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Rosh Hashana Day 1 sermon from B'nai Jacob on Vimeo.

There is a proverbial Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times. This seems to be our lot.”

When I think back over the last several years, I am struck by how many assumptions that I held have been upended. I am shocked that once solid institutions seem shaky, that as a nation we have lost so much trust and goodwill, and that we have lost much of the feeling, however illusory it was, that life is at least somewhat predictable.

I want to take a few minutes now and invite each of you to think about yourselves and our world and the ways in which your assumptions have been upended and your world turned upside down over the last several years.

Here are the things I thought about: the pandemic, seven million people dead around the world, most of us locked in our homes for months on end, unsure of how to keep safe and deprived of one another’s company. The erosion of democratic norms which many of us thought were unshakable. January 6 — the US Capitol under attack, legislators running for their lives. The drumbeat of climate change ever louder — smoke-filled skies, hot, wet summers, snowless winters, fires, floods, hurricanes.

And then came October 7 and a whole other set of norms toppled, this time even closer to home.

We stopped trusting that Jews in Israel and North America were fundamentally safe. We stopped believing that the liberal order, which enabled American Jews to enjoy 75 years of unprecedented security and opportunity, would hold. We have witnessed universities, a lynchpin of liberal democracy, and a bastion for Jews, unable to summon even minimal moral courage, failing to condemn that which is blatantly evil, failing to protect their students.

We have learned painfully that peace in Israel is not around the corner as some of us imagined since Oslo; that the left, whom some of us considered allies, does not actually share our values or even see us; and that Zionism has not transformed the narrative of Jewish history, the idea that a Jewish state would ensure that Jews are safe in their own homes, in their own beds, within sovereign borders. We yearn for Israel to be a beacon of morality; we are unsure of how to fight an enemy who hides beneath its people. We are horrified by the deaths in Gaza, distraught that the hostages have still not been brought home, and fearful that Israel’s government drifts farther and farther away from its moral center and from American Jewry.

I now think of the timeline of my life both in terms of BP and AP, before and after the pandemic, and before and after October 7, as if these events are continental divides indelibly separating past and present. If you feel disoriented, destabilized, uncertain, if you feel that life is shakier than it was, you are not alone. The question is how do we find our bearings when the ground shakes beneath us? How do we move forward? How do we rebuild trust?

I ask these questions because I think they are critical, but I also ask them as the rabbi of this synagogue. I deeply believe that the events of the world demand something from us, something more than the occasional vote, and, as I spend my days writing sermons, visiting the sick, working out the details of a program, assuaging an upset congregant, I have wondered if we are doing enough. In such critical times should we not be throwing ourselves into work on climate change or elections or defending Israel? I am not in any way suggesting that you shouldn’t do those things — you should — it is just that I have wondered if the day-to-day business of the synagogue addresses these cataclysms or if it is somehow irrelevant.

That is the question I want to address today and again on Kol Nidre night — specifically, how a synagogue or any other intentional community or organization actually plays a critical role in sustaining us and in healing our world. I will focus specifically on two areas — this afternoon I will talk about resilience; on Kol Nidre night I will talk about democracy.

I also want to say at the outset that although I am conscious that we are a month away from a deeply consequential and hotly contested election, I am not going to say anything about it these High Holidays. It is a third rail. I don’t believe that I can do any good or convince anyone of anything by talking about it. I am also hopeful that if I can dig deeper, and illuminate enduring truths of our lives, bringing Torah to the fore, I will have accomplished more than I could by talking politics.

So how do we get through these challenging times? How do we survive and even thrive?

Resilience, as you probably know, is a hot topic in schools and workplaces and everywhere right now. What makes some people more resilient than others? How can we cultivate resilience?

While resilience certainly seems like a desirable trait, one only has to scratch the surface of resilience curricula and literature to see that most of what is proffered amounts to an updated version of Norman Vincent Peale, think good thoughts, cultivate optimism, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, and with the right attitude and hard work anyone can overcome trauma and achieve happiness and success.

While it is true that optimism is a good quality to cultivate, and that hard work matters, too often this ideology becomes a kind of updated Calvinism, blaming those who don’t succeed for their failure to work harder or be more optimistic. It ignores the fact that individual resilience is no match against larger social trends, corporate greed, persistent discrimination, and stacked economies.

In reality, so-called resilience training in schools and workplaces often looks a lot more like educating for compliance — lauding students or workers who don’t make a fuss when things go wrong, even tragically wrong, but quickly rebound, putting their nose to the grindstone, not being the squeaky wheel. Such notions of resilience serve the capitalist machine, but their human cost is terrible — hardened masculinity, rugged individualism, and ultimately a kind of narcissistic maladaptation that “tacitly relies on carelessness and exploitative behavior toward others.”¹ Is this who we want to be?

“Despite the tragic loss of his wife and daughter, Sam was back at work the next week, sunny and affable, even going out of his way to help his neighbor remove a fallen tree.” Really? Sounds a little Life of Brian, always look on the bright side of life — If life seems jolly rotten/There’s something you’ve forgotten/And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing/When you’re feeling in the dumps/Don’t be silly, chumps/Just purse your lips and whistle — that’s the thing/And always look on the bright side of life…

I think of the people who were labeled heroes during the pandemic — healthcare workers, teachers, mothers. While I am in no way minimizing their heroism — tens of thousands of people went above and beyond to save lives and help others — I think a closer look at what we labeled heroism ought to concern us. We asked people to do difficult things without the requisite resources — masks, equipment, time, money, support, rest — and then called them heroes when they persevered, despite the enormous toll it exacted from them. Since 2020, over 20% of healthcare workers have left their jobs, citing burnout as the primary cause. What is called heroism often comes at too high a price, especially for people who didn’t sign up to be heroes.

So if resilience is not primarily about individual traits like optimism and grit, what does make us resilient? Soraya Chemaly, in a new book called *The Resilience Myth* writes, “we cope, change, survive, and thrive together, in interdependent, mutual caring relationships.”² “The strength, quality, and reach of our social connections are our most effective, resilience resources.”³ Contrary to popular belief, resilience is not so much about toughing it out alone with grit and perseverance, eschewing softer virtues like love and compassion, but rather nurturing qualities of care, connection and kindness within communal settings. Whereas trauma separates us from others, resilience emerges from connection and integration. Resilience is a collective more than an individual virtue.

If you think about your own experience, you know this to be true. We don’t magically bounce back or soldier on regardless of what happens. When someone we love dies, we sit shiva; we are surrounded by family and friends who lift us up. We find our way to daily minyan where we say kaddish in the presence of others who have also suffered loss. We make ourselves part of a historic community that has been held by these prayers and guided along this path. We learn from and lean on others. With the support of our community, our tradition, and the knowledge that countless others before us have walked this path, and with the gift of time, we find our way, not all at once and instantaneously, but slowly, haltingly, until, over time, we find that despite loss we are whole.

Brave Heart, a Native American social worker, professor, and mental health expert, studied the intergenerational effects of the Holocaust on individuals and families and understood that a treatment paradigm based on individuals, divorced from context, culture, and history, could not address the scope of damage to the Jewish people. Based on this research, Brave Heart developed a treatment paradigm for her own people, recognizing the importance of addressing history and its impact, immersing Native Americans in their cultural and social narratives, incorporating rituals and spaces that generate safety, belonging, respect, care, and knowledge.⁴

We Jews are heirs both to a history of trauma as well as powerful tools for collective resilience. The first of these which I want to highlight is stories. “Shared narratives,” writes Chemaly, “are a fundamental unit of our resilience. …Stories are how we move through time, empathize, and gain perspective. They enable us to negotiate, make meaning, shape social norms, and define our values. Stories teach us to cooperate and allow us to build communities and cultures that make our resilience and survival possible.”5 Science corroborates this truth — telling the story of past hurt or trauma to an empathetic listener or to one another increases oxytocin and decreases pain.

Think back for a moment to one of the foundational stories of Jewish history — the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70CE. This was a cataclysmic event in Jewish history — the Temple was seen as the place where God dwelled, a living testament to God’s favor, the place in which we achieved collective atonement, year after year, and connected directly to a sense of God’s presence.

With the destruction of the Temple, many people — most notably Christians — gave up on the Jewish story. God had clearly abandoned His people and it was time to find a new story.

The rabbis of old, however, made a different choice — to stay in the story while writing a new story, that is to use the old story, the material of the destruction and the tools of reinterpretation, to tell a new story that was continuous with the old story but also new. Instead of believing that God had abandoned His people, the rabbis created the idea of Shechina, God’s indwelling presence, who wept at the destruction of the Temple and went into exile with her beloved people, forsaking her ruined sanctuary, traveling with us in our wanderings, longing for a return to wholeness.

Think for a moment about the seder ritual. When the Temple stood, Passover took place in Jerusalem. Each family came with its lamb, sacrificed it in the Temple, and ate it with bitter herbs and matzah, in celebration of freedom and redemption. After the destruction, what’s the point of Passover? We are, in important ways, neither free nor redeemed. Why celebrate? How to celebrate with no Temple and no sacrifice?

And yet Raban Gamliel, the second head of the Sanhedrin following the Destruction, invented the seder we have. We would no longer eat the paschal lamb, but we would talk about it and that would suffice. We would no longer sacrifice in Jerusalem, but we would gather around our tables in our homes, each head of household his own priest at his own altar, and, as long as we told the story it would be enough. We would continue to celebrate the exodus from Egypt but that story would also become a paradigm for future redemption for which we prayed, inviting Elijah to our table, concluding with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

What an unbelievable strategy for resilience! For literally thousands of years we have gathered at our tables to tell the story of our people, to internalize the seder’s messages of hope, resilience, and justice, to sing together and to eat together, embedding memories deep within our collective conscience, reminding ourselves that despite the destruction of the Temple, despite the traumas of history, we are still here, we are not slaves, we are living proof of God’s miraculous power of redemption.

Of course, seder is not only a story but also a ritual. Shared ritual joins us to one another and gives us a sense of belonging and being cared for. Rituals are a source of comfort — whether on Shabbat or at the seder table we find comfort in returning to the familiar in the face of the world’s chaos, which in turn helps us adjust to change and crisis. Rituals ground us in a historic community, connecting us to ancestors who are metaphorically at the table, who survived the vicissitudes of their lives practicing these very rituals which they, in turn, passed down to us.

Ritual also works on a visceral level. Music, food, candlelight, repetition all quiet our busy minds and connect us to memories and people. When we sing together and pray together we literally resonate with one another — we listen deeply and tune ourselves to those around us. For me, the experience is as if I am a small aeolian harp vibrating with the wind. When we sing, I have to quiet my mind, my ego, so that the sound of others singing reverberates within me, enabling me to tune to them and join them in song. It is a feeling of deep resonance, deeper than words, a feeling of being part of something much larger than myself, a feeling of deep connection. Both shared ritual and shared stories remind us of the extent to which we are physically, emotionally, neurologically, and materially reliant on one another.

A few years ago I watched a video by Koolulam, a social musical initiative, led by Ben Yefet, a skinny Israeli with long dreadlocks who brings groups of people together for a kind of flash mob. This particular performance was held on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, in a hall in Jerusalem; several hundred survivors and their families participated. The song they sang was “Ani Od Chai,” “I am still alive.” Witnessing these people who had survived the worst atrocities known to humankind singing Ani Od Chai—I’m still here—with their descendants standing with them, children and grandchildren who by all probabilities never should have been born, was beyond moving. There was not a dry eye in the house. An academic who studied Koolulam “found that participants find meaning in Koolulam events because they connect to others and create something more powerful and beautiful than any individual can create alone. The result is that participants feel a sense of belonging to a community where they are seen and heard.”⁶

Resilience takes us out of ourselves. Through the experience of ritual and shared stories, we connect to one another and transcend self. We don’t do this merely to bask in the glory of God or just to enjoy our feast and music — once we experience ourselves as deeply connected to one another and all that is, we sense the world’s suffering and the demand to respond to it. Or to say it in Jewish terms, we are obligated to mitzvot. As Isaiah reminds us on Yom Kippur, God isn’t interested in our fasting and sackcloth. “No, this is the fast I want: to unlock the fetters of wickedness, to let the oppressed go free…to share your bread with the hungry, to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe them.”

It is why we say ha lachma anya on seder night, inviting the hungry to join us at the table. We cannot self-indulgently enjoy our seder meal without expanding the boundaries of our community to include those in need. If you don’t already, take this mitzvah seriously. Opening your home on seder night to a stranger, to someone who might not have a place to go for seder, is a gift to them and to you.

Similarly, the message of seder is because you were slaves in Egypt, you know what slavery is. You know the bitter taste of oppression in your mouth. The lesson is not simply not to be slaves again but to ensure that others are not enslaved, that others do not go hungry, that the most vulnerable among us are cared for. Connection, deep connection, takes us out of ourselves and connects us to the larger world — we are simultaneously filled with wonder at that world and charged with responsibility to care for it. This is a “do good” resilience, not just feel good.

In fact, this is exactly what we are doing right now, when we come together as a synagogue community, to hear the stories we have told over and over, to say and sing these words, these prayers together, to feel the presence of one another shoulder to shoulder, breathing, laughing, sometimes crying together, to know that our parents and grandparents and ancestors sit with us in these pews, to remind ourselves of our obligations to those in need and strengthen our collective resolve to respond, and to express our hopes, our longings, and our dreams for a better world and for a good new year.

Before I close I would like to invite each of you to think of three of your deepest hopes for the coming year.

Being part of a Jewish community, being a member of this synagogue then, is not something you do just to scratch an ethnic itch. It’s not just for fun, belonging, nostalgia or comfort, although we hopefully offer those gifts in abundance. It is fundamentally how we transform our world. It is about creating a community of deep connection to one another that, through our shared stories, rituals, and mitzvot, will make us collectively resilient and able to join together and with others to face the many challenges of our world. Far from being some irrelevant stories of old, or meaningless and endless commandments, it is the most relevant and important thing we can do to nurture our collective resilience, to make us strong and whole together, and make our world a better place.

I will close with the words of the young poet, Amanda Gorman:
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
that even as we grieved, we grew,
even as we hurt, we hoped,
that even as we tired, we tried,
that we’ll forever be tied together victorious,
not because we will never again know defeat,
but because we will never again sow division.⁷

Together we can heal one another. Together we can hold one another’s pain, we can connect heart to heart. Together we can dig deep wells of resilience that will nurture others long after we are gone, just as we have been privileged to drink from the wells our ancestors dug for us.

¹ Soraya Chemaly, *The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth after Trauma* (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2024)p. 206.

² Ibid, 207.

³ Ibid, 208.

⁴ Ibid, 201.

⁵ Ibid, 204.

⁶ Based on an academic study conducted by Dr. Weiss, based at David Yellin College of Education, Koolulam, https://www.koolulam.com/.

⁷ Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb,” Inaugural Poem delivered at Inauguration of President Joseph Biden, January 20, 2021.