Did we cover courage last week? We good with that? About being present rather than trying to be brave?
So tonight we’ll move on to connection, the B Side of our High Holy Day theme of “Courage and Connection.”
What do you think of when you hear the word “connection”? Connection can be deep or, trust me, it can be shallow. Lifelong or fleeting. It can be beautiful – connections to place or time. Beloved humans. Beloved landscapes. Childhood homes. The thing is, connection can be almost anything. There is no specified content to it.
I remember my first year law school classmate, Ken Cmiel, of blessed memory. This was in the Reagan Era, and our school was rife with young conservatives, members of the founding chapter of the Federalist Society, ambitious young soon-to-be lawyers who promised to unleash who knows what kind of mischief on the world in the course of their careers. There were a couple of them specifically whose life progress Ken vowed to follow, to monitor what harm they would cause. “Why?” I asked. “Well,” he replied, “they’re my hate-brothers.” I looked at him without comprehension. “You know,” he said, “people you hate so much they’re almost family.”
Not all of our connections are happy-making. They can be troubling and challenging. Family itself can be a tangle of difficult connections. Right now, in this MAGA-riddled country, in this Post-October 7 era, huge divisions run right down the middle of many of our holiday tables. I have relatives that I love, with whom I don’t even know how to have a conversation right now.
Maybe that’s why Psalm 133 famously says, hineh mah tov u-mah na’im shevet achim gam yachad. Behold how good it is to sit like siblings, like family, together. It doesn’t say, behold how good it is to sit together like chums. Beause sitting with your pals is usually easy. To sit with family can also be beautiful, but there can also be elements of obligation and challenge. Which is why it is a blessing when it actually goes well.
So we’ve ratcheted up now from personal connection to family relationship. Shall we keep going and look at something bigger?
Glad you asked. Tomorrow, our Torah brings us back to our mythic memory of Mt. Sinai. It opens with Moses reminding the people how everyone was gathered at Sinai to receive Torah and enter into a kind of peoplehood bond. The old and the young. The wood-choppers and the water-bearers. The mucky-mucks and the hoi polloi. The parashah explicitly states that the women were there, which can’t be taken for granted in Torah. It also says that non-Israelites were there – “the stranger who dwells among you.” So there we were, around the Mountain, a great sea of people – all the Hebrews, and all the Hebrew-adjacent.
Then, as if this didn’t quite cover it, the text continues:
I make this covenant not with you alone. I make it with those who are standing with us here today before Adonai and also with those who are not with us here today. (Deuteronomy 29:13-14)
So who are these absentee people? Our sages unanimously understand this to mean the members of our tribe, of our lineage, who had not yet been born. In other words –– us! Those of us sitting here today in the room and on Zoom: old and young, wood-choppers and water-bearers, mucky-mucks and hoi polloi. Those born into this lineage and those who had to journey to get here. All of us drafted into a covenant long before we were born.
So there it is: the official launch of our peoplehood. It’s described as a covenant, or brit in Hebrew, a word with a lot more content than “connection.” It is not just affinity or ancestry. Covenant is an agreement. It involves obligation, reciprocity.
Covenant is a powerful answer to the individualism that is at the core of our American culture. As my friend Rachel Naomi Remen, who made an appearance in my Rosh Hashanah drash and who insists on registering her presence tonight also, once said: “We think of independence as the strongest of human states, but it isn’t. Interdependence is.”
Covenant is a communal statement of interdependence. Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionism, described community as a kind of covenantal body, in which “the welfare of each is the concern of all, and the life of the whole is the concern of each.”
So what are the terms of this covenant that we Jews have with each other? We let’s look at what tradition says. We visit each other in time of sickness. We grieve together in time of loss. We make sure every child has access to learning and that there is food on every table. These are ancient Jewish communitarian values that run through all our literature and history.
And many of you at Ner Shalom have continued to uphold these covenantal values. You’ve joined the Band of Angels or donated to the Rabbi’s Discretionary Fund. Nine years ago when the Tubbs Fire broke out, people came here at 3am before we could even announce that we were opening the building. And while some of you lived and slept here, other of you brought blankets and pillows and food; and if you had extra space at home, you invited the fire refugees to come stay.
These are all covenantal acts, to care for each other. We don’t do these things as favors. We do them because we are under obligation to each other, under good obligation. This is covenant.
It makes sense that covenent manifests mostly in local, synagogue-centered ways. This is our sphere of action. And we know each other. We mostly all like each other. Or at least we’re used to being around each other. We share a lot of outlook, not entirely, but enough to feel comfortable doing Jewish under the same roof.
If we then look at our covenantal commitment to a larger Jewish community – the county, the country, the world, it can become a little more challenging. These days we feel disagreement with so many other Jews and we don’t know how to be in covenant together. But as Rabbi Deborah Waxman, the recent president of Reconstructing Judaism, reminds us:
A covenantal community does not run on autopilot; we need to tend to it continuously. It can be easy to do so in times of celebration. It’s really hard to do it in times of conflict. And that is the power behind the concept of covenant. It’s binding. It’s intended to last, maybe for centuries. It’s a religious metaphor that demands that we stay in deep relationship even in times of struggle.
I know this. I know it and believe it to be true. And that doesn’t make it easier for me. I grew up understanding that we must care for other Jews. Supporting the State of Israel and pushing for the release of Soviet Jews were movements in my childhood that felt at the time to be clearly about caring for other Jews. I also understood early some of the perils of peoplehood – that the acts of some Jews inevitably reflect on all Jews. And I grew up, like many of you, with my mother reading the morning paper and sometimes wondering out loud, “Is it good for the Jews?”
So I am not a stranger to the concept of Jewish mutual support and interconnectedness. But the stakes of being in covenant seem higher now.
In the past decade I – and we – have spoken out in the larger Jewish world to protest actions of the Israeli government that seemed inconsistent with the “light to the nations” idea we were raised with. All the moreso in the aftermath of the horrors of October 7.
In these years I’ve found myself speaking my truth out there and dropping back and hiding out here with you. Because the response to my words is not always kind. There has been an unspoken assumption in wide swaths of the Jewish world, that to be part of the covenant, you must stand with Israel in all ways, uncritically. Which makes words of dissent seem like betrayal.
I also know that being in covenant with other Jews requires us to call out anti-semitism when we see it. And I do feel an intense protectiveness toward any Jews that have been targeted. I feel that, even while I am aware that not everything that gets called anti-semitism is. And while I am aware that the fear of anti-semitism has been consciously mobilized in support of the Netanyahu government. Israel’s news is filled with reports of anti-semitism. When I am in Israel, which I am often, everyone I meet, friends and strangers, ask if I feel safe in the US with all the anti-semitism – even while missiles are flying there. And while yes, anti-semitism is bubbling up in this pot, it is the Netanyahu government that has turned up the heat through its actions. And charges of widespread anti-semitism benefit the Netanyahu government because if it is everywhere, then Israel is proven to be the only safe place for Jews, and whatever Israel needs to do militarily to maintain it is justified.
So what a strange position to be in – a covenantal commitment to fight anti-semitism while at the same time disagreeing about what anti-semitism is and how it is being exploited.
My covenantal connection is also challenged when I see Jews doing things in the name of our peoplehood that are unforgivable. Rightwing Jewish settlers in the West Bank carrying out deadly pogroms against Palestinian villagers. And a Jewish military that stands by and watches. And a Jewish government that winks and allows the settlers to do it. What is my Jewish covenantal responsibility toward Jews doing the most un-Jewish things I can imagine?
Talmud has something to say about this. It teaches that if a member of your household is perpetrating some evil, you are obligated to speak out, or else you are also considered guilty of those acts. (BT Shabbat 54b) This is a remarkable passage acknowledging that sometimes family loyalty and morality come into conflict.
To me this passage is key to understanding our role in the covenant. It involves loyalty for sure. And it involves speaking out for justice as well. It’s not just so that we’re not seen as complicit. It’s because the covenant needs it. We speak out for the sake of the collective’s integrity and moral standing. We speak out for the sake of the Jewish soul.
This is a holy task. We might currently be a minority voice in the Jewish covenant, but what’s happening in Israel can’t be solved without our voice. If not us, then who?
And yes, asking you, asking us, to stay present and engaged with a Jewish collective that also causes us pain and enables harm to be done in our name is a big ask. I know I have moments where I wonder why I am in this covenant at all? That’s how bad it gets some days. We live in an era that prioritizes our freedoms over our responsibilities. We are free to opt in or out of all our other commitments. Why not this one?
Last year we had a B.Mitzvah Academy retreat up in Mendocino County. Micah, one of our students whom some of you know, arrived and asked me where the boy’s cabin was. I told him it was the same cabin as last year. He said, “I wasn’t here last year.” I had forgotten that fact and told him I couldn’t remember why. “Oh, this time last year I didn’t want to be Jewish,” he explained. “So,” I replied, “How’s that going now?” He looked at me in the eyes. “Better.”
Why is this a funny story? Because deep down we don’t experience ourselves as free to opt out. And while Micah might have simply been opting in, he might, on another level, have been coming to the understanding that in Jewish peoplehood, we are pre-enrolled and attendance is mandatory.
Stuck in the covenant. That’s what we are. We might feel ambivalent about it. We might be uncomfortable with some of our covenant companions. But we are stuck here.
So if we’re going to be here anyway, let’s be who we are and bring our gifts. We may more often than not be a dissenting voice, but it is important for us to be in the game.
We need to bring our Jewish covenantal commitment to activist spaces to counter the risk of anti-semitism there. And we need to bring our deep demand for justice to our conversations in Jewish spaces. As it says in the Book of Esther, “Who knows if it is not for just such a moment as this that you came into the kingdom?” Who knows? (Esther 4:14)
Who knows how we ended up here, in this place, this community, this incarnation. But here we are. We belong together. We are stuck together. We are responsible for each other. Here at Ner Shalom and in the worldwide Jewish People. Our frequent dissent is not a departure from covenant; it is our covenantal responsibility. Ours is a crucial voice, pushing hard for our people and all people to do better. Always better.
So let us say yes to covenant every day. When it is easy and when it is hard. Let us cultivate our beautiful connections with each other, to help us hold covenant with greater love and holiness. And for the love of our shared legacy and for the sake of our shared future, let us say yes.
We are a covenant people. Time to lean in.
For further reading, check out Rabbi Deborah Waxman’s essay “Covenantal Community and Classical Reconstructionism,” Evolve (originally published December 2024), with lively commentary from four other Reconstructionist rabbis. View it here.
