As of March 2024, I’m migrating to a new website to share about my work, including my articles, essays, sermons, and other writings. You can check it out at www.rabbiknopf.com.
This site will still be active, but mostly as an archive for older material. You can continue to access anything I’ve written prior to March 2024 here. And head over to www.rabbiknopf.com to stay up-to-date on everything I’m up to.
Thanks for reading and learning with me!
This past fall, there was a great disturbance in the Force. You may not have felt it, but clergy everywhere sure did. A Presbyterian minister named Alexander Lang, left his job as senior pastor of a Presbyterian church outside of Chicago, and wrote a blog post about his decision.
In the essay, titled “Departure: Why I Left the Church,” Rev. Lang spoke candidly about the compounding emotional impact of being a congregation’s primary, and often sole, care provider – day in and day out, sometimes even on days off and vacations, for years – and to do it with a smile, striving to please all the people all the time. Ultimately, he said, “I realized that if I spen[t] the rest of my life” enmeshed in such a system, “I [would] end up an angry, bitter, broken shell of a human being.”
The blog quickly went viral, particularly among clergy and other congregational professionals.
According to recent studies, clergy and other congregational professionals are increasingly suffering from compassion fatigue, burnout, and worse. Many congregational clergy have left their pulpits in recent years, and even more have considered quitting. Countless others are clearly choosing not to pursue the career path altogether, as is evidenced by alarming reports of a nationwide clergy shortage. In the Jewish community, rabbinical schools across America are experiencing a significant decline in enrollment. As a result, the demand for rabbis, cantors, educators, and other professionals to serve congregations is rapidly exceeding the supply. Among the primary reasons given for this growing rate of attrition are stress and burnout, loneliness and isolation, and strain on religious leaders’ personal life, relationships, and family.
Of course, it’s not just religious professionals: according to some reports, there has been a mass exodus of caregivers across the board in recent years. Everyone from nurses and other healthcare professionals to therapists, teachers, and social workers are leaving their jobs at staggering rates, mostly citing burnout as the cause, in search of positions that afford better work-life balance and support systems. The result is the same as with clergy and other congregational professionals: the need for caregivers far exceeds the supply, and we are all worse off for it, unable to access the care we need when we need it. When no one holds the healers, everyone suffers.
This issue is in many ways at the heart of this week’s Torah portion. With Parashat Va-Yikra, we begin a new book of the Torah, Sefer Va-Yikra, the book of Leviticus – bane of B’nai Mitzvah, a book brimming with blood and guts: sacrifices and skin diseases, purity and pollution, abnormalities and abominations; a book that defies our desire for a Torah of self-help and social justice, wistfulness and wisdom, and instead reads more like a cultic manual, relevant only to the smallest un-squeamish subsection of ritual functionaries and religion nerds. It is perhaps for this reason that Va-Yikra is sometimes referred to by another name, Torat Kohanim, literally, “Instruction for the Priests.”
Why did our ancestors include this Torat Kohanim in the Torah, and why is it still part of the text after all these years? Most Jews are not kohanim, nor have they ever been. Why not just make a separate user’s manual for the priesthood, and give it directly and exclusively to the kohanim?
For example, today’s parashah lays out the procedure the priests were to follow for several different types of sacrifices that were offered in the Tabernacle, and later in the Temple. In chapter 4, the text turns its attention to the hattat, the sin or purification sacrifice, which would be offered when an individual realized they had violated one of the Torah’s laws unintentionally (4:1).
According to the text, the particulars of the procedure were different depending on the nature of the sin and the identity of the sinner – whether an average Israelite or a tribal chieftain or even the community as a whole. Given the fact that this whole book reads like a priestly manual, it’s perhaps unsurprising that this section begins by outlining what happens if a priest is the perpetrator.
But the actual language that introduces the passage is somewhat surprising, or at least strange. It starts, “im ha-kohen ha-mashiah yeheta…” OK, so far, so good: If the anointed priest sins. But the verse continues, “im ha-kohen ha-mashiah yeheta…l’ashmat ha-am,” literally, if the anointed priest sins for the guilt of the people. It’s the kind of oddly worded phrase that stops traditional commentators and biblical scholars in their tracks. What could the Torah possibly mean by saying “if the anointed priest sins for the guilt of the people”?
The Etz Hayyim Humash, along with many if not most other translations, renders the phrase “l’ashmat ha-am,” as “so that blame falls upon the people.” These translations, in other words, understand the verse to mean that a priest’s sinful behavior negatively impacts the community, perhaps because we look to our leaders, especially religious leaders, for cues about appropriate behavior. If a priest engages in wrongdoing, people who naturally see him as a role model will be led astray and act similarly. This understanding follows Rashi and other traditional commentators who similarly assume that the Torah is commenting here about a failure of leadership: when the priest sins, the people suffer.
Such an understanding is, of course, in line with the apparent focus of Leviticus as a manual for the priests – the verse in a sense cautions the kohanim to be especially mindful of their behavior and scrupulous in their observance of the commandments, since as leaders their actions impact the whole community. They have the capacity to inspire people to goodness or to influence them to behave badly.
But the Jewish mystical tradition offers an altogether different interpretation. According to the Zohar, the issue is not that the transgression of the kohen causes the community to sin, but rather the opposite – it is the crime of the congregation that leads the priest astray: “lama ‘yeheta l’ashmat ha-am’?” asks the Zohar. “Why does the Torah say ‘for the guilt of the people?’ Biglal hatta-ei ha-dor sh’garmu l’kakh, because the sins of that generation led him to this behavior. ‘L’ashmat ha-am’, on account of the sin of the people, v’lo la-ashamah shelo, and not on account of his own transgression.”
I don’t think the Zohar here is refuting the truth that people follow their leaders, and so therefore a priest’s transgressions will negatively impact the entire community. But I do think the Zohar is pointing us toward something that is also true, and too often forgotten or overlooked – that the behavior of the community also impacts the priest. After all, both the priest and the people are part of the same system. And in any system, the breakdown of one component part will inevitably impact every other component part. The brokenness of a leader will certainly result in a broken community. But it is also true that a broken community will invariably produce broken leaders. In the famous words of the ancient sage Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am [only] for myself, what am I?” Of course, we must take care of our own selves, because we cannot necessarily rely on others to provide for our needs, at least not as fully as might be necessary, or all the time. Yet at the same time, our own personal welfare is bound up in the wellbeing of others. Total self-absorption is, ironically, tantamount to self-abnegation.
Through this intentionally paradoxical lesson, Hillel points to a complicated truth about human flourishing: self-care and communal care are interrelated and interdependent. Or, as the great 20th century Israeli poet Zelda put it, “שלומי קשור בחוט לשלומך / My peace is tied by a thread to yours.”
The reality of שלומי קשור בחוט לשלומך, that my welfare is bound up in yours, points to the need for communities to adopt what political scientist Joan Tronto calls an ethic of “caring with.” An ethic of “caring with” means a culture in which all members of a community commit to equitably receiving and providing care for one another, helping one another live “as well as possible.”
French social psychologist Pascale Molinier illustrated what this looks like. A few years back, Molinier studied female domestic workers in Colombia, socioeconomically disadvantaged women who work long hours, day in and day out, cleaning, cooking, ironing, and preparing and serving meals for wealthier families. Molinier observes that the notion of “self-care” is virtually nonexistent, perhaps unthinkable, among these women. But the women instinctively compensated for this by practicing an ethic of “caring with.” Molinier observed how, for example, they cared for one another’s children, boosted one another’s self-esteem through acts of moral encouragement, and supported and advocated for one another.
Many of us would likely consider religious communities as settings characterized by an ethic of “caring with,” at least in their ideal. Yet in my experience, few congregations are actually successful at the equitable distribution of care. Most congregants, to the extent they participate at all, do so as recipients or beneficiaries of care, whether regularly or infrequently. Only some will embrace roles of care providers, and even fewer in congregations that employ professional clergy and other congregational professionals, who are disproportionately relied upon for the provision of care. Such communities form something of an inverse pyramid, in which the professional clergy, and a handful of other professionals, carry the weight of caring for the majority of the people.
There are, of course, understandable reasons for this dynamic: clergy and other congregational professionals often have expertise in caring for others that few others in the community possess; and we do this work in the first place because we are committed to accompanying and supporting people throughout their lives – at spiritual and emotional peaks, valleys, and everywhere in between. And congregations are justified in expecting their professional staff to shoulder a disproportionate burden of the congregation’s caring needs.
Yet while many congregational professionals, myself included, would readily say that caring for others is a great blessing, a sacred calling for which we are perpetually grateful, the work – as Rev. Lang pointed out – can take a toll, a toll that can be exacerbated by other challenges that are particular to congregational contexts, such as the fact that congregations are often short-staffed, under-funded, and pervaded by complex and sometimes even hostile communal politics. Congregational professionals are often expected to work long and irregular hours, making it difficult to establish and maintain clear and well-defined boundaries. And they often find it difficult to secure (and actually take advantage of) the time and resources needed for self-care, study, and spiritual nourishment; nurture their social and family lives; and feel supported personally and professionally in their values, priorities, and goals.
Over time, the weight of all this can be too much to bear, with negative consequences for everyone – the congregational professional as well as the congregation itself. Caring for others all day, every day, comes with a high physical, emotional, and spiritual cost. No professional, however gifted or skilled they may be, can realistically fulfill all of a congregation’s needs on their own. Professionals who are unable to refill their own proverbial tanks will, eventually, with 100% certainty, break. And it’s only a matter of time before a congregation with a broken professional will itself become broken. So too, a broken community – one that does not embrace and practice an ethic of caring with, in which all congregants take responsibility for caring for one another – also will eventually, with 100% certainty, break their clergy and other professionals. Broken professionals will inevitably break their congregations; and broken congregations will invariably break their professionals. Our wellbeing is bound up together.
Ensuring the wellbeing of the congregation as a whole is therefore inseparable from ensuring the wellbeing of its professionals. Just as a congregation’s professionals are called to care for their congregants, congregants have a responsibility, as my teacher Rabbi Sharon Brous puts it in her beautiful new book The Amen Effect, to hold their healers, to care for their professionals – seeing them as human beings with needs just like everyone else in the community, caring for them the way we would want them to care for us.
Why did our ancestors include Leviticus in the Torah, and why is it still part of the text after all these years? Perhaps in order to teach us שלומי קשור בחוט לשלומך – that our welfare is intertwined and interdependent. The priest can’t be well if the community is unwell, and the community can’t be well unless the priest is, too. My welfare is bound up in yours, and yours is bound up in mine.
Confronting a seemingly downward spiral of declining affiliation, shrinking resources, and now a growing shortage of clergy and other congregational professionals, religious communities like ours are at a historic inflection point. As we look toward the future, I pray that we renew and rededicate ourselves to the principle of “caring with,” holding our healers so that, in turn, they can hold us too.
The tradition of wearing costumes on Purim is based on one of the central themes of the biblical book of Esther, namely, revealing that which is hidden. Various instances of unmasking occur throughout the story: The original queen, Vashti, reveals her inner strength by refusing to be put on display at the king’s banquet. Mordechai reveals the identity of two men who were conspiring to assassinate the king. Queen Esther reveals her true identity as a Jewish woman, in the process unmasking Haman as an evil “adversary and enemy,” rather than the wise and trustworthy adviser the king had believed him to be (Esther 7:6). King Ahasuerus, consequently, is revealed not to be a shrewd sovereign, but a buffoon, susceptible to manipulation and bribery. The Jews of Persia, presumed to be vulnerable to annihilation, are revealed to possess the power to defend themselves. And, according to tradition, God, though unseen (God’s name is famously never mentioned in the book of Esther), is revealed to be present with and for the oppressed. Indeed, even the Hebrew term for the book – Megillat Esther, literally the Scroll of Esther – attests to this theme: the name Esther comes from the Hebrew word for hidden, hester, and the term Megillah, is connected to the Hebrew word for revealing, megaleh. In other words, we don’t read the “Scroll of Esther” on Purim; we read the book of “Revealing the Hidden.”
The act of unmasking is spiritually and morally significant. Only when we know the true nature of a thing can we understand our relationship with it and discern how to engage with it. We can’t appreciate what we don’t truly see, and we can’t fix what we don’t face.
“But wait,” you might say. “What about Shabbat? Isn’t Shabbat about escaping the world – rife as it is with pressures of school and stress of work, mundane irritations and systemic injustices, disquiet of domestic politics and global affairs? Isn’t Shabbat basically a requirement to turn away from uncomfortable aspects of reality and ignore our problems?” It is true that, according to tradition, Shabbat is considered to be m’ein olam ha-ba, a taste of heaven. We step out of our world and experience Heaven on Earth, embracing the calming quiet, the perfect peace, of doing nothing but spending time with friends, family, and community.
But we do this not to escape the world as it is, but rather to expose it for what it is. The glimpse of heaven that Shabbat provides confronts us with the contrast between our real world and an ideal one, a world free from wandering and want. That act of unmasking is meant to unsettle us, reminding us of what we have yet to fix that is broken in our world, and energizing us to busy ourselves the rest of the week with our obligation to repair the world. On Shabbat, we enter a “sanctuary in time” not as escape, but rather as inspiration – to dedicate ourselves, once we depart, to bridge the gap between the ideal and the real.
Through its theme of unmasking the truth, Purim highlights the weekly practice of revealing the hidden that’s at the heart of Shabbat. And this year, with Purim starting as Shabbat ends, the two celebrations come as close as possible to coinciding on the calendar, reinforcing their important shared message, that while it is understandable not to want to honestly confront painful truths, it is the only way to overcome our obstacles in the present and flourish in the future. This year, as we put on our Purim masks by the light of the havdalah candle, let us commit to pursuing the truth and repairing all that is revealed to be broken.
A story is told of the people who once dwelled in a village called Chelm. Of all things the people of Chelm loved, they loved the moon most of all. When it shone brightly in the night sky, there was joy and celebration in the town. Everything in the town was brighter: Homes would glow with happiness; lovers would walk through the town slowly, staring into each other’s eyes; children would listen to their parents and their teachers; the old, the young, even dogs and cats were kind and considerate to one another. But when the moon waned and disappeared, a gloomy sadness settled over everyone.
We have to do something about this!” proclaimed the town leaders. “We have to find a way to stay joyful even on the dark nights. But how?”
“If only we could capture the moon!” one Chelm genius declared. “Then we could let out a little light on those dark, gloomy nights and bring happiness to the world!”
“But how do you capture the moon?” the townspeople wondered.
“Well,” offered Shmerel the tailor, “once I was eating a bowl of soup. And as I ate, I looked into the bowl. And in the bowl was the light of the moon. If we had a big enough bowl of soup, perhaps we could capture the moon!”
And so it was determined: They would build the world’s biggest bowl, fill it with soup, and capture the moon! In the town square a giant bowl was constructed. And one night as the moon shone brightly in the sky, the whole town came forth with soup – jars of soup, pots of soup, vats of soup, bathtubs full of soup. Soon they had filled the world’s largest bowl. As the bowl filled up, the moon’s brilliant light was reflected in it.
“There it is!” they shouted.
Stealthily they snuck up on the moon. Then, all at once, they slammed the top on the bowl. At that very moment a cloud covered the sky, blotting out the moon’s light. “We own the moon!” they shouted. “It is right here in the world’s biggest bowl of soup. We own the moon!” That night there was dancing and rejoicing all night long in the town of Chelm.
But the next night, as the sun went down and darkness covered the land, the moon rose again, bright as ever, shining high in the sky.
Everyone in Chelm was perplexed. “How can the moon be in the sky? We captured it right here in the town square, in the world’s biggest bowl of soup!”
“Someone must have let it out!” shouted Shoshanah the matchmaker.
“But who? Who would do such a terrible thing?” asked Avrum the butcher.
And so an investigation was launched. Everyone in the town was interrogated. Each person was required to account for his or her whereabouts all during the day. No one was spared. No one except, of course, the rabbi. No one suspected that the rabbi, beloved, wise, and learned, would … No – it couldn’t be, not the rabbi!
But the investigation came up empty. Everyone had an alibi. Everyone was in school, at work, in the fields, in the shops, at home – everyone but the rabbi. And so the townspeople of Chelm timidly approached their beloved rabbi.
“Learned Rabbi, did you let the moon out of the soup?” the designated spokesperson inquired.
“Yes,” he sighed. “It was I.” A shock ran through the town. “But why, dear Rabbi, why?” they persisted. “Why?”
He looked at them through his bushy white eyebrows and stroked his long white beard. “Why? Because there are things we enjoy while we have them. They are ours to own and to hold and to enjoy, and there are other things, things of far greater value, that we enjoy only when we share them. Do you know what things I mean?”
“Love?” someone suggested. “Yes, love,” he answered. “And hugs!” someone else offered. “Yes, hugs,” he answered. “And joy!” they shouted. “Yes, joy,” he responded.
“And the moon!” said Shmerel the tailor sadly. “Yes, the moon as well,” the rabbi responded. “Only when we share it can we really enjoy its light. And so I was the one who let the moon out. And now all the world can share it!”
“But what will we do now, on dark nights, when the moon disappears? We’ll be sad and gloomy and dark,” the people cried. “That’s true, responded the rabbi. “Into every life come times of sadness, darkness, and gloom. That’s part of life. We’ll just have to find something else to share that sustains us when that happens!”
“Like what?” they asked. “Like soup!” declared the rabbi. “We’ll share soup. If you can’t own the moon and share happiness all the time, the next best thing is to share soup.”
And so it was declared a tradition. On nights when the moon disappeared and the night sky grew dark and gloomy, everyone shared soup. And it helped. For soup may not bring happiness – but it helps.
This charming story, which I have adapted from Capturing the Moon, a recent anthology of classic Jewish tales as retold by one of my teachers, Rabbi Edward M. Feinstein, is perhaps my favorite example of a subgenre of hasidic legends, about a fictional Eastern European town called Chelm that is populated by wise fools. In this narrative, the people of Chelm express anxiety. They are anxious about experiencing impending seasons of sadness. Seeking a way to avoid those fearsome times, they convince themselves that it is the moon’s light that causes their joy, since they seem to experience joy at times when the moon shines brightly in the night sky. Therefore, they reason, if they could somehow hold onto the moon in perpetuity, they would never again have to be sad. When they are forced to face the fact that they cannot actually capture the moon, they come to realize that the moon itself does not bring them joy. In fact, they learn, joy does not and cannot come from possessing anything in particular. Rather, it is joining and sharing with others – in relationship and, ultimately, in community – that facilitates joy.
In her essay, “Giants and Grasshoppers: Stories That Frame Congregational Anxiety,” congregational consultant Susan Beaumont observes that congregations experiencing seasons of anxiety, “apprehension and uneasiness of mind…over an impending or anticipated ill,” frequently tell particular kinds of stories “to hold their anxiety and to frame their understanding of the problem.” According to Beaumont, one of the most common types of stories told by anxious congregations is one in which the congregation casts itself as the noble hero battling against a nefarious outside force that is threatening to destroy it and everything it holds dear. Lawrence Peers, another congregational consultant, refers to this as “the problem-saturated story,” one that focuses on “who or what has been going wrong,” usually “a villain, a problem child, an unmensch.” Telling this kind of story, according to Susan Nienaber, a third expert in congregational life, “is one way of trying to reestablish a sense of control” in the face of “larger cultural and social influences” that are much more difficult to identify and overcome. Moreover, as Beaumont points out, as that story is “repeated throughout the congregation,” it shapes “the congregation’s perception and experience of truth.” It becomes the narrative, the explanation, the conventional wisdom.
Drawing from the insights of adaptive leadership, Peers notes that such stories are problematic because they disable a congregation from diagnosing, considering, and addressing their problems as adaptive – the result of complex, interlocking factors, including but not limited to the fact that everyone within the system plays “some role in keeping a problem situation intact.” As Beaumont explains, this type of story “prevents members from grasping the full complexity of the situation,” which can be not only unproductive – as adaptive problems cannot be solved with technical solutions – but also dangerous, allowing the real problem to fester unaddressed, exacerbating it, or adding new problems to an already broken system.
For example, the townspeople of Chelm decide to pin their problem (widespread depression) on a singular, easily identifiable “villain” (the absence of the moon in the sky), and determine that the solution is, simply, to conquer the villain (reestablishing a sense of control over their lives by literally trying to capture the moon). By telling themselves this story, they avoid recognizing that a problem like mass gloom wouldn’t be so pervasive if it didn’t have deep, complex, systemic root causes; and lead themselves to attempt a solution doomed to failure like trying to capture the moon. When their technical solution to their adaptive problem inevitably fails, the very sadness they were trying to keep at bay in the first place is exacerbated.
Something similar happens in Parashat Ki Tissa: the Israelites are anxious when Moses, their leader, does not return from Mt. Sinai when they expected him to. Feeling lost and out of control, they tell themselves that the solution to their problem is having something concrete to look to for direction in Moses’ absence, so they ask Aaron to fashion a calf out of their gold. By telling themselves this story, they avoid the complexity of their situation, other possible explanations for their predicament, and other, more helpful, potential interventions. And when their technical solution, making a golden calf, to their adaptive problem, uncertainty about their leadership, inevitably fails, the very chaos and confusion, desolation and death, they were trying to keep at bay in the first place is exacerbated.
So how do we overcome the problem-saturated story? By deconstructing the narrative, or revealing the untold story. In the Chelm story, the rabbi intervenes by “releasing” the moon, deconstructing the problem-saturated story the townspeople were telling themselves about their sadness problem by naming an alternative, that joy could be experienced even without the moon. And the rabbi reveals the untold story, that joy is experienced through joining and sharing with others in relationship and in community, rather than from possessing the moon, or anything else. By doing this, the rabbi enables the townspeople to construct an alternate story, that joy is the product of relationships, and name an alternative, that they could enhance and sustain their joy by coming together and providing for one another.
What would have happened if, instead of making the calf as requested, Aaron had attempted to deconstruct the Israelites’ narrative, or reveal the untold story? What if he had helped them interrogate the premise of their concerns, or point out the flaws in their proposed solution? We actually have a model for this kind of leadership elsewhere in the parashah: when God, furious about the Israelites’ apostasy, threatens to annihilate them, Moses challenges God’s narrative, asking God whether it was actually true that the people are incorrigably “stiff-necked,” or whether they just needed to be taught differently, or provided with different resources to be led in the right direction? Moses further asks God to consider what the end of the story God is telling God’s self will actually look like — that God’s reputation in the world would be destroyed along with the Israelites; and furthermore, that Moses would demand that his name be removed from the story! By deconstructing God’s narrative, and revealing the untold story, Moses changes God’s mind and Israel’s destiny. What would have happened if Aaron had done the same? What would happen if we could in our contexts?
The challenge is to recognize the problem-saturated narratives we tell ourselves – and then deconstructing them, revealing the untold stories, helping one another identify alternative stories, and proposing a different, better story – one that accounts for the complexity of the situation and that more accurately situates all the characters within it. How can we – as individuals, as a community, as a society – become better at interrogating the stories we tell ourselves about the way things are, enhancing our capacity to see how those stories may not be the only, or the most productive, way of diagnosing or addressing the serious, complex issues confronting us? How can we make space for less commonly told narratives to augment and even complicate the stories we tell ourselves, thus revealing other ways of seeing and dealing with the problems we face?
The story of the Golden Calf in this week’s parashah challenges us to tell different, newer, better stories – ones that enable us to truly see our problems, and how we can work together to resolve them.
One of my favorite TV shows in recent years is a silly but sweet game show called Floor is Lava. The show is based on a game you may have played as a child: 3 teams of 3 contestants each (often family units or groups of close friends) must get from one side of a room to the other without touching the floor, which is made entirely of “lava”. Scattered around the room are various surfaces onto which contestants can crawl, cling, walk, or jump. Whichever team manages to get more of its members to the other side of the room than the others wins $10,000…and, of course, a lava lamp.
Among the reasons I think I have appreciated Floor is Lava so much is that it is, in a sense, a perfect metaphor for the tumultuous time through which we are living. The show itself appropriately came out at the height of the pandemic. And the pandemic in turn erupted during what was already an era of extraordinary upheaval – a time of technological transformation, political turmoil, and environmental disaster. As has been the case throughout Jewish history, all this unrest has been fueling an alarming rise in antisemitism in the U.S. and around the world.
More recently, the horrific terror attack of October 7th has compounded our sense of instability and insecurity as Jews. The very place that was supposed to have been our people’s safe haven was revealed to be terrifyingly vulnerable. And paradoxically as we witness the staggering number of civilian deaths and displacements in Gaza after October 7th, we wrestle not only with the reality of Jewish vulnerability but also the price of Jewish power. Meanwhile, over these past few months, Jews in the Diaspora have been increasingly targeted for discrimination, harassment, and even violence on account of our real or perceived association with Israel, even from individuals and communities many of us had long regarded as allies, compounding our fear with isolation and anger.
Metaphorically speaking, we are living in a time where it feels like all the floors are lava, where the ground beneath our feet and all around us seems to be on fire, imperiling our every step.
As a people that is well over three thousand years old, Jews have collectively lived through many eras of upheaval. We have endured revolutions and conquests; crusades, inquisitions and expulsions. One of the tumultuous times that looms largest in the Jewish consciousness is the setting of today’s Torah portion, parashat Shemot. In parashat Shemot, we are told of the brutal oppression of our ancestors in ancient Egypt, how Pharaoh and a nation of collaborators, enablers, and bystanders enslave an entire people – young and old; men, women, and children – a subjugation the Torah describes as uniquely cruel, using the rare word b’farekh, with ruthlessness (1:13). To compound this suffering, Pharaoh eventually plots a genocide, ordering the systematic murder of all Israelite baby boys.
Against this backdrop, one Israelite mother, perhaps aided by courageous midwives, bravely resists Pharaoh’s decree, placing her baby boy in a basket and sending him down the Nile in the hopes that he might be discovered and saved by someone, anyone, in Egypt who still possesses a beating human heart. He is discovered by none other than Pharaoh’s daughter, who recognizes right away that this is an Israelite child, and in direct defiance of her father’s command, takes the child and commits to raising him in her household. She names him Moses – the one who is drawn from the water.
Sometime later, when the boy has grown up, he witnesses an Egyptian brutally beating an Israelite slave, and makes the fateful decision to intervene, killing the Egyptian and burying him in the sand. When Pharaoh hears about this, he orders Moses be put to death, so Moses flees into the wilderness, ending up in the neighboring territory of Midian, where he is taken in by a Midianite priest, whose daughter he eventually marries. Moses starts a new life in Midian, tending his father-in-law’s flocks.
One fateful day, as he was driving his sheep into the wilderness, he notices something strange: a bush that was on fire but somehow not consumed by the flames, ha-s’neh bo’er ba-esh, v’ha-s’neh einenu ookal. Astonished by this, he goes to get a closer look, and as he approaches, something even more amazing happens – God calls out to him mitokh ha-s’neh, from within the bush, and commands him to lead his fellow Israelites to freedom from their enslavement to Pharaoh.
It’s a lot for Moses to process in the moment. But it’s no easier for us to make sense of this scene ourselves: of all the ways God could have revealed God’s self to Moses, of all the ways God could have communicated with the person chosen as Israel’s liberator, of all the bushes in all the deserts in all the world, why did God call to Moses from this one? What are we to make of God’s choice to appear in a bush that was burning but not consumed?
Our sages offer a number of possible explanations, but the one that resonates for me, particularly in this moment, is found in the medieval midrashic collection known as Exodus Rabbah. According to this midrash, God sees that Moses is worried that the Egyptians might succeed in destroying the Israelites through their ruthless oppression. After all, he had witnessed it himself, when he fought off the taskmaster, and saw how his solitary act of resistance met with such a swift and fierce response from Pharaoh’s forces. The Egyptian people themselves showed no sign of any significant opposition to Pharaoh’s despotic regime. Many were active collaborators, helping create the systems and norms that entrenched the oppression and rendered resistance futile. Against this pervasive power, the Israelites would have appeared to any rational observer to lack the ability to mount any successful uprising themselves, and there did not appear to be any force willing or able to come to their aid.
The precarious position of the Israelites in Egypt – profoundly isolated and oppressed; engulfed by the flames of danger and doom – must have seemed hopeless. So to see a bush on fire but resisting destruction must indeed have been an absolute marvel to Moses. According to this midrash, God’s purpose in appearing in and speaking from a bush that was burning but not consumed by the flames was to signal to Moses that the destruction of the Israelites through Egyptian oppression was not only not inevitable, but perhaps even impossible. Netzah Yisrael lo yishaker, says the biblical prophet Samuel – the eternity of the Jewish people will not be proven a lie.
Yet the question Moses asks upon witnessing this marvel resonates in our time – madu’a lo yiv’ar ha-sneh? Why does the bush not burn up? How does this bush endure despite being engulfed by flames? How do the Jewish people survive? If we must burn, how do we burn like this bush?
According to tradition, the kind of bush Moses encounters in the wilderness, in Hebrew a s’neh, isn’t any old shrub. It’s a specific species of plant. A s’neh bush has deep roots that enable it to access water underground, even in a dry desert environment. And a bush with deep roots is not easily burned by fire. So too, the Jewish people can survive even in harsh conditions, even when engulfed by flames, so long as our roots remain deep, so long as we remain true to who we are.
The nature of the oppression that our ancestors endured in Egypt is that it threatened not just bodies but also souls. According to the classical commentators, that is the reason the Torah uses the unusual word b’farekh, to describe the Israelites’ subjugation. The term conveys the sense of physical cruelty, but can also be understood as a conjunction of b’feh rakh, with soft speech – the Egyptians offered the Israelites the option of assimilating, effectively forcing the Israelites to choose between subjugation or annihilation. In that sense, Egyptian oppression was just like modern antisemitism. Yes, antisemitism endangers Jewish lives, but perhaps even more pernicious, it pressures us to blend in and escape notice – to abandon our identity and eventually to lose what makes us special in the first place. Yet while remaining noticeably different is to risk discrimination, persecution, violence, and even death, abandoning our uniqueness is to guarantee our own people’s extinction.
Indeed, according to tradition, the Israelites were able to withstand generations of oppression in Egypt because they held onto their distinctive national identity by maintaining the practice of giving their children Hebrew names. That, we are taught, is why the book of Exodus is called “Shemot,” the Hebrew word for names, and why our national liberation story begins with a list of the names of the Children of Israel who originally immigrated to Egypt. Just as a s’neh bush can survive a fire, Israel’s survival and liberation was made possible by remaining connected to our roots.
But difference for its own sake is not enough to secure Jewish survival. Neither even is maintaining our difference simply as a strategy of resistance. As my friend Bari Weiss once put it, the Jewish people “were not put on this earth to be anti-antisemites.” Yes, it is important to embrace our Jewish roots, but our calling as Jews is greater than national self-preservation. A s’neh bush is able to withstand fire not because of the strength of its roots per se, but rather because its roots keep it constantly connected with its source of hydration deep under the parched soil. So too, the midrash says, it’s not identity itself that enables the Jewish people to endure whatever trials come our way, but rather the fact that our identity is rooted in our people’s longstanding and time-tested life-source: Torah.
Rabbinic tradition often likens Torah to water because just as water sustains life, Torah has always been a powerful anchor for Jewish identity. Through more than two-thousand years of precarious homelessness, Jewish faith and practice has formed the foundation of our understanding of what it means to be, and what makes one, Jewish. For all our beautifully divergent perspectives on what Torah means and teaches, our people’s attachment to Torah is part of what has enabled us to survive all these tumultuous centuries.
More importantly, Torah is a source of stability during tumultuous times because it points us forward. It reminds us not just what we are as Jews, but why – why our survival matters, that we are needed to help God build a world of love, justice, and peace. Possessing that sense of purpose empowers us to persist. Additionally, Torah tells us not only where we are striving to go, but also how we get there. In the Torah, we have a map for getting to the Promised Land of a world repaired. Having such a map helps us navigate the perilous present.
But the true power of Torah is that it enables us to diminish the danger altogether. More than just helping us withstand destructive flames, Torah, like water, provides a path to extinguish them and prevent them from reigniting. After all, it is the absence of moisture that transforms a thriving plant into flammable tinder. Similarly, it is a lack of love and justice in our world that fuels the flames of oppression and violence. When we heed the Torah’s call to make a more godly world by advancing equity and pursuing peace, we diminish the conditions that allow the forces that threaten our world to emerge. By persistently pursuing the loving and just society Torah envisions and calls us to build, we not only make our world invulnerable to flames, we make it impossible to catch fire in the first place.
Yet even as our sages often liken Torah to water, they also frequently compare it to fire. So too, alongside the midrash that instructs us to draw upon Torah as a way to resist burning like the bush, an alternate interpretation suggests exactly the opposite: Perhaps, suggests this midrash, the bush, with its thorns and thistles, symbolizes oppressors – perpetrators of inequality, purveyors of violence, the greedy that dominate the needy. If so, then the Jewish people, powered by a Torah of love and justice, are the fire. Just as fire purifies and illuminates, the Jewish people, in living lives and building communities inspired and guided by Torah, can light the way for the refinement of the whole world. The world may resist the Jewish people’s fire for now, but it can’t and won’t forever. Sooner or later, the fire of our Torah will catch and spread. And one day the whole world will be suffused with its warmth and light. We may not ultimately see that day ourselves. But we can keep the fires of Torah burning, doing our part to facilitate that bright future.
So which is it? Are we to embody a bush that resiliently resists the forces that seek its destruction? Or are we to become the fire itself, fueling the flames rather than fighting them?
Perhaps our tradition offers these two midrashim side by side to teach us that both approaches are needed – we must remain rooted in our distinctiveness while also rallying ourselves to fulfill our purpose; we must be proud of who we are while also passionately pursuing what we are called to build; we must resist the devouring fire while also reaching for a better future.
Fires may threaten. The floors may be lava. In such a world, we endure by burning like a bush – stubbornly and steadfastly resisting the flames with pride and purpose. And when we burn like a bush, we warm and illuminate all that is cold and dark in our world, until every thorn and thicket is consumed by the light of God’s love, and perfect peace is all that remains.
So may it be God’s will. Amen.
El Malei Rahamim, God, full of compassion, who transcends all worlds and yet is close to the brokenhearted, we cry out to you in this devastating and destabilizing moment, as is written in our sacred Writings, “We pour our hearts out like water before Your presence, and we raise our hands to You over the lives of Your innocent ones” (Lamentations 2:19).
Matir assurim, God who liberates captives, watch over and be with those who have been callously and cruelly abducted – soldier and civilian, man, woman, and child. Have compassion upon them, and bring them from suffering to relief, from darkness to light, and from subjugation to redemption, ensuring their swift and safe return home (Mahzor Vitry, Shabbat 199:3). Somekh nof’lim, God who lifts the fallen, send comfort and strength to the bereaved families and friends of those who have been brutally and brazenly murdered; let the souls of our lost loved ones find perfect peace in Your eternal embrace, bind them to us in the bonds of everlasting life, and help us ensure their memories endure as a source of blessing. Rofei holim, God who heals the sick and injured, send a full and speedy recovery to the wounded, and grant all those providing care strength and wisdom, resources and resilience.
Tzur Yisra’el v’Go-alo, Rock and Redeemer of Israel, shield all our brothers and sisters in our holy land with the serene shelter of Your sukkah of peace, as was written in the manner of David, Your servant, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, May those who love her rest tranquil, May there be peace within your walls, tranquility in your palaces, For the sake of my family and friends, let me please pray for your peace, for the sake of the dwelling place of The Infinite our God, let me seek your good” (Psalm 122:6-9).
Adonai tzeva’ot, Infinite One of Multitudes, guard and protect those who defend our brothers and sisters in our holy land, granting them courage and clarity, and equipping them to overcome and subdue those who would harm, and then hide behind, the innocent. Ribbono shel Olam, Sovereign and Teacher of the world, shine the light of Your truth to Israel’s leaders, officers, and advisers, guiding them to see Your image in all people, aligning them Your standard of righteousness, and planting in them “the precepts of liberty, justice, and peace taught by” Your prophets, so that they may advance the age when “bow and sword and battle will be banished from the land, and all may lie down secure.” (Israeli Declaration of Independence; Hosea 2:20).
Hovev amim, Lover of all peoples, ready us to rescue our holy land from the spilling of blood, remembering that You have called upon us as Your children to safeguard one another and to dwell together in peace. Steady us with Your spirit, so that together we may make “justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24), and speedily bring about the day when “when nation will not raise up sword against nation, and they will never again learn war” (Isaiah 2:4).
And let us say, Amen.
This past summer, smoke from forest fires raging in Western Canada blanketed much of the eastern portion of the North American continent. In particular, you may remember that, for several days in June, a dense wall of smoke emanating from these fires turned the skies of northeastern American cities a ghastly, opaque orange, and rendered air hazardous to breathe. Millions of children, elderly, and those with preexisting health conditions, suffered from smoke inhalation. Some even died.
New York City got hit particularly hard by this smoke cloud, with the worst day being Wednesday, June 7. I know, because I was there. I was in the City to participate in a Rabbinical Assembly strategic planning retreat, and on that day, a couple of colleagues and I made plans to grab lunch at one of my favorite pizza joints – the kind that sells jumbo slices as big as your head. Being a typical New York hole-in-the-wall, the restaurant’s only seating was outdoors. Despite hearing about air quality warnings, the weather seemed ok, so we decided to dine al fresco. However, not long after we started eating, the skies began to darken and it became increasingly difficult to see things that were more than a block away. Our throats started to feel scratchy, our eyes teary, and our breathing more labored. Smarter people, ones who take their health and wellbeing seriously, would have taken their food to go and continued lunch indoors. But since we are here on Yom Kippur I will confess to you that your rabbi and his colleagues are clearly not particularly smart, and we made the extremely unwise choice to sit and schmooze for well over an hour, pretending that it did not look and feel like the apocalypse was unfolding all around us. We just kept eating pizza while the world burned; or, to borrow a phrase from my teacher, Rabbi Sharon Brous, we were lunching “at the edge of the abyss.”
In coining that phrase, Rabbi Brous was referring to a passage from the Book of Genesis, in which Jacob’s sons grab their younger brother, Joseph, strip him of his technicolor dreamcoat and cast him into an empty pit. After perpetrating this violent crime, the older brothers sit down together to enjoy a meal (Gen. 37:25).
Lunching at the edge of the abyss means going about your life as if everything’s fine when nothing is fine. It’s about ignoring injustices because you’re doing alright and pretending something is not broken because it would be too disruptive to your comfortable status quo to do something about it.
Indeed, it only occurred to me much later just how fortunate we were to be in a position to make our (admittedly stupid) choice to continue eating pizza while the world burned. My colleagues and I are relatively young and otherwise healthy, so breathing the air was less immediately risky for us. We could have easily moved to a safer, air-conditioned and filtered, spot comfortably indoors, unlike New York’s thousands of unhoused people.
When many of us think about climate change, the images that likely come to mind are of melting glaciers and vanishing polar bears. Of course, we should care about those things. Our tradition calls upon us to be stewards of creation, which includes obligations to preserve biological diversity, care about the wellbeing of living creatures, conserve precious resources, and maintain a habitable environment for all life (Stephen Jurovics, Hospitable Planet, 71-72).
Today, we must confess and atone for the fact that we have collectively failed to uphold these obligations. The scientific community is virtually unanimous that the radical changes we are experiencing in our climate are caused by human activity. The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels traps heat and causes temperatures to rise, just as a greenhouse holds in heat. You probably noticed that this summer was extremely hot. As climate journalist David Wallace-Wells recently reported, “This June was the hottest June on record. July was the hottest July on record. In Phoenix, all but one day in July crossed 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The city’s burn units were filling up with people who had fainted on the street and been burned by the asphalt, which measured as hot as 180 degrees.”
Indeed, more than disappearing ice and animal welfare, it is the impact of human-caused global warming on human life that ought to arouse our Jewish conscience. Above all, our tradition obligates us to preserve and protect human life, guarantee equal rights for all, and pursue a just society.
And that’s precisely what’s at stake in the climate crisis. Humans, like all living beings, are only capable of surviving in a certain range of climates — the “Goldilocks Zone,” as scientists call it, between temperatures that are either too cold or too hot to sustain human life. Heat waves aren’t just uncomfortable, they can be deadly. As of today, extreme heat kills half a million people annually. If current trends continue, it is estimated that in less than 50 years, extreme heat will be the norm for over 2 billion people around the world, with yearly death tolls in the millions (Jeff Goodell, The Heat Will Kill You First, 10, 66). And, as always, the poorest and most vulnerable will be on the front lines of these trends.
Now, some of us might say, “That’s too bad for them. But my family and I have air-conditioning, so we’ll be fine!”
Our tradition actually has us confront this callous mentality on Yom Kippur. This afternoon, we’ll read the story of Jonah. You remember Jonah, right? The reluctant prophet who gets swallowed by a giant fish? Well, that story, in essence, is about God’s concern for the welfare of all people, including even the sinful citizens of the capital city of ancient Israel’s greatest enemy, in contrast to Jonah’s disregard for the lives of the Ninevites. We don’t get to consider our wellbeing as more important than others’, that our lives matter more than others’. Rather, we must act in ways that are consistent with our faith’s core principle that all human life is infinitely and equally precious. Since our tradition insists that all human beings are created in God’s image, we all have an equally inalienable right to life on a hospitable planet – and a responsibility to secure that, not only for ourselves, but for each other. And we are reminded of Jonah’s moral failure on today of all days as if to emphasize that, in so many ways, the bedrock value of human equality and its attendant obligation to ensure one another’s well being are the whole ballgame in Judaism.
In any case, while our air-conditioning might enable some of us to survive the heat itself, at least for now, ultimately none of us is safe from extreme and extraordinary weather events that rising temperatures are increasingly precipitating, like this summer’s fire that utterly destroyed the town of Lahaina, Hawaii, killing more than 100 people, or the recent hurricane-caused floods in Eastern Libya that washed away entire communities, resulting in well over 20,000 deaths. Rising temperatures make storms more intense and less predictable, cause extreme droughts and severe water shortages, and fuel the creation of novel pathogens, spreading diseases and exacerbating pandemics.
For more than a century, scientists have warned us about how human industry is destroying our climate, and what we can do to create a more sustainable future. But because saving ourselves from climate disaster means having to make sacrifices – inconvenient and possibly painful or even pizza-related ones – many of us choose to deny reality in order to continue our environmentally disastrous activities. We don’t want our comfortable status quo disrupted. So instead, we lunch at the edge of the abyss, going about our lives as if everything’s fine.
The slow and incremental process of global warming facilitates this illusion. This summer may have been hotter than last summer, but for many of us the difference wasn’t that noticeable. And it’s easy to mistake extreme weather as random. But avoiding thinking or talking about an uncomfortable truth doesn’t negate the reality that millions upon millions are already hurting, and dying, because of what we’ve done, or at least allowed to be done, to our climate. And the consequences of our actions will eventually catch up with all of us, or at least our children and grandchildren. If we don’t deal with reality, sooner or later, in one way or another, reality will deal with us – all of us. For all these reasons, I think it should be painfully clear that climate denialism is inconsistent with Jewish values.
On the other hand, confronting and acknowledging the reality of human-caused climate change too often leads to pessimism. Many of us look at the problem and conclude that we’re already too far gone, or the scale and scope of what is needed to transform our society from one that relies on fossil fuels is far beyond what any existing political system on the planet is capable of accomplishing. I admit that I have personally felt this way at times and used it as an excuse for my own inaction. After all, if you believe that we are inevitably doomed by global warming, why bother even trying to stop it?
But our tradition doesn’t allow us to see a problem and act as if it doesn’t exist. Lo tukhal l’hitalem, instructs the Torah. Lo ta’amod al dam re’ekha. You may not look away (Deut. 22:3). You may not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor (Lev. 19:16).
I understand why the formidable magnitude of the climate crisis can make us feel pessimistic. Nevertheless, because pessimism, like denialism, leads to inaction, it is a response our tradition would demand we resist.
So, then, what’s left, beyond denialism and pessimism? Should we all become climate optimists?
As I’ve wrestled internally with this issue over the past few years, I’ve come to the conclusion that our tradition’s response to the climate crisis is not optimism, but hope-timism.
What’s hope-timism? As the term suggests, hope-timism is about hope. Hope is about being perennially discontented with present reality, and stubbornly, defiantly refusing to see it as unchangeable. That’s different from optimism. An optimist minimizes what is broken by choosing to look on the bright side. or believing things will inevitably get better. A hope-timist, on the other hand, recognizes the full extent of the brokenness and refuses to be reconciled with it. And while a hope-timist doesn’t believe that a better future is inevitable, it is always possible, regardless of how improbable it might seem in the present. To the hope-timist, what seems to be impossible now is just a thing that hasn’t happened yet. The apparent limitations of our present reality can be overcome and a new dawn can rise (Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 16-17). To be a climate hope-timist is to recognize that, yes, things are bad now; and, yes, there is a lot of hard work to do, both as individuals and as a society. But it is also to insist that difficult is not the same as impossible, and we can bring about a radical new reality if we dream it audaciously and pursue it ambitiously (Eileen Lindner, Thus Far on the Way, 69).
Our worship today provides us a roadmap for hope-timism. In a few moments, we will recite a prayer known as U-Netaneh Tokef, a liturgical poem found toward the beginning of the repetition of the musaf Amidah. On the surface, at least until the last stanza, U-Netaneh Tokef is pretty terrifying. It declares, “B’Rosh Hashanah yikateivun,” on Rosh Hashanah our fates are written, “Uv’yom tzom Kippur yehateimun,” and on Yom Kippur, our fates are sealed. And its list of what might befall us once our fates are finally sealed focuses overwhelmingly on punishments, including, notably, many different ways we might be killed by a harsh climate: “Who by fire, and who by flood? Who by famine, and who by drought? Who by wild beasts, and who by plague?” These are the very phenomena that we are currently making more common and intense through global warming. The prayer is clear-eyed about our reality: some of us, unfortunately, will perish due to climate catastrophe. Yet the poem also asserts that who, and how many, among us will meet this evil fate is ultimately in our hands, not God’s.
The poem’s last stanza declares:
“וְּתשוָּבה וְּתִּפָלה וְּצָדָקה ַמֲעִּביִּרין ֶּאת ֹּרַע ַהְגֵׂזָרה, //Repentance, prayer, and justice overturn the severity of the decree.”
Before I explain what this line is saying, let me first explain what it is not saying: it is not saying that if you repent wholeheartedly enough, or that if you pray sincerely enough, or that if you do enough good deeds, that God will spare your life.
Rather, it’s saying that repentance, prayer, and righteousness enable us to overturn the severity of what might currently appear to be inevitable. By engaging in those three acts, by living lives dominated by those deeds, we can transcend despair, pessimism, and optimism.
Let’s start with prayer. We often think of prayer as trying to persuade a powerful God out there to come down here to help us out. While we do have prayers like that, that’s not by and large how our tradition views prayer. The Hebrew word for prayer is tefillah, more accurately defined as self-assessment, or introspection. Prayer is about reminding ourselves of our values and evaluating how we’re doing with respect to them.
In the context of the climate crisis, prayer can help us identify how we, as individuals and as a society, have contributed to and are complicit in the problem; remind us of our values and responsibility for each other and for the world; and enable us to discern how we can play a role in advancing a future distinct from our present. In other words, prayer is hope-timistic, reinforcing a belief that things can change and reminding us of our capability and responsibility to effect that change.
In this sense, prayer is the indispensable companion of repentance. The Hebrew term usually translated as repentance, teshuvah, more literally means to turn. It involves recognizing how we have gone astray and returning to our responsibility to pursue justice and repair the world. Like prayer, repentance is hope-timistic. It is predicated on the notion that our future is not dictated by our past or present, or even predetermined on high; it is up to us, dependent on the choices we make. We can’t change the past, and the present is what it is. But by engaging in the process of repentance – recognizing our role in climate change, acknowledging how we have brought ourselves to where we are now, identifying what we can and should do next in order to make a better tomorrow, and committing to doing the work – we can advance a different future. And, according to our tradition, it’s never too late to start. We are never too far gone to change course and get back on track.
If prayer is about knowing the way and evaluating our place on the path, and repentance is about getting back on track when we’ve gone astray, then justice, or tzedakah, is about what we do next. Often, tzedakah is translated as charity. But tzedakah is derived from the word tzedek, meaning justice, fairness, or equity. In our tradition, tzedakah is about leveling our society’s playing field. Whereas charity is about giving a meal to a hungry person, justice is about creating a society in which nobody goes hungry. In the context of the climate crisis, charity is an individual switching to an electric car; justice is enacting policies that make electric cars as affordable as conventional ones, ensuring charging stations are conveniently accessible for all, transitioning to a clean energy infrastructure to power them, and, perhaps even better, expanding access to cheaper, cleaner public transportation.
Climate tzedakah is about systemic social, economic, and political change. And one of the main ways we can affect the kind of changes we need is by supporting organizations and causes that are in the trenches advocating for them, whether by donating our money or volunteering our time. On the local level, I encourage you to speak with our friend Avi Calhoun about the important advocacy work of Virginia Interfaith Power and Light. And I also encourage you to speak with our friend Gary Goldberg about Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action, which aims to mobilize Jews to confront the climate crisis on the national level.
Of course, not all of us have the capacity or the inclination for advocacy work. But we all at the very least can and, I think Jewish tradition would say, must, support environmentally-friendly policies and political candidates – because politics is the process through which we accomplish the things that are bigger than any one of us can deliver on our own, and ultimately fashion a society that reflects our values.
Indeed, the scope and “scale of what needs to happen” in order to avert climate catastrophe “is so massive” that it can only be solved through collective action (Claire Dederer, Monsters, 239-240). We unfortunately will never be able to make enough of a difference as individuals acting alone. And thinking that we can turns more and more of us into climate pessimists every year., What is actually effective is working together. For example, experts agree that eating a plant-based diet reduces our carbon footprint. On my own, I could never eat enough kale to fix the climate crisis. But if many of us decided together to stop eating hamburgers, we would collectively prevent gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions. Similarly, an individual advocating for change may not have much of an impact. But when people organize and advocate together, their voices become amplified, and their power magnified. As Wallace-Wells points out, “the world is [now] decarbonizing faster than anyone anticipated a decade ago,” and “clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel energy in most parts of the world.” None of those positive developments could have happened without regular people organizing and advocating for them (Goodell, 310). Therefore, in the year ahead, I want to charge us to organize and champion the systemic solutions necessary to combat the climate crisis – not only as individuals but moreover as a congregation. If you are interested in getting involved in a congregational climate initiative, please be in touch.
U-netaneh tokef asks, “Who by fire, and who by flood?” If we continue on our current course, the answer to that question will, tragically, be all of us, sooner or later. But the poem also reminds us that doom is not inevitable. “B’Rosh Hashanah yikateivun, Uv’yom tzom Kippur yehateimun,” our fates may be written now, but the decree is not final; our doom is not yet sealed. Yom Kippur reminds us that a better future is possible, but whether it comes about is, in many crucial ways, up to each of us individually, and all of us collectively.
But what we can no longer afford to do is eat pizza while pretending our world isn’t burning. Our present is filled with peril. Our world is still warming. People are still dying. There is much work yet to be done, and the road ahead will be long, hard, and halting. But our hope is not yet lost. Repentance, prayer, and justice can yet change our destiny. What may today seem impossible is just a thing that hasn’t happened yet.
In the year to come, let us then embrace hope-timism.
Let us be resolute in our refusal to accept climate disaster as our destiny.
Let us be bold in our belief that a better future is possible.
And let us be determined to do all we can to transform possibility into reality.
Ken Yehi Ratzon, so may it be Your will. Amen.
So here’s a name that I’m going to bet none of you had on your High Holy Day sermon bingo cards: Marilyn Manson.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with his work, Manson – whose real name is Brian Warner – is the lead singer of a rock band of the same name, and is known not only for his music – which is probably best described as heavy metal, with shades of industrial, goth, glam, and even country in the mix, depending on the song or album – but moreover for his outlandish and outrageous stage persona. Deliberately provocative, Manson’s art is intended to shake people from their complacency and comfort with the world as it is, goading them to refuse to accept the status quo as inevitable or unchangeable, all while encouraging and empowering those who are too often rejected and ostracized for thinking, looking, or acting differently that it’s okay to be themselves.
While the critics among us can debate the merits of Manson’s music, taste is subjective – as my kids like to say, “different people have different taste bugs” – and it’s hard to do justice to how much Manson’s music and message has meant to me over the years.
As I entered high school, I switched from a small Jewish day school to a larger Christian prep school. In that new environment, I felt really lonely. I wasn’t athletic enough for the jocks, creative enough for the artists, or smart enough for the honors’ students. I found the belonging I sought with a small group of other unpopular misfits. This new circle of friends didn’t always bring out the best in my character or encourage the best choices, but they at least (thankfully) influenced my musical tastes.
Discovering Manson’s music changed me – I think for the better. It taught me that what is right is not always popular, and that what is popular is not always right; that while our world is filled with hypocrisy and injustice, it doesn’t have to be that way – the brokenness of our world can not only be exposed but also repaired. And it taught me that each of us matters regardless of how many friends or followers we have, or how closely we conform to society’s definition of “normal” or “beautiful.” We need not let others tell us who or what we should be. Rather, we should love and embrace who we are, and free ourselves to be what and who we want to be.
But in recent years, numerous women have come forward to allege that Manson had abused them, often over the course of long periods of time.
Manson, for his part, has consistently denied all of these accusations, and in both Jewish tradition and American law everyone deserves the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. But many if not most of the allegations against Manson strike me as specific, serious, and credible, backed up by material evidence and eyewitness testimony, not to mention that the accusers have little to gain and much to lose by coming forward, as has been evidenced by the scores of horrifying threats that many have received from Manson’s extremely passionate fanbase. Even if only a small handful of the allegations are true, they are extremely damning.
Inescapably confronted with the magnitude of Manson’s monstrousness, I have been struggling with what I should do about his work. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: even after everything, I still love his music. As such an important part of my history, my biography, and my very sense of self, it still matters to me. Can I keep listening to his music, even after I know about all the terrible things he has (very likely) done? If so, how, and under what conditions? Or is the only moral approach to quit cold turkey?
This summer, I came across an exceptional book by the critic and memoirist Claire Dederer called Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. Though Dederer doesn’t discuss Manson specifically, her book wrestles with similar questions about consuming art created by moral monsters. Dederer argues that it’s impossible to wholly separate a work of art from the artist who made it. The artist’s biography and context are invariably part of the art that is produced, and similarly, when we approach art we bring ourselves and our history. “Consuming a piece of art,” Dederer points out, is always “two biographies meeting” (Dederer, 80). The consumption of art is inherently interpersonal and relational. I have never met Marilyn Manson, and he certainly doesn’t know me, but by virtue of listening to his music, I am engaging in a mutually beneficial relationship – not just with the art that he produced, but with him, the artist who made it. This is, in part, why it’s so heartbreaking to learn that an artist whose work you love has perpetrated evil. In addition to the immediate harm that they have caused their victims, we experience their actions as a betrayal of their relationship with us. And it’s also why it’s so difficult to figure out what to do with our knowledge of their wrongdoing, because sometimes the relationship feels just too personally important to completely sever.
The relational reality of consuming art leads Dederer to what I think is her most profound point. She writes: “What do we do with the art of monstrous men? This question is the merest gnat, buzzing around the monolith that is the bigger question: what do we do about the monstrous people we love?…Do we excise them from our lives? Do we enact a justice, swift and fierce? Do we cancel them?” (Dederer, 254-255).
We’ve all loved terrible people. We all love terrible people. Maybe, right at this very moment, we are wrestling with how or whether to remain in relationship with such a person, even after everything they have done. And an even more haunting possibility: Maybe we’re that terrible person, loved by someone who deserves better; maybe right here in this room, someone is agonizing over the question of how or whether to remain in relationship with us, even after everything we have done.
As we gathered together for worship this Yom Kippur eve, before Cantor Childs led us in that exquisite and moving rendition of Kol Nidrei, we recited the words:
“Bi-shivah shel malah, u’vi-shivah shel matah, Al da’at ha-makom, v’al da’at ha-kahal, Anu matirim l’hitapellleil im ha-avaryanim. // By authority of the court on high, and by the authority of the court below, with the consent of the Divine, and with the consent of the congregation, we are permitted to pray with the sinners.”
This passage is traditionally understood to affirm “that whatever our faults and doubts on this night, everyone is welcome in the synagogue,” including those of us “who feel burdened by guilt and the sense of being unworthy to join with our community” (Mahzor Lev Shalem commentary).
It’s a moving sentiment. But upon deeper reflection, it actually doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. After all, Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, a holy day that exists precisely because, as the Torah puts it, “l’khol ha-am bishgagah,” all the people have done wrong – or as Marilyn Manson might have translated it, “Light a candle for the sinners, set the world on fire.” We will repeat this sentiment in various ways throughout the next 24 hours. Today, we are forced to confront the reality that we have all sinned, whether over the past year, or in the course of our lives. We have all wronged one another in ways large or small. We are all flawed, imperfect, broken vessels who have fallen short, gone astray, and caused harm.
The whole concept of having a Day of Atonement in the first place only makes sense if there are people who need atonement, which is to say, people who have sinned!
So what are we doing when we say tonight that “we are permitted to pray with the sinners”?
First, note that this statement distinguishes between “we,” which is to say, us, and “the sinners.” In other words, while none of us are perfect, and all of us have erred in ways large and small, both in the past year, and throughout our lives, we must not be the sinners to whom this declaration is referring.
Some scholars suggest that the Hebrew term used for “sinners” here, avaryanim, is actually a play on the word “Iberians.” In this understanding, the phrase is referring to people from Europe’s Iberian peninsula, namely Spain and Portugal. Why them? Because during the Inquisition, some Spanish and Portuguese Jews attempted to secretly maintain their Jewish identities, even as they publicly practiced Christianity. This declaration, then, was intended to assure these so-called “Conversos” that they still had a place in the Jewish community – that no one has strayed too far to seek what Yom Kippur offers us all, which is an opportunity to set things right with one another and with God.
Why would Conversos have thought otherwise in the first place, though? In order to answer this question, we have to understand something about traditional Jewish law. Traditionally, Jewish law considers public sins, such as publicly renouncing Judaism and embracing Christianity, even if one privately didn’t mean it, to be especially grievous. That’s because sins that occur in, or that ultimately become, public – including sins committed by public figures that may have originally occurred in private but that eventually come to light – harm everyone in the community. They have a ripple effect. Whether or not someone specific was directly harmed by the behavior, the impact of that behavior when in the public eye invariably spreads in ways that can neither be controlled nor revoked, indirectly impacting countless others, in part by influencing or even encouraging others to commit the same transgression (Danya Ruttenberg, On Repentance and Repair, 76-77). Therefore, according to Jewish tradition, the Conversos’ sin wasn’t against God, it was against the entire community.
To remain in a mutually beneficial relationship with someone who has sinned against others, or against the community as a whole, so long as they are unrepentant, is to become implicated in their transgression. The Jewish legal tradition helps to explain why this is. According to Jewish law, it is forbidden to purchase a stolen item – even when theft is only strongly suspected. In fact, it is considered an especially grave sin, worse than stealing itself. What’s so wrong with purchasing a stolen item, especially if it cannot be proven that it was stolen? Because purchasing items even merely suspected of having been stolen encourages more theft in the future.
Jewish law places the locus of responsibility on the consumer. The reason, I think, is that sometimes, too often, even today, legal systems are unable or unwilling to hold suspected perpetrators accountable. Sometimes, the only available option is for the consumer to uphold and enforce ethical norms. If a thief sees that he can profit by selling stolen items and face no consequences, he will continue to steal. Moreover, if the public becomes aware that a thief is making money by selling stolen goods and is not being held accountable in some meaningful way, others will feel emboldened to do so as well. What becomes of a society where such behavior is broadly tolerated or supported?
Dederer, for her part, rejects the logic that animates this Jewish legal principle. Instead, she argues that an individual’s choice not to consume a particular work of art “is essentially meaningless as an ethical gesture…you will solve nothing by means of your consumption” (Dederer, 241-242). Of course, she has a point. Whether or not I stream “Antichrist Superstar” this week will have little impact on Marilyn Manson’s career. And I certainly can’t check the box on my obligation to pursue a just society, just by deleting his songs from my playlists.
But our tradition wants us to recognize that when a perpetrator encounters no legal or social consequences for their behavior, and moreover sees that they can profit regardless of how they act, they will be emboldened, even if only in a small way, to continue committing the same crimes. Moreover, it sends a message about the kind of behavior we are willing to accept in our society, signals to the victims that we are apathetic to their suffering, and grants others license to behave similarly. That’s why Jewish law extends this principle to virtually all forms of harm, not just theft, because to remain in a mutually beneficial relationship with any unrepentant perpetrator, even if their sin is only suspected, and especially if their sin is in public view, is to effectively become their accomplices – tacitly endorsing their behavior, enabling them to keep it up, and encouraging others to act similarly.
It is for that reason why the Yom Kippur liturgy focuses less on the wrongdoings we may have personally perpetrated than on transgressions that have occurred in our society and community, so to speak, on our watch. To borrow a phrase from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “some are guilty, but all are responsible” (“The Reasons for My Involvement in the Peace Movement,” in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, 224-225). Either we are part of the solution, or we are complicit in the problem. One does not have to be Marilyn Manson to be guilty of perpetuating a toxic culture that harms everyone, in ways large and small, and that empowers the worst among us to feel they can do whatever they want, to whomever they want.
Since we are prohibited from supporting and benefiting from sinners, especially those who sin in public, we might have assumed that the Conversos should have been, for lack of a better word, canceled – that is to say, they should have been punished for a crime against the community by being ostracized from the community. To welcome them into the congregation, to worship alongside them, could have been seen as implying consent to, or endorsing, their behavior, which would not only encourage others to do the same, but also embolden the Inquisitors to continue their persecutions, ultimately leading to the destruction of the entire community.
But cutting off a relationship, while perhaps justified in certain contexts, is by definition extreme, and can sometimes obscure the path to restoration, perhaps even rendering it seemingly impossible. Whether it is a public official who has crossed the line, an artist who has behaved badly, or a loved one – a significant other, a friend, or a family member – who has hurt us or others profoundly, who we can’t bear to have in our lives anymore; whether we are a victim, an ally, or the one who has been canceled, we might rightly wonder – can one become un-canceled? And if so, how?
Asking those questions can help us understand why we declare tonight that we are permitted to pray with perpetrators of public harm, even as our tradition warns that remaining in relationship with such people implicates us in their transgressions or turns us into their accomplices.
Our liturgy tonight is instructing us to see showing up to worship with the community on Yom Kippur as tantamount to taking the first steps toward repentance.
The simple act of showing up to worship with the community on Yom Kippur is in and of itself an implicit public acknowledgement that we know we have gone astray, that we have sincere remorse for our misdeeds, that we want to discern how to repair the damage we have done, that we want to act differently in the future.
Think about it: if this were not in some way, however small, part of an individual’s motivation for coming to synagogue on Yom Kippur, why bother? The person who believes they have done nothing wrong doesn’t need Yom Kippur. The person who believes their wrongdoings, whatever they are, are only between themselves and God, and no one else’s business, doesn’t need to display remorse in public. Yom Kippur only makes sense if we know we have erred. Joining with the community in worship on Yom Kippur only makes sense if we believe our transgressions impacted others or the community as a whole.
Is that not why we are, all of us, here tonight? Indeed, when each of us says “we are permitted to pray with the sinners,” we are really saying “I” am permitted to pray with them. But if I put others who are not me in the category of “them,” then I must also acknowledge that I too might be part of someone else’s “them.” Tonight, I declare it permissible to pray with other sinners, which include at least some of you. And at least some of you may be similarly declaring it permissible to pray with me. “L’khol ha-am bishgagah.” All the people, each and every one of us, have done wrong. If we start excluding those who, by virtue of showing up tonight, demonstrate that they are seeking the same thing that we are, none of us would be able to be here. Or, to reframe the Manson lyric I mentioned earlier, if we don’t let sinners light candles, we snuff out the world’s light.
I do want to make something very clear: The fact that we must recognize when perpetrators of harm are trying to change their ways and not prevent them from engaging in the process of teshuvah, does not mean we have to forgive them, or reconcile with them, or grant them an automatic ticket back into the wholehearted embrace of loving and supportive community. Taking the first steps toward teshuvah is not the same as completing the journey. We as individuals and as communities can, and sometimes must, still keep perpetrators of harm at arm’s length until we are satisfied that they have done the work.
But it does mean that we are permitted to pray with them, and that we should permit them to pray with us – that we recognize that since we, too, are flawed and have gone astray, we must afford others the same opportunity to get back on the right path that we would want afforded to us, which also means being willing to give others the benefit of the doubt we would want given to us, by seeing even small steps forward as indications of earnest striving. If we want to live in a world in which teshuvah is possible for ourselves, then we have an obligation to ensure that it is possible for others, too.
The story is told of a ruler whose child had gone astray on a journey of a hundred days. The child’s friends said, “Return to your parent.” But the child said, “I cannot.” When the ruler learned what their child had said, they sent a message to the child, saying, “Return as far as you can, and I will come the rest of the way to you.” In a similar way, God says, “Return to me, and I will return to you” (Pesikta Rabbati 184b-185a, in Ruttenberg, 201).
The path toward complete teshuvah is available to us all, at all times. We are never too far gone, we have never wandered too far astray. Wherever we go, there God is – calling us back, inviting us to return.
And so, to the Marilyn Mansons of the world, I quote the artist himself in saying, “Repent. That’s what I’m talking about.” I hope to one day be able to listen to your music again. True, complete teshuvah can be, to quote Manson once more, “a long, hard road out of hell.” But our tradition affirms that we don’t have to get all the way ourselves. The most important thing is to begin the journey, taking our first steps toward earnestly striving to make amends and change our ways, however small and iterative those first steps may be. A simple act like showing up to worship with the congregation on Yom Kippur may not be the end of the road, but we can recognize it as a beginning – for ourselves, and for others.
As we seek to start our own journeys of repentance and repair, let us strive to enable others to do so as well, creating a community, and a world, where change, for good, is truly possible for us all.
So may it be God’s will. Amen.
Many of you know, I’m not much of a sports fan. But I’ve always had a soft spot for baseball. Going to Braves games with my Dad are some of my most cherished memories from growing up.
So when I had kids of my own, I naturally wanted to offer them similar experiences and bless them with similar fond memories. I took Lilah to her first game we were still living in Philadelphia, and one city, two more kids, and about a decade later, I have made it a point every season to take the kids to at least one game, whether it be at The Diamond, or to make pilgrimages to major league parks in cities we visit. I know I am incredibly blessed to have these opportunities with my kids, and I cherish the time we spend together.
But if I’m being honest, it doesn’t always feel that my kids appreciate them as much, or in the ways, I had hoped they would. Are they going to look back on these experiences with the same fondness and wistfulness that I have when I recall the games my Dad took me to as a kid? How could they, when literally all they do for as long as we’re in the stadium is ask for snacks, stand in line at the concession stand, eat snacks, ask for souvenirs, shop for souvenirs, ask to use the potty, stand in line for the potty, ask for more snacks, stand in line for more snacks, eat more snacks, ask to find Nutzy, hunt around the whole ballpark for Nutzy, realize when we finally find him that they are too scared to say hi, ask for more snacks, get upset when the answer is no, and then demand to go home? I swear – in the decade or so I’ve been taking my kids to baseball games, we’ve cumulatively watched maybe a whole inning of actual baseball.
Of course, some of this is just the distorting effect of nostalgia. I was sharing about these experiences with my Dad recently, and he responded by saying that they were virtually identical to his experiences taking me and my siblings to games when we were little. It turns out my fond memories might be less about enjoying the sport itself and more about the excitement of being at the ballpark and the warmth of spending quality time with my father.
But this spring, something significant changed. Last April, I took the kids to DC to see the Braves play the Nationals on opening weekend. The Braves took a tough loss that day, but it didn’t matter. The sun was shining. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The temperature was in the high 60’s. There was a kosher hot dog stand. And, amazingly, my kids actually watched the game. The flood of requests and demands for snacks, souvenirs, and potty breaks slowed to a trickle, merely periodically punctuating long stretches of witnessing actual baseball. Strikeouts and double-plays were met with cheers. Cracks of bats prompted motion to the edge of seats. Solid swats elicited excited leaps and high-fives. Questions were asked about rules and strategy, and answers were actually listened to. It was miraculous, I tell you.
Were my kids just a year older, and a year more mature? Had they developed longer attention spans, or a greater appreciation for the subtleties of the game, or a diminished interest in treats and toys?
I think if you’ve had any interaction with my kids over the past year, you would know that our extraordinary experience at the ballpark this spring could in no way be attributed to these explanations. So what changed?
The answer is deceptively simple: Baseball. Baseball changed. This season, Major League Baseball instituted some radical rule changes designed to stimulate offense, encourage more aggressive baserunning, and, above all, make the game move faster. Perhaps the most significant of these changes was instituting a pitch clock, giving pitchers 15 seconds to begin their motion to throw the ball, and hitters just 8 seconds to be set in the batter’s box.
The changes worked. All of a sudden, the game took on an exciting, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality. Without the half-hearted pickoff attempts making at-bats take forever, innings seem interminable, and games feel utterly endless, the pace of play became brisk and breezy, getting my kids into the game, keeping their interest, holding their attention, and dare I say, transforming them into actual baseball fans – well, at least Shemaya; the others I would now at least call baseball tolerators, if not appreciators.
It turned out that my kids’ seeming inability to watch and enjoy a baseball game without constant whining and interruption wasn’t due to them being broken, or my bad parenting. Rather, baseball itself was to blame. Over the course of my lifetime, the average length of baseball games had ballooned by nearly an hour. And all that extra time was mostly filled with things like player and equipment readjustments. Who wants to watch that?
The answer, of course, is fewer and fewer people every year. Over the past few decades, attendance at Major League Baseball games and TV viewership have been steadily declining, a trend that correlated perfectly with games becoming longer, slower, and quieter. Unless it did something to expand its appeal to new and younger cohorts of fans, Major League Baseball faced the very real threat of eventually withering and even dying.
Faced with the challenge of reversing these worrying trends and saving baseball, league brass arrived at a deceptively simple and somewhat paradoxical idea: the cure for what ailed baseball was more baseball. They asked, in effect, “What if we restored baseball to its most basic self, if we returned baseball to being just baseball? If we built that – would the people come?” And it turned out the answer was a resounding and definitive “yes.”
So what does that have to do with us?
Just like Major League Baseball, American synagogues have experienced a marked decline over the past forty years or so. Today, only about a third of American Jews belong to a synagogue. This decay has precipitated a drying up of infrastructure and resources, which in turn further facilitates disaffiliation.
How do we account for this decline? And what can those of us who believe that synagogues remain essential centers for Jewish spiritual life in America do to turn things around?
It was in the 1990’s that American Jewish leaders first began to truly notice these troubling trend lines. Rabbi Michael Lerner, in an attempt to figure out what was going on, surveyed hundreds of Jewish Americans who had abandoned organized Jewish life. What he found was that these Jews had not lost their religion. Rather, they were leaving synagogues because they believed their synagogues had left Judaism. They had been taught – correctly, I think – that the heart and soul of the Jewish tradition is the imperative to pursue a loving, just, and peaceful society. Yet from their perspective, their synagogues weren’t embodying and nurturing that spirit. Rather, they focused primarily on things like the importance of Jewish identity, communal engagement, and ritual observances as ends to themselves. Therefore, Lerner concluded, the way to revitalize organized Jewish life in America was to embrace, center, and emphasize the moral mission that Jews correctly understood to be our tradition’s essence and purpose (see Lerner, Jewish Renewal). The cure for what ails Judaism is Judaism itself; not transformation, but return (see Heschel, The Prophets; cf. Hosea 14:2, Isaiah 44:22; Jeremiah 3:14).
Reconciling Jewish people and its institutions with the essence of Jewish faith, bringing individuals and organizations back into alignment with what Judaism was always supposed to be, and what we are fundamentally called to do was the main project of the biblical prophets. Often misunderstood and mischaracterized, the biblical prophets, known to us through their writings in the Hebrew Bible, were not fortune-tellers or radicals trying to remake Jewish religion. On the contrary, they saw their mission as attempting to bring their people back to the essence of Jewish faith. The primary prophetic directive, echoed in today’s haftarah portion from the book of Jeremiah, as well as countless places in the other prophetic books of the biblical canon, is not shinah, change, or halaf, transform, but, rather, shuv – return.
What did the prophets believe was the essential faith from which their people had strayed, and to which they must return? That the God of Israel is also the One God of all humanity; that this great, mighty, and awesome God Most High loves kindness and detests injustice; and that, above all, God desires a world rooted in equality and sustained through justice – a radically inclusive, thoroughly just, and perfectly peaceful social order.
Moreover, the prophets emphasized that God relies on human action, calling upon us to act as God’s partners in the tasks of lifting up the downtrodden and repairing the brokenness of our world. To this end, we are called to care for those in need – feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, and providing shelter to the unhoused – and also to pursue justice on the broader social level – advancing policies and systems that ensure a society where all have sufficient food, clothing, healthcare, and housing in the first place.
It’s important to note what is not on that prophetic list of God’s priorities: Jewish identity, communal engagement, and ritual observances, at least not as ends to themselves. According to the prophets, the God of the Torah couldn’t care less about what you profess to believe, or who you are, or what tribe you belong to, or what your social calendar looks like, or what or how or when you pray, if those pursuits don’t lead you more fully into the moral mission of building the world that God desires for us.
That message is echoed in today’s haftarah portion, taken from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. After the reign of King Solomon, the kingdom of Israel split into two: a kingdom in the north called Israel, and a kingdom in the south called Judah. Those two separate and independent nations existed side-by-side for nearly two centuries until the Assyrian empire invaded in 722 BCE and destroyed the northern kingdom.
The prophets, for their part, had been warning of this impending doom for years. Prophets like Amos repeatedly confronted the people of Israel for inviting destruction by abandoning God. But the people didn’t listen to the prophets. They responded, “What are you talking about?! We haven’t lost our religion! Look! We still go to temple! We still observe the rituals by the book! We contribute to the building fund” The prophets, however, argued that, to God, the people’s behavior outside their sanctuaries spoke louder than the words they uttered inside them. Actively and passively, they had abided the creation of a “culture of affluence and ease for the rich and poverty and oppression for the poor…where those at the top lived in luxury and those at the bottom in abject poverty and despair,” all while believing that “comfortable ritual divorced from God’s demands for justice” would be enough to protect them from internal decay and external danger (Letty M. Russell, Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference, 108-109).
The prophets railed against this mindset, arguing that God detests worship decoupled from moral action; that regardless of how frequently or fervently the people prayed, regardless of what they professed to believe, they had broken faith with God and each other through establishing and tolerating systemic inequities, alienating God and courting disaster.
After the fall of the northern kingdom, the prophets turned to the people of Judah with the same message: change your ways, champion the cause of the poor and the oppressed, build a society rooted in human dignity and strengthened through justice. In other words, get back to Jewish faith and practice as it was intended – or else you will end up sharing the same fate that befell your kinsmen.
Yet despite witnessing the calamity that happened to their fellow Israelites, the people of Judah remained relatively unfazed, for they too thought that so long as the Temple stood in Jerusalem, they would be safe. Even as the Babylonians conquered the Assyrians and stood menacingly on their northern border, the people of Judah continued to reason that as long as they offered sacrifices properly, prayed dutifully, and maintained this one building fastidiously, that all would be well.
Jeremiah calls this out as a dangerous delusion. “Do you consider this House, which bears [God’s] name, to be a den of thieves?” he asks (7:11). Do you think God cares only about proper worship but not the proper behavior of the worshiper? Of course not, Jeremiah insists, reminding his people of the Torah’s warning that God will only “let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your ancestors,” if “you execute justice between one another…if you do not oppress the stranger, the orphan, and the widow; if you do not shed the blood of the innocent” (7:5-7). The God of the Torah, Jeremiah warned, ultimately does not care about “burnt offerings or sacrifice” but, rather, that we listen to God’s call and follow God’s ways (7:22-23). All other paths lead to destruction.
The people of Judah, of course, do not heed Jeremiah’s warning. In 586 BCE, the Babylonians invaded Judah, sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, and sent the leaders into exile in Babylon.
To this community of exiles, Jeremiah could have gloated. He could have said “I told you so.” But that’s not what Jeremiah did. Instead, he offered words of hope. All is not lost, he said. You may be broken and scattered, defeated and desperate, but you need not despair. Restoration and revitalization is possible. But the only way to secure it is through return: “aharei shuvi, nihamti,” which I would translate as “[we] will be restored when [we] return.”
The path to healing and moving forward in wholeness and vitality is through going back – returning to fidelity to a God who detests cruelty and oppression, a God who delights in love and equity, a God who wants our service more than songs, a God who calls for our partnership in building a world of inclusion, justice, and peace. Jeremiah teaches that the only thing that can fix the brokenness of his Jewish community is to go back, reconciling and realigning with essential Jewish faith. So Jeremiah calls upon his people to pray, “hashiveni v’ashuvah, ki atah Adonai Elohai / allow me to return and I will return, for You The Infinite are my God,” I acknowledge that I went astray and I sincerely commit to returning to the right path of fidelity to a God of love and justice.
The power of Jeremiah’s message, and one of the reasons we read it today, is because this kind of return, which our tradition calls teshuvah – a term usually translated as repentance, but which, stemming from the Hebrew root shuv, more literally means to turn – is the essence of the Days of Awe. These solemn days are dedicated to inviting us to recognize how we have gone astray and get back on the right path.
Importantly, the teshuvah, the return, that the High Holy Days calls us towards is fundamentally about embracing our moral responsibility. The liturgy and rituals of these days call our attention to how we treat one another, not how well we perform religious rituals, reminding us that God judges us not for what we say or do not say in prayer, but rather for what we do, or fail to do, to build a just society The path to which we are being called back is not the path of private acts of piety but, rather, the path of public acts of love and justice.
It is striking to me that our ancestors who originally built this place decorated it with an extraordinary series of stained glass windows that depict imagery and ideas from the biblical prophets. Look at these magnificent works of art all around you. Through them, our ancestors were reminding us that time spent in our sanctuary is meant to be a foundation for what we must do outside of it: repairing the world by caring for those in need and advancing the cause of justice in our society.
How do we do this? How do we approach what happens in this place as a foundation for what we do outside? For starters, we can see prayer as preparation for service, regarding communal prayer as a means to cultivate awareness of and compassion for the oppression and suffering that breaks God’s heart, and to energize ourselves and each other to transform the world as it is into the world as it ought to be.
Similarly, we can utilize this space to cultivate community purposefully, creating a context for nurturing deep, involved, and supportive relationships “in which we come to learn about one another’s interests, obstacles, pain, and dreams” and “investing in the ongoing creation of one another’s lives” (Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, 211). This kind of intentional communal engagement can enable us to recognize God’s image in one another; learn that each and every person is infinitely valuable and equally worthy of dignity, concern, and care; understand our connection to and responsibility for others; and become inspired to perfect the world, not just for ourselves, but also for everyone.
And perhaps the best way we can honor this space is through how we observe Shabbat together. Our tradition refers to Shabbat as “m’ein olam ha-ba / a microcosm of the World-to-Come” (B. Shabbat 57b). On Shabbat, we cease the self-centered business of acquiring, consuming, and creating that dominates our daily lives, enabling us to envision a different reality and re-energize ourselves and each other for the work of pursuing it. And by dedicating a day to activities like study, prayer, and engaging with community – encountering the Divine within, the Divine beyond, and the Divine image reflected in the face of each other – we model and cultivate the inclusive, equitable, and peaceful world that ought to be.
We best honor this renewed and rededicated space by embracing, cultivating, and acting upon the prophetic call, highlighted by these windows, for teshuvah, returning to our primary purpose as Jews. As we complete our Building for the Next 90 renovation project and delight in returning to our beautifully remodeled and refurbished home; as we consider how to ensure that this space is cherished and utilized, and that our congregation – and indeed our people – remain vibrant and vital for generations to come, let us place our attention and energy on embodying and nurturing what our prophets taught, our congregation’s founders venerated, and our people continue to understand to be the authentic spirit of our tradition – the imperative to pursue a loving, just, and peaceful society. Let us approach our gatherings, holiday and lifecycle observances, study and worship not as ends to themselves, but rather as the means through which we might live more fully into our moral mission to repair the world. I want to challenge us especially to cultivate a more robust Shabbat community by placing renewed emphasis on celebrating Shabbat together, enabling the kind of communal engagement and spiritual nourishment that will galvanize us to embrace and rededicate ourselves to the work of social transformation, the essence of our Jewish calling.
We will flourish in the years to come through return, a return to our most essential selves, a return to what and who God calls us to be and do in the world. Hashiveni v’ashuvah – If we return to Judaism, I am convinced the Jews will return to us. And more importantly, if we return to who we are supposed to be, then we will advance a world suffused with God’s presence.
In today’s haftarah, the prophet Jeremiah assures us that teshuvah is always possible; we are never too far gone, we have never wandered too far astray. Wherever we go, there God is – calling us back, inviting us to return, to go back in order to move forward. How we respond to that call is up to us.
This year, may we respond to that call by turning toward the right path, the path we were and are always called to be on – the path of love, the path of justice, and the path of peace.
Just over two weeks ago, we commemorated the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That oration is, for good reason, one of the most renowned in American history. Less well-known is the fact that its most famous portion was not in King’s prepared remarks. While King had previously preached about his dream for America’s future, doing so on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial was unplanned and extemporaneous, as though inspired from on high. But it turns out that King wasn’t channeling that day so much as remembering, inspiring and guiding us by repeating words that had inspired and guided him.
According to important recent scholarship from Rev. Dr. Courtney Pace of Memphis Theological Seminary, King actually first encountered the powerful sermonic refrain of “I Have a Dream” in 1962, almost a year before the March on Washington (Freedom Faith, 30). That summer, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, often better known by its acronym SNCC, was deeply engaged in a campaign to register Black voters in southwest Georgia. SNCC’s work was fraught with danger; activists and community members risked their lives to combat the widespread disenfranchisement that was endemic to the Jim Crow South. The night of September 9, 1962, white supremacist terrorists torched two African American churches that had been supporting and cooperating with SNCC’s campaign, burning them to the ground (Pace 30).
The next day, a prayer vigil was held at the ash heap that was once Mt. Olive Baptist Church. King came down from Atlanta to participate. No one recorded or transcribed King’s remarks at that service, perhaps because he was upstaged by one of SNCC’s local leaders, a young African American woman from Philadelphia named Prathia Hall. As Hall led the group in prayer, asking for God’s help “to be free so our children won’t have to grow up with our heads bowed,” she offered a vision for an inclusive and just society, and punctuated her description with the phrase, “I have a dream.”
King was apparently so inspired and moved by Hall’s remarks that he sought and received her permission to use the phrase in his own preaching – including his famous oration at the March on Washington (pace 60). Now, more than 60 years later, Hall is beginning to get the recognition she deserves as one of the great heroes of the Civil Rights movement and shapers of American history.
The dream Hall shared at that prayer vigil was rooted in what she called “Freedom Faith,” the belief that God wants all people to be free, and equips and empowers those who work for liberation (Pace 1).
I am guessing that most of us have never heard of Rev. Dr. Prathia Hall. I admit that I hadn’t heard of her before this summer. But the more I learned about Hall’s Freedom Faith, the more Jewish it sounded to me. Over and again, our Torah and tradition depicts God as the power within, between, and beyond us that inspires, guides, and sustains those who work to advance a world where all children can grow up with their heads held high, where all people are equally able to flourish and participate in the decisions that shape their lives and communities. After all, the foundational and central narrative of our faith is the Exodus. The God we are called to serve is, above all, a God of liberation.
Seen from this perspective, it ought not be surprising that Freedom Faith is at the heart of this Holy Day. In today’s Torah portion, our matriarch Sarah gives birth after many frustrating, fruitless decades trying to have a child of her own. Abraham names the boy Isaac.
And they all live happily ever after. The end… Right?
Unfortunately, no.
Remember that Abraham actually already had a son, Ishmael, whom he had conceived a few years earlier with Sarah’s Egyptian slave, Hagar. Let me underscore that – Hagar was Sarah’s slave. We commonly gloss over that uncomfortable fact, perhaps because we are understandably hesitant to impugn the moral integrity of our ancestors. Sarah was an enslaver?! How could we say such a thing?!
But here’s the thing – the Torah itself makes it plain. It asserts that Hagar was, in fact, a slave, in every painful sense that the term evokes. And Hagar’s subjugation – under the dominion, no less, of the mother of the Jewish people – is crucial for us to understand the meaning and message of today’s Torah portion.
But let’s back up for a moment. Who is Hagar? What do we know about her? Well, the Torah itself tells us very little. We aren’t told anything about her background or upbringing, other than the fact that she is an Egyptian. In fact, we very likely don’t even know Hagar’s name, at least her real name. As contemporary womanist biblical scholar Wilda Gafney points out, the name Hagar is a masculine Hebrew word “meaning ‘foreign thing’” (Womanist Midrash, 34). It is doubtful, Gafney argues, “that her Egyptian parents gave her such a name.” Think about it: can you “imagine an Egyptian mother naming her child ‘alien’ in the language of the people to whom she will be subjected in servitude” (34, 40)? It is more likely, Gafney explains, that Hagar, The Foreign Thing, is what she came to be called after she entered Abraham and Sarah’s Hebrew-speaking household. That the Torah would identify Hagar in this way – stripped of her real name and referred to, simply, as a foreign thing – is significant. It highlights the fact that, in the eyes of her enslavers, Hagar is just an other; nothing more. Certainly not their equal in status or basic worth.
That Abraham and Sarah see Hagar this way is evident from the moment she enters the narrative. Hagar is introduced in the opening verse of Genesis chapter 16. Immediately, in the very next verse, Sarah proposes giving Hagar over to Abraham as a surrogate wife, using Hagar’s presumably fertile body to do what Sarah in her desperation believed she could not do alone – produce a child to fulfill God’s promise that they would birth a great nation. Abraham agrees to Sarah’s proposal, but it is noteworthy that we are not told whether Hagar consented. After all, to Abraham and Sarah, Hagar is just a slave, their personal property, an object that could be used as they wished, her body a mere empty vessel that, in the words of Gafney, could “be colonized to gestate the hopes” of our patriarch and matriarch (34).
Because Hagar is “just a slave,” the child she bears and eventually births is not hers. Legally, the child becomes Abraham and Sarah’s firstborn son and legitimate heir. Abraham names the child Ishmael, Yishma’el, meaning God listens – God has answered the couple’s prayers, given them a child and heir, and fulfilled God’s promise.
But having a child by virtue of a legal fiction was never Sarah’s first choice. And no matter what the paperwork said, in Sarah’s eyes, and perhaps in the eyes of the rest of the world, Ishmael would always in some inescapable way be, as she puts it in today’s Torah portion, “the son of that slave woman” – inherently less than, like his birth mother.
Moreover, as Gafney points out, being “an infertile woman in a male-dominated world…imperil[s Sarah’s] status,” while Hagar’s status is elevated by her fertility. In other words, Sarah’s plan to protect her status by using Hagar’s body ironically had the unintended consequence of making her and Hagar closer to social equals.
The equalizing effect of Hagar’s fertility must have made Sarah deeply insecure. And, as we know from both history and current events, insecurity breeds oppression. It’s a tale at least as old as the Exodus story: The growing Israelite population in Egypt makes Pharaoh and the Egyptian people insecure, and they respond by enslaving the Israelites.
Not coincidentally, the Torah reports that Sarah begins to abuse Hagar as soon as Hagar becomes pregnant, and goes out of its way to tell us that Sarah’s mistreatment of Hagar was serious, even using the exact same term, anah, that it uses to depict the oppression of the enslaved Israelites in Egypt. The Torah wants us to know that Sarah wasn’t just mean to Hagar. She treated Hagar just like the Egyptians treated the Israelites – with cruelty and brutality.
That context is crucial to understanding today’s Torah portion, which begins with the birth of Isaac. When Isaac is born, Sarah at long last gets the son she really wants, the one that is not half-slave, the one that represents the promise of her restoration at the top of hierarchies of class and status where she sees herself as rightfully belonging.
Almost immediately, Sarah moves to radically and permanently reestablish what she perceives to be the proper order of things by discarding and destroying Ishmael and Hagar. Sarah demands that Abraham send Ishmael and his mother away, saying “גָּרֵ֛שׁ הָאָמָ֥ה הַזֹּ֖את וְאֶת־בְּנָ֑הּ / cast out that slave-woman and her son / כִּ֣י לֹ֤א יִירַשׁ֙ בֶּן־הָאָמָ֣ה הַזֹּ֔את עִם־בְּנִ֖י עִם־יִצְחָֽק׃ / for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.” Make no mistake: to send an enslaved woman and her child out into the wilderness – even with the limited resources that Abraham ultimately provides them – is to send them to their deaths.
My objective here is not to impugn or indict Sarah. Indeed, given her history, given her context, given the circumstances of her life, how she must have felt is completely understandable. Recall that prior to this story, Abraham had twice given Sarah over as a sex-slave to other powerful men in order to secure his own well being. And in her male-dominated society where women were valued primarily as mere tools for procreation and male sexual pleasure, Sarah was likely clear-eyed in her assessment that her infertility diminished her status, indeed her very worth as a human being.
No, I do not for one moment begrudge Sarah for how she felt. But I am also mindful of what she forgot – she forgot that God had rescued her and her family from tyrannical oppression in their native land; she forgot that God had twice liberated her from her own enslavement with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; she forgot that God had led her nephew Lot and his family safely to freedom when Sodom was destroyed. Sarah forgot that God had routinely and repeatedly shown God’s self to be a force for liberation.
Yes, Sarah had been victimized. Yes, Sarah had been traumatized. Yes, Sarah had been hurt. But trauma can constrict the moral imagination, and hurt people hurt people. We ought not begrudge Sarah for how she felt. Yet we must also be mindful of the terrible cost of what Sarah forgot. Sarah forgot about Freedom Faith. She forgot that hers was a God who works to support those who suffer. She forgot that hers was a God who loves kindness and hates injustice; who always sides with victims against their victimizers, always opposes oppressors, and always facilitates freedom. And it’s precisely in the moment where Sarah’s Freedom Faith falters that people get hurt.
Sarah’s trauma and pain blinded her to other possibilities that were available to her, other choices she could have made. Instead of using her own privilege to lift herself up at Hagar’s expense, she could have used her position and relative power to stand in solidarity with Hagar and lift her up. Sarah could have recognized that liberation is not a zero-sum proposition, that in fact none are safe and free unless all are safe and free. The tragedy of the story is that Sarah responds to her own oppression by oppressing others, rather than partnering with them to dismantle the entire oppressive system.
It is telling that Sarah’s role in the drama ends with her expelling Hagar and Ishmael. The Torah doesn’t mention Sarah again until it reports her death. There is similarly no “happily ever after” for Abraham or Isaac. Soon after Abraham consents to cast Hagar and Ishmael out to die in the wilderness, God instructs him to kill Isaac, perhaps as poetic justice, and then never speaks to Abraham again. As for Isaac, according to many of the traditional commentaries, his near-death on Mt. Moriah, which we read about tomorrow, leaves him permanently damaged, both physically and emotionally. And his children and grandchildren are doomed to spend most of their lives at each other’s throats, and also locked in endless cycles of conflict with their neighbors, including with Ishmael’s descendants, which tragically endure to this day.
True, Abraham and Sarah get the empire they are promised through Isaac, but it is lonely, fractured, and perpetually vulnerable. Civilizations in which liberty, equality, and rule of law are secured only for a privileged few all ultimately collapse under the weight of their own injustice. People will not stay oppressed forever. The only way to the Promised Land is together.
How might the story have turned out if Sarah made different choices? What if Sarah had seen her and her family’s fate as bound up in Hagar and Ishmael’s? What if instead of allowing her insecurities and past traumas to make her cruel to Hagar and Ishmael, she had realized that the path to securing her and her family’s future could only be through generosity, care, and concern for their wellbeing?
As if to invite us to ask those questions, the Torah continues Hagar and Ishmael’s story after it diverts our attention from Sarah. Sent off into the wilderness to die, Hagar and Ishmael wander until they run out of water. Near death, Hagar starts to cry. And then something extraordinary happens: as Hagar bursts into tears, God appears, reassuring her that not only would God save them from death, but that God would indeed fulfill the promise of making Ishmael into a great nation. God enables Hagar to find life-sustaining water, and accompanies them to safety. Hagar and Ishmael ultimately return to Egypt, their ancestral homeland, where Ishmael finds a wife and begins the journey of establishing a great nation of his own, in fulfillment of the Divine promise (Gafney 44).
If that story sounds familiar, it’s because it is in fact an “inverse parallel” of our own exodus narrative. In the exodus narrative we recall and celebrate each Passover, Egypt is the oppressor and Israel is the oppressed. But in this version, the roles are reversed: the Egyptians are abused by the Israelites; the Egyptians flee to the wilderness, where they encounter and forge a covenant with God; and the Egyptians are ultimately restored to freedom in their homeland.
In both exodus narratives, people are treated as inconvenient objects by those who exert power over them. In both stories, people are demeaned and dehumanized; used, abused, and discarded; broken, vulnerable, and desperate. But the same group of people are the oppressors in one story, and the oppressed in the other. What doesn’t change is God’s role. In both stories, God meets the oppressed in their suffering, affirms their humanity, responds with intimate and immediate presence, and provides spiritual and material support.
The God of the Torah, in other words, is not a parochial, national deity. The God of Israel is also the God of Egypt. Yes, God redeemed Israel from Egyptian oppression. But today’s Torah portion reveals that God also redeemed Egyptians from the cruel abuse of Israelite tormentors. True, when we are oppressed, God does what God can to support our struggle for liberation. But it is not with us exclusively that God always keeps faith. It is not us exclusively who God will always deliver. Rather, God will always take the side of the oppressed – whether or not that is the side we are on. And if we’re on the wrong side, God will actively oppose us, equipping and sustaining those who are struggling for their freedom from us. Today’s Torah portion reminds us that the God of our tradition is in fact the God of Freedom Faith – a God who wants people, whoever they are, to be free; a God who equips and sustains those who work for freedom; and a God who opposes those who don’t.
Our tradition has us study the story of Sarah and Hagar today of all days because Rosh Hashanah is a day devoted to recalling and recommitting ourselves to Freedom Faith, declaring what we believe and dedicating ourselves to enact those beliefs with our lives.
For proof, look at the prayers we say on Rosh Hashanah: Throughout today’s service, we declare God’s universal sovereignty. When we assert that God alone is supreme, we are also affirming that all peoples, under God, are fundamentally equal.
Similarly, today’s liturgy highlights the expansiveness of God’s sphere of concern, asserting that God is equally mindful of all humanity, not just the Jewish people. Indeed, according to tradition, Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of the creation of the whole of humanity, not the Jewish people alone, hence the Talmud’s assertion that all who dwell on earth, not just the Jewish people, pass equally before God’s consciousness on Rosh Hashanah. Of course, God already and always knows this. But how readily we forget. So on this day, we remind ourselves of the axiom that Jew as well as non-Jew is created equally in God’s image, that we are all God’s children, equally and infinitely beloved by our Heavenly Parent.
And alongside liturgy that reminds us today of what we believe, we sound the shofar to underscore the implications of those beliefs. According to tradition, the shofar’s sound is meant to evoke a cry and a call – a cry that alerts us to the brokenness of our world and a call to do our part to repair it. It is meant to rouse us to recognize that if all peoples are fundamentally equal, then to regard or treat anyone as inferior is to reject a basic principle of faith.
Tradition holds that it is the shofar’s sound that heralds redemption. It is the sound that brought down the walls of Jericho, opening our people’s path to the Promised Land. It is the sound that announces the year of Jubilee, when all debts are forgiven and all slaves are set free. And it is the sound that will declare the advent of the coming world, where all will be safe and free.
To sound the shofar today, then, is to proclaim our steadfast belief in that coming world, our yearning for that world, and even more importantly our commitment to bringing it into being. Teka ba-shofar gadol l’heiruteinu, we declare in our worship today – the sound of the great shofar is for our freedom. And even in a year such as this one, when the sanctity of Shabbat precludes us from physically sounding the shofar, this is still Yom Zikhron T’ruah, a day for holding the sound of the shofar in our memories and moral imaginations, a day for its clarion call to penetrate our hearts, stir our souls, and inspire our Freedom Faith.
Let us hold the sound of the great shofar for our freedom – freedom from the insecurities and fears that can transform us from victims into victimizers, abused into abusers, oppressed into oppressors.
Let us hold the sound of the great shofar for our freedom – freedom from the dangerous delusion that we can elevate ourselves by diminishing others.
Let us hold the sound of the great shofar for our freedom – freedom to realize that our fates are intertwined, that our liberation is bound up together, that redemption is only possible when all are redeemed.
Let us hold the sound of the great shofar for our freedom – freedom to join with one another, and with a God who wants all people to be free, as partners in perfecting the world.
Let us this day hold the sound of the great shofar for our freedom, so that we may speedily and in our time bring about the day for which we pray today, the day we realize our equality and unity under the sovereignty of the One Who Humbles the Haughty,
The One Raises Up the Lowly,
The One Who Releases the Bound,
The One Who Redeems the Poor,
The One Who Helps the Weak,
The One Who Answers Those Who Cry Out;
The One Who Fights for Freedom.
For on that day, all will be One, and our name One.
So May it be Your Will. Amen.
The Tisch
Rabbi Michael Rose Knopf 