Clergy Sermons

When I was 18 years old, I got to spend a gap year in Jerusalem, studying at an Orthodox women’s yeshiva. It was 1990, the year Sadam Hussein invaded Kuwait. 

 

In January, the United States led a coalition of 42 countries invading Iraq. It was a devastating war for everyone on the ground. 

 

In the midst of that violence, Saddam began lobbing missiles at Israel. Israel had nothing to do with the conflict, was not part of the 42 country coalition. But many Arab and other Muslim-majority countries were, and Saddam figured that if he could draw Israel into the conflict, he might push his Muslim brothers to withdraw from it.

 

Fortunately, Israel did not take the bait. I don’t know what would have happened if Saddam’s missiles had been more effective, or if the Patriot defense missiles less so. I do know that people were scared. We believed the reports of weapons of mass destruction. Our dorm emptied out - most of the girls went back to the US – and the once-crowded building felt spacious and lonely.

 

Each of us who remained was issued a big, black, rubbery gas mask. My bedroom was on a high floor, so it was designated as a sealed room - which just meant that we covered the windows with thick plastic wrap. When the war sirens went off, we all crowded in. We would sit there trapped and scared, listening for a boom.

 

The shrill, piercing sound of those war sirens is embedded in my bones, forever. Even when it’s obviously just a recording, that sound always provokes a twist of dread inside me. 

 

And I never saw real violence. We just huddled in our sealed room, afraid but untouched. What does that sound do to people who have survived the full violence of war?

 

This has been a year of war sirens. In Israel, actual war sirens. Constantly. All the time. In a nation in which every person was already carrying the psychological wounds of past wars. It has been a year of funerals, and military drafts, and racing to the shelters with the haunting cry of that siren spurring them on. 

 

For us here in America, the experience has been more subtle. But a subtly that warps the mind and heart in its own way. There are no actual sirens and minimal physical violence. I would feel wrong even making the comparison – if it were not that numerous Israelis, living in Israel, have told me that THEY are worried for OUR welfare. 

 

It’s been a year in which I have felt rage, and terror, and helplessness, and shame, and despair. And I have seen all of those feelings in your faces.

 

We have not endured sirens. We have endured slogans  – hateful tweets and billboards and banners and two-minute public comments and thoughtless comments and shouted insults in public spaces. 

 

Does it sound too metaphorical to compare slogans to war sirens? But I think the impact on our brains may be similar. 

 

Slogans force our complicated, multi-faceted minds down to a single channel. When you try to compress all of our complexity into a slogan, force each of us to fit into a narrow camp - the pressure of the constraint leaves us ready to burst. 

 

Are you with us, or are you against us? Even when the question isn’t asked explicitly, we are being driven by the zeitgeist of this time to feel that false binary.  Pro-Israel or Pro-Palestine? Democratic or Republican? Trump or Kamala? It’s not just happening in Israel and America, though. It’s happening around the world. People are being polarized by wars of slogans.

 

Which side are you on? It’s a fine question for baseball or soccer, but it’s no way to run a world. I came up against that question explicitly last winter. The Redwood City Council was considering a ceasefire resolution, and so many people turned out to speak that they had to provide overflow seating in the atrium. As I sat there waiting for a seat to open in the main hall, a young man came over to me, presumably drawn by my kippah. He was wearing a “Bring them home” dog tag, similar to mine, but mine was still tucked inside my jacket. Without bothering to introduce himself, he said, in a distinct Israeli accent, “I just want to know, which side are you on?”  I hesitated. “I don’t think of it as sides,” I said slowly, intending to elaborate. He cut me off.  “Ok, you’ve told me what I need to know,” and he walked away. 

 

The exchange left me outraged. Almost as much as that obscenely one-sided ceasefire resolution.

 

Choose a side. Limit yourself. The pressure builds. We begin to shut down.

 

The Redwood City Council meeting was intense. The resolution was voted down 5 to 2, thanks to a lot of relationship-building work by a team of CBJ members and others in the Jewish community. But there was so much anger in City Hall that night. When it was finally over, we Jews had to be escorted to our cars by police, as none of us felt safe amid the shouting out in the atrium. 

 

Still, Redwood City was a walk in the park compared to San Francisco. One of my closest friends is the Rabbi of a congregation in the city, and she attended that meeting to speak out against their ceasefire resolution. Whenever a person tried to speak against the resolution, the crowd booed them down. A few people tried to describe the atrocities of October 7th, and were drowned out with shouts of “liar”. Liar! How is there any possibility of dialogue with people who deny basic facts? One guy shouted an obscenity every time a Jewish woman got up to speak. Another guy was videotaping the whole thing on his cell phone. My friend felt so threatened, and afraid of what he was going to do with the cell phone footage, that she removed herself from the line of people waiting to speak.

 

So yes, I believe that slogans can shut us down, as surely as war sirens can.

 

A war siren has a repeating pattern of rising, hold, then falling with this erie, jagged sound. The all clear is the same set of sounds, but it only rises once, holds the steady, unpunctuated note for a few minutes, and then falls off. In Jerusalem, the all-clear is sounded every Friday evening at candle-lighting time. It is meant to call us away from the aggravations of daily life, to begin a day of peace, gratitude, acceptance of the beauty in our imperfect world. But as the all-clear blast trails off into that jagged, falling sound, it does not induce in me a feeling of peace.

 

It is curious that the warning siren and the all-clear siren sound so similar. You’d think in today's technological world, it would be possible to create an entirely different sound - if not to use as an all-clear, then at least to welcome Shabbat. 

 

Believe it or not, the custom has an ancient history. What was the war siren of ancient times? The shofar! Our ancestors carried it with them into battle to rally the troops, and to terrify the locals. But they also sounded it to announce a ceasefire, to tell people it was safe to return home. The prophet Isaiah promised that someday, a great Shofar will sound to announce the arrival of the Messiah, and usher in an era of peace and hope. 

 

And the Talmud prescribed that on Friday afternoons, in every place where Jews live, a community leader must sound six blasts on a shofar, announcing throughout town that it is time to let go of the week’s work.  

 

What sound could possibly be more triggering than an inanimate cry announcing war? Yet this is the sound we use to set the tone for Shabbat.

 

Isn’t there something quintessentially Jewish about that? The shofar announces both war, and peace. Rosh Hashanah is a day of fear and trembling, and of apples dipped in honey. The sukkah represents fragility, and protection. The charoset is the mortar of slavery, and the sweetness of freedom. We break a glass at every wedding, a symbol of mourning. And during a year of mourning, we recite a prayer to exalt the source of life.

 

Today’s assault of simple-minded slogans is stripping our Jewish souls. It leaves no space to live with both fear and hope, with both love and anger directed at the same source. Instead, anger shuts us down, and fear drives out hope.

 

It’s been a hard year, and too many of us are  imagining worse things on the horizon.

 

Who of us dares claim to actually know the future? 

 

Whatever may or may not lay ahead, we are here today. We are free to gather in our beautiful synagogue. Free to choose from an abundance of varieties of apples, and dip them in all kinds of honey. Free to speak our minds – no matter which side we are on, or how complex our ideas.

 

It is time to stop responding to the binary. It is time to open to the possibilities of a future that may be far more beautifully textured and broad than anything we can imagine,  למצוא חן במדבר to find grace in the desolate wilderness, as Jeremiah promised. In the words of Isaiah, to enlarge the size of our tent, to widen our hearts, to open our gates.

 

I was blessed this summer to attend a conference for Jewish leaders at the Hartman Institute, in Jerusalem. There, for the first time, I heard Rabbi Tamar Elad Appelbaum teaching in person. Rabbi Tamar is the spiritual leader of an incredibly innovative, warm, inclusive community in Jerusalem called Tzion. Rabbi Tamar loves Judaism, she loves Israel, and she loves humanity - with a love that just spills forth from her.

 

She shared with us that on October 13th, she had spent a very long day in the south of Israel, supporting the refugees from the Gaza envelope. She came back to Jerusalem barely in time for Shabbat, and for the first time in her life she came to services looking tired, bedraggled, tear streaked. A little boy came up to her and tugged at her skirts as she walked in the room. “Rabbi Tamar,” he asked, מותר עכשיו שתהיה שבת בעולם?“ Is it allowed now for Shabbat to be in the world?

 

She left us with that question for a few minutes. When she came back to it, her answer was gentle but firm. Shabbat is an expression of hope, she said, and ALL children deserve to have hope - children in Israel, children in Gaza, and (I will add to that now) children in Lebanon –  ALL children. Snd she will not let ANY terrorist take that away from us.

 

She said the very creation of the world was an act of protest. Against the darkness and chaos, God declared “Let there be light.” To be Jewish is to stand amidst despair, and to create moments of hope. Quoting Israeli writer David Grossman, Rabbi Tamar compared hope to a heavy anchor, that we haul up and cast into the future. And then - through great effort - we use that anchor to pull a better future into our reality today. 

 

To be Jewish is to train ourselves, through hard effort, to hear the sounds of peace, even in a war siren. 

 

Even on October 7th. 

 

Rabbi Tamar told us that her community rents space in the same building complex as Chasidei Orloi, an ultra-Orthodox hasidic group. In normal times, these two communities do not usually pray together. But when those sirens went off in the middle of Simchat Torah, they were forced to crowd into the same shelter. And they were stuck there for hours! And so they prayed and sang and ate together - the diverse community of Tsion with its woman rabbi, and the UltraOrthodox chasidim of Orloi with their long black coats and beards and shtreimels. After the year of internal strife that Israel had been through, on the darkest day of recent Jewish history, those two communities experienced light and hope together in a bomb shelter. 

 

This summer, my own family spent two nights at a bed and breakfast in a remote town in Montana, with a population smaller than the size of CBJ. Our first night there, we heard that awful sound - war sirens. Dread in the pit of my stomach. But it was so incongruous, on a quaint little street in Choutow, Montana, surrounded by miles and miles of cow pasture. I went downstairs to ask our host what the siren meant. He shrugged. Choutow has a volunteer fire department, and the sirens call the volunteers out to duty. It was raining very heavily, and he thought the volunteers were needed for flood control. 

 

The idea of a VOLUNTEER fire department in today’s world, blew my mind!  

 

The sirens went off again the next night. But this time, I looked out into the dark street and instead of dread I felt something else. Appreciation. Gratitude. Someone was out there, sounding the alarm to support their neighbors. Others were preparing to leave their homes right then, to go out into the cold, wet night, to lend a hand. 

 

An all-clear siren shouts the possibility of peace, if you can open your heart to it. But even a warning siren carries within its broken tones that hope. Because it means that someone is out there to sound the siren, that people are still looking out for each other, that we have –  if only a wobbly platform – something, on which to put our feet, as we cast our anchor of hope into the future.  

 

One last Rabbi Tamar story - of resisting the binary, and of opening ourselves to the possibilities of hope.

 

 In the weeks and months after October 7th, soldiers began returning from Gaza. Heroes, who are ready to sacrifice their young lives, to protect Israel. When they come to Tsion on Shabbat, Rabbi Tamar asks them if there is anything they want to pray for. And every single one has asked for a prayer for peace.

 

But many soldiers do not return. Rabbi Tamar spoke about one in particular, Ben Zussman, whose parents are her dear friends. Before he went off to war, Ben wrote a will, as apparently many soldiers do. At age 20, having to write a will!, Ben told his parents that they must live and enjoy life.

 

Ben’s parents prepared a huge memorial gathering 30 days after his death. The room was filled with Israelis from all different communities. Shuli Rand performed in honor of Ben’s memory –  a  popular Israeli singer, who is also a Breslover Chasid - think big gray beard and black hat. Lucy Harish, an Arab-Israeli, spoke in honor of Ben, about her vision for the State of Israel, and reminded the room about the higher vision of Zionism.

 

Ben’s father, Tsvi, spoke, too. He lifted a beer in a toast, because Ben loved beer, and he said, “Ben commanded us to live and have joy, and so I want to say l’chaim.” 

 

If Tsvi Zussman could find such joy and hope, at the shloshim memorial for his son, how can we do any less?  And so to each of you, at the start of this new year, I wish a l’chaim. Open your hearts to joy. Listen for the sounds of peace, even when they are hard to hear. And work to create hope in the possibilities for the year to come.