A year ago today - October 3 - I hosted a wonderful event in our shul’s sukkah. As the de facto coordinator of the greater Olney Interfaith clergy group, I thought it would be nice to start off our year by having my colleagues learn what a sukkah is and what the holiday of Sukkot is about. I was pleased that about 15 people attended. We enjoyed each other’s company and there was good energy as we agreed that we would enjoy a year filled with camaraderie and also that we would try to plan some combined social justice events. As I bid farewell to everyone I felt good - because it seemed like we were deepening our friendships and we were building trust. Muslims and Christians were in attendance. Young and old. Men and women. All of us, deeply rooted in our faith traditions yet also committed to sincere interfaith dialogue. Or so I thought.
Four days later we woke to the news of the unspeakable brutality and murder perpetrated by Hamas on innocent Israeli civilians. We know what happened - I don’t need to mention all the horrific details of the crimes Hamas committed. But since that day we - American Jews - have been living in a new world. It’s a world of increased antisemitism. It’s a world in which Israel has become increasingly isolated. It’s a world which has ignored the plight of the hostages in Gaza and has also ignored the horrific crimes perpetrated by Hamas. It’s a world where many college campuses have been overrun by anti-Israel, anti-zionist and antisemitic rhetoric and protests. It’s a world in which we as Jews not only have felt attacked, we have felt abandoned.
As the war progressed after Oct 7 I was very surprised that I only heard from one colleague from the interfaith clergy group. One colleague alone - Rev. Henry McQueen of St. John’s Episcopal Church just up the road - reached out to see how I was doing. We’ve met for coffee a couple times over the past year and I have sincerely appreciated his friendship and support.
But Rev. Henry’s outreach is in stark contrast to the other members of the interfaith clergy group who have been silent. I can’t speak to their reasoning as to why they haven’t reached out, but their silence has left me feeling sad and bewildered. The sadness and bewilderment swirl in my head along with many other thoughts and feelings as I have tried to come to terms with everything that has happened in the world since Oct. 7. I am glued to the news from Israel - reading the headlines from the Times of Israel several times a day along with other news outlets. As I read, the anger, the bewilderment, the abandonment, the incredulity, the questioning of values are all in my head. It has been hard to come to terms with all of it - that is all of these feelings and emotions. So, with your indulgence, I want to try to sort through all of this in my sermons over these High Holidays.
The rabbis, in their spiritual and religious wisdom, taught us that Rosh Hashanah is a time for personal spiritual reckoning. We are meant to honestly come to terms with what has happened in our lives the past year and what we have done. Our goal is to acknowledge our missteps and try to commit to live better lives in the future.
That reckoning is also meant to be done in context. That is, the more we feel comfortable in our environment - our family, our community, the society in which we live - the easier it can be to focus on ourselves. The more we are distracted by hate, the more our world is chaotic, the harder it is to tune that out and work on our souls. The only way we can approach God with a pure heart is if we acknowledge all of our thoughts, feelings and issues. The only way we can attain a sense of spiritual equilibrium and balance is if we confront the chaos around us. The only way to feel hope in the future is if we feel empowered by our community - that is, knowing that we are not alone, that we are part of a community in which all of us are working toward the same goals.
And so, in order to begin the spiritual reckoning today, I wanted to focus on this feeling of abandonment. On October 25 last year, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal published a letter that my colleague, Rabbi Brad Artson (the Dean of the Ziegler Rabbinical School) wrote to his non-Jewish friends. Just three weeks after the war began, Rabbi Artson wrote: “You’ve always been with me, always supportive and encouraging. But now I feel an existential divide, and I know you’d be open to hearing about it. … The anguish and the pain is unbelievable. In this time, I know that I’m not the only Jew who has felt existentially cut off from humanity. Too many friends and allies were silent, offering no consolation, no condemnation of [the] terrorist assault on civilians. We’ve watched as other people post the same cheerful pictures of vacations, books read, and meals eaten while we are grieving, in shock, mourning and terrified. It feels as though there are two separate worlds and I’ve been consigned to one of them, while you, dear friends, are living large.”
This description of the two contrasting realities is exactly how I felt. In one moment - on October 3 - I felt that my interfaith colleagues and I were friends. I felt that we had the same goals of learning from each other and working together. I thought that we were building a framework for the faith communities in Olney to respect and learn from each other. But after October 7 those positive feelings dissipated.
Despite feeling abandoned, I tried to bring our group back together. In January, after 3 months of the war and 3 months of my colleagues’ silence, I decided to call a meeting which I provocatively titled in the email, “Can we talk about Israel”. 20 people showed up in the Winer Gallery that day and though they politely let me describe what I’ve been feeling and what I’ve been witnessing about Israel, the discussion quickly devolved into the enormously high number of Palestinian casualties and highlighting what they thought was Israel’s disproportionate conduct. I tried to explain and provide context, but to no avail. One colleague respectfully suggested that we end the meeting agreeing to disagree, and I concurred. It was heartbreaking. I wasn’t being heard. My pain, and the pain of Israeli society and American Jews, wasn’t being acknowledged.
Rabbi Artson, in his letter, after acknowledging his sense of isolation, continued to describe the increased security checks that have been adopted by his rabbinical school, his synagogue and other Jewish institutions in Los Angeles and around the world. He has a significant presence on Facebook and X and he described the antisemitic attacks and threats on his life that are written in his feeds weekly if not daily. And he concluded his letter with these thoughts: “What do I need from you, friends? Nothing more than what you’ve given me my whole life: Love, support, curiosity. I’m so grateful to share this journey with you. We share so much culture in common, a love of democracy, a passion for justice and inclusion, a love for art and thought and history and, of course, our shared childhood. I want to write this to you because it occurred to me that I now know that there’s a part of me in a secured shelter that is sealed off from the comfortable world in which you get to live….Your existential worries are about life as a whole: climate change, aging, illness, kids. But they’re not about whether your people will be obliterated. … They’re not about the possibility that you’ll find out that those you love have been kidnapped, murdered, raped, tortured or that the country that is the the only one in the world where your people are a majority is the only one that people want obliterated from the face of the earth, or paradoxically that there are people who claim to be the real Jews and claim that you’re a fraud….My loneliness will be mitigated, as it has been so often, by your love and care, but also by your understanding and by your seeing. I am a person and I am a Jew.”
Artson’s letter ended on this note of optimism. Perhaps, after baring his soul, his friends would recognize his despair and anguish. Perhaps if his friends could act like friends, then his loneliness would fade and he would feel heard.
But this sense of abandonment goes deeper than just Rabbi Artson. It’s even more than what many of us may be feeling at this moment. Could this sense of abandonment be a systemic Jewish problem? This past July I had the privilege of attending the Rabbinic Torah Seminar at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. I hadn’t been to Israel since Oct 7 and it was so good to be there. Among the many lectures I attended was one titled: “A People That Dwells Alone” by Tal Becker. Tal Becker is an Australian Jew who made aliyah with his family years ago. He is a lawyer for Israel’s foreign ministry and in that capacity he has worked at the United Nations and at the International Criminal Court. Most recently he was on the team headed by Justice Aharon Barak defending Israel against South Africa’s charges of genocide.
In his lecture, Tal Becker focused on the blessing that the Midianite prophet Balaam blessed the people of Israel. The Moabite king, Balak, hired Balaam to curse the people of Israel but God intervened and caused Balaam to bless the people instead. We might be familiar with a line from his blessing - מה טובו אהליך יעקב - “how goodly are your tents O Jacob, your dwelling places O Israel”. The verse that Becker focused on was that Israel will be עם לבדד ישכון - a people that dwells apart. That standard English translation isn’t quite literal. It really means that Israel will always be a nation that lives alone.
“How goodly are your dwelling places” sounds like a blessing. But what kind of blessing is “Israel will always live alone”? In an attempt to make that line sound like a blessing, the traditional commentaries over the centuries have answered that by living alone we, the Jewish people, wouldn’t be influenced by the negative aspects of the world around us. That we would be living in peace, dedicated to God.
Most people though don’t understand the verse as a blessing but rather they understand living alone as a comment on our predicament - that Balaam was predicting that we would always be different. Our different religion which has caused us throughout history to dress and act differently and has caused us to have different ethical and moral values, has led us to be treated differently. So much so that we were isolated in ghettos and worse.
Yet the irony is, as Becker reminded us in his lecture, that we have always, despite the segregation and oppression, have wanted to be treated equally in the country and society in which we lived. Over the centuries we adopted the values, the dress, the customs of the greater society to try to fit in. We’ve gone to university when permitted and become part of the intelligentsia. But, except for our time in America, that striving to be seen and valued has always failed.
In other words, for centuries we have felt abandoned and isolated and at the same time we have longed to be seen - longed to be treated equally by the greater society. For centuries, even when living in ghettos, and even while forced to dress in a unique way, we have wanted to be free. We have wanted to be part of the greater society.
The abandonment that I have been feeling aligns with this historical and sociological feeling. On October 3 I thought I was on equal footing with my interfaith colleagues, but after Oct 7 and especially in our meeting in January, it was clear that the age-old tropes played out. I was alone, wanting to be back in the fold, but left alone after all.
Our haftorah this morning emphasizes the pain of being alone. Told from a deeply personal perspective, our haftorah describes Hannah’s emotional pain both in being barren and by falling out of favor with her co wife Penina. She had to endure seeing Penina’s children every day which only exacerbated her pain and her shame. When Elkanah - their husband - took the family to Shiloh (where the mishkan, the sanctuary, was) for a celebration, Hannah decided to pray to God. Aside from Moses praying on behalf of the people, there are no other examples of people praying in the Bible. Yet somehow Hannah knew this was what she needed to do.
As she was praying, the high priest interrupted her and accused her of being drunk. What else could explain her unusual behavior! But Hannah says, “I haven’t poured myself wine or hard liquor, I have instead poured out my soul before God…It is out of anguish and anger that I have been speaking to God.”
Hannah’s words, spoken 3,200 years ago resonate today. We could have said them ourselves. As Rabbi Artson begged to be seen and as our ancestors cried out from persecution and oppression, and as we beg today, we want to be seen. We want to be heard. We don’t want to feel abandoned.
Just two weeks before his son was brutally murdered by his Hamas captors, Jonathan Polin wrote an essay for an Israeli newspaper. Polin wrote how his son Hersh was always sensitive to his father’s needs. He wrote that Hersh declared to his family that he wasn’t observant anymore. But he still attended shul with his father just to keep his father company. “He came with me,” Jonathan said, “so that I would not be alone.” Polin ended his letter back in August pleading that we not forget Hersh and all of the hostages. “Please don’t be silent,” he wrote. “Let your voice be heard! Speak up!”
The plight of the hostages as expressed by Jonathan Polin reflects our biggest fear - that of being alone and abandoned. It is a tragedy that the very young man who ensured that his father wasn’t alone, ultimately was murdered in captivity. How can we be sure that Hersh’s parents won’t be alone? How can we assure that we, the Jewish people won’t continue to feel isolated?
Our haftorah tells us that Hannah’s prayer was answered. The high priest Eli tells her “go in peace”, (which most likely is the Biblical way of saying “rest assured”) “the God of Israel will answer your prayer.”
If only it was so simple today. If only we could have proof or an iron clad guarantee that God would answer our prayers and that God would help us to not feel alone anymore. But even if God may not answer our prayers today, crying out to God still serves a purpose. Baring our souls helps us recognize what we are feeling. It helps us verbalize our deep seated feelings and thoughts. By putting words to our despair, by articulating our feelings of abandonment, we do feel better.
And when we do that together, as a community, we feel stronger. Yes we may personally feel anguish and despair, but just the fact that we were able to find the strength to be here today, helps us recognize that we are not alone in our pain. We have family and friends here who will support us and care for us.
We also have to find the courage to reach out. Instead of seeing ourselves as different, as a group worthy of being hated, we, despite our pain, need to cry out like Hannah. We need to say we are here. We share the same values. We all believe in social justice. We want to make the world a better place. Listen to us. Hear our cry, O God. Give us the strength to overcome our isolation so that we can fulfill our mission to be a light unto the nations.
May this coming year be one of healing and repair. May we no longer feel alone. May we see the day when there will be peace in Israel. Amen.
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