A Time of Testing

In this sacred season, in this sacred space, as we connect to tradition, community, and the highest calling of our being, let my first words to you be ones of blessing. May you, your loved ones, the people and State of Israel, and all of humanity know a year of health and peace. Please join me in saying Shehecheyanu: 

            Barukh atah Adonai, eloheinu melekh ha-olam, 
            shehecheyanu v’kiy’manu v’higgianu la-z’man ha-zeh. 

            Blessed are You Adonai, our God, ruler of the universe, for granting us life, 
            for sustaining us, and for bringing us to this time.

This time, our time, is a time of testing. Comforting as it is to return to the synagogue on the holidays, for us as a Jewish people, the year gone by has been as difficult as any in our lives., a tortured catalogue of tests and trials. Countless in quantity, increasing in severity, and never-ending in complexity. It is a lot, it is not easy, and it is not getting better; the most difficult tests seem to still lie ahead.

It is not as if this time last year was so simple. The State of Israel and the Jewish people were divided on the question of judicial reform. A nation that once brought us together was rife with internal division both in Israel and across global Jewry.

And then, perhaps sensing our internal weakness, on October 7 our external enemies attacked. Some 1,200 murdered in cold blood – men, women, children, babies. Unspeakable physical and sexual violations – crimes against Israel, against Jews, and against humanity. Over 250 hostages taken captive that day. The fate of some 100 remains in the balance, an ongoing trauma for us all.

Since the horrors of October 7, the cascade of tests and trials has flowed uninterrupted. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis evacuated from the line of fire – in the south and in the north – entire communities displaced to this day. A nation mobilized for war, the lives of soldiers and their families disrupted, a nation interrupted. Thousands of IDF soldiers wounded and killed in courageous defense of the Jewish state, in the face of an enemy whose stated goal – and let me mince no words – is Israel’s total destruction. 

Hours, mere hours, was all it took for the tide to turn across the globe. Israel was still counting its dead, had yet to mobilize, and was already being named the aggressor. Online, on campus, in the World Court, and in the streets – a pernicious and porous blurring of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. A world that would place blame for the horrific loss of Palestinian lives solely on Israel’s shoulders, on the Jewish people’s shoulders, expending no thought to Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s cynical, sinister, and sadistic tactics that cause maximum pain to innocents. 

War is horrific. Whatever one’s politics are, not to be heartbroken at the loss of Palestinian life is to be inhuman. The equal and infinite dignity of every human being created in the divine image is the North Star of our faith and this community. Any bloodshed is a diminishment of God’s presence on this earth. How to champion Israel’s right to self-defense, counter antisemitism, and express empathy for Palestinian suffering? It is a test we all feel, a test dividing our people, a test dividing the generations, a test dividing our very persons.

A teeming cauldron of violence, as described by the prophet Jeremiah, has spilled into Israel from Lebanon, and Israel is wholly justified in defending the lives of its citizens on the northern border and the tens of thousands of evacuees. And yet, even as Israel mobilizes for the next front, the fault lines have erupted from within, with protests for and against a hostage deal, for and against the Israeli government, in Israel and in the diaspora. Those who believe that expressing dissent in wartime is the highest form of betrayal versus those who believe that the failure to do so is a failure of conscience. And now, the arrival of a contentious election season exacerbates the divisions within American Jewry. 

Trial after trial, test after test, and the toughest yet ahead. We may be dressed in our holiday finest, but on the inside, we are ragged and threadbare. No doubt, I imagine, every one of us can identify with Tevye’s cry to God in “Fiddler on the Roof”: “I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?” 

As long as Jews have been Jews, we have been a people tested. The rabbis of old enumerate ten trials faced by our founding first family, Abraham and Sarah. Some, like Abraham’s self-circumcision and Sarah’s infertility, are biological. Some, like Abraham’s argument with God over the fate of the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, are theological. Many, like Abraham’s wars with neighboring tribes, his kin being taken captive, and the seizure and sexual compromise of Sarah by a foreign power, cut too close to home this year. Some, we read about today on Rosh Hashanah. The struggle between Isaac and Ishmael, the ancestors to the Jewish and Arab people, over their father’s physical and spiritual estate. We identify with Sarah’s defense of hearth and home, even as we empathize with Hagar and Ishmael’s rightful search for a home of their own. On the second day of Rosh Hashanah, we read what is often referred to as the greatest trial: the binding of Isaac. In fulfillment of the covenant, God commands Abraham, “Take your son, your only son, the one you love, Isaac, and bind him on the altar” (Genesis 22:2). A terrible choice: his own flesh and blood or his covenantal obligations to the nation? A test of ultimate consequence without a clear or clean answer. An ancient story that speaks to us with urgency today.

Beginning with our founding biblical family, we are a people tested. Of the many ways to tell the story of the Jewish people, one is through the prism of trials extended and trials transcended. A few years ago, I visited the Cairo Museum and set eyes on what is known as the Merneptah Stele, a black obelisk describing the conquests of an ancient Pharaoh. The hieroglyphic inscription is dated to 1207 BCE and contains the earliest mention of Israel, reading, “Israel is laid waste, his seed is no more.” In the Louvre, another stele, this one dated to 880 BCE and attributed to King Mesha of Moab, similarly reflects on Israel having “perished forever.” It seems, to repackage Mark Twain, that the reports of our demise have been greatly exaggerated. Merneptha, Moab, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans – all in the dustbin of history. The Jewish people, small in number, still very much present. We have been tested, and we are still here. The historian Simon Rawidowicz once penned a famous essay on our people’s enduring nature; it was entitled “Israel: The Ever-dying People.” Be it due to persecution, dispersion, or the forces of assimilation, every age of Jewish existence has believed itself to be the last one, until of course, the next generation arrives – utterly convinced of the same. 

The question, of course, is “why?” or perhaps, more precisely, “how?” From the trials of Abraham to our wilderness wanderings, from Daniel in the lion’s den to the Babylonian exile – what is the thread that has connected one generation to the next and sustained our people in our hours of darkness?

In a word: hope.

In his book on the subject, David Arnow explains hope to be the “embrace of the possibility of a particular, deeply defined future . . . hope fuels our actions to help bring it about” (p. xiv). When God plucked Abraham and Sarah from obscurity to leave their native land and fulfill a covenantal promise to journey to another land sight unseen, they needed hope. When God told the childless and aging first couple that they would bear a son, they laughed. Thus, the name Yitzhak, meaning “he will laugh” – in the future tense, the joy that would hopefully be to come. Even when Abraham climbed that mountain hand in hand with his son, he held out hope that this terrible test would find resolution. It wasn’t that Abraham was always successful; he wasn’t. His pleas to God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah fell short. But in the aggregate, he was. Perhaps most importantly, even when he wasn’t, he picked himself up to fight another day. The first Jew, our first prophet of hope.

When Jacob fled his brother Esau with nothing to his name but the stone where he laid his head to sleep, hope enabled him to reach the dawn of a new day. When Joseph languished in the dungeons of Egypt, hope enabled him to persevere. When Pharoah issued the decree to kill newborn Israelite males, the Hebrew midwives demonstrated the hope to follow their conscience, exercise civil disobedience, and bring life into this world. When Moses stood at the burning bush, wondering if he was up to the task, he sought assurance by asking for God’s name, to which God famously responded: Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, I will be what I will be. In other words, the mark of the divine, in the heavens and in the human soul, is the belief that who we are and where we stand today is not and need not be where we will be tomorrow. From that first step into the sea with Pharaoh’s chariots in hot pursuit, to the Hasmoneans lighting that single cruse of oil despite having only enough for one day, hope has been the thread tying the master narrative of the Jewish people together, from strength to strength, one Jewish generation to the next.

Hope is at the core of Israel – the people and the state. In 1870, the founders of then Palestine’s first agricultural school called themselves Mikveh Yisrael, the hope of Israel. Seven years later, the first agricultural settlement was named Petach Tikvah, the opening of hope. Herzl’s vision of political Zionism, Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s revival of the Hebrew language, Israel’s anthem, Hatikvah – all statements of hope, a rejection of the status quo, declarations of self-empowerment, agency, collective responsibility, and possibility. A people of possibilitarians – af al pi khein, in spite of it all, and against our better judgment – we are, as described by the prophet Zechariah, “prisoners of hope.” We climb the mountaintops whether or not we reach the Promised Land. Hope that depends neither on the kindness of others nor on divine intervention. Hope that announces the intention of the Jewish people to take agency and secure the destiny of the Jewish people. This is Zionism: the hopeful right to Jewish self-determination in our historic homeland.

And, stripped down to its essence, hope is what today, Rosh Hashanah, is all about. The High Holiday prayer book calls today hayom harat olam, the day the world was created, but it is more than that. Today is the day that we roll out not just the blueprint of creation, but of our imagination. And yes, this year we do so from a place of darkness. My thoughts turn to Rachel Goldberg Polin who, prior to the murder of her son Hersh, stood before a global audience sharing that since October 7, she felt like she lived in another world. We felt her anguish then, all the more so now, mourning as we do Hersh and the other hostages. We see the shattered state of the world and we imagine the sort of world in which we seek to live. The Hebrew word for hope, tikvah, has the root kav, meaning “line,” as in the shortest distance between two points. We may presently exist in a place of darkness, doubt, and despair, but hope is the line we cast forward, the rope by which we pull ourselves toward the goal of actualizing an as yet unrealized future.

This is the hope, the tikvah, that has impelled our people from our earliest beginnings, through every dark hour, through the founding of Israel, and that we are in such desperate need of right now. Today, literally today, threatened as the State of Israel is by its neighbors, threatened as the people of Israel are by our detractors and haters, we too must hope. Eyes wide open to the trials before us, we must imagine a future reality, we must give voice to that reality, and most of all we must work to make that reality happen. As have those who came before us, today we face our trials with hope.

First, and most urgent, is the trial of survival. We hope not just to survive, but to win. To win because we have no other choice but to win. Israel need make no apology for defending its citizens or waging war against its enemies. The hate-filled ideology presently driving Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other proxies makes no allowance for any Jewish presence in the Middle East. I am reminded of Golda Meir’s comment: “You cannot negotiate peace with someone who seeks to kill you.” As long as the hostages remain captive, as long as Israel’s citizens stand in harm’s way, as long as Jewish lives are at risk around the world, we must stand firm in our defense of our people’s interests and the justness of our cause. It may not be popular, but that has never and presently does not deter us. As the midrash explains, Abraham was called Ha‑ivri, from the Hebrew root ever, meaning “to cross over,” because he was willing to cross over to one side while the rest of the world stood on the other. As Churchill said in the face of peril, so too for us today, “To ride out the storm of war, and outlive the menace of tyranny . . . .” To support the brave soldiers of the IDF, to advocate on behalf of Israel’s right to self-determination, to bring the hostages home, to call out the scourge of antisemitism from any and every quarter, and to secure the well-being of Jews worldwide. We must fight. We must support those who fight the good fight, and we must win.

Hope must fuel our drive to victory, and second, hope must remind us of what we are fighting for. Hope is about imagining an alternative, in this case, an alternative to fighting. In other words, a secure Jewish and democratic State of Israel living at peace with its neighbors. In the short term, this means that Israel needs to prosecute this war as if there is no tomorrow. It also means that Israel must prosecute this war with an eye to tomorrow. The coming generation of Israelis need hope. The coming generation of Palestinians need hope. “Where there is no vision,” teaches the book of Proverbs, “the people will perish” (29:18). We need to imagine, articulate, and seed a hopeful vision for the future lest the victory on the battlefield be rendered hollow by failure to affirm the very thing for which we are fighting.

And make no mistake: this too is a test. Regarding Abraham’s ten trials, different rabbis – Rashi, Rambam, and so forth – all enumerate them slightly differently. All but one commentator identifies the tenth, final, and greatest trial, to be the binding of Isaac. Only one, the thirteenth-century Spanish commentator Rabbenu Yona, holds otherwise. For him Abraham’s tenth, final, and most difficult trial came after the binding of Isaac, when Abraham’s wife Sarah had died, and Abraham had to negotiate for a burial plot with the inhabitants of the land. “Negotiate? Haggle? Compromise? Coexist? Really?” Abraham thought. “I thought the land was promised to me! To do with as I pleased!” No, teaches Rabbenu Yona. This too was a test, the hardest one. To square the circle of the Jewish claim to the land with the counterclaims of others. To figure out a way to coexist. This is the test in which Israel still finds itself, both within Israel and within our own community. 

The Jewish people do not lack for external enemies, but it is the enemies we make from within that will be our undoing. I know what I stand for, and I know what this community stands for: a secure, Jewish and democratic State of Israel. I suspect most of us, if not all of us, share that hope. I also suspect that there are as many opinions as to how to arrive at that outcome as there are people in this room. Which is why, I believe, more important than what we say is how we say it. To have a community dialogue that is robust but without rancor. That is passionate but not personal. Where we can peel off the reductive and destructive labels of the hour, engage in each other’s ideas, and be willing to have our own ideas challenged. If our starting point is our shared hopeful vision of a secure, Jewish, and democratic state, rather than convulsions over views we just can’t conscience, maybe, just maybe, we can pass this test, keep our people together, protect the well-being of global Jewry, and nudge Israel constructively forward.

Third, finally, and most importantly, while most believe the final and greatest test was the binding of Isaac, and some believe it was the settling the land, I believe the final test was something else. Estranged from his son, in mourning for his wife Sarah, Abraham goes on to do something daring and hopeful and instructive for us today. Like Noah sending out a dove following the flood, in that darkest of hours, Abraham sends off his servant in search of a wife for his son Isaac. After all he had been through, after all the trials, Abraham understood that it would all be for nought if the Jewish story ended with him. In other words, Abraham took active steps so that there would be Jewish continuity, Jewish grandchildren, and a Jewish future. It is actually what the name Abraham means: av meaning “ancestor” plus raham meaning “many,” together mean “ancestor to many.” Would Abraham create a Jewish future? This, I believe, was his greatest test, and we know, because we his descendants are all here today, that he passed it with flying colors.

And here I put you to the test. Fight the fight of our people – of course. Keep the Jewish people together – no question. But the ultimate test for each of you and all of us, will be how you, in your own deeds, commit to the Jewish future. If you, like Abraham, can make a shidduch, connect two young people with an eye to helping create a Jewish home – God bless, you should do so. If you are positioned to secure and support institutions of Jewish life and living, know that the need has never been greater – by all means, and with all your means, please do so. But as with all things, the most important thing is your personal example: what you do by way of your own choices, your own deeds, filling your own life with positive and proud expressions of Jewish life and living, for yourself and for the generations to come. I refuse to let the sum total of my Judaism, or my synagogue, be a defense against antisemites or the last decision of this or that Israeli government. In our synagogue, at your Shabbat table, in the community, in your personal observances, if you want the next generation to live a joyous, proud, engaged, and literate Judaism – then start with yourself. Pass that test, pass that trial, and from there we will have the strength to pass all the others. 

Throughout the year, but especially at this time of year, my thoughts return to a famous passage in the Talmud (Shabbat 31a) that previews the questions each one of us will be asked when we reach heaven: 

            “Did you conduct your business with integrity?” 

            “Did you set aside time for Torah study?”

            “Did you engage in the pursuit of wisdom?” 

One question is a little different and perhaps as important as all the others combined: Tzipita liy’shua? “Did you hope for the future?” In other words, did you imagine, anticipate, and work to operationalize a hopeful vision by which the Jewish people can dwell in strength, solidarity, vitality, and peace? We are not at the gates of heaven, but we are at the gates of the new year. It is the question that is before each one of us today.

Trial after trial. Test after test. This year, I identify with Abraham, trudging up that mountain. We all do. This year has bruised us all, we have been laid low. I have been bent to my limit, but I will not break. Like my ancestor Abraham, I have hope. Af al pi khein, in spite of it all, I have hope. I will face this next trial. I will hope for a brighter future. I will take agency for my role towards realizing that future, and I will work tirelessly to making it happen. Will I succeed? Will any of us? Will there be another test after this one? I do not know. None of us does. What we can know, what we can do, what we can hope for, is that in the days to come, we will look back at this moment knowing that we did everything in our power to pass this time of testing and secure the future of our people. 

Arnow, David. Choosing Hope: The Heritage of Judaism. Melrose Park, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 2022.

Rawidowicz, Simon. Israel, the Ever-dying People and Other Essays. Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986.