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Annnnnddd….We’re back! It’s been a meaningful season of holidays. Our services at Chevrei Tzedek were full of ruaḥ, joy, and connection. Our programs for youth engaged our children and teens in meaningful activities and conversations. The discussion groups on Yom Kippur afternoon stimulated our minds and spirits in the waning hours of the fast. The holidays set us up for a shanah tovah m’od, a very good new year.
We’ve now reached the period often referred to as aḥarei ha-ḥagim, after the holidays. In the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah, any number of new ideas or congregational priorities get put off until aḥarei ha-ḥagim. Even things that are on our community’s agenda but not happening imminently migrate off our radar screen. Now that the holidays are behind us, it’s time to give our attention to everything that’s coming up and everything that we’ve been saving for later. It’s an exciting time, but to be completely honest, it can be a little overwhelming. We’re still recovering from the intensity of the holidays. And there are already so many things to do, so many ways to strengthen our community, so many celebrations to look forward to. In my studies of Parashat Noaḥ this week, I came across a midrash that helped me reframe my sense of overwhelm and recapture my excitement for this period of our year. After the floodwaters abate, God commands Noah to exit the ark, taking with him his family and all of the animals who had weathered the flood with him. (Genesis 8:15-17). God’s instruction to Noah to bring everyone out of the ark uses an unusual pronunciation of the word, prompting the midrash to seek out a deeper interpretation of the text. Bereishit Rabbah 34:8 first explains that the unusual word in question indicates that Noah had to employ some coercive force to get everyone to leave. The ark had become everyone’s new normal, an all-encompassing experience from which it was difficult to emerge. They needed a little push to come back to regular life. The midrash goes on to open up God’s command in the same section that all the creatures on the ark, upon leaving, were to “teem upon the earth and be fruitful and multiply upon the earth” (Genesis 8:17). The phrase “upon the earth” is repeated to emphasize that they could not move about freely or reproduce while on the ark. Their time on the ark was a period of dormancy. Surrounded by the protecting walls of the ark and the security of each other’s presence, they hunkered down to prepare themselves for a new world. Only once back in the world could they resume their regular activities. The analogy to the juxtaposition of the holidays and aḥarei ha-ḥagim comes easily. Our holidays together were a time of intense connection, of feeling the fullness of our community, of being buoyed by each other’s presence. They were immersive and important. Now, as we prepare to welcome the month of Ḥeshvan in just a couple of days, we return to regularity, renewed by our celebrations and ready to focus our attention on all of the opportunities that lie ahead. I can’t wait to get started on it all together. Shabbat shalom.
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In a few moments, when we turn to our Yizkor prayers, we will chant several verses from Psalms to introduce this portion of the service. The first couple of verses ruminate on the fleeting nature of human life, a fitting focus for prayers we say in memory of those who are no longer with us. But then we read : לִמְנוֹת יָמֵינוּ כֵּן הוֹדַע וְנָבִא לְבַב חׇכְמָה׃ / “Teach us to number our days rightly, that we may acquire a heart of wisdom.” (Psalms 90:12) This verse, in contrast to the previous ones, focuses on us, instructing us to cultivate an awareness of our lives, which will allow us to attain wisdom. In his commentary on this verse, the 12th century scholar Abraham ibn Ezra explains that the verse reminds us that our days may be very few; therefore we should be inspired to appreciate the lives we have and live whatever days we are granted in the fullest way possible.
In this way, the opening verses to our Yizkor prayers are like a conversation within our hearts. “I know life is like a breath, a passing shadow,” we say, as we stand in memory of someone we’ve lost. “But I’m still here right now - how can I honor the days of my life, however few or many they may be?” This past summer, I picked up a book that had been sitting on my shelf for a while, The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. The story centers around a woman, Nora Seed, who is going through a devastatingly difficult time. Her relationship with her brother is tense and nearly non-existent. She has a broken-off an engagement that she is not over. She is fired from her dead-end job. The final blow – her cat dies, seemingly hit by a car after it got out of her flat without her noticing. She decides she doesn’t want to be alive anymore. As her last day on earth comes to a close, she suddenly finds herself in the Midnight Library, a mysterious place filled with shelves and shelves of books as far as she can see. Soon she meets the librarian, who explains, “‘Between life and death there is a library. And within the library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices…if you had the chance to undo your regrets.’” The librarian goes on to describe how the library works, that the life she was attempting to leave is really one of infinite parallel universes, that each book on the shelf will transport her into one of those alternate lives, dropping her into herself at this exact moment, allowing her to try on that life and see if she likes her new path better, if she wants to stay there and pick up the thread of her life in this different version of herself. If she doesn’t want to stay in that life, she will simply return to the library, where she can pick a different book off the shelf and try again. How will Nora decide which lives she wishes to inhabit? She will want to choose ones that do not include the problems and challenges that made her want to leave her root life altogether. And to know how to make this choice she will need to examine her Book of Regrets. Nora’s book of regrets is massive and she is overwhelmed by the choices and circumstances of her life that she wishes were different. As she encounters the regrets that speak most to her, she leaps into those life paths where they don’t exist, where she has made different choices. While living each of these lives for a time, she discovers that, in some cases, circumventing regrets simply makes room for other, more painful, ones. And in some cases, living free from the pain of certain regrettable decisions actually makes Nora feel happier, more actualized. As the story progresses and Nora explores more and more possible life paths without settling on one where she truly wants to live, we see her grow weary of the process. She finds it hard to believe that in some lives, she struggles to pay the rent and in others she’s an internationally renowned rock star, that the same decisions can have such wildly varying consequences. At the same time, she notices that her book of regrets is starting to grow shorter. Some of the alternate lives she has tried out helped her resolve and let go of regrets that had previously haunted her, even when those lives turned out not to be ones in which she wanted to stay. We begin to see that exploring these unlived lives is a kind of conversation Nora is having with herself. It is not an easy conversation; it has her visiting and revisiting the consequences of her choices, many of which are quite painful. It forces her to look critically at her past, to confront her missteps and mistakes, to acknowledge how she has been hurt and how she has hurt others. While The Midnight Library is not a book specifically authored for this moment of Yom Kippur, it lines up pretty evenly with what’s on our minds right now. Regret, resolution, seeking a better, more fulfilling, life, particularly in this moment when the fragility of life is so present for us. I’ve been talking a lot about difficult conversations over these High Holidays. The story of Nora Seed points us to another kind of difficult conversation that we ought to be having, especially on Yom Kippur – a conversation with ourselves. Like Nora, we need to examine our lives closely, acknowledging those things we regret, the ways in which we have made choices that have caused our lives to veer off course, or led us to hurt others. And we need to find our way out of or beyond those regrets, so that we can continue our lives with renewed purpose, on the path of renewal and repair. We need to count our days, guiding ourselves toward wisdom. While we can’t jump from life path to life path across infinite parallel universes, the lives Nora explored highlight some of the areas of our own lives that can become topics for these kinds of conversations. In her root life, Nora was a talented swimmer, who gave up the sport as a teenager. Her father strongly disapproved of her choice and they were never able to resolve their disagreement before he suddenly died. Swimming features prominently in several of her new lives, but in one, she is a decorated Olympian swimmer who now is sought after as a motivational speaker. She sees what it might have been like for her to stay with swimming and push herself to develop her talent and skill more fully. What professional paths have we not taken? What talents or skills have we moved to the margins of our lives? What would it be like for us to pursue them? Nora is also a musician - she plays piano and sings well. But just as the band she’s in with her brother seems like it’s about to take off, she collapses under the pressure and leaves the group, destroying her relationship with her brother. In many of the lives she tries on, Nora’s brother is there. In some they’re still estranged, in some he’s reluctantly part of her life, in some, he has tragically succumbed to addiction. Not until the very end of the book does her relationship with her brother begin to take a more hopeful turn. In all of her alternate lives, the opportunity to reconnect with her brother is *this* far away, but she never gets there. What are the relationships in our lives that are in need of attention? What quarrels are due to be resolved or forgotten? What opportunities have we missed to deepen our connections with those who are closest to us? Nora, as I mentioned a bit ago, was devastated by the death of her cat. She blamed herself for his demise, thinking that he got out because she was neglectful and that’s why he was hit by a car (he had been found by the side of the road). In one of her earliest leaps, Nora learns that her cat actually had a fatal congenital condition. In her root life, he was not hit by a car; it was simply his time. She had it all wrong. Instead of being the reason he died, Nora realized that she was why he had a warm, loving home, delicious food, and companionship while he was still alive. What are the situations in our lives that we see wrong? How will the reality of these situations finally get through to us, and what will we do with that new knowledge? These contemplative conversations are ones we can have as individuals, and they are also ones we can have as a community. As a shul, a spiritual home and place of connection for our members, it behooves us to look within ourselves and examine our book of regrets, for of course, we have regrets. What have we gotten wrong? How have we caused pain? How could we have lived our mission more thoroughly? Regret is inevitable; repair is a choice. So, once we can see our regrets clearly, we want to resolve them. What can we do to address any hurts that still exist? What new paths can we explore that will help our community feel more connected and cohesive? One area where this model of regret and repair feels especially salient for our community is our ongoing conversation about how we welcome and serve multi-faith families, where one member of a couple is Jewish and the other is not. The Conservative Movement and indeed, the Jewish world as a whole, has had a long and difficult journey when it comes to how we respond to interfaith relationships, a journey that is full of regrets. The epicenter of those regrets is the way that the Jewish communal world held multi-faith families responsible for any and all problems, real or imagined, with Jewish continuity and flagging membership numbers. The National Jewish Population Survey of 1990 was the cause of many of these alarmist responses. This was the study that found that a whopping 52% American Jews were marrying people of other faith backgrounds. In response, prominent voices in Jewish communal leadership began predicting our demise. “We are probably witnessing the last generation of Jewish life in America as we now know it,” a leading rabbi wrote in the Los Angeles Times. Literary critic Leslie Fiedler predicted ‘an end to a separate Jewish identity, whether defined racially, religiously or culturally.’ And…Alan Dershowitz warned that Jews were ‘in danger of disappearing.’ Intermarriage, he wrote, was a ‘threat to our survival as a people.’” It was also emotionally devastating to the Jewish community overall. We were constantly assailed by news articles and op-eds discussing the study and decrying that one statistic. The study took American Jewry “from a community that was appreciating its successful rise to the upper echelons of socioeconomic status to one that was concerned about its very survival.” The response to the NJPS frightened us about our future and told us exactly what was to blame for our feeling of instability. Fearing that the children born to intermarried parents would simply disappear from the Jewish community, synagogues and organizations went about trying to woo these families and give them reasons to stay Jewish. At the same time, they put up high barriers to true inclusion. Using the Conservative Movement as an example, some synagogues would not even congratulate interfaith families celebrating weddings or births with the words “mazal tov,” reserving those for endogamous families. People in interfaith relationships were not allowed to serve as synagogue presidents, or in professional roles in movement organizations. Non-Jewish partners could not be considered members of the synagogues where their families worshiped and where their children were educated. It’s hard to be fully welcoming when you see interfaith marriage as a mortal threat. We know that our prior stance on interfaith marriage has caused a great deal of pain. We carry that regret and we feel the responsibility to work toward repair. It also turns out that the fears about interfaith marriage were significantly exaggerated. Interfaith marriage rates have indeed continued to increase. The 2020 Pew study of Jewish Americans found 72% of non-Orthodox Jews married since 2010 are in interfaith marriages. However, children of interfaith families are increasingly identifying with their Jewishness. “Among Americans older than 49 with one Jewish parent, just more than 20% identify as Jewish. But among Americans ages 18 to 49, nearly 50% identify as Jews.” Pew and other Jewish population studies have also shown that the population of Americans who identify as Jewish has increased 35% since 1990; 10% of that over the past 7 years. This growth has been fostered and allowed space to develop thanks to organizations, such as 18Doors, who understand that interfaith families aren’t going anywhere and deserve our attention, respect, and sincere engagement. As Jodi Bromberg, head of 18Doors has said, “Interfaith families aren’t a drop in the ocean. They are the ocean.” Our movement has also begun to make significant changes to our approach to interfaith marriage. In addition to removing some of the barriers for full inclusion (for example, the USCJ, our parent organization, officially allowed partners of other faith backgrounds to be synagogue members in 2017), we are actively taking steps to rethink our approach to interfaith marriage, training clergy and community leaders to embrace inclusivity more fully. I’m sharing all of this with us because our community has been thinking and talking about matters of interfaith inclusion for quite some time. We have taken some small steps in the past couple of years to be more welcoming to people in interfaith relationships, but I believe it is time for us to have a larger conversation about how we will face the realities of the Jewish world. We are a community with an abiding respect for tradition and we are a community with a tremendous ability to love and care for each other. I want to see us link those values and join other synagogues in our movement by learning about possible approaches and newer pathways for making interfaith families feel truly welcome at Chevrei Tzedek. Over the course of this year, we will learn together about these approaches and have opportunities to engage in deep conversation about this topic. I am so looking forward to being together as we examine where we’ve been and envision where we are going. May this process help us to number our days and acquire hearts of wisdom, finding true appreciation for the possibilities that lie ahead for us. The melody that we heard just a bit ago for Kol Nidrei, that we all know so well, is described in the world of Jewish liturgical music as a “MiSinai Melody,” a tune that goes all the way back to Sinai. Not literally of course. MiSinai tunes trace back to between the 11th and 15th centuries in the Rhineland, the heart of medieval Ashkenaz. These melodies, which appear throughout the High Holiday liturgy, became codified in the Ashkenazi tradition and are tightly woven into the way we conduct services on these Yamim Noraim. They speak to our hearts and are embedded in our souls. When we call them MiSinai, we are saying that they are as much a piece of who we are as the experience of standing at Sinai. They are part of our collective memory.
Collective memory is the term we use to describe how groups remember their past and assimilate it into their shared identity. It is the communal pool of memories, knowledge, and information that forms the backbone of a social, cultural, or religious group’s understanding of who they are. As Jews, collective memory is our thing. Our most basic collective memory is having left Egypt. We instill the idea that we were enslaved in Egypt and rescued by God’s strong hand and outstretched arm every chance we get. It’s written into our daily prayers. All of our major festivals - not just the one on which we reenact it extensively - have a connection to the Exodus from Egypt. We sing songs about it and read our children stories about it. A significant part of being Jewish is being able to say, “I was enslaved and now I am free.” We often hear the idea that all Jewish souls were present at the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Each and every one of us, somewhere deep down inside, knows what it is to stand before God and enter into a relationship with Torah. There’s the experience of living in exile, following the destruction of the second Temple in the year 70. For nearly 2,000 years – until this very moment – we outside of Israel refer to where we live as the Diaspora, even though most of us have never made our home anywhere else. The piece of us that fears wearing our Judaism too outwardly remembers the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion from Spain more than 500 years ago. The Chmielnicki pogroms of 17th century Ukraine and the ghettos and death camps of Nazi Europe in the 20th century are also parts of who we are, whether we know victims and survivors from our families or as students of history. The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 is another, more recent, piece of our collective memory. I personally never knew a world without an internationally recognized Jewish homeland. Still, I feel the power of that moment in my kishkes every time I watch a recording of the UN partition plan vote or hear Ben Gurion read Megillat HaAtzmaut, the Declaration of Independence. Collective memory generally becomes embroidered into a group’s identity in a number of specific ways. It is passed down through storytelling, through ceremonies, rituals, festivals and holidays. Looking back at the list of Jewish collective memories I just shared, we can see how these ways of transmitting collective memory are very much operative in Jewish culture and practice. Collective memory is also imparted through art and literature, the ways we envision and talk about important events of our past. Particularly for traumatic past events, monuments and commemorations are an essential part of ensuring that collective memory gets passed to the next generation. It’s why we build Holocaust memorials, record survivor testimony, and hold Yom HaShoah ceremonies. We are currently living through what will very clearly be the next chapter in our book of Jewish collective memory: the attacks of October 7, 2023 and their aftermath. Over the past year, we have grappled with how to respond, what to feel, what to do. Just about a week after October 7, researchers from the USC Shoah Foundation arrived in Israel to interview survivors and eyewitnesses. They have recorded 400 testimonies to date. Religious leaders have written prayers of hope and prayers of mourning. We sing Acheinu during services and at community events. We leave empty places at our Shabbat and holiday tables. The names, faces, and stories of the hostages have been published and shared, printed on posters and discussed in television interviews. All of this begins to transform October 7 from a terrible date in our history to a piece in the fabric of our collective memory. It seems obvious that the events of October 7 and what has followed will remain as a permanent part of our Jewish identity, of how we see our past refracted through ourselves. And it should be equally obvious that we don’t know exactly what that will ultimately look like. Part of that is because we’re still living through it. Collective memory is about looking back, but we’re not yet on the other side of whatever this is and whatever it will become. Moreover, we don’t quite know what meaning to make of October 7 with the specter and experience of rising antisemitism that has accompanied it. In 2013 the Anti-Defamation League recorded 751 antisemitic incidents in the United States. In 2023 they counted 8,873, an increase of more than 1,000 percent. And most of the massive bump in 2023 took place in the months following October 7. Whereas we once felt that we were safe, an essential part of the societies in which we live, we are now discovering how close to the surface ancient stereotypes and prejudices have remained. To write October 7 into our collective memory, we need to understand its significance. We know it was a horrifying pogrom against the people of the State of Israel. Is it also the beginning of the end of feeling secure as a global Jewish community? We experienced pain, uncertainty, and a sense of impotence following October 7. We don’t yet know how to think about or talk about the significance of October 7 in a way that is truly collective, in a way that makes room for all of the diverse voices that comprise our community. This is another important piece of why we’re not yet ready to let October 7 become part of our collective memory. Over Rosh Hashanah, I explained that I’d be talking about some difficult conversations we’ve been having and need to have as a community. This is one of them. We, like Jews around the world, were emotionally eviscerated by the events of October 7. In those first moments of confusion and grief, we were stripped down to our most primary feelings, among them fear, anger, and contempt. We simply couldn’t hear each other, couldn’t open our hearts to each other’s experiences. When we heard opinions that didn’t gel with our own, we resorted to those primary emotions, blaming each other and drawing lines in the sand about what values did and didn’t belong in our community. Let me be clear - this wasn’t something that only happened at Chevrei Tzedek, but it regrettably was a part of our community’s experience of those first few weeks this past fall after it all started. Let me be clear about something else: Believing that I knew the best path forward and that I, as spiritual leader of our congregation, had the responsibility to guide us in the right direction, I sought to cut off debate and quiet the voices of dissent when they became too acrimonious. I did so in order to make more room for the voices advocating for what I believed we should do. I spoke more than I listened. And while I don’t regret the choices we made -- particularly about how to celebrate Shabbat with Rabbi Deborah Sacks Mintz and how to define whom we can partner with as a community -- I know that the outcome was hurtful to many. Some members chose to leave our shul over what they saw as a breach with values they hold dear. Others felt censored, unable to share their real opinions for fear of not passing an unspoken litmus test. Still others felt misunderstood, judged by those they otherwise called friends. The term collective memory gives the impression that we, the collective, are all the same, that we all experience things in the same way, that we all have the same opinion about what to do in response to what we’ve experienced. As we well know, this is simply not true. Being part of our collective, part of the variegated and diverse tapestry that is the Jewish community, we know that we, like everyone else in the world (but maybe a little bit more so…), each have our own perspectives and points of view. Our sense of unity as a collective comes from shared identity, not from uniformity. We experience the same events in our own unique ways. This, of course, also holds true for how each of us is experiencing this moment in history. There are as many responses to October 7 as there are people in this room -- and definitely so many more than that. I’ll name a few here, drawing on conversations I’ve had with members of our community as well as friends, family, and colleagues over the past year.
So many varied and even contradictory perspectives -- it’s no wonder that we haven’t yet figured out how to talk to each other about October 7 or Israel overall. And in the wake of the discord and hurt that resulted from our previous attempts to have these conversations, many of us have stopped trying to talk to each other about October 7 and Israel overall. Learning to talk to each other across our differences is integral to making sense of the past year. Learning to talk to each other across our differences is also integral to healing and to emerging from this past year buoyed by the presence of our community. Speaking about our obligation to remain united despite our differences, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recently wrote: “To be a Jew obliges us to many things, particularly our duty to be our brother’s, and sister’s, keeper. That means never to forsake one another, much less to join in the vilification of our own people.” So we need to have the hard conversations, and we need to learn to do it better than we have been. Fortunately, we don’t need to figure this out on our own. There are people who study this stuff and organizations dedicated to teaching folks to create constructive dialogue around our potentially contentious differences. This is sacred work, and I’m hopeful that we will be able to engage in this kind of dialogue as a community at multiple points over the course of this next year and beyond, both about our perspectives on Israel and about other important issues facing our community. In thinking about this topic and beginning to prepare for the kinds of conversations I hope we will have, I have been reading books, scouring websites, talking with colleagues, and consulting experts in the area of creating dialogue across differences. Based on what I’ve learned, I want to share with us some of my key takeaways, so that we can all begin this journey on the same page. Strong disagreement raises strong feelings. When learning how to have these kinds of conversations, it’s helpful to acknowledge the ways in which strong disagreement can push us out of our comfort zone and into our panic zone, engaging our fight/flight/freeze response. For constructive dialogue to work, we need to become attuned to when we’re heading toward panic and we need to redirect ourselves away from that place. It’s important to plan ahead. To help us walk calmly through difficult conversations, we should first talk about how we want to talk about things, articulating our hopes for our conversation as well as what worries us about discussing a topic about which there is so much disagreement. We can and should set norms for our conversation, agreeing to listen without interrupting, and to keep the conversation just between the people having it. We must remember why we’re doing this. Having conversations about high-conflict topics can put us on the defensive, or worse, on the offensive. To keep us on the right track for when (not if) this happens, we can start with a collaborative goal, shifting our focus from winning a debate to understanding another’s point of view. Our collaborative goal might be “I want to maintain a good relationship with this person.” Or, “I want to understand this person and have them understand me.” Get curious! Particularly when we hear something that we disagree with, we respond by asking questions to help us understand the other person’s perspective. Questions must be non-judgmental and we must truly be open to hearing the answers. The best kinds of questions to ask are ones that invite the other person to tell their story. What personal experiences have informed their way of thinking? How does their opinion support their most cherished values? Once we allow others to feel heard, they’re much more likely to hear us out in return. When we share our stories with each other, rather than triggering panic, we can inspire and experience empathy. We may never come to agree with one other, but that’s not the point. Having difficult conversations is about fostering respect for diverse viewpoints, knowing each other more deeply, and nurturing the fullness of our community. October 7 and the current war will eventually become part of our collective memory. How these events become woven into our collective memory will be our legacy as people living through this time. Learning to hear each other’s stories, to acknowledge and even welcome different perspectives, even ones with which we disagree or that cause us pain, learning to have the difficult conversations is of utmost importance. We can help shape how people 50 years from now will be talking about October 7. We can repair how members of the Jewish community talk with each other about Israel. We can learn to understand one another and honor how each of our stories and perspectives contributes to the multifaceted whole of our people. As hard as it is to think about such things, much less contemplate talking about them with each other, this moment of Kol Nidrei is the perfect time to start considering how we will have these conversations. Tonight is a night of unlimited potential. We come to Yom Kippur having begun to think about the changes we want to make in our lives. Tonight we begin to find the fortitude, the will within ourselves, to enact those changes so that they last. In the coming weeks and months, we will be planning opportunities for our congregation to engage in dialogue about some issues that have in the past divided us. We will be working together to develop the skills to do so in a way that is constructive and honors the diversity of our community. I hope that you will join in, sharing your voice and opening yourself up to hear the voices of others. As the maḥzor reads, כי הנה כחומר ביד היוצר, we are like clay in the hands of the sculptor. We can reshape ourselves, strengthening our ability to listen to and engage with each other. We can reshape our community, transforming our response to this current moment into what future generations will remember and hold in their hearts. It’s a big job, and tonight is just the beginning. כתיבה וחתימה טובה - May we, families, our community, and the Jewish people be blessed with a year of life, peace, and growing together. I’ve written and spoken before about my dear friend Aaron, the Episcopal priest. We met as colleagues teaching at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School - he was the choir teacher and I was in the Jewish Text department. We bonded over a shared love of musical theater and nerdy religious stuff like biblical exegesis and the establishment of a fixed liturgy. He was ordained this past summer, and our friendship continues to grow, now with periodic meetings of our two-person interfaith clergy association.
Aaron invited me to attend his ordination at the National Cathedral. It was a profoundly moving and humbling experience. The space was grand and beautiful; the rituals were intentional and full of meaning, but most of it was foreign to me - except for one thing. As part of the service, the presiding bishop, Mariann Budde, bishop of the diocese of Washington, DC, gave a sermon, much as I’m doing right now. In her sermon, Bishop Mariann spoke about each of the about-to-be priests, about their growth during their years in seminary, and about the unique talents and personality traits each brought to their role as religious leaders. When she spoke about Aaron, she shared how he made it his mission to attend a Sunday service at every church in the diocese. Even though this pursuit made him a frequent stranger, he was always deeply present with whomever he had the opportunity to sit down and talk, whether it was the clergy of the church he was visiting or a fellow parishioner. Aaron brought his full self wherever he went, and communicated through his presence that he was really and truly there. Not surprisingly, Bishop Mariann made a link between Aaron’s way of connecting with others and the biblical text. She looked to the Hebrew Bible reading selected for the service, the story of Isaiah’s call to prophecy in chapter 6. Like Moshe before him, the strains of whose story can be clearly heard in the opening verses to the chapter, Isaiah answers God’s call with a simple “Here I am, הנני.” הנני is a word that should prick our ears. It’s something we hear regularly during this season. We know it perhaps best from Akedat Yitzhak, the story of Avraham and the binding of his son Isaac, which we will read in the Torah tomorrow morning. It is a word with deep significance, a word that marks major moments in the lives of the patriarchs and early leaders of the people of Israel. Avraham is the first in the Torah to say this word - and he says it three times in the story of the Akedah - but he is certainly not the last. Esav says הנני when approaching his father Yitzhak for a blessing (Gen. 27:1). Yitzhak says it when Ya'akov approaches him, disguised as his brother (Gen. 27:18). Ya’akov says הנני twice over the course of his narrative (Gen. 31:11 and 46:2), most profoundly toward the end of his life, as God calls him to go down to Egypt and reunite with his son. Yosef says הנני when his father calls him for the fateful trip to go check on his brothers (Gen. 37:13). It should be clear at this point that הנני is more than a simple “Here I am,” more than just a quick response. Our traditional texts and commentaries begin to shed light on the depth of הנני. Midrash Tanḥuma (Vayera Siman 22) explains that it is an expression of humility and piety. Rashi, quoting this midrash, adds that it indicates readiness. By saying הנני, one is humbly expressing their understanding of their place in the world as well as their readiness to respond and serve. Haamek Davar (to Genesis 22:1), the commentary written by 19th century scholar and leader of the Volozhin Yeshiva Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, comments that הנני indicates that one’s mind is settled and calm. God waited after calling Avraham for him to understand that the Holy Blessed One was about to ask something big of him. הנני was Avraham’s way of communicating that he was able to listen, that he had a clear mind, that he was aware of the significance of this moment. הנני is a word that continues to inspire and challenge us. A young writer named Rosie Yanowitch, currently a student at Brown University, says: “Hineni is a declaration: it requires an awareness of the space in time that you inhabit and a commitment to engage with your full self. It is declared despite fear and ambiguity…There is a sense of power, intention, and responsibility implied when declaring Hineni.” Rabbi Lauren Grabelle Herman of SAJ in New York teaches that “Hineni is about turning toward and not turning away…We say Hineni whenever we turn toward…the needs of another; we answer Hineni when we decide that we will not remain indifferent.” More than simply a word, it is a stance, an approach to the way we bring ourselves to our interactions with others. הנני requires us to set aside our egos and feel how small we truly are. It asks us to listen deeply, to make ourselves vessels for the words and needs of others. At the same time, הנני expresses a depth of self-awareness. It shows that we own our power, that we know what we bring to any given situation. Perhaps a better translation of הנני is “I am present.” ~~~~~~~ It has been a year. We were all caught off guard by the events of October 7, to put it mildly. As a global Jewish community, our eyes have been turned toward Israel. We have mourned those killed, prayed for those still held in captivity, felt existential angst for the country’s future, been disheartened at the present state of Israeli political affairs, been devastated by the loss of life over the border in Gaza (and now in Lebanon), and questioned the merits of continuing this war. We have felt loss and fear as we watched antisemitism in both word and deed grow at an alarming pace. For many of us, the upheaval of the past year has drawn us closer to the Jewish community. We have stepped up to express solidarity; found new meaning in religious community and new urgency in prayer; been motivated to learn more about Israel and discovered previously unknown ways to show our support. This year has also presented us with profound challenges to the cohesiveness of our community. The intensity of our feelings and opinions has made us less able to hear ideas that contradict our own deeply held beliefs. We have become wary of sharing too much about where we stand on sensitive issues, lest the people we are talking to reject or even attack us for our views. We have created echo-chambers, spaces where we can share freely with others who think just like we do, clinging to the illusion of safety that comes with never being challenged to defend our positions and to the gross misconception that there is only one right way to look at things. These one-sided conversations make us feel unified - after all, we all agree with each other - but in reality they break us apart into separate blocs and factions. It’s not only matters related to Israel and the current war that create such fissures in our sense of community. For some time now, the political and cultural climate here in America has led to greater and greater polarization. Here, too, we tend to stick to echo-chambers, the result being that we’re forgetting how to talk to each other, really, deeply talk to each other. We are reaching a point - if we’re not already beyond it - where engaging in open, honest, and even (and especially) difficult conversations feels impossible. Difficult conversations, conversations where we address the things that matter most to us without the expectation of uniformity or unanimous agreement, where we look straight on at the things that divide us can, if I’m really being honest here, be divisive. But they don’t have to be. And I would argue that it is exactly these kinds of conversations, the kinds of conversations that allow all of us to share openly without fear of recrimination, even when disagreements are deep and of consequence, that are exactly the kinds of conversations that build and strengthen community. These are exactly the kinds of conversations we need to be having. Over the course of the holidays, you’ll hear me speak from this bimah a number of times about the sorts of difficult conversations we need to engage in and the skills and practices that will support us in taking on this challenge. There are a number of conversations that we’ve been trying to have as a community and a few that are on our agenda for the coming year. We want these conversations to move us forward and bring us closer together; and they can. ~~~~~~~~ To do this and do this well, we need to take the approach of הנני. So how do we do that? Thinking back to my friend, Father Aaron, we start from and with ourselves. We enter into our conversations with each other with self-awareness, knowing what it is we bring to the interaction. If we understand הנני to mean “I am present,” we begin with the “I am” part of the word. I am. I don’t know that I, or many of us, give a tremendous amount of critical thought to who we are. But it deserves our attention. What makes each of us us? In his excellent book, How to Know a Person, David Brooks defines our personhood in this way: “A person is a point of view. Every person you meet is a creative artist who takes the events of life and, over time, creates a very personal way of seeing the world.” The way we see the world is a conglomeration of our memories, beliefs, traumas, loves, fears, and goals. These experiences from our lives construe how we feel about any given situation and help us construct our image of ourselves. Just as my image of the world and myself is uniquely mine, your image of the world and yourself is uniquely yours. To cultivate the self-awareness that is the “I am” part of הנני, we need to understand, discover, or rediscover, who we are. We begin by acknowledging the idea that our unique personhood lies in our unique perspective. And then we must examine that perspective. What is our point of view, and how did it come to be that way? What experiences from the earlier parts of our lives have been the most impactful in shaping how we see the world and our role in it? What activities or roles do we gravitate toward and which ones repel us? Why? When we pay attention to these aspects of who we are, we begin to know ourselves on a deeper level, and we can understand what it means to say, “I am.” Now the second half of הנני’s meaning: “present.” The first piece of presence begins with what we discovered about ourselves and recognizing that the same is true for everyone else. Every single other person in our lives and in the world is a creative artist whose selfhood is constantly being experienced into being. They cannot see the world just as we do and we cannot see the world just as they do - even when we agree with each other. Given how disparate our experiences and worldviews often are, we will of course not agree with each other from time to time. This is only natural; not cause for alarm. Expecting and sitting in disagreement is the next part of being present. Connecting deeply with another person means making room for them to be themselves, just as we want room to be ourselves. It means engaging with curiosity, rather than trying to define them from our own point of view. It means acknowledging when an idea or perspective is new or uncomfortable for us and asking questions to understand more deeply. Let me be clear: this is not easy to do, especially when we’re first starting to use these muscles. It is real, intentional work. When people express ideas or opinions that conflict with our own, it can be tempting to go into convincing mode, trying to get them to see the light and adopt our point of view. Sometimes, the ideas others express are so contrary to our own that our first instinct is to dismiss the other person out of hand. Or we hear something that gets our back up, that puts us on the defensive. When we feel this way, we have a tendency to speak in exclamation points rather than in question marks. These types of interactions only reinforce our differences and push us away from each other, rather than bringing us closer together. As human beings, we are hardwired to feel more of a connection to people who are most similar to us. The flip side of this is the tendency to be suspicious of or even hostile toward those whom we perceive as different. Rabbi Sharon Brous calls this tribalization. Pushing past our tendency toward tribalization is the next piece of presence. And it goes back to engaging our curiosity. When we reach that hard point, when we feel the distance between us creeping in, we need to open ourselves up to wondering, not just about the other person, but about ourselves. As Rabbi Brous says, “When we don’t wonder what the other is thinking or feeling, or where the pain comes from, when we don’t interrogate our presuppositions, our hearts close to one another.” Being curious, asking questions in a way that doesn’t prejudge the answer (“What makes you think that?” is very different from “WHAT makes you think THAT?!”) helps us turn our hearts back toward each other. In Rabbi Brous’s words, “...[W]hen we hold this kind of curiosity…we affirm another’s humanity, we reinvigorate our own.” Taking a הנני approach, especially to interactions and conversations where we anticipate deep disagreement, takes focus and practice. If we’re not yet experts in this, we’ll get it wrong a lot before we start to get it right. But when we start to get it right, when we are vulnerable, curious, openhearted with each other, when we bravely walk together through the hard stuff, then we are truly present. This New Year, may we ask more questions than we answer, may we see each other as the unique masterpieces that we are, may we find wonder and wholeness in even the hardest conversations. May we be blessed to say honestly and with conviction, הנני - I am present. Shanah Tovah. |
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