Born Perpetually With a Knife in Our Hearts

These remarks were delivered as a sermon on the morning of Yom Kippur, October 12th, 2024, at Westchester Reform Temple, Scarsdale, New York.

Never in my life have these Days of Awe so lived up to the literal meaning of their name:  ימים נוראים, Yamim Nora’im, “Terrible days.”  Since I began composing these remarks, the war, still convulsing Gaza, has spread to Lebanon and deep into the heart of Israel.

As for our hearts, there too has lodged an ugly and unhealed wound called October 7th.  The late Israeli poet Hayim Gouri was right.  In a poem written in the 1950s that doubles as a midrash, a Rabbinic story that explains a Biblical text, Gouri took up the subject of the Binding of Isaac.  The poem is called “Inheritance.”

“The ram came last of all,” it begins.

And Abraham
did not know that it came to answer the
boy’s question – first of his strength
when his day was on the wane.

The old man raised his head. Seeing
that it was no dream and that the angel
stood there – the knife slipped from his hand.

The boy, released from his bonds,
saw his father’s back.

Isaac, as the story goes, was not
sacrificed. He lived for many years,
saw what pleasure had to offer,
until his eyesight dimmed.

But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring.
They are born with a knife in their hearts.¹

We are the children of Isaac, born perpetually with a knife in our hearts.

Still, this agonizing today will some day be a yesterday.  Our work on these Yamim Nora’im is to consider what it will mean to be the “Jews of October 8th,” the Jews of tomorrow, and to journey in that direction.

We’ve already begun this journey.  Over the past ten days, we’ve gathered together, ached together, prayed together, sung together, sought healing and hope together.

Today we do the deep introspective work, the work of Kippur.  And we affirm that we can change.

The journey we take begins in trauma and ends in empathy.  It begins in suffering and ends in love.

We take this journey as members of a specific People who carry specific traumas.  We also begin with the awareness that suffering is the common ground not just of Jewish experience but of human existence.  We know too well that the world provides no upper limit to the pain that can be inflicted on a life; that Nature may not be intentionally cruel but is, at best, monumentally indifferent.

Suffering is the one constant, the inescapable fact, the binding thread, the covenant we make with life:  by being alive, we suffer.

We cannot change this fact.  We can choose only how we will respond.  And there are many ways to respond.

One instinctive response is to seek safety.  October 7th exposed all the many ways we are unsafe:  Jews, violated in their homes by Hamas in Israel’s south; Jews, displaced from their homes by Hezbollah in Israel’s north; Jews, unsafe on college campuses, unsafe in workplaces that dictate sensitivity and safety for all minorities except for us, the ones subjected to the greatest preponderance of hate crimes.  And of course our hostages:  still unsafe, still in mortal peril, even now.

So we build stronger bunkers.  We buy bigger guns.  We gravitate to politicians who promise to keep us safe.  We tell our children to stay alert but stand tall; don’t run away and don’t back down but also don’t engage and don’t lose your cool; and for heaven’s sake, please be safe.

We also respond with force.  We rain fury down on those who would abuse, kidnap, and murder us.  We strike not just reactively but preemptively.  We fight like hell.

And weeks go by, and months, and a year and more, and one day, we wake up and realize: we still hurt, something awful.  The knife is still there, lodged even deeper in the heart.

And we are tired of our tears; and tired of the tears of all the innocent children, and all the mothers crying for the dead and the maimed and the missing, and we wonder:  why has all this pain not gone away?

We are learning—again and again—life’s most unyielding lesson:  that we cannot protect ourselves from pain, and loss, and death.

We can, however, protect ourselves from the death of love.

Rabbi Shai Held, a gifted teacher and friend who lives up the street from me and who presented at WRT as scholar-in-residence a few years ago, recently published an exceptional book called Judaism is About Love.  It “challenges the conventional wisdom that has shaped the history of the West”:  that “Christianity is the religion of love, and Judaism the religion of law.”²  It instead places love and empathy as the foundation-stones of Jewish thought, belief, and practice.

Moving from suffering to love is neither easy nor linear.  Suffering by its nature tends to pull us away from love, away from connection.   In Kabbalistic thought, suffering is how we experience separation from God, the all-binding force of existence.

As Rav Shai (as he likes to be called) observes, “Trauma can lead us to retreat into ourselves, to withdraw from community and companionship, to feel so defeated that we grow incapable of intimacy and connection; few things can be as isolating as intense loss.”³  

What’s more, love cannot—at least not in any direct way—make us physically safer.  Love cannot dissolve our hurt.  It cannot extract the knife from the heart.

What love can do is grow the heart around the knife, so that we can experience more than just the hurt.  With love we can feel not only what we’re going through, but also what others are going through.  And, in time, that is how we heal.

So we’ve come here to take this journey:  from suffering to love, trauma to empathy, isolation to connection.  It is very much a Yom Kippur journey.

Our model for the journey can be found by studying one of the most fascinating characters in all of Jewish literature, and that is the character of God.  In our literature, composed by Judaism’s great geniuses, God arises from that mysterious nexus of human intelligence, imagination, inspiration, and lived experience—the same nexus out of which God shows up in our lives.

And in our literature—as in our lives—God often shows up as a sweeping force of love.  One passage stands out.  We’ve already repeated it several times these High Holidays, including every time we have approached the Ark to read Torah.

:יְהֹוָה יְהֹוָה אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת: נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִים נֹשֵׂא עָו‍ֹן וָפֶשַׁע וְחַטָּאָה וְנַקֵּה

“Adonai, Adonai—God compassionate and gracious, endlessly patient, loving, and true, showing mercy to the thousandth generation; forgiving evil, defiance, and wrongdoing; granting pardon.”

A God of empathy, compassion, forgiveness.  A God of love.

This oft-repeated verse in the machzor is lifted straight out of the Torah, from Exodus, Chapter 34.⁴  This is how God describes the Divine nature to Moses, God’s character in God’s own words.

But God had to make a difficult spiritual journey to get to this state of Being, and that journey begins in trauma.  Specifically, the trauma of the Golden Calf:  when, in the very instant of closest connection to the Israelites, the giving of the Law at Sinai, the entrance of our People into the Divine Covenant, God sends Moses down the mountain to confront a terrible betrayal.  The people have made a god of gold, a false and unholy god, an obscenity—this, but weeks after their miraculous deliverance from Egypt—and God gets very, very upset.⁵

This is not the first time God has been wounded:  in response to primordial human evil, waywardness, and violence, God reacts in wrath and regret, sending an all-destroying Flood.⁶  Moments after the Exodus from Egypt, the Israelites vex God with complaints about the limited dinner menu in the wilderness.  God does not take kindly to their kvetching.⁷

But, for God, the Golden Calf is personal.  A knife in the heart of the Divine.  God threatens to destroy the people, one and all, and start over with Moses alone.  It is Moses who has to intervene and talk God off the ledge, petitioning for clemency, appealing to the better angels of God’s nature.

And, then, something miraculous happens:  God changes, grows, evolves.  Out of pain, God responds with grace.  Out of suffering, God summons love.

:יְהֹוָה יְהֹוָה אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב חֶסֶד וֶאֱמֶת: נֹצֵר חֶסֶד לָאֲלָפִים נֹשֵׂא עָו‍ֹן וָפֶשַׁע וְחַטָּאָה וְנַקֵּה

“Adonai, Adonai—God compassionate and gracious, endlessly patient, loving, and true, showing mercy to the thousandth generation; forgiving evil, defiance, and wrongdoing; granting pardon.”

And in this moment, the Torah is teaching us not only an essential truth about God’s character, but also an essential principle for living a life of purpose, beauty, and joy:  that suffering need not consign us to a lifetime of anger and resentment, fear and torment, but rather, can lead us to greater empathy, when we recognize in our suffering the common ground of our humanity, and respond with love.

As Rav Shai puts it:

….[Y]ou want to be a religious person, learn to be present for other people when they are in pain….  [I]f we are serious about the spiritual life, we have to learn to care more and more deeply about other people and to be there for them when they are in need.  …[T]his is extremely important, and… it can be very hard work.  Keep at it; learning to be more and more present with people who need comfort and support is the task of a lifetime. It is the heart of the religious life.⁸

I want you to know that, in years to come, when I think about the past year, I will of course remember the pain and suffering.  But I also will remember the incredible love.  The way we showed up to find, and, even more, to give, comfort and support.

I will remember all the times that you, our WRT family, responded to our shared suffering not with rage or fear, but with empathy and commitment.  I will remember standing arm-in-arm on October 10th, 2023, here in our sanctuary, as full then as it is today, singing Hatikvah, anthem of undying hope.  I will remember the Jewish Scarsdale High School students who teamed up with Muslim and Christian students to mobilize humanitarian relief for Israeli and Gazan children.  I will remember Shabbat services, lighting blue candles, pews full, voices loud in prayer and song.  I will remember the rally in DC, and, just as much, the aroma of corned beef sandwiches on the bus (which, by the way, is a smell that evokes a lot of love for me).

I will remember ECC children singing their first Jewish songs and celebrating their first Jewish Holidays, and, even though that’s something I get to enjoy every year, it moved me more this year, healing a bit of my own sorrow with a generous dose of love.

I will remember how we welcomed the Hostage Families Forum to WRT, twelve Israelis with mothers, fathers, siblings and children in Gaza, and responded to their presentation not with probing questions, but tearful hugs.

I will remember the Caring Community luncheons, and the conversations with concerned parents with kids on campus, and the amazing college students who journeyed from anxiety and anger to commitment and compassion, modeling peaceful and constructive engagement with fellow students, faculty, and school administrations in the face of harassment, insults, and rage-filled screaming.

One of many such students who grew up at WRT, Ryan Silberfein, now a senior at Michigan, spent last year on a journey that led her not only to get involved, but to become president of Michigan Hillel, and one of the country’s most passionate, articulate, and thoughtful spokespersons on behalf of Jewish students on college campuses everywhere.

I look at our students, at our children, and my fear and rage and hurt soften, and love increases.  And this, my WRT family, is what I want you to know more than anything else, on this great day of Kippur—a day, by the way, that the Rabbis of old characterized as the most love-filled day of the Jewish year:  that Judaism is about love, and that we have to live and give a Judaism of love to the world.  

I know this from Rav Shai, and from our rich tradition of texts; I know it from being a rabbi, of course.  But more to the point, I know it from my life as Jew.  Because, for me, Judaism has always been about love.

Judaism is my grandmother Sally’s Kamishbroit, “crazy bread,” which is kind of like what would happen if a cookie had a baby with a jelly roll, and yes, I know it’s Yom Kippur and we’re fasting; deal with it.

Judaism is learning the four questions and dropping pocket change in the blue JNF tzedakah box; and practicing Torah trope with my childhood Cantor, David Green, of Keneseth Israel (KI) in Allentown, and Bar Mitzvah lessons with Bernie Lewine who was kind, and ancient (and kind).  It is goofing off with Josh Axelrod in Monday night Confirmation class at KI and Shabbat dinners at Amherst College Hillel.  It’s waving a lulav in all the directions of Nature’s bounty, and getting just tipsy enough on Purim that I need to be very careful whether or not my microphone is on.

Judaism is meeting a young woman named Kelly McCormick in, of all places, the Shabbat morning choir at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and, a few years later, standing with her under a chuppah.

And Judaism is Mel Brooks and Jerry Seinfeld, Joan Rivers and Sarah Silverman, the Marx Brothers and Lenny Bruce, Adam Sandler and Alex Edelman; Judaism is laughing so hard you cry.  It is Albert Einstein and Jonas Salk, Louis Brandeis and RBG, Jascha Heifetz and Irving Berlin, Paul Simon and Carole King, Amy Winehouse and Leonard Cohen… and did you really think I would forget Bob Dylan?

-=-=-=-

I cannot paper over the truth:  this was a devastating year.  I expect that suffering will not cease, but may increase, in this new year.  Expanding war may push us beyond what we think we can bear.  Surging anti-Semitism may push us to new levels of concern.  For our people, for innocent people trapped in the hell of war, for those of us who love Israel and who also love justice and peace, for all who worry about the future of America and the future of humanity—these are yamim nora’im, terrible, terrible days.

And Judaism is about love.

So the question is:  what kind of Judaism will we live in 5785?  Will it be a Judaism of fear and sadness, rage and resentment?  Or might we grow our hearts around the knife, and live a Judaism of love?  A Judaism that our children and grandchildren will love?  A Judaism that invites us into the Omnipresence of a God of love?

With so much out of our hands, this one choice is still ours.

1. Translation: T. Carmi, The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse. New York: Penguin Books, 1981.
2. From the publisher. See https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374192440/judaismisaboutlove.
3. Held, Shai. Judaism is About Love. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. p. 282.
4. Exodus 34:6-7.
5. Exodus 32:7ff.
6. Genesis 6:5ff.
7. Exodus 16:2ff.
8. Held, p. 259.