Loving Through The Pain

Imagine the two of them walking up the mountain path, their sandaled feet cut by bristle and thorn. The sun is already hot mid-morning; their calves ache from the effort and their parched throats speak few words. One is old, the other young. The old one is driven by a zealotry that the young one struggles to comprehend. The young one questions the purpose of their three day trek to Moria. An unspoken dread settles over him. He must ask.

‘Avi?’ ‘Father?’

The old one looks at him, the fire in his eyes dimming for something sorrowful and tender. ‘Hineini, b’ni’, ‘I am here, my son.’

We know how the story continues. We have the wood and the fire, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering? We feel the drama in our bones, even if we know the outcome. Isaac gets bound upon the altar, Abraham’s knife hovering over him; the ram’s horns caught in the thicket—offering swift redemption. Isaac is spared his life; Abraham, perhaps, is spared his conscience. It is a raw, painful, complicated, hopeful story, exposing every seam of love and pain in our collective Jewish condition. Both love and pain resonate stronger this year than in many years before.

October 7^th and the ensuing, ever escalating war leaves us in a state of shock, grasping for words to describe our experience. I remember in those early days, we struggled hard to make sense of our place in the world. I will never forget the kindness of local Christian clergy who showed up at the synagogue mere days later, bearing flowers and lit candles in a quiet vigil.

I embraced them but I did not know what to say; the grief was too raw. This would become a pattern; our relationships with the outside world recalibrating in real time. I remember struggling to talk to non-Jews outside the orbit of our own community. No matter my ecumenical, interfaith, universalist inclinations, I wanted to be left alone with my own people. I know many other Jews who expressed a similar yearning.

What does it mean to walk up Moriah together, the weight of the unspeakable between us? Turning away from the ‘Gentile Gaze’ of (social) media, we also found that we needed to recalibrate our Jewish relationships. It did not take long for our communities to fracture along lines of ideology, experience and moral commitment. With each passing day of the war, the fissures widen. Not only did many of us struggle to speak to non-Jews; we also struggled to speak to our fellow Jews. Sometimes, we lost trust, relationships, and assumptions of safety and belonging when we needed these the most.

Isaac and Abraham never spoke again after the Binding, and Sarah, his mother, died soon after. I believe it will take historians years, if not decades, to truly analyze and contextualize what this annus horribilis means for our people, but we all feel the immediacy of its profound trauma.

Among this pain, what does it mean to love? To love Jews and to love humanity? I promised a sermon series on love. But as I noted yesterday, it is not ours to trade complexity for sentimentality. A complicated love is what we will be holding today; in our scriptures, prayers and in our hearts. The stories of our people may offer us a way through.

I often insist we Jews are ‘a particular people with a universal mission.’ The paradox of Rosh haShanah is that it is our most universalist festival. Arguably, it’s not a ‘Jewish’ holiday at all, but the holiday of all humanity and Creation. ‘HaYom Harat Olam’: ‘today is the birthday of the world’. At the same time, it is the most particular expression of the most Jewish festival through its sheer ability to gather Jews to synagogues and cultural centers, dipping apples in honey and tightening our communal relationships with cords of love. Today, I want to tell the story of us and what it means for our collective condition and conscience.

The length and breadth of our tradition has struggled to reconcile our lofty humanitarianism with the basest impulses of revenge. , are well documented in the Hebrew Bible. Our tradition asks sincerely what it means to love our fellow Jews (ahavat Yisrael) without abdicating the responsibility of loving the stranger (ahavat ger) and all humanity. Often, these are presented as a zero sum game, but I think this is an error: an error which is proving catastrophic in our time.

To love our fellow Jews means to feel kinship to our fellow Jews; to be bound by a common bond, a shared destiny and unshakable joint responsibility. ‘Kol Yisrael arevim zeh ba zeh’, the Talmud insists, ‘all of Israel is responsible for one another.’ It’s something as small as the sense of ‘Jewish geography’ when you travel to another state and find so-and-so who is related to so-and-so. It’s something as great as the transnational solidarity of the global Jewish civilizational project; the deeply shared pain in the face of the horrifying massacre on October 7^th witnessing over 1200 of our own brutally murdered, and the outpouring of concern for the hostages. We feel it in the shockwaves of love and pain that reverberated through the community after Hersh Polin-Goldberg’s cruel and unnecessary death. Many of us read the heartbreaking eulogy of his courageous mother in the pages of Ha’Aretz. We are often only one or two degrees separate from each other; it is exactly this closeness that I have not been able to fully explain to my non-Jewish friends.

The tribal pride and protectiveness – in the best of ways! – that comes with being Jewish, of feeling your chest swell with the collective wisdom and achievements of our civilization is second to none. I feel that pride every day.

However, the love for our own people can become a tormented, misplaced or a self-absorbed love. It is hard to determine the tipping points, through multigenerational trauma and woundedness, where solidarity with one’s kin slides into something superioristic. To take seriously the mitzvah of ahavat Yisrael means grappling with its long shadows. We see the consequences of this play out on the geopolitical stage, whether it is through the Messianic war-mongering of Smotrich and Ben G’vir, or through the much smaller but still cutting conflicts that play out in the domestic sphere, where Jew bitterly fights Jew.

It is reflected in the language of internal dehumanization (‘you are no longer a Jew, if…’ fill in the dotted line), in the struggle to reflect deeply, honestly, and vulnerably on what it means for our people to go from powerlessness to military superiority (and in some cases, Jewish supremacy) in the course of two generations. Among the many emotional twists of a cruel year, and the current regional escalation, the constant recalibrating of our Jewish commitments can leave us unbalanced, untethered, and exhausted. Where we yearn for calm, there is only chaos: rising antisemitism, an entrenched global conflict, intergenerational trauma, internal division, moral injury. It feels grotesque that I preached on ‘Jewish joy’ last year. This year, the Yiddish ‘shver tzu zayin a Yid’, ‘it is hard to be a Jew’, cuts much closer to the bone.

In the midst of this, where do we turn?

We turn to two stories of Rosh haShanah. They are subtle, but subversive. We will leave behind the famous (and admittedly dysfunctional) protagonists of the season: Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Yishmael and Isaac. Instead, we turn to the Prophet Jeremiah, who in the second day Haftarah pictures Rachel weeping poignantly for her children. In the book of Jeremiah, in chapter 31, the prophet offers words of healing. He tells us that after the pain of collective transgression comes God’s great love – an ‘ahavat olam’ – that will bring reconciliation. Tears will be wiped away. Among this nechemta, these comforting words, there is the stark image of Rachel weeping for her children.

Jeremiah 31:15: ‘Kol b’Ramah nishma ne’hi bechi tamrurim Rachel mebakah al baneihah me’anah lehinachem al baneihah ki eineinu…’

“A cry is heard in Ramah—
Wailing, bitter weeping—
Rachel weeping for her children.
She refuses to be comforted
For her children, who are gone.”

Brokenness may heal, but the losses remain. Rachel weeps because her children are dead, and nothing can bring them back. The backstory is that Rachel was a young mother suffering relentlessly from prolonged infertility and familial torment. When she finally conceived and birthed Joseph, followed by a son she named Ben-Oni – the son of my duress – (later renamed Benjamin) as she was dying in childbirth by the side of the road. Rachel knows that she cannot protect her children; that they will suffer greatly in her absence. The desperate image of a laboring woman dying beyond the safety of her own birthing bed, hidden in the bushes for scant cover, is particularly resonant today.

Jeremiah teaches us that even though better days may be ahead, it is equally valid to stay with the pain and mourn it deeply. That kind of Jewish pain does not easily dissipate.

Yet, there is a counterpoint. Asking why we blow a hundred Shofar blasts on Rosh haShanah, the rabbis of the Talmud (Tractate Rosh haShanah 33b) find the answer in the Book of Judges. They read the Prophetess Deborah’s victory paean when she routs the pagan military leader Sisera. The Hebrew Bible also imagines Sisera’s mother, despite her being an enemy of Israel, weeping and waiting for her commander son to return home.

“Through the window peered Sisera’s mother,
Behind the lattice she whined:
“Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why so late the clatter of his wheels?” (Judges 5:28)

The inevitable cannot be staved off: Sisera’s mother will learn that her son is dead. Scripture hints at Israelite triumphalism: ‘peace returns to the land’.

This is not where the Talmud takes it. According to the Rabbis, it was Sisera’s mother’s hundred mournful cries that correspond to the hundred shofar blasts in synagogue. It is a remarkable move towards shared empathy. It is not only Sarah Imeinu, our tribal mother, who evokes the blast of the shofar. It is even this nameless enemy of Israel. In the words of pop-singer Sting: ‘they love their children too.’

These two texts teach us something profound about Jewish pain and love: the pain and love we feel for our own people, and the pain and love we feel for all humanity. The particular Jewish values of our tradition imagine the universal suffering of all parents in the midst of war.

Despite all the pain of the last year, I am buoyed by what the data tells us: a large majority – 87% according to a recent poll cited in the Daily Forward– of American Jews support a hostage deal and bilateral ceasefire. They give me hope, and I stand with them. Like me, they want to see Rachel’s children come home before there are none left to return. They consider it an ethical imperative to protect Palestinian (and Lebanese) civilian lives as well as Israeli lives. They desperately wish to avert regional escalation. And perhaps less tangibly but more fundamentally, they remind us that we are meant to be an ‘am rachman’, a compassionate people, a people that integrates ahavat Yisrael with love of all humanity. Israelis deserve to live in safety and security; Palestinians deserve dignity and self-determination; all deserve to experience a just and lasting peace—as fleeting and impossible as it seems now.

Love for the Jewish people. Love for all humanity. Both-and. A great love indeed.

Building a Jewish culture of healing after this impossible year will rely on internalizing that truth and living it communally. Some of us feel strong ties to and solidarity with Israel; we have family and friends there, know people sheltering in bomb shelters as we speak or feel ideologically committed to the project of Jewish self-determination and sovereignty. Some of us connect to the land and its history and sights, having walked the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

At the same time, some of us have complicated, indifferent, or even highly critical feelings about the Jewish state. Some of us bear witness to the suffering of Palestinians and question how this can be perpetrated in our name and have Palestinian friends as dear to us as our Israeli friends.

All these are real and our communities worldwide must honor and accommodate these diverse voices of conscience. If we silence Jewish conscience, then we diminish the Jewish civilizational project itself. If we suffocate our moral imagination, we stifle healthy and necessary dissent. Instead of plowing salt into the soul of our moral imagination, we should be sowing seeds.

This unfathomable year has torn me apart and pushed me to the brink. It has humbled me beyond any experience I can articulate. How can I, as a congregational rabbi, hold these multiple truths without reducing them to zero sum games? It is my responsibility to create a diverse and inclusive synagogue and hold people together—with a wide array of conflicting views. As I said on Charity Nebbe’s IPR radio show about six months ago: ‘I am perpetually terrified and my failure is 100% guaranteed.’

Bringing together the particular expressions of my Jewish solidarity and the universal orientations of my humanitarianism, I give voice to my conscience and tears. I am not an expert in foreign policy, international human rights law or military strategy. I am merely a teacher of Torah and a servant of the Holy One, conscripted to a mission of love. And yet, as small as it may seem in the grand scheme of things, I do not believe it is futile to expand the reach of Jewish humanitarianism in our community. Even if I cannot stay the sacrificial knife upon the altar, I am obligated to say hineini, here I am—if only to speak for the quality of our collective Jewish soul.

HaYom Harat Olam—today is the birthday of the world. We fill our lungs with oxygen and possibility; stretch our limbs with empathy. We strengthen our values, even in our little corner of the Diaspora. None of this is easy; there are bound to be deep disagreements.

But to love each other is to take each other seriously. To take love seriously means to hold it – and ourselves – to account. To cultivate conscience means to make space for this to be said aloud. As we continue to pray for peace, it is impossible to know what the future brings.

We do know that we can be roused by the blasts of the shofar.

May we arise in repentance, mercy and love.