There are moments in our lives that clarifies things for us in ways we don’t really expect. And there are people who sometimes cross our paths just to clarify something for us, like a nudge on the right direction – and then they disappear. Like changing a vowel in a Hebrew word, which is a device that the rabbis use often enough, they change how you see things – and whenever you read that verse in the Torah again, it is impossible to forget the new reading.
One example of that is a verse in Song of Songs that states “al ken alamot ahevuha” – and therefore all the young unmarried women love you”. The rabbis say – don’t read alamot, but olamot – worlds. And so the other reading is “and so, many worlds love You”, meaning, You, God, are loved in many worlds, because You are the presence that makes all worlds possible.
So, yes, as one of our great students in Hebrew School would say, Judaism holds by the multiverse theory.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, my friend Cooper Bruno will explain it to you.
So it is just a vowel – and with that one change, every Passover when we read Song of Songs, I think about maidens and worlds. And there are people, who function in our lives a lot like vowels and the rabbis, giving you a glimpse, changing everything, and then disappearing.
One of those people was the mother // of a guy // I knew briefly in high school. I really did not know him well, we met on our last year of high school and we shared no classes. I am guilty of not remembering his name, or his mother’s. All I remember about him is that he had a brother that everyone thought was his twin, but they were actually born nine months apart.
And for some reason, this kid decided that I had to talk to his mom, whom he deemed very wise and whom he thought could help me. He really set his mind into it – to the point of, on the last day of school, he got his mother to come and, somehow, I found myself sitting in the café near the school talking to this woman whom I never met before – and whom I sensed I’d never meet again. And we talked for a long time. And then she told me that her son said I was interested in Judaism. And did I know what did it mean to be Jewish?
To choose life, she said. I had no idea what she was talking about.
And yes, she was very wise, because then she asked me a question that I only saw again in Rabbinical school.
What happens, she asked, when a wedding procession meets a burial procession in the same street?
Imagine, for a moment, there is only one street they can take. Which one takes precedence?
For a second there, I have to say, I was afraid she wanted to set me up with her son. That’s how clueless I was about this conversation.
But then she continued asking questions: did I know what happens if the father of the bride or the mother of the groom dies just before the wedding?
I had no idea.
Truth is, she continued, the wedding is completed before the burial. And similarly, the procession that takes precedence is the wedding’s, and not the burial. Jews choose life, even when things look bleak. Even when terrible things happen.
Years later, looking back, I am sure that the boy in question just saw my loneliness and my sadness for having lost my father at the beginning of high school, and he sensed somehow that I had spent the two and a half years after that in a mournful stage, stuck. Yes, I went to classes, got good grades, even had boyfriends, but this boy sensed I needed a talk with an adult who would be just invested in helping me out of the rut, the pit, the spiritual and emotional mud I was stuck in.
And his mother did what she could, steering me to look at life, to see life as a blessing to be lived and enjoyed. As the transitory miracle it is. Choose life.
And then of course there’s the verse in the Torah: “see – I set before you life and death, blessing and curse, therefore chose life” – now stop thinking about it for a moment. Isn’t this is somewhat obvious?
If you have life and death in front of you, how could you possibly not choose life? If you have blessing and curse in front of you, isn’t the choice of blessing the one you’d definitely take?
And this is what the mother of that kid told me: no, not obvious at all. You have to be aware that the choice is always there, even in small moments of processions using the same road. Even in large moments of lifecycle events. Always direct yourself towards life – that is where the arrow of the Jewish compass points to.
That conversation returned to my consciousness a few times in the past year. Particularly because we have seen many moments when those two values clashed – death and life. A week after October 7th of 2024, the family of one of the hostages, Itay Chen, z”l, had a dilema: should they go on with the bar mitzvah of Itay’s younger brother?
The Peretz family faced a similar dillema: Should Yonatan go ahead with his wedding, given that one of his brothers might be abducted to Gaza and Yonatan himself had been shot in the leg on October 7th?
The Ben Yishay family had the same dillema: what to do about the bat mitzvah of Noam, when her grandfather, Gadi Moses, is a hostage?
I could go on and on, cases like that were – and to our sorrow, still are – incredibly common. And true to my friend’s mother’s words, true to the Talmud, all of those life affirming moments were celebrated, the absence of their loved ones still there, pervasive, but not setting the tone for the experience.
The barbarity and the cruelty of what happened in October 7th, the scale of the brutality, had a goal which has nothing to do with conquering land: to demoralize and degrade. It was not just about doing unspeakable acts, it was about putting them on the internet for all to see. Because the goal was to shame and humiliate, to transform us, to change our core.
And our collective choice of going ahead, forging the path, of choosing life, is a form of spiritual resistence, a form of spiritual resilience that we can find throughout our history. The decision of not falling into the vortex of despair and anger, the decision of still holding onto limits for actions, even military actions, the embracing of the fact that in two bad choices we must take the one that is less terrible – this is also our spiritual resistance. Because it is always a decision, both for individuals and for the collective.
Choosing life is not always obvious. Many heroes appeared, or were made, by this war. Many were and are soldiers and sergeants, police officers and generals. But soon after the attack, one story captured my attention for days. That is the story of Sholomo Ron z”l. He lived in kibbutz Nahal Oz, which he helped establish. He was 85 years old, and because he was going to have a procedure on Sunday, his two daughters and a grandson were with him that Shabbat. As he heard what was happening around the kibbutz, he made the three of them get into a hidden safe room, despite their protests, and sat on the living room, pretending to read the newspaper. He hoped that the terrorists would assume he was an old man living alone in the house. They did. He knew he could be killed, and he was – saving his family in the process. Had he too hidden himself along with the family, the terrorists would most likely have entered the empty house and searched for the entire family. They would all have been killed, or taken hostage. None in the family were armed, while the terrorists were armed to the teeth with advanced weapons.
Choosing life is not always obvious – sometimes we need to be spiritual contortionists to figure it out. Sometimes we have to think on our feet, get up in our hands and pass our legs above our heads to find the right position.
And I know that there are people who look at today, at Yom Kippur, and wonder – haven’t we suffered enough? What do I have to do with fasting, regretting actions, saying sorry?
And I get it. I get the strength of our collective suffering – here in the Diaspora, we have been reminded almost every day that Jews are seen at best with suspicion by certain groups, at best as useful foils by people who are malicious actors in the cesspool of social media, at best as a problem by people who have difficulty accepting our existence.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t see myself as part of the Jewish problem. I see myself as part of the Jewish existence. I exist. I am not a problem.
And my existence has two poles, the pole of those of us living in the State of Israel and the pole of us living outside of it. It is the existence of Jewish peoplehood.
The rabbis of the Talmud, when confronted with people and animals that had two heads, had a question: are we talking two entities or only one? The solution was, in the best scientific research of the time, proposed as an experiment. Make one head or one side of the body feel pain, and see what happens. If the other side feels pain too, you know it is just one entity.
I felt this teaching keenly this past year – for all our differences, Jews in Israel and Jews in the Diaspora are feeling the same pain. In our incredible multiplicity, in our profound diversity, we are one existence. One people. And together, in the middle of harsh conditions, we still chose life.
The pain, sometimes, seems so great that I know there are some of you who might have arrived to Yom Kippur feeling dislocated and angry, depleted and full of self-righteousness against God, against life. You might feel that you have nothing to apologize for, that God is the one who should be apologizing this year. And to you, I offer the tradition of bringing God to trial, to what is called a Din Torah, or in Yiddish a din Toire.
This was first done by Reb Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, in Ukraine. It was on Neilah, the end of Yom Kippur – Levi Yitzchak put God on trial. His charge?
That God failed to prevent the persecution and economic deprivation of his fellow Jews of the 18th century – it was really not easy to be a jew in Ukraine in the 18th century. His witnesses? His righteous community, doers of good deeds, mostly poor Jews but not all, and yet all persecuted and beaten in a pogrom. And the verdict? You might be surprised, but this hasidic rebbe, beard and peyes, proclaimed that God was guilty on all the charges. And then… Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev closes his invective by saying Kaddish, the prayer that sanctifies God in the midst of loss and pain, the one you might know from funerals and shiva. His Din Toire is famous, you can find the text in the internet, translated. And Reb Levi Yitzchak finished Neilah, certain that God would bless his community with a good year. In a scene that defies our vision of what a pious person is, Levi Yitzchak chose life, both with lowercase EL and with EL as a capital letter.
Elie Wiesel wrote a similar scene as part of the book Night, and later, his famous play “The Trial of God”. In Night, the inmates in Auschwitz bring God to trial – and Elie Wiesel himself said in an interview that he was there when this happened. At the end of the trial, unlike Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who says “guilty”, the inmates said “chayav”, God owes us something, God is in debt. And then they went on to say ma’ariv, the evening prayer.
So the anger and the pain of our existence are made bareable by our choices – by our embracing of the mystery and by our embracing of our collective existence, by our being together throughout the centuries as the miracle we are. Choose life – so that you and your children may live, says the text. So we can live a meaningful, dedicated life to our community, our people and the world.
Gmar Chatimah Tovah.