Join me if you know this:
Well the first days are the hardest days; don’t you worry anymore.
‘Cause when life looks like easy street, there is danger at the door.
Think this through with me; let me know your mind.
Oh-oh what I want to know, is are you kind?
That’s track one of the most important (or at least most used) gift I received on the occasion of my bar mitzvah fifty years ago. The gift came in the form of a cassette designed to look like a record album. There were two actually – the other was a bright green cassette of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung – but this one lived in another of my most used bar mitzvah gifts, a Sony mini boom box that made it to and through college nearly a decade later.
A new guitar player at the time, I wanted to learn and replicate every note and chord, and eventually did. It took a lot of years for me to notice that the song’s lyrics feature a quite profound version of what we might think of as ‘the four questions.’ Nothing here about matzah and maror, of course. Rather, Hunter and Garcia’s arba’ah kush’yot are these:
Are you kind?
Won’t you come with me?
Where does the time go?
How does the song go?
Of course, ours is a tradition built on the asking of questions – some are technical, like the questions with which the Talmud begins – me’eimatai korin et sh’ma b’arvit – at what hour can one recite the evening sh’ma? – but many are deep and penetrating, such as Pirkei Avot’s famous series attributed to Ben Zoma – who is wise, who is wealthy, who is powerful, who is honored?
The Mahzor and later the daily Siddur prompts us to ask such questions of ourselves – Mah anu: What is our life? Our goodness? Our righteousness? Our achievement? Our power? Our victories? What really can we say in Your Presence?
And the Torah and Haftarah readings on this first day of Rosh Hashanah bring us powerful, poignant and painful questions.
God to Hagar after Abraham has forced her and Ishmael out of his encampment – Mah lakh Hagar? What troubles you Hagar?
Or Elkanah to his wife Hannah during their annual visit to God’s shrine in Shiloh – לָ֣מֶה תִבְכִּ֗י וְלָ֙מֶה֙ לֹ֣א תֹֽאכְלִ֔י וְלָ֖מֶה יֵרַ֣ע לְבָבֵ֑ךְ – Why do you cry? And why won’t you eat? And why is your heart bitter?
This has been, indeed continues to be, a year of many questions. Questions of the piercing, penetrating variety; essential, even, existential questions. So much troubles us, and we have so much to cry about; our hearts are indeed bitter.
So here are four questions for your consideration —
Why do we feel so alone and what can we do about it?
What can we hope for in a moment of hopelessness?
How do we continue to support, love, help build Israel?
Can we see and feel the humanity of our enemies?
Each of my questions has sub-questions, or perhaps better put, questions generate more questions. And so these four questions may quickly morph into forty or more; just be forewarned!
Why do we feel so alone and what can we do about it?
The phrase ‘am l’vadad yishkon – a people that dwells alone – appears in the Torah as a blessing. Balaam, a local seer and prophet, is hired by Balak, king of Moab, to curse the Israelites whom Balak sees as a great threat. Guided by divine directive, Balaam can only speak words of blessing. “As I see them from the mountain tops, gaze on them from the heights, they are a people that dwells alone, that is not reckoned among the nations.”
The problem is that aloneness doesn’t feel like much of a blessing. The Bible’s collection of laments, grieving over the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the first Temple, begins with this cry: “Alas! Eikhah yashva vadad – Lonely sits the city once great with people! She that was great among nations is become like a widow; the princess among states Is become a slave.”
Alone doesn’t feel so good and we have felt alone for quite a while now, at least since October 7th 2023. Grieving over that day’s massacre in Israel and the war that has followed, and at the same time worrying deeply about anti-semitism and broken alliances and friendships in America, have dramatically magnified our sense of aloneness and isolation. We feel alone and we’re not liking it one bit.
Aloneness and isolation after all fly in the face of our essential ethos as American Jews. We’re supposed to fit in, be part of the fabric of this place, this culture, this civilization; and for most of us, for the most part, that has been our experience for the past 50 years and more. That’s meant to be the blessing of America! Now, seemingly all of a sudden, we’re feeling alone, not welcome, not heard; it’s jarring to say the least. And terrifying.
So what can we do about it? To my mind, part of the answer is to keep telling our story whether our friends and allies and others are listening or not. Eventually we will be heard; such at least is my faith in this place’s goodness. And we need to keep pursuing alliances and connections with as many neighbors and friends, former and future, as we can. I hope that will work; I hope it will help.
Which leads me to my next existential question for today.
What can we hope for in a moment of hopelessness?
First, let’s think together about this thing called hope. One of my heroes, Vaclav Havel, views hope as “a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul… an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart …” But that’s just the inside piece. Externally, hope bespeaks “an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is …” And even more, according to Havel, hope describes a creative dynamic, a way of being in the world. “It … gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”
Poet Adrienne Rich, writing at almost the exact same moment as Havel, poses a couple of additional questions for us.
“What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope? —“
“Although your life felt arduous new and unmapped and strange what would it mean to stand on the first page of the end of despair?”
We get to stand together on that first page of the end of despair, working to change one another’s fear and worry into hope.
Musician, poet, philosopher Nick Cave is here to encourage us.
“I think if we can move beyond the anxiety and dread and despair, there is a promise of something shifting not just culturally, but spiritually, too. Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit, and with it a great opportunity. We can seize this opportunity, or we can squander it and let it pass us by.”
And finally writer and activist Rebecca Solnit teaches us that “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.”
Will you join me in embracing the unknown and the unknowable with hope? Or as my rebbes Hunter and Garcia put it – will you come with me? won’t you come with me?
How do we continue to support, love, help build Israel?
In Israel’s first year, 1949, David Ben Gurion convened a pair of meetings of writers and intellectuals. At one of those gatherings Martin Buber asked an existential question.
“Do we still have a purpose?” he mused aloud. “We spoke of ‘redemption: the redemption of the soil, the redemption of labor,” said Buber. “We even spoke of the redemption of man in Israel. The matter was rooted in the concept of faith, but we destroyed that element of it. We spoke of redeeming the soil and we meant making it Jewish soil. Jewish soil to what end?”
“To bring forth bread out of the earth!” Ben-Gurion replied.
“What for?” Buber continued.
“To eat!”
“What for?” Buber kept pressing.
“Enough!” Ben-Gurion pronounced, quite enraged by then. “He asks questions to which there are no answers. Isn’t it enough to bring forth bread out of the earth? That’s not enough. For the sake of independence? Again, that’s not enough. For the sake of redeeming the Jewish people? Even that isn’t enough. And Professor Buber continues to ask why. Maybe he has a final answer, though I doubt it. So I ask him : What are all these questions for?”
My first visit to Kibbutz Kfar Aza took place in December; I was overwhelmed by the smell, the sounds, the sights, and the soot. I stood for a long time in front of a torched home – markings of all kinds on its walls – utter devastation inside, imagining who had lived there. It was ‘the young singles’ neighborhood on the kibbutz … they went after the 20 somethings … so it was a young adult who lived there. What was their name? Their loves? Their work? Did our son Josh, whose host family comes from Kfar Aza, know them? Surely his host family, Zohar and Nina Shpak and their children, did. What color were their eyes? Their hair? And…WHY? It just felt so senseless…Yes, I know all about Hamas’s ideology, but still… And while I’m here, where was the army on that terrible morning? Shouldn’t they have been there?
On a later visit I learned whose home it was. Nirel Zini and Niv Raviv had lived on Kfar Aza for just 6 months. Nirel grew up nearby on a religious moshav called Tlamim, Niv came from Netanya the daughter of a secular family. They met in the army, were together for 8 years and planned to settle down at Kfar Aza. Niv’s sister-in-law described them this way: “They wanted to live in the kibbutz and live a simple life. They said it was paradise. They loved the kibbutz, the community, the people. They were happy there. Niv said she could see their children running on the paths there. Nirel planned to propose to Niv, and she wanted to get married on October 10 next year. They were always busy. Helped, volunteered and donated. They were so good. Helped family and friends.”
Can we help to rebuild Kibbutz Kfar Aza and the shattered and traumatized communities of Israel’s south? Please?
And while we’re engaged in that work of tikkun ‘olam, can we also find it in our hearts to see and feel the humanity of our enemies?
I want to share with you a stunning contemporary Midrash written by Rabbi Yael Vurgan who leads Kehillat Shaar haNegev, a regional congregation comprising ten of the kibbutzim in the Gaza Envelope.
Yael said,
“All my days, I grieved over this verse: ‘And God said to her, two nations are in your belly, and two peoples will go their separate ways from your bowels, and one people another will overpower, and the elder will serve the younger’. (Genesis 25:23)
“And I asked: How did Rebekah hear this harsh prophecy while Isaiah heard ‘no nation will take up a sword against another nor shall they learn war anymore’ (Isaiah 2:4)?”
And I heard most of the people and the leaders saying: we will live by the sword forever, and I grieved and wept even more, that they prefer that bad prophecy that Rebecca heard over the good one. Until a poem came into my hands:
I will believe in the future too
Even if it is far off today,
But it will come, they will come bearing peace,
And then, blessings, one people to another.
And I rejoiced a great joy that Tchernikhovsky had come and turned the first prophecy upside down, and made it like the second, better one. And I too, chose to believe in it, with all my heart and all my might.
And I would go about in the city and call out, and shout: The two nations can, they can, live on this land in peace, share its blessings and be a blessing to one another!
As you know, Nomi and I became grandparents this past year. Josh and Dani welcomed Liam Melvin Ackerman to the world on May 24th. Blessedly, we were able to spend much of the summer in Israel and Liam and his parents were with us here for four beautiful weeks from late August to late September. Which means that we got to see and be with Liam everyday for close to three of his four months on the planet so far! Liam in Hebrew means ’to me there is a people.’ At his naming Dani and Josh expressed their hope that Liam will always feel a part of the Jewish people, committed always to our people’s well being. They also shared that his name is an acronym for the last four words of Isaiah’s prophecy of peace – in Hebrew: lo yilm’du ‘od milhama – ‘nor shall they learn war anymore.’
לֹא יִשָּׂא גוֹי אֶל גּוֹי חֶרֶב וְלֹא יִלְמְדוּ עוֹד מִלְחָמָה
Can we hear that prophecy together this year? Please?
And if you want to know ‘how does the song go’ – it sounds something like this:
Lo yisa goy el goy herev v’lo yilm’du ‘od milhama
