Rosh Hashanah Afternoon – 2024
Shana Tovah and a Happy New Year to all of you friends and family. I hope you feel welcome and at home here at Temple Isaiah. I want to express to you something right away as we begin these holiest of days and the moments that will define them, together: I am glad you are here. I really am. These are not empty words.I promise you I am not exaggerating when I tell you that the stakes have never been higher. You have never been braver, and we have never needed you here more than we need you right now. Being Jewish, and embracing Jewish identity has never been more confusing, more complex, more meaningful than it is right now. You have decided to show up for High Holy Day Services in the most Jewish of spaces possible. It is not just a matter of where you are that is remarkable, but when you are here. We have to talk about this. We have to have this discussion. You arrive at these High Holy Day services, the first we have had in the wake of one of the most horrific moments in Jewish history, and certainly the most horrific in Jewish history since the darkest days of the Shoah. We all know the date. We all know of October 7th, 2023-22 Tishrei 5784. The irony of that day being Simchat Torah (joy in Torah) is not lost on us. By now we have all likely heard multiple accounts of the infamous morning and its aftermath, the cries, the screams,the horrific images, the videos we wish we could unsee, and anecdotes we never wanted to hear. The children snatched from families…entire families violently stolen from communities and kibbutzim. I do not need to recount all of those atrocities here today…Not because I shouldn’t but because the taste is still in our mouths.
It is not the events of October 7th alone that inform us. Not the crimson stains in homes, or the eerily empty cribs and abandoned community centers. No. It is the global shockwaves that still can make us feel as if we are treading on a rickety bridge. It is the echoes of chants “from the river to the sea,” the claims of a genocide, the gutwrenching calls for the continued October 7ths. October 7th after October 7th. Calls from spaces in our own country that we considered safe. Places that seemed inviting. Places that perhaps, we frequent or frequented. I attended a meeting with the Anti Defamation League on antisemitism before these High Holy Days. 2023 saw the most antisemitic incidents on record…ever in this country. There was an antisemitic incident in the US every hour in 2023. In the past decade, antisemitic incidents have risen 873%. We are learning that we cannot truly begin to process a traumatic experience when much of the world does not want that experience to end. There is no decompression while we are still being pressed. When the greater world feels as a knife-wielding, wild-eyed Abraham, and, we, the Jews are a bound up Isaac, the trauma is kinetic, it is in motion. We so often during the next ten days mention Ha-Sefer Chayim, a book of life. We pray with words as if names will be written in the book of life or not on Rosh Hashanah, and then the decree will be sealed on Yom Kippur. God will decide who will live and who will die, and how. All the while, many of the names of those who were hastily scribbled unfairly into a book of death with blood-red ink sit in the back of our sanctuary on an easel.
In an article entitled “October 7th: The Jewish Collective Trauma Response” Talya Gordon writes: “I don’t have the answers for how or even if we will be okay. Right now, all we can do is sit with the pain and be honest about how we are doing. We are not okay.” Gordon goes on to explain how we need the world to help us, how we do not even have the time to process and heal from the trauma. The world moves rapidly, and we have to keep on moving. Just keep on moving. One of the most famous of trauma responses is “freeze,” of fight, flight, freeze fame. Before we can thaw from our frozen moment, we must recognize the past. One of the themes of our day is Zichronot…remembrances. Remember we must.
Let’s recount: 7th of October 6:29 AM, Negev Desert outside of Kibbutz Reim. Nova; a music festival. A celebration of life’s joys, of music, of holiday, of being free and able to dance. Hamas terrorists enter and murder 364 people. About 40 are taken as hostages into Gaza. In total, over 1,200 souls were lost that day. To put the power of this day into context of the music festival’s turn toward massacre, many have called this moment the time “when the music stopped.” We have heard calls through tears of anguish of our Jewish desire to dance again. To move again. We might have been momentarily stopped from dancing beginning on October 7th, but we always seek new ways to return to free movement in time. Sometimes we have to change steps, we change tempos, we waltz in 3 if we have to. For some, to function again will be a high art form.
On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we will read the Akeida, the binding of Isaac. Reading this section of Torah is powerful, but after October 7th it strikes me with a sense of panic. Abraham, so willing to sacrifice Isaac, his own son, places him on “ha-mizebeiach,” the altar, and stretches out his hand, takes his knife to slay his own son. Our Torah says that at that very moment, a messenger stops him by crying out, “Abraham, Abraham!” Abraham replies with, “Hineini.” I am here, or here I am. Isaac is spared. Where was God on October 7th? Why didn’t God do the same? Didn’t God cry out? The knife was lowered. Precious blood was shed. I believe that God did cry out. God cried out with all of God’s might. Abraham was listening to God. The terrorists were not. This is the difference. Shema Yisrael.
On Rosh Hashanah, some read the words of our prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah was prophesying during the destruction of the first Temple of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and also the subsequent Babylonian exile. Jeremiah, while so often offering solemn words, also offers hope and comfort in our reading. When discussing our peoples’ exile, he also mentions our eventual return. He writes of this occasion specifically, “Then maidens will dance with delight; the young and their elders together. Their grief I will turn into bliss. I will comfort them and gladden them in their time of sorrow.” These words of comfort are about the return from Babylonian exile; they are also about October 7th, 2023. These words leap off the page. “Then maidens will dance with delight.” We will dance again without fear of harm. “The young and their elders together.” A 9-month-old Kfir Bibas, a 4 year-old Ariel Bibas, their mother, Shiri, and father, Yarden will be together, safe and alive. A family, one of so many, will never be torn from each other so catastrophically ever again. Our tears of grief will turn into tears of joy and laughter. I will comfort and gladden them in their time of sorrow.
I am not up here to talk extensively about the politics of Israel and the middle east. To try and dissect what happened in Gaza after Israel exited the strip in 2005, and what led to the violent takeover by Hamas in 2007. I am not here to try and figure it out while you all listen to my perspective. How the existence of Israel as a state became political, a matter of policy is the problem. Most of us are well-aware of the fact that Israel is an ocean of world Jewry, and what happens there sends not just ripples across the Jewish world, but tidal waves, tsunamis, whether or not we like it. We are forever linked to the Jewish state. There is quantitative data from multiple agencies, perhaps most notably the ADL, which tells us of an increase in antisemitism, both in acts, and in speech, that goes into the hundreds of percents. Not in Israel. Here.
There is nothing good about what happened on October 7th. There is good that has happened afterward. We have seen those who felt disconnected from their Judaism find their way back…feel a sense of protectiveness and identification that they had never felt prior. We have been involved in acts of lovingkindness in the form of monetary giving to organizations like Magen David Edom. We have connected students in our religious school with pen pals living in Israel. We have seen humanity at its most vulnerable and at its most beautiful. Many of the student pen pals from Israel wrote of the sirens that go off when enemy rockets are detected entering into Israel. These rockets signal that residents should get to safety. They awaken people from slumber, and they cause them to act.
On Rosh Hashanah, we awaken our souls with the sound of the Shofar. The Shofar represents so many emotions. The single blast of the T’kiah, representing our stability, our constant. The three medium-length blasts of shevarim are our pains…our cries. Shevarim means “broken.” We allow ourselves to go to our broken places…to be unafraid to approach them. We are brought to attention in what I perceive to be a joyful and playful manner with the nine staccato notes of the Teruah. Finally, the long blast of Tekiah Gedolah leaves us in awe. It centers us while simultaneously shaking us to attention. As we hear the blasts of the Shofar during these high Holy Days, let us take back the sirens of panic, rockets, and pain for the purpose of holiness and renewal.
Let us go on this journey together, the remarkable and ever-evolving story of the Jewish people…through triumph and tragedy. Thank you again for being here, for celebrating together when it could be easy to stay home, to tune out, to hide. The sirens pierce through regardless. Let us take back the siren sound of shofar, and when all is said and done, let us move. Let us dance. Let us honor the trauma and let it create new strengths. Even through difficulty, we find the sweet center that is the neshamah, the soul of it all.
Shana Tovah U’Metukah- A sweet and happy New Year!
– Rabbi Josh Gray