Forty Years

This past May, within the span of less than two weeks, I marked two milestones in my life that were closely related to one another.

The first milestone was that I turned 40. In a different generation, we would have said that I was now “over the hill.” And even though that phrase is less common today than it once was, still, in our Jewish tradition, 40 remains a significant number. It is typically used to indicate a period of time that was both long and challenging. The flood of Noah’s ark lasted 40 days and 40 nights. The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years. For me, turning 40 signified something similar: that I have now lived long enough to have faced some of the challenges that life inevitably brings.

The second milestone, which occurred less than two weeks later, was that I ran my first half-marathon. The preparation required considerable effort and perseverance. I logged more than ten months of training. I went on nearly 100 runs. I sustained two moderate muscle strains, for which I needed physical therapy. It was a challenging process that culminated in a challenging run.

I actually did not plan for these two events to occur in such close proximity to each other. But once I realized that they were going to, I found that there was something accidentally meaningful about it. Turning 40 and running a half-marathon both were milestones that required prolonged effort. Taken together, they felt like a personal challenge – a test of my grit and character. And as a result, I have spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about two closely related yet subtly different character traits. I have spent a lot of time thinking about endurance and resilience.

The American Psychological Association draws a helpful distinction between the two. Endurance is the ability to sustain effort over time, to withstand extended hardship through persistence and stamina. Resilience, by contrast, is the ability to adapt to difficult circumstances, to respond to hardship with flexibility and adjustment. The goal of endurance is to make it through a challenge. The goal of resilience is to come back from a challenge perhaps stronger than we were before, having grown.

It strikes me that the Jewish people is both long-enduring and incredibly resilient. Our 3,000-year history has been marked by adversity. And yet, throughout that period, we have not only endured, we have thrived. We have evolved our tradition; we have adapted to new circumstances; and as a result, despite our many tribulations, we have contributed immensely to culture and society.

The renowned psychologist Froma Walsh argues that the key ingredient to a person’s resilience is what she calls our “belief systems” – or, the lenses through which we view the world. [1] Given this, we might wonder: what are the Jewish people’s belief systems that have allowed us, over the past 3,000 years, not only to endure, but to thrive? What wisdom might we gather from our tradition so that in this new Jewish year, each of us might develop a little more resilience?

Perhaps the place to start is with our people’s origin story. Our Torah recounts how, while the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt, Moses first encountered God in the desert. One day, while he was tending the flock, he noticed a wondrous sight: a bush that was on fire, but was not consumed by the flames – and from within the blaze, the voice of God emerged and spoke to him.

The sages of old ask: why did God choose to appear to Moses in that particular form? Could not God have just as well appeared in the form of a shimmering pool or a whirlwind of sand? The sages respond by saying that the medium was the message: that just as the bush was not consumed by the flames, so too would the Israelites not be consumed by their servitude. [2] It is an image that would stick in our people’s imagination for countless generations.

What God showed Moses was a symbol of endurance, that the Israelites would survive their challenges. But at the start of a new Jewish year, our goal is not merely to endure adversity, but also, to develop resilience: the capacity to adapt and grow. Toward that end, our High Holy Day U-n’taneh Tokef prayer suggests two helpful tools.

First, in what is likely its most famous passage, the prayer reminds us just how little of our lives are actually within our control: “On Rosh Hashanah, this is written – on Yom Kippur, this is sealed: who will live and who will die; who by fire and who by water…”

It can be a frightening realization, to face our existential vulnerability – frightening, but also, potentially helpful. The prayer reminds us that life will almost certainly present us with unexpected, painful experiences. Our child is unhappy at college. An argument with our sibling leads to estrangement. A friend is diagnosed with an incurable disease. U-n’taneh Tokef helps us to recognize that these challenges are a normal part of being human. It does not make them any less painful. Rather, it helps us to integrate them into our lives – to see them not as impossible burdens, but rather, as difficult realities that we can learn to navigate.

This, so far, is the prayer’s first tool for resilience. And a second tool is quick in coming. The prayer famously goes on to say: u-t’shuvah, u-t’filah, u-tz’dakah ma’avirin et ro’a ha-g’zeirah – that “repentance, prayer, and righteous giving can temper the harshness of the decree.”

We should be careful not to misunderstand this teaching. It does not mean that repentance, prayer, and righteous giving will change our fate. Rather, it means that these three habits might just help us to change our character. Repentance might allow us to repair our relationship with our spouse, to replace our emotional distance with closeness and affection. Prayer might allow us to listen more closely to the quiet yearnings of our heart, to gently dissolve the protective crust that has formed over our soft spots. Righteous giving might allow us to extend our circle of concern beyond just ourselves, to feel a sense of responsibility for and contribute to the well-being of others. If we can cultivate these three habits, then, when unexpected, painful challenges inevitably arise, we might be better equipped to meet them with resilience – and, perhaps, even to grow.

Contemporary psychology says something similar, that resilience can be learned and practiced. Research shows that we develop resilience by encountering manageable challenges and discovering that we can handle them. These experiences provide us with what researchers call “psychological evidence”: the recognition that we have faced challenging circumstances before, and were able to find a way through. [3]

Jewish life expresses this insight in our own particular idiom. For many of us, psychological evidence can be found not only in our own personal experiences, but also, in the stories we inherit from past generations. There is a reason why so many of us continue to cherish the frying pan that our grandmother once used to make latkes, or the kiddush cup that is engraved with our great-grandfather’s name – why we continue to retell the story of how she immigrated to this country with nothing, or of how he helped to establish the synagogue in our hometown. These artifacts and stories are more than just heirlooms; they are psychological evidence – an inherited pool of resilience from which we can draw.

Our tradition also understands that relationships and community are essential tools of resilience. We see this especially vividly in our customs around grief and mourning. There is a reason why a Jewish funeral is only supposed to be conducted in the presence of a minyan, in the presence of at least ten people. And after the funeral is over, we do not go back to the solitude of our lonely house. Rather, we go straight into the week of shiva – seven days during which the house is full of family and friends, full of food and photos. We share memories. We share tears as well as laughter.

And when the week is over, there is the custom of getting up from shiva – of leaving the house, and having our friends accompany us on a walk around the block. It is a ritual meant to indicate not that our grief and our pain have subsided – but rather, that we can integrate them into our lives, carrying them with us as we reenter the world.

To help us with this task, there is a certain noteworthy tool that the Jewish people has developed over the millennia. And although this tool is not exactly a religious practice, it is, nevertheless, an identifiably core feature of our Jewish culture – namely: that we Jews have mastered the art of finding humor, even in the face of hardship.

Humor can be a tool for resilience in at least two notable ways. First, humor can provide relief from the stressors of life. In the recent HBO documentary [4] about Mel Brooks, Susan Stroman – who directed the Broadway production of The Producers – relates the following story. While the musical was being developed, Stroman’s husband died of cancer. The next week, Mel Brooks knocked on her office door and said: You will cry in the morning. And you will cry at night. But in between, when we are together in the rehearsal room, you, and I, and this company of characters will find ways to make each other laugh. “He was totally right,” she says. “And it ended up saving me.”

Or, as the sages of the Talmud put it long ago: “A place is reserved in the World-to-Come for those who bring laughter to the downhearted.” [5]

But there remains a second, even deeper way in which humor can be a tool for resilience. Humor can help us change our relationship with a difficult experience. It allows us to reclaim a measure of power over the things that trouble us. Whether it is the ancient custom of ridiculing the wicked Haman, [6] or the more recent quip from Fiddler on the Roof: “May God bless and keep the Tzar… far away from us” – we Jews have a long and rich history of using humor to reclaim a sense of agency, even in the face of adversity.

These, then, were the thoughts and Jewish ideas that had been rolling around in my head over the past year – as I anticipated turning 40 years old, and as I trained to run my first half-marathon. I had come to see these two milestones as a personal test: to see whether, after 40 years of life, I had developed the tenacity and endurance to meet life’s challenges and succeed.

And then, on the morning of the race, as I reached mile-marker 12, and had only one mile left to go, I felt my body starting to get overheated – and I had to stop running.

I was crushed. I not only felt like I had failed to run the whole race – but also, felt like I had failed to live up to the emotional challenge I had set for myself: to be strong, to push through, to arrive at age 40 believing that I am the kind of person who meets life’s challenges with determination. Later that week, I cried the hardest that I have in years.

And although I had spent the preceding 10 months pondering the topic, it was only then, after the race was over, that I began to more deeply understand the difference between endurance and resilience.

Resilience is not the ability to push through and do hard things. Nor is it the belief that, if we have enough determination, we will always succeed. Nor is it a guarantee that we will never feel disappointment or pain.

Rather, resilience is the recognition that difficult, painful experiences are a normal part of life – and that a healthy way to face them is to adjust our expectations, to adapt to our circumstances, and to find a new way forward. Not necessarily by running another half-marathon – although I do indeed intend to do that – but rather, by finding a way to carry those difficult experiences with us, to integrate them into our lives, and perhaps even to learn and grow from them.

The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years – for as long as I have been alive. And, devastatingly, our Torah story comes to an end before they are able to enter the Promised Land. 

And perhaps that is the point. Resilience is not about some finish line that we are trying to cross. Rather, it is about developing, along the way, our own capacity to thrive.

__________

[1] Froma Walsh, Strengthening Family Resilience (1998), “Chapter 3 – Belief Systems: The Heart and Soul of Resilience”

[2] Midrash Exodus Rabbah 2:5

[3] Deborah Gilboa, MD, on the What Matters Now? podcast, produced by The Times of Israel: “Dr. Deborah Gilboa: The neuroscience of resilience” (July 11, 2026)

[4] Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! (2026), directed by Judd Apatow

[5] Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit 22a

[6] See Adele Berlin, JPS Bible Commentary: Esther (2001)

Twelve Tribes

I wonder if you have ever had an experience like this one.

This past summer, my family and I were hiking in Acadia National Park in Maine – when, about 100 feet ahead of us on the trail, coming our way from the other direction, I noticed a young couple whom I could tell were Modern Orthodox Jews. The man had tzitzit dangling out from beneath his tucked in shirt and was wearing a ballcap – under which, I imagine, he was likely wearing a yarmulke. And the woman, despite it being a warm August day, was dressed in a long skirt and long sleeves.

Now, I’ve been told before that I look pretty recognizably Jewish – or, at the very least, that, for those who would know, my features are distinctively Ashkenazi. But nevertheless, seeing this Modern Orthodox couple approaching, I wanted to be sure that they unmistakably recognized that I, too, was a Member of the Tribe.

And so I did two things. First, surreptitiously, as if I were just wiping a bead of sweat from my forehead, I pulled my Star of David necklace out from beneath my t-shirt. And second, just to make sure I didn’t leave any stone unturned, I called out by name to my kids and niece and nephew, who were a few paces ahead of me on the trail: “Keep to the right, Gavi, Nomi, Hannah, and Adam” – knowing that a more overtly Jewish set of four names you would be hard pressed to come up with.

And just as I had hoped would happen, as I and this young Modern Orthodox couple passed one another, we gave each other a knowing nod – not just the usual friendly hello that many hikers give one another on the trail, but rather, a nod with a deeper layer of meaning, a nod that silently indicated: you and I are connected.

I imagine that many of us may have had an experience like this one. Maybe you noticed someone’s chamsa necklace. Or maybe you overheard a conversation at the mall about shopping for a Bar Mitzvah suit. And maybe, like me, you felt not just that you and that person were connected, but also, that you wanted to acknowledge the connection with them.

There is a humorous slang word for this type of interaction. (I’m not making this up; you can look it up later.) It’s called “bageling.” And although the bagel is not a universal Jewish food – but rather, originates in the Ashkenazi community – nevertheless, the term is used to describe the interaction when one Jewish person tries subtly (or, in my case on the trail in Acadia, tries not so subtly) to establish with a stranger that both of them are Jewish.

It is a peculiar feeling, this sense of connection that many of us might feel when we encounter another Jewish person – peculiar, but nevertheless, real, and sometimes very strong. And even if the word “bageling” is too silly or too frivolous to describe that sense of connection, there is another word that we could use – a word that carries some sociological seriousness, a word that is likely as old as the Jewish tradition itself. The word that we might use is “peoplehood.”

Peoplehood is the idea that all Jews, in one way or another, are connected to each other. The feeling of peoplehood can include those who are Jewish by birth, those who are Jewish by choice, and those who are not formally Jewish but who participate in the life of the Jewish community through family bonds.

Sometimes, Jewish peoplehood feels really easy and good. It is the instinct you might have, when you meet someone who is Jewish, to casually use a Yiddish phrase. It is the sense of pride you might feel when you learn that a beloved public figure is Jewish – say, for example, when you learn that the point guard for the Knicks, Jalen Brunson, and his family belong to a synagogue here in Westchester. It is the feeling of familiarity and belonging you might experience when you go into any synagogue in the world – in Boston, or Berlin, or Buenos Aires – and recognize that they recite the very same prayers as we do.

And also, sometimes Jewish peoplehood can feel surprisingly difficult. It is the feeling of embarrassment you might experience when you learn that someone who has been in the news for unsavory reasons is Jewish. It is the unexpected sense of disconnect you might feel when you wander into an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood – say, Borough Park, or Monsey – and encounter a Judaism that might feel strange or unrecognizable. It is the strong feeling of frustration, or outrage, or the sense of somehow being implicated when you read about other groups of Jews acting in ways that clash with your own deeply held convictions.

Both when the relationship feels good and also when it feels difficult, Jewish peoplehood is a sense of communal relatedness – the feeling that we are all a part of one sprawling, extended family.

It pains me deeply to realize that we are living in a time when the bonds of Jewish peoplehood are becoming loose. We are living in a time of great rupture for the Jewish people – in which the many different fault lines between us are becoming wider and deeper.

A few prominent examples come to mind.

Consider the ways in which this year’s war with Iran illustrated the growing differences between the American Jewish experience and the Israeli Jewish experience – where the proportion of American Jews who were in favor of the war was approximately 40%, while for Israeli Jews, who perceive Iran to be a more immediate existential threat, support for the war was upwards of 90%.

Or: consider the heated conflict within Israeli society over whether Ultra-Orthodox Jews should be obligated to military service – a responsibility that all other groups of Israeli Jews undertake – or, alternatively, if their intensive study and preservation of the Jewish tradition should be considered its own sufficient form of national service.

Or, here in the United States: consider the ways in which each end of the Jewish religious spectrum critiques the other – how the secular Jewish world criticizes the Ultra-Orthodox for failing to meet educational standards in math and in English, and meanwhile, how the Ultra-Orthodox criticize the secular for growing increasingly disconnected from Judaism.

Or, in what is likely the most sharply felt rift that has emerged within the Jewish community: consider the fiercely argued debate among American Jewry over how to properly balance support for and critique of Israel – a debate that recently boiled over in our own Reform Movement around the question of whether the Reform rabbinical and cantorial seminary should ordain students who identify as antizionist.

Around each of these debates, the Jewish people is currently experiencing a moment of great fracture. I regularly hear from congregants about their feeling of alienation from – and sometimes, even their desire to fully disconnect from – other Jews whose lives and, seemingly, values feel unrecognizable. It sometimes feels as if our sense of Jewish peoplehood – the feeling that we are all inextricably connected to each other – is beginning to come apart.

The idea of Jewish peoplehood is ancient. As a Hebrew phrase – am Yisrael – it makes its first appearance early in the Torah, in the very beginning of the Book of Exodus. [1] There, it describes how the Jewish people have grown numerous during their 400 years in Egypt – how, originally, Jacob and 70 members of his household had migrated to the Nile Valley, and how, over the course of many generations, that small group has grown and multiplied into some two-and-a-half million men, women, and children. [2] They are no longer a mere extended family. Now, they rightly constitute a people.

As their numbers have grown, they have also grown more diverse. Although they all share a common ancestry and speak a common language, internally, they are comprised of many distinctive sub-groups: the Twelve Tribes of Israel, as they are called – each with its own particular identity. For example: the Tribe of Levi was known for being especially pious [3] – while the Tribe of Benjamin, by contrast, was known for being fierce warriors. [4] Or: the Tribe of Zebulun was comprised of sailors [5] – while the Tribe of Issachar was comprised of farmers. [6]

In today’s Jewish world, we are similarly made up of a variety of distinctive sub-groups: with Israelis and Americans; from the secular to the Ultra-Orthodox; with political liberals, centrists, and conservatives; with Jews who trace their cultural heritage to Vienna as well as to Baghdad, to Ethiopia as well as to the former Soviet Union. We might even say that we, like our biblical ancestors, are now comprised of the contemporary Twelve Tribes of Israel: as diverse and sprawling as our mythic forebears.

Perhaps we should find it surprising that a people so diverse and sprawling has been able, over the course of 3000 years, to maintain a sense of collective identity. In his classic book on the topic, the late political scientist Daniel Elazar [7] explains that, historically, there have been two different modes by which the Jewish people maintained a sense of peoplehood. The first mode, he labeled “kinship.” The second, he labeled “consent.”

“Kinship,” on the one hand, is the feeling that many Jews have of some sort of implicit family connection between us – a bond that we share, across our differences, simply by virtue of common ancestry. “Consent,” on the other hand, is an active choice that we make – a willing decision to affirm the group’s shared set of values, norms, and practices by claiming them as our own.

To put it in the context of our biblical ancestors: kinship is the connection that the Twelve Tribes felt towards one another in Egypt, even as they grew in number and diversity. Consent is the willing agreement they entered into with one another at Mount Sinai, when they collectively committed to uphold the Ten Commandments and other laws of the Torah.

Throughout most of Jewish history, kinship and consent were virtually indistinguishable. For thousands of years, the vast majority of our ancestors lived in relatively boundaried Jewish communities, where practically everyone shared the same set of collective norms and practices.

But over the past 250 years, the external boundaries around the Jewish community have become more porous. Today, individual Jews are largely able to decide for themselves not only whether to affiliate with a Jewish community – but also, which one.

As a result, we have wound up with a wide variety of different kinds of Jewish communities, each with its own set of values and norms. A secular Jew in Berkeley and a Haredi Jew in Jerusalem might understandably feel that they share very little in common. Our feeling of Jewish peoplehood has seemingly narrowed – extending only to those Jews who are in our own particular one among the Twelve Tribes.

In our era of Jewish choice, it would often be tempting to conclude that perhaps our own particular tribe should choose to fully disconnect and disaffiliate from other Jewish groups with whom we tend to disagree – that, in order to stay true to our own deeply held convictions, perhaps the time has come to shrink our commitment to Jewish peoplehood.

However, against that instinct, a similar moment from ancient Jewish history provides a tale of warning.

Two thousand years ago – in the era immediately before the destruction of the Second Temple – there were, like today, a variety of different Jewish sects, each with its own unique identity and way of practicing Judaism: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and others.

After the destruction of the Temple, the Rabbis who survived that calamity looked back and tried to explain what had caused the catastrophe. We might find their explanation surprising.

They did not write the kind of military or political narrative that a historian might give – even though they themselves had lived through the historical events. They did not write about the statue of Caligula that the Romans tried to erect in the Temple, and the subsequent rebellion that broke out against it. They did not write about how Rome suppressed the rebellion with an overwhelming display of military strength.

Rather, when the Rabbis looked back and tried to understand why their Temple was destroyed, they gave a very different kind of explanation. They said: the Temple was destroyed because the variety of different Jewish sects had harbored towards one another (in Hebrew) sinat chinam, “hatred for no good reason.” [8]

It is a curious explanation. But it is not entirely historically inaccurate. As many historians have demonstrated, [9] infighting among the various factions did indeed gravely weaken Jerusalem’s ability to resist Roman rule.

But when the Rabbis say that the Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam, “hatred for no good reason,” they are making a different kind of argument. Theirs is not primarily a political concern. Rather, they are making an ethical claim.

The Rabbis are saying that the social bonds between the Jewish people – which were supposed to help sustain them through a time of crisis – had become too weak to endure. They had spent decades building mutual mistrust and disdain: vilifying one another, blacklisting each other – spending more time arguing about who is in-bounds and who is out-of-bounds than on talking about the actual issues.

It is important to note that the Rabbis are not pointing a finger at any one particular group – although there certainly were other groups with whom they vehemently disagreed. Rather, they are pointing a finger at their whole society – at the culture of distrust and delegitimization in which they themselves were active participants.

It requires only a little bit of imagination to see the parallels between their time and our own. We, too, seem to be stuck in a cycle of intra-Jewish vilification: between American Jewry and Israeli Jewry; between progressives, centrists, and conservatives; between the secular and the Ultra-Orthodox and everything in between. Like the ancient Rabbis, we, too, are living through an era of crisis, in which the Jewish people is grappling with unprecedented dilemmas. We would be wise to heed their warning: not to let sinat chinam, “hatred for no good reason,” erode the collective Jewish bond whose purpose is to help us endure.

Now, you might be thinking: my feeling towards other Jewish groups is not sinat chinam – it is not “hatred for no good reason” – that, rather, my feeling of distrust is entirely well founded.

To be clear: I am not saying that we should suppress our strongly held commitments for the sake of Jewish unity. On the contrary: a true commitment to Jewish peoplehood demands that we speak up when we see our fellow Jews acting in ways that violate our moral code. As we’ll read in our Yom Kippur afternoon Torah portion – when it comes to our extended Jewish family, our obligation is clear: “Rebuke your kinsman,” the Torah teaches. “Bear no guilt on his behalf.” [10]

But just as importantly, we must also remember the other half of that biblical verse. The Torah goes on to say: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart. … Rather, you shall love your fellow as yourself.” A commitment to Jewish peoplehood requires that we speak up – and also, requires that we do so in a way that clearly demonstrates that we are coming from a place of love and of care.

This is incredibly hard to do. Commenting on this biblical teaching, the sages of the Talmud wonder: “Is there any person in this generation who properly knows how to offer loving rebuke?” [11] We ought to take their caution seriously. It is one thing to believe in loving rebuke; it is entirely another thing to know how to actually give it. Here, then, are three practical suggestions for how to do so.

First: we should seek to understand, on their own terms, what it is that the people with whom we disagree actually believe. This will mean letting go of our own caricaturized version of their argument – and instead trying, with true curiosity, to understand what it is that keeps them up at night: the concerns that they are worried about, the values that they are trying to advance.

Second: only after we have understood them on their own terms can we effectively offer our pushback. If our critique misrepresents their true motivations, not only are we souring the discourse – but also, we are arguing against a straw man.

And third: we need to be willing to turn the critical eye inward – to acknowledge what it is that troubles us about our own position. This does not mean giving up on our deeply held convictions. Rather, it means acknowledging that everyone, including us, has blind spots.

If we can cultivate these three things – the curiosity to understand each other, the insight to offer accurate pushback, and the humility to recognize our own blind spots – perhaps we and the people with whom we disagree might be better equipped to offer loving rebuke.

Then, during a time of crisis, rather than spending our time vilifying each other, we might instead be able to actually talk about our differences. Rather than deciding to walk away from one another, we might instead decide to recommit ourselves to the ancient idea of Jewish peoplehood: the idea that, despite our very real disagreements, we are all just different plot lines in the same unfolding story; the idea that, because we light the same Shabbat candles as one another, because we blast the same shofar, because we retell the same story of the exodus, we are all a part of the same ancient, extended family – one people, comprised of twelve tribes.

Our Torah records the story of the prophet Balaam – who, from a distance, beheld the throng of two-and-a-half million Israelites crossing the desert wilderness. As they drew nearer in his field of vision, the undifferentiated mass slowly became clearer – until, at last, he could see in fine detail how it was that a people so sprawling had managed to stay together on their journey. He saw that, whenever they set up their camp, they pitched their tents tribe by tribe: with each of the twelve tribes arranged around the perimeter of the camp – and at its center, their sacred sanctuary, holding them all together. [12]

Seeing this, the prophet was so moved that he unwittingly broke into song – a song that eventually made its way into our prayer book, a song that we continue to sing unto this day – the song: mah tovu ohalecha Ya’akov, mishk’notecha Yisrael, “How lovely are your tents, O Jacob; how beautiful your camp, O Israelites.”

It is a song that you might hear in any synagogue around the world. It is the song of Jewish peoplehood: of twelve tribes that are all a part of one family.

__________

[1] Exodus 1:5-9: “The total number of persons that were of Jacob’s issue came to seventy. … The Israelites were fertile and prolific. … And [the new pharaoh] said to his people, ‘Look, the Israelite people [am b’nei Yisrael] are much too numerous for us.’”

[2] The census in the Book of Numbers (1:45-46) records 600,000 adult men. We might assume roughly the same number (or more) of adult women, and the same number (or more) of male and female children. Thus, we might assume at least 2.4 million people in total (600,000 x 4).

[3] Numbers 3:6-7: “Advance the tribe of Levi and place them in attendance upon Aaron the priest to serve him. They shall perform duties for him and for the whole community before the Tent of Meeting, doing the work of the Tabernacle.”

[4] Genesis 49:27: “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf. In the morning he consumes the foe, and in the evening he divides the spoil.”

[5] Genesis 49:13: “Zebulun shall dwell by the seashore. He shall be a haven for ships.”

[6] Genesis 49:14-15: “When [Issachar] saw how good was security, and how pleasant was the country, he bent his shoulder to the burden and became a toiling serf.

[7] See Kinship and Consent: Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses (1983), edited by Daniel Elazar. See also Yehuda Kurtzer’s award-winning article, “Our Fragile Tents: Community, Consent, and Care” in Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas (Fall/Winter 2025: Two Years Since 10/7).

[8] Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 9b

[9] See Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (2007)

[10] Leviticus 19:17-18

[11] Babylonian Talmud, Arakhin 16b

[12] See, specifically, Numbers 24:2: “As Balaam looked up and saw Israel encamped tribe by tribe, the spirit of God came upon him.” Shortly thereafter, in Numbers 24:5: “How fair are your tents, O Jacob – Your dwellings, O Israel!”

On Superheroes, Ragtime, Judaism, and America

Nations are like superheroes: they each have their own origin story.

Such is the argument of the American-Jewish theologian Rabbi Dr. Elliot Dorff. Just like Spiderman experiences the fateful radioactive spider bite, or Batman witnesses the murder of his parents, so too do nations tell stories about their founding: not just about how they were established, but equally, about how to understand their identity.

The Romans told the story of Romulus and Remus: twin brothers born to the god of war and raised by wild wolves. When a dispute arises between them, Romulus kills Remus – and on the site of the murder establishes the city of Rome. And indeed, throughout its history, the Roman Empire would be marked by the wolf-like spilling of blood.

By contrast, the Jewish people’s origin story, Rabbi Dorff argues, is about moving from degradation to dignity. After more than 400 years of being enslaved in Egypt, the Israelites are redeemed from bondage and brought to Mount Sinai. There, they receive the Ten Commandments, and are repeatedly taught: You shall be holy – for you were once slaves in the land of Egypt.

As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of our founding, an old debate has resurfaced about how best to understand our nation’s origin stories. There are those who would want to emphasize the vision and achievements of the founders: highlighting the nation’s founding ideals of liberty and equality – and, in some cases, obscuring the founders’ moral failures. Others insist that those failures are not peripheral but foundational, making it difficult – and, in some cases, impossible – to regard the nation's beginnings as a source of inspiration or hope.

But each of these approaches, taken to its ideological extreme, presents an overly simplistic version of the American story. They reduce the conversation to a binary choice: asking us to regard the nation's founding either as perfect or failed – either worthy of celebration or deserving of condemnation.

This is not a very Jewish approach.

We Jews don’t believe that human beings are either good or evil, either saintly or sinful. This, argues the late Rabbi Dr. Eugene Borowitz, might be the primary distinction between Judaism and Christianity. Classical Christian theology believes that human beings are born sinful, and can only be redeemed from sinfulness through faith in Christ.

Judaism, by contrast, believes that human beings are born neutral, a blank slate. In the daily morning prayers, we read: Elohai, n’shama she-natata bi t’horah hi, “O God, the soul that You have given me is pure.” And alongside our pure, neutral, blank-slate of a soul, we are also given two inclinations: the yetzer hara and yetzer tov – our aggressive inclination and good inclination. In any given moment, we are free to choose which of these inclinations to follow. That is to say: we are not fundamentally good or fundamentally bad. Rather, we are an amalgamation of both: complex creatures, who sometimes do good and sometimes do not.

What Judaism teaches about the individual, we might be wise to apply to society. The United States, of course, is not unblemishedly virtuous – but neither is it irredeemably corrupted. Our country’s history, rather, is complex: with times throughout the past 250 years when we have lived up to our founding aspirations of life and liberty, and other times when we have not.

The United States is both the Land of Opportunity – where my immigrant ancestors found economic success, where civil liberties are enshrined in law, where our founding document declares that all people are created equal – and also, is a nation that has committed grave injustices: enslavement, the dispossession of indigenous peoples, a deadly contemporary conflict over immigration and deportation, and much else. And, it has always been a nation of striving: where suffragists, the civil rights movement, advocates for LGBTQ equality, and many others have courageously helped our country more fully live up to our ideals.

Last month, the Broadway show Ragtime was honored with the Tony Award for the Best Revival of a Musical. And perhaps what has so deeply resonated with audiences and with critics is that the show refuses to tell a binary story about this country: that we are deserving either of celebration or condemnation. Rather, it tells a multifaceted story of America: a place where great ideals can be realized, and where there is still much work to do. As the musical’s opening song puts it, ours is a complex country: a nation of both “riches and rags, and rhythm and rhyme” – if only we can acknowledge it all.

For USA 250, I Took a Trip to Canada

To mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, I and a group of 40 other Reform rabbis took a trip to Canada.

The trip was born out of a simple but important idea – namely: that diaspora Jewish leaders should learn from one another’s experiences. Around the world, diaspora Jewish communities are living through a complex period of upheaval. Perhaps, as the trip’s organizers proposed, if a group of American rabbis were to spend a week immersed in the Canadian Jewish experience, we might return home with a deeper understanding of the American Jewish experience.

Indeed, the American Jewish experience is currently in a moment of tumult. The point is clearly illustrated by two prominent news stories that appeared in the Jewish press immediately before our trip.

The first news story was the vigorously debated “Re-Charging Reform Judaism” conference that took place two weeks ago on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The conference was organized by a group of Reform Jewish leaders who feel that the Reform Movement has become too universalistic and not enough particularistic – that is: that Reform Judaism has spent too much energy on issues that are not uniquely Jewish (say, for example, climate change or gun-violence prevention), and, correspondingly, has spent not enough energy on issues that are particular to the Jewish people (Israel, antisemitism, and a feeling of attachment to the Jewish people). The flashpoint of the conflict is a debate over whether Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion – the Reform Movement’s rabbinical and cantorial seminary – should ordain students who identify as antizionist. It is an issue around which the two-million Reform Jews in the United States share no general consensus – and one that is liable to develop into a future organizational schism.

The second news story that broke just before our group left for Canada had to do with New York City’s annual Celebrate Israel Parade – and, specifically, centered around two polarizing political figures: one who did not attend the parade, and one who did. The figure who did not attend is New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani – making him the first sitting mayor in the festival’s 60-year history not to participate, and illustrating a leftward shift in the politics of the city. The figure who did attend the parade is Israel’s Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich – the highly controversial leader of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, an illustration of the rightward shift in Israeli politics.

It was with these two headlines in mind – along with many other trends and dilemmas that are currently roiling the American Jewish community – that our group departed for Canada.

I had imagined that the trip would primarily be a study in similarities. Instead, it turned out to be a study of differences.

We soon discovered that Jewish life in Canada is culturally thicker than it is here in the US – that group identity is stronger, and that Jewish practice is more traditional. For example: among American Jews, only about 7% of non-Hasidic families enroll their kids in Jewish day schools. In Canada, the proportion is 20%. Similarly: among American Jews, 37% identify as Reform – making it the largest denominational affiliation. In Canada, only 16% identify as Reform – making it the smallest denomination, behind Conservative and Orthodox.

On questions of Jewish practice, Canadian Jewry is notably more traditional than here in the US. In the US, Reform rabbis are granted the autonomy to decide for themselves whether or not to officiate at weddings where only one of the partners is Jewish – and, according to a 2018 study, nearly 85% of Reform rabbis (including me) do indeed do so. Similarly, here in the US, the Reform movement has officially embraced the notion of “universal descent” (also known as “patrilineal descent”) – whereby a person is considered Jewish not only by virtue of their mother having been Jewish (the historically accepted position), but rather, so long as they have one Jewish parent (regardless of that parent’s gender) and they are actively living a Jewish life.

Canadian Jewish practice, by contrast, is far more restrictive on both of these issues. For example: according to the policies the Reform Rabbis of Greater Toronto (who, again, are the smallest denomination), a rabbi can maintain membership in the organization if they officiate at intermarriages or accept universal descent – but they are not permitted to serve on a Beit Din (a panel of three rabbis who preside over conversions to Judaism).

A quick glance at two websites further demonstrated the point. When you visit the homepage of the Reform Jewish Community of Canada, the top banner (at the time of our trip) reads: “We Stand with Israel.” When you visit the corresponding US website, ReformJudaism.org, the top banner reads: “Registration Now Open for our Biennial Conference 2026.”

There are many possible explanations for these differences between American Jewry and Canadian Jewry. Three, in particular, stand out.

The first is that while the US is strongly individualistic, Canada is more oriented towards group-identity. The US Constitution protects the private rights of its citizens: the individual’s right to personal property, or to freedom of expression. Because Canada, by contrast, was founded as a compromise between English and French settlers, woven into the Canadian Charter are specific protections not for individuals, but rather, for cultural groups. For example: the Anglo-community in Quebec is entitled by law to an independently operated English-language school-system – and the same applies to the French-community in the majority-Anglo provinces.

As a result, Canada is widely recognized as a model of true multiculturalism. Unlike the American model of “the melting pot” (a metaphor first articulated by the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill), in which various cultural groups gradually homogenize to a shared national norm, Canada epitomizes the model of “the mixed salad,” in which cultural groups are mixed and tossed together without losing their distinctive identity.

A second possible explanation for why Canadian Jewish life is relatively thicker than here in the US has not to do with the national multicultural ethos, but rather, with immigration timelines. The first large-scale wave of Jewish immigration to the US began in the 1840s, when the highly assimilationist German Jews began to arrive. Canada, by contrast, had no such wave. What’s more: at the turn of the 20th century, when Eastern-European Jewish immigrants began to arrive on these shores, they settled in the United States a full generation earlier than they did in Canada – starting in the 1880s, rather than the 1900s.

As many sociologists have argued, the cultural identity of immigrant groups tends to follow a generational pattern: the first generation (the immigrants themselves) are de facto cultural outsiders; the second generation (their children) work to shed their immigrant parents’ cultural awkwardness; the third generation can’t believe that their parents were so foolish as to discard their cultural legacy, and struggles to reclaim it; and the fourth generation is apathetic. If this is correct (even roughly speaking), then it is only natural that Canadian Jewry, which immigrated later than American Jewry, would have a thicker cultural identity.

A third possible explanation for the thickness of Canadian Jewish identity has not to do with immigration timelines, but rather, with immigration experiences – specifically: immigration after the Holocaust. After World War II, both the US and Canada took in a large number of Holocaust survivors. However, the pre-existing Jewish community in the US was significantly larger than in Canada. As a result, in today’s United States, Holocaust survivors and their descendants account for only 8% of the Jewish community. In Canada, that figure is 35% – and studies show that survivors and their descendants are more likely to have a deeply rooted sense of Jewish identity. 

***

This, so far, has been a study in differences: the ways in which Canadian Jewish identity is more traditionally constructed than here in the US, and three possible explanations for why that might be so. But the purpose of our trip was not merely to identify what is different about the Canadian Jewish experience – but rather, in so doing, to help us better understand the idiosyncrasies of the American Jewish experience: aspects of our lived reality that are often hiding in plain sight.

For starters, consider the differing roles that Israel-politics plays in each country. Because (unlike in Canada) the United States is a global superpower, and values having a democratic partner in the Middle East; and because (unlike in Canada) the United States has a powerful evangelical Christian voting bloc, with strong theological ties to Israel; our national conversation about Israel occupies a far more prominent and contentious position than it does in Canada. As a result, Jewish Americans more often feel themselves tumbling in the political whirlwind.

Perhaps even more significantly, consider two American narratives that are fundamental to our self-understanding. One narrative is aspirational; the other narrative is condemning.

The aspirational narrative is the American notion of the Promised Land. The United States has long thought of itself as a “shining city on a hill” – a beacon for humanity, a light unto the nations. Ours is a country that was founded on and strives after an ideal – even though we have not always lived up to it – that all people are created equal, and are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Canada, by contrast, strives for far less lofty aims. Its founding document promises not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – but rather, a more mundane and practical trio: “peace, order, and good government.”

Indeed, this aspirational national narrative has impacted American Jewry. European Jewish immigrants came to this country not for convenience, but rather, because they believed it was a land of opportunity – di goldene medine, as they would have called it in Yiddish: a country where the streets were paved with gold. But the American Dream didn’t offer only economic advancement. Equally, the US offered a system of government committed to civil liberties and democratic norms – a degree of acceptance and protection that was unique in all of Jewish history. So strong was the American narrative of Promised Land that many Jews here proclaimed that “the United States is our new Zion.” Canadian Jews, by contrast, are far less messianic about their home-country.

But there is also a second narrative that has shaped American life, and that has, in turn, shaped the American Jewish experience – this one not aspirational, but rather, condemning: the narrative of Original Sin. From the time before the country was even established, the United States committed grave injustices – towards the indigenous people who lived here, and through the institution of slavery and its long legacy. It is more than 250 years later, and the question of how to understand our nation’s Original Sin continues to be a matter of fierce ideological debate.

In that debate, American Jews have often found themselves maligned. In some circles, Jews are cast as the ultimate oppressors – the perpetrators or enablers of many of America’s sins. In other circles, Jews are accused of trying to overturn white cultural hegemony, under the supposed guise of atoning for America’s sins. In both instances, classic antisemitic tropes have seeped into the debate about our nation’s Original Sin – and American Jews are cast as villains.

In Canada, by contrast, these two narratives – the narrative of Promised Land, and the narrative of Original Sin – are not a core part of their national identity. It took visiting there to realize how significantly these narratives have shaped American Jewry.

***

Last year, a biography was published (and last week, a new documentary released) of one of the most culturally significant Canadian Jews: the famed co-creator and executive producer of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels.

In it, the biographer describes how Michaels’ Canadian identity has contributed to his comedic sensibility. Growing up in Canada allowed Michaels to absorb American media, politics, and culture – but do so at a distance: able to see with ironic detachment what is funny about our society.

In a different cultural medium, this is the role not only of the comedian, but equally, of the prophet: to stand at the margins and point out things that are askew about our world. It is a role that, for thousands of years, Jews have naturally fit.

What the prophet does for the world; what the comedian does for society – such can Canadian Jewry do for the American Jewish community.

As we navigate this complex period of upheaval in American Jewish life – and as we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of our country – we might learn from our neighbors to the north. Sometimes, you have to stand outside of a thing to understand it.

After West Bloomfield, Find Jewish Joy

Yet again, it has been a painful week for the Jewish community. The car ramming at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, yesterday afternoon was destabilizing. As a close friend texted me last night: “It hit too close to home.”

For our congregants who live in Hastings, the news from Michigan was made only more unsettling by the antisemitic stickers that were placed around town earlier in the week.

Quite honestly, I am exhausted by news like this. Over the past several years, there have been so many violent and even deadly antisemitic attacks – Sydney, Australia; Manchester, England; Boulder, Colorado; Washington, DC; Colleyville, TX; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and too many others to full recount – that it is hard to keep track of them all.

Recently, there has been much conversation in the organized Jewish community about how best to respond to antisemitism. One writer and thinker whom I especially admire (Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute) makes the following argument. (The full article is worth the time, if you have five minutes to read it.)

There are many possible approaches to confronting antisemitism – some of them more productive, some of them less so. The best approach, Kurtzer argues, is for the organized Jewish community to maintain strong relationships with elected officials and with law enforcement, and to work to support the healthy functioning of the institutions of democracy. Doing so reframes antisemitism not as “a problem for the Jewish people” but rather as “a problem of our society.” And indeed, I am grateful that Temple Beth Shalom has strong relationships with our elected officials, law enforcement, and other civil servants.

Another productive approach is to strengthen security measures within individual Jewish institutions. This, too, we have been doing at Temple Beth Shalom – as our several recent congregational emails about security have noted. Our Board has been proactive in implementing security personnel, facilities improvements, trainings for staff and leadership, and consultations with outside experts to help keep our congregation safe.

Unfortunately, Kurtzer notes, there are also less productive approaches to confronting antisemitism. Perhaps most harmful among them is the tendency, so prevalent in our society, to hunker down into our partisan bunkers. It is long-evident that antisemitism is a problem not only of the political left or the political right. Comparing the two, and trying to determine which one is worse, unhelpfully transforms the actual threats against the Jewish community into a game of partisan one-upmanship.

There is an additional approach that Kurtzer considers, an approach that likely won’t transform the antisemitic landscape around us, but nevertheless can transform the Jewish feeling within us – which is: in spite of those who would threaten us, to continue to cultivate Jewish joy.

This evening, after what has been a painful week for the Jewish community, we will gather here at Temple Beth Shalom as we do every Shabbat: to light candles, to sip wine, to eat good food, to sing, to tell stories, to be surrounded by family and community – in short: to experience Jewish joy. Tonight, in particular, will be especially joyful. This evening is our annual Klezmer Shabbat (services begin at 7:30pm) – featuring our congregant-driven Klezmer band, our adult choir, and a special guest appearance from our Third Grade Religious School class.

Ethnomusicologists have described Klezmer music’s distinctive tone as the sound of “joy through tears.” Most Klezmer music is written in a hybrid of a major and a minor key – the sound of celebration (major), despite the difficult circumstances of the world (minor).

This week in particular, Klezmer will give a lift to our souls – the opportunity to experience joy through tears, surrounded by our loving Jewish community.

I hope we might see each other this evening. And I hope we will soon know better days.

Don't Let the Light Go Out

We awoke this morning not only to the joy of a snowy Chanukah, but also, to the pain of two deadly shootings: the shooting at Brown University (an institution to which several of our congregants are connected) – and the shooting at the menorah lighting on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, where (as of this writing) eleven people were killed, including the Chabad rabbi, Rabbi Eli Schlanger.

It is particularly painful that this act of antisemitic violence occurred at a public Chanukah celebration. Chanukah, after all, is a holiday on which we celebrate our freedom to live proudly and publicly as Jews.

Like the Maccabees before us, we will not let those who’d wish to do us harm deter us from expressing our Jewishness.

Tomorrow evening (Mon 12/15 at 5pm), I’ll be attending the Public Menorah Lighting sponsored by Chabad of the Rivertowns in front of the VFW in Hastings. And this Shabbat (Fri 12/19 at 6:30pm), we’ll be celebrating Chanukah as a Temple Beth Shalom Community in our sanctuary. (Bring your menorah and candles.) It would be great to see one another there.

In their 1982 Chanukah song “Don’t Let the Light Go Out,” Peter, Paul, and Mary asked: 

What is the memory that's valued so highly 

That we keep it alive in that flame? 

What’s our commitment to those who have died 

When we cry out: “They’ve not died in vain”? 

 

This Chanukah, at least one answer to that question is clear. In honor of those who have died, our commitment is to continue to live proudly as Jews. 

Wishing your family a meaningful Chanukah.

After the Release of the Remaining Hostages

Many of us awoke this morning to see the joyful, emotional scenes from Israel – as the 20 remaining living Israeli hostages, who had been held in Gaza in Hamas captivity for 738 days, were at long last reunited with their families. In images and videos from all across Israel – and, indeed, from all around the Jewish world – the feeling of relief was palpable. Over these past two years of war, the fate of the hostages and the worry of their families has been a shared pain felt by the Jewish people. At last, it has come to an end.

Meanwhile, on Friday morning, the Israel Defense Forces withdrew from the urban centers of the Gaza Strip, and a cessation of combat took effect. A ten-fold surge of humanitarian aid – including 600 trucks from Israel, and 400 trucks from Egypt – have been entering the strip on a daily basis.

This moment – the return home of the hostages – is exactly what the overwhelming majority of Israelis have been hoping for. When I visited Israel last November as part of a Westchester interfaith delegation, there were posters and billboards all across the country reading not only “Bring Them Home Now” (a common political refrain here in the United States), but also, a more politically directive slogan: Nitzachon Hu HaShavat HaBanim, “‘Victory’ means the return of our children” – a statement from the Israeli public that between the two sometimes-conflicting strategic goals of the war (dismantling Hamas and freeing the hostages), the latter was top priority. Indeed, this past Saturday evening, Israelis gathered at Hostages Square in Tel Aviv – as they have been doing every Saturday evening for the past two years – to celebrate the government’s official approval of the hostage-release deal. More than half-a-million Israelis showed up.

It is true that the Twenty Point Plan is still in a fragile state. Although all parties have signed on to the agreement, the thorny, critical issue of post-war governance of Gaza – and, specifically, Hamas’s stated intention to play a role – remains unresolved. Nevertheless, a major hurdle has indeed been cleared: the means of the dispute have shifted – with the parties no longer using military force and hostages as the tools of negotiation, but rather, relying on political and diplomatic processes. That is to say: the means have shifted from the tactics of mutual destruction to the tactics of mutual possibility.

Beyond the Twenty Point Plan, there is tremendous work that will need to happen in the months and years ahead. Massive cracks have surfaced in Israeli society between two differing visions of the Jewish state; these will need mending. Gaza has been utterly destroyed, and its civilian population devastated; these will need rebuilding and rehabilitation. The souls of Israelis and Palestinians – and, to a different degree, of Jews around the world – have been deeply wounded; these will need healing. And most of all, if all these things and more can happen, then perhaps a sense of neighborly tolerance – if not trust – between Israelis and Palestinians can be built and nurtured.

These past two years of war have sometimes been reminiscent of another period in this conflict. In 1973, Israel was caught off-guard (like it was on October 7) when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on the morning of Yom Kippur. That war led to a political and psychological shift in both Israel and in Egypt – a recognition that perpetual war would not solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Just six years later, Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel signed a peace-treaty between the countries – Israel’s first with any of its neighbors. The peace treaty has lasted ever since.

Two years ago, the most recent and deadliest chapter of the conflict also began on the morning of a Jewish holiday. October 7, 2023 was the morning of Simchat Torah. Tomorrow – October 14, 2025 – it will again be Simchat Torah.

Simchat Torah is the time on the Jewish calendar in which we complete one cycle of reading our Torah story, and immediately rewind the scroll to retell the story from the beginning. It is a time of starting again. And although we will reread the same story that we have read every year for thousands of years, nevertheless, with each new retelling, we understand the story differently. We find new insights. We make new observations. We highlight different angles. In this way, it is not the same story repeated over and over again. Rather, it is an opportunity to understand our old story differently.

This Simchat Torah, we pray that what is true of our sacred story might also be true for our people’s lived experience. Let us hope – and let us do the work that is needed – that this might be the beginning of a new chapter.

Politics is the New Religion

A few weeks ago, shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a congregant came up to me at the end of a synagogue program with tears in his eyes. He wanted to share with me an experience he had recently had. His pre-teen son, he told me, had come home from school the other day saying that he and his friends had been talking about the shooting. A few of his friends said that their parents had said that Charlie Kirk deserved to be killed – and the son wanted to know if his father agreed.

The question, the dad told me, hit him like a punch in the gut. How is it possible, the dad wondered, that this is even a question? How is it possible that we can be so sophisticated in our ability to parse the news, and yet, so unable to grasp some of life’s most basic principles, like “Thou shalt not murder?” How is it possible that our country has come to this?

The sad truth is that our country has long suffered from the scourge of political violence. The assassination of Charlie Kirk is just the latest incident in a long trend – with dozens of assassination attempts, and with armed uprisings stretching backwards from January 6 all the way to Shay’s Rebellion of the 1780s, in which a group of armed protestors tried to overthrow the Massachusetts state government.

And yet, despite this long history, ours seems to be an era in which politically motivated violence is especially on the rise – with the average number of annual incidents having quadrupled over the past ten years.

It is clear that something in our politics has gone sour. But it is equally clear that the problem is more than merely political. Rather, there are many complex and interlocking factors that have contributed to the problem – many layers of societal tumult that have fed into our political malaise. And one of those layers of tumult – a layer in which we might be particularly interested this Yom Kippur morning – is the tumult we have been experiencing in American religion.

When we look at statistics, the trends become obvious. Studies from the Pew Research Center show that, over the past several decades, Americans’ participation in organized religion has been steadily on the decline. Meanwhile, other Pew studies show that, over the same period, Americans’ political engagement has been at a near-all-time high.

Looking at this data, many observers have theorized that, in the United States today, politics has gradually become our new religion.

We can see it not only in the data from Pew, but also, (if you will) in the data from the pews. In a previous era, when a person of Christian religious faith moved to a new town, they would choose which church to attend based on denominational affiliation: Lutherans would go to the Lutheran church; Baptists, to the Baptist church. Today, however, that is no longer the case. Today, most Christians choose their church based not on denominational affiliation, but rather, on political leaning: such that, regardless of whether a person grew up Lutheran or Baptist, a political liberal is more likely to join a liberal church – and a political conservative, to join a conservative one.

(As an aside: the same is roughly true in the Jewish community as well – though, in our case, the political dividing line is typically over Israel.)

This observation – that most Americans chose their house of worship based on politics – leads University of Pennsylvania political scientist Michele Margolis to a surprising conclusion. It may once have been the case that a person’s religious values came first, and that our political opinions were merely a downstream expression of those values. But today, Margolis argues, the exact opposite is true. For most Americans, it is our political commitments that are primary – and we then mold our religious values to fit around our politics.

This dynamic helps to explain how it is possible that a religious group might have internal political disagreements. Take, for example, the issue of climate change. There are some Christian groups who cite verses from the Bible as proof that humankind is responsible for the care of the earth. And meanwhile, there are other Christian groups who cite different verses from the very same Bible as proof that climate change is just another natural cycle in God’s creation. For each group, it is the political commitment that is primary, and we then mold our religious values accordingly.

In a society in which politics has become our new religion, we naturally end up looking in the political realm for the kinds of transcendent experiences that religion has historically provided. Lacking the sense of congregational fellowship that we once found in religion, we instead go looking for community among the people who vote like us. Lacking the sense of shared belief that we once found in religion, we instead subscribe to certain political ideologies – and, in some cases, even dogmas. Lacking the prescribed rituals that we once found in religion, we instead find ritual catharsis through conventions, rallies, and protests.

Considering this, we should not be surprised by the degree of religious fervor that has invaded our politics. When all the powerful effects of religion are displaced into the political arena, it becomes easier to understand how a person might come to believe in a conspiracy theory – or, worse, might decide to assassinate a political opponent.

To help address our country's political malaise, we would be wise to stop treating politics as if it were a religion.

To be clear: this is not to say that we should stop caring about politics – nor is it to say that we should no longer bring our religious traditions to bear on the political questions of our day. On the contrary: Judaism is a religion that insists that we take the world seriously. Ours is a tradition that has something to say not just about the spiritual questions – like what is a soul, or is it possible for a human being to truly change. Rather, our tradition has something to say – and, usually, a multiplicity of things to say – about every aspect of the human experience: about commerce as well as criminal justice, about medical- and military-ethics.

Instead, when I say that we would be wise to stop treating politics as if it were a religion, what I mean is: that we ought to try and satiate our natural human thirst for meaning not only in the realm of politics, but also, back in the realm of the religious, where it once belonged.

Doing so would come with several practical benefits. For starters, religion can help fulfill our human need for community. Unlike in a political group, where the feeling of fellowship is centered around the shared pursuit of a certain agenda, in a congregational community, the feeling of fellowship is an end unto itself: an extended family with whom to share the highs and lows of being human, with whom to mark the passages of the life-cycle and the changing of the seasons.

What’s more, being part of a congregational community pushes us to form and maintain relationships with people with whom we disagree. Instead of having us hunker down in our own ideological echo-chambers, a congregational community keeps an open seat at the same Torah Study table for people whose political views do not match our own. When we have grappled together over our sacred texts, or mourned together the death of a fellow congregant, it becomes a lot harder to demonize the person with whom you disagree politically.

In addition to providing us with community, religion can also help fulfill our human need for ritual. Ritual helps us to find transcendent meaning. That is: it is meant to help us feel connected to something that is bigger than just ourselves. For example: when we perform the ritual of lighting Shabbat candles, we experience not merely the act of a striking match and setting a wick aflame. Rather, when we strike the match, we might also remember the voice of our grandmother, whom we so often heard recite the blessings; we might feel ourselves connected to the millions of other Jewish households all around the world, who, at the very same moment as us, are also lighting their Shabbat candles; we might feel ourselves connected to long-gone eras in Jewish history, in which our ancestors kindled lights for Shabbat sometimes in secret; we might even feel ourselves connected to the Jewish creation myth, in which God’s first statement was “Let there be light,” linking our act of candle-lighting with the mythic birth of the universe.

Without this kind of religious ritual, we are left to look elsewhere to help us feel connected to something that is bigger than just ourselves. And when we try to fulfill that human need in the political arena, we might find ourselves participating in unsavory activities – whether that is storming the Capitol Building or burning down a police station.

These, so far, are some of the practical benefits of religion: that it can provide us with community, and that it can help us to feel a part of something greater. And it is indeed true, as our times demonstrate, that these practical benefits can also be achieved through politics.

But there is something more that religion has to offer – something deeper, which simply cannot be replicated through politics.

Religion, uniquely, is intended to orient us towards the numinous – towards the mysterious, the awe-inspiring. And in our Jewish tradition, the feeling of awe is nowhere better captured than in these, the Days of Awe – our High Holy Days. This sacred time – and especially today, Yom Kippur – is intended to orient us towards a spiritual perspective that politics can never replicate.

I can think of at least two ways in which this is so.

First: among the two High Holy Days, Yom Kippur is clearly the more important. The Torah calls it Shabbat Shabbaton: the Sabbath of all Sabbaths – the holiest of all holy days. We ought, then, to wonder: Why is it that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are both called High Holy Days, but Yom Kippur alone is considered the highest? Or, put differently: What is it about Yom Kippur that distinguishes it from Rosh Hashanah?

On both holidays, we sound the shofar. On both holidays, we sing Avinu Malkeinu. On both holidays, we chant the U-n’taneh tokef prayer. But it is only on Yom Kippur that we recite the Vidui. That is: it is only on Yom Kippur that we recite the penitential prayers – the prayers of confession, the prayers in which we acknowledge that we have made mistakes in the past year.

The thing that sets Yom Kippur apart – the thing that makes it the holiest of all holy days – is that on Yom Kippur, we humbly admit that we are not perfect. We stand before the open ark and we read these words of contrition from the prayer book – knowing, in the depths of our heart, that they ring true. We say: “We are not so arrogant and stiff-necked as to say before You, our God, that we are blameless and free of sin. Rather, we know we have stumbled and strayed. We have indeed done wrong.”

In the political realm, by contrast, to flip-flop – that is, to realize that one has made a mistake – is considered a liability. In the religious realm, however, admitting to our mistakes is praiseworthy.

Second: in ancient times, when the Temple still stood in Jerusalem, our ancestors did not observe Yom Kippur in the same way that we do today. They did not gather in their local synagogues. They did not chant from a prayer book or read passages from the Torah.

Rather, when Yom Kippur arrived, they went to the Temple in Jerusalem, where the priests would conduct a carefully prescribed ritual. The High Priest – the highest-ranking religious official in the land – would enter the Temple shrine. He would walk through the outer courtyard, pass through the inner courtyard, past the sacrificial altar, and carefully enter the central chamber of the Temple complex: the Holy of Holies – a place where only the High Priest was allowed to enter, and even for him, only on Yom Kippur. And there, inside the Holy of Holies, the High Priest would utter a word that was otherwise never allowed to be spoken. He would whisper the name of God. As the Talmud famously summarizes the ritual: on the holiest day, the holiest person would enter the holiest place and utter the holiest word – a perfect nexus of time, space, person, and language.

But it turns out that the name of God – this holiest word that only the High Priest was allowed to utter – is, in fact, no word at all. It is nothing more than a silent breath of air: the Hebrew letters Yod Hey Vav Hey – a combination of letters that produces no sound, a mere exhalation. On the holiest day, the holiest person would enter the holiest place and utter the holiest word: and the holiest word is to be speechless – to be attuned to wonder, mystery, and awe.

In these two ways – by asking us to acknowledge that we are imperfect, and by keeping us open to awe and to wonder – Yom Kippur orients us towards a spiritual perspective that politics can never replicate.

Perhaps this spiritual perspective is exactly what we need in order to help us heal our country’s political malaise. If we can stop treating politics as if it were our religion, then perhaps religion might be able to reclaim the actual, helpful role that it can play in a healthy democracy.

It is a role that, at its best, religion has long played in this country – a role that was already recognizable in the early decades of our nation, when the famous French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his seminal book Democracy in America.

What de Tocqueville recognized then, we would be wise to remember today – which is: that democracy works best when it is grounded in some sense of the transcendent. As de Tocqueville wrote long ago: Tyranny “may be able to govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”

Our Strange New World

When future generations look back and study our era of Jewish history, they will almost certainly recognize that it was an unsettling time to be Jewish.

I know that I have been feeling that way. And I am confident that there are many others in the congregation who have been feeling that way too. For me, there have been many times over the past handful of years in which I could not bear to look at the news, for fear that what I would read there would feel overwhelming.

Consider this dizzying – and yet, only partial – list of events, all of which have happened just in the past eight years. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, in which protestors marched through the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us.” The shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The election in Israel of the most religious and most rightwing government in the country’s history. The proposed Israeli judicial overhaul, and the popular protests against it. The massacre and hostage-taking of October 7. The murder of hostages like Hersh Goldberg, or Shiri Bibas and her children. The utter destruction of Gaza – with 70% of all buildings destroyed, and more than 60,000 people killed. A 30% increase in extremist Jewish violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. The removal by the Trump administration of billions of dollars in federal funding for universities, ostensibly withheld under the guise of fighting antisemitism. The arson at the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro; the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers; the fatal flamethrower attack at a rally for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado. Mass starvation in Gaza. A war between Israel and Iran, in which the United States also got involved. And many, many other such troubling headlines.

This torrent of unsettling events has left me with a pit in my stomach: a sinking feeling that the relatively comfortable Jewish world in which most of us grew up is gone – and that we now have entered a strange new era of Jewish history.

I know that I am not alone in this feeling. Over the past few years, many of the most prominent Jewish social commentators have been writing about the end of an era in Jewish history. For example: perhaps you saw one of the most widely shared magazine articles of 2024 – a piece in The Atlantic entitled “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending.” Or: perhaps you listened to an episode of The Ezra Klein Show this summer that began with the line: “The consensus that held American Jewry together for generations is breaking down.”

For me, among all the public intellectuals who have been writing about the end of an era in Jewish history, one of the thinkers that I have found most helpful is Yossi Klein Halevi. He argues that this past era can be characterized as a time in which, on the whole, the Jewish people felt an increasing sense of optimism. In the United States, American Jews were able to climb the economic ladder, and grew to feel more accepted here as a welcome minority group. In Israel, a sovereign Jewish state guaranteed not only physical safety and political self-determination, but also, Jewish cultural flourishing. It was an era, in Halevi’s formulation, in which the Jewish people moved from formerly having no home, to suddenly having two homes.

However, over the past decade, that era of increasing optimism has gradually come to an end. In the United States, in the time since the Charlottesville rally, antisemitism has only become more wide-spread, more high-profile, and more deadly. In Israel, October 7 tore a deep wound in the Jewish psyche – undermining not only the feeling of security, but perhaps even moreso, undermining the feeling of hope. Halevi argues: if the previous era represented the move from no home to two homes, then our strange new era represents the move from stability to precariousness.

When the Jewish people find ourselves in precarious times, one of the primary ways in which we make sense of our situation is by looking to the past for guidance. Ours is a tradition that venerates precedent – that believes deeply in the wisdom of our ancestors.

The novelist Dara Horn describes it well. She points out that in many great stories, there is often the literary motif of the portal – a magical door through which a character passes that whisks them away to a foreign land. In Alice in Wonderland, a young girl falls through a rabbit hole and into a fantastical world. In The Wizard of Oz, a tornado carries Dorothy away to Munchkinland.

For the Jewish people, our magic portal, Dara Horn notes, is our literature. And the foreign land to which it carries us away is the eras of our Jewish past. When we pull a volume off the Jewish bookshelf, we are transported back in time to the period of the Babylonian Exile, or to the destruction of the Second Temple, or to the Golden Age of Jewish Spain. And there in the Jewish past, we rummage around for historical experiences that might help us make sense of our own day.

Given this, we might wonder: now that we have entered this strange new era of Jewish history, where – or, rather, when – in our people’s past might we look to help us make sense of our day? In this unsettling time to be Jewish, we might ask: what would our ancestors tell us to do?

I spent much of the summer puzzling over exactly this question. I pulled off the shelf many of my favorite books on Jewish history – in hopes that a magic portal to our past might open, and provide us with some wisdom. I read about the Babylonian Exile, and the destruction of the Second Temple, and the Spanish Golden Age. I took pages and pages of notes.

But after two months of searching, I came up dry. Nothing from those historical eras quite matched the circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

And then at last, in late August, I came across an article by the historian Yehuda Kurtzer that finally helped – although I should add: it helped, but not in the way I had expected. In his article, Kurtzer writes: “One of the reasons our particular moment in Jewish history feels so hard – especially for those of us who think about our place in Jewish history a lot – is that our moment in Jewish history is entirely unprecedented.”

Perhaps this helps to explain why it feels like such an unsettling time to be Jewish. Perhaps this helps to explain the sinking feeling in my stomach. It is not only because we are living through a time of great upheaval. Rather, it is also because we are a people who looks to the past to help us make sense of the present – and our present is completely unprecedented.

I can think of at least three key ways in which this is true.

First: there have indeed been previous eras of Jewish history in which a diaspora community, like ours, has witnessed the slow and steady erosion of their host society’s commitment to civil liberties. And yet, never before in Jewish history has that erosion taken place, at least in part, under the guise of fighting antisemitism. A legitimate concern for the Jewish people – the rise in antisemitism – has been hijacked and turned into a political battering ram, used in service of a broader political agenda aimed against elite institutions like universities and other voices that this administration opposes. This development puts the Jewish people in an uncomfortable position: concerned, on the one hand, about threats to our safety – while also concerned, on the other hand, about some of the ways in which those threats have been responded to.

Second: there have indeed been many previous eras of Jewish history in which a diaspora community has experienced a rise in antisemitic violence. And yet, never before in Jewish history has that rise in antisemitism taken place, in part, as a repudiation of a Jewish state in which we do not live. I know many proud Jews, including myself, who sometimes choose (with great pain, I might add) to hide their Jewishness in public – for fear that the sight of a Star of David necklace might provoke uninvited questions or even criticism.

Third: there have indeed been previous eras of Jewish history in which our people endured the kind of hideous violence that Israelis experienced on October 7. And yet, never before in Jewish history has that kind of violence been committed against a sovereign Jewish state – such that our reaction was not only to gather together and collectively grieve, but rather, also to muster our significant military capacity and respond with force. Over the past almost-two-years, Israel’s just cause for war against Hamas has slowly deteriorated into a military and humanitarian catastrophe. As many Israeli citizens and even the IDF chief of staff have been saying: we have long since passed the point where further military action could make any meaningful progress towards the original strategic goals of dismantling Hamas and bringing home the hostages. And meanwhile, the continued war effort has led to the utter devastation of the Gaza Strip and its civilian population.

In all of Jewish history, these three developments are entirely unprecedented. (Again, they are: first, the erosion of civil liberties under the guise of fighting antisemitism; second, violence against Jews in reaction to a state in which they do not live; and third, Israel’s ability to respond to horrific terror with significant force.)

Considering all of this, it is no wonder that these feel like unsettling times, or that we sometimes cannot bear to look at the news. We face a set of circumstances that no generation of Jews before us has ever faced. And the feeling, at least for me, is overwhelming.

It would be entirely understandable to sometimes feel overwhelmed. But even in our unsettling times, there is, in fact, a sliver of Jewish wisdom that might help us to keep our heads above water.

It may be true that our circumstances are entirely unprecedented. But it is also true that the Jewish people has faced unprecedented circumstances before. If we look through the portal, we will see that while the particulars may be different, the experience of living in a strange new era is something we have been through in the past.

When the leaders of the Jewish people were exiled to far-away Babylon in 586 BCE, leaving behind the only homeland they had ever known, their world must have felt new and strange. And yet, they did not give up hope. Rather, they discovered that God does not live in just one place: that God is everpresent, accessible not only in Jerusalem, but also, in far-away Babylon – with us, not only in our triumphs, but also, in our tragedies.

When the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, making it impossible for our ancestors to practice the religion of priestly ritual and animal sacrifice that they had known for a thousand years, their world must have felt new and strange. And yet, like their ancestors before them, they did not give up hope. Rather, they discovered that religion can be practiced not only through sacrifices, but also, through study and prayer – that religious leadership can be conferred not only by virtue of being born into the priestly class, but also, by virtue of piety and learning.

When our ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492, and scattered to every corner of the Mediterranean, their world must have felt new and strange. And yet, they too did not give up hope. Rather, they evolved the Jewish mystical tradition – founded upon the belief that, just as their Golden Age in Spain had been shattered, so too, they imagined, was God shattered: that every part of the universe was a broken-off piece of the Divine, and that the Jewish people’s task was to recognize the holiness of every single piece, and work to reconnect the broken parts.

In each of these historical eras, our people faced unprecedented circumstances. And while never before had they been through anything like it – although there was no previous chapter in Jewish history to which they could turn – there was, and still is, one enduring principle of Jewish history to which they could hold fast. Which is: history might not always tell us how to navigate our strange new world; rather, it reassures us that we can.

It may be true that an era of Jewish history – the era of increasing Jewish optimism – has come to an end. But the end of an era does not mean the end of our people. And the loss of optimism does not have to mean the loss of all hope. Rather, we must now strive to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors: not to avoid the news, not to let ourselves feel overwhelmed by the unprecedented circumstances of our strange new world – but instead, to approach these challenges head-on, with clarity of vision, and with resolve that we can face them.

This, after all, is exactly the message of Rosh Hashanah: the year ahead may seem new and strange, but we also have power to shape it.

To Understand and Discern – להבין ולהשכיל

In his article “The Problem of the Form of a Jewish Theology,” our teacher Rabbi Dr. Borowitz likened doing Jewish theology to arranging items on a flowchart. He argued: When you examine what Heschel, or Kaplan, or Buber has to say about God, we find that they are all quite similar. The interesting differences between them become apparent only when we zoom out, and look to see where God fits among the other elements on each thinker’s flowchart. 

For example: Heschel arranges the elements thus: God → Torah → Jewish people. That is, God reveals the Torah to the Jewish people. Another thinker (Leo Baeck) arranges things differently: God → Jewish people → Torah. That is, God’s universal ethics are filtered through the particular lens of the Jewish people in order to produce the Torah. [1]

I’d like to make the case here for a flowchart that is informed by Kaplan: Jewish people → Torah → God. That is, the Jewish people has recorded our best (and sometimes our prickliest) ideas in our Torah tradition, which allows us to reach towards the divine.

Despite the natural human tendency to assign the greatest importance to beginnings and to endings, I do not by this arrangement intend to emphasize the Jewish people (our starting point) or God (our end point). Rather, for me, the most important element in the flowchart is the middle one: our Torah tradition. Our Torah tradition plays the critical, linking role. It is the bridge that the Jewish people continues to build in our ongoing quest for the divine.

To be clear, when I use the phrase “our Torah tradition,” I do not narrowly mean the Five Books of Moses, nor do I mean the broader corpus of the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic Literature. Rather, I mean all kinds of Jewish critical thinking and creative expression: our people’s stories, songs, poems, essays, ethical dilemmas, political theories, mystical visions, scientific discoveries, and so much else – Isaiah as well as Einstein, Deborah as well as Dara Horn.

As a rabbi, I find that some of my best work is in doing talmud Torah – that is, in grappling along with our congregants with the best of Jewish ideas. I have found that 21st century American Jews sincerely want to explore the interesting Jewish ideas that they never encountered in their adolescence – and, moreover, that they want a Jewish framework for thinking about the most pressing questions of our times, not to mention the questions that are timeless.

Exploring Jewish ideas is a hallmark of Jewish life. Indeed, we believe it to be a commandment – that is, a sacred responsibility: v’dibarta bam b’shivt’cha b’veitecha, the Book of Deuteronomy instructs us. We believe that it makes our lives holy – that is, that it adds meaning to our existence: asher kidshanu, we say, before we engage in the act of learning. Although to the outsider, study may seem unproductive or pointless, we believe that it is as important as any of our ethical commitments: talmud Torah k’neged kulam, the Mishnah says.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin [2] makes the case that one of the most salient differences between early Rabbinic Judaism and proto-Christianity was the Jewish emphasis on study and learning. The great Jewish sage of that era, Hillel, is famous for his maxims about study – such as: “Do not say, ‘When I have time, I will study,’ lest you never have time,” and “The rest is commentary. Now go and study.” Noticeably, he had very little to say about prayer. By contrast, Hillel’s younger contemporary, Jesus, had the opposite orientation – saying little about learning, and much about prayer: “Ask, and it will be given to you,” and “When you pray, go into your room and close the door. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

For Hillel, study fulfills the same sort of spiritual function that prayer fulfills for Jesus. It is not merely an enriching intellectual exercise. Rather, it is a way to encounter the divine.

Israel Prize recipient Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein [3] makes a similar point. Writing about the meaning of Torah lishmah [“study for its own sake”], he explains: “In part, talmud Torah is oriented towards accomplishment – with the acquisition of knowledge and skills being obvious goals. However the process is no less important than its resolution. Even if, after one’s studies, one has retained nothing, the experience itself – live contact with the epiphanous divine will, as manifested through Torah – can that be less than invaluable?”

Following our flowchart (in which the Jewish people comes first), we would reframe Rabbi Lichtenstein’s formulation. It is not: God → Torah → Jewish people. That is, it is not that the divine will is manifested through Torah to the Jewish people, as Rabbi Lichtenstein expresses it.

Rather, it is the other way around: Jewish people → Torah → God. That is, the Jewish people has created a record (our Torah tradition, we call it) of our quest for the divine – a record of our seeking after the ideals that we associate with God: truth, beauty, meaning, comfort, mystery, wonder, complexity…

And when we contemporary Jews engage with that record, we, too, might gain a glimpse of the divine. [4]

_____

[1] Not every example is linear in its organization. Additionally, some examples use categories other than God, Torah, and Israel.

[2] In his book Hillel: If Not Now, When? (2010), “Chapter 12: The Jewish Sage and the Christian Messiah”

[3] In Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (1972), edited by Arthur Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr. See the entry on “Study.”

[4] Given more space, I would arrange the flowchart thus: Jews of the past / present → God → Torah; Jews of the present → Torah → God. || That is, the Jewish people of the past and the present have had encounters with God, and recorded those encounters in our Torah tradition. And Jewish people of the present can engage with our Torah tradition, and therein encounter God.