Rosh HaShanah II, 5785

Delivered October 4^th, 2024 at Congregation Beth El of the Sudbury River Valley 

This past summer I spent two weeks in Greece with my family and another family. It was a marvelous vacation. We spent two days in Athens, a week touring the Northern Cyclades islands by sailboat, and another few days in the mountains. I did not check my email. My body relaxed as it hadn’t since ordination.  

And. Fear traveled with me, on this trip. I mentioned that we spent a week on a boat? The Talmud, as you may know, tells parents to teach their children to swim.¹ My kids, aged 10 and almost 8, do know how to swim. They don’t yet know how to no-lifejacket-in-the-Mediterranean swim. And on board we had only adult-sized lifejackets. When we anchored in a bay off of Kea for the first night, and our friends plunged into the sparkling, salty water with happy cries, I anxiously tugged the long black straps of the lifejackets around my impatient children, twining the straps around their backs and through their legs, trying to make it work. The boys popped into the water… and their lifejackets promptly popped up and darned near off. We swam for ten minutes or so with my heart in my mouth, and then I hustled the boys back onto the boat and rubbed them down with towels and fed them dinner, fretting all the while over the sea.  

That night in bed, for an hour I had visions of my youngest drowning, his sweet small body sinking as the hungry sea closed over his head. I woke up the next morning badly rested and jittery and thought, I cannot ruin my kids’ vacation and my own. I can’t tell them that they can’t do what they see their friends doing all week. My fear is not groundless. The ocean is deep; they are not capable of dealing with it alone. And, I can’t tie up my children up in the knots of my own fear. I have to figure out how to live with it, and to let them live with it too.  

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Fear – particularly trauma-based fear – is a tricky beast. Trauma sends our panicking hindbrains into hyperdrive. In Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone writes that when something terrible happens that overwhelms our coping mechanisms, the part of our brain that usually absorbs, analyzes, and processes experiences takes a backseat. “Instead,” she writes, “the emotional brain (the limbic area and brain stem) takes over, and it is hardwired for speed and survival… Our ability to see, integrate, and store the incoming information is markedly reduced. So is our capacity to witness ourselves.”² This tidal wave flowing from our emotional brain centers washes away nuance and turns the world black and white. Rabbi Firestone calls it “limbic lava.”³  

Fear narrows our options.  

In our Rosh HaShanah Torah readings, three different parents act in fear. Sarah speaks of her fear for Yitzchak’s future inheritance. She tells Avraham to banish Yishma’el and Hagar, his son and his son’s mother, into danger, severing them forever from the family. Hagar miserably sits far away so that Yishma’el’s thirsty death cries might not reach her. Just a little while ago, we listened to Avraham bringing Yitzchak up Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him, at God’s dread command.  

Rabbi Firestone writes about the importance of cultivating an “inner witness…the neutral observer who tracks our experiences with kind, alert attention. It is neither judge nor critic, nor even the problem-solver inside of us, but rather, the calm, self-aware part of ourselves that is wakeful, curious, and on our team.”⁴ Witness lives inside our statement of faith, Sh’ma Yisra’eil, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. If you look in a Torah scroll, the ayin at the end of “Sh’ma” and the dalet at the end of “Echad” are written large, to form the word “עד,” (eid) or “witness.” We witness the Divine in the world; and God witnesses us.  

In our Rosh HaShanah stories, neither Avraham nor Hagar can hear past their terror for their children. A divine witness steps in, who calls them by name, allows them to better process and analyze where they are and what is happening. When the voice of the angel cries out to Avraham, his frenzy of pious fear dissipates and he reorients himself as he answers, “Hineini!” Here I am. Here I am preparing to kill my son, and it is not right. Avraham, once witnessed, is able to hear the angel’s offer of the ram in the thicket, and he makes a different choice. When the voice of the angel calls out to Hagar, her eyes are opened, and she is able to see a lifesaving well of water, that may have been there the whole time.  

Sarah’s story is different. Avraham is distressed by her command to expel Hagar and Yishma’eil. In most translations, God clamps down, saying “Do as Sarah tells you!” But the Hebrew actually doesn’t say that. It says, כֹּל אֲשֶׁר תֹּאמַר אֵלֶיךָ שָׂרָה שְׁמַע בְּקֹלָהּ , “kol asher tomar eilecha Sarah, sh’ma b’kolah.”⁵ All that Sarah says to you, listen to her voice. Listen to what’s going on with her. Witness it. Reflect it back, be that voice on her team. But Avraham doesn’t do this. Whether he misunderstands God or just doesn’t have the capacity, he doesn’t say a word. Nobody witnesses Sarah’s fear, or the pain of her vulnerability that, perhaps, fuels it. Her unexamined fear commands her and Avraham. Their whole family – we could say,our whole people – loses because of it. 

We feel grief when our fears are realized as loss – and then we feel fear again, lest fresh grief rock our world. I lost my nephew Eric three years ago to an accidental drug overdose. I know in my bones how badly I could panic, if a child of mine abuses drugs, because of the pain of this tragedy. I might interrogate my kid, ground them, yell at them, stop trusting them. Fear could take over my parenting. 

As a Jewish community, each and all of us have felt the grief of terrible loss increase exponentially since October 7th. We’ve felt it in different ways – beloved people killed and taken captive, treasured relationships in tatters, deep values betrayed or in conflict, loss of our own sense of safety even here in America, as antisemitism and Islamophobia too have skyrocketed.  Fear of fresh losses courses within us. The kol d’mama dakah, the “still small voice” of our inner witness is very hard to hear. 

Vered Weiss, Irit Ronen, and Avner Dinur, three scholars from Sapir College in the Negev in the “Gaza envelope” of the border, live where missile fire is constant. In a collection of essays published this year, they use the phrase “emergency routine” to talk about the way they see the experience of emergency normalized in Israel, suspending peacetime laws and behavioural codes.⁶ Weiss, Ronen and Dinur date the beginning of this “emergency routine” not to October 7^th, but to 1948: the establishment of the State of Israel, which Palestinians call the Nakba – the catastrophe of expulsion. Today, of course, the frighteningly escalating hostilities with Lebanon and Iran are part of the ongoing Israeli emergency. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank also live in “emergency routine.” Poet and researcher Yusuf al-Kidra writes recently from Gaza that “We are here in an intense collision with a ‘final moment’ at any time, and in all places, without exception.”⁷  

When every day, every hour, can and does bring attack, “limbic lava” flows, traumatic losses multiply, inner witnesses detach, and what was unthinkable becomes an option. The government of a Jewish state hems another people into two corners of land behind endless checkpoints and barriers. Young people strap on vests full of explosives. Hospitals and schools are bombed.  Crowds cheer on atrocities. Former IDF soldier and scholar Omer Bartov retold his conversation earlier this year with recently returned IDF soldiers: “After what they did to us, we have no choice but to root them out. After what we did to them, we can only imagine what they would do to us if we don’t destroy them. We simply have no choice.”⁸  

I see stakes rise and choices narrow here in America, too, as we also experience – at a crucial physical remove – this fog of war. Jews are painted as dangerous monoliths, used as political footballs and scapegoats. Antisemitic and Islamophobic vandalism, physical attacks and threats have increased. We too see, and sometimes do, what was unthinkable. Friendships have unraveled. Family tables have gone silent. Universities have erupted. Students have been doxxed by adults, their identifying information published without their consent to make them targets.  

We can still choose to live by our hopes rather than by our fears. Israel and Hamas successfully held brief ceasefires to allow foreign aid workers to administer the first dose of a polio vaccine last month in Gaza. During these smallest of breathing spaces, the armed powers in the Holy Land chose to work together to preserve life. Those ceasefires are over, and doubtless, freshly vaccinated children are among the newest dead in Gaza. We don’t know if the remaining child hostages are still alive and if so, whether they received vaccines.  

Fear is not the only common experience of Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims, there and here. We also share the experience of seismic loss and the grief that follows.  Grief can isolate, but we can choose to let it connect us. We can ask our grief to teach us how to love each other better. We can ask it to help us choose life: to value each moment we have with our loved ones, and to work for a shared future in which we all lose less and thrive more.   

Some Israelis and Palestinians are doing just this, together, in the Parent’s Circle- Families Forum, in writing, in difficult dialogue and fierce advocacy. And former hostages and their families continue to speak about how their grief drives them to choose life. They urge governments to do the same. 

Liat Atzili is an Israeli high school teacher in Kiryat Gat and an educator at Yad Vashem. She was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th and released two months later, to learn that her husband, Avi, had been killed in the attack. Liat wrote in February: “I am humbled by how my fellow Israelis put their lives at risk to fight my kidnappers, but I do not feel any catharsis in seeing the destruction of Gaza. Instead, I want to focus on building a better future for my three children — and for the children of Gaza…For me tekumah [rebirth] is not only about Jewish lives, it’s also about all those lives that shattered on Oct. 7 and after — including those of my non-Jewish neighbors, Israeli citizens, who have been caught up in the battles ever since. It also means working toward a rebirth for Gaza.”⁹ 

How do we choose life, when we are in the grip of great and appropriate fear? How do we choose rebirth when we are submerged in catastrophic grief? 

There is no blueprint. Nothing about this choice – particularly in this moment, as we continue to read the news headlines – is easy. Our tradition offers three possibilities that I’ll share with you today. 

Each one of us can turn intentionally to our inner witness. Noticing our daily fears, how the “limbic lava” rises up, and what possibilities are submerged beneath it. Asking ourselves, gently, “ayeka?” “Where are you?” Where am I? What am I doing? Is it what I want to do, what lets me live my values? If not, what’s binding me to it? Might there be another choice I can make?  

When we see a loved one struggling in their own fear and the weight of grief, we can also be that voice on their team, who witnesses them and asks without judgment, “ayeka?” “where are you right now? Is this what you want to be doing?” We can invite them to reground in themselves. David Krieger drew our attention in Torah study this past Shabbat to the presence of communal witness in one of the Hebrew words for “community,” עדה eidah. We come together as a witness. We witness one another.  

And when the fear freight train is gathering steam, consider the Torah of Sefer Y’tzirah,¹⁰ אם רץ לבך, שוב לאחד. If your heart is racing, return to the One. In moments of fear, particularly during travel, I find myself saying the Sh’ma over and over again. Sh’ma Yisra’eil, Hashem Eloheinu, Hashem Echad. I connect to the oneness of the universe, myself as what Rabbi Jay Michaelson calls “a ripple on the ocean of the Divine.”¹¹ This oneness grounds me. It reassures me to see myself and my fears within a larger perspective: we are a ripple on the ocean of existence. 

אם רץ לבך, שוב לאחד If your heart is racing, return to the One. 

The One That grounds you might not be God; it might be your connections to your family, community, the people Israel, global humanity. It might be the natural world, or the laws of physics.  When we ask ourselves to be witnesses to a reality larger than ourselves, that reality witnesses us. And as our heartbeats slow, our breath steadies, and our eyes open, we can look for paths other than those of fear.  

There is one more tool that we have. We can bring to light the pain and grief that underlie our fear. Leadership coach Yotam Schachter teaches that fear protects us from feeling pain to which we should be paying attention. “When you honor the pain that fear is protecting you from, it metabolizes into wise caution, grief, and relief.” 

• Wise Caution: What reasonable steps can I take to ensure adequate safety? 

• Grief: What do I need to let go of? 

• Relief: What becomes possible now?¹² 

When we find that we have bound our children and ourselves on the altar of our fears…we can say “Hineini.” We can remember who and where we are. We can honour our pain without being bound by it. We always have choice. We read last Shabbat from the Torah, and we’ll read it again on Yom Kippur morning: “I call heaven and earth to witness with you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, so that you and yours live.”¹³  

That morning this summer on the boat, in a little sheltered bay on Kea, I breathed deeply. Mike and I spent more time experimenting with the lifejacket straps, how to bind the jackets to our boys’ bodies more securely, while still letting them move. We worked out a buddy system where one of us would swim with each child. For the rest of the week, we all lived in and on that water, hair stiff with salt, exploring each new cove and beach with our friends. We lived each moment as fully as we could. My fear did not disappear – and, I learned to swim with it.  

L’shanah tovah umtukah. May we be sealed for a good and sweet new year. 

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Endnotes 

1. Kiddushin 29a 

2. Firestone, Tirzah Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma Monkfish Book Publishing Company: New York, 2019, 2022 p. 54 

3. Firestone, p.133 

4. Firestone, p. 57 

5. B’reishit 21:12. I am indebted to Lizza Sandoe, who in her own exquisite drash given half an hour before mine, shared the last six lines of Jessica Jacobs’ poem “Why there is no Hebrew word for ‘obey,’” which directly informed my re-interpretation of this passage. The poem is published online in Southern Humanities Review, vol. 56 no.3.

“What if we turn  
from certainty and arm ourselves  
 
instead with questions? 
Obey, obey, obey is everywhere  
 
in translation. The real word is 
shema: listen.” 

6. Weiss, Vered, Irit Ronen and Avner Dinur Israeli Culture and Emergency Routine: Normalizing Stress Lexington Books: London, 2024 

7. Al-Kidrah, Yusuf, as quoted in Kadry, Suha Taweel “The Heartbreaking Final Testimonies of Gazan Writers and Poets,” publ. in Haaretz on Sept. 24^th 2024 

8. Bartov, Omer “As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel” published in The Guardian, Tuesday August 13th 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov?CMP=share_btn_url&fbclid=IwY2xjawE1kMtleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHZUUcJqztgRXovLYmaUAPUXpIkMQoMmTtYqG0-YMUi4NPaqMlg9ft4oOFg_aem_J5sKYlEfINJ5ZtRS3nhgGA 

9. Atzili, Liat, “Choosing Rebirth over Revenge after my Release from Gaza,” published in the New York Times on Feb. 1st 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/01/opinion/gaza-war-holocaust-shoah.html  

10. Sefer Y’tzirah, Chapter 1, Mishnah 4:8 

11. Michaelson, Jay Everything is God, Trumpeter Books: Colorado, 2009 p. 43 

12. D’varim 30:19, my translation 

13. Teaching slides by Yotam Schachter, quoted with permission