On Kol Nidre, we are asked to consider our mortality. To look into the open ark with all of the scrolls removed as if it were our coffin, waiting for us. We ritualize ways to make us understand this life will not go on forever and that death is our end – we stop eating and drinking, we wear white, we confess. And yet in a year like we have had, maybe we don’t need to work so hard for death has been our steady companion since October 7th.
One year. It has been one year. Our tradition teaches us that after that shanah, that first year, we are meant to shift ourselves out of formal mourning, but this grief, maybe like all grief really, traumatic grief certainly, this grief clings.
Grief is sometimes described as waves in an ocean. Sometimes, grief is described as a rollercoaster. But maybe it’s more like this: Grief is like living in a house under renovation. You live there, trying to move through the motions of everyday life, but someone has turned off the electricity and removed the sink, and everything is destruction and re-construction, and hammering and dust. Some days, the walls are down. Some days, the whole house is gutted. We’re just trying to make our home a home again, but it seems all we can do is pray that the foundation beneath us is sturdy.
This year has been a year of grief and dust and dislocation.
From the Book of Jeremiah:
A cry is heard…
Wailing, bitter weeping—
Rachel weeping for her children.
She refuses to be comforted
For her children, who are gone.[1]
This has been a year for weeping. We are like Rachel imeinu. There is no comfort in losses like these, in the carnage and the brutality. In the decisions, too, made to ensure our safety that brings ruin to others. When the Temple was destroyed two thousand years ago and life as we knew it ended, Rabbi Elazar said that while the gates of prayer were now locked, the gates of tears were wide open.[2] And the tears, they have been flowing. They have flowed since October 7th when we first began to hear the terrible news from Israel. Kibbutzim overrun. Kidnappings. The massacre at Nova. Rape as a weapon of war.
We were/are one with the psalmist who cried:
Min hametzar karati yah[3] - From the narrow place I called to God.
The metzar, the narrowness is so constricting we can barely breathe. There is no air when entire families have been wiped out, murdered together. Like the Kedem-Siman Tov family: Tamar and Johnny and their children, twins Shachar and Arbel, age 5, and Omer, age 2. Like the Kotz family: Livnat and Aviv, and their children, Rotem, age 19, Yonatan, age 17, and Yiftach, age 15. Like the Kapshetar family: Evgeny and Dinah, and their children, Aline, age 8, and Eitan, age 4. Eitan was on the verge of turning 5. His birthday was October 8th; a party had been planned.
Min hametzar karati yah - From the narrow place I screamed God’s name. God, how do we go on knowing an entire family was kidnapped? Shiri and Yarden Bibas and their children, Ariel, then age 4 and K’fir, then 9 months. I wake up at night dreaming of red hair wondering where they are, if they’re with their ima, if they’re even alive. What is more the epitome of metzar than the tunnels in which they may be crouching this very moment?
Min hametzar karati yah, From the narrow place, I reached out to God. And how does God answer me? Anani bamerchav Yah – The Eternal answers me with God-filled expanse – with openness. But how do we get to that sense of openness, God? How do we climb out of this constriction? Our text taps us on the shoulder: The gates of tears are open, the gates of tears are open.
It turns out we can’t rush a grief like this. We can’t look at a calendar and declare we’re done. The metzar will one day open into expansiveness and for that, I am grateful, but for now, I know, I must contend with this constriction – we all must - and sit with our grief, accept it, not fight it, and cry.
Thousands of years ago, there was a case that came before the rabbis[4]. The case was to determine the status of someone born with two heads. While the rabbis debated whether that someone should wear one pair of tefillin or two and how many shares he should inherit, the core of the case was: was one person standing before them or two people? Millenia later in the 1950s, Rabbi Soloveitchik considered this case.[5] He posited – hypothetically, of course - that if boiling water was poured on one of the heads, and the other head screamed in pain, then the two-headed person was a single being; if not, “then they are two individuals enfolded in one body.” This case, he argued, was foundational for how we should consider the status of the Jewish people who are spread out across our world. Are we one people or are we many? This painful year feels like we are living out this ancient case. The boiling water has been poured on one head, the one residing in the land of Israel yet here we are on the other side of the sea screaming out as well. This is the essence of Jewish peoplehood. Across the globe, we revel in each other’s joy, but we also viscerally feel each other’s pain.
Our shared peoplehood and that pain are what brought me back to our homeland twice since October 7th. I remember walking through Kibbutz K’far Azza on a rabbinic mission. I felt like I was living out the ancient Talmudic story of the rabbis who walked the ruins of the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. Here in K’far Azza, I was walking through a holy place, too – a place where couples once embraced, where friends toasted one another over a glass of wine at night, where children played and grew. We walked past walls filled with bullet holes and saw scorch marks where grenades thrown into homes had exploded. Someone from the kibbutz had laid markers in front of many of the ruins of homes to indicate who had died there. We walked by house after house, sign after sign. Netta Epstein was brutally murdered in this house. Ofir Shoshani was brutally murdered in that house. Sivan Elkabets and Naor Hasidim were brutally murdered together here. Meanwhile, sounds of war echoed in the distance, explosions, gun fire. Smoke was in the air. We could see the buildings of Gaza just a few kilometers away, clear as day and so close.
So much was shattered on October 7th. We not only had to contend with the horrors of that day, but also with our shattered faith that the Israeli military and government would always protect Israelis in their most desperate hour. We were not as strong and together as we thought. How do we shake the truth that terrorists on tractors were able to bring Israel with its mighty military to its knees, leaving Israelis to fend for themselves for awful hours upon awful hours upon awful hours?
Our faith in many of our neighbors around us was also shattered. While the Jewish people received maybe a few days of sympathy (and not even that in some corners), the blame quickly shifted, and for some -too many- the crimes of October 7th became justified as legitimate revolution.
We felt abandoned by many in the interfaith community who either failed to show up or who had already made up their minds on the Zionist enterprise. Meanwhile in progressive justice spaces, there has been explicit erasure of Jewish pain in favor of Palestinian pain and usually a requirement to check one’s Zionism at the door. Even in spaces like the #metoo movement where one would expect outrage or at least feigned concern, there was none to be had. It’s #metoo unless you are Israeli.
It took far too long for UN Women, the official arm of the United Nations that focuses on women and who have spoken out against gender-based violence in other nations to acknowledge what happened to the women in Israel. They seemingly decided to avert their eyes when Na’ama Levy who still is being held as a hostage today was led away in blood-stained pants. They completely ignored Shani Louk’s naked, broken body being paraded around Gaza City in the back of a pick-up truck. And the UN wonders why we do not trust them.
Since October 7th, some of us have lost dear friends due to silence or overt anti-Israel sentiment. And some of us have lost family over the same.
Witnessing the rifts between family members, most often between parents and adult children has weighed heavily on my soul this year. Some of these young Jews have told us, and rightly so, that they learned to stand up against injustice in beloved Jewish community and some even right here from their clergy and teachers. And so, that is what they are doing when they join a college encampment or even a JVP protest. They see what we all see, the deaths of innocents at the hands of the IDF.
I want all of us to be able to look beyond our community and empathize with pain that is not our own. However, when we emphasize others’ pain in such a way that our own pain no longer matters or worse, is diminished, something has gone deeply awry. When we become ashamed of Jewish pain, ashamed of Jewish pride, ashamed of Jewish power, we need to engage in serious self-reflection. When our supposed allies want to delegitimize Israel as a state, and engage in proximate or outright antisemitic behavior, it is high time to find new friends. To look out for oneself, to care for one’s people is not selfish; it is not an act of egocentrism. It is an act of deep love. Do not internalize what the world tries to tell us: that we must be smaller, quieter, take up less room and that while the suffering of other marginalized groups must never be tolerated, Jewish suffering alone is the exception.
And conversely, those of us only concerned with Jewish suffering need to widen our eyes. As Jon Polin, Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s father said, “There is a surplus of agony on all sides of the tragic conflict in the Middle East. In a competition of pain, there are no winners.”[6] For us not to be deeply disturbed by the death of innocents caught in this conflict, even if they are strategically used as human shields by Hamas, means our own pain has blinded us. For us not to mourn the death of a Palestinian child, any child, means we need to pound on our chests a little harder this year.
Tomorrow night at the end of Neilah, we will sound the shofar one more time. Our tradition provides us with many teachings for the basis of the shofar blasts. Most hear in the shofar sounds of wailing. One tradition links the sounds of the shofar with the sobs of Sisera’s mother. In the Book of Judges, Sisera commands the Canaanite army and was cut down in his battle against our people. Our sacred text fascinatingly switches perspective during the telling of the story of that battle placing us directly inside the home of our enemy’s mother. We watch as she stares out the window, wondering why her son tarries.[7] When she realizes that he is never coming home again, she breaks out in sobs.[8]
The shofar then is not the sound specifically of Jewish wailing, but human wailing. That the rabbis decided to make our enemy’s mother’s tears a foundational text behind the sobs of the shofar teaches us so much. The grief of a mother, a parent for their child transcends. If we can take in the mother’s tears for the leader of an enemy army, how much more so must we open our ears to hear the cries of mothers of innocent children killed in the vicious cycle of this war. I know that there are those among us who will say that there is only so much room in our already broken hearts, and I understand, but we must try. In this war against our people when they have already taken so much from us, body and soul, let them not take our hearts as well.
When the Egyptians in their pursuit of us were drowning between the parted seas as the waters crashed back over them, the angels rejoiced, but God admonished them, crying: These are my children, too.[9] God still turned the sea against our oppressors to save us, but there was no joy at the destruction of life.
These are difficult days with difficult decisions and no easy answers. But here is what we can be clear about: Our people are not a people who crave death, nor do we celebrate it. In our mission to uproot evil, we must strive to save the innocent. And here is what we know: When our people are threatened, they must be defended. When our people are kidnapped, they must be brought home. And here is what we believe: Where today there is only mourning and wailing and sobbing and grief, one day, happiness will return. I have faith that in generations to come, the Jewish people will still be living in the land, and we will be thriving. And here is what we pray: one day, please God, let there be peace.
Zionism is the movement for Jewish self-determination in our indigenous homeland. I am a Zionist. We are a Zionist congregation. And you can be a Zionist and believe in the right to Palestinian self-determination, too. I still hope and expect one day there will be a secure Palestine side by side with a secure Israel, but after the heinous acts of October 7th, the path forward toward that goal has never seemed more uncertain and distant than in this moment.
For anyone who believes that the path to get to Palestine is through armed attacks from a place that Israel had already disengaged from in 2005 with terrorists gleefully filming themselves killing us, kidnapping us, torturing us, raping us needs to do a serious check on their soul.
This, of course, is part of our enemy’s strategy. Hamas knew in perpetuating this horror, Israel would be forced to strike back. They also knew that they had ensured that there would be no way for Israel to engage without killing innocent Palestinians and every Palestinian killed would be a win for Hamas on the world stage. For why else would almost every mosque, school, and hospital house terrorists, weapons, and entrances to tunnels to hide our hostages? And they knew that this war would likely incite a larger war with Hezbollah and Iran and other Arab nation-states creating more dead civilians, each and every one of them an incredulous win against Israel, for they figured if they could not complete the job on the ground with guns and knives, and tractors and hang-gliders, then they’d let the rest of the world destroy Israel for them.
And with that truth, we are back sitting with our overflowing grief in the metzar, the most narrow, dark, and despairing place in the entire universe. Min hametzar karati Yah…
Over 80 years ago, a Jew was sitting in his grief in an underground tunnel in Cologne, Germany with other hidden Jews during the Shoah. A version of these words was found written on a wall in that tunnel:[10]
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. And I believe in love, even when there’s no one there. And I believe in God, even when he is silent... But sometimes in this suffering and hopeless despair, my heart cries for shelter... But a voice rises within me, saying hold on… I’ll give you strength, I’ll give you hope… May there someday be sunshine. May there someday be happiness. May there someday be love. May there someday be peace….
As the Jew whose name is lost to us now sat in his suffering, a voice, maybe the still, small voice whispered in his ear that one day the sun would shine again.
We are not okay, and we are not going to be okay for a long time. But the still, small voice of God whispers in our ears, too, telling us we are resilient, and we have centuries, millennia of ancestral strength behind us.
On days when you do not feel hope or strength, and faith feels so far away, know I will hold you up or the person next to you will or the one behind you. And on days when I can barely stand, I need you to hold me up, too. We can do that for one another for that is peoplehood, that is community, and that is how we are going to get through this grief.
When Mia Schem returned home in the November hostage deal after being kidnapped from Nova, she affirmed, “we will dance again.” And I hear in her words a commandment echoing with all the force of God and Sinai behind her. It is a mitzvah to have hope. Od lo avda tikvateinu.[11]
Soon, may the days be upon us when all the hostages will have returned home to their waiting families. Soon, may the days be upon us when the rockets will have stopped falling from the skies, and peace will become a real possibility. Soon, we pray, may the days be upon us when we will dance with joy again.
Am Yisrael chai.
[1] Jeremiah 31:15
[2] Berachot 32b
[3] Psalm 118:5
[4] Menachot 37a
[5] Rav Soloveitchik, Kol Dodi Dofek
[6] Remarks delivered at DNC 2024
[7] Judges 5:28
[8] Rosh HaShanah 33b
[9] Megillah 10b and Sanhedrin 39b
[10] https://humanistseminarian.com/2021/04/04/i-believe-in-the-sun-part-v-the-source/ and “Inscription of Hope” by Z. Randall Stroope based on words found from an inscription on a cellar wall in Cologne, Germany
[11] From HaTikvah
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