Shanah tovah! Welcome to Rosh Hashanah, our Jewish New Year. I’m grateful for this opportunity to share thoughts from our tradition with you tonight, and I thank you for being here as we begin this holy time together.
Our services are made possible by many minds, hands and hearts: Cantor Re’ut Ben Ze’ev, our volunteer prayer leaders and shofar blowers, Leah Adler and all of the ritual committee, the board, Joanna Schnurman, Julio Ramos and Honor Edmands. Each has played a fundamental role in bringing us together yesterday, today, tomorrow and the High Holy Days ahead.
This is a wonderful beginning of the season of transformation, our Yamim Nora’im, our High Holy days.
Transformation, the recreation of the self, is what our tradition invites us to these days. We take leave from the world to embrace the possibility of transformation.
Now, I was seven and a half years old when I witnessed my first and most amazing moment of transformation – and that was… Clark Kent becoming Superman. As we had moved to Argentina, and settled in a tiny sleepy little town of 2,000 families, Pergamino, my parents decided to treat us, children, to an amazing experience – and took us to the movies. Superman was playing on the local cinema. The fact that he spoke English, and you had to read Spanish fast to catch up to the story, made no difference. I was smitten with the man of steel.
I mean, who wouldn’t? A completey good guy, someone who can fly faster than a speeding bullet, who is more powerful than a locomotive, and who, in a single bound, can leap tall buildings, can go backward in time, fix all problems and defeat evil. And to top it all, incredibly handsome. Blue, earnest eyes, and black waivy hair.
So it should come with no surprise that Mark and I, along something like 60 million other people worldwide, took our kids to see the new Superman movie this year. And as I revisited this powerful first example of transformation, I of course I hit the books, I learned something amazing: the man of steel was actually forged in the shtetl.
We all know Clark Kent is Superman, but I learned that both Clark Kent and Superman are Jewish. Books like “Up, Up, and Oy Vey” and “Is Superman Circumcised?” tell us a story that is actually hiding in plain sight:
In 1938, two Jewish kids from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, lived the immigrant story. Their families had fled Eastern Europe in the great Jewish migration of the late 1800s, and they understood what it meant to change your name, blend in, and yet never forget where you came from, who you were, which are your values. They made that story into a character: they called him Superman.
Siegel and Shuster imbued that creation with a deep, hidden identity. Consider the core elements of Superman’s story: his given name, Kal-El, is Hebrew for “voice of God” or “swift is God.” El is the ending of many names for angels in our tradition, that became regular names used by Jews and non-Jews alike: Michael, Rafael, Gabriel. Kal means swift, and Kol, which can be written as kal, depending on how you transliterate, means voice. Kal-El. What a Jewish name.
Now Superman, as a baby, was sent away from a dying world to survive. That world was a grand world, but is no more, there is no expectation of ever getting it back. There is no return to that past. Superman was destined to grow up hiding his true identity, he is raised by two good people who love him deeply, know he is a wonder, gifted, and yet do not understand him completely. Those adoptive parents have to be hidden themselves from the bad guys.
And his story is even more complex than that. Superman has a secret. He lives his everyday life as Clark Kent, the mild-mannered reporter of the Daily Planet in the city of Metropolis. Clark is quiet, a bit of a klutz, a little incompetent and clueless, and wears glasses. This the opposite of his heroic self. This duality — the public, assimilated persona of Clark Kent and the private, powerful, and truly unique identity of Superman — is a powerful metaphor for the Jewish American experience.
For many of us, our lives are a balance between these two worlds. We live as Clark Kent, fully integrated into American society, speaking its language, understanding its culture, and fitting in seamlessly.
Yet, within us lies a powerful, ancient, and divine identity — the Superman within. The question for us today is not which identity is real, but how we can embrace both. And all the other identities that happen inside the life of a person in America in the 21st century.
Nearly a century ago, Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan talked about Jews living in two civilizations – two identities. Kaplan meant that a Jewish American person could maintain kashrut while embracing democratic values, celebrate both Sukkot and Thanksgiving as meaningful cultural moments, and draw from both traditions to create a rich, authentic life.
This framework back then liberated many of us from the false choice between assimilation and isolation. We were happy to be both 100% Jewish and 100% American. That rung true and powerful in 1920s, when he was writing.
Nowadays, however, we know that there are multiple identities for any person, and certainly any Jewish person. The binary does not work anymore – we have Jews that are Black, Asian, Latino, LGBTQ+, say nothing of the political expressions that are used as identities these days.
Our tradition speaks to these many identities in different ways – living in the Diaspora and its tensions with Jewishness is as old as the Bible itself. Consider a beloved Jewish holiday, Purim. The story is in the Book of Esther, the redemption from Haman is celebrated every year at Adath Israel, with reading the megillah and our Purim carnival. The entire story of Purim revolves around a hidden identity – and antisemitism.
Esther, a Jewish woman, becomes queen in the court of the Persian king, Ahashverosh. At the urging of Mordechai, her uncle for all purposes, she keeps her Jewish identity a secret. She is a perfect Clark Kent, blending in so completely that no one suspects her true origins. But when her people are threatened by Haman, Mordechai delivers a message that forces her to confront her true self: “Who knows if for such a time as this you have attained royalty?” (Esther 4:14).
Esther realizes that her identity is not a weakness to be hidden, but the very tool of her salvation. She sheds her Clark Kent persona, reveals her Jewishness to the king, and ultimately saves her people. For many of us, there comes a moment when our Jewish identity is called upon, not just for our own sake, but for a greater good. It is in those moments that our hidden strength is revealed.
Take the true story of Shai Davidai. He was a professor at Columbia University, and in his own words not very public about his Jewish and Israeli identity until October 7th.
As an Assistant Professor in the Management Division of Columbia Business School, his research examined people’s everyday judgments of themselves, other people, and society. A very universal theme. I first heard him speak on a podcast called Israel Story, which features “wartime diaries”, by Mishi Harman. There, Shai Davidai explains that prior to October 7th 2023 his Jewish identity was important but never “out there”. Shai even looks a little like Clark Kent. As a good professor, he wears glasses. In the army, he served as a medic for the Navy. He self-defines as a left winger in Israel, usually critical of the government. Living in Israel, he explains, makes your Jewishness paradoxically less intentional – it is like water for a fish. In America, he and his wife found out, for the first time, that to remain Jewish you have to be intentional about being Jewish. So they spoke Hebrew at home. They read the Israeli equivalent of PJ Library to their kids. They made time to observe some of holidays. They talked about values.
But the atmosphere he witnessed on college campuses (and specifically at Columbia), compelled him to speak up and speak out against Hamas. And let me tell you that on Twitter, on October 6th 2023, he had 900 followers, most people who are self-proclaimed nerds of universities, professors, talking about research in economics. But once a video of him speaking off the cuff, about his experiences on October 7th, and the experiences of his family in Israel, and what was happening on the campus, all that changed.
By March 31, 2024, he had 30,000 followers. Nowadays he has almost 108,000. Having found his identity and his voice, he also lost his job at Columbia University. He has a podcast, entitled Here I am. Hineini. This is a powerful Jewish sentence.
It was on that podcast, Here I am with Shai Davidai, that I heard the story of Debra Messing. Having been born in Brooklyn, but moving next to a farm in Rhode Island, Debra Messing had many encounters with antisemites. She was called names in second grade, her grandfather’s car was vandalized with a swastika and she was taunted by the other kids when she observed Yom Kippur. So she hid. She began lying to other children, telling them she was sick every time she had to stay home for a Jewish holiday. “I had decided I am just going to hide,” she explained. “I’m going to hide my identity. I’m gonna try and just blend in because that’s the safest way.”
Sounds like a great Clark Kent to me.
But for college she went to Brandeis University. That shook her awake, because the school is, I am quoting her here, “Jew U.”
She explained that not only they “had off for Yom Kippur, but everyone talked about Shabbat and all of the sudden I felt seen. And I over the years became proud and decided that I wasn’t going to hide anymore and that I was going to embrace my heritage, and be loud and proud.” Debra Messing has emerged as a prominent voice against antisemitism in recent years, as a side to her activism regarding marginalized communities seeking equity and inclusion. She also chose to say Hineini, here I am.
And this sentence, here I am – Hineini, is a powerful Jewish sentence. Abraham is the first human to use it, as the Torah reading of today has told us: here I am. I am present at this moment – unapologetically Jewish. Now all of us can see the Superman behind the glasses. The Clark Kent persona was no longer.
None of them: Esther, Shai Davidai, Debra Messing, Superman are hiding their strength – they are all showing their essence, their soul.
This brings us to a second Jewish source for this morning, the very essence of Jewish existence. The Zohar speaks of the Neshamah, the soul, and the Guf, the body.
The body is the external vessel, the public-facing part of us that interacts with the world. But the Neshamah is the inner, divine spark, our true, spiritual self. Our soul. It is this hidden essence that connects us to God and to our tradition.
Our Clark Kent self is the Guf, navigating the complexities of the modern world in diaspora, in America of the 21st century. Our Superman identity is our Neshamah, the part of us that remembers our covenant, our history, and our sacred obligations. It never forgets. It remembers its deep devotion to Life, with capital L.
In that, we are no different than our ancestors in other great Jewish Diasporas, like Spain in the early middle ages, like Poland in the 13th century with the statute of Kalisz, when Jews were so accepted and integrated in the general community that they had to be intentional about their Jewish identity and practices.
The Jewish challenge has always been to ensure that the Guf never completely overshadows the Neshamah, but rather serves as its protective shield, a way to move through the world while keeping our deepest identity intact, coming out when needed to connect with the Transcendent, to defend Jewish peoplehood.
The thing is, we are different. We straddle two worlds: the world of religion and the world of peoplehood.
When a convert comes in, they are not signing up just for a set of beliefs and actions, they are signing up for a collective destiny: in Nazi Germany, for instance, a convert, even if they were 100% Aryan, had the same end as a born Jew.
But our Jewish identity cannot be constructed just by antisemitism. We can’t be Jewish just because others hate us. Ours is a tradition in which the main life-long intellectual exercise is to know enough to have a dialogue with the tradition. A few of my non-Jewish friends express surprise when they learn how alive and full of opinions Jewish Law really is, how diverse. This is because Christians come from a tradition, particularly if they are Catholics, that prizes agreement with tenets, and a collective path of decision making – in the Catholic tradition the Pope is the presence of God in the world.
But not us. The Shechinah, God’s presence, according to the rabbis, resides whenever one, two, three, ten people are studying and debating together. God’s presence is inside every Jewish soul, lovingly beconing us to be our best selves, using our traditions and our mitzvot as a vehicle to survive in the world.
And Jewish peoplehood gives us a lesson too.
Look at our history, look at the history of the Jewish people. Time and again, we have been a people who were seemingly scattered, weak, and without a homeland, yet we have defied all expectations. We are a miracle in time: the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans – not one of those remain, their cultural influence makes up bits and pieces of the Western culture, but they are not here.
We, on the other hand, can say – hineini, in Hebrew, here I am. Or Ich bin doh, in Yiddish – here I am. Or that phrase in any of the several other Jewish languages in the world, like ladino, judeo-arabic, judeo-Malayalam….
We, my friends, we are the ultimate Superman, a people that has survived against all odds, creating a powerful spiritual and intellectual tradition that has shaped our presence in the world through Torah, mitzvot and community.
This strength did not come from our public persona, did not come from our Clark Kent, but from our hidden resilience, our Superman, our emunah our faith, about which I will be speaking about tomorrow – I know, shameless plug – and from our unwavering commitment to our identity and the right of being us. The right and the beauty of being different.
Ours is a strength that is so profound, it often takes an outside observer to see it. It is the kind of strength that shows up in moments of great crisis, but it has been building inside us all along, being nurtured by our commitment to our values, ideals and texts.
Let us learn from Superman’s duality. Our Jewish identity is not something to be forgotten or compartmentalized. It is our greatest strength, our moral compass, and our source of resilience. We can be Clark Kent, fully present in the world, and we can be Superman, powered by the strength of our Neshamot, our souls.
The challenge, and the opportunity, is to let our Superman self—the one who draws from thousands of years of tradition, from the Torah, from our sacred texts, and from our collective soul—guide our actions as Clark Kent. As a reminder, you all received a seal of Superman – remember who you are.
So here is to a year in which we all have the strength to live as both Clark and Superman, finding the right moment to reveal our true selves for the good of our people and all of humanity. May we finding the strength to do so, and the courage to learn so as to be a meaningful part of our people. Le Shanah Tovah tikatevu. May we all be inscribed in the book of a life well lived.