The Times They Are A-Crashing
10/03/2024 01:30:51 PM
Rosh Hashanah 5785 | 2024
“The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending,” screamed the cover of April’s The Atlantic magazine. Subheadings blared these messages: “An Era of Acceptance is in Danger,” “Hatred from the Right . . . and the Left,” “Jews Fleeing Schools,” and “An Era of Acceptance & Achievement is in Danger.” Coming just seven months after the horrific atrocities of October 7 th , Franklin Foer’s stark assessment of our present realities crystallized what many of us were thinking but had not yet articulated. Something felt palpably different about this moment. Not everybody wants to talk about it. It’s painful, and it's scary.
This past year has demolished a flurry of foundational narratives for us in the Jewish community and we are left wondering “what is going on in the world, what is going on in my country, what is going on in Israel, what is going on with my people?” So as your rabbis focus on what we consider the most important themes of this moment, we are wrapping our sermons around the value of sacred listening, because if we are not able to really communicate with each other and truly listen and hear each other, we won’t be able to best respond as a community.
In my messages, I will be focusing on two subjects that call to us with urgency. Today, I’ll be exploring where we are as an American Jewish community, and on Kol Nidre night I’ll be looking at our relationship with Israel and Zionism. And I’m going to use a different format. In keeping with sacred listening, I’m encouraging all of us to share our core values about our Jewish identities, including our fears and our hopes, with the important people in our lives. I am encouraging us all to put our hearts out there, and then, to really listen. I’m going to do that with my three children, Rachel, Abby, and Ellie, and I’m encouraging all of us to do something similar. I’m going to model and go first with this sermon today.
To younger generations,
This has been a year like no other. We have all mourned and celebrated family moments. For my family, these included some of the saddest moments we’ve gone through—the death of my great nephew, Theo, to brain cancer, and the deaths of my mother, Francine, and father-in-law, Joe. And there’s been wonderful happiness too. Those were
followed by my daughter Rachel’s wedding to Andrew and then my sixtieth birthday, a time for celebration and reflection.
In addition to these important family moments, my whole year bears the imprint of October 7 th and the ongoing pain that began October 8th . In one way or the other, every day since then has been impacted by the attack on Israel and its aftermath. Tonight, I want to share what is in my heart, in the hopes that you will hear and that you too will share so that I can hear. I know we won’t always agree, but I also know that we must continue to share with each other because we love each other and will always walk life’s path together. As a parent of Jewish children in a committed Jewish home, I was always aware that you brought your Jewish identities wherever you went, and that never worried me, even when you travelled abroad. The relative safety and comfort I felt as a Jew in America felt normal, but maybe that normal feeling wasn’t, historically speaking, normal.
I was on webinar a month ago for rabbis preparing for the High Holy Days, and a rabbi around twenty years older than I made a startling statement: “These are not unprecedented times,” he told us. “This period since the end of World War II, those were unprecedented times.” And in fact, that’s exactly what your Grandpa Joe often said. What we are facing now, that is how it has normally been for Jews throughout history. (Rabbi Michael Zedek, High Holy Day Sermon Writing Seminar, Central Conference of American Rabbis Webinar, August 5, 2024)
But the world I was raised in reflected different historical realities. In religious school in the 1970s, in rabbinical school in the 1990s, at synagogues for the past thirty years, there were two elemental premises that protected us: one, the stability of our liberal democracy—with its separation of powers, independent judiciary, and a system of checks and
balances between branches of government—and, two, the sovereignty of Israel. A slogan Jews quoted often in the second half of the twentieth century was “Never again.” We would never allow ourselves to be victimized again.
It’s hard now to imagine how much 1948 changed our self-conception. A few weeks ago, I led a funeral for a congregant in his nineties, and his children recounted how for this man, the creation of Israel changed everything in terms of antisemitism. Now, we Jews were warriors capable of defending ourselves. The catastrophe of October 7 th and its
aftermath have violently shaken the two narratives that have been foundational in my life and at least in the beginning of yours: that Jews in America could comfortably combine being Jewish and American, and that Jews in Israel, who now had a state, could exert control over their futures.
As a rabbinic colleague, Rachel Timoner, has expressed, there were two devastating moments. October 7th destroyed us. But October 8th took whatever pieces we had left and destroyed those as well, as we watched our allies, our organizations, and our institutions that we thought would stand by us as American Jews all dissolve into Jew-hatred, antisemitism, and virulent anti-Zionism. This hurt me at the deepest level. After all the causes across progressive circles where we in the Jewish community stood side by side and marched with our allies, it pained me to feel that we in the Jewish community had been mostly abandoned. Not all left us on our own, but most.
Which makes me even more appreciative of the local city and county leaders and politicians, clergy members, Burlingame and San Mateo County school principals and superintendents, who stood with us and have continued to collaborate and try to solve problems together through very difficult conditions.
There’s another narrative that our current reality makes me rethink. As part of the Reform Jewish community of the Bay Area, most of us tend to consider ourselves highly assimilated into American society. We feel that we are fully engaged in American culture. And if we now need to reconsider the promise of American liberal democracy and whether the existence of Israel protects us, our American Jewish identity demands reconsideration as well. The fact that so many areas of American society marginalized Jews the day after October 7 th demands of us a new way of understanding our Jewish identities. Our commitment to American society and communal and intersectional causes blinded us to the fact that, just like that, we could be screamed at, just for being Jewish. What do we do with that discomfort, knowing that is happening as Jews walk across their campuses or show up for a cause?
I don’t know if this is the end of the golden age for American Jews or not, but no matter what, the situation has changed dramatically. We can’t act as if things are the same. There’s a helpful way of looking at the world that Rabbi Benay Lappe describes. They put it this way: “And there are three, and only three, responses to a crash, ever. . . . Option One, which is denying that a crash has occurred and reverting to your master story and hanging on for dear life—and people tend to build walls around that old master story to make sure that nothing interferes or threatens it again. Option Two would be accepting that your master story has crashed, completely rejecting that master story, and jumping off into a completely new story. Option Three is to accept that the story has crashed, but instead of abandoning the story, you stay in it, reinterpreting it through the lens of
the crash, and building a new story from the amalgamation of the original story the crash material and the reinterpretation.”
I choose option three. It’s not an option to close our eyes and pretend this didn’t happen. We will need to reimagine, and we will have to reinvent. And I want you to know that my generation will need the creativity and different perspectives that could only come from your generation.
An area of Jewish identity that begs our attention is the balance of two opposites: Jewish particularism and Jewish universalism. Over time, Reform Judaism has leaned toward emphasizing our universalist message and articulated our universal hopes, dreams, and values, at the expense, I could argue, of our particularist ones. But the past year, that universalist message took a hard hit.
We have invested so much time in the notion of tikkun olam, of repairing the world, and that, as president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, Yehuda Kurtzer argues, is really a very American Jewish version of inclusion and equality. We may be 0.2 % of the world’s population and 2% of the USA’s population, but we still talk of our obligation to heal the world, and that’s beautiful, this notion of caring as much about the non-Jew as about the Jew. We don’t want to give that up. But we might do well to revise how much time we put into thinking about the, the well-being of Jews everywhere, and that includes right here in our country, right here in our state, right here in our town. When vile antisemitic graffiti shows up in Burlingame schools, it deeply hurts my heart, and I hope you and your peers will care just as much.
And at the same time, I really do think it’s a false narrative to think we need to choose between these two visions of Jewish life—particularism and universalism. We can double down on both. We can lead with our Jewish identity, and we can answer the ancient call to create a world for all people, working side by side with people of all backgrounds. We can deepen the degree to which we care about our people, and we can double down on our efforts to reinvest in our relations with leaders and organizations. We will
need to rebuild our faith again in the partners who didn’t call this past year, or who, worse, posted terrible things about Jews on social media. (Inspired by the words of Rabbi Dara Frimmer, Sermons for 5785: Texts that Inspire Us, Central Conference of American Rabbis Webinar, August 27, 2024.)
My dear people, I close with this image. We Jews have always thought we were living in the end of times. We are not the first generation to question if our surroundings are safe. So, all these millenia later, there must be something we have done right as a people, because we are still here. One of those things has always been our sense of hope and our inclination to work for it.
There is a beautiful midrash about the first humans, Adam and Eve, who were not told by God on day one that the sun would rise again. As they saw the sun setting, they wept and held on to each other. Imagine their relief when the sun rose again and they were blessed with the ability to create and recreate, to find resilience and keep creating. Like us, they did not have all the details and instructions. They probably felt ill-equipped to face the challenge, but they did, and the next day, they expressed their gratitude.
Elie Weisel has a wonderful line that I hope will bring you comfort as it does me: “God gave Adam a secret—and that secret was not how to begin, but how to begin again.” We Jews have found ways, from ancient times until now, to emerge from dark periods. We have activated hope as a superpower. It reminds us that we are not powerless. It reminds us that we always have agency.
I’ll share where I find hope: our infinite capacity to meet crisis with reinvention and cultural creativity. It’s our Jewish superpower. Throughout our story, all the great books of tradition were written in response to catastrophe—the Talmud was created as the Second Temple was destroyed and in the wake of Roman destruction. The Zohar was created
out of the destruction of Jewish life in Spain and Portugal. Chasidism was created in the dark shadow of antisemitism and destruction in the seventeenth century. Zionism grew in Europe when the light from theEnlightenment cratered, and Jew-hatred grew. And after the Shoah, two wonders occurred. The Jewish people created a whole network of Jewish institutions that have sustained Jewish life. And our people created the State of Israel. Later in the twentieth century, we modeled God’s power to redeem, and we redeemed Jews in Russia and Ethiopia. (Inspired by the words of Rabbi Ed Feinstein, High Holy Days Sermon Workshop, Wisdom Without Walls Webinar, September 4, 2024.)
I am turning to you this Rosh Hashanah, with my breaking heart this year, and I’m hoping that you will continue to care deeply about our Jewish people—here in America and across the globe—allowing yourselves to hurt when your fellow Jews are hurting, demonized for just being Jewish, or for caring about Israel. I pray that your generations understand how important it is to show up for the Jewish people, and that you will continue to feel the desire to be part of whatever Jewish community you live in.
This past year has made this truism even more apparent: how a society treats its Jews—in any country, but especially a democratic country—is a measure of the health of the country. And that when the Jews are targeted, other ethnic groups will also be targeted. When society careens toward a tendency to deny the humanity of the other, our Jewish tradition reminds us that every human being was created in the image of God and is worthy of dignity. I am proud to be part of a religious community that gave that idea to the world. And I know you also take pride in that too. I love this community and love that we share this faith, this people, and this story. Kein y’hi ratzon.