Let me begin with perhaps a radical premise. The premise is that we are suffering from an epidemic of hopelessness. Maybe not all of us all the time, but definitely some of us some of the time. We’re wringing our hands over the news, our hearts are breaking over situations seemingly out of our control. It feels heavy to be a human in 2025. It feels heavy to be a Jew.
Part of my sacred work today on this bima is help us to name this moment. If we think back over this past year, from last Rosh HaShanah to today, most of us might affirm that it has been an emotionally exhausting year. I saw it in the folks who came to sit with me in my office sharing different struggles they were facing. Some of you said: “I just feel so hopeless after the election,” or “I just feel so hopeless about the antisemitic rants I see on social media,” or “I just feel so hopeless watching the Israeli onslaught on Gaza,” or “I just feel so hopeless every time I think about the hostages.”
Helping us name the moment is part of my work, but the other part, the crucial part is what happens next. But before we get there, let us try to understand this moment a bit more. Our Torah text this morning offers us some insights.
Let’s start with the origin of the name of Isaac who was serving as his father’s sacrifice. Isaac in Hebrew is Yitzchak. When God first tells Abraham that his wife, Sarah will conceive, his reaction is: vaYitzchak,[1] he laughed. He said, I’m a hundred years old and Sarah is ninety. And when Sarah hears the news: Vatitzchak. She laughed.[2] She must have been thinking: how absurd after all this time and trauma, when she had finally given up her dream for her family, now was the time when it all came to be.
And so, the unexpected miracle occurs, a baby is born, and in an echo of his parents’ initial reaction, Va’yitzchak, vatitzchak, he laughed, she laughed, they name their son Yitzhak, Isaac. They name their son, Laughter. His name embodies a spirit of joy and happiness and triumph over adversity. It’s Yitzchak’s, Isaac’s birth that we evoke in the traditional first day reading on Rosh HaShanah for this new life is a symbol of the new year reminding us that even though we are not guaranteed this future, any future, we still rejoice in gratitude and in radical possibility.
Soon after Isaac’s birth, Sarah proclaims, “God has brought me laughter; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”[3]Laughter can be a powerful response to pain. Sarah may have been cautious with her first laugh, a natural reaction of disbelief, but now these new parents fully lean into laughter by giving their child this name. Laughter is contagious and so is hope. When Sarah says, “everyone who hears will laugh with me,” she means to pass that hope onto others who dare to dream. We are the descendants of Yitzchak, a name given as a defiant act of hope against the backdrop of hopelessness, and a bold choice to embrace joy.
And yet as we turn the scroll and flip through the pages, we come to the text we shared aloud this morning, which though ancient could not be more relevant for today. For what is the Akedah, the story of the binding of Isaac but the story of the binding of laughter? Abraham is asked to sacrifice his Yitzchak; he is asked to sacrifice his laughter and his joy. This Torah reading is about naming the experience not only of what it feels like to potentially lose your happiness, but also to be the one asked to kill it.
And isn’t that our experience today? We, too, it seems, have been coaxed over time into killing our joy. For what could be more joyless than this culture of outrage we are all currently living in. The constant, stifling stream of bad news is flooding our brains and our hearts. The algorithms on our media channels decidedly do not favor our joy; they favor our anger, and they serve to keep our nervous systems on high alert at all times.
Our current culture in this nation thrives on division and discord. Instead of being praised for working with people across lines of difference, we are taught to avoid those who think differently as if liberal or conservative values are a deadly contagion. How are we ever going to break this divide when we can’t even talk to each other anymore? Righteous anger rules the day.
And for our community, on some days, it can feel like the joy of being Jewish is bound on that mountain waiting to be sacrificed. The trauma of October 7th is an open wound. As Jews, we are worried about Israel, and we are worried about what Israel is doing in Gaza. This has correlated with a rise in antisemitic incidents in our schools and neighborhoods. I hope and pray this isn’t your reality, but maybe you’ve found yourself tucking away your Magen David or not wearing one at all. Maybe you don’t bring up your Jewishness in certain environments because you don’t want to get into yet another debate on Israel in the supermarket or in the lobby of your doctor’s office or at back-to-school night.
And perhaps in our own personal lives, we too, are struggling with joy as we navigate illness or disappointment or a death.
We’d all prefer an easier story to wrestle with, not a story that affirms that there will be days that will utterly change us, maybe even break us, days when we will have to contend with hearing the terrible news, “take your son, your only son, the one you love….”[4] or the terrible news coming out of Israel on what was supposed to be a joyful Simchat Torah morning, or the terrible news your doctor needs to deliver.
The story of the Akedah is descriptive. That’s why I think we read it on a day like today when we are reflecting on our past and praying for our future. It describes our lived experience on our worst of days or the cumulative experience of years of hopelessness overlaid with helplessness. Our story names this moment. But the ending, that’s where hope lies. The ending comes along to say: right now, at the start of a new year, now is the time to say that you don’t have to keep living this way. Just because we are living in these broken-hearted times doesn’t mean despair needs to take all the available space in your heart.
Just as Abraham raises his knife, the angel cries out, “Abraham, Abraham.”[5] And I imagine that angel is simultaneously calling out each of our names as well. The angel is speaking to you and to you and to me. Because this is personal. The angel holds back Abraham’s hand and tells him this is not what is required of you. You don’t need to sacrifice your very happiness in order to live this life. God does not want this of you.
There are so much out there threatening to steal our laughter and kill our joy; there is so much brokenness in the world that has yet to be repaired. We feel like we need to cut away our joy like some sort of sordid badge of honor to help us allay our guilt. We think, how can we go about our normal lives while someone somewhere is suffering? So many of you are holding this so close to your heart. I want to say to you that I see you, I see the angst like an aura around you. But I also want to say: please give yourself the permission to live.
After the angel stays Abraham’s hand, the text tells us Vayisa Avraham et einav vayar v’hineh eyil,[6] Abraham lifted his eyes and here, he saw a ram, a ram caught in the thicket by its horns. The truth is that sometimes what we really need has been here all along, but we haven’t been able to glimpse it. This is a recurring theme throughout Torah, which is our cue not to ignore it. When Hagar fears her son will die of thirst, God opens her eyes and suddenly she sees a well. When Moses flees from responsibility, he turns and suddenly sees the burning bush. And so, too, in our tale, when Abraham thinks it is all over, he suddenly sees the ram and saves his son. Our tradition teaches that none of these items miraculously appeared. They were there all along, but we just couldn’t see. That happens when we think we know the ending to our story, when we have already surrendered our hope, but really, we just need to widen our view and realize that our redemption could be right in front of us.
So, in this moment, what is our ram caught in the thicket, our well, our burning bush? What can’t we see that is right in front of us?
I began by stating that part of my sacred work today is to help us name the moment. The other part, the crucial part is this: to help us let God stay our hand, to guide us to protect our joy, and to let Yitzchak live.
One of the curses we encounter in Deuteronomy is v’lo ta’amin b’chaiyecha “you will not believe in your life.”[7] It essentially means you will sink into your own despair. That curse is a whopper, and it is self-inflicted. Torah reminds us again and again that we always have a choice no matter what life throws at us. We can let helplessness and hopelessness define us or we can believe in our life. We can choose to follow in Sarah’s footsteps who wanted her laughter to be contagious and her hope to inspire the hopeless.
This active choice, this decision point – that’s what’s right in front of us. That is our ram caught in the thicket, our well, our burning bush. Inspired by that angel who grabbed our hand and said enough, we need to decide to hope.
Now, let us be clear with one another, to decide to hope and to let our laughter and joy live does not mean ignoring our pain or turning off the news or allowing ourselves to become apathetic, no. If anything, deciding to hope means the very opposite.
Choosing to fill our lives with good is a necessary and crucial form of spiritual resistance. Grounding our lives in gratitude can help us sustain our souls and prepare us to face the inevitable, harder aspects of life. What paralyzes us is when we only see the worst and leave no room for the blessings. The answer to helplessness is not to sit back and let helplessness ride; that only leads to more helplessness. The only way out of helplessness is to make yourself helpful. The world’s problems are too big for any one of us. If you think you can solve it all, you will live on that lonely mountain forever, killing your joy over and over again. But if you can carve out one area of this universe where you can make a difference, if you can take one step every day in the direction of creating the world as it should be, you will find meaning, you will find purpose, and you will make an impact.
This year, we need to commit to taking care of ourselves and filling our spiritual buckets so that we are ready to do our necessary part for this world. This year, we need to let ourselves laugh again; we need to embrace joy.
And this year, what we really need more than ever is let ourselves revel in Jewish joy. These days threaten to make us forget that there is so much more to being a Jew than sorrow and heinous attacks. There is endless joy and boundless hope and mitzvah after mitzvah after mitzvah about living life as a whole person. As Jews, of course, we acknowledge sadness; we are not immune to pain, but we also embrace love and happiness with everything we’ve got.
Let us make this year the year of surrounding ourselves with gorgeous words of Torah, exulting in text that makes us think and challenges us to ask the big questions. The year of basking in rituals that elevate our spirit like when we bring in light for Shabbat as a way to deal with the darkness. The year of following our ancient wisdom that teaches us to say at least 100 blessings a day because gratitude makes us better people. Let us make this the year of raucous Jewish celebration eating as much challah as we can possibly stuff in our faces and stomping on glasses under beautiful chuppotand raising exhilarated kids in chairs at simchas and wearing the biggest Jewish stars we can find because we love who we are, and no one should ever be able to steal that from us.
Enjoy being Jewish. Be proud of being Jewish. Love yourself because you are Jewish and love everyone else because you are Jewish.
What is the story of Abraham on the mountain teaching us today, right now, in this moment of Jewish history? It is teaching us to not let anyone kill our joy, including ourselves. To pay attention to the pressures of these difficult days so we don’t smother the hope in our hearts. To boldly say: We are the ones -no one else- who get to define our Judaism. To let the angels stay our hands and to let laughter live.
Eloheinu v’elohei doroteinu, Our God and God of those who came before us, be with us as we struggle on the mountain. Let your angels come close. Open our eyes to the possibilities of redemption that are right here in our midst. And when our world feels like it's falling apart, remind us that we are the descendants of those who laughed and who defiantly chose to hope. May we choose to hope as well. Shanah tovah.
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