Rabbi Elizabeth Dunsker
Rosh Hashanah Morning 5786
Congregation Kol Ami Vancouver, WA
Rising Sap
In February of 2023, speaking to her Israeli congregation in the town of Shoham, during Shabbat services, during a time of great upheaval in Israel just before October 7, my colleague Rabbi Rinat Safania looked out at her congregation and said, “My job as a rabbi is to offer hope.” I didn’t personally meet her until February 2024 after October 7th, during the early days of the War with Gaza. That day, in her tiny synagogue building which was a converted house with one small community room, a bathroom and a closet sized kitchen, she oversaw my group of American Reform Rabbis as we sculpted clay into the shapes of ceramic red anemone flowers, in Hebrew they are called “kalanit.” (slide) Once fired, these kalanit would be used to adorn the graves of those who were killed during the attack on Oct. 7th since then, an entire garden of them has been created. Why kalanit? These red anemone flowers? Because these flowers bloom in the desert from January to April, under harsh conditions and are considered to represent the indomitable spirit of the Israeli people. Placing ceramic flowers on graves in order to symbolize survival may seem ironic, but it is meant to offer hope.
Around the same time that Rabbi Safania was teaching her congregants about hope, the book “Hope Amidst Conflict” by the Israeli social psychologist from Hebrew University, Oded Leshem was published, also before October 7th. Clearly finding hope during conflict is a national obsession for Israelis. What Leshem writes about so beautifully is his idea of Optimal Hope. This is the feeling when your desire for something is very high and your own sense of the likelihood of the thing happening is very low. You hope emotionally and desperately for something even while logically understanding it is unlikely to occur. He says, (slide)
Optimal hope is not ignorance because it is not guided by overestimating favorable outcomes and seeks, rather than avoids, the search for truth. Optimal hope is not arrogant either, as it accepts reality as “it is” and accounts for the costs of pursuing the hoped-for goal. Maybe most importantly, optimal hope is more immune to anguish because it is not driven exclusively by the belief in fulfillment. Because wants, needs, wishes, and aspirations are the main forces driving optimal hope rather than the high estimations of attainment, disappointment is not as painful and should not cause the hopeful person to give up. … precisely because of its modesty, incremental nature, and cautiousness, optimal hope is more sustainable in the face of ongoing hardships.
If my job as a rabbi is to offer hope, the best I might do today is to offer optimal hope, one that I believe may be sustainable. I find generalized hope to be hard right now. I don’t just mean about the situation in Israel vis-à-vis Gaza, or Israel vis-à-vis the US, or Israel vis-à-vis the UN and the world. I don’t just mean the state of things in the United States, or the state of climate change, or the state of higher education, or free speech, or scientific studies and health and the future. I find hope to be hard right now for all of those reasons and more. But I look to my colleague Rabbi Safania and to Dr. Leshem, and I see that hard situations are exactly the time that hope is called for. I very much appreciate these words from Oded Leshem that remind us that there are different kinds of hope some of which are very hard to sustain and we should seek to carry with us a hope that will not lead to anguish and disappointment.
The rabbis also wondered how hope might be sustained. Predictably perhaps, their answer was to pray. They pull from the words of II Chronicles and offer these words in the traditional prayerbook, (slide)
וַאֲנַ֗חְנוּ לֹ֤א נֵדַע֙ מַֽה־נַּעֲשֶׂ֔ה כִּ֥י עָלֶ֖יךָ עֵינֵֽינוּ
As for us, we know not what to do; but our eyes are upon You.
This is perhaps the cry of one who has lost all hope in their own power or in the power of humanity to make a difference. “As for us, we do not know what to do.” Last night I said I thought perhaps the best I could do is to offer a primal scream. I think this is the biblical version of that, “we do not know what to do.” But the hope here is that God might help. “Our eyes are upon You God.” Please make a difference for us. And they tell us in the Talmud (slide) if that first prayer—”I don’t know what to do God, but my eyes are on You,” if that prayer doesn’t work, then a person should pray again. And if it still doesn’t work there’s still prayer, pray again. But I suspect that for many of us in this room today the advice “pray, and if it doesn’t work, pray again.” Is maybe not going to cut it for us.
Growing up in the last century, everything about Jewish life in the Reform movement focused on tikun olam and our individual and communal responsibility to bring healing and wholeness to the world. And we believed that it was possible that if each of us work at bringing goodness, the arc of history would for sure bend toward justice no matter how long it took. Our Gates of Prayer prayerbook instilled those ideas in us by including Shabbat readings about how we’ve learned from history, we sang songs like ani v’atah, you and I can change the world. And in 1976 The Central Conference of American Rabbis-the rabbinic organization for the Reform Movement came out with it’s Centenary Perspective-essential thoughts on 100 years of the Reform Movement in America. In it, Rabbi Doctor Eugene Borowitz wrote, (slide)
Previous generations of Reform Jews had unbound confidence in humanity’s potential for good. We have lived through terrible tragedy and been compelled to reappropriate our tradition’s realism about the human capacity for evil. Yet our people has always refused to despair. The survivors of the Holocaust, being granted life, seized it, nurtured it, and, rising above catastrophe, showed humankind that the human spirit is indomitable. The State of Israel, established and maintained by the Jewish will to live, demonstrates what a united people can accomplish in history. The existence of the Jew is an argument against despair; Jewish survival is warrant for human hope.
The fact that we Jews had survived to this point, and thrived both in the US and in Israel, we were taught, was the best example of hope. They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat is itself a form of hope, and Dr. Borowitz taught us that in fact Jewish survival offers hope not just to the Jewish people, but also to all of humanity. As a Jewish teenager, as a rabbinical student and to some degree, even now, I believe this, but my hope in these words is a little more critical. These words once felt like they were all that needed to be said. We have survived and will obviously continue to do so, now let’s just get to work on the rest of the world. But these days, these words sound too simple and while I once thought they contained nuance, I now feel like there was a lot more that could be said. Many more lessons we might have learned about the costs of survival, more lessons to learn about how our survival affects the rest of the world in ways that they maybe don’t see as hopeful. Nor does the rest of the world celebrate our survival in quite the way we hoped they would.
So where does a rabbi look for hope when she has the job of offering hope to her congregation? There is one place. It’s the place I often turn to because I do believe that our own history can lead to a better future. The Torah portion we read today, the Akedah, is a terrible one, but we read it every year at this transitional moment because it is ultimately a story of hope. It is the story of God deciding to test Abraham by calling out to him and telling him to take his son Isaac on a journey to a high place where Abraham must then sacrifice his son whom he loves as an offering to God. As they get close, Isaac points out to his father that they have the wood and they have the knife for the sacrifice, but where is the sacrifice? He asks. Abraham offers a few words of Optimal Hope, something he desperately desires but realizes there is very little chance that it will happen. “God will provide the sacrifice” he tells his son.
Meanwhile, back at home, Sarah realizes that Abraham has taken her only child in order to sacrifice him. She cries out in sob after sob. The midrash tells us that her sobs of fear that her son Isaac is being marched to his death are echoed in the sound of the shofar. When we hear the shevarim, the broken three sounds da-duh, da-duh, da-duh that is Sarah’s primal scream, the last sounds she makes. The next parshah opens with news that she has died.
So emotions are very high in this portion. Sarah cries out and dies from fear and a broken a heart over the state of things. Abraham meanwhile is holding on to Optimal Hope, prepared for disappointment but still clinging to the idea that help will come. He ties his son up, places him on top of the wood and holds a knife to his neck. As he is about to do destroy his son, an angel comes and calls Abraham! Abraham! And Abraham answers with one word that is also a kind of prayer. He says, “Heneini-I am here” but we might read it as “I am here, and I don’t know what to do, so my eyes are on You God, show me a different way.” And there, caught in the bushes is a ram who is offered in place of Isaac.
The entire story is horrifying in every way. Death and life and the destruction of a family, our first Jewish family. The entire future of our people is on the line here. From our vantage point we can see that Isaac will survive, and we know that even while they may be changed, traumatized people can and often do, survive. But if we imagine we are these three main characters, we can understand that from their perspective it felt like the end of everything for all of them. For Sarah, the unimaginable death of her child. For Abraham, he would be responsible for causing the unimaginable death of his child. And for Isaac of course it is his life, taken by the person who’s meant to keep him safe. Who could have possibly imagined a hopeful future growing from that moment?
The midrash offers us two thoughts. The first is that Isaac is the author of the M’chayah Meitim prayer. During the T’filah, when we stand and call out the names of our ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel, we Reform Jews praise God for reviving all things, we say M’chayah Hakol. Because we are invested in the work that we do in partnership with God to renew and improve and heal the entire world. But the traditional blessing, which is offered in parenthesis in our prayer book, is M’chayah Meitim, a praise to God for reviving the dead. It is generally considered a messianic idea that teaches that at the end of the world, all the dead will rise. But one can imagine Isaac who experienced something very scary and very close to death praising God for changing the decree and raising him from the dead. This moment of terror that we read in the Torah today is a moment that reminds us that life will prevail in ways we cannot imagine, especially if we imagine that it is only up to us to fix things. “As for us, we do not know what to do, so our eyes are on You God.”
The other thought the rabbis offer us is the midrash that tells us of Rebecca’s birth. They tell us that Rebecca, the future wife of Isaac and the mother of Jacob and Essau, is born at that moment when the angel called to Abraham and Abraham saw the ram. Rebecca’s birth is the hope for the future of that first Jewish family that they could not have imagined at the moment when everything seemed about to end.
Things feel very difficult right now. And my job as a rabbi is to offer you, my congregation hope. Rabbi Yisrael Freedman of Ruszhyn (slide) comments on the words from Isaiah עמי ימי העץ כימי “The days of the tree are like the days of my people.” He says, “Israel [and here he means the Jewish people, he is writing long before the founding of the State of Israel] Israel is compared to a tree that stands naked and frozen in the winter. The storms blow it asunder and threaten to uproot it. At first glance, it appears as though its situation is hopeless. Indeed, also at this hour, in the midst of these winter days, the tree nurses renewed life from the depth of the earth. So too, Israel which is degraded and suffering all of its days, davka [even in spite of this] in these dark periods the light is already woven in. When despair appears to have taken over, the sap is already rising in the trees.”
This is Optimal Hope. When things look and feel very bleak davka the sap is already rising in the trees. This time feels very stressful and my job is to offer you hope. I believe there is hope to be found in the words of the Torah, I believe there is hope to be found in our work to heal the world, I believe that even when we cannot see it or feel it, our own sap is already rising and when we do not know what to do, I do believe there is a place to look for an option we may not yet have imagined.
And I’ll tell you something else. I believe that hope can be found in all of you. This morning we welcomed a new Jewish adult and a brand new baby. On Sunday I celebrated as one of our members stood under the chuppah. This past Saturday we celebrated 20 years in our community of the Holtzman Twins NICU at Peace Health, one that offers music therapy and follow up services to the smallest and most vulnerable people. And I heard our member David Nierenberg speak in front of his friends, business partners, and politicians, democrats, republicans, and independents about protecting the dignity and humanity of immigrants and their importance to our country. This year we had more than 70 people who are not yet members of our congregation make reservations to join us during the High Holy Days. I don’t know if I always am able to fulfill the role of offering you hope, but for sure, you are offering it to me.
One last note. Rabbi Rinat Safania of Shoham recently announced the fundraiser and shared the architectural plans to build a Reform Synagogue. What is amazing about this moment is that this is the first Reform synagogue in Israel to be granted land and funding from the municipality without having to demand it through the courts. This is new and this is a big deal. In past years, Reform synagogues in Israel have had to go through the court system in order to receive this kind of support from the government that any Orthodox Synagogue receives easily. Kehilat V’ahavta which means Congregation and you shall love is an Israeli egalitarian congregation in Shoham. In the midst of war, in a time of great upheaval a community that offers love is building. The kalanit, those beautiful red flowers will bloom again this winter in the harshest places. We know realistically our hopes for peace and for an end to antisemitism and all the other issues we are struggling with will be very hard to achieve and yet it is still reasonable to find hope amidst struggle. A solution may yet come that we have not considered. Ken Yehi Ratzon, may this be God’s will.[1]
[1] Much thanks to Rabbi Leon Morris for his webinar study session including many of these texts.