"If I had a sermon ...." (or if I had to listen to one)
Part I of thoughts about what I'd want to hear if I were sitting in a synagogue where these was a sermon during these High Holidays
Rosh Hashanah is in the air, and all over Israeli Instagram accounts. Guy Morad, the cartoonist who created the illustration above, is a super well-known Israeli cartoonist and illustrator who works for a variety of newspapers and is widely followed online. This image was posted on his Instagram page. We’re sharing it because it so perfectly captures the mood here, as people wonder what Rosh Hashanah is going to be like:
The guy on the right says, “So, where are you going to be for Rosh Hashanah?”
The guy on the left, holding a Tzav Shemoneh, an order to report for reserve duty, and looking a bit alarmed, responds, “Looks like I’ll be in the Dahieh” [the Beirut neighborhood which is Hezbollah’s headquarters].
Are our kids going to be home for Rosh Hashanah, or are they going to be in Lebanon? It’s too early to know, but there’s no one who’s not wondering, and worried. \
I heard this week that there have been 80 Hebrew books published in Israel about 10/7 so far. There are many fewer in English, but some of those that are out are outstanding. Each of these three new books will dramatically enrich your holidays; if you order them now, you’ll have them on hand in time.
Shiva: Poems of October 7, is a gorgeous volume of Israeli poetry post October 7 , with excellent English translations. We’ll be posting about that book next week, before Rosh Hashanah.
One Day in October: Forty Heroes, Forty Stories, which came out in Hebrew months ago, is forty stories, each only a few pages, of extraordinary heroism. Much is it is heartbreaking; it’s all very compelling. We’re written about it before, and will return to it, now that the English is out.
10/7: 100 Human Stories by Lee Yaron is a very different take on telling these stories. We have a podcast with Yaron, one of Israel’s highly regarded young journalists, coming up soon.
Again, we’ll come back to all these, but for those looking for something to take with them to synagogue or elsewhere on Rosh Hashanah, you have enough time to order these now and to get them in time. Each is truly excellent.
So, once on the subject of Rosh Hashanah
Some of what we’d planned to post this week made no sense once the new fighting broke out in Lebanon. What we’d prepared simply didn’t fit the mood of the country, so we put it off. Some of it, we’ll get back to.
I got an email from an American rabbinic organization the other day. “It’s late,” the note acknowledged, but it asked for a “message or messages you would like to suggest rabbis should tell their congregants on the High Holidays.”
I didn’t bother replying— after all, is there a single rabbi in America who hasn’t finished their sermons for the High Holidays and printed them out? Less than a week from Rosh Hashanah, no rabbi is looking for messages to include …
Still, the email got me thinking. If I was a rabbi at an American congregation this year, what would I speak about? But much more importantly, if I were a congregant, there or here, what would I want to hear?
Truth is, I had started thinking about this even before that email came in. A couple of weeks ago, a friend here in Jerusalem sent me a WhatsApp, asking me to listen to a sermon online. She wrote me that the sermon had been sent to her by a friend to calm here, but that instead, the sermon had sent her “into orbit.”
I know the rabbi, and really didn’t want to listen to the sermon (I have enough stress in my life), but was kind of curious. What was it that had sent my friend—who is very nuanced, hardly extreme on any side of the issues we’re all wrestling with and has pretty thick skin—“into orbit”? So yes, I was curious, but not sufficiently curious to have a stroke.
But earlier this week, I was caught in a massive traffic jam between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the drivers were being ridiculously aggressive and we were all getting exactly nowhere. I was, in short, already incredibly stressed, so it struck me—this was the perfect moment to listen to that sermon. It’s not as if I was going to get any more stressed. So I pulled it up on my phone, and listened away.
It was exactly what I expected. Genuine, heartfelt grief over the deaths of the six murdered hostages, beautifully expressed. A full-throated condemnation of Hamas as a sadistic death cult, also very articulately stated. It was masterful in many, many ways. The rabbi should be teaching the art of sermons in a rabbinical school.
And then, all the criticism of Bibi. His corruption, his lying, his torpedoing the hostage deal, and following all that, as if on cue, a demand that Netanyahu resign and Israel end the war.
Honestly, the sermon didn’t send me into orbit. It was just what I’d expected. In fact, I probably would have forgotten about it were it not for another friend (part of a conspiracy of friends to get under my skin?), who sent me this:
This one I checked out more quickly, and of course, here, too, exactly what one would expect.
“We are gravely concerned about this escalation in Israel’s ongoing conflict with Hezbollah. There is no question that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that has and continues to commit war crimes, including by directing missiles at civilian areas in Israel and Israel-controlled areas. …
“Israel, too, has already committed war crimes in Lebanon, including by exploding the beepers and walkie talkies of hundreds of Hezbollah members last week. Those holding these devices were not actively engaged in combat, and Israel knowingly endangered civilians, including children, in proximity to the explosives.
[I suppose they got this bit about the exploding pagers being against international law because the people were not engaged in combat at that moment from Michael Walzer’s very disappointing NYT column, Israel’s Pager Bombs Have No Place in a Just War, which argued that “the attacks … came when the operatives were not operating; they had not been mobilized and they were not militarily engaged.” I’m curious: should Israel find a group of Hezbollah terrorists who normally sit at the side of a rocket launcher but then go home to have sandwiches for lunch, we shouldn’t attack them until they finish lunch and get back to work? That’s not exactly how wars against terrorists work. But we digress…]
“We urge Netanyahu to listen to the hostage families and to the hundreds of thousands of Israeli protesters who demand that he make a deal and end the war.”
Here, too, a bit of obfuscation. Most of the hostage families who are calling for a cease fire so the hostages can be released (which may or may not be realistic or possible) fully understand that the war will continue after the exchange; virtually no one here is calling for the war to just end. If it does, the people from the Otef will remain in danger and the evacuees from the north will not go home. In that scenario, Israel will have lost the war. An Israel in that condition cannot survive.
As I listened to the sermon and then read the materials above, which are clearly meant be used in sermons next week, I asked myself not about the content, but about the purpose:
“How are we to understand the purpose of sermons like these?” What are they designed to accomplish?”
Of course, it is true: Israel is in the grips of a corrupt, self-centered man whom virtually no one in the country trusts, and he’s brought in messianic extremists who are doing tremendous damage. His wife has undo influence, the hostage negotiators accuse him of having torpedoed deals, he’s virtually not on speaking terms with the Minister of Defense during an existential war ….
It’s actually much worse than that; all of that is just the tip of the iceberg. But … so what? Who in the communities who hear these messages didn’t already think that way before? In what way does a message about Israel’s horrific political quagmire (in contrast to America’s shining situation😌) leave anyone more committed to Israel, more devoted to the idea of a Jewish state, or any deeper or more thoughtful Jewishly?
So I got to thinking. What would I want to hear on the High Holidays? What do we need to hear?
I remember many years ago, probably 30 or 35 years ago, I had a conversation with Rabbi Harold Schulweis, z’’l, one of the great Conservative rabbis of his generation. He was deeply learned, a visionary community leader and an extraordinary pulpit rabbi. To this day, I remember where we were standing when he said to me, “I never give a sermon unless it makes clear to people what I hope they will do.”
In other words, there was no point in saying what people already think. There was no point in reiterating what was on the OpEd page of the NYT or the WSJ, because he knew that his congregants could read those just as well as he could. He was a rabbi, not a political commentator. His job, he believed, was to get his congregants to live richer, deeper Jewish lives. His job was to get people to do something, to live in a certain way.
Now, to be sure, Rabbi Schulweis’ definition of what a sermon should seek to do (and I imagine that over the years his sermons did many different things) is not the only legitimate definition. When I’m in shul, I feel that a sermon was worth having listened to if I learned a text I didn’t previously know, or if I learned to see a text I did know in an entirely different light. Or if the speaker is a person of profound moral insight and makes me see the world in a way that is entirely different from what I felt or thought when I’d walked in—then, yes, it was worth it.
Here I’m thinking of Rabbi Tamar Elad Applebaum (who was on our podcast years ago), who strikes me as being as close as one can get to living the experience what it might have been to hear one of the biblical prophets in ancient times.
As I was pondering the challenge of sermons this year (traffic generously gave me plenty of time), I couldn’t help but think about the the calls some rabbis are making in their sermons for Netanyahu to step down. And I understand the desire to say that, if one believes it. But what I don’t understand is the goal: there are millions of us here in Israel—yes, millions, including many thousands who voted for him—who want him out, but we so far can’t make it happen.
If we can’t do it, what’s the point of calling for his resignation in suburban America on the high holidays? Dirty politics is the loftiest we can get? Does that call for governmental change in Israel, before a community of people who can’t vote or influence Israel in any way whatsoever, impact anything at all? Does it deepen anyone’s sense of what being Jewish is all about? Does it get anyone to live their lives any differently, à la Rabbi Schulweis? Do we just want people to leave their synagogue feeling even more despondent about Israel?
After a year like this, should’t we be aspiring to more, much more?
This, by the way, has nothing to do with left-right, or liberal-conservative, either. Yes, I imagine that on Rosh Hashanah we’re going to hear on one side of the “aisle” a litany of complaints about Israel’s politicians (the list of my own complaints are, I assure you, is much longer), but I also imagine that in many synagogues on the other side of the spectrum, we will hear lots of stories of the heroism of October 7th, the evil of our enemies, and all that. Again, things that the congregants already know very well.
To be sure, there was on October 7 and since then genuine heroism, heroism that deserves to be honored, sanctified and remembered forever. But here, too, I’d ask the same question: everyone sitting there knows these stories. Yes, perhaps there’s a particular story they hadn’t previously heard. (See the books above—they’re musts.) So yes, they’ll be moved, likely to tears.
Thus, please forgive this question: So what? Does even being so deeply moved get them to think any differently? Does hearing these stories, as compelling as they undeniably are, teach them something about Judaism that they didn’t already know? Does it get them to live differently?
They’ll be moved. They’ll appreciate that the rabbi related the story. But still, I’d ask—what was the goal? This is the most contemplative period of the Jewish year. What should we be thinking about? In what ways should we be stretching ourselves?
I’ll explore this a bit more next week, too, but here, I want to suggest two ideas that I would love to hear rabbis speak about. Not because these ideas matter more than many other ideas, but just because they’re things that I’m thinking about these days, about which I’d love to hear my teachers and colleagues guide me and challenge me. And not because, at this stage, anyone is going to change their sermons, but because we all have conversations not tied to sermons.
What might we as a Jewish world be thinking about these days that honors October 7, does not ignore the horror of this past year, but does not devolve into politics or hagiography?
History came calling
The first topic has to do with history. This is more complicated than space here allows, but I’ll lay out the basics. Both Israeli Jews and American Jews (thus 90% of the Jewish world) were smacked hard by history this past year.
We Israelis had been taught that part of what the Jewish state guaranteed us was that the days of Jews hiding from marauding murderers in closets, Jewish women being raped by sadistic gangs, mothers and children being bound together by wire and burnt alive, Jewish homes being incinerated with Jews still trapped in them, and more—all that was Europe. But here, we were told, would never be Europe. We were going to bend the arc of Jewish history differently.
That’s why Israel purposely fashioned its national symbol, the menorah, to look exactly like the rendition of the menorah on the arch of Titus, which celebrates the plundering of Jerusalem. It was as if to say, the Romans stole it, so we’re here to bring it back. If not the actual menorah (because we don’t know where it is), then Jewish sovereignty. If not the menorah itself, then at least the end of Jewish defeat. Here, in the Jewish state, Jewish history would have a different ending. This would be the place where stuff like that didn’t happen.
But it did.
American Jews also got horribly wounded by history. But, again to dramatically oversimplify, if Israelis were taught that we could change the arc of Jewish history, American Jews believed that we could dodge it. As Saul Bellow put it in his Pulitzer Prize winning Humboldt’s Gift, Humboldt—the son of a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant father—believed that “history was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s rest.”
So much for the good night’s rest. There’s none to be had.
Bellow is hardly alone. We find comments like this, often in comparison to israel, in books lke Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink in comments made by Marissa, or in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am, as well. There’s a lot to be said about how this theme emerges in American Jewish literature—another time.
There’s obviously much, much more to say about the ways in which our takes on history betrayed us. For now, here’s the point and the question: for as far as the eye can see, it is going to be much less pleasant, easy or safe to be a Jew in our world. Whether on a kibbutz near Gaza or in New York City, we’re going to think differently, fear differently. Never again will people go to the Gaza envelope and not at least worry, however momentarily. And it is going to be a very, very long time before a Jewish kid can go to Columbia and have the kind of extraordinary experience that I did.
Israel and America are both deeply changed places, and in both, Jewish life is going to be hard. It’s going to be scary. It’s going to mean taking risks.
So, why? Why do it? Why not just leave this country, or if one’s already in America, why not just fade into the woodwork? Why stick it out?
To answer that, we’d all have to have a lot to say about what Judaism says. Not tikkun olam, please; churches and atheists do that just fine, too. We have to dig deeper, to demand more of ourselves. What do we need to learn, what do we need to study, what do we need to read and to understand to have a sense of what Jews and our tradition still bring to the world? What did the Jews and do the Jews have to say that mattered in the past, and what do we have to say today? Where were we different? Where are we still different—or how could we be different, in ways that matter?
So there’s the challenge that a rabbi might raise about that topic, or that we might pose to ourselves: How many of us or our children can say something meaningful about why we matter? About ? Why did the best educated Diaspora community in the history of the Jewish people allow itself to become the most Jewishly illiterate community in Jewish history?
Many people have made that point but few more pointedly than Leon Wieseltier. “It is illiteracy unprecedented in the history of the Jewish people. …. It is a crime.”
Why, if I walk by a home one evening in suburban America and look through the windows and see a set of Mishnah or Talmud in the living room, can I be virtually certain (though not entirely certain, to be sure) that that’s the home of an Orthodox family? Why did 80% of American Jewry decide that literacy in the texts that defined us for a thousand years suddenly didn’t matter?
That, too, is a conversation that emerges from the horror that befell Israel this year, a conversation that emerges from the collapse of our worlds. For in this new world, the world in which being Jewish is not going to be easy and could also periodically be dangerous, we need to be able to articulate why it matters that we perpetuate it, what it is, precisely, that we’re trying to perpetuate.
This is one of those conversations that doesn’t sour us on anything, but rather, urges us to do something. To learn something. To become something. What that something is, and how to do all that—that’s where each rabbi’s message will differ, and rightly so.
The soldiers’ letters
Or, something entirely different, also born of Israel’s horror, but again, with an attempt to have us grow, change, speak.
There have been far too many newspaper stories these past eleven months in which the paper reported about a letter written by a fallen soldier. The letter was to his family, and was found in his uniform pocket when he was killed.
Here’s one, that I believe we may have posted already. By Ben Zussman, it’s one of many dozens, tragically:
I'm writing this message to you on my way to the base. If you're reading this, something probably happened to me. As you know me, I'm likely the happiest person right now. It's not for nothing that I was about to fulfill my dream soon. I'm happy and grateful for the privilege I'll have to defend our beautiful country and the people of Israel.
Even if something happens to me, I don't allow you to sink into sadness. I had the privilege to fulfill my dream and destiny, and be sure that I'm looking down at you from above with a huge smile. I'll probably sit next to Grandpa and catch up, each of us sharing our experiences and how things have changed between wars. Maybe we'll also talk some politics, ask him what he thinks.
If, God forbid, you're sitting shiva, turn it into a week of friends, family, and fun. Have food, meat of course, beers, sweet drinks, seeds, tea, and definitely Mom's cookies. Laugh, listen to stories, meet all my other friends you haven't met yet. Really? I'm jealous of you. I'd like to sit there and see everyone.
Another very, very important point. If, God forbid, I fall into captivity, alive or dead, I'm not willing for a single soldier or civilian to be harmed because of some deal for my release. I don't allow you to run a campaign or struggle or anything like that. I'm not willing for terrorists to be released in exchange for me. In no way, shape, or deal. Please don't violate my words. I'll say it again, I left home without even being called up for reserve duty. I'm full of pride and a sense of mission, and I've always said that if I need to die, I hope it will be in defense of others and the country. Jerusalem, I have set watchmen, may the day come when I'll be one of them.
These letters rip your heart out. They’re not all the same; some are cute and funny, others very much not. Some read like wills, stating who should get what, others avoid that entirely. But there are still certain things that the letters all have in common: First, they’re written by people who are much too young to be writing letters like that. Second, many of them tell their families not to mourn forever, but to live life. “That’s what I went to fight for,” the letters say, “so this nation can fully live.” And many say, “If I died in this war, I died doing what I wanted to be doing—defending my people, defending the Jewish people. There’s nothing more important to me.”
These letters are written by secular soldiers and religious soldiers alike. And note that the army tells the kids to write these letters. In other words, the army says, “you might not come out of this alive. We’re sending you in to a very nasty situation. Write your family.” These kids know what they’re getting into.
So here’s something a rabbi in the Diaspora could ask their congregation, after reading a few of these letters (and thus shattering the hearts of most congregants). “Let’s say we asked our kids here [New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, wherever] to write a letter like that. What would they say? What to them is more important than life itself? What do they believe in more than they believe in their desire to stay alive?”
If we don’t know, or they don’t know—how do we start the process of figuring it out?
Because isn’t that the purpose of these next few weeks?
Next week, in Part II of these musings, I will address two other ways in which I think that this past year in Israel can help shape us this coming year. I’ll share some thoughts about (1) Hatikvah and the obligation to hope, and (2) the phenomenon of the memorial stickers that have become ubiquitous in Israel since the 7th.
We’re not going to have a sermon where we go to shul. It’s going to be very, very different from what life would have been like had we stayed in LA. There’s not going to be a sermon. There are going to be lots and lots of people carrying guns. We’re going to start early, and be home by 10 am. A lot of the guys are going to be wearing shorts (which in itself, if you ask me, is reason enough to make aliyah).
Shanah Tovah seems like a strange thing to say this year: the coming year is not looking like it’s going to be so great. What probably makes more sense is the line from our liturgy that says,
תכלה שנה וקללותיה, תחל שנה וברכותיה:
“May this year and its curses come to an end, and may a new year of blessing begin.”
Perhaps we start those blessings by getting ourselves and each other to think more broadly, more deeply than we would have had our worlds not collapsed.
What a masterful summary of what so many of us are thinking. It touches all of the needed points.
In Israel even a traffic jam can produce something meaningful
Rabbi Gordis, thank you for this it's pieces like this that make IFTI what it is and why I subscribe. Sadly, most of those who are not subscribers are the ones who need it the most.