On Sunday mornings and Tuesday afternoons the last few weeks, this place has been hopping. I am really thrilled to share that there are more children coming to learn in our religious school than ever before. It is wonderful, but it carries with it a tremendous responsibility.
I ask myself constantly, “what we are doing to build a sense of Jewish identity and peoplehood in our kids?”
These are some of the questions I have been discussing with our staff: How would someone who has just celebrated becoming B’nei Mitzvah explain what it means to be Jewish? How would they describe what belonging to the Jewish people feels like, and the responsibilities that come along with it? Could they offer a simple definition of Zionism and discuss how the existence of the State of Israel plays a role in Jewish identity?
With everything that has been happening in the world these past few years, these questions seem particularly relevant. In this environment, what are we doing to help the next generation, our children, form strong Jewish identities?
To explore that question, we must look inward. All of us here made a choice to gather with our community to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. Many of us had to take off a day of work or school to do so.
That speaks to me of a strong commitment. Every one of us here has core memories that anchor our Jewish identities. Past moments for which the sights, sounds and emotions are most vivid. Core memories form the narratives of who we are. They define my essential self, affect how I view the world, and guide how I interpret new experiences.
One of my core memories goes all the way back to when I was five or six years old. My family has recently joined a synagogue for the first time. We are attending Friday night services. The congregation is welcoming new members to the community, and my family is being honored.
A few details stand out. A warm light suffuses the sanctuary. The room is packed with people, and we are sitting on the right side of the room. There seems to be a lot of attention placed on a large piece of furniture up on the stage, but I don’t know why, or what is inside of it. It is mysterious.
Everyone stands up, and my parents, my baby brother, and I are invited to come to the front. There, we are presented with a basket. I think that there is probably a siddur, challah, and candles, and I know for sure that there is definitely a bottle of Manischewitz wine. That I remember distinctly. I feel really proud of my family in that moment.
When I think back, I still feel the warmth, mystery, and belonging. I suspect that the journey leading to my becoming a Rabbi began in that moment.
I invite us to take a few moments to turn to someone sitting next to, in front of, or behind us, introduce yourselves, wish them a “Shanah Tovah,” and in just one minute each, share a Jewish memory that still makes you smile. It could be something from childhood or adulthood, with family or strangers, at home, in synagogue, in Israel, or anywhere in the world.
Let’s come back together. You’ve just named some of the moments that anchor us, the kinds of memories that remind us: this is who I am as a Jew.” But if we are honest, not all of our core memories feel good. Some come out of pain, doubt, or disconnection, and those too shape us.
Perhaps it was facing antisemitism or harassment. Maybe it was a feeling of exhaustion for being “different.” For some, moments of alienation come as a crisis of faith, the result of a deep personal loss or tragedy. Maybe it was the actions of other Jews, or (dare I say) the Israeli government, that led to such a moment.
For me, I stopped keeping strictly kosher for a while while I was in college. Specifically, it was the junior year that I spent in Israel studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. That year, and a little bit afterwards, is the only time that I have eaten non-kosher meat since I was twelve years old.
While I had lots of wonderful, life-changing adventures that year, I was surprised to find myself feeling religiously alienated. The American Judaism that I knew was built around Jews living in a secular society actively choosing to gather together with other Jews for social and religious experiences. I had gone to day school, was active in my synagogue and USY, worked at Camp Ramah, was a leader in Hillel. When I got to Israel, I found myself disoriented. The Judaism I encountered there felt very different from the Judaism I knew in America — and in my confusion, I let go of a practice that had long anchored me.
Ironic, isn’t it? I go to Israel and stop keeping kosher.
When Dana (my wife) and I were speaking about this last week, she shared a similar experience. She showed up at Brandeis University, ready to be immersed in Jewish life. Within a month and a half, she had disenrolled from the kosher dining plan, stopped going to Hillel, backed off on her Shabbat observance, and found herself avoiding the East coast Jews in favor of the international students.
In the course of a person’s life, it is impossible to predict those moments that are going to be significant. But it is both the high and the low points that contribute to our journeys. Each of us can point to moments when Judaism felt far away, when community or practice felt alien, when being Jewish was complicated. In fact, it is sometimes the case that the low points create opportunities for positive transformation.
The Haftarah that we read today gives us a striking example of this dynamic in the life of Ḥannah. She is someone whose deepest religious experience begins with humiliation and rejection.
Ḥannah is one of the two wives of Elkanah. She is the beloved, but it is the other wife, Peninah, who has children. Every year, the entire household travels to the shrine at Shiloh to offer sacrifices. Every year, Peninah goes out of her way to taunt Ḥannah, making fun of her barrenness. Ḥannah takes it to heart, weeping and refusing to eat.
At least Elkanah notices, “Ḥannah, why are you crying and why aren’t you eating? Why are you so sad? Am I not better to you than ten sons?” The commentaries give him credit for trying, but a modern reader might see Elkanah’s attempt to tell her not to feel what she feels as gaslighting. In any event, he does not make her feel any better.
One year, during the annual pilgrimage, Ḥannah gets up to spend some time alone. She begins to pray silently, with only her lips moving. Eli,the priest in charge, sees her, and immediately jumps to conclusions. “How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Sober up!”
This surely must have been a low point in Ḥannah’s life, forming a negative core memory. Her household has rejected her, and her husband has failed to bring comfort. Now the priest, that is to say, the religious establishment, has compounded the injury. There is no safe place for Ḥannah.
To her credit, she stands up for herself against the most revered religious leader of the day. She objects that she is not drunk, but has been “pouring out her heart to the Lord” out of her “great anguish and distress.” Eli, unaware of what, specifically, Ḥannah has been praying for, wishes for God to grant her request.
The household returns home, and we are told that God remembers Ḥannah. She conceives, a baby is born, and Ḥannah names him Shmuel, meaning “I asked the Lord for him.” In fulfillment of the vow she had made, she dedicates him to God as a Nazir. She turns Shmuel over to the very institution that had once rejected her.
He goes on to transform it, just as, in rabbinic tradition, she herself transforms prayer itself. Ḥannah’s turning to God in her lowest moment is held up as the ideal model for prayer. Out of her despair, she creates a new model for religious life: one that is intimate, vulnerable, and honest.
Ḥannah’s story of humiliation and transformation has a surprising parallel in modern times. Franz Rosenzweig was born in 1886 into a thoroughly assimilated German Jewish family. Although culturally Jewish,he was increasingly drawn to philosophy and the promise of universal redemption offered by Christianity.
Particularist Judaism, in contrast, was like a fossil, valuable as an ethnic heritage perhaps, but not as a living faith. Rosenzweig later wrote that he saw Judaism at that time as “merely a stubborn survival, a religion without life.” In his mid-twenties, Rosenzweig decided that he would convert to Christianity. His friend, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, issued a challenge, if Rosenzweig was going to convert to Christianity, he should do so “as a Jew,” like the first Christians — entering the new faith through Judaism.
On September 13, 1913, Franz Rosenzweig entered a Berlin synagogue on Yom Kippur evening, intending it to be his last time as a Jew. This would be his final farewell to his ancestral faith.
Something happened to him that night, something he never described in detail. Was it the haunting melody of Kol Nidrei? The poetic beauty of the piyyutim? The experience of standing with a congregation dressed in white?
Whatever it was, he emerged transformed. Conversion to Christianity was no longer possible. He referred to that service as a wendung, a “turning point” in his life, the moment he entered “the gates” of Judaism. From then on, Judaism became a living religion to him. The Jewish people, by following their covenantal traditions, modeled for the world the ultimate redemption for humanity as a whole.
Rosenzweig dedicated the rest of his life to Judaism. While serving on the Balkan front as a soldier in the German army during World War One, he wrote a series of postcards home to his mother that formed the outline of his grand philosophy of Judaism, the Star of Redemption, which he completed in 1919. He translated the Hebrew Bible into German with his friend, Martin Buber. He founded the Lehrhaus, a school of advanced Jewish studies for adults in Frankfurt.
Rosenzweig died in 1929 of ALS at only 43 years of age. By the end of his life, he was unable to speak or move. He and his wife Edith developed a system whereby he would blink his eyes to indicate letters and words, which she would type. Using this technique, he composed his final communication:
“And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there—”
Just then the doctor walked in for a conversation. Rosenzweig never returned to finish his final sentence. Perhaps that is fitting. His life’s work passes the task to us: to continue the story, with our own Jewish memories, commitments, and transformations.
Like Ḥannah thousands of years earlier, Rosenzweig’s experience of alienation from Judaism led to his transformation and growth. It is the high and low points of their lives that led to such growth and bequeathed such important legacies to us. Like Ḥannah, like Rosenzweig, we carry both joy and pain, pride and disappointment, acceptance and rejection, in our Jewish lives. The question is not whether we have these experiences, but what we do with them, how we shape them into the core memories that define who we are.
As I think about the next generation, I try to keep in mind that it is impossible to know which Jewish experiences will form core memories, positive or negative. My own children continue to surprise me. All that we can do is provide rich communal experiences in which we express our own pride and love of Judaism and the Jewish people.
On this Rosh Hashanah, may we treasure the joyous moments, learn from the hard ones, and open ourselves to the possibility of new core memories — ones that connect us more deeply to Judaism, each other, Israel, and the world.
Rebyehoshua 