Our Voices

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5876 | 2025

I would like to invite you to join me on a ride through Jewish history. It’s a wonderful story, one that just keeps going up and up: The Israelites finally succeeded in entering the Promised Land. We were militarily successful, unified under one kingdom, with a Temple, as a permanent house for God. Even when people attacked it, we found ways to rebuild. And when we were attacked once more, we pivoted as a nation and a people, turning to scholarly pursuits: Torah, Talmud, prayer. We transformed ancient relics into shining gems. We established civilizations for ourselves, spreading out far and wide, building schools for people of all ages in which to learn. In every society we moved to, we managed to find success. We have been scientists, philosophers, authors, teachers, leaders, lenders, artists, healers, and so much more. Even when we were pushed away, we managed to find success somewhere else. They intended to destroy us in Europe, but we continued on. 

And here in the United States, ever since the first Jews arrived in 1654, we have been making our way into the fabric of American society. We have made strides in government striving to pursue justice at all levels, practically built the foundations of the American film studio system transforming Los Angeles into a global epicenter of cinema, revolutionized science and medicine through vaccines, theories, and inventions, authored significant works over the centuries both fiction and nonfiction, influenced the music scene in our own rite and even in the domain of Christmas, and achieved great renown by the sheer number of Nobel Prizes awarded. I could go on. There is so much success. This story keeps going and it keeps getting better. 

Friends, all of this is true. And also, we both know this is not the whole story. There is another side of the story, the scary one, the one that seems to always descend–down, down into the depths of destruction. We struggled to make it to the Promised Land for 40 years and we would have stayed but they destroyed our temple and exiled us. We rebuilt, but the Romans came along and burned everything to the ground. We had to pivot to survive so we built schools and studied our ancient texts. They were all we had left. And from then on, we continued to live for centuries under the rule of others. And when they had a problem, they scapegoated us. They villainized us and kicked us to the next town. They have always exiled us. They did it in the land of Israel, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, England, France, Italy, Bavaria, Yemen, the Russian Empire, and so many more. They nearly succeeded in destroying us in Germany and throughout Europe, murdering 6 million of us, leaving us as displaced and hated people. Even when we made it here to the United States, they persecuted us. Even when we built institutions for ourselves and made important strides in American society, they found ways to blame us, condemn us, make us the other. And today both the right and the left have found ways to find us responsible for the world’s ills, to discriminate against us, and single us out amongst the crowd. We cannot seem to catch a break. It just keeps happening.

This too is our story. But you and I both know that neither one of these narratives alone is our story. We are not part of some ever-ascending or ever-descending narrative. We are part of an oscillating narrative, one where successes are followed by challenges, followed by successes and so on. And that’s a good thing. In a 1990s study by psychologists Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush research1 found that knowing family stories had a direct correlation to emotional resilience in children and that an oscillating narrative (rather than an ascending or descending narrative) had the strongest impact on a child’s emotional well-being. This knowledge gives a person what they called an “intergenerational sense of self.” The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem, and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. 

I first learned about this concept at a Jewish Learning Works conference on spirituality and resilience. As a group, we were asked to consider both a high and low moment from Torah so we could put them all in order with the intent to demonstrate this oscillating narrative. Immediately my mind went to Mt. Sinai. What an incredible high moment (literally)! The Israelites stood at the mountain while Moses ascended so we could receive the tradition that we stand here practicing today. And what about the story of creation? Incredible! The exodus from Egypt? Miraculous! I could go on. But then there are the low moments. There are plenty of those as well: being exiled from the Garden of Eden, bondage in Egypt, Moses being told he may not enter the Promised Land. What first came to mind for me though was the Akeida: The Binding of Isaac. 

This story, one that we traditionally share on Rosh Hashanah, is in many ways one of horror. God tests Abraham and instructs him to do the unthinkable: sacrifice his son, his favored one, the one he loves, Isaac. It serves as a terrible reminder of a time when God asks God’s servant to sacrifice his child for whom he had prayed for years and what’s worse is that Abraham chooses to listen to those orders. He even gets a chance to opt out when Isaac questions what is going on. But Abraham manages to answer without admitting his intentions and continues on his way up the mountain. When he gets up there, about to do the unthinkable, he hears a voice crying out to him: Abraham Abraham. He stops and it changes everything. This turn of events hardly makes it a peak moment, but my God, is it better than the alternative. This low moment of the narrative becomes a turning point in our story. It becomes the beginning of the lineage that will take us through the rest of Torah, that even leads us to our highest moments: to Exodus, to Sinai, to the Promised Land. We cannot simply remember just the high or just the low moments. We must hold them all so that we might begin to see ourselves as part of something larger, as part of an oscillating narrative that transcends generations.

In his 1982 article, “Auschwitz or Sinai,”2 Rabbi David Hartman of the Shalom Hartman Institute posed an important and perhaps timeless question: will we define ourselves by the lowest moments of our history: the time in Auschwitz when our people were brutally persecuted and murdered or will we define ourselves by the highest moments of our history: the moment of covenant at Mt. Sinai when we accepted the gift that is our tradition. He posits that we must hold ourselves to that moment at Sinai, a moment of strength, of clarity, of hope. He closes by writing, “Auschwitz, like all Jewish suffering of the past, must be absorbed and understood within the normative framework of Sinai. We will mourn forever because of the memory of Auschwitz. We will build a healthy new society because of the memory of Sinai.” I tend to agree with Hartman in this regard. We must see the weight and significance of both these moments in our narrative, but we are obligated to use the memory of Sinai to move forward so that we might be able to build something that strives toward a similar high even when we find ourselves at our lowest moments.

Our sense of peoplehood requires this of us should we want to move forward with fortitude, resilience, and hope. However, this remains true at the personal level, just like Duke and Fivush suggested in their psychological study. We must begin to see ourselves not just as existing in the present moment of our lives, but also within the intergenerational sense of ourselves. We are part of nuclear and extended families that have had both challenges and successes. Whatever moment each of us is living in right now is not the only moment we have lived. It becomes easy when in a state of despair to say it is bad, it has been bad, and it will always be bad. But to do so would sacrifice what good there truly has been, even if fleeting. Just as well, it would be a misrepresentation of reality to ride the highs of life, expecting nothing to ever change.

Recently I found myself gripped in re-reading Katherine May’s book “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.” She writes of the many ways in which we may “winter” so to speak. There are those who live in climates where preparing for winter is a way of life. There are the animals and plants which are forced to change form and lifestyle to survive the winter. There are those who fall seriously ill, as the author personally does with cancer, who are forced to retreat from society as they live through a difficult moment, a period of winter. In each version of winter, she manages to find a sense of purpose. At the very end of her book she reminds her readers, “it winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever… To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it’s happened before.”3 

I share this perspective known as wintering, not to make it seem any less significant, because it so often is all-encompassing, but rather to say that it is part of a larger narrative. There is no winter without spring, summer and fall. This remains true for our personal selves and for our peoplehood.

If nothing else, I hope that this Erev Rosh Hashanah, I can inspire in us a sense of hope, of tikvah. Tikvah is the Hebrew word for hope, the very thing that has kept our people alive and well through the ages. 

I love Hebrew for its root system. That three letter root of kuf, vav, and heh that make up k’veh in tikvah is so much more than hope. This root also refers to a cord, a long string, a long string of a narrative that bends and turns, it moves up and down, but it is never static. It represents our oscillating narrative. It is not one solitary moment, but something that connects us to our past and our future, so long as we hold onto it. This root k’veh also connects to mikveh, the word we refer to for immersing oneself in a ritual bath. A mikveh is a reservoir. Inside that reservoir is mayim hayim: living waters. Hope is that living water from which we not only have permission but obligation to draw. 

We must draw from each other and from our history both somber and celebratory if we want to understand ourselves and be resilient for years to come. This is our call as Jewish people. I hope that this High Holy Day season and beyond, we will remember to draw from that reservoir of hope by immersing ourselves in community so we know we are not alone, by recalling our story for all that it is–both high and low, and by leaning on each other in the bad and the good. May the living waters of hope sustain us in our difficult days because we know we are part of something larger than ourselves that transcends generations. And may that hope lift us out of the depths of sorrow and help us climb even higher on our best days. Shanah Tovah.
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¹ https://jewishgrandparentsnetwork.org/family-room/why-sharing-family-stories-is-good-for-your-grandchildren
²  https://www.hartman.org.il/auschwitz-or-sinai/
³  May, Katherine. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. United Kingdom: Penguin Publishing Group, 2020, p. 237-238.