Just One Blessing - Thoughts on Parshat Toledot

This is always, for me, a difficult Parasha

I get that we are supposed to favour Jacob over Esau and indeed find ourselves, the Children of Israel, in the narrative of our patriarch Jacob.

But … I never have.

Jacob comes across in this week’s Torah reading as a bit of a schemer, quick to do his brother out of his birthright at the beginning of the Parasha. And then quick to follow his mother’s – let it be said – desperately dishonest advice, at the end.

And I know the Rabbinic commentaries, that Rebecca knew that the covenant had to run through her favoured son, which is supposed to justify the deceit. But it doesn’t help much.

And I know Easau, the red-headed, the purchaser of red-lentil soup, is the ancestor of the Edomites who wreak such havoc later in our story and presage the terrible things done to our people by the Romans, called Edom. I know also the Rabbinic commentaries that associate every action of Easau with idolatrous wrongdoing. But it doesn’t shift me much.

I mean, I know he’s quick to sell off his birthright;

          וְיַעֲקֹ֞ב נָתַ֣ן לְעֵשָׂ֗ו לֶ֚חֶם וּנְזִ֣יד עֲדָשִׁ֔ים וַיֹּ֣אכַל וַיֵּ֔שְׁתְּ וַיָּ֖קׇם וַיֵּלַ֑ךְ וַיִּ֥בֶז עֵשָׂ֖ו אֶת־הַבְּכֹרָֽה׃

That verse is brutal in its stripped backparsimony.

He ate, he drank, he got up, he went and he spurned, did Esau, the birthright.

But Esau is not supposed to be the smart one, who dwells in the encampment studying. He’s the guy out hunting in the field and he’s, at the very least, tired and hungry.

He certainly regrets the action.

When Esau finds that Jacob has come in and taken the blessing from their father from under his nose – Bmirmah – as Isaac says it, in guile. Easau wails.

That’s another extraordinary passage,

[Esau] said, “Was he, then, named Jacob that he might supplant me these two times? First, he took away my birthright and now he has taken away my blessing!” And he added, “Have you not reserved a blessing for me?”

Isaac answered, saying to Esau, “But I have made him master over you: I have given him all his brothers for servants, and sustained him with grain and wine. What, then, can I still do for you, my son?”

And Esau said to his father, “Have you but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!” And Esau wept aloud.

 

It breaks my heart every year.

I know people like Easau, who are a bit simpler than the very sharpest of men but loyal and decent. By the way, who wins the prize for honouring your father in the context of this week’s Parasha?

And I do know I one of the Children of Israel, one of the people of the God of Abraham, and for me to be in this place – this place I love, holding this heritage I adore -  I need that the Biblical story unfolds not through Esau, but through Jacob – who is to become Israel in next week’s Torah reading, when he wrestles that angel.

But it doesn’t sit easy.

And every year, when I come to this parasha, and I read through the classic commentaries that justify the actions of Jacob and Rebekkah and Isaac, and the modern commentaries, particularly from within the Orthodox world, I’m left cold. To mix my metaphors, a little as if I’ve been given something beautiful to eat, but it’s got ashen, somehow in my mouth.

So, for those of you who have heard me preach on this Parasha before, you will have heard me preach about destabilising narratives which see me retreat behind the sense I have of what I know is right, or preaching about not falling for the assumptions of the evil of the other, or that sort of thing.

Actually, it’s not even the tale of Jacob and Easau that brings up this destabilized sense of my relationship with the Avot and Imahot of these stories – the founding parents, the archetypes and the bases of our faith.

Back a generation, as it were, there’s the story of the Hagar. Brought in to provide a child to an infertile couple and then kicked out when the couple manage their own child. Hagar is, of course, the mother of Ishmael – held to be the first Arab.

It’s almost a trop.

That we have a thread of connection that binds us to archetypes who shape everything we are, as Jews. But none of them is a paragon of perfection on the straightforward reading of their lives. They behave, at times, in ways that cause us and other characters in our sacred scripture distress.

The characters who suffer the behaviour of our great archetypes go down in our literary and religious history as our enemies, but when we read these tales with an open heart, they inspire empathy too. At least they do for me. Actually, it might be even more complex than that.

The great Tikvah Frymer Kensky in her book, reading the Women of the Bible, writes

Hagar is the prototype of Israel. Everything that happens to Hagar is paralleled by the story of Israel's sacred history. The liberation, the wandering in the desert, the promise from God. The unsettling nature of the story is that Sara is our mother, but Hagar is us. You sympathize with Hagar and feel uneasy about it. That is the technique of the storyteller. Hagar is the double of Israel, yet so is Sara.

We might be both sides of each of these stories. The hero and the antihero all bound into one.

I don’t really have an end to this sermon.

I don’t have a neat way to wrap it up and apply it to the awful bloody brokenness of the Middle East.

I certainly don’t excuse or feel anything less than utter contempt for the perpetrators of the horrors of 7^th October, or anything less than utter heartbreak for those suffering.

But I can’t retreat behind only feeling for one side of this story.

Maybe there is a lesson in a Midrash which tells us how Abraham felt about his two sons – the covenantal son, the one who goes on to bear the story from his own generation into the future, Isaac, and the other son – the one to be sent away – Ishmael.

When God tells Abraham, “take your son, your only son, the one you love, Isaac,” the Rabbis assume the conversation between God and Abraham,

“take your son,” – I have two sons

“your only son,” – they are each the only son of their respective mothers

“the one you love,” – is there a limit on how much we can love? – Says Abraham, in the mind of the rabbis of Bereishit Rabba.

Why does there have to be a limit on the amount we can love.

Or, from this week’s reading, my heart is still snagging, and ripping on that verse Easau shares, when he realises that Isaac has blessed Jacob instead of himself.

Have you but one blessing father? Bless me also father -  הַֽבֲרָכָ֨ה אַחַ֤ת הִֽוא־לְךָ֙ אָבִ֔י בָּֽרֲכֵ֥נִי גַם־אָ֖נִי אָבִ֑י:

But mainly, my heart is just with the continuation of that verse.

וַיִּשָּׂ֥א עֵשָׂ֛ו קֹל֖וֹ וַיֵּֽבְךְּ

And he lifted up his voice and wept.

Shabbat Shalom

 

Here I Am

I had the privilege of being at a 20-year reunion at JTS today.

Amazing!!

20 years.

It turned out we didn't have enough time to make it through all the various plans we had for a day together and my dear colleague Rabbi Rachel Ain asked me to run a closing something in 3 minutes.

I shared the Sugya, in honour of the person from whom I first learnt it, my then Dean, Rabbi Bill Lebeau, who made a special appearance to celebrate the special day.

This is the first time I used the Sugya in a Sermon, my interview sermon at the Synagogue I now lead, and joined 16 years ago, formerly home of Rabbi Louis Jacobs and the synagogue I grew up at.

Dika Anna

 

This is, I think, the sixth time I have had the honour of addressing this community from this pulpit.

And it always feels a bit strange.

 

I still think of myself sitting over there somewhere, with my father.

I still think of myself, as a small child, hiding in the velvet curtains and pretending I had understood the sermon so I could join in the conversation between my parents as we walked home from shul.

 

And it feels particularly strange today.

For me,

To be applying to become the next Rabbi at Louis’ Shul.

 

I’m reminded of a previous American Presidential campaign where Dan Quayle, a man who couldn’t spell the word ‘tomato,’ tried to pass himself off as an inheritor of the legacy of JFK.

‘Senator Quayle,’ responded Lloyd Benson, ‘I knew Jack Kennedy, I worked with Jack Kennedy. Senator Quayle, you are no Jack Kennedy.’

 

Other faith traditions have tales about the glory of having an occasionally errant child of a community wander away and look to return.

Other faith traditions have tales of welcoming back the returning child with extraordinary delight.

But I don’t think those stories reflect us, you and I, today.

I’ve spent almost five hours in interviews this past week facing questions and concerns.

And there’s been a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety. I am too much this, not enough that, what about the legacy of Louis?

 

I want, today, to explore what I understand by inheriting a fearsome and glorious spiritual inheritance and what I understand by the command to carry a fearsome and glorious inheritance forward.

 

It is a perfect parasha to explore these ideas.

Ve’eleh toledot.

And these are the generations.

This week’s parasha is the story of Isaac, an inheritor of a fearsome and glorious spiritual inheritance.

A man who

dug again the wells of water, which they had dug in the days of Abraham his father; and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them.

 

Ve’eleh toledot

And these are the generations

This week’s parasha is also the story of Isaac the ancestor

A man who bequeathed a legacy to the generation to come – to Jacob, Israel, to all of us sitting here today, some four thousand years later.

 

The unfolding of generations.

From one to another.

 

A story, about the unfolding of generations.

It comes from Rabbi Jacob’s charming autobiography.

Rabbi Jacobs has just been appointed to the flagship congregation, the New West End, and he is, in his own words, indulging in some namedropping.

He’s telling of all the Lords and Ladies, the dignitaries and captains of industry and he recalls a moment, just before the first Kol Nidrei service at the synagogue.

And he’s standing in the vestry with the Third Lord SoandSo whom he had only recently met.

 

These are Rabbi Jacobs’ words.

Time was pressing and I suggested that we go into the synagogue for Kol Nidre.

The Lord replied that he did not want to enter the synagogue for a while and that he would explain why after the service.

His explanation was that his grandfather, the first Lord, although a very observant Jew, did not hold with the Kol Nidre formula and used to wait patiently in the foyer until this part of the service was over.

His son, the second Lord, less observant and a little indifferent to the whole question would still wait outside because his father had done so.

The third Lord explained he personally didn’t understand what it was all about, but felt obliged to carry on the family tradition.

 

I find it a sad tale.

A tale of an emptying, a tale about the survival of the husk at the expense of the kernel.

A meaningless ritual followed for no particular reason other than the fact that his father had done is that way.

It’s the kind of story that makes me fear for the future of our glorious spiritual inheritance.

It’s a story that makes me fear, just a little, about this glorious synagogue.

 

I’m sure that as Rabbi Jacobs was writing this tale of his Lordship, he had in mind the famous story that closes Gershon Scholem’s magisterial Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Scholem, of course, was much admired by Rabbi Jacobs who chaired one of Scholem’s lectures in London.

The story of their Lordships certainly reminded me of this tale.

 

When the [founder of Chasidism] the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer and what he had set out to perform was done.

When, a generation later [his student] the Maggid was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say, ‘We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayer – and what he wanted done became reality.

Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said, ‘We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditation belonging the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs and that must be sufficient’ and sufficient it was.

But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he say down on his golden chair in his castle and said, ‘We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayer, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done.’”

 

Rabbi Israel died some 150 years ago, and most of us have forgotten even the story.

 

It’s very easy to become maudlin at the passing of one generation.

We mourn those we love.

We mourn those who lit a beacon for us.

Even if we think, in theory, that we have ‘got over’ the mourning for a lost loved one, our losses prey upon us,

Most particularly when we face the all too concrete question of moving on - opening our homes and our heart to someone else – that’s when our losses can haunt us most fiercely.

And in the face of this ferocity it is all too possible to cast any potential next partner as a fraud, as a failure, as not really ‘my type.’

It’s all too possible to subject any incomer to a test that will break anyone.

I’m sure we have all done it.

And it’s a good thing to be scared about, if you are in the business of vele toledot.

And I am scared.

 

I was thinking about this, particularly last week, in the context of Eliezer’s attempt to find a partner for his master’s son Isaac.

I couldn’t help but read this story from the perspective of a Rabbinical Search process.

Abraham sets out the brief;

no-one from the daughters of Canaan, Gd forbid,

And off Eliezer goes, loaded up with trinkets and baubles to attract some bright young thing for Isaac.

I wonder how Eliezer felt on the return journey, coming back with this stranger, someone to lead into the future. Leading a search committee is a daunting task, Milton, I suspect you know this better than I.

A lot of nerves and a good slice of fear.

 

I wonder how Rebecca would have felt, shifting a little uncomfortably on her camel at the prospect of spending the rest of her life with a man she had never met.

I wonder how Isaac would have felt, at the prospect of some new woman in his life.

Actually while we know nothing about Eliezer and virtually nothing about Rebecca’s feelings, we do know about Isaac – the suitor.

 

v¼¨­¦t‰k IËk›h¦v§T³u vÁ¨e‰c¦r›,¤t jÍ©E°H³u IºN¦t vɨr¨G ¿vŠk¡v«Ît¨v e½¨j‰m°h ¨vɤtˆc±h³u 

IœN¦t hË¥r£jœ©t e¼¨j‰m°h oË¥j²B°H³u ¨v·†c¨v¡tœ®H³u

 

And Isaac brought Rebecca to the tent of Sarah his mother

And he took Rebecca and she was for him a wife

And he loved her

And he was comforted after the death of his mother.

 

We know it works.

 

Oddly there is virtually no Rabbinic commentary on this verse.

There’s a charming Midrash[1] that tells us that once Rebecca was installed as Isaac’s wife a cooling wind – a ruach, a spirit, that had been lacking since Sarah passed away – returned.

We know it worked, but we don’t know how.

There are no stories about Isaac and Rebecca going on dates in the foyers of the King David Hotel.

No clues as to what I could do, now, to help find a way to have you accept me as the next Rabbi of this special community.

 

The verse is so stark in its simplicity –

He took her as a wife, and then he loved and then he was comforted.

Maybe there is wisdom in the order of the verbs.

You have to commit before you can love.

You have to love before you can be comforted.

Courting seems so much more complex these days.

But I’m not sure it is possible to feel comforted until you fall in love again,

And I’m not sure it is possible to fall in love without commitment.

 

It’s easy to feel maudlin at the passing of a generation.

 

This is the very last Mishnah in Tractate Sotah. It is describing the end of a generation some 1800 years ago.

 

When Rebbi Meir passed away, there were no more great tellers of tales.

When Ben Azzai passed away, there were no more keen scholars.

When Ben Zoma passed away, there were no more great sermons.

When Rabbi Akiva passed away, there was no more honour for the Torah.

It goes on.

When Rebbe died, there was no more humility and there was no more fear of sin.

 

It’s a maudlin, almost terminally despairing view of Jewish life.

And admittedly it was a hard time to believe in a Jewish future.

But we, Jews, are forbidden from yeush – despair, and by the time of the completion of the Gemarah this Mishnah has a different ending.

 

Rabbi Yoseph turned to the teacher of the text and he told him,

Don’t include the piece about there being no more humility – d’ika ana.

For here I am.

Rabbi Nahman turned to the teacher of the text and he told him,

Don’t include the piece about there being no more fear of sin – d’ika ana.

Here I am.[2]

 

Who did these fools think they were?

Rabbi Yoseph, I knew Jack Kennedy, I worked with Jack Kennedy...

 

Actually I suspect they knew exactly what they were doing.

I love the idea that Rabbi Yoseph waits, while this whole litany of what is no more unfolds, until someone says there is no more humility. And this is the point he challenges – what holy chutzpah does that take!

The Mishnah can’t be allowed to stand because it’s too maudlin, and we are forbidden to despair.

 

I love the idea that the only possible response to what has passed, as one generation unfolds into another, is to say

Ika ana

Here I am.

 

And so,

Ika ana

Here I am.

And I don’t know how to light the fire, I don’t know the words of the Baal Shem’s magical prayer, I don’t know where to go in the forest.

But I do know the story.

I know Scholem’s story, the story as it appears in Major Trends.

I know a whole bunch of Talmud and philosophy and theology and all that good stuff.

And I know the story of this place, of New London Synagogue.

 

But more important even than all that, I know something else that the Baal Shem and the Maggid and the rest of them knew.

I know that there is something that needs to be done.

A task which summons our attention and our best efforts.

And what is that task?

The same as it has always been.

 

We live in a world where the unfettered call of materialism spreads misery and threatens to rip the soul out of human beings, turning us into productive units, overpaid hamsters spinning our way round and round and not really getting anywhere.

We live in a world where religious idolatry – fundamentalism – has succeeded in destroying the World Trade Centres and threatens so much more horror.

Ve’ele toldot some things change and some just stay the same.

We are still the inheritors of Avraham avinu who broke the false idols of faux religious piety and struck out on a journey towards a life with decency, integrity and kindness.

The task is still not done.

The story is not at an end.

 

D’ika anna

I know this story.

I know its past and I think I know its future.

A future I want to share with you all.

If you will do me that honour.

Shabbat shalom,

---

[1] Bereishit Rabba 60:16

[2] Sotah 49b 

Kol Nidrei - Hope

I want to give a sermon about hope.

I’ve been thinking of the tale of the person searching for their lost keys in a pool of light cast by a streetlamp.

Someone walks by, sees the person searching round and round the same patch of illuminated concrete and asks why they don’t search over there, along, just a little bit further away, and the person responds, they can only look for their lost keys where they can see them.

I think it’s a perfect story for our time.

We are all a bit trapped looking in places where we know solutions are not.

In Sanskrit, the antipathy towards the perpetuation of our searching in pools of our existing vision has a poetic quality. There’s a line in the Ashtanga Yoga Mantra that says this - Samsara Halahalah. I like the rhythm. It means that the cycle of repeated, repeated action is poisonous.

Let me do the most challenging part of all this first.

Yuval Diskin is a former director of Israel’s Shin Bet counter-terrorist security service. He gave his first-ever interview to Dror Moreh for the documentary The Gatekeepers. The movie, it’s on iplayer, opens with grainy black and white footage of a van driving down a road. Diskin is explaining the situation.

“Let’s say,” he says, “you are hunting a terrorist and you’ve been looking for them for a long time and you can get him, but there are 1 or 2 other people in the car and you’re not sure if they are part of the gang or not. What to do? Shoot or don’t shoot? There’s no time. These situations last seconds, minutes at most. People expect a decision, and by a decision, they mean “to act.” ‘Don’t do it,’ seems easier, but it’s often harder.”

And the crosshairs of the drone footage converge on the roof of the van and the van erupts into a fireball.

“People expect a decision, and by a decision, they mean “to act.” ‘Don’t do it,’ [he says] seems easier, but it’s often harder.”

Diskin lived his life in cycles of violence - when they hit us, we hit back. Reflecting on his life he’s saying that “acting” – hitting back, might sound like a hard decision to the rest of us, but from his seat, it feels easier; easier, but unable to change the political situation, acting was, in the Sanskrit, a poisonous Samsara. The other decision – looking for ways other than responding to violence with violence – is genuinely hard, but it might bring us all to a new place.

The Gatekeepers is a remarkable movie, in which all six surviving leaders of Shin Bet in Isarel’s history, reflect on how the cycle – the samasara – is failing - halahalah. In its final line, Ami Ayalon, who spoke at a NLS salon a couple of years ago, chillingly shares this, “the tragedy of Israel’s public security debate is that we don’t realise we face a frustrating situation where we win every battle, but we are losing the war.”

Our lost keys, for all of us in so many ways, are in the darker places. That’s where we need to look but to do that we need, I think, hope.

I suspect the Hebrew word for hope is one many of us know, and we know it from one very particular place; Israel’s national anthem HaTivkah – literally ‘The Hope.’

The lyrics come from Naftali Hertz Imber’s poem Tikvateinu where the really great line, the one that sustains me against the gnaw of despair, is actually the opening line of the poem.

עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ – our hope is not yet lost.

I’ve dwelt on that line this year, I think many of us have. But, as I’ve been preparing this sermon, I’ve come to feel I had the wrong conception of what hope, religiously, Jewishly, really is.

I used to think, עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ suggests hope is a kind of bucket that sometimes is more full, sometimes less full and hasn’t yet run dry. Reasonable, perhaps, but, I think wrong. And certainly dangerous. Thinking of hope as a bucket with some level of hope in it feels tenuous. After all, there are those here tonight, particularly when turning Eastwards, who can feel the bucket is empty. “I used to hope,” they tell me – “I’ve given up.” What a year.

If we think of hope as quantity in a bucket, we are in danger of getting to a point where we feel hope is something we’ll just have to muddle on without.

The good news is that I don’t think Tikvah is this, certainly if seen in its Biblical context. I’m grateful to Rabbi Shai Held[1] for directing me to two really important verses that get, I think, to the heart of the matter.

Tikvah, in the Hebrew, means cord, as in the verse in my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah Haftarah - tikvat hut ha-shani, the cord of crimson thread that Rahab hangs outside of her window as a sign for Joshua and the Israelites to let her family live.[2] This kind of Tikvah is a thread reaching towards something beyond Rahab’s current experience, reaching away from doom. By means of this thread, Rahab’s Tikvah is drawing something down from beyond herself to herself; less a bucket, more a pathway to express a yearning for something beyond her immediate experience. Tikvah is the orientation towards that which Rahab doesn’t possess, not a reflection on how much liquid she has in a bucket labelled ‘hope.’ I think that has to be right. Hope is how we address what we don’t have, not a reflection on what we do.

And what is it that travels along this cord of hope? There’s a verse in Job

כִּ֤י יֵ֥שׁ לָעֵ֗ץ תִּ֫קְוָ֥ה אִֽם־יִ֭כָּרֵת וְע֣וֹד יַחֲלִ֑יף וְ֝יֹנַקְתּ֗וֹ לֹ֣א תֶחְדָּֽל׃

For trees have Tikvah - hope; If it is cut, it will renew itself; Its shoots will not cease.

The Tikvah of this poor tree, cut but still alive and preparing to Yachaleaf - renew, is its lifeforce. Tikvah is the thing that allows us to exist, even after we are wounded.

I think it’s a radically different, and far more resilient way to think about hope; as the orientation towards what we do not have, and the essence of our resilience to pain.

I think Natfali Tzvi Imber knew that too, when he crafted that line;

עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ – our hope is not yet lost.

In a terrific article, Rabbi Dalia Marx,[3] shows Imber created that line as a riff, or inversion, based on a Biblical verse that appears in Ezekiel’s vision. The prophet is instructed to look over a field of dry bones and summon the bones back to life. In the text, the revived bones themselves speak of their experience of death and say this;

אָבְדָ֥ה תִקְוָתֵ֖נוּ – our hope was lost.[4]

In death their hope was lost, and now life comes back to these revived bones and

Od Lo – not so fast, there is life in these old bones yet.

I think these verses paint a conception of hope which is, again, more than the scale on which we grade exactly how miserable we feel about the Middle East. Hope is the very thing of life itself. Hope is what pulses through xylem and phylum, veins and arteries; hope is the essence of our existence and it’s how we find the keys to our future. It’s not an accounting practice. I don’t mean to be rude to accountants. Sorry accountants.

Avdah Tikvateinu isn’t a resigned reflection on how difficult it will be to make peace in the Middle East, or any of the challenges in our lives. Avdah Tikvateinu is death. It’s dry bones. It’s giving up on existing at all. Because existing at all means we reach out and tie threads of hope that take us beyond the solipsism of our here and now towards a future we cannot yet see, even if that feels dark or dangerous or foolishly optimistic. Hope is an attitude toward existence, precisely designed for the moments we are lacking, afraid or in pain or even when close to despair. It’s resistance.

Noah Ephron, not the screenwriter, the host of my favourite podcast from Israel, The Promised Podcast, told this story of the immediate aftermath of October 7^th.

There were still lots of people who were still missing from the Nova music festival [and no-one knew who had been taken captive and who were murdered with bodies undiscovered]. And the soldiers and the forensic types had gone over the area outside the ground and found the bodies they were going to find. And then one professor had this idea, “Let’s track the flight plan of birds of prey and compare them to the normal flight plans and, if they are different, we’ll go to where they are flying now and maybe we will find the remains of the people we are looking for,” And they did and they did. And that idea, “follow the birds,” [said Ephron] is maybe the saddest and most remarkable act of creativity I ever heard of. A brilliant and surprising act of mourning and consolation. And families got their terrible news which was terrible, but at least they knew.[5]

And I don’t know if it feels obscene to consider this a tale about hope. It probably should feel obscene. But this is the kind of hope I’m talking about. The willingness to respond to challenge by looking into the dark places, driven by a refusal to walk away from our commitment to life in all the beauty and fragility of where life has taken us.

I think that’s why we need Yom Kippur so. It’s why Yom Kippur is the most hopeful of all our festivals, even given our fasting and dwelling on our mortal condition.

כל נדרי ואסרי וחרמי, וקונמי וכנויי,

May all those things that have imprisoned our past and threaten to imprison our future.

מיום כפורים זה עד יום כפורים הבא

From this Yom Kippur to next Yom Kippur

כולהון אחרטנא בהון,

Those things - they are no longer to control us.

We are free to hope for something other,

Emboldened to look for something other,

Compelled to hope for something other, even if that means looking in the dark places.

This is my call, don’t give up on hope. Don’t give up on saying, “Yes, I do feel hope.” Don’t fall for the repeated cycles of the Samsara, for - Halahala - they are indeed poisonous. Keep looking in even in dark places, harder places for the keys to our future, as individuals and members of this community of faith, and the broader Jewish community and the community of humankind. And live in this bold direction of reaching beyond the misery to express that sense of hope and make it manifest in this world.  As we read in Deuteronomy two weeks ago.

I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you this day, that I have set before you life and death. Choose life.

Indeed, that’s the only way we are going to see things tomorrow that are different from our experience of today. And it’s the way towards the year of health and peace we seek. May it come to us all.

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[1] https://mechonhadar.s3.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/HeldHHD5785.pdf

[2] Joshua 2:18

[3] https://www.thetorah.com/article/tikvatenu-the-poem-that-inspired-israels-national-anthem-hatikva

[4] Ezekiel 37:11

[5] https://tlv1.fm/promised-podcast/2024/10/02/the-a-year-edition/  

Yizkor - In Memory of Hersh Ben Perel Chana

I want to do something I’ve never done in a Yizkor sermon before.

I know so many of us are here with our own mourning and our memories of those we have loved and lost. And that is already painful enough, without the weight of the deaths of this last year.

I know too of the tradition that, in that first year after a death, we don’t even expect mourners to attend a Yizkor service. It’s not something I would ever police, but I can understand that the experience of a death, within the year, is too sharp for a decorous moment like this one.

And I know that there have been so many deaths for our people, and for humanity, in this last year, that to pause overlong on just one lost life risks, I’m not quite sure how to express it, an oversentimental favouritism, possibly to suggest that one life takes precedence over any other life. Clearly, I don’t mean any of that.

But I’m going to take the next minutes to share, as this Yizkor sermon, the words of one bereaved parent, for one deceased child; Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of Hersh of blessed memory. Hersh Goldberg-Polin, was taken from the Nova music festival on 7^th October. Actually, that’s not quite right. Hersh attended the festival to dance and fled the terrorists who attacked it and took refuge in a roadside bomb shelter along with twenty others who, with extraordinary bravery, survived as grenade after grenade was thrown in and then thrown out. Then Hersh lost an arm in a grenade explosion, and then he lost his freedom. And then nothing was heard of Hersh until, 201 days, later there was a video, he was still alive. Then, most tragically of all, on the 328^th day after 7^th October came the news of his murder.

And throughout that unfeasibly awful time, Rachel fought for her son, together with the lives of all the hostages, wearing a strip of masking tape with the number of days that had passed since his capture written on it, stuck to her chest.

I’m sharing Rachel’s words today, in some ways, as an everyman; for all our pains of love and loss and memory and gratitude and fear and anger and hope.

In some ways, I’m sharing Rachel’s words because it’s been this last awful year, and I think we still need to hear how we need to respond, even here so far away, to those awful events.

And I’m sharing Rachel’s speeches because, well I know so many of us have heard them, because they are a kind of Torah for our age. I am, I have been all year, in awe of Rachel’s strength and heart and also deeply inspired by the way in which she drew on our tradition to articulate that strength and heart. That’s helped me as I’ve done what I can for the release of hostages and fought against the darkness that has risen against me when I’ve turned towards the pain of the losses of this last year.

I hope it can help us all.

If you want to hear Rachel in her own voice, all these speeches can be found on the Promised Podcast, the “Hersh Ben Perel Chana” Edition.[1] It’s an extraordinarily moving listen.

 

On Day 33 of Hersh’s captivity, Rachel said this;

There are 240 souls buried alive deep in the ground, but they are breathing, and here I wait like Yaakov being told, here it's Yosef’s coat. It's all bloody, but just you wait. One day, we will see them all again, and we will fall on their necks, and we will weep when we see their faces and we see that they are still alive. When the captives return to Seon, we will be like dreamers, and our mouths will spill out with laughter all over the floor.

 

On day 67 at the United Nations in New York City.

 

My name is Rachel, and I am the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin. He is my eldest child, and he is my only son in Gaza at this very moment, as we all stand here, there are 138 being held. They range in age from 10 months to 85 years old. They are from nations all around the globe. They are Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. They have not been attended to, nor treated by any international aid organization. And we, their families, want to ask you to look at their photos, read their names and then replace their names with the name of Your own daughter, son, father, mother, brother, sister, spouse, grandparent, and we want you to tell us that you would do exactly what you have been doing for these past 67 days to get them out. We all remain sleepless, and we all are running to the ends of the earth. We are the best actors in the world. We act like people, when really we are other beings, frozen in our acutely agonizing desolation. On Friday night, October 6, right before Hersh left, one of the last things I did was I blessed him. See on Sabbath evenings, Jewish parents bless their children to be like specific biblical characters. Jewish boys are blessed to be like the sons of Joseph, named Ephraim and Menasha. It's an intriguing choice, given that there's so many more well-known biblical characters. So why do we bless our boys to be like these two not so well-known brothers? Up until Ephraim and Menasha, all biblical brothers suffered from destructive hatred and poisonous rivalry; Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Easau, Joseph and his brothers. But Joseph has two children named Ephraim and Menasha. And those brothers, they loved each other. It sounds so simple, but suddenly, for the first time, we have biblical siblings who broke the pattern of hatred between brothers. And every Friday night, Jewish parents all over the world bless their sons to aspire to be like them, the brothers who didn't fight.

We are at a crossroads. And when I say we, I don't mean we Jews, Muslims or Christians, Americans, Palestinians, Europeans, Israelis, Ukrainians, Russians. I mean we humans. We can keep dividing the world into the paradigm of them versus us, or we can start thinking about those who are willing and those who are not willing. It's an idea that will require the most brave, creative, heroic efforts and strengths unimaginable, for those who are willing, amidst ongoing trauma, angst and suspicion, to build an idea of a future. We have got to learn to live together, or all over the world, we are going to die together.

 

On day 166

 

I think of Ishmael from Sefer Bereshit, when he and his mother, Hagar, were cast out into the desert. You know, Ishmael runs out of water, and he begins to die. And the text describes him crying out to God to save him. And just as [God] is about to save him, our [classical Biblical commentators] tell us that the [angels] say to God, God, what are you bananas? Do you know who this person is going to be, the father of don't save him. He's going to be the father of all the future enemies of your people... But our God is a God of mercy. Our God is a God of compassion. Our God is a God of grace, and he saves him. We are told, in Devarim, “walk in God's ways and be godlike.” And I think to myself, If God saved Ishmael, who he knew, would be the progenitor of all our future enemies, how much more so must we save our people now in Gaza, right now this morning. We have grandfathers, brothers, sisters, fathers, spouses, sons and daughters. We need to save our people. We say we are an Am Kadosh. Kadosh is a funny word. It's always hard to explain in English. We like to say it means holy, but actually, Kadosh means different, separate, special. Part of being different and special is that we will do things that seem extraordinary. For example, we will pay a high price to get innocent people back, because we value life, and we think it's precious, and that is what makes us a holy people, an Am Kadosh. And so paying a high price should be something we are proud of, and we lean into and we embrace. As my husband John has said, the price to bring home these people will be high, but the price not to bring them home will be higher, because we will never recover as a people. We will no longer be the nation who can claim to value life, and we will have to look our children and our grandchildren in the eye and say to them, I love you in Sweet dreams, but if someone comes and drags you from your bed in the middle of the night, we are not coming, and then we really will have lost because we will not be recognizable to ourselves. We will look in the mirror and see a stranger blinking back at us.

 

On day 201

 

Hersh, if you can hear this, we heard your voice today for the first time in 201 days. And if you can hear us, I am telling you. We are telling you we love you. Stay strong, survive.

 

On day 311

 

I am desperate to be able to use masking tape again for normal reasons, for normal reasons, like closing the rice when I'm making rice, not having my name change every single day.

 

And on day 332, Rachel’s gave this eulogy at the funeral of her son

 

I have had a lot of time during the past 332 days to think about my sweet boy, Hersh. And one thing I keep thinking about is how, out of all of the mothers in the whole entire world, God chose to give him to me. What must I have done in a past life to deserve such a beautiful gift? It must have been glorious. And I am so grateful to God, and I want to thank God right now, in front of all of you for giving me this magnificent present of my Hersh, for 23 years, I was privileged to have the most stunning honor to be Hershey's mama.

I'll take it and say thank you.

I just wish it had been for longer.

Part of what is so deeply crushing and confusing for all of us is that a strange thing happened along this macabre path upon which our family found itself travelling for the last 332 days, amidst the inexplicable agony, terror, anguish, desperation and fear, we became absolutely certain that you were coming home to us alive, but it was not to be. Now I no longer have to worry about you. I know you are no longer in danger.

I send each of the families my deepest sympathies for what we are all going through and for the sickening feeling that we all could not save them, I think we all did every single thing we could, the hope that perhaps a deal was near was so authentic, it was crunchy, it tasted close. But it was not to be. So those beautiful six survived together, and those beautiful six died together, and now they will be remembered together forever.

At this time, I ask your forgiveness. If ever I was impatient or insensitive to you during your life or neglected you in some way, I deeply and sincerely request your forgiveness. Hersh, if there was something we could have done to save you and we didn't think of it. I beg your forgiveness. We tried so very hard, so deeply and desperately. I'm sorry.

Now my Hersh, I ask for your help as we transform our hope into grief

and this new, unknown brand of pain. I beg of you, Hersh, please do what you can to have your light shine down on me. Dada, Libby and Orly, help shower us with healing and resilience, help us to rise again. I know it will take a long time, but please, may God bless us one day dada, Libby Orly, and I will hear laughter, and we'll turn around and see it's us and that we're okay.

 

I often think, indeed some of you have heard me say it, that the pain of loss is the cost of love. And I hear that in Rachel’s extraordinary words.

And then there’s the call for us all to do whatever we can to fight for the release of those other brave and equally each-in-their-own-way hostages. And I hear that.

And then there’s the way that the pain, the fear during that awful 10 months of captivity and even the pain Hersh’s murder, has brought Rachel, and so many, many others, to actions of courage and beauty and power. 

That, I think, is the meaning of what we say when we say of someone, Zichronam L’varachah – may their memories be for a blessing. We mean, may we be changed and lifted and inspired and challenged and may we rise to that challenge in their memory to do good in this world.

 

May all the hostages be released.

May peace come to the region.

May the memories of all we have loved and lost be, forever, a blessing.

Amen.

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[1] https://tlv1.fm/promised-podcast/2024/09/05/the-hersh-ben-perel-chana-edition/