Yom Kippur 5786 – Scroll Down for Video
וְהָיָ֗ה כְּעֵץ֘ שָׁת֪וּל עַל־פַּלְגֵ֫י מָ֥יִם אֲשֶׁ֤ר פִּרְי֨וֹ יִתֵ֬ן בְּעִת֗וֹ וְעָלֵ֥הוּ לֹא יִבּ֑וֹל
V’hayah k’etz shatul al palgei mayim. (Psalm 1:3)
May we be like trees, planted by streams, with roots that reach all the way to the groundwater of Blessing; to the mayim chayim, the waters of Life. May we draw from those waters and be saturated with them, so that in every moment, with every movement of trunk, branch, and leaf, we may serve the cause of Life and Blessing.
I’d like to talk a bit about Blessing tonight. It was present with us last week on Rosh Hashanah as we read the story of Bil’am in Torah. Bil’am, a great sorcerer, was hired by the king of Moab to cast a curse on the Children of Israel, who were encamped on Moab’s borders. Instead, when the time came, Bil’am opened his mouth and out came: Mah tovu ohalecha. “How beautiful are your tents.” (Numbers 24:5)
What makes this story so memorable, I think, besides the plot devices of a talking donkey and an angel with a sword, is that in our life experience, we rarely see curse replaced by Blessing. By curse I don’t just mean muttering epithets at other drivers on the road. I mean the impulse to protect ourselves from anything new or challenging by reacting with suspicion or hostility or indifference. This is hard enough to resist or to be around when it is between us as individuals. But when that suspicion or hostility or indifference becomes a mass movement or public policy, well that is where such tremendous and frightening harm can happen.
In tomorrow’s Torah, we return to blessing and curse in another famous passage: “I have placed before you blessing and curse, life and death. Therefore choose life.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)
Choose Life. Sounds easy. But then of course we are left to manage the practicality of that. How do we serve the cause of Life and Blessing in a time of such curse, such catastrophe, around us?
The word for blessing in Hebrew is one we all know: berachah. The word for curse might be newer: k’lalah, which contains the word kal, meaning, “easy.” The way of curse is the easy way. A shallow stream with a quick current. It can carry you away. Whereas Blessing and Life, I believe, are deeper, a great subterranean pool. That is where we need to be rooting deep. Those are the waters we need to be drawing up.
Take a moment right now and imagine the waters of Life and Blessing at the tips of your roots. Draw them into you, right now.
We need to be drawing up these waters, because we are being called to respond to the suffering of this world, wherever we can. Here at home the cause of Life and Blessing impels us to protect immigrants and transgender youth and the democratic institutions we cherish. And we Jews have something to say on this matter. We have a still-fresh memory of what it is like to get plucked off the street by strangers and taken away to who-knows-where. Of what it is like to be criminalized. Of what it is like when journalists are threatened and satire is suppressed and academics are silenced and opposition is punished. We know how that story goes, because we have lived it, within the memory of people in this room.
We, as Jews, are uniquely poised to bring our voices and our bodies and our money and our art to help shore up this tender democracy. Not on social media, which is designed to distract and discourage us. But in the real, with each other, in community, in person and out loud.
We are called not only to act and but to act now. Not later when it gets worse. I know the downward slide we’re experiencing is discouraging and makes us feel powerless. But I do not believe that the worst is pre-ordained. Jimmy Kimmel getting taken off the air and then restored within a week reminds us that we the people do have power – political, economic, creative. We can also harness that power and turn it to address other threats that are not as glamorous as the sidelining of a famous talk-show host, but are crucial nonetheless.
It might sound like I am simply describing resistance. But what I am trying to describe is insistence. Because the ways of Life are insistent; the ways of Blessing are insistent. We do not need to be in a posture of defensiveness and reactivity. Our actions can be an affirmative pouring-forth of the deep waters of Life and Blessing into the circumstances in front of us.
Okay take a breath. Because here comes the other important and painful way we are being called as Jews to the cause of Life and Blessing. And that is in responding to the ongoing destruction in Gaza. We are being called to respond as Jews. Because this destruction is being carried out in our name.
In the immediate pain and tears following the horrors of October 7, many of us held our breath – and our tongues – waiting to see what would happen. No one doubted that there would be strong military response. Now, two years later, it is clear that the ongoing violence has not brought home the hostages, has not toppled Hamas, and seems to serve no strategic purpose except, apparently, to prop up the Netanyahu government. But the suffering it has caused is immense – greater than we can imagine. It will raise up new generations of human beings who are scarred and hopeless. And it has dragged the State of Israel and all of us into an untenable moral position. Here are words that might describe it: “The intensity of the agony is high, the hour is late, the outrage may reach a stage where repentance will be too late, repair beyond any nation’s power.” Those are the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, talking about Vietnam, and those words are alive right now. The hour is late. Soon even repentance will be impossible.
I know there might be difference of opinion in this room about what Israel’s strategy is or ought to be. But I will go out on a limb and say that no one here, no matter what their view, wanted the horror that has since unfolded.
I know that our history of Jewish trauma makes it hard to break ranks with other Jews. It makes it hard to speak up against a Jewish State. I feel this all the time; the pit in my stomach as I try to pull words together, feeling like I will be seen as a traitor for wanting something better and saying so. But speak up we must, because the cause of Life compels us. The cause of Life insists.
After two years of this agony, we are still the only congregation in Sonoma County that has called for ceasefire and one of the few in the country and I am ashamed. A growing consensus of rabbis in the US are now saying the violence must stop. But at the same time many of our legacy Jewish organizations have doubled down, distracting us by trying to convince us that anti-semitism is the most pressing problem in front of us, usually identifying protest of Israel as anti-semitic.
An example. Oren and I were driving home from Monterey last month and we passed a purple billboard that said: “Protesting Israel but silent on Myanmar? Makes you wonder why.” In other words, why are you attacking Israel when other places, like Myanmar, are even worse? The only possible answer, the billboard implies, is anti-semitism. But in fact the US funds Israel’s military operations in Gaza whereas it places sanctions on Myanmar because of their human rights record. That in itself is a good reason why Americans might protest this war and not so much Myanmar. But mostly the billboard made me sad that the charge of anti-semitism could be used to discredit voices calling for peace – our voices calling for peace. It also made me sad that Myanmar is the comparison that Israel draws, even from its most ardent supporters. I don’t want the Jewish State to be in that company. I want better.
This is where we must resist. Where we must resist the intimation that our moral outcry is in some way disloyal and instead insist on something better for Palestine and for Israel. The starving of children, the starving of adults, is not the way to resolve a conflict or bring about the security of the Jewish people. It is not the way to be a Jew.
We need to be at the forefront of the opposition, not at the back of it. Israel has received a lifetime of our support; its government acts in our name. Talmud says that if we see members of our family transgressing and do not call it out, we are also guilty of the transgression. (BT Shabbat 54b) In other words, while we might not ourselves be guilty we are still responsible. We are implicated. And if we were at the front of the opposition – all of American Jewry – the violence would stop.
In this moment of moral crisis, we must have a moral response. We must get this violence to end. Later on we can iron out the political consequences, and work for healing and repair and repentance. Later on we can assess how much of what got labelled as anti-semitism was in fact anti-semitism (because certainly some of it is, and I would need yet another high holy day to even begin to explore the contours of anti-semitism today), and how much of it was just non-Jews speaking painful truths that we were uncomfortable hearing or ashamed to say.
Now is the time to be insistent. To join with our beloveds in Israel who are protesting the government and the war. Now is the time to collectively put an end to this nightmare that has ruined uncountable lives. And individually to look inward and take upon ourselves a cheshbon hanefesh, a reckoning, of what we believe, what we fear, what we value, and why.
Jews have been speaking to me a lot of late about their disillusionment. About how they don’t want to be associated with what’s happening to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. How it makes them not want to be Jewish anymore. I myself have had similar moments. But then I think that I do not want to give Netanyahu or his defenders the power to rob me of my Judaism. And I do not want to give Netanyahu or his defenders the power to rob Judaism of me.
Tomorrow’s Torah portion says, “I call Heaven and Earth to be your witnesses today that I have placed before you the choice: life or death, blessing or curse. Therefore choose life.” Heaven and Earth are our witnesses. The world is watching. History has its eyes on us. How will we act? How will we speak? How will we be remembered?
The task ahead is daunting, but Torah offers us an encouragement. Maybe anticipating the weight of the lift, how difficult in practice it might be to choose Life and Blessing when the swift waters of curse are all around us, an assurance is offered: Lo bashamayim hi. What we need is not somewhere in heaven, remote and unreachable. It is not across oceans where we can’t retrieve it.
כִּי־קָרוֹב אֵלֶיךָ הַדָּבָר מְאֹד בְּפִיךָ וּבִלְבָבְךָ לַעֲשׂתוֹ
Rather it is very close to us. Already in our mouths, already in our hearts. We already know how to do it. So people, trust your big hearts, trust your kind words. What you need is already in you.
May we be like trees, planted by streams, our roots reaching to the groundwater of Blessing, the waters of Life. May our branches offer shade, may our fruit offer sweetness and sustenance everywhere. May we, tree by tree, turn this parched, troubled world into Eden once again.