students from all over the world, as part of a learning fellowship. This was my first time there since I was a child. Having spent the time of life when young people often go to Israel pursuing a whole different set of goals and interests, I missed out on the summer camp trips and the young adult trips that are carefully curated for Jewish identity formation. Instead, I got the chance to play catch-up, when I was already fully committed to my Jewish identity, and to the importance of Jewish life overall. 

Encountering Israel as an almost-rabbi after such a long time away enabled me to expand my understanding of the place, to shift away from childhood memories of things like the strawberries at the hotel on our stopover in Athens, my grandmother drinking tea in the morning through a lump of sugar propped between her front teeth, and the friendly street vendor who sold us carrot juice on our way back to her apartment after our daily trips to the beach.  

On my fellowship trip, I saw Israel as a Jewishly-committed and Jewishly-informed adult. I knew I was in a whole different world when, on the trip from the airport to the hotel, I saw a pickup truck emblazoned with one of my favorite Torah verses, in Hebrew. Over the course of that visit, I encountered everyday Israelis of all backgrounds, living their lives side-by-side. I met shopkeepers and Bedouins and scholars. Musicians and librarians, activists and soldiers. And, I visited the memorial exhibit at the Nova Festival site, and toured the unadorned ruins of Kibbutz Nir Oz. 

But I didn’t just see contemporary life. The past was incredibly present! I fell in love with the landscape I had spent my years of rabbinical school imagining. Our group had the chance to tour Breichat haShiloach, the pool where supplicants would purify themselves before they began the walk up to the Second Temple to make their offerings. I rested my forehead on the cool stones of the Western Wall—known in Hebrew as the Kotel—the last remnant of the ancient Temple, our people’s holiest place.

One thing I saw that still stays with me and that puts the ancient and the modern into conversation was a wall, with a message that read: “Our wounds are centuries old, but so are our resilience and our strength.”

That graffitied wall spoke as loudly to me as the Kotel, both of them teaching a lesson about the history of our people. 

Seeing old and new side-by-side, and sometimes jumbled up together, turns out to provide critical context for the unfolding cultural discord that can make us feel that the Jewish world is poised to collapse at any moment.

I think everybody in this room knows that the Jewish community is once again under the microscope in unsettling and painful ways. Recent controversies include the strife between the business magnate Robert Kraft and the rapper Macklemore, over the latter man’s statement before a recent concert, a message that was at best simplistic and inflammatory and at worst antisemitic. Not to mention some overheated rhetoric and concerning actions from the Mayor of New York, and the new senatorial candidate in Michigan, both of whom seem to be working from the same playbook. I’m sure there is a wide range of opinions in this room around each of these issues and the many others that concern the Jewish community. We are not monolithic, and other than God’s oneness, there is very little in our tradition or our culture that is not worth considering from multiple points of view.

Wherever each of us sits with any of these matters, the fact of increased antisemitism from both the left and the right is difficult to dispute, much less to ignore. The fatal attacks during this past year at Bondi Beach and in Manchester, England are but two examples. There have also been assaults against synagogue buildings and other Jewish gathering places, not to mention an increasingly fevered rhetorical environment, in which conflating the actions of the Netanyahu government and of extremist West Bank settlers with the entire Jewish people is ever more normalized.

It really can feel at times like it’s all going to fall apart at any minute, like it’s time to start sleeping with our boots under the bed while a bag packed with our valuables sewn into our coats sits waiting by the door. It is only from the vantage point of the future that we could possibly discern where we are in the rhyming historical pattern that our people knows all too well. Events will unfold as they do, and I am neither qualified for nor interested in predicting outcomes. 

This talk is not about that. 

It’s about the bigger picture, the one we can see if we level up from our understandable but ultimately inconclusive worries.

The educator Zohar Raviv introduced me to the following framework. 

The story of the Jewish people is one of tragedy and persecution, with occasional bright spots of achievement and innovation. Somehow, despite the roiling rhythm of violence, exile, and wandering; we have managed to endure until the next crisis. 

Also, the story of the Jewish people is one of resilience and growth, punctuated by occasional catastrophe. Our work in the world—the arts, medicine, West Side Story and the polio vaccine—makes its mark, even as civilization after civilization tries to eliminate us.

As Raviv puts it: “The Jews are an ever-dying people. The Jews are an ever-living people.”

Obviously, both of these narratives are true. 

What, then, do we make of this lingering, agonizing anxiety, this near perpetual knot in our stomachs? What do we make of all the voices that are crying out, History is repeating itself. We are no longer safe. We never were?

Matthew Boxer, a professor at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis, argues in a recent essay called The Paradox of Prophecy, that the voices of doom play a crucial role in our survival. With every scare that the Jewish community is on the brink of destruction comes a spark that reinvigorates. The survival instinct kicks in when we need it the most. Boxer writes: “We mourn our own passing even as we build and maintain institutions to nurture our descendants, hoping for a better future.”

We are not the only people of resilience, nor the only people who have suffered brutality and persecution. But damn do we know how to rise from the ashes.

Think of the crisis in the year 70CE, when the Romans conquered Jerusalem, set fire to the Temple, and exiled the Jews. This could have spelled the end of our people. But Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai bravely asked the Roman emperor Vespasian for permission to set up an academy at Yavneh. This resourceful request led the dispossessed Jewish community to find another way: the Rabbis of the Mishnah (who didn’t yet know they were the Rabbis of the Mishnah) set about preserving every aspect of their beloved tradition that they could recall, repeating and repeating the teachings that meant the most to them. This preservation of oral tradition opened up a new landscape for Jewish potential, as our Sages devoted themselves to saving what could be saved.

We are here because they succeeded.

The words of וְהִיא שֶׁעָמְדָה from our Haggadah remind us that in every generation there have always been forces arrayed against us, and in every generation, with God’s help, we find a way forward with dignity and resilience. Overcoming the impossible is part of the Jewish soul, as integral as the songs we sing and the values we pass to those who come after us.

History is a rollercoaster: at times exhilarating, and at times nauseating. Yet through it all, we keep Judaism not just alive but flourishing through our creativity, our resourcefulness, our unquenchable will to live. We continue to thrive, through our commitments to one another. We are in hard times now, and may be in for much harder. There will be individual and communal pain. AND there will be uplift and innovation to follow. As survivors from the Nova Festival and their supporters have said often, “We will dance again.”

The spirit that dances even in the face of annihilation, that cleans up and buries its dead after an attack and keeps going, is the Jewish way. It will hold us, as we hold one another, through whatever is to come. 

Gmar chatimah tovah.

Kol Nidrei 2026/5787 for TAA

(Delivered on September 20, 2026)

The liturgy for tonight’s service begins with not one but two disclaimers. In the first, we grant ourselves permission to pray in the company of עֲבַרְיָנִים—those who have transgressed. Shortly thereafter, our second disclaimer כָּל נִדְרֵי—literally, all my vows—states that we pre-annul all the failed promises we make to ourselves and to God, from this year to the next.

It’s an interesting place to start. We look at the task before us—of reckoning with our words and our deeds from the past year, of exposing ourselves to God’s judgment—and we know that it’s both necessary and untenable. So we hedge, in two different directions. We acknowledge that the people around us have transgressed and that we ourselves are likely to do so in the future. In my shallower moments, I see these disclaimers as almost absurdly cynical. Of course it’s everyone else who is an עֲבַרְיָן. Of course we have been perfect in every way, all year long. And if we happen to mess up in the coming year, it’s not real because we’re giving ourselves a loophole before we even get started.

But this year I am thinking about the vulnerability that these disclaimers are tap-dancing around. I am thinking about how it might feel to enter the sanctuary, each of us laden down with our own humanity, each of us thinking we’re the only one who feels guilty or doubtful or alienated. I’m thinking about how hard it is to admit to our own failings when the world around us appears to be made up of perfect, highly curated selves. I am thinking about the loneliness that our opening disclaimers mask. It is the Day of Atonement. It is the day of alone-ment.

In the past few years, the medical establishment has been sounding the alarm about what they call an Epidemic of Loneliness. Study after study has looked at social dynamics and trends in the US and abroad, trying to trace how we got here. A 2023 report by then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy articulated some of the long-term health consequences stemming from loneliness, such as heart disease, stroke, and dementia. The report placed loneliness on a par with public health threats like smoking and drug addiction.

More than a quarter century ago, the Harvard sociology professor Robert Putnam articulated this issue in his landmark book, Bowling Alone. The book described how Americans had gradually shifted from being a nation of joiners to being a nation of loners. No longer affiliating with clubs, bowling leagues, faith communities, volunteer organizations and the like; we had become, in Putnam’s view, an ever more atomized population. Social capital, the engine that drives communities forward through shared values and initiatives, that unites people from different backgrounds in common cause, that holds civilizations together through relationship, was waning.  

And this was before smartphones had taken hold, before electoral politics had become so profoundly polarized that we couldn’t seem even to bear the company of anyone we disagreed with, before the culture wars had taken bitter root in our every decision, before we spent two years sequestered in our own homes during the covid pandemic, suspicious of even breathing too close to another person. To say that modern America—and to an extent, the modern world—has made a religion of loneliness, probably understates the case.

This loneliness manifests in the ways we relate to each other and in the ways we don’t. It manifests in the decline of movie theatres and in the constant presence of the small screens that take our attention at every waking moment. It manifests in the American confusion between resilience and voluntary isolation. It manifests in the ever more shrill and hateful media environment that reinforces the message that anyone who doesn’t think the way we do, or vote the way we do, or worship the way we do, or express their identity the way we do is not just wrong but stupid and unworthy of our trust. 

Putnam’s point goes deeper: the decline of social capital is not an end in itself but rather a symptom of fraying social fabric. It’s not only that a weak PTA means less fundraising for the drama club. It’s also that if people are not meeting over shared interests or mutual labor, the relationships that enable us to see one another’s humanity more fully are not allowed the chance to flourish. 

Over the summer, at a family visit to MassMOCA, the modern art museum in North Adams, I learned that even though Putnam had described this phenomenon 25 years ago, it has roots that go deeper still. An installation by the artist Alison Pebworth explored the 19th-century neurological disorder known as Americanitis. Pebworth’s gallery statement described a wide range of symptoms from abnormal fatigue to premature baldness, as well as the anxiety and ennui that plagued many Americans in the wake of industrialization. She went on to note that these feelings appear today as burnout, climate anxiety, polarization, and loneliness.

The language of loneliness, apparently, is one we are all too fluent in. Despite our blossoming congregation here at TAA, overall we are in a Dark Age for communal thriving. 

And yet, perhaps the Renaissance is right here in this room, and in our tradition. Our sources, from the Torah to Pirkei Avot to the Hasidic masters, urge us to guard against loneliness, to find solidarity with one another, to work through difference rather than ignoring or pathologizing it, to accompany one another in times of joy and sorrow and change.

From the narrative of Creation, the very beginning of the human story, we learn that we are each other’s most precious resource. It comes as early as the second chapter of Breishit (the Book of Genesis). God looks at Adam, the first—and, so far, the only—human, and says: 

לֹא־טוֹב הֱיוֹת הָאָדָם לְבַדּוֹ אֶעֱשֶׂה־לּוֹ עֵזֶר כְּנֶגְדּוֹ׃
It is not good for the person to be alone;
I will make a counterpart for him.

The word טוֹב in the Torah means much more than just good. A modern Hebrew speaker might use it to describe a movie or a sandwich, but in scripture, טוֹב carries a heavier valence. It is a signifier of integrity, of rightness—a term of wholeness. And so, when the Torah says something is NOT good, it’s not just a Yelp review of a mediocre restaurant but a moral and theological teaching. And other than this statement in the Creation story that it’s not good for a person to be alone, the only other time that the phrase לֹא־טוֹב appears in the whole Torah is in the Exodus, when Moses’s father-in-law Yitro urges him to share the load of leadership with trusted advisors, saying in chapter 18, verses 17 and 18:

לֹא־טוֹב הַדָּבָר אֲשֶׁר אַתָּה עֹשֶׂה׃
נָבֹל תִּבֹּל גַּם־אַתָּה גַּם־הָעָם הַזֶּה אֲשֶׁר עִמָּךְ 
כִּי־כָבֵד מִמְּךָ הַדָּבָר לֹא־תוּכַל עֲשֹׂהוּ לְבַדֶּךָ׃
This thing you are doing is not good.
Both you and the people around you will be exhausted,
for this thing is too heavy, you cannot do it alone.

In short: it’s not good for a person to be alone, and it’s not good for a person to do alone. 

Indeed, our tradition pushes us in the direction of relationship, even (or perhaps especially) when there is disagreement or friction. The Talmud, that sprawling intergenerational conversation that forms the backbone of Rabbinic Judaism, both articulates and illustrates the theme. The very fact that each page of Talmud preserves unpopular opinions alongside those that won the day is a powerful teaching. Yet this pull toward connection across difference is not just in the form, but also in the substance of the Talmud. So many of its stories teach about complicated relationships that enrich the soul when preserved and can become catastrophic when not.

A phrase that arises on Taanit 23a and is threaded throughout the literature says it all: אוֹ חַבְרוּתָא אוֹ מִיתוּתָא. Friendship or death. This is the point of the roundabout story of Honi the Circlemaker. (No extra charge for bad puns.) The main character, a sort of Jewish ancestor of Rip Van Winkle, falls asleep for 70 years and wakes up to find that his family and his community are unrecognizable, and worse, that he is unrecognizable to them. He goes to his Beit Midrash and says I am Honi. Nobody believes him. The shock of having nobody that knows him upsets Honi so much that he prays for mercy, and dies. The story concludes:

הַיְינוּ דְּאָמְרִי אִינָשֵׁי: אוֹ חַבְרוּתָא אוֹ מִיתוּתָא
This is why people say: friendship or death.

I said before that the antidote for loneliness is in this room, and I truly believe it is. Not just in the textual examples I’ve just cited and the many similar ones I didn’t include. It’s in the people gathered here, and in the very prayers we say throughout the High Holiday season.

When we come around to the Vidui, when we confess our wrongs, we do it communally. We stand together and beat our chests and recite an almost impossible list of sins. Impossible in the sense that no one person could have done all of these things. It’s the moment when we really dig into our commitment to each other. The Vidui is all about the collective, and the way that one person’s mistakes can affect everyone around them. It’s about the way that taking responsibility for ourselves helps us take responsibility for others. It’s about the way in which we can influence each other and support each other in good times and bad. 

עַל חֵטְא שֶׁחָטָאנוּ לְפָנֶיךָ: For the sin we have committed against you
אָשַֽׁמְנוּ. בָּגַֽדְנוּ. גָּזַֽלְנוּ: We are to blame, we have rebelled, we have stolen
הַיּוֹם תְּאַמְּצֵנוּ: Today, strengthen us

Reckoning with the essence of this holiday is something we do together, on purpose.

Notice, by contrast, that when we make those two disclaimers I mentioned before, we make them in the first person singular. I consent to pray with transgressors. I annul my vows, promises, and oaths. Alone, we can only skim the surface.

But when it comes to the actual moral and spiritual work we’re doing here, we do it in the first person plural. We do it as a “we.”

 אָבִינוּ מַלְכֵּנוּ: Our father, our king. 
חָטָאנוּ לְפָנֶיךָ: We have sinned before you
חַדֵּשׁ עָלֵינוּ שָׁנָה טוֹבָה: Renew us for a good year

שָׁנָה טוֹבָה —a year, remember, of goodness, of integrity, of rightness. A year of wholeness. 

כֵּן יְהִי רָצוֹן. May this be God’s will.

May each and every one of us—may we all together, as a holy and beloved community—be inscribed and sealed into the Book of Life for sweetness, for joy, and for the blessing of companionship.

Gmar chatimah tovah! 

Rosh Hashanah Day 1 2026/5787 for TAA

(Delivered September 12, 2026)

Shabbat shalom! Shanah tovah! 

I want to start with a story from my life. Most of you know I have two sons, and once upon a time, they were quite little. The story I’m about to tell takes place in the sweet spot when they were big enough to think about תשובה—about return or repentance—but little enough that I was still tucking them in every night. It was a very sweet spot indeed.

One night at bedtime, during the month of Elul, I managed to get a quiet moment with each boy. Nobody else was listening, and I said privately to each son in his turn: “If I have done anything to hurt you or harm you in the past year, intentionally or unintentionally, I sincerely ask your forgiveness.” 

I’m a very lucky mom, because even though I had made plenty of mistakes with them over the year, they both accepted my תשובה and offered me their forgiveness. 

A few minutes later, as I was leaving the room, having tucked them both in, I heard a murmur from one bunk to the other one, as one boy said to his brother: “If I have done anything to hurt you or harm you in the past year…”

[…]

Dayeinu, that moment would be sufficient for its sweetness alone. But year by year, as I look back on it, I see new layers. Today, it speaks to me as more than just a teaching moment, but also as a moment that teaches.

At the pshat level, the level of basic, simple meaning, this is a story about תשובה, about the mechanics of asking and offering forgiveness. Going deeper, it reflects the strength that lies in vulnerability and the value of opening ourselves up to criticism or rejection, for the sake of getting closer. It reveals the ways that children can step up when given the tools to do so. And it suggests the ripple effect of not just telling but showing the people around us what’s most important.

We hear a lot these days about the generational transfer of wealth, the resources that one generation passes onto the next, and about how it extends and solidifies differences of advantage and disadvantage. In that context, we typically think of generational wealth as referring to material riches, financial resources like land ownership, money, family heirlooms. 

Yet when you use your grandmother’s silver at Pesach, it’s about much more than how much you might get for it if you put it on eBay, much more than just the ornate spoons and forks. Chances are, that silver traveled a distance, gathering stories as it went. Chances are, you’re using that silver to serve and eat recipes that came from generations past. Chances are, you’re enjoying your meal with people from different generations who share some of your history and likely some of your DNA. 

In Jewish tradition the generational transfer of wealth is not just material. It’s also cultural, religious, historical, and theological. It’s emotional and spiritual. Our Amidah says:

 לְדוֹר וָדוֹר נַגִּיד גָּדְלֶךָ וּלְנֵֽצַח נְצָחִים קְדֻשָּׁתְךָ נַקְדִּישׁ
From generation to generation, we will declare the greatness of God,
and for ever and ever we will amplify God’s holiness. 

From generation to generation לְדוֹר וָדוֹר, we will hold the objects and stories that are precious to us in trust, to transmit to the people we love. And although we have a history in Jewish tradition of revering our elders and our teachers, that’s not the whole story. Truly, the intergenerational sharing flows in all directions.

Take this teaching from the Talmud, on Taanit 7a:

אָמַר רַב נַחְמָן בַּר יִצְחָק: לָמָּה נִמְשְׁלוּ דִּבְרֵי תוֹרָה כְּעֵץ
שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: עֵץ חַיִּים הִיא לַמַּחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ
Rav Nachman bar Yitzhak said: Why do we compare words of Torah to a tree,
as in “It is a tree of life to those who hold on tight to it.”

In other words, how in the world did we get the image of the Torah being like a tree? 

If you stop and think about it, it’s a reasonable question.

The Gemara continues: Just as a small piece of wood can ignite a larger one, so too a lesser Torah scholar can sharpen a more experienced one. This is why Rabbi Chanina says: I have learned much from my teachers, and more from my friends, but it’s from my students that I’ve learned the most. 

And as the one person who gets to learn Torah with all the generations in our community—from the youngest students in our Sylvia Cohen Community School, to the Bnei Mitzvah students I work with in preparation for their Divrei Torah, to the folks in our congregation and around town who share Torah study and Backyard Mishnah, I can confirm. I often say I’m never so dim-witted as when I study Torah by myself; but boy, do I learn from each and every person who comes to my classes!

Another story about intergenerational sharing of wisdom, from the very first mishnah of Pirkei Avot (Wisdom of the Ancestors), starts this way:

משֶׁה קִבֵּל תּוֹרָה מִסִּינַי, וּמְסָרָהּ לִיהוֹשֻׁעַ, וִיהוֹשֻׁעַ לִזְקֵנִים, וּזְקֵנִים לִנְבִיאִים,
וּנְבִיאִים מְסָרוּהָ לְאַנְשֵׁי כְנֶסֶת הַגְּדוֹלָה
Moses received Torah from Sinai, and passed it along to Joshua, and Joshua to the Elders, and the Elders to the Prophets,
and the Prophets passed it along to the men of the Great Assembly.

On the basic level, this is a concrete way of talking about just what I was saying before, about the generational transfer of intellectual and spiritual wealth. But notice the first line: משֶׁה קִבֵּל תּוֹרָה מִסִּינַי—Moses received Torah miSinai. Literally from Sinai, but is that mountain in Egypt really the source of our wisdom tradition? 

Sinai here is a metaphor representing the communal experience of receiving Torah, and not just at one moment in the Book of Exodus, but over the course of the forty years’ wandering, and over the course of the millennia since. Moses and the Israelites received the Torah step by step, and our tradition has been receiving and transmitting it ever since. The sages of the Rabbinic period, the architects of halacha, the midrashists, the women who made their voices heard and the women who couldn’t, the creatives who set it all to music and made images dance in our eyes. 

And always, that receiving and that giving, taking shape in the context of a community of fellow-travelers. More than a place, Sinai is a complex, ever-evolving culture.

Sinai is what we experience in intergenerational community, the way tradition cements itself and becomes a part of us. We see it taking root when we wrap a baby in a family tallit for naming, and when the baby grows up and wears that tallit at their B mitzvah. We see it when the tallit becomes a chuppah and eventually, with fringes torn, a shroud for burial. We receive our tradition from one another in these milestone moments and at other stops along the way.

We are at Sinai when we are in the company of other Jews, singing, or arguing, or studying, or contemplating life’s big questions and themes. We are at Sinai when we come into the synagogue and when we go to the woods. We are at Sinai when we share Jewish cultural events and when we wrestle with ancient teachings. We are at Sinai when we suddenly recognize that the “trust-fall” scene in Mean Girls is communal תשובה, and when we join the circle of kavod at religious school each week. We are at Sinai when we are locked in with the words of our prayer book and when our minds wander to the beauty of the sunlight filtering in through the windows of this holy space.

Sinai is with us and in us. 

And some of the most iconic words of our tradition—words that some of us say several times a day—teach us what to do and how, in order to access the Sinai that is our inheritance. 

שְׁמַע! Listen, as if you’ve never heard them before.

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת ה’ אֱלֹהֶיךָ
And you will love Adonai your God

Ours is a teaching rooted in love: love for our people, and for our ancestors, and for all the forces that gathered somehow to make us what we are. Forces that, when considered collectively, some people call God.

בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ
With all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your being

This is not a halfway project. The tradition that we pass from generation to generation depends on our wholehearted commitment. Whole soul too. Everything we are, and more.

וְהָיוּ הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם עַל־לְבָבֶךָ
And these things which I command you today should be on your heart

OK, but why ON? The Kotzker Rebbe, one of our ancestors in 18th century Poland, used to teach that we have to set things on our hearts because there are times when our hearts aren’t open. Making it a practice to place our most cherished teachings and ideas on our hearts is a way of making sure that at those moments when our hearts do open, the wisdom is right there, ready to drop in where it is needed the most. 

וְשִׁנַּנְתָּם לְבָנֶיךָ
And teach them to your children

Sometimes I think placing the teachings on your heart and sharing them with your children are actually the same action.

וְדִבַּרְתָּ בָּם בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ בְּבֵיתֶךָ וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ בַדֶּרֶךְ וּבְשָׁכְבְּךָ וּבְקוּמֶךָ
And talk about them when you sit in your house, and when you walk the path, when you lie down, and when you get up

This might be my favorite part, among favorite parts. This line speaks so deeply to the everyday practice of לְדוֹר וָדוֹר. The things we talk about all the time are the things that the people around us learn are important to us. And if they admire us, they begin to regard them as important too.

וּקְשַׁרְתָּם לְאוֹת עַל־יָדֶךָ וְהָיוּ לְטֹטָפֹת בֵּין עֵינֶיךָ
And bind them symbolically on your hands and between your eyes

Keep these cherished teachings where you can see them, keep them in the work of your hands and in the way you view the world. 

וּכְתַבְתָּם עַל־מְזֻזוֹת בֵּיתֶךָ וּבִשְׁעָרֶיךָ
And write them on your doorposts and on your gates.

Not just inside your house but outside too. The words of our tradition sustain us and guide us in the way we encounter the world around us. They are an inheritance we pass up and down the generations, so much so that we are devoting ourselves to intergenerational learning this year through a series of community-wide programs organized and co-planned by the Sylvia Cohen Community School and the Adult Learning Committee. You’ll hear much more about this as the year progresses, and I hope you’ll join and support these programs as yet one more way we engage with one another across time and space, joining in the immortal conversation of our people. 

On this Yom haZikaron—Day of Remembering—may we know the blessing of recalling our sacred past with reverence. On this Yom Harat Olam—Day of the World’s Birth—may we know the optimism of continual re-creation. And on this day of family togetherness, of gathering in beloved community, of apples and honey shared around a joyful table, may we know the sweetness of finding our place in the never ending flow of our beloved tradition. 

Shanah tovah!

Erev Rosh Hashanah 2026/5787 for TAA

(Delivered September 11, 2026)

Shabbat shalom! Shanah tovah!

On the morning of August 7, 1974, a young man with a bold vision pulled off one of the most spectacular victimless crimes ever. For six years prior, he had been methodically planning and setting the pieces in place: bow and arrow, riggings, steel wire. He and his accomplices studied blueprints and weather patterns, structures and elevator schedules, all in the service of whimsy executed at an epic scale.

The young man was Philippe Petit, a French aerialist who dazzled Lower Manhattan for 45 minutes that day, as he walked, danced and even lay down on a tightrope suspended between New York City’s iconic Twin Towers. On that summer day, a mesmerized crowd gathered in the Financial District, hushed, watching, worrying, gasping, applauding in wonderment. High above, Petit dreamed with his body and his soul, magicking into being a world of joy and reverence suspended between life and death, a world where imagination could flower in a hundred directions, where space was unlimited, where gravity didn’t count.

Twenty-five years ago today, Petit’s dreamscape became a nightmare as those towers crumbled, destroyed by terrorists. Something broke on that awful day. Any notion of safety and justice lay twisted in the rubble. The suspension between life and death seemed forever decided, the delicate cord permanently snapped.

I say “seemed” because the tightrope between life and death ultimately remains eternal, something our tradition has been reflecting about for millennia, something we call into our souls deeply at this time of year.

A series of tales from the rabbinic period goes on flights of speculation to rival any modern-day fan-fiction, around the question of what lies beyond the boundaries of the known world. One such midrash, from Breishit Rabbah, chapter 4, reports an encounter between Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Shimon ben Zoma. 

וּכְבָר הָיָה רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן זוֹמָא יוֹשֵׁב וְתוֹהֶא
It happened that Rabbi Shimon ben Zoma was sitting in contemplation

R. Yehoshua passes by and asks how he is, once then twice, with no answer. On the third try, ben Zoma startles. Rabbi Yehoshua asks insistently: “Are you OK? What’s going on?” 

Ben Zoma emerges from his reverie, only slightly.

The secret his contemplation reveals? There’s very little distance between the heavens and the earth. The רוח אלהים—the breath of the divine—that hovers over the waters in the Creation narrative, is interpreted by the Rabbis of this Midrash, to pass through a space smaller than your hand.

The space between earth and heaven, between life and death, is at once an unbridgeable chasm and a span no wider than a whisper or the flutter of a hummingbird’s wing.

As we enter these Ten Days of Teshuvah, we are suspended in this unfathomable yet delicate space between life and death. 

After months of reflection, soul-searching, חשבון הנפש—taking the soul’s account—we arrive tonight at the starting line. Over the course of the coming week and a half, we will pin ourselves down in the crucible of our own lives, daring ourselves not to look away. This season, equal parts mounting dread and sweet hopes, days of bulky, complex, alienating liturgy and festive reunions with dear friends and family… The whole shebang invites us into the holy work of telling ourselves the truth.

And while we are each taking our soul’s account, tradition holds that God is working the other side of the ledger. The Talmud teaches on Rosh Hashanah 16b that God keeps track of humanity through three books, and during the Ten Days of Teshuvah opens them for review. There’s the book of resha’im gemurim (the thoroughly wicked), and the book of tzadikim gemurim (the thoroughly righteous), and the book of the beinoni’im (the in-betweeners). For people in the first two categories, God’s work is simple: the wholly wicked are summarily written and sealed for death; the wholly righteous are immediately written and sealed for life. But we, the beinoni’im, flutter between life and death for these Yamim Nora’im, these Reverent Days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, while God examines our lives, to discern a final decision about the year ahead. 

We walk the tightrope between life and death. If we take them seriously, these days of reflection demand that we acknowledge our worst moments without excuses, and open ourselves to judgment both human and divine. We picture ourselves facing the judgment of our Creator, as we catalog all that we have done wrong throughout the year. The urgency of teshuvah is matched only by our vulnerability. The machzor reminds us of life’s fragility and brevity. It teaches that our lives are short, shorter than we may think. Unetaneh tokef imagines the many ends that could await us: 

מִי יִחְיֶה וּמִי יָמוּת
Who will live and who will die
מִי בְקִצּוֹ וּמִי לֹא בְּקִצּוֹ
Who in a good time and who untimely
מִי בַמַּיִם וּמִי בָאֵשׁ
Who by water, and who by fire

And yet in the same breath, it reminds us:

וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה
Return, reflection, and righteousness can soften our harsh fate. 

Into this liminal space between life and death, between thriving and emptiness, words from Isaiah, chapter 40 flow:

כָּל־הַבָּשָׂר חָצִיר וְכָל־חַסְדּוֹ כְּצִיץ הַשָּׂדֶה׃
יָבֵשׁ חָצִיר נָבֵל־צִיץ
All flesh is grass, and all its chesed like flowers of the field
Grass dries out, and blossoms fade

It’s worth pausing over the metaphor, for within its almost nihilistic view of human insignificance is tucked a glimmer of divine hope. Our physical beings and our deeds are like grass and flowers that become parched and die. But remember, flowers shed seeds. If human chesed is like a flower, it has the potential to endure, even as the bloom fades. The seeds of our kindness continue to blossom in the souls of others. Every act of caring we engage in, every mitzvah we fulfill, plants a seed for more chesed in this world. 

On this thin thread between life and death that we dare to contemplate at this season, the choices we make form both the substance of our lives right now and what we will be remembered for after we’re gone. What we do in this one and only life, including the ways in which we reckon with our own failings, will become our legacy. Death is inevitable but while we walk the tightrope of life, let us strive for righteousness and love, in the hopes that when our time of flourishing ends, we have planted seeds that will continue to flourish. Our tradition is to say, זכרונם לברכה—may their memory be for a blessing—when someone dies. I can think of no more important aspiration than to live in such a way as to make our memory a blessing, when memory is all that’s left of us. 

And so as we enter this period of intense reflection, may we find inspiration in the image of that space between life and death—Philippe Petit’s tightrope, ben Zoma’s delicate membrane. May the fragility of it all inspire us to plant the seeds of lovingkindness with our every deed. And at the times when inevitably we miss the mark, may we draw on the season’s invitation to conscience to realign our steps and write our way into the book of life. 

Shanah tovah!

Yom Kippur for TAA

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.

Kol Nidrei / Erev Yom Kippur for TAA

(Delivered October 1, 2025)

When I was little, my mom had a cute habit of pretending she couldn’t quite make me out. I’d get up in the morning and go find her, and she’d say, “Is that you?” Although I do have three siblings, we are different enough from each other and far enough apart in age that I’m pretty sure my mom knew it was actually me. But still, it was fun to play the game, and to get that delicious moment of recognition when she would act like she couldn’t believe her luck at running into me, as if we’d been apart for decades, not hours. 

Looking back on it as an adult, I can see in her question, “Is that you?” more depth of meaning than either of us probably imagined during those days of practiced silliness.

The world we live in today seems designed to prevent us—parents and children, friends, partners, and strangers alike—from truly seeing one another. So many aspects of our lives are mediated: by the screens that dominate our waking hours; by the modern definition of work, which presses us to keep up a punishing pace, with no room for reflection or connection; by a poisonous algorithm that daily divides us into sharp categories designed for maximum agitation and isolation. Day by day, I encounter people who are even considering cutting off ties with someone they went to high school with, or with a co-worker, or, God forbid, with a child or a parent, because their political beliefs are so far apart as to make it impossible to talk without opening up a painful, unbridgeable chasm between them. Throughout these recent years of recreational rage, controversy and contention, I pride myself on not having broken off any relationships, but even I have to admit to a whole lot of avoidance. The much-talked-about polarization of American discourse has led to too many slammed doors, literal and figurative. As Rabbi Tali Adler puts it, “We have started to see each other … not as neighbors but as people who think the wrong things.” 

As always, I look to our tradition for guidance, if not precedent. As folks who participated in Backyard Mishnah this summer may remember, I have a fondness and an emotional connection with the Sages of the Rabbinic period. Even as foreign as it feels to us in terms of daily life, the world of the ancient Rabbis had more than a little bit in common with our world today. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves facing prejudices and violence because of who they were. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves in a place of profound alienation from cultural norms that had once seemed unbreakable. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves navigating profound communal disagreements that could have broken them apart. But also they found themselves with a sense of purpose: having lost their Temple and their homeland, they sought to reimagine every aspect of the world from the vantage point of their exile, as they built a new Judaism from the broken shards of the old one.

Despite the fact that we live very different lives from theirs—not many of us are blacksmiths or ride to and from work on a donkey, much less spend all our days reading, reciting, and memorizing Torah—even so, perhaps some of the principles they derived speak to our current day.

One core teaching comes to us from chapter 7 of Tosefta Sotah, a compilation of Jewish law from the second century. In the chapter, the Rabbis are grappling with ambiguities of meaning in the Torah and looking for a way to resolve the contradictions. In a mysterious and perhaps slightly maddening example, they look at the appearance of these three similar but different citations from Parshat Yitro: דברים  הדברים & אלה הדברים—words, the words, and these are the words. To the Rabbis, these almost-repetitions are different enough to raise curiosity, and so they wondered together, why the difference? Is one expression more valid than another, and if so, why? Which is the right one, the authoritative one? 

The way they resolve the question is subtle, and opens a way to abide this and other disagreements: כָּל הַדְּבָרִים נִתְּנוּ מֵרֹעֶה אֶחָד—All these things / words were given by one Shepherd. That is to say, the Torah can refer to things in different ways because it’s all part of a greater whole. There doesn’t have to be one and only one way to understand something. And from that, the Rabbis offer a gorgeous image to harmonize the principle:

 אַף אַתָּה עָשָׂה לִבְּךָ חַדְרֵי חֲדָרִים—Only make yourself a heart of many rooms.

A spacious heart, with capacity for understanding multiple viewpoints, can hold the uncertainty of not knowing, can open the imagination to a deeper understanding of the role that perspective plays in our experience.

Luckily for us, the Rabbis didn’t insist on unanimity—or worse, on one opinion being right and the rest being thrown out. Instead, as even a cursory look at a page of Talmud will show, they kept everything, almost like hoarders of ideas. Text and commentary, argument and counterargument, secondary and tertiary conclusions and legal derivations are all present on the page, allowing us to access a conversation across time and space, a conversation we are invited to join. Had the Rabbis looked for a single answer, the beauty and richness of our tradition would have been watered down to nothing, and it’s quite possible that Judaism as we understand it would not have survived. 

Holding one another’s perspectives with reverence in a time of upheaval  required the Rabbis to overcome their impulse toward avoidance. Instead, they made a spiritual practice of getting closer, of listening with curiosity about what was underneath their disagreements. Masechet Brachot page 9b finds them considering the question of when to say the morning Shema. That is to say, when is the light sufficient to be defined as morning? A few possibilities are offered in the Mishnah’s argument: Perhaps morning is defined as the moment when a person can distinguish blue from white. Or perhaps, as Rabbi Eliezer says, it’s when one can distinguish blue from green. The Gemara carries the discussion forward, with different voices introducing different possibilities: Rabbi Meir suggests it’s when you can distinguish two similar animals, like a wolf and a dog. Rabbi Akiva narrows the difference, saying when you can distinguish a donkey from a wild donkey. Still others say that morning comes when you can recognize the face of a neighbor from four cubits (or six feet) away. Ultimately the halachic ruling is with this final position. 

The Rabbis’ concern here is not just to button down when to say their prayers; we wouldn’t be so interested in this text thousands of years later, if that were the case. Rather, they’re teaching us the value of truly seeing. They’re teaching us how to pay attention, how to treat the moment, and one another, with reverence. In a similar vein, the Torah teaches in Exodus chapter 10 verse 23 that during the plague of darkness (familiar to us from the Pesach Haggadah) neighbor lost sight of neighbor, such that everyone was immobilized during the time of darkness. The physical darkness became a kind of existential metaphor: it’s not just tripping over the furniture, it’s that everyone became unhinged without the reference point of other people.

In our own time, as it grows harder and harder to see one another clearly through the distorting lenses of social media, a poisonous political discourse, and disproportionate representation in the public square from the toxic fringes; our timeless tradition offers an antidote. Indeed, it’s at the moment of the morning Shema—the moment the passage in Brachot is referring to—when we gather the fringes of our tallitot to symbolize the reunion of our entire fractious people. We declare the unity of God with all those fringes in our left hands—closer to the heart!—with threads of hope binding us together. We have no illusion that all of those fringes will all point in the same direction, but we do know: the vastness of God is able to contain their variation.

The Rabbis of the Talmud modeled for us the capacity not only to tolerate different points of view, but to learn from them. They implore us to teach our mouths to say, “I might be wrong.” And, “Tell me more.” And, “What I’m hearing from you doesn’t align with how I’ve been thinking about this, can you help me understand how you got there?” 

I want to be clear that I’m not advocating for changing our minds with every conversation, or for moral relativism. In the words of Dylan Marron of the podcast Conversations with People who Hate Me, “Empathy is not endorsement.” What I am advocating for is meeting one another with the courage to listen for the sake of understanding: for protecting our own humanity by acknowledging the other’s humanity.

Our Rabbinic literature is itself a conversation that’s been preserved because of the Sages’ open, searching minds, and their dogged determination that what we shared as a people was worth saving, despite the violence done to us and the destruction we suffered. Our ancestors invite us, in turn, to imitate their dogged determination—to see and hear one another, the better to save what can be saved. The better to save what can be saved.

The Rabbis offer a cautionary tale as to what can be lost when we stop seeking one another out, when we let insult and stereotype close off the doors of our hearts. In Masechet Baba Metzia 84a we encounter Rabbi Yochanan and his protege and havruta (study partner) Reish Lakish. When they first meet, Reish Lakish is a career criminal. Rabbi Yochanan sees his intellectual potential and convinces him to leave the bandit life and become a Torah scholar. They enjoy years of passionate yet respectful disagreement in their learning together, until in one debate about weaponry, Rabbi Yochanan blurts out a reminder of Reish Lakish’s past as a criminal. This vicious insult causes Reish Lakish so much emotional pain that he falls ill. Even then, Rabbi Yochanan refuses to apologize for his hurtful comments. It’s only after Reish Lakish dies that Rabbi Yochanan realizes the consequences of his harsh words, and laments the heartbreaking loss of his beloved partner in respectful dispute. He tries to find a new havruta, but nobody is able to challenge him the way Reish Lakish had done. Filled with remorse for having broken what was most important to him by allowing for an element of contempt to bubble up in their productive disagreements, Rabbi Yohanan himself goes mad and dies.

The ancient Rabbis saw their world shattered; they knew the perils of conflict in which respect is not a touchstone. And so, in addition to reinventing Jewish practice, in addition to preserving and elevating the work of their learning—the Sages also sounded a warning as piercing as a shofar call. Even, or especially, in times of moral degradation, seeing the divine image in one another—and acting in the image of God—are non-negotiable.

As we read in Pirkei Avot,

בְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.

Let this be our watchword as we navigate our ever more fragmented world: to strive to be human, to cherish the infinite variety within the human family, and even in the deepest conflicts, to remember that they, that you, that we, are all created in the divine image. 

Shanah tovah!

Rosh Hashanah 5786 | 2025

(Delivered September 23, 2025)

Shanah tovah! 

It is so good to be together as a community; these times when we are all gathered are a dream come true for me. Let’s take a moment to feel the sweetness of it.

OK. I’m going to start with a little survey. Listen carefully. […] Blink once if you feel totally comfortable in High Holiday services and know what’s going on at every single moment. […] Blink twice if you feel like everybody around you just blinked once. […] I’m not 100% sure of the survey results because I was … blinking twice. 

This fall season wouldn’t be the same without the High Holidays. The best-known verse from the psalm for the season says:

אַחַת  שָׁאַלְתִּי מֵאֵת־יי אוֹתָהּ אֲבַקֵּשׁ
שִׁבְתִּי בְּבֵית־יי כּל־יְמֵי חַיַּי לַחֲזוֹת בְּנֹעַם־יי וּלְבַקֵּר בְּהֵיכָלוֹ
One thing I ask of Adonai, this is what I seek: to dwell in the house of God
all the days of my life, to gaze upon God’s beauty, and to visit God’s temple

And indeed as summer turns to fall, an invisible thread starts to tug at our hearts to bring us here, to our human approximation of God’s temple. Yet for all our longing to be here, for all that mysteriously pulls us in, these services can be as alienating as they are uplifting. For folks who are regular synagogue-goers, the services are different enough from the usual Shabbat service to be strange and destabilizing. And for folks whose primary engagement with prayer comes only at this time of year, the services can be long, confusing, and repetitive. If we have memories of childhood High Holiday services, they are definitionally different from this—different tunes, different people, a different rabbi. And if people don’t have those childhood associations—becase they came to this tradition with a partner or through their own journeys in life, or because they are still children—this all can feel very foreign. Objectively: catching up with old friends we haven’t seen all year by reflecting together on the fragility of life and the passage of time, and meditating on the nature of sin and the challenge of forgiveness, is kind of a weird combination.

Yet both culturally and religiously, something calls us back every year. The concept of תשובה—of return or repentance—is woven throughout the season and throughout the liturgy. 

The imagery of return is with us in the structure of the shofar service that the students just led with me. Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, a 17th-century European sage, noted that there is a pattern of departure and return in the order of the shofar calls: tekiyah, shevarim, t’ruah, and back to tekiyah, like a baseball player taking off from home plate, and then returning to the same place having accomplished something. In Horowitz’s framework, the first tekiyah represents us when we feel whole and sure of ourselves. Shevarim, the slightly elongated broken sound, shows us the cracks just beneath the surface, the places where we are not quite aligned, or have done things we regret. Going deeper still, the t’ruah, those sobbing, shattered calls, show us the parts of us that are truly broken. Horowitz teaches that by coming to terms with the aspects of ourselves represented by the t’ruah call, we can return to the wholeness of tekiyah, stronger for having reckoned with our own brokenness. 

Another way we reflect on departure and return at this time of year is through the words, חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם—renew our days, like before. It’s a funny phrase. We want something new, but we want it to be similar to the past. Even when we seek new experiences, we crave the security of being able to recognize them like familiar faces and connect them to our experience. The idea that something can be both new and old is central to our holiday cycle, as we shed the old year’s hard words and cruel deeds and, as I spoke about last night, renew our hopes for the coming year.

We come home to ourselves through these rituals and words, and through the very act of entering this space as a community.

And yet for all this spiritual uplift, there are moments for many of us when, for one reason or another, we don’t quite feel like we belong here, don’t quite feel like all this belongs to us. 

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, a Hasidic rabbi who lived in 18th-century Ukraine, was one of our wisest and most sensitive teachers. He told the following story:

One time, a certain man in a certain city dreamed that in the city of Vienna, under a bridge, there was a treasure. He went there and stood by the bridge and asked around as to how to dig there. A soldier came by and said to him, What are you doing standing here and thinking? And he thought that it would be good to tell the soldier his dream so maybe the other man could help him in exchange for a share of the treasure. So he told him.

The soldier answered saying: Oy, stupid Jew! Why do you pay attention to dreams? Couldn’t I dream a dream that there was a treasure underneath the oven in the house of a certain Jew who lives in your home town? Do you really think I’d travel there for a treasure?

The Jew was taken aback and went home to his house. He dug in the kitchen under the oven, and found the treasure. Afterward, he remarked: I had to travel to Vienna in order to know there was a treasure right near me, in my own house. 

My beloved friends, each one of us is on a journey throughout our lifetimes of going away and coming back and going away and coming back, of searching for a treasure somewhere else, and then finding that it was close by the whole time. Finding that treasure isn’t easy, and making sense of it isn’t either. I can imagine the man in our story digging underneath the oven to find the treasure and then needing to figure out how to put his kitchen back together. Teshuvah is not neat and tidy. 

My own story is full of those zigzags, from the first time I got sent to the principal’s office in religious school because, having started in 5th grade, I didn’t know what was going on and didn’t understand why I was there. The zigzags continued for decades: from refusing to schedule a Bat Mitzvah and dropping out of religious school, to putting off rabbinical school for some years because I thought it was too late for me to learn and I’d have to be alienated forever. 

But the beauty of our tradition of תשובה is that we have a whole entire framework for coming back. There will always be aspects of Jewish tradition that feel uncomfortable—I’ve got a couple myself—but תשובה invites us back and encourages us to find our way. The root letters of the word תשובה—shin vav bet—speak of return, but they are close cousins of another root word, yud shin bet meaning, to stay. Teshuvah is not only an invitation to come back, but to stay, to settle in and explore.

To be Jewish is to wrestle with God, and sometimes with ourselves. It’s there in the word ישראל—God-wrestler. Our tradition expects us: to interpret the text, to ask hard questions, to argue with God. Digging up the kitchen is bound to kick up some dust.

So for folks who are counting the pages till the end of the service, or squirming in your seats, or wondering just who is this God that keeps accounts with such coldness, what I want most to say to you is: you belong here. All this—

the long, confusing services, 
the ambiguous teachings, 
the endless details and variations,
the arguments and the counter-arguments,
the words with multiple meanings,
the melodies that float around in your head for days and weeks, 
the shofar and the honey cake, 
the grownups who pat your head and tell you how tall you’ve gotten, 
the children who make you think—sometimes too much,
the soft heart and the sharp points,
the community that loves you—

All of it. This is your treasure. 

Welcome home. Shanah tovah.

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5786 | 2025

(Delivered September 22, 2025)

Some years back, I went through a big six-word story phase. For a self-professed haiku enthusiast and general word freak, this was the obvious next step! The six-word story demands that the writer have a clear expressive goal and the courage to trim everything that doesn’t point toward the goal… and then trim some more. Some of my attempts include: 

Two sweet boys. One sweet life.

Read books, write words, eat popcorn.

Awkward young nerds can become rabbis.

There’s something about a short story.

But seriously, there is. Sometimes the discipline of having parameters like 5-7-5 for haiku or using only six words to make your point reveals some greater truth. So it is for me with this phrase from our machzor:  

תִּכְלֶה שָׁנָה וְקִלְלוֹתֶיהָ וְתָּחֵל שָׁנָה וּבִרְכוֹתֶיהָ
An old year with its curses ends; a new year with its blessings begins.
Or to attempt to put it in six words:
Cursed year ends; blessed year begins.

There are so many ways in which the year just ending feels accursed. We’re living in a time of mounting dread: here, in Israel, and around the world. Dark forces are gathering, hard realities closing in. From a regime that governs by chaos and intimidation, to an ever-fracturing public discourse in which the toxic fringes drown out reasonable voices, to a widening crisis in Israel, to a disturbing uptick in antisemitic words and deeds, to devastating climate events, to school shootings, to drug overdoses, to political violence… It’s demoralizing even to list all these, much less to live them. Day by day, it seems the world threatens to boil over, with rage, dehumanization, and cruelty.

Amidst all this, something drew each of us here tonight. We come back to our tradition day after day, week after week, year after year. We come into the synagogue looking for connection, for spiritual uplift, for community, for emotional catharsis. Threaded through each of these, and many others I could have named, is hope. Even in a world beset by so many problems, in a time when it’s all too tempting to despair about humanity, we—as a community and as a people—are called to find some semblance of hope.

As we begin this new year, I want us to be able to approach it with hope. 

I don’t mean to paint too rosy a picture. Hope isn’t some namby-pamby, fake cheer. It’s not the practice of telling ourselves lies, convincing ourselves that everything is going to be perfect in some future time. Rather, to paraphrase Rabbi Shai Held, hope allows us to muster the energy to remind ourselves that we are OK enough for now. 

Recently, I came across a passage from the book Hope Amidst Conflict by the political psychologist Oded Leshem of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the excerpt, Leshem writes of disentangling the connection between our desires and our expectations, in a move toward what he calls optimal hope. In extreme conditions, it’s wise to, as he puts it, “decrease our expectations but keep our hopes propelled by our desires.” In other words, optimal hope is balanced between realism and yearning. When we want something but are realistic and clear-eyed about how likely or unlikely it is to come to pass, we approach Leshem’s intricate calculus of desire and expectation. Putting optimal hope into practice would mean, for example, engaging in activism out of conviction and integrity, rather than out of an exaggerated notion of how much influence we have on the wider world. It would mean parenting with deep feeling, but without attachment to the fantasy that our children will turn out to be violin prodigies and math geniuses with the athletic skills of LeBron James and the patience of the Dalai Lama. Even though, theoretically, some of them might.

Despite or perhaps because of the pattern of catastrophe and recovery that permeates Jewish history, our ancient tradition places a huge emphasis on hope. We see it in the way Torah pushes ever forward in the face of daunting obstacles. Take Moses, who suffers grievously throughout his life. He is deprived of the chance to be a child in his own family, and after being reconnected to his people as an adult, loses numerous close relatives, including his nephews, Nadav and Avihu, and his siblings, Aaron and Miriam. And he is ultimately denied the chance to see his life’s work fulfilled by crossing over into the Promised Land. Yet even Moses finishes with hope for his people. As he prepares to send the Israelites ahead without him, he says in Deuteronomy 31:8:

וַיי הוּא  הַהֹלֵךְ לְפָנֶיךָ הוּא יִהְיֶה עִמָּךְ לֹא יַרְפְּךָ וְלֹא יַעַזְבֶךָּ לֹא תִירָא וְלֹא תֵחָת׃
God will go before you and will be with you.
God will not abandon or forsake you. Do not be afraid, and do not panic.

Even as Moses agonizingly steps back, his thoughts and good wishes are with his people, carrying them forward, without him.

There are hints of hope amidst despair tucked in throughout our sacred texts—in our daily prayers, and in words that get pride of place at this time of year in particular. For example, the final two verses of the psalm for the season, Psalm 27, point tentatively toward hope. Verse 13 reads:

לוּלֵא הֶאֱמַנְתִּי לִרְאוֹת בְּטוּב־יי בְּאֶרֶץ חַיִּים
If only I could believe in seeing God’s goodness in the land of the living…  

The verse trails off as doubt and skepticism loom. Then the next verse, the final one of the psalm, answers:

קַוֵּה אֶל־יי חֲזַק וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ וְקַוֵּה אֶל־יי
Hope toward God! Be strong and courageous of heart,
and hope toward God.                      

This final couplet finds the Psalmist in a crisis of faith, wondering if he can actually believe the things he’s been saying—and then pulling himself toward hope and wholeness. The doubt peeks through in the phrase קַוֵּה אֶל־יי—hope toward God; it’s not a direct hit, but rather a fumbling in the general vicinity of the Divine. As in Leshem’s concept of optimal hope, the Psalmist acknowledges his desire for closeness with God while admitting that it is not a guarantee. This is optimal hope. Grownup hope. 

The Akeidah, the story of the Binding of Isaac, which we’ll read on the second day of Rosh haShanah, offers a stunning hint at hope. In a moment of moral compromise and panic, when it seems even God has turned away, as Abraham is poised with the knife over his son’s neck, there appears, just in the nick of time, a ram in the thicket. The Mishnah teaches that this ram was there all along, since the earliest days of creation. At the moment when it could all go irreparably wrong, Abraham sees the ram, a new possibility, and he narrowly avoids making the mistake of a lifetime. Even when it seems that all is lost, the narrative somehow pulls us back from the brink. 

For my part, when the brink feels perilously close, I often look for guidance from the Piasceczner Rebbe, who served as Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. The Piasceczner Rebbe endured unimaginable oppression over an extended period of time, and yet managed to scrape together some crumbs of hope to help his community manage the day-to-day existential threats they faced. He walked the tightrope between desire and expectation, even as the dangers grew more and more acute.

In his Rosh Hashanah sermon from 1940, he included a parable of a man so distraught he burst out in wailing and tears. The man called out so loudly that his father ran to him and tried to comfort him. But because he was so wrapped up in his own anguish, the man couldn’t recognize his father or accept the comfort being offered. Imagine the solace he could have experienced, had he been able to perceive his father reaching out to help. This wouldn’t have reduced the ultimate cause of his distress, but at least he would not have been holding it alone. The Piasceczner’s teaching is profound, for his time and perhaps for our own: as individuals, we have very little power to alter or even mitigate the distressing circumstances swirling around us. But allowing ourselves to accept care—both human and divine—softens the heartbreak that threatens to overwhelm. And coming to the side of those who are suffering gives us a sense of purpose. That the Piasceczner could find inspiration to serve, week after week, in perhaps the most hopeless time our people has known, should itself be a source of hope.

In fact it’s due to an incredible act of hope that we even have his writings. During the Holocaust, in the Warsaw Ghetto, a historian by the name of Emanuel Ringelblum collected the everyday artifacts of Jewish life, in the hopes (that word again!) of preserving what could be preserved. Among the things he collected were the Piasceczner Rebbe’s writings, which were packed up into milk cans and buried underground, to be dug up later, after the war’s end. The miracle is that in a time of unrelenting misery, when the worst of humanity was on gruesome display, there were people—the Piasceczner Rebbe, Ringelblum, and others whose names we will probably never know—who saw that even though so many individuals would not survive; Jewish theology, culture, and thought were worth saving. Could be saved. The unimaginable future would someday come. In the words of the Chinese poet Lin Yutang: Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

The Hebrew language invites us to reflect on just how fragile hope can be. The word for hope תקווה also means… cord or thread. Sometimes, hope is as robust as a strong cable, a lifeline; sometimes it’s as thin as a thread we can barely see. But threads can be spun together, becoming strengthened over time. Threads can weave in and out of fabrics to reinforce and beautify them. You tie a knot in a thread and have an anchor for your work. Sometimes a thread is all you need to keep the story going.

A thread, like a six-word story, can hold our place and pull us forward.

Cursed year ends; blessed year begins.

Threads of hope bind us together.

Shanah tovah.

Sukkot for TAA

(Delivered October 17, 2024)

Four days later, we choose exile. 

I wrote those words twelve years ago, as I tried to map the arc of the fall chaggim in relationship to the narrative arc of Jewish history. On Rosh Hashanah the world is created, and our story begins. On Yom Kippur we fall spectacularly from grace as if from Gan Eden itself. We reckon with our human frailties and weaknesses, with the ways we will never quite be good enough. And we find ourselves, four days later, fully invested in the impermanence of life. 

The book of Kohelet accompanies us through these seven days of embracing the elements. Where Yom Kippur liturgy reminded us that human life is brief, vanishing like a curl of smoke when the wind blows hard enough; by the time we get to Sukkot, we say, OK let the wind blow. We’ll build some walls, the best we can, we’ll invite friends and strangers into our flimsy shelters. We’ll eat and we’ll drink and we’ll sing, we’ll peek at the full moon between the branches. 

That curl of smoke from Unetaneh Tokef? By the time Sukkot rolls around, we’ve almost made peace with it. 

הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים אָמַר קֹהֶלֶת הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים הַכֹּל הָבֶל׃

Total vanity, Kohelet says. Total vanity. Everything is vanity.

This year feels vainer than most, this year it feels at times as if a whole world is vanishing with that curl of smoke. Will we ever recover a sense of safety and wholeness? Or will the simmering rage and violence boil over yet again?

הַכֹּל הָבֶל

It’s all temporary, and will vanish like a fever dream. 

Meanwhile, here we are.

Sukkot tells us that the meanwhile is the point. Zman simchateinu—the time of our joy. We are commanded to rejoice for seven days before God. Today we are here together. We won’t wait until life is perfect and calm and orderly again before we rejoice. Today is the day. As we sang in Hallel: 

זֶה־הַיּוֹם עָשָׂה יי נָגִילָה וְנִשְׂמְחָה בוֹ

This is the day God has made: let’s rejoice and be glad in it.

This day today. This is the one we have. As long as we have voices to sing with, minds to think with. As long as we have each other, we will find the joy lurking in the marrow of the hardest moments. 

Elsewhere, Kohelet teaches, famously, that there is a time for everything: a time for birth, a time for death, a time for planting, a time for uprooting. A time for killing and a time for healing. A philosopher-king in a melancholy mood, Kohelet says: whatever you see or think or feel right now, wait. It will change. It always does. Investing yourself in keeping everything the same is a fools’ strategy.

In the words of the great Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai: 

A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.

I often say—and I’ve probably said it more often this year than in every prior year combined—that our joy is our secret weapon. As Jews, we live in a state of paradox. It’s not for nothing that some of our happiest songs are in minor keys. Our story is one of constant persecution, anxiety, and isolation. Also our story is one of incredible growth and triumph, punctuated by occasional catastrophe. Both of these are true. Life has never been unambiguously easy for us, and when the short view looks terrible, we look toward the long view. Every time we say the Amidah, we are locating ourselves in a line that goes all the way back to Abraham. If the God of Abraham came through for him, we may yet find our way through the current catastrophe.

On Sukkot, we grab hold of what remains and say, yes it’s awful, but let’s go outside and feel the sharp wind on our faces. We’re alive and that is all there is right now.

Yom Kippur Sermon for TAA

(Delivered October 12, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! Shanah tovah!

In one of my previous incarnations, I worked as a singer and actor, and as such, I became deeply devoted to the TV show, “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” On the show, host James Lipton would interview high-profile actors about their approach to the craft, citing examples from their work and talking about how they built this or that character. The conversations were individual to whichever actor was in the hot seat, but each episode ended the same way, with Lipton giving his guest a questionnaire consisting of, I don’t know, seven or eight questions—what sound or noise do you love? What is your favorite word? Your least favorite word? And so on. Lipton’s final question was the most intriguing: If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

Admittedly, the Christian image of the pearly gates might not resonate. But even if we don’t relate to the mental picture, we can surely relate to the question: If we had a chance to meet God panim el panim—face to face—what might we wish for God to say to us? What would we like to learn is God’s essence, God’s true nature, God’s message for us?

In my days of watching Inside the Actor’s Studio religiously, I was not in the habit of thinking about God, much less imagining a personal meeting. But also, in those days, my sense of God’s nature was fairly one-dimensional, a very conventional one in our culture: I pictured an old white guy with a long beard and billowy robes, either sitting on a throne or floating around on a cloud. This image in my head was informed by children’s books and the occasional New Yorker cartoon, and had so little to do with my actual experience as to be laughable. Although I was an adult by then, my idea of God hadn’t really changed since I was about six. 

Over the ensuing decade or so, I guess I got a system upgrade when it comes to how I think about God. And so, with more trepidation than you might think, I’d like to use this time to talk about God. I figure since I’ve already talked about Israel and Gaza, I might as well take a real risk. But all kidding aside, if your rabbi doesn’t take God seriously, who will? 

The image called up by James Lipton’s “pearly gates” question is in tension with today’s Torah and Haftarah readings, and with the depth and breadth of the universe of Jewish thought. So let’s look at the readings first. 

This morning, in Parashat Acharei Mot, we meet a rather forbidding God, a God who, after the sudden and unexplained deaths of Nadav and Avihu, seems to return to business as usual, giving instruction about the proper way to approach the Beit haMikdash (the ancient Temple). This leads into a fairly detailed imagining of the Kohen Gadol, the High Priest, encountering God—not in the heavens, but rather in the earthly realm, in the innermost chamber of the Beit haMikdash, the Holy of Holies. In this moment of solitude and heightened occasion, with the weight of the community and its sins on his back, the Kohen Gadol will have a fleeting encounter with the presence of God. And because he will be entirely alone—he being the only human with this security clearance—we are left on the outside to wonder what it might be like. This exclusivity is in sharp contrast to the Haftarah, in which we read: 

דְּרָכָיו רָאִיתִי וְאֶרְפָּאֵהוּ וְאַנְחֵהוּ וַאֲשַׁלֵּם נִחֻמִים לוֹ וְלַאֲבֵלָיו׃

בּוֹרֵא נִיב שְׂפָתָיִם שָׁלוֹם  שָׁלוֹם לָרָחוֹק וְלַקָּרוֹב אָמַר יי וּרְפָאתִיו׃

I have seen their ways, and will heal them: I will guide them, 

and comfort the mourners among them. 

Create consoling words, bring peace, peace to far and near,
and heal them, says Adonai.

The Haftarah’s God is a God who sees human imperfection with compassion. In contrast to the Torah reading, we find here a God who is present with the people, a God who heals and consoles, a God who makes a particular point of offering peace and consolation to those who need it. Rashi doubles down on this more accessible God, saying that the “near and far” refers to those who are accustomed to the ways of Torah and to those who are either new to it or have fallen away and returned. Importantly, by Rashi’s estimation, שְׁנֵיהֶם שָוִין—the far and the near are equal. 

The mincha Torah reading this afternoon will add another layer to consider, with instructions for holiness punctuated by the repeating refrain of אֲנִי יי אֱלֹהֵיכֶם—I am Adonai, your God. Be holy, because I am holy, and here’s how. The mincha Torah reading lays out standards for behavior that, if followed, allow for us to become more like God. By honoring parents, rejecting idolatry, cherishing the dignity of the economically needy, treating all with integrity, including speaking up rather than letting resentments fester, we are emulating God. The face of God that emerges from this description is one of high ethical and moral standards. 

Our final scriptural reading of the day, the Haftarah for mincha, is the Book of Jonah. There we find a God who performs an improbable rescue, redeeming Jonah from the belly of a huge fish. Of course, Jonah is in there in the first place because he runs away from God’s instruction to serve as a prophet, so God decides to teach him a lesson. The teaching doesn’t stop there. When, later, Jonah is angry with God for accepting the teshuvah of the citizens of Nineveh and therefore not destroying them, God gives Jonah a profound teaching in empathy. So now to the images of God as stern rule-giver, or as comforter of mourners, or as moral exemplar, we add the idea of God as teacher.

Expanding our vision beyond today’s readings to the biblical corpus as a whole, we discover seemingly endless dimensions of—and metaphors for—the nature of God. In Psalm 146 God is One who

עֹשֶׂה מִשְׁפָּט  לָעֲשׁוּקִים נֹתֵן לֶחֶם לָרְעֵבִים [יי] מַתִּיר אֲסוּרִים

יי] פֹּקֵחַ עִוְרִים [יי] זֹקֵף כְּפוּפִים [יי] אֹהֵב צַדִּיקִים]

Brings justice to the oppressed, gives bread to the hungry,
frees the captive, restores sight to the blind,
lifts those who are stooped over,
and loves the righteous.

Then again, God is also creator of the natural world, as we’ll read in the opening chapters of Breishit in a couple of weeks. Many of us, unlike the Kohen Gadol, find God’s abiding presence in the woods, by the ocean, or surrounded by living beings.

God as bringer of justice, feeder of the hungry, healer of life’s wounds, author of creation… These hopeful images work well when things are going well. But I have to admit they are a tough sell in this moment of deepening crisis in the Jewish world. When Israel is under attack from multiple fronts, when many both in Israel and the diaspora worry that the current leadership has lost its moral footing, when antisemitic rhetoric becomes less and less unacceptable, when the world feels perilous for us, the notion of God coming to the rescue can be eclipsed by the sense of הֶסְתֶר פָּנִים—that God’s face is hidden. A concept rooted in a verse from Parshat Vayelech, הֶסְתֶר פָּנִים has become a way to talk about those historical periods when God seemed absent from the scene, a way of addressing the question of how God could allow great tragedy or unbearable pain in a world which is supposedly suffused with God’s glory.

This past Monday was the secular anniversary of the barbaric October 7th Hamas attack on Israel. Seeing photos of the destruction, hearing survivor stories, remembering the hostages who were killed and those who may yet be alive but are surely suffering, it’s all too easy to wonder, where is God in all this? Where do we turn when catastrophe is suddenly plausible?

For this, we need to resort to the long view, the eternal nature of God that we encounter in daily prayer when we say:

אַתָּה הוּא עַד שֶׁלֹּא נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם 

אַתָּה הוּא מִשֶּׁנִּבְרָא הָעוֹלָם 

אַתָּה הוּא בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה 

וְאַתָּה הוּא לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

It was You before the world was created
It is You who created the world
It is You in this world
And it will be You in the world to come

Let me repeat that in all its gorgeousness: 

It was You before the world was created
It is You who created the world
It is You in this world
And it will be You in the world to come

This beautiful verse locates the unity of God, and God’s enduring nature, in the ever unfolding universe, in the passage of time. As we learned from the Sfat Emet last night, the unity of God encompasses that which appears good and that which is not yet assimilated into goodness. Even the ashes of the burnt offering—an image that may make us shudder a bit—might unlock something good in the future. The world and its goodness are ever unfolding.

This is not an easy metaphor to get close to; we may long for a less abstract sense of God, for a God who is right here by our side. And the idea that horrific tragedy might someday give rise to something better runs the risk of sounding like justification. I know I’m treading dangerously close to “everything happens for a reason” territory, and I want to be clear that’s not what I mean. But things are happening all the time, and the happening itself is an aspect of God, and what it will come to mean is often still being revealed and created.

To have a non-corporeal, singular, unfolding God means that sometimes God seems hidden or distant. Think about a folded piece of paper. As it unfolds, different shapes manifest themselves. Edges and planes move away as a natural part of that process; geometry demands it. That moving away can really sting. But inevitably things change and change again. Time does its magic. The unfolding continues.

And as this beautiful, terrible, mysterious world unfolds, we can find our connection to the divine in so many ways: in nature, in the riches of our tradition, and in one another. To paraphrase the Sefer Hasidim, a 19th-century halachic work by Yehuda HeHasid: “Two people carrying a load would not be able to carry it as well separately, as together. Two people raising their voices are more apt to be heard than if they cry separately.” If each and every one of us is created בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים—in the image of God—then every encounter with another person has the potential for holiness, for the experience of God’s presence. Singing together, praying together, laughing, crying, talking about things that matter, or simply being together in companionable silence can all draw us closer to the divine, and draw the divine closer to us. I think of the last words of Rabbi Tzvi Hirsh of Liska, as reported by his grandson Rabbi Zev Wolf. As he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by several generations of his beloved family, Tzvi Hirsh, the Lisker Rebbe, said: “My children, if you cling to God, it will be good for you.” My dear community, may it be good for you, and may you find the face of God that can hold you close and that you can hold close in these trying times. 

G’mar tov and shanah tovah!