This Is A Moral Test — R'Lizzi Rosh Hashanah 5786

This sermon was delivered at our 5786 Rosh Hashanah service.

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Fire and Ice, Robert Frost

Jewish Tradition holds that God tested Abraham 10 times. It’s not an accident that, among all the many stories of our founding father and founding family, two of these tests in particular are highlighted for us to read on the first and second day of Rosh HaShannah. It’s like our ancestors are begging us, every year, to look at our world in the light of these stories and learn their lessons anew. So before we get to the world this year, and there’s a lot to talk about, I’d like to spend a little more time with Torah.  Sound good? Yes? For the privilege of learning Torah together in this new year: Shehekhiyanu v’kiyemanu v’higianu lazman ha’ze.

For decades before Isaac’s miraculous conception (not immaculate– but miraculous nonetheless), our protagonists Abraham and Sarah tried to have their own children, to fulfil God’s promise that Abraham’s progeny should be as numerous as the stars of sky and sands of the sea. But when that proved impossible, Sarah told her husband to sire a child with her Egyptian handmaiden, Hagar. That child is named Yismael, which means, God Will Hear. 

Literarily, Hagar plays the role of the outsider – the immigrant, person of low or outsider status, as reflected in her very name Hagar/haGer, in Hebrew, the stranger, or the person who’s here, but not from here. When Hagar the Egyptian gets pregnant, rather than feeling like she helped fulfill God’s promise, Sarai’s shame becomes even more pronounced, which, in turn, causes her to abuse and oppress Hagar. It is those very same words– innui, avdut, oppression, abuse, slavery– used in The Book of Exodus to describe how the Egyptians treat the Israelites. The text is not even subtle about the idea that what goes around comes around, especially when it comes to the way we treat gerim, strangers.

https://youtu.be/w3aXgNRRB9Y

Fast forward thirteen years, Sarah gets pregnant, Isaac is born, and Sarah wants Hagar and Ishmael gone once and for all, and says, “Abraham, make it happen.”

Abraham is understandably deeply distressed by the prospect of exiling his firstborn son and Hagar, whom he obviously cares for very deeply. So Abraham does what all biblical prophets do, goes to God, and God responds enigmatically, “In everything Sarah tells you, Shema B’Kolah, listen to her voice.” 

This is the hinge, the test. God says, “listen to her voice.” Listen to her voice, not “obey her instructions.” When I read, Listen to her voice, I read, hear her agony, her feeling of scarcity and protectiveness; hear the years of disappointment, shame and humiliation, which strangely don’t just disappear now that she suddenly has a child of her own– if anything, it’s all is coming wooshing back in a flood of the memories and hormones of new motherhood? Abraham, can you affirm how unfair it feels that Hagar got all of this first and so easily? When Sarah cries, can you just hold her? When she rages, will you let her… but when she asks you to do something that will expand the circle of hurt, humiliation and shame because she feels like it will make her feel better, can you also gently say, “I hear you, and I love you, I get where that feeling is coming from. But no.”

We don't get to hear Abraham's inner monologue. We only see that the next day he has muscled through his discomfort, and obeys. He places a skin of water on Hagar’s shoulder. He hands her some bread, and sends her and his first child out into the wilderness, probably to die.

This is the precursor to tomorrow's story in which God instructs Abraham to take his one remaining son up a mountain and offer him as a sacrifice. This time there is no protest.

We watch Abraham and Isaac ascend the mountain together, we see Isaac’s confusion: “Here are the implements for making a sacrifice, but where is the animal?” We watch his painful realization that being the favored son did not spare him the very same fate as his brother Ishmael in the end. One capitulation has led to another. An angel of God calls out to Avraham, pulling him out of his trance of obedience at the last moment, revealing a ram in the thicket to sacrifice in place of Isaac. 

But at this point Isaac disappears from the story. They do not walk down the mountain together. And the next reference to Sarah in the text is at her own funeral, from which the rabbis deduce that when she heard that her husband had taken her only miraculous, beloved child up a mountain to slaughter him at God’s command, she died of grief. The sound of the shofar’s staccato moan recalls the sound of Sarah’s anguished heartbreak. Of the heartbreak of every mother whose child was made a sacrifice to forces more powerful than her love.

I’ve talked about heartbreak before on this holiday. Because the theme of Rosh HaShannah is HaYom Harat haOlam, Today the world is born anew! But I have a confession to make (wrong holiday, I know): the excitement and hope that I want to feel on this day has, for years, been eroded by a kind of heartbreak at the state of the world. My sense of hopefulness at the prospect of a fresh start in the new year isn’t gone… it’s just had to make room for heartbreak. Maybe I relate to Sara… I fear that I cannot prevent my children being sacrificed to forces greater than my love… My heartbreak is anticipatory loss and grief: it’s the sense of loss that comes with feeling like the forces contributing to climate change, war, authoritarianism, gun violence, white Christian nationalism, and ecocide are rapacious, unrelenting and will win. And it might not be permanent, but it will do real damage, for a long time. 

But.. it is just a feeling. Feelings aren’t truth. They’re real, but they can also be wrong. And I hope to God I’m wrong. So every day I wake up, thank God for my life, and I behave like what I do matters, as a rabbi and mother and citizen, of this country and of this world. That it matters, existentially, that we have spaces to feel buoyed by a tradition whose moral wisdom, spiritual practices, and obsession with justice, have helped shape our people and survive times like these for thousands of years. And I am devoted to that with every ounce of my being. That sits next to my heartbreak.

So, I just want to affirm for anybody who might be feeling similarly, heartbreak is a legitimate emotion to feel, even on this day. Everybody in our story walks away with a broken heart. Maybe the lesson we learn from that is not to silence or deny our heartbreak, but to let it crack us open, to listen to it and to let it be our teacher, so we don’t expand the circle of pain in our heartbreak.

Nitsan Joy Gordon, a leader in the Israeli Palestinian peace building organization, Together Beyond Words, has a phrase, “Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.” What if our test is to transform our heartbreak, so we don’t transmit it?

In both of our stories, we see Abraham do the opposite: harden his heart and override his conscience — something for which we say a collective vidui, or confession, on Yom Kippur — striking our chests for the sin of being hard-hearted. Abraham hardens his heart to imagine that his own flesh and blood is the Other, and can be sacrificed to preserve his ‘family,’ namely, Sarah and Isaac. Rabbis over the generations have praised Abraham’s faithfulness, but it seems to me that his compliance in these two tests results, ironically and devastatingly, in the destruction of the one thing he was trying to protect — his own family, all of them. 

What we do to others, “The Other,” or allow to be done to others, because we feel threatened, because we think it will protect us — it comes back around to us, eventually. When we harden our heart against “them,” imagining it will protect “us” that sense of safety is at best temporary, and ultimately, an illusion. At the end of the day, there is no  “them” and “us.” There’s only us. All of us. Surviving or destroying ourselves, on our pale blue dot in the solar system, together. 

We know this, as Jews. We know the reality of our interconnectedness, how what happens to them and us is one and the same. Before I could recite any Torah, I could recite that famous passage by German theologian Martin Niemöller, you know it: First They Came. “First they came for the Communists, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. And on and on. Then they came for the Jews, but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.” The essential lesson of the Holocaust I learned as a kid — is that the world is saved when people listen to their conscience and speak up. Never again to saying about any group, “they are expendable”; never again to applying different moral standards and rights to different groups of people; never again to allowing bullies to get away with it; never again to dehumanization. Never again for us and never again for anyone. It wasn’t controversial. 

But when we feel threatened, it is precisely these moral muscles that quiver and atrophy. Our limbic brain gets hijacked, and we reflexively seek out who is to blame for our pain and to make them pay, or at the very least neutralize the threat posed to us. I get where Sarah was coming from, emotionally. It’s an instinct in us developed to protect us in situations of mortal danger — it’s an important one — but it can be easily exploited. Will we have the self-awareness to know when our big feelings — our fear, our rage, our sense of victimhood or injustice — is causing us to make choices that don't solve the problem, but mask it or expand it or put it on someone else? It's in these moments we need someone to listen to our heartbreak — shema b’kolah — to hear and validate our pain, and to prevent us from acting on our worst impulses of revenge and blame in the heat of the moment. First of all, it's not when we do our best thinking, and more importantly acting from rage and pain tends to be where we do things we come later to regret, that can take years, or generations, or millennia, to fix, if we can fix them at all. 

This is why Jewish tradition over 3500 years has produced verses, chapters, tractates, holidays, rituals — designed to hone and train our hearts for precisely the moments when they are most likely to close down in fear. L’ma’an tizkeru, so that we will remember. Genesis introduces us to the idea of the ger when it’s someone else. Exodus shows us ourselves as gerim, the oppressed minority, the stranger in a strange land. Leviticus tells us what to do when we’re finally free (again): “You must never oppress the stranger, the immigrant– ki gerim hayitem– because you’ve been there.” Deuteronomy goes so far as to say, “You shall love the immigrant, the stranger” — the person most likely to be scapegoated when people feel threatened, ki gerim hayitem, because we’ve been there. 

We don’t need to look far to see the disastrous effects of buying into the idea that we will be safe if we could make those people go away, or control them in a way that we would never accept for ourselves or our children. This way of thinking has justified our own country’s treatment of Native Americans, African Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Mexican Americans, Communists, queer people, trans people, and immigrants and their families. There is a battle happening right now for the soul of our country, and the battle ground is precisely this question: will we invest in the structures, institutions and laws that protect all of us, even when it's uncomfortable, or will we buy into the illusion of safety that comes from identifying a “them” to erase or silence? 

And for those of us that love and care about what happens to our Israeli siblings and Palestinian neighbors, we have witnessed for the past 2 years the abject horrors of the mutual dehumanization that comes from seeing the another group as nefarious, taking up space that should be ours, inherently prone to evil, in need of elimination. The horrific results of such thinking can be still seen in the burned out homes of Kibbutz Nir Oz, Kibbutz Beri, Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and in the harrowing stories of the hostages who have come back to share them, the fact that there hostages still being held by Hamas, and in hostages — including children, including babies — who were plucked from their homes, and murdered in tunnels beneath Gaza. The threat of violent Islamic extremism is real. 

And. The threat right now for those who care about Israel, as I do, is violent Jewish extremism and its enablers. The same eliminationist beliefs that call for all Jews to disappear from the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea, is mirrored by the highest ranking ministers in Israel’s government to justify, even proudly, the IDF’s “flattening of Gaza,” “the assault on Gaza,” the “burning of Gaza,” the “starving of Gaza” – the making of Gaza, and much of the West Bank for that matter, uninhabitable for Palestinians (and that’s not me editorializing, those are direct quotes from government ministers). And it’s not just rhetoric, they’re describing the reality they are creating as we speak. Our religion permits, even obligates, self-defense when one is under direct attack, but even according to IDF commanders this war is no longer a war of self-defense. It has become a war of ideology, driven by these very cabinet ministers, enabled by the Prime Minister himself, over the objections of the vast majority of Israel’s population, not to mention the families of the hostages still held in Gaza right now, who feel utterly abandoned by their own government.

We Jews carry the trauma of our history in our bodies, Israelis perhaps more than most, and these high level cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister himself exploit that pain to implement a dangerous messianic fantasy.  This fantasy rejects the idea of two states with self-determination for two peoples who both legitimately call that land home, and replaces it with the idea of one state with Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea, what they believe is the fulfillment of God’s will and the Jewish people’s final assurance of security. And this government is moving expeditiously toward that vision, with the support of the United States. I don’t need to tell you that in that vision, Palestinians will not share rights equal to Jews, and if they succeed it will be impossible to contest accusations of ethnic cleansing and apartheid, if one can now. They do all of this in the name of Jewish security — knowing how good those words feel to hear, and I imagine they believe it. But these messianic fantasies, and there have been a few over the course of Jewish history, they never end well for us. For those of us who care about Israel, we cannot cosign on this.

I understand the instinct to look the other way, and to focus on issues and places we feel we have efficacy. There’s plenty to do here. And who has time to deal with blowback, online, at work, from family or friends, for saying the wrong thing about such a sensitive, volatile issue? Let alone that putting yourself out there now can put a literal target on your back in a culture of increasing political retribution and violence here in the States. I can understand why anyone would not want to add their voice to the chorus on this. 

But we do the Jewish people and the Jewish state no favors by keeping our heads down, as if, if we don’t look, it’s not happening. Because the consequences of empowering state sponsored Jewish extremism imperil all of us. Not only Palestinians — and that would be bad enough — but Jewish Israelis as well, as young men come home in body bags every day. As Jews around the world feel afraid to be publicly Jewish, lest people who object to the actions of Israel’s government (which, to be clear, so do I) take out their rage on random passing Jews (which, to be clear, is antisemitism). Antisemitism of this kind and worse is rising, but for me, the solution is not to hide and let the most extreme voices speak for our people and define Judaism, Israel and Zionism — words I claim in my own way, but very differently. I would rather us be proudly, joyfully Jewish and make clear that violent Jewish extremism is a distortion of Judaism, a bastardization of Zionism and bad for Israel. And will ultimately be self-destructive.

Honoring the very real pain of our people, now and throughout history, need not and must not mean closing our eyes to the reality of the pain Palestinians have felt historically, and the pain our people are causing them right now. That does not mean dismissing the role that their own leaders and failures have played in contributing to where we are. It means holding both grief and responsibility at the same time. It means knowing that pain that is not transformed, will be transmitted. And we’re watching that transmission happen on a catastrophic scale. 

And it would be easy for people on the ground to despair. But I am encouraged by those who know that action and hope can and must live alongside heartbreak. I’m encouraged when I think about Israelis and Palestinians who are doing the hard, thankless work of transforming their pain into purpose, like Women Wage Peace and Women of the Sun — a movement of Israeli and Palestinian women who, for the sake of their children, refuse to hate and demonize the other, and organize rallies, and marches and demonstrations often over the literal walls that separate them. They’re part of a much larger network of peace makers, who have not given up on the idea of coexistence, and who feel in their very bones, that the key to peace is not eliminating the other, or controlling or dominating the other, but hearing the other, so they themselves can be heard, and together, imagine a different future, in which the security of all is bound up in the dignity and freedom of all. 

That kind of capacious heart, that vision, can be hard to hold onto when we feel threatened, but that’s why our tradition prepares our hearts precisely for moments like these. And it's why Israelis like the historian Yuval Noah Harari say to us American and worldwide Jews, “You are further away from the site of the pain. When we lose the vision, we need you to hold onto it for us and remind us it’s possible.” 

And here at home, I’m encouraged by people in this community who wake up every morning and fight for the hard-won progress made over the past 60 years to create a greater “We” in America’s “We the People.” I am encouraged by people who are fighting for reproductive freedom, environmental sustainability, public health, for the rights and healthcare of LGBTQ people, for the existence of trans people, for immigrants, and for democracy itself. I’m encouraged by people who plant trees and tend community gardens; who act as AA sponsors and big brothers and mentors; who are running for local office; who participate in trauma-informed community safety and violence prevention; who pick up trash they didn’t litter; who smile and make eye contact with service workers and strangers, who volunteer at soup kitchens, who invest in the arts and in non-profits fighting the good fight and doing what they can where they can to get back in touch with the foundational values of neighborliness and compassion that remind us who we are at our best. I’m encouraged by every-day people who speak with respect and nuance even though the algorithms reward bombast and outrage.  Against a backdrop of echo chambers — on social media, in the news we consume, and in almost every other realm of life that used to happen in the public square and now happens online, alone — I have to say, even what we’re doing here, davening in a synagogue with people we know may disagree on topics we care a lot about, including disagreeing with the rabbi — is a counter cultural triumph of democracy-building.

And it feels like right now we need to do more, more than we’re used to or more than is in our comfort zone, to resist the forces threatening to close down our hearts, and our very humanity. In 1961, Professor Stanley Milgrim wanted to understand how everyday Germans in such an advanced, civilized society, could capitulate to the Nazis so easily. His hypothesis was that there had to be something inherent in German culture that made people more obedient to authority. He couldn’t get the permission to do it in Germany so he did it on the campus of Yale University.  Researchers wearing white lab coats told subjects they were in an experiment about learning– they were to ask questions of someone on the other side of a wall and if they got the answers wrong, to deliver shocks with increasing voltage. The subjects obviously didn’t know the shocks were not real and the person on the other side of the wall was an actor. Milgram observed that almost all subjects of the experiments expressed initial discomfort at what they were being asked to do, especially as the voltage increased and the person on the other side of the wall yelped, groaned, banged on the glass, and eventually thudded to the floor. But when the experimenter pressed them, saying “The experiment must go on. Please continue. You have no other choice but to continue,” they continued, and ultimately over 2/3rds of people did everything they were asked to do, including “killing” the person on the other side of the wall. In the end Milgram wrote, “After doing the study at Yale, I saw so much obedience, I hardly saw the need to take the experiment to Germany.” 

Psychologists have run many different versions of this experiment over the years to see what might mitigate these results. People are more obedient if the person running the experiment is wearing a uniform or labcoat. They are more obedient if the experimenter assures them that they bear no personal responsibility for what happens to the person on the other side of the wall. But if the subject understands the experiment is a moral test, on which they are being evaluated– they act very differently. They don’t comply with orders. They speak up. They walk out.

Abraham had ten trials, and so too, each one of us is tested, over the course of our life. Just as Abraham didn’t know which of his moral conundrums were the tests, neither do we. 

In 10 minutes, we will chant the haunting words of Untetane Tokef, calling to mind the image of each one of us standing before the divine throne in judgement. The theory of Rosh HaShannah — of standing before a Judge on this day, even if the judge is just a voice in your own head — is that if we don’t know which one is the test, we’ll think to ourselves “Maybe this is the test.’ “Maybe this is the test.” And if we always sense that this might be the one that really matters, we actually might start to live differently, to listen to our conscience, to expect more of ourselves, even when it’s hard. 

We’ll take a breath before responding in anger. We’ll treat everyone like they’re human, worthy of the same dignity, safety and freedoms that we value. We’ll fight to protect the institutions that protect all of us, even when it's uncomfortable. And you might even take a risk, for folks in your own family, and for folks far beyond your family. Because at the end of the day, we’re all family. We can stand up for ourselves as Jews, while standing up for others. As Jews. This should not be controversial. We can wake up in the morning and decide to live as if our choices, our words, our hope, our integrity, makes a difference.

So, I am telling you, to quote my own Rabbi Sharon Brous: moral conundrum ahead. You are being tested. We all are.

I want to bless us that we accept the tests before us in this year to come, and rise to meet them for the benefit of us, our people, and all creatures on this fragile, interconnected planet of ours. 

May you be inscribed for health and for life. L’shannah tovah.