Rabbi's Blog

Pekudei –

Summary: “Pekudei,” means “Accountings of”. This is what the Parsha deals with: an accounting is made of the gold, silver and copper donated by the people for the making of the Mishkan. Betzalel, Oholiav and their assistants make the eight priestly garments—the apron, breastplate, cloak, crown, hat, tunic, sash and breeches—according to the specifications communicated to Moshe before, in Tetzaveh.

The Mishkan is completed and all its components are brought to Moshe, who make it stand and anoints it with the anointing oil, markign that every single piece is now holy. Moshe initiates Aharon and his four sons into the priesthood. A cloud appears over the Mishkan, signifying the Divine Presence that has come to dwell within it.

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In a small village, far from the great centers of Torah learning of Poland, lived a simple Jew named Shmuel. He was neither a scholar nor a wealthy man—just a carpenter, he made his living by building houses. His hands were rough from years of labor, and his back hurt from carrying wood. He never felt the center of anything, and always thought of himself as a background figure.

Shmuel often thought of the Mishkan, the holy sanctuary built in the wilderness. He loved listening to the Torah portions detailing the construction. He marveled at how each material—gold, silver, wood, wool—was carefully accounted for, and how every craftsman, from the most skilled to the simplest, had a role in its creation.

One day, news spread that the great Rebbe of Mezhibuzh, the Baal Shem Tov, was visiting a nearby town. Though the journey was long, Shmuel felt an irresistible pull to go. “Perhaps,” he thought, “I will hear a teaching that will lift my soul.”

Upon arriving, Shmuel found the Rebbe surrounded by scholars and wealthy patrons, all seeking his wisdom. Shmuel stood quietly at the back of the crowd, listening intently but feeling small. What could a simple carpenter like him contribute to such a gathering?

The Baal Shem Tov suddenly looked up, his piercing eyes scanning the crowd. “Tell me, my friends” he called out, “is there a carpenter among us?”

The people turned, surprised, when Shmuel hesitantly stepped forward. “I am a carpenter, Rebbe.”

The Baal Shem Tov smiled. “Tell me, beautiful soul, when you begin preparing boards for building  a house, do you ever find a board that seems crooked or unfit for use?”

Shmuel nodded. “Yes, Rebbe. But I do not discard it right away. Sometimes, I find that it fits perfectly in a place I did not expect.”

The Rebbe’s face lit up. “Aha! And so it is with us. In the great structure of creation, some souls seem crooked, unworthy, or unimportant. But Hashem, the Master Builder, does not cast them away. Instead, God knows exactly where they belong.”

A hush fell over the crowd. The great scholars, the wealthy patrons—all of them suddenly understood that just as the Mishkan needed all the willing participants to be there, even those who seemed small and unnecessary, in the world too, very person has a place, even those who feel unworthy.

Tears welled in Shmuel’s eyes. He had always felt like an unnoticed worker in the background, but now he saw the truth: in Hashem’s divine accounting, no one is extra, no one is wasted. Every person, every effort, is counted.

As he left, his step was lighter, his heart full. He would return to his work with new strength, knowing that in the great building of Hashem’s world, his hands—and his soul—mattered.

That night, he had a dream: the Mishkan stood in front of him. But it was not the mishkan of the Torah text. An angel explained to him: “Shmuel, what you see is the spiritual reality of the Mishkan, the mishkan above. Every good deed, every pure thought, every time you hold back from speaking ill, every tear you shed in prayer — all these are pieces that come together in this Mishkan, the one that all the souls of the Jewish people help build, in this reality above. And Shmuel, there is one piece missing… and it is yours to place.”

From that time on, Shmuel never again saw himself as small. He understood that in Hashem’s divine accounting, every action of every person who yearns for for God’s presence is a fundamental piece in the spiritual reality of the Jewish people.

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Shacharit

~ When was the Mishkan completed? When is that this year?

~ What is Moshe’s reaction when all is said and done? Why, in your opinion? What does he do?

~ Can you find connections between the mishkan and the story of creation, back in genesis?

Summary: Bo means “come”, as in “come to Pharaoh”, even though the translation will say ‘go to Pharaoh’. And this is God commanding Moshe to talk to Pharaoh after the announcement that God has, indeed, hardened Pharaoh’s heart. We read the last three plagues: locusts, darkness and the plague of the firstborn. We read the very first collective mitzvah – establishing a calendar. We read the first passover of all times, with the lamb and the blood on the mezuzot. Passover specifics are given: not bread, no leaven for seven days, eat matzah, tell your children. The commandment of tefilin is also given.

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KS

The Kotzker Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Morgensztern of Kotzk lived from 1787 to 1859 in Poland wants to tell us an important point regarding our portion. He starts with, “Bo el Paro,” come to Pharaoh. Notice, he says, that the Torah does not say lekh, as in like Lekh Lekha to Abraham and Sarah. It could. And actually, good Hebrew would say it should read “lekh el Par’o, go to Pharaoh. But it doesn’t the Text says Bo, “come” to Pharaoh. The Kotzker will say that there is a reason for that, that the reason is that one cannot go from the Blessed Holy One – it is impossible to distance one’s self from God, because God exists in every makom or in English, “place,” in every place.

Every piece of reality we experience, the good, the bad, the ugly – there is God there too.

The Kotzker rebbe quotes Isaiah, which is a famous sentence if you come to shul on the morning: “Melo kol ha-aretz kevodo –  The whole earth is full of God’s kavod.” – that is, glory, majesty, honor. The Kotzker continues: “Therefore God says here, ‘come’, as if to say, ‘Come with me.’ Hineni it’cha, Behold, I am here with you wherever you go.”  Meaning, as the Talmudic rabbis say, the universe is not the place of God, God is the place of the universe. God is not a deity with limited location and powers, God is not a him, God is not a her either, God just is. Maimonides will say something to the effect that God is the background or ground of all meaning, of all reality. God is the touchstone of all morality and ethics. In other words, that God is not “a god,” but that God is the word our ancestors used to mean that reality that we need to acknowledge before we can do anything meaningful.

The Kotzker is saying is that Moshe needs to change his own paradigm about God. Moshe – and us, of course – need to stop thinking that God is going to take him by the hand and go somewhere with him, and fix all things. Moshe needs to understand that God, in the way that God wants to be known, is already with him and in fact also with Pharaoh, and that the responsibility is now entirely on Moshe to understand that truth and to do what needs to be done.

Another famous story of the Kotzker is him asking his bewildered students, “Where does God dwell? Where does God exist?” They say, “Well you taught us that Rebbe. You taught us that God is everywhere. The whole earth is full of God’s glory.” And the Kotzker answers “Not exactly – God is wherever we let God in.” In other words, there’s no place or person or thing or animal in whom God is not – there is no place in the world that is void of God’s presence.  But we, we can be void of the awareness of that reality, we can feel that God is not there because we do not acknowledge that reality.

In a way, the Kotzker is trying to disabuse us of a childishly idea of God, that of a superman (or superwoman) or that of a big daddy (or mommy) that will make it all better. It is fine to have that idea when you are a kid, but once you have some more years and experiences under your belt, that theology is a recipe for disaster. The notion that the Kotzker is advancing here is that God is the reality who is already here with you, and will be with you even in the frightening moments of your life  – in Moshe’s life, the moment of confronting a Pharaoh who has a hardened heart. In your life, think of whatever was the most frightening time you had – and God was there with you too, and God will be there with you. The only thing left for you to do is also the most fundamental: acknowledge and understand that reality.

So may this be a week of embracing this mystery: God is. In all of our experiences, God is, was and will be. Shabbat shalom.

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What are the mitzvot mentioned in our reading this morning? What are the connections that you can find between them?

[matzah, pessach, telling the story, sacrificing firstborn, tefilin] All hearken back to knowing we were slaves.

Summary: “Vayechi,” means “And he lived” – just as we had with Chayey Sarah, which means the life of Sarah but actually talks about her death, here too we will begin with Vayechi Yaakov – Yaakov lived, but we are actually seeing Yaakov’s last moments.

Yaakov will take the transformation of death haed on: he first make Yosef, or Joseph, swear that his body will be taken to be buried in the Cave of Machpelah; and then in a second scene he blesses Yosef’s children, Efrayim and Menashe. The third scene of his passing is where our triennial picks up: at the end of his blessings for each of his children. We read the blessing for Biniamin and an explanation for the request of being buried in the Cave of Machpelah. We will read the Egyptian rites for Yaakov and the Jewish ones. The portion will end with Yosef again assuring his brothers of his complete forgiveness, his death and making the descendants of Yaakov promise they would take his bones back to the land of Israel when possible.

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KS

There was once a man who lived a comfortable life in a quiet village. He had three close companions whom he loved dearly, each played an important role in his life.

One day, a royal messenger arrived at his home with startling news: “The king has summoned you to his court. Prepare yourself, for you must give an account of your life.”

The man grew anxious. “I have never been to the palace,” he thought. “I need support. I must ask my friends to accompany me.”

He turned to his first friend, the one he loved most. He said to the friend: “the king has summoned me. Will you come with me to the palace?”

The friend answered: “Are you kidding? I will stay in your house. Don’t you know what is written? “Riches profit not in the day of wrath” (Prov. 11:4).

The man felt a pang of sorrow. He then turned the second friend, whom he loved but paid less attention in life than the first friend and asked: “the king has summoned me. Will you accompany me and speak on my behalf?”

The second friend was a little better than the first, but not by much. He said: “I will come with you to the gates of the palace, but we cannot go beyond the gates. At the king’s court, you you are on your on. Don’t you know what’s written: “None can by any means redeem their brother” “For the redemption of their soul is priceless” (Ps. 49:7-8).

The man’s heart grew heavy. Finally, he turned to his third friend, which he had often neglected in the busyness of life. Hesitantly, he approached him. “My faithful friend,” he said, “I have not always tended to you as I should. But the king has summoned me and I am afraid. Will you come with me?”

The third friend, glowing with quiet strength, replied, “I have been with you all along, though you may not have noticed. Wherever you go, I will go. At the king’s court, I will even speak for you. Don’t you know what’s written? “Your righteousness shall go before you, the glory of Hashem will be your reward” (Isa. 58:8)

The man felt a deep sense of peace.

The first friend, his possessions, only help a person in this world. Even before burial, they are gone. The second friend, which are a person’s family and friends, can only help to escort a person to burial. Then they must take leave. But our good deeds, even though they are not always appreciated and even though they are the ones we least pay attention to, they are the true loyal friend. With their assurance, the man prepared for his journey to the palace, as we all do.

(Based on Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer, 34:8, on Ps 49:5)

Supporting sources

אָמַר לֵיהּ רִבִּי חִייָא רוּבָּא כְּדוֹן אִינּוּן מֵימָר לְמָחָר אִינּוּן גַבָּן וְאִינּוּן מְעִיקִין לָן. אָמַר לֵיהּ וְחַכְמִין אִינּוּן כְּלוּם לָא כֵן כְּתִב וְהַמֵּתִים אֵינָם יוֹדְעִים מְאוּמָה. אָמַר לֵיהּ לִקְרוֹת אַתְּ יוֹדֵעַ. לִדְרוֹשׁ אֵין אַתְּ יוֹדֵעַ. כִּי הַחַיִּים יוֹדְעִים שֶׁיָּמוּתוּ אֵלּוּ הַצַּדִּיקִים שֶׁאֲפִילוּ בְמִיתָתָן קְרוּיִין חַיִּים. וְהַמֵּתִים אֵינָם יוֹדְעִים מְאוּמָה אֵלּוּ הָֽרְשָׁעִים שֶׁאֲפִילוּ בְחַיֵּיהֶן קְרוּיִין מֵתִים. מְנַיִין שֶׁהָֽרְשָׁעִים אֲפִילוּ בְחַיֵּיהֶן קְרוּיִין מֵתִים שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר כִּי לֹא אֶחְפּוֹץ בְּמוֹת הַמֵּת. וְכִי הַמֵּת מֵת. אֶלָּא אֵילּוּ הָֽרְשָׁעִים שֶׁאֲפִילוּ בְחַיֵּיהֶן קְרוּיִין מֵתִים. וּמְנַיִין שֶׁהַצַּדִּיקִים אֲפִילוּ בְמִיתָתָן קְרוּיִין חַיִּים. דִּכְתִיב וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו זֹאת הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר נִשְׁבַעְתִּי לְאַבְרָהָם לְיִצְחָק וּלְיַעֲקֹב לֵאמֹר. מַה תַלְמוּד לוֹמַר לֵאמֹר. אָמַר לוֹ לֵךְ וֶאֱמוֹר לָאָבוֹת כָּל־מַה שֶׁהִתְנֵיתִי לָכֶם עָשִׂיתִי לִבְנֵיכֶם אַחֲרֵיכֶם.

(Proverbs.9.5) “The living know that they will die”, these are the just people, who even in death are considered living; “but the dead do not know anything;” these are the wicked people, who even in life are called dead. From where that the wicked even in life are called dead? It is said (Ezekiel.18.32) “For I have no pleasure in the death of the dead;” how can a dead person die? But these are the wicked who even in life are called dead. And from where that the Just even in death are considered living? It is written (Deuteronomy.34.4) “And He said to him: This is the land I had sworn to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to tell.” Why does the verse say “to tell”? He said to him: go and tell the patriarchs that all I had promised I fulfilled to your descendants after you. Jerusalem Talmud, Brachot 2:3

״וְהַמֵּתִים אֵינָם יוֹדְעִים מְאוּמָה״ — אֵלּוּ רְשָׁעִים, שֶׁבְּחַיֵּיהֶן קְרוּיִין ״מֵתִים״, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״וְאַתָּה חָלָל רָשָׁע נְשִׂיא יִשְׂרָאֵל״. וְאִי בָּעֵית אֵימָא, מֵהָכָא: ״עַל פִּי שְׁנַיִם עֵדִים אוֹ עַל פִּי שְׁלֹשָׁה עֵדִים יוּמַת הַמֵּת״, חַי הוּא! אֶלָּא, הַמֵּת מֵעִיקָּרָא.

In contrast to the righteous, who are referred to as living even after their death, the verse states explicitly: “The dead know nothing.” These are the wicked, who even during their lives are called dead, as the prophet Ezekiel said in reference to a king of Israel who was alive: “And you are a slain, wicked prince of Israel” (Ezekiel 21:30). And if you wish, say instead that the proof is from here: “At the mouth of two witnesses or three witnesses the dead shall be put to death” (Deuteronomy 17:6). This is puzzling. As long as the accused has not been sentenced to death, he is alive. Rather, this person who is wicked is considered dead from the outset. Brachot 18b

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Morning – questions for discussion

~ Look at the burial practices of Egypt and of the Hebrews, both in our reading.

~ What is surprising? What can you tell about the pressures Yosef is under?

~ What do you make of the exchange between Yosef and Pharaoh?

I want to thank Adath Israel for the privilege to talk to you tonight. Much has happened since our last Rosh Hashanah together, and I am thankful to have us as a community to process the sadness, madness and miracles of the past year.

A story is told // about a shoemaker // who was a follower of the Rebbe of Ger, Reb Yitzchak Me’ir Alter. The shoemaker// approached the rebbe to know what he could do// about his prayer. “You see, rebbe,” he said, “I am poor. My customers are poor. They only own one pair of shoes. I pick their shoes to fix late at night, when they arrive from work, and I work on them for the night and a part of the morning, so I can deliver the fixed shoes to them before they have to go to work. How should I make my morning prayers? Should I just pray quickly in the morning, rushing, alone, with no intention, so I can go back to work and deliver the shoes? Is that even prayer?”

“What happens, asked Yitzchak Me’ir Alter, “when you can’t pray?” “Oh, rebbe, I raise my hammer every so often and sigh a great sigh, and say “woe is me, I haven’t prayed yet”. “Sometimes”, said the rebbe, “a sigh is more than prayer itself.”

A sigh – more than all the words in the morning prayer, but just sometimes.

And according to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “God lives in a word.”  But, he added, “Words can only open the door, and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible.”

These words of Abraham Joshua Heschel and this story of the shoemaker have been in my mind a lot this past year, since the incomprehensible. I thirst to be able to approach God. And yet.

October 7^th weighted heavily througout the year.

And it still does – truthfully I only feel I have got used to the weight, but it is still there, a deep hole of despair and sadness that is reinforced with every hostage that is declared dead, with every interview with a survivor. To be completely transparent, my spiritual survival this year had a lot to do with our daily minyan. To be in community, even if it is to share in the flabbergastedness, even if only to share the heavy news as each day brought details, even if only to say kaddish for countless souls – that was a life saver. Or maybe a spiritual life saver.

And some people asked me – but rabbi how can you pray?

And the question is really not a “how” question. It is not a nuts-and-bolts question. This is a “why” disguised in a “how”.

How can you pray: that is a simple thing – you open your heart and you pour it out to the One that is always listening, even if you are hurt, even if you are angry, even if you are numb and can barely get any feelings out. How is a simple thing: Jews pray with words, most of the time. Either the ones our ancestors honed for the past 2100 years, or your own, or a combination, or a poem you find somewhere – or soetimes, like the shoemaker, Jews pray with a sigh. Tears can be prayer. Or laughter. Or joy.

The how, as I said, is simple – maybe not easy, but simple.

But the question is not a “how”. It is a “why”. Why do you pray, rabbi? Why, in front of such a disaster, do you pray?

The real problem is that we, humans, tend to hide so much of whom we are from other people, that when it comes to talk to God we are in real trouble, as we can’t even show to ourselves who we are – so what does it mean to open our hearts and pray?

And some can say – there is no God, rabbi, wake up, if there was a God, the Holocaust woudn’t have happened! If there was a God, October 7^th wouldn’t have happened!

Well, that is not a reason for God not to exist, I’m afraid. There is no reason why God should interfere with what people do to one another, do with one another. The fact is, we are still here.

We, the Jewish people. Through destructions, through expulsions, through pogroms, through massacres, /// here we still stand. If you need a proof of the existence of a miracle, look no further than our own people. The Egyptians? Gone. The Assyrians? Gone. The Babylonians? Gone. The Romans? Gone. But we, our Torah and our prayers? We remain. Ich bin doh, here I am, said the camp survivor visiting Auschwitz 40 years after the liberation. Hineini. Here I am.

When I was at camp Ramah this past summer, one of my classes was with eleven year olds, in which I would discuss theology and God.

Theology is a big scary word, so I changed it to “thoughts about God”. And I explained to them that we need to revisit what we think about God every so often. When you were five or six, I asked, what were your abilities in math? How big were the numbers you could sum? And in English? What kind of sentences did you know how to write? And they all agreed that, if now, at fifth or sixth grade they would present the same work that got them high praise when they were six, there would be no praise. If at age 15 you still think like when you were 10, that’s no badge of honor. Kids know this as “growth mindset” – and what I mean is: we will talk about what you think about God, but do not let this be calcified in your soul, in your heart, in your mind. Let it grow and develop. This is true, just as your growth in language and math is true. You learn, you appreciate, you live more – and you change, and so your relationship with God changes as well.

And then I tell them the story of my grandfather – a wonderful, loving, beloved man who had no use for God whatsoever. I’ll give you the cliffnotes, as some of you may have heard this story before: when I was seven, I flew back to Brasil, seeing my grandfather for the first time in six months. And boy, was I excited to see him. I wanted to share all the wonderful things I had experience flying, all I had seen. He listened patiently, while I was sitting on his lap. And then he asked: but did you see God up there? And I had NO IDEA what he was talking about. That was one of the things that we didn’t do in my house: we did not talk about God. So I asked him what did he mean? And he asked again: well, did you see a man, with a long beard and a scepter, sitting on a throne, up there? And I said no, I had not seen anything like that. To which he replied: this proves to you: God does not exist.

And the funny thing was that already then I did not believe that image of God. And later, of course, I understood – this is an image that every four and five year old has about God. It is the image that the Sumerians had about the gods.

Any Sumerian god is a guy – that goes without saying – ten thousand times more powerful than you, so it makes sense to worship that god and hope he won’t create too many problems for you when he is angry, and hope that he will help you when you need help. That is a fine idea when you are 5 years old and in a concrete phase. You need mental images. But you see – that does not work so well after you are 5 or 6 years old, because life grows, things happen, in my grandfather’s case his father dies, he is left taking care of the family at the age of ten, in a poverty stricken situation so bad that he and his brother had to share one pair of shoes to go to school.

And then, if you are expecting that a supernatural being is going to come and make it all better, because you prayed, you begged, you asked so very well and so very much – I have a bridge to sell you.

That same theology, says Melissa Raphael, in her book The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, which is a comparison of women’s theology and men’s theology, that same theology of an “all powerful god that will come and save you and make his presence known as clear as the day”, that theology enables us to understand how come men, in a much higher percentage than women, went through the holocaust and become atheists. Men, she says, were given a theology of a great power that would intercede and make it all better. A hierarchical theology. God as a strong father who will take care of you if he’s not angry at you.

Women, she says, were given a theology that you find God as you help others in a worse situation than you. A horizontal theology. And do you know how many people in a worse situation than you you can find in a concentration camp?

It is not that God is not there – it is that you have to change your thoughts and your relationship to God, and the way you find God and the way you nurture that relationship and that closeness. To me, that also happens through prayer. Prayer is not about just asking things from God. Prayer is in part a moment that helps me to see who am I becoming, what are my deepest impulses, which ones I wish to curb and which I wish to develop. As I go through the 19 blessings of the daily Amidah, most of which are unabashed requests, I watch my impulses and my words regarding repentance, healing, judgment, peace. Where are my feelings? Where are my desires?

It is said that prayer really is our humble answer to inconceavable surprise of being alive. It is all we can offer in return to the Mystery by which we live. It is a small act – this devotion of mine is wrapped on gratefulness for being alive, able to experience a world that is exquisite in its complexity and beauty, dangerous and marvelous, in which hate and love coexist.

Prayer to me is also a hook my own soul to the chain of our ancestors. The words in the machzor were composed throughout our history, and I tend to use them because in difficult times, like this year in particular, they remind me that no matter how difficult my times look like, there is always a time when it was harder for us, Jews. And yet – hineini, here I am, living in a time when America is still the best of diasporas it can be and Israel is still the best of that the holy land can be.

Rabbi Dr. David Weiss Halivni z”l, a survivor of a labor camp called Wolfsberg, remembers being in the presence of a hazan, Naphtali Stern z”l, who transcribed the High Holiday prayers from memory with a pen, on paper torn from cement bags that he purchased at great risk in exchange for bread. Halivni, then 16, was present while Naphtali Stern led the inmates in the high holiday prayers. Halivni tells us that in the labor camps those who prayed did not create new prayers, the torture and fear silenced the creative urge. Those who prayed, prayed like their usual custom and manner. They sought some traditional prayer that would express their deep longing to overcome the forces arrayed against them, and their sense that the suffering and misery around them was the result of evil, of cosmic forces over which they had no control or influence. Halivni points out that they found such a prayer in the prayer “מְלוֹךְ עַל כׇּל־הָעוֹלָם בִּכְבוֹדֶךָ” (eloheinu v’elohei avotenu m’lokh al kol ha’olam bikhvodekha); “Our God and God of our ancestors, reign over all the world in your full glory…” In this prayer, which you can find in the Uvechen section of our Amidah for Rosh Hashanah, we ask God to reign alone, to take the reins of the universe completely, and not allow evil forces to prevail. Sounds about right, if you ask me.

And also – many new prayers and poems and songs have been composed by Jews since October 7^th. For all the terrifying things that this year brought about, both in the diaspora and in Israel, we are still able to be creative.

A rabbi friend of mine went to Catalonia, Spain, and he stood in what was the floor of what was once-upon-a-time a marvelous synagogue. And then he realized – when Jewish people prayed then and there, it was a wholly different Jewish experience. Jews in Spain had arguably the greatest of times in Jewish history – until the ascension of kings who did not like Jews or Judaism at all, and expelled all Jews in 1492. But, even before those kings entered, Jews prayed for centuries in Spain.

And when they prayed towards Jerusalem, it was not to a possible place. Sure, some Jews lived there. But going to Jerusalem, under the Otoman Empire, was not a thing, as they say.

And here we are, almost 600 years later, and if we want we can go – many do, and become part of the strand of our people that make alyiah, return, and experience a Jewish government with a Jewish land with a Jewish army in a Jewish capital. Jerusalem nowadays speaks Hebrew, mostly. And even that is kind of new – the last time we hung out in a Jewish Jerusalem, before the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, we were speaking Aramaic. But we were still praying in Hebrew.

In our many diasporas, the Jewish people created and absorbed many customs and spoke many languages: Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Malayalam in India, Lishan Didan in Urmia, Yeshivish in present day America and many others. And yet, the Hebrew in the prayer book and in the Mishnah was the great unifier, the one constant in all our diasporas.

But what you thought about God when you said those prayers? No so much of a unifier. A friend of mine in Brasil used to say – the only thing Jews agree on is that there is only One God… and we disagree about everything that follows that statement. And some disagree as to whether that One God exists.

So we are about to spend a few hours together throughout Rosh HaShanah. We will go through the Machzor and we will use some of the new texts in the booklet.

Take this time to refine your relationship with God. To refine your relationship with prayer. To refine your relationship with our people. And if you feel like the shoemaker, if you feel that only a sigh will do, then sigh with all your being. If only tears will do, then cry with all your being. If taking to the streets will do, then take to the streets with all your being.

In times of profound dissonance, in times of feelings of deep vulnerability, in times of deep dislocation, in times of radical disorientation – prayer begins with the machzor, but it does not end there.

Given what year we had, may we make this a better year than last year. LeShanah Tovah, no – let’s say this year LeShanah Yoter Tovah – may we all go on to have a better year.

LeShanah Yoter Tovah.

I want to thank Adath Israel for the priviledge to talk to you today. Much has happened since our last Rosh Hashanah together, and I am thankful to have us as a community to process the sadness, madness and miracles of the past year.

Many years ago, I was a very young teacher at a Hebrew School, in charge of my first class, of first graders. It was a small class, only three kids, and I had a real blast with them. In Brazil, the school year begins in March, after Carnival of course, so our first big Jewish calendar moment is Passover, or Pesach. As befits the moment and the age group, I was told that I had to plan a mock seder. And so I did, with lots of games.

When we get to the four questions, I said to myself, I’ll ask the kids for their questions, of course they will ask about the seder, it will be fine. I had in my backpack something like “the Big Book of Jewish Answers” it weighed a ton. Surely, I thought, surely the answers I need, if I don’t know them, are there in that trusty book. I felt completely and absolutely prepared.

We got to the four questions. And a child named Glenda, which is an odd name even in Portuguese, throws me her question: “if I wasn’t born Glenda, but there was a different Glenda in my family, would I still be me?” To which the second kid, with the much more common name Julia, asked “yeah, Nelly, is there such a thing as reincarnation in Judaism?”

Of course the answers to those questions were not found in the book of Jewish answers, and I got my first moment, as a teacher, in which I had to just be, and dig deep to find my answer.

And my first lesson about never underestimate the depth of thought of a child – given the opportunity, children show you human greatness. Glenda’s question remains with me, Julia’s too.

Do we make a difference, they are asking? Do each of us have an essential part, or are we just pieces that can be replaced? When we die, what happens?

Reb Simcha Bunem of Prisuzha said that we have to walk around with two pieces of paper, one written “I am but dust and ashes” and the other saying “the whole world was created just for me”.

So what are we? Nothing? Or the center of the universe? Reb Simcha Bunem says – both. Living a meaningful Jewish life means toggling between those two extremes, finding balance.

One example of that is a letter in the Torah. If a Torah scroll is missing one letter, or one letter is badly written, or if the letter is in the wrong place – the entire scroll is considered pasul, invalid, you can’t read from it. You got to get it fixed. “But it is just one letter!” I can hear some of you think – what’s the big deal?

So yes, it is just a letter. And yes, it is a big deal. Let me tell you why.

Language is quite an amazing thing, because the alphabet is quite finite. The Hebrew alphabet has only 22 letters. Compare that with the English alphabet that has 26. And yet, with that finite number of sounds, the possibilities are endless.

It is a letter. And it is just one letter. How can a letter be so important?

Because one letter carries with it all the meaning – change one letter in a word and you have a whole different understanding of that sentence.

Now, when our tradition wonders how many Jews were there to receive Torah, the connection the sages make between the many population countings of the book of Numbers is clear: as many Jews as there are letters in the Torah.

So here is a secret: you, too, are one letter. You can make all the difference – in someone else’s scroll, in their story.

And you do make all the difference in our people’s scroll, our people’s story. And you are your own Torah, you came here to teach us. Rabbinic Judaism, what we call Judaism today, takes letters incredibly seriously. And vowels, the little dots and traces around the letters. There are many explanations of words and letters and vowels that never fail to amaze and enchant.

One of them, for instance, is the word EMET, which means truth, in Hebrew. Here it is [SHOW POSTER]

It begins with the alef, which is the first letter of the alphabet. It ends in tav, the last letter. Its middle letter is mem – the letter that is exactly in the middle, the 13^th letter. The rabbis then say – truth has a beginning, an end and a middle, in the right order. Not only that, but if you look at the format of those letters they all have two points on the line, standing firmly, like a person who knows they are telling the truth and not moving. Compare that with the word for lie, SHEKER. The order of the alphabet here is all jumbled: kuf, resh, shin is the alphabetical order, and here we have the end in the beginning, the beginning in the middle and the middle in the end. Confused? Well, lies are confusing. Also, the word is made up of the ending of the alphabet – a lie is something thought only at the last minute.

Besides that, say the rabbis, look at the letters themselves: all have only one point of standing, just as lies do not stand up to scrutiny.

Why are the rabbis playing with the order and form of letters, you may ask? Because everything is Torah, they believe.

Humans come to this earth to learn and to teach, sometimes for a quick spell, sometimes for upwards of one hundred years.

How much meaning are we going to eek out from our stay here is up to us. What will we do with our own letter, it is up to us. What will be our story, who will cry when we die, what will they say when we are gone – that is all up to us.

Sidney Poitier, the famous actor, told an interviewer of his story in 2013. He was born in 1927, in Miami, three months premature, to parents who were poor and who already had six children.

Of course his childhood was a difficult one, with hardships we can barely imagine. He wore flour sacks, lived in a series of impoverished towns in Florida and the Caribbean, and attended school for only two years. At the age of 12 he left school to work, at age 14 his friends were kids that got into trouble and made trouble. His parents decided to send him to Miami, where one of his married brothers lived, in the hopes that the distance would shape him up. And he makes his mind up that he wants to be an actor, at age 16 he finds himself in New York auditioning for the American Negro Theater in Harlem. Ah, but they hand him a script. And he can’t read at all. The two years in school prepared him for nothing. He was making his living as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Sidney Poitier said in that interview, “there was one of the waiters, a Jewish guy, elderly man, and he looked over at me, and he was looking at me for quite a while. I had a newspaper, it was called Journal American.

And he walked over to me, and he said, ‘What’s new in the paper?’ And I looked up at this man. I said to him, ‘I can’t tell you what’s in the paper, because I can’t read very well.’ He said, ‘Let me ask you something, would you like me to read with you?’ I said to him, ‘Yes, if you like.’” And so they studied late at night in the restaurant, long after closing time.

The elderly Jewish waiter – Poitier described him as patient and bespectacled – slowly and deliberately taught Poitier the meanings of punctuation marks and how to sound out words, week after week after week. They used newspapers to sound out words. During the day, Poitier listened to the radio to expand his vocabulary and diction; at night he read with the Jewish waiter. Eventually, after about six months, Poitier was finally a fluent reader, his Caribbean accent less pronounced. The rest, as they say, is history.

Once he was a recognized actor, Sidney Poitier tried to find the waiter who’d helped him so much during his teenage years. To his lasting regret, he never found him.

But this unnamed waiter was a fundamental letter in Sidney Poitier’s story. Would Sidney Poitier become the great actor he was without the waiter? We will never know. Did the waiter know what he was doing, who he was enabling to live a life of greatness? I’m sure he didn’t, I’m sure he just saw a kid struggling with something basic, he saw someone in need and decided – because it is always a decision – to help in a place he could help. But we know who Sidney Poitier became because of the waiter.

This past year has been a difficult and hard year, beginning on October 7^th and to this very moment.

To cope with all the loss I engaged in a project that an Israeli teacher of mine, Rav Avi Novis Deutsch, began. He studies one or two pieces of Jewish text in the memory of someone who was killed on October 7^th and in the war that continues. He and others write about the life of that person in Hebrew. I translate it into English, together we study the texts. It is all on Facebook.

It is a great and humbling experience. Humbling because the victims are from all walks of life, from ultraOrthodox to completely secular, there are Jews, Druze, Bedouin, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, young, middle aged, old. Most times, you can see how much a difference someone did with their lives, even if they lived few years.

Some of the people who I wrote about did wonderous things before being killed.

One donated bone marrow, one wrote poetry, one had benches set up in beautiful spots, one helped kids with cancer, one helped people to get over their fear of water and learn how to surf, many helped animals, some used animals to help others with their traumas. Sometimes you just get a glimpse of what could be, as they were still children when they were killed: a Bedouin boy wanted to be a doctor, a Jewish girl was set to become a pastry chef, another boy was an avid camping enthusiast at the age of five.

And sometimes you don’t see it, particularly in the case of Chinese migrant workers that were killed and there is little or no information besides the age, the gender, the name and where they worked. But of course, we all know: they were all children of someone, someone’s spouse, parent, sibling. In those stories, they were a fundamental letter.

You have all received a Hebrew letter this morning. It is tiny. Maybe you know which letter it is, maybe you know the sound, maybe you can rattle words that have this letter, maybe you are a fluent Hebrew speaker. And maybe you don’t, and maybe you aren’t. Embrace the mystery. You received a letter. It is your letter, a reminder that you, too, have your own scroll, your own story, and that you play a part in other people’s story.

It is just a letter, just dust and ashes – but the story cannot be told without you, you are the center of your story – but other people’s story cannot be told without your story. The story of this community cannot be told without your story, without your letter, without your engagement and without your presence enriching and animating this story.

As Reb Nachman of Bratslav used to say – the day you were born is the day God realized that God’s dream could not continuing without you in it. You are a fundamental part of this, and your letter, your existence, is a fundamental part too.

And I know – you receive so many messages that say the opposite. So many ads telling you that your value lies outside of you, in the things you own. So many ads telling you that your value lies on how you look, or how the people around you look. But Judaism does not hold by that at all.

All of us, regardless of mental ability, finances, looks, physical and emotional challenges, all of us and each of us are a facet of the Life with capital L that animates this universe. And all of us has a Torah to learn and teach, all of us are a letter in the scroll of the Life of the Universes.

Now, that does not mean things are supposed to be easy. Or even easily understood. We don’t come here to write the perfect story – because we are not perfect. We are here to write a story of striving towards perfection, towards becoming better, towards growth and development. Towards kindness and reflection. The fact that we go back and forth, the fact that we have periods in which we feel we are making spiritual progress, and we have periods in which we feel we are stuck, and we have periods we even feel we’re falling to where we began – all this is a feature, and not a bug, in this human existence of ours.

We write our own stories, we help write other people’s stories. We are here as ourselves, as souls searching for meaning and growth. Just as we prepare ourselves before a difficult conversation, before exercising, before staging a play, before planting a tree or a garden – just as we prepare ourselves for any of that, we should prepare ourselves for growth and all that growth implies. That’s why we are here today – to remind ourselves of our own importance and of our non-importance, to remember to take the long view in things, and not to be discouraged if the story changes. We are here to be the best letter we can – with all its greatness, with all its importance, but still, just one letter.

Take your place in that. Take your letter. Embrace the mystery of why this letter got to your hands and not a different one. I am completely sure that you will find a message that will make sense to you. There are many books out there about the secrets and the power of the Hebrew letters. And as the sage Hillel told the person who wanted to become Jewish – the rest is commentary, go and study.

Grow into your letter. Become the best Jew you can. Write the best story you can. Help others with their stories. The goodness, the kindness, the raising others to their own greatness – all this will transform this world. May we make this a better year than last year.

This year we do not say LeShanah Tovah tikatevu, no, we don’t say may you will be written for a good year. This year we say LeShanah Yoter Tovah tikatevu – may we be inscribed for a better year.

Le Shanah Yoter Tovah tikatevu.

I want to thank Adath Israel for the priviledge to talk to you tonight. Much has happened since our last Rosh Hashanah together, and I am thankful to have us as a community to process the sadness, madness and miracles of the past year.

When I went to university in Sao Paulo, my second major was Hebrew Language and Literature. I was ecstatic when I got a transfer from Chemistry to Hebrew Langugage and Literature. I liked all my first year classes, with the exception of one, which I believe was Jewish History – the trauma was so great I would like to think I forgot what we were studying, but it was Jewish History. The teacher’s first name, and I am not joking, was Maria. Maria Rabinowicz. Her mother, she told us, had given her the most Christian name she could think of so that Maria could blend in and not be singled out as Jewish.

What could she expect would happen, I ask you, as Maria Rabinowicz asked us, with a last name like Rabinowicz? She was made fun – by Jews and non-Jews alike. By Jews because – what kind of name is that for a Jewish girl, Maria? And by non Jews because what name is that, Rabinowicz? With a C and a Z at the end?

She was the most bitter Jew I had met until then, and few I met since have rivaled her bitterness. She taught Jewish history accordingly – disaster after persecution after tragedy. She would pause every so often and say Why did we have to be chosen by God? Chosen for what? To suffer?”

And she was my first encounter with what is called Negative Judaism. Now Negative Judaism happens when we define our Jewish identity, our Jewishness, by the negative things that happen to us, either as individuals or as a collective.

This phenomenon is well known, so well known that it gave rise to the term “lachrymose Jewish history,” teaching Jewish history focusing on persecution and destruction, on the parts that make you cry. When historian Salo Baron first talked about this term, it was 1928.

And we happen to know a few more things today in 2024 than Salo Baron did in 1928, and yet, his point remains: we cannot define our Judaism, our being Jewish, by the negative alone.

We hear the same thing when people explain to you that they were brought up in a “very reformed house” because they didn’t go to temple or anything. Or when they say they are Consevative Jews because they don’t want to be Orthodox, but would never eat traif. Or Orthodox, because it’s a shanda that the women wear a talis and a yarmulke in shul!

In his book, Tikkun HaAm, Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, a Reform thinker, posits that Liberal Judaism is in crisis. Mind you, he wrote the book before October 7^th – it was ready to go to the printer on that date, and on October 8^th he pulled the plug on the publisher and rewrote the beginning to make it actually relevant. He posits that us, liberal Jews, we have to fix ourselves, all across the board, particularly now. In part, because defining oneself by the negative, by supporting your identity and your children’s identity because of a crisis – any crisis – is not something sustainable long term. We have to be defined because we built a great and loving community, because we do service to others, because we study, and because we share certain values. We have to recover the surety that we, as proud Jews, have something to contribute to our more perfect union. We have worthwhile ideas and attitudes that can help bring light to this world.

One of these values is the art of disagreement. The famous “two Jews, three opinions” is used as a put down, like there is not really any right way to do anything so why bother – that is negative Judaism. And this is not the disagreement I am talking about. I want to bring to you tonight the story of Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt.

Just raise your hand if know who Gershom Scholem is.

Gershom Scholem was arguably the greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism, in truth, he probably was the greatest scholar of Judaism that the 20th century produced.

The amazing thing about Gershom Scholem is that he came from a very assimilated German Jewish family. His father was such a contrarian Jew that when his mother lit shabbat candles, his the father would light his cigar off the candles. And would say Baruch Atah boreh pri tobacco.

Which shows that he was Jewishly educated enough to be a pain. And of course, you already know that Gershom Scholem was not called Gershom in grade school. He was Gelhard. But as a teenager he falls in love with Zionism, changes his name to Gershom. And the parents, you ask? Well, the parents gave him as a gift of a portrait of Herzl. That’s the good news. The bad news? It was for Christmas, not Hanukkah. But I digress – Gershom Scholem becomes one of the great scholars of Judaism of the 20^th century. And with whom he exchanges letters? With none other than Hannah Arendt, whose book Eichmann in Jerusalem became much more famous in Jewish households than Scholem’s Basic Trends of Kabbalah. This is reversed in Rabbinic schools.

So they are friends. Now if you know anything more about Hannah Arendt you know that she was a problematic figure.

I could be slipping into lashon hara, into gossip, but this is all public knowledge. It’s too close to Yom Kippur for me to risk it, you know.

First of all… there’s no nice way of saying this… while married she had an affair with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. And before you think I am a prude, I have an equal problem with whom she chose to have an affair with. If you know what Heidegger thought of the Jews and how big his support of Nazism was, well, then you understand me better. If you didn’t, now you know. And yeah, so I think there’s a compounded problem with that particular choice made by Hannah Arendt.

And yet – Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt had this correspondence for decades.

They were actually friends, there were no text-guessing and no figuring out the tone in an email, I’m talking pen and typewriter type of correspondence between two very articulate individuals. The letters were published by the University of Chicago in 2017.

The New Yorker sends Hannah Arendt to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. And she goes to the trial and then comes a series of articles which becomes her most famous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The book was problematic for several reasons. One of them is how she portrays Eichmann himself, as a boring, mediocre, soul-less bureaucrat. And then there are the harsh things she wrote about those who served in the Yudenrat, the Jewish councilpeople in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, those who had to to obey Nazi orders, to make up the list that people will be deported, to collaborate the deaths of their fellow Jews, and then they themselves go to their deaths.

It is as if she could never imagine having to face choices that were no good. Some of the Yudenrat committed suicide – just to be replaced by other leaders. But Hannah Arendt had no space for nuance on that side of things, she was very judgmental to her fellow Jews.

And those depictions infuriated Gershom Scholem. So he writes the following:

“It is the heartless, the downright malicious tone you employ in dealing with a topic that’s so profoundly concerned, it’s the center of our life. There is something in the Jewish language that is completely indefinable yet fully concrete, what the Jews call ahavat Israel, or love for the Jewish people. With you, my dear Hannah, In you, dear Hannah, … I find little trace of this.” He comes this close to calling her a self-hating Jew.

Do you know what she answers?

“You are quite right – I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. … The greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that? Well, in this sense I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.”

What she was saying to Scholem is: number one, it’s not my job to love the Jews. Number two, it’s God’s job to love the Jews. Number three: How can I love a huge faceless entity that cannot possibly love you back?

Well, good philophical answers. And between you and I – I have seen friendships crash and burn for far less.

In the letter she acuses him of misunderstanding her work, her ideas, her passions, her life. It is a very harsh letter. But do you know how does she chose to end the letter? With: “best wishes for your trip to Europe.” And they continue their correspondence and friendship for a few more years.

She was basically saying, I disagree with everything you’ve written, you misunderstand me, you malign me, you rip me to shreds, you insult me, but… have a good trip to Europe. We are still friends after all.

It is not by chance that this happens. Ours is a culture of profound disagreement and of profound respect – within friendship. Take a listen to Israel in Turmoil, a podcast of the Hartmann Institute in Jerusalem that has Doniel Hartmann and Yosi Klein Halevi as sparring friends. You can learn a lot about respectful and friendly disagreement from them.

But that does not spring in a vaccum either. The Talmud is full of disagreements, and one of the greatest stories that the Talmud has is the story of what happens to Rabbi Yochanan when Resh Lakish, his sparring partner, dies. Rabbi Yochanan is inconsolable. The rabbis find another partner for him, Rabbi Elazar Ben Pedat, deeply learned in his own right, to learn with him. Rabbi Elazar Ben Pedat offers prooftexts to validate each opinion that Rabbi Yochanan expresses. To which Rabbi Yochanan says: Do you come even close to the son of Lakish? In our discussions, when I said something he would raise twenty-four difficulties against me in an attempt to disprove my claim, and I would answer him with twenty-four answers, and the halakha would become broadened! And yet you say to me: There is a ruling which is taught that supports your opinion. Don’t I know I’m right?!”

His end is a sad one. He looses his mind with his broken heart over this loss, going around calling: “Oh, son of Lakish, oh son of Lakish where are you?”

Yehuda Amichai, the famous Israeli poet, has a wonderful poem and you can find it on page 10 of the High Holiday booklet. It’s called “From the place where we are right”:

From the place where we are right, flowers will never grow in the spring. // The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard. // But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow.// And the whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.”

Now, none of this appears in a vaccum. We are a people that can offer many things to the current moment in America and in th world. One of them is the art of disagreeing and still seeing the humanity of the other, still entertaining their thoughts, listening to their reasons – even if to disprove or to be disproven, to embrace the possibility of changing how we see things.

This holiday we do a great Mitzvah. I don’t want to give you a spoiler if you weren’t able to be here, but there is a shofar involved.

And, I would like to remind you that the mitzvah is not to sound the shofar. No, to sound the shofar is a nice thing to do, but it’s not a mitzvah. The mitzvah is to listen to the shofar.

So may this be a year in which we are able to remind ourselves to have passionate and respectful disagreements, searching and growing towards a positive, rich, interesting Judaism.

LeShanah Tovah – no, actually I want to offer a change to the traditional greeting. Given what year we had, may we make this a better year than last year. LeShanah Tovah, no – LeShanah Yoter Tovah – may we go on to have a better year.

LeShanah Yoter Tovah.

I want to thank Adath Israel for the privilege to talk to you tonight. Much has happened since our last Rosh Hashanah together, and I am thankful to have us as a community to process the sadness, madness and miracles of the past year.

A story is told // about a shoemaker // who was a follower of the Rebbe of Ger, Reb Yitzchak Me’ir Alter. The shoemaker// approached the rebbe to know what he could do// about his prayer. “You see, rebbe,” he said, “I am poor. My customers are poor. They only own one pair of shoes. I pick their shoes to fix late at night, when they arrive from work, and I work on them for the night and a part of the morning, so I can deliver the fixed shoes to them before they have to go to work. How should I make my morning prayers? Should I just pray quickly in the morning, rushing, alone, with no intention, so I can go back to work and deliver the shoes? Is that even prayer?”

“What happens, asked Yitzchak Me’ir Alter, “when you can’t pray?” “Oh, rebbe, I raise my hammer every so often and sigh a great sigh, and say “woe is me, I haven’t prayed yet”. “Sometimes”, said the rebbe, “a sigh is more than prayer itself.”

A sigh – more than all the words in the morning prayer, but just sometimes.

And according to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “God lives in a word.”  But, he added, “Words can only open the door, and we can only weep on the threshold of our incommunicable thirst after the incomprehensible.”

These words of Abraham Joshua Heschel and this story of the shoemaker have been in my mind a lot this past year, since the incomprehensible. I thirst to be able to approach God. And yet.

October 7^th weighted heavily througout the year.

And it still does – truthfully I only feel I have got used to the weight, but it is still there, a deep hole of despair and sadness that is reinforced with every hostage that is declared dead, with every interview with a survivor. To be completely transparent, my spiritual survival this year had a lot to do with our daily minyan. To be in community, even if it is to share in the flabbergastedness, even if only to share the heavy news as each day brought details, even if only to say kaddish for countless souls – that was a life saver. Or maybe a spiritual life saver.

And some people asked me – but rabbi how can you pray?

And the question is really not a “how” question. It is not a nuts-and-bolts question. This is a “why” disguised in a “how”.

How can you pray: that is a simple thing – you open your heart and you pour it out to the One that is always listening, even if you are hurt, even if you are angry, even if you are numb and can barely get any feelings out. How is a simple thing: Jews pray with words, most of the time. Either the ones our ancestors honed for the past 2100 years, or your own, or a combination, or a poem you find somewhere – or soetimes, like the shoemaker, Jews pray with a sigh. Tears can be prayer. Or laughter. Or joy.

The how, as I said, is simple – maybe not easy, but simple.

But the question is not a “how”. It is a “why”. Why do you pray, rabbi? Why, in front of such a disaster, do you pray?

The real problem is that we, humans, tend to hide so much of whom we are from other people, that when it comes to talk to God we are in real trouble, as we can’t even show to ourselves who we are – so what does it mean to open our hearts and pray?

And some can say – there is no God, rabbi, wake up, if there was a God, the Holocaust woudn’t have happened! If there was a God, October 7^th wouldn’t have happened!

Well, that is not a reason for God not to exist, I’m afraid. There is no reason why God should interfere with what people do to one another, do with one another. The fact is, we are still here.

We, the Jewish people. Through destructions, through expulsions, through pogroms, through massacres, /// here we still stand. If you need a proof of the existence of a miracle, look no further than our own people. The Egyptians? Gone. The Assyrians? Gone. The Babylonians? Gone. The Romans? Gone. But we, our Torah and our prayers? We remain. Ich bin doh, here I am, said the camp survivor visiting Auschwitz 40 years after the liberation. Hineini. Here I am.

When I was at camp Ramah this past summer, one of my classes was with eleven year olds, in which I would discuss theology and God.

Theology is a big scary word, so I changed it to “thoughts about God”. And I explained to them that we need to revisit what we think about God every so often. When you were five or six, I asked, what were your abilities in math? How big were the numbers you could sum? And in English? What kind of sentences did you know how to write? And they all agreed that, if now, at fifth or sixth grade they would present the same work that got them high praise when they were six, there would be no praise. If at age 15 you still think like when you were 10, that’s no badge of honor. Kids know this as “growth mindset” – and what I mean is: we will talk about what you think about God, but do not let this be calcified in your soul, in your heart, in your mind. Let it grow and develop. This is true, just as your growth in language and math is true. You learn, you appreciate, you live more – and you change, and so your relationship with God changes as well.

And then I tell them the story of my grandfather – a wonderful, loving, beloved man who had no use for God whatsoever. I’ll give you the cliffnotes, as some of you may have heard this story before: when I was seven, I flew back to Brasil, seeing my grandfather for the first time in six months. And boy, was I excited to see him. I wanted to share all the wonderful things I had experience flying, all I had seen. He listened patiently, while I was sitting on his lap. And then he asked: but did you see God up there? And I had NO IDEA what he was talking about. That was one of the things that we didn’t do in my house: we did not talk about God. So I asked him what did he mean? And he asked again: well, did you see a man, with a long beard and a scepter, sitting on a throne, up there? And I said no, I had not seen anything like that. To which he replied: this proves to you: God does not exist.

And the funny thing was that already then I did not believe that image of God. And later, of course, I understood – this is an image that every four and five year old has about God. It is the image that the Sumerians had about the gods.

Any Sumerian god is a guy – that goes without saying – ten thousand times more powerful than you, so it makes sense to worship that god and hope he won’t create too many problems for you when he is angry, and hope that he will help you when you need help. That is a fine idea when you are 5 years old and in a concrete phase. You need mental images. But you see – that does not work so well after you are 5 or 6 years old, because life grows, things happen, in my grandfather’s case his father dies, he is left taking care of the family at the age of ten, in a poverty stricken situation so bad that he and his brother had to share one pair of shoes to go to school.

And then, if you are expecting that a supernatural being is going to come and make it all better, because you prayed, you begged, you asked so very well and so very much – I have a bridge to sell you.

That same theology, says Melissa Raphael, in her book The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, which is a comparison of women’s theology and men’s theology, that same theology of an “all powerful god that will come and save you and make his presence known as clear as the day”, that theology enables us to understand how come men, in a much higher percentage than women, went through the holocaust and become atheists. Men, she says, were given a theology of a great power that would intercede and make it all better. A hierarchical theology. God as a strong father who will take care of you if he’s not angry at you.

Women, she says, were given a theology that you find God as you help others in a worse situation than you. A horizontal theology. And do you know how many people in a worse situation than you you can find in a concentration camp?

It is not that God is not there – it is that you have to change your thoughts and your relationship to God, and the way you find God and the way you nurture that relationship and that closeness. To me, that also happens through prayer. Prayer is not about just asking things from God. Prayer is in part a moment that helps me to see who am I becoming, what are my deepest impulses, which ones I wish to curb and which I wish to develop. As I go through the 19 blessings of the daily Amidah, most of which are unabashed requests, I watch my impulses and my words regarding repentance, healing, judgment, peace. Where are my feelings? Where are my desires?

It is said that prayer really is our humble answer to inconceavable surprise of being alive. It is all we can offer in return to the Mystery by which we live. It is a small act – this devotion of mine is wrapped on gratefulness for being alive, able to experience a world that is exquisite in its complexity and beauty, dangerous and marvelous, in which hate and love coexist.

Prayer to me is also a hook my own soul to the chain of our ancestors. The words in the machzor were composed throughout our history, and I tend to use them because in difficult times, like this year in particular, they remind me that no matter how difficult my times look like, there is always a time when it was harder for us, Jews. And yet – hineini, here I am, living in a time when America is still the best of diasporas it can be and Israel is still the best of that the holy land can be.

Rabbi Dr. David Weiss Halivni z”l, a survivor of a labor camp called Wolfsberg, remembers being in the presence of a hazan, Naphtali Stern z”l, who transcribed the High Holiday prayers from memory with a pen, on paper torn from cement bags that he purchased at great risk in exchange for bread. Halivni, then 16, was present while Naphtali Stern led the inmates in the high holiday prayers. Halivni tells us that in the labor camps those who prayed did not create new prayers, the torture and fear silenced the creative urge. Those who prayed, prayed like their usual custom and manner. They sought some traditional prayer that would express their deep longing to overcome the forces arrayed against them, and their sense that the suffering and misery around them was the result of evil, of cosmic forces over which they had no control or influence. Halivni points out that they found such a prayer in the prayer “מְלוֹךְ עַל כׇּל־הָעוֹלָם בִּכְבוֹדֶךָ” (eloheinu v’elohei avotenu m’lokh al kol ha’olam bikhvodekha); “Our God and God of our ancestors, reign over all the world in your full glory…” In this prayer, which you can find in the Uvechen section of our Amidah for Rosh Hashanah, we ask God to reign alone, to take the reins of the universe completely, and not allow evil forces to prevail. Sounds about right, if you ask me.

And also – many new prayers and poems and songs have been composed by Jews since October 7^th. For all the terrifying things that this year brought about, both in the diaspora and in Israel, we are still able to be creative.

A rabbi friend of mine went to Catalonia, Spain, and he stood in what was the floor of what was once-upon-a-time a marvelous synagogue. And then he realized – when Jewish people prayed then and there, it was a wholly different Jewish experience. Jews in Spain had arguably the greatest of times in Jewish history – until the ascension of kings who did not like Jews or Judaism at all, and expelled all Jews in 1492. But, even before those kings entered, Jews prayed for centuries in Spain.

And when they prayed towards Jerusalem, it was not to a possible place. Sure, some Jews lived there. But going to Jerusalem, under the Otoman Empire, was not a thing, as they say.

And here we are, almost 600 years later, and if we want we can go – many do, and become part of the strand of our people that make alyiah, return, and experience a Jewish government with a Jewish land with a Jewish army in a Jewish capital. Jerusalem mowadays speaks Hebrew, mostly. And even that is kind of new – the last time we hung out in a Jewish Jerusalem, before the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, we were speaking Aramaic. But we were still praying in Hebrew.

In our many diasporas, the Jewish people created and absorbed many customs and spoke many languages: Judeo-Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Malayalam in India, Lishan Didan in Urmia, Yeshivish in present day America and many others. And yet, the Hebrew in the prayer book and in the Mishnah was the great unifier, the one constant in all our diasporas.

But what you thought about God when you said those prayers? No so much of a unifier. A friend of mine in Brasil used to say – the only thing Jews agree on is that there is only One God… and we disagree about everything that follows that statement. And some disagree as to whether that One God exists.

So we are about to spend a few hours together throughout Rosh HaShanah. We will go through the Machzor and we will use some of the new texts in the booklet.

Take this time to refine your relationship with God. To refine your relationship with prayer. To refine your relationship with our people. And if you feel like the shoemaker, if you feel that only a sigh will do, then sigh with all your being. If only tears will do, then cry with all your being. If taking to the streets will do, then take to the streets with all your being.

In times of profound dissonance, in times of feelings of deep vulnerability, in times of deep dislocation, in times of radical disorientation – prayer begins with the machzor, but it does not end there.

Given what year we had, may we make this a better year than last year. LeShanah Tovah, no – let’s say this year LeShanah Yoter Tovah – may we all go on to have a better year.

LeShanah Yoter Tovah.

October seventh is a new date for us in the Jewish tradition. It’s a strange thing, this date, as it is now ingrained in our psyches – different from the Yom Kippur war, which began on Yom Kippur, because October seventh is not being called the Simchat Torah pogrom, which could actually be a better description. It is just being called October seventh, as the lack of a title expresses our lack of words – ein milim, there are no words – said every Israeli I know and heard.

And this is not a sermon about Israel or about October 7th, even though it would be easy to give one. It is more than that. Those who know me already know, those who don’t will – I have been an overarchiever all my life. So this is a sermon about us, the Jewish people.

The thing is, I cannot look at October seventh without thinking of the entirety of our people, and the entirety of our history.

In the Torah, as we know, as soon as the Jews leave Egypt, with 10 great miracles, a strong hand, an outstretched arm, seeing God’s greatness and presence become explicit and obvious, in ways that us moderns can beg for and never ever get… …. ….  – merely three months later, ‘ninety days’, here are the Jews dancing around // a golden calf. That disappointment leads God to almost kill everyone. Moshe, with words we still chant throughout our High Holidays today, Moshe changes God’s mind. And a few months later, here come the 12 spies. If God was disappointed earlier,  now God is really upset. Again wants to kill everyone, and Moshe again is able to prevent that – but, here comes the quicker – that generation has to die. Why?

Put this in perspective for a second: why was God so upset this time around? The Jews were definitely not dancing around a golden calf. They were just afraid, not willing to go up to the land. What’s the big deal?

The thing is… God can deal with you not believing in God. And as modernity continues on, God gets really used to that.

But God cannot deal with you or us not believing in the Jewish people. God can’t deal with you not believing in yourself – after all, God Godself believes in you!

Look it up in any siddur – modeh ani, the very first prayer of the day, ends with us saying “great is Your faith”, Your with a capital Y. God has faith in us as individuals and faith in us as the Jewish people.

So when the Jews say “we can’t do this, we can’t go up to the land, we are mere grasshoppers” – God gets Godly mad.

Now humans are capable of incredible things. Take science, for instance. Some of you know that my parents were scientists, and this frames a lot of my views of reality.

Now what really is the greatest thing in my opinion, is when science mixes itself with another of my interests, history, and yet another one, philosophy. Science nerds all know that there is this amazingly interesting field of History of Science.

Now science, you might be surprised to learn, does not grow incrementally – all science historians know that. Science does not grow neatly, with one discovery on top of the other.

It is not that each scientist discovers something a little more refined or better than the previous scientists, and incrementally we get to truth. That is not how it works.

The historian of science Thomas Kune is the one who writes about this, in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Science, he says, begins with the scientist having a theory about the universe, and theories about how certain things work, and then the scientist and their team gather data points and see if those fit in the theory, refining the theory, giving it more strength. And then, every so often, certain data appear that do not comfirm that specific theory.

And every so often, certain data points bring a complete change – this is what is called a paradigm shift. Take the Ptolomaic universe – this was a theory of the universe that had the earth in the center and everything circling around our earth. It worked until we got telescopes, courtesy of Galileo Galilei. And then you can see, with your own eyes, a moon circling Jupiter.

Oops. Not supposed to see that.

Because that was really the death blow for the Ptolomaic understanding of things.

And this is what happened – the old theory was eventually thrown out, and a new one began forming, one that we call Copernican universe, one that accounts for these new data points. In Kune’s words, this was a paradigm shift.

Tonight I want to venture that our Jewish people knows quite a bit about new data points and paradigm shifts. Despite our fierce love for tradition, and for continuity, our people has adapted countless times, either because of what has happened to us from the outside or because of what we have done to ourselves from within. We recreated, reinvented, reviewed and adapted values, institutions, practices and thoughts.

Arguably the greatest change in our history was the destruction of the Temple by the Assyrians in 586 BCE and then by the Romans in 70 CE.

Each of those destructions brought about changes, by necessity. The first destruction gave us our Hebrew alphabet. And without the temple and its sacrificial system, which were in their last legs due to corruption anyway, we primarily became a people organized around texts, books and the rabbinic interpretations of those texts. Most of you have heard me say a few times that Judaism is not the religion of the Torah, Judaism is the religion of the Torah interpreted, domesticated and renewed by the rabbis – with Mishnah and Talmud, with Midrashim and Kabbalah.

But that was not the only change we survived. The encounter with philosophy, Greek and Arabic, brought us the great Maimonides. It is the obvious tension between that theory of reality and Judaism that impels him, for his own sake and for the sake of his students, to write the law code Mishneh Torah and then the Moreh Nevuchim, the famous Guide for the Perplexed. Who are the perplexed?

Whoever studies both Torah and philosophy, and is perplexed, astounded by the distance between those views, those who are seeing, feeling, understanding this paradigm shift, that do not believe in the same truth of their grandparents.

That shift brings about the Spanish Golden Age, with Jewish music, grammar, philosophy, poetry as our own recreation of our world view and our love for Torah and tradition. And the Jews are very comfortable in Spain for about 6 centuries.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, back in Ashkenaz, we have the Crusades, and Rashi and his grandsons writing their commentaries to Torah and Talmud, 800 years after the mishnah. Another incredible change: instead of knowing things by heart, needing a teacher who knew midrash and could explain things to you, now we have books that can explain things.

Just get a group of Jews together and get going, reading, debating, deciding and revisiting decisions. This was an amazing feat, and Rashi’s commentaries are now the most basic door to understand Judaism.

And then you have the expulsion from Spain. That is another paradigm shift that brings about the first popularization of Kabbalah which takes over the Jewish world. And then the Polish academies and the poverty of the shtetl bring about the Ba’al Shem Tov and all of Hasidism, all the “really Jewish Jews” in the words of a student of mine.

And here is the mind blowing thing: all those amazing books, all those incredible teachers only show up in times of paradigm shifts, in times of discontinuity. It is actually the challenge of discontinuity and destruction that make what we call the Jewish tradition.

Think about it: when everything is ok, when everything is actually going as it should and there is continuity, you just do what your parents and grandparents did. You don’t need a new book if nothing is being challenged. You have no questions. It is all working as it is supposed to. But when the temple is destroyed – we create the synagogues and Yochanan ben Zakai and Yehudah HaNasi together compile the beginnings of the Rabbinic tradition.

And don’t think for a second that any of this happened without despair: as the temple is destroyed, the question is not simply “now, what? Where do we go from here?” The question was much bitter – “does God hate us? Does this all still matter? Where do we go from here?” And come the rabbis to say – Paradigm shift. The word is the center. The study. Open to all. God will be happy with the sacrifices of our lips, with our words. With our hearts.

And here we are, heirs to that break and all the other breaks and despair, and challenges and adaptations since then.

Think of it, we happen to be very good at this.

After the Baal Shem Tov, comes another “small” paradigm shift – Enlightment. The new idea that we, too, are equal citizens like other equal citizens in countries. Enlightment brings the idea that we can do tradition and change, that we can embrace modernity and still be Jews. And new leaders appear. All with profound answers to the question “now, what? Where do we go from here?” As the beloved Hanukkah song says “in every age, a hero or sage came to our aid”.

And October 7^th is another such event.  It looms large this year and it will loom large for years to come. It has been compared to 9-11, and it has been compared to the destruction of the temple.

And it does not come alone, of course. All our paradigm shifts and all the adaptations I reminded you before, all of those happened with a few centuries between them. But look at the 20^th century. That alone brought us [FINGERS] modernity, Zionism, the first World War, the Holocaust, the state of Israel.

It is obvious that we, as the Jewish people, are still trying to figure out what do with modernity. All of the discussions that all the forms of Judaism that we see today, all the facets of this beautiful, great diamond that is the Jewish people – all of them, are answers to modernity’s great question: what is the relationship between the individual autonomous self, and the collective? Between me and my family? Between me and my community, my people, my country, all of humanity, the world?

For us, Jews, that is a huge question. We are still working that out.

We use different facets to do this answering back: Ultra Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanistic, Zionist, Secular.

And really, you know and I know that if one of those facets should disappear, the Jewish people would be poorer for it –just as a broken diamond would loose its value.

And let me give you yet another thing to think about: as I said, the greatest destruction that happened to our people in our sources was the destruction of the Temple by the Romans. And the Holocaust makes it look like child’s play. …

And the greatest redemption that happened to our people in our sources was the Exodus from Egypt, and the establishment of Israel in 1948 makes it look like child’s play. …

And the greatest creative center that happened to our people in our sources was Babylonia – and America and Canada make it look like child’s play. …

So all of this – all of those paradigm shifts, all happened in the last two generations. We are still trying to figure all those out.

If you are as old as Rav Yitz Greenberg, may he live to 150, you have seen it all with your own eyes. And some of you around here saw a lot of it.

And then October seventh happened. And I will tell you that I think we all were shaken because that day is revealing fault lines we did not know were there.

The promise of Zionism was that we would not be objects of Jewish history anymore, that we would create a new people and become actors in the history of our people. That Jews would be safe from their enemies at least in our own land. And that shattered.

The promise of America and Canada and the rest of the liberal democracies in the world was that Jews would be accepted as part of the melting pot, or fruit salad. And that shattered: we had to deal with “Jews Will Not Replace Us” in Charlotsville and with “It depends on the Context”.

We, collectively, did not expect that antisemitism would show up in Harvard and Columbia and other universities and colleges. White supremacists were a known quantity, your garden variety of antisemitism, so common that they kind of faded in the background noise of America – until about seven years ago. Those are all small shifts, maybe they are signaling a larger one.

There is one idea I want you to go out tonight with: We have a particular talent for cultural creativity. Our people has an incredible knack for revisiting, translating, surviving crisis and paradigm shifts.

God is not finished with us yet – God has an immense faith not only in you, individually, you, Jew in the Pew, but also God has an incredible faith in us, as the collective of the Jewish people, to keep on going and renewing the connections between us and God Godself.

A dying people does not produce the great things we have been studying and creating and renewing for the past five thousand years. And that we continue to create.

The amount of books and Torah and music and videos and software and podcasts and tshirts and coffee mugs created since October Seventh is staggering.

The German philosopher Theodor Adorno said that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. As sad as this might be, I want to point out how unJewish that reaction was.

As a response, the Jewish and Israeli poet and educator Rachel Korazim wrote: To write poetry after October 7^th is necessary.

As the prophet Jeremiah says: there is hope for your future. Renewing, revisiting and reinventing, creating new traditions, we will get through this – together with our people, taking part in our facet of the invaluable diamond of the Jewish people.

Gmar Chatimah Tovah.

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 7^th 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 7^th, 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 18^th 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.