(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.