What Rupture Can Bring: Rosh Hashanah 5786 Day 1

Last year, I stood here and talked about how it had been one of the hardest, most disorienting years of my life, of our community’s life– reckoning with the aftermath of October 7th and the ongoing war in Gaza. Trying to wrap my head around so much of the disconnection, anger, and grievance that seems to fuel our government and our culture. Trying, as best as I could, to keep my head above water, and protect my heart. And I had hoped, perhaps naively, that by the time this Rosh Hashanah arrived, by the time I took my perch here on the bimah to talk with you all, that things would be different. Marginally better, at least. That we could enter this new year feeling triumphant– like we had emerged from the many crucibles of our moment, transformed, changed forever, and hopefully for the better. That we would feel safe and hopeful. But things haven’t changed. And the many dangerous status quos persist. 

Recently, we have seen a sharp rise in extremist rhetoric and political violence. In 2025 alone, there have been 302 mass shootings– schools, places of worship, neighborhoods and birthday parties, all targets (According to the Gun Violence Archive. Since the first day of Rosh Hashanah, this number has risen to 317). The continued and unchecked access to assault weapons, to guns created for the sole purpose of causing injury or death, a deep stain on the moral center of our country. We’re seeing the most vulnerable in our communities targeted by punitive attempts to scale back a budget- leaving those who rely on medicaid, on food and housing assistance with nowhere to go, priced out of markets, healthcare, the American dream. Increasing barriers to vaccination, the rolling back of decades-long public health policy. There is so much to worry about. And I fear that our spiritual reserves are dangerously close to running dry. If our hearts were broken last year, this year, they seem to be crushed, buried beneath a rubble of our own making. 

And I can’t tell you how desperately I wanted to talk about something else. How desperately I wanted to share a different truth, paint a different picture of who we are as a nation. And I know that regardless of where you sit on the political map, few of us would say that this level of suffering, of uncertainty, or fear is acceptable. 

I try my very best to find comfort in Psalm 121:

שִׁיר לַמַּעֲלוֹת אֶשָּׂא עֵינַי אֶל־הֶהָרִים מֵאַיִן יָבֹא עֶזְרִי׃

עֶזְרִי מֵעִם ד עֹשֵׂה שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ׃

I turn my eyes to the mountains; from where will my help come? My help comes from G-d,

maker of heaven and earth.

Or in Psalm 130: 

שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת מִמַּעֲמַקִּים קְרָאתִיךָ ד׃

אֲדֹנָי שִׁמְעָה בְקוֹלִי תִּהְיֶינָה אׇזְנֶיךָ קַשֻּׁבוֹת לְקוֹל תַּחֲנוּנָי׃

Out of the depths I call You, G-d. O G-d, please listen to my cry; let Your ears be attentive to my plea for mercy.

But I admit to you that I can’t always do that. Can’t always find the comfort or the strength or the faith or the trust that each of us need to weather this world and all it has thrown at us. How could G-d let all this happen? To be sure, Judaism is my anchor. Our tradition and our texts, a grounding and constant presence in my life. But, in this moment, the Psalms feel too simple, too easy. 

And as if all this weren’t enough, there is an added layer of Jewish pain– that is thick, opaque, and increasingly hard to move through. And it’s what has made this year particularly challenging. The war in Gaza continues to rage, and Jewish communities around the world continue to tear themselves apart over questions around the legitimacy of the war and the future of Zionism. 48 hostages still remain captive by Hamas in Gaza. The death toll in Gaza nearing 65,000 since October 2023. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians repeatedly displaced from their homes in the Gaza strip. Israelis traumatized, begging their government for this war to end, for the hostages to come home. For peace. 

We have become skeptical, suspicious of one another, having set standards and created baseline definitions for political commitments that maybe don’t meet the reality anymore. We have made clear and painful distinctions about who is welcome in the Jewish tent and who isn’t. Who is a good Jew, and who is a bad, traitorous Jew. 

We’re seeing a rise in antisemitism and white-nationalist rhetoric at the very highest levels of our government– so much of which has permeated our society and culture, and has left many of us feeling frightened, raw, and vulnerable. Many of you have shared with me that you don’t disclose to students or co-workers that you are Jewish– the risk just too high. Fear, real, palpable fear is holding us back from so much. From talking more openly, from more freely embracing our culture, religion, and identity as Jews. 

We’re reading about the rift between mainstream Jewish institutions and their non-Zionist members. We’re seeing data on the growing disaffection of young Jews from synagogue life. Almost every day, I get close to a dozen emails about the state of Jewish life in North America. One that even includes siren emojis that flank both sides of the subject line– signaling urgency and alarm! That the Jewish people are in a state of emergency. On the surface, the data and the demographic shifts are troubling, to be sure. There is a lot to be worried about. And many legitimate questions about our future– and the inevitable grief that comes with acknowledging and accepting that it’s a future we may not recognize. 

But we have been here before. In fact, our story as Jews is one that is built on building and rebuilding time after time. We are masters of redefining who we are in moments of crisis and tragedy, and we are preternaturally built not only to meet the moment, but to redefine our Jewishness specifically so we can preserve Judaism and ensure that it not only survives, but can thrive and flourish in new and unprecedented times. 

And so I struggle to understand the insistence on reminding us that we should be afraid, that we should be existentially concerned for the future of Judaism. Judaism is changing, yes. But it can’t break. It’s stronger than that, more resilient than that. 

Perhaps with the exception of the Exodus from Egypt, the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE was the most pivotal, existentially threatening moment of transformative opportunity for the Jewish people. And it’s this beautiful, modern, Judaism that we all know and practice and experience today, that emerges from that moment of rupture. 

Rabbi Benay Lappe, a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and founder, President, and Rosh Yeshiva of Svara: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva based in Chicago, talks about this moment in 69-70 CE as the crash, the inevitable breakdown of one master story, that surprisingly gives rise to a new story, and a radical, new Jewish story that has stood the test of time for all these years. 

Before the Temple was destroyed, the Jewish community of Israel saw the writing on the wall, and they responded in ways that we may actually see playing out today, and perhaps all throughout our history in various cycles. Here, Rabbi Lappe identifies three options for confronting and responding to a crash:

Option #1: Deny the crash, and return to your master story, take refuge in it. In this case, you’ll build a wall around your master story. You’ll shore it up and reinforce it so no threatening information can get it. Nothing can taint it. You’ll keep the things that are most important to you, but you’ll pay a steep price. The priests, the Kohanim, go option one. They are employed by the master story, they earn their living by it. And they can’t imagine theirs or any other Jew’s life differently. They do everything they can to protect the master story to preserve their way of being Jewish. 

Option #2: You can accept the crash. Reject your master story, and jump off into a new story. But crashes are inevitable, so you will have to jump from one story to the next, to the next, and to the next, and on and on and on. Never quite finding your place, never settling in a master story that has you at the center, or that can withstand the vicissitudes of history. Historical records from the Temple period show that 90% of the Jewish people went option two after the Temple was destroyed. They left Judaism, and completely melted into the Roman Empire.

I understand the instinct to choose option two. When your world has been destroyed, your places of worship sacked and desecrated. When you can’t see a viable or safe future for your or your family, you run. You take shelter in the systems that have power, and you begin to rebuild your life all over again, in the shadow of what once stood. 

But there is yet another option. Option #3: Enter the Rabbis. In Rabbi Lappe’s words, “these fringe, hippie, weirdo guys,” transformed the Jewish world forever. Because what they did was radical, unprecedented, and completely unfathomable to the vast majority of Jews living at the time. The Rabbis accept the crash, they embrace it! They don’t reject or bury their heads in the sand. Somehow, miraculously, they are not afraid of what it might mean. And what they did next is the most important piece of this story. After they had accepted what was happening– that Judaism as they knew it would cease to exist– they went back to the tradition, took with them what still worked, mixed the old with the new, and created a beautiful, viable, radical new tradition, a new Judaism, that would have been unrecognizable to a Temple Jew. 

Every single one of us who is here, every single Jewish person who has lived a Jewish life since 70 CE, could do so only because these fringey, brilliant outcasts rejected the inertia and the defeat that the Romans expected. In the face of unimaginable suffering, catastrophe, and uncertainty, this group that would later come to be known as the “rabbis,” refused to accept the certain death of our people. The rabbis knew that Judaism was going to change forever. Those were the choices: embrace change, or watch it all wither away. And so they did what they could in their lifetimes to ensure that Judaism would be pliable enough, and would have enough depth, to weather all sorts of change– so that even a series of major crises wouldn’t be enough to break it forever. And this choice gave us the diaspora, the Talmud, the vast and still expanding Halachic canon. It gave us modern Judaism, and synagogues like OZS, and Jewish diversity, and rabbinical schools and appreciation for the minority opinion. Everything that we know about Judaism, the Judaism that we practice today, was born of that moment and that choice nearly 2000 years ago. 

I’m reminded of the midrash that describes Moshe sitting on Mount Sinai, watching G-d affix crowns to the letters of the Torah. Moshe asks why G-d insists on adding these flourishes? G-d says, there is a man who is destined to be born after several generations, and Akiva ben Yosef is his name; he is destined to derive from each and every thorn of these crowns mounds and mounds of halakhot, laws. It is for his sake that the crowns must be added to the letters of the Torah. 

Even G-d knows, from the very beginning of our covenantal relationship, that it will change.

Moshe asks to see Rabbi Akiva. And in a perfect storm of spirituality and magical realism, G-d flings Moshe nearly 1500 years into the future, right into Rabbi Akiva’s Beit Midrash, his study hall, his classroom. The midrash teaches that Moshe sat at the very end of the eighth row. Rabbi Akiva is teaching his students, and it dawns on Moshe that he has no idea what’s going on. He doesn’t understand the Halacha, the law, that Rabbi Akiva is teaching, and he begins to worry that his own Torah study and knowledge is deficient. Even Moshe, our wise leader who cemented our story as a people, cannot understand or recognize this future iteration of Judaism that he helped to create! 

And just as soon as Moshe begins to worry, another student asks:

My teacher, from where do you derive this? Rabbi Akiva said to them: It is a halakha transmitted to Moses from Sinai. When Moses heard this, his mind was put at ease, as this too was part of the Torah that he was to receive.

The changes, the expansion, the rupture even, it was all built into our tradition and our DNA from the very beginning. G-d gave us an unbelievable gift, did an unbound act of Chesed for us, in this way. Being Jewish, being part of this still unfolding story, has always meant adapting. Not only because it’s often required, but because that is precisely what gives Judaism its power, its strength, and its depth. 

In Avot D’Rabbi Natan, the Rabbis share yet another midrash about the covenantal moment at Sinai:

This is one of the things which Moshe did of his own accord… He broke the Tablets of the Commandments, and his judgment coincided with G-d’s… He took the Tablets of the Commandments and descended and was exceedingly glad. When he saw the people worshipping the Golden Calf, he said to himself: “How can I give them the Tablets of the Commandments, for if I do do I will be obligating them major commandments and condemning them to death at the hands of Heaven; for it is written in the Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Moshe then started back up the mountain, but the seventy Elders saw him and ran after him. He held fast to one end of the Tablets, and they held fast to the other, but Moshe’s strength prevailed over theirs…As he was ascending the mountain, he looked at the Tablets and saw that the words had flown away and ascended from them. How can I give Israel tablets with nothing on them, he thought; better I take hold of them and break them. 

I love this Midrash because it’s subversive, and is a total departure from the way we traditionally read this moment. But I also love it because we see the same three options that Rabbi Lappe points to playing out here. The שבעים זקנים, the seventy elders, are later reflected in the priests, who choose option #1. Holding tight and fast to the status quo, to the way they believed things had always been and always should be. The people, those dancing around the Golden Calf choose option #2. In a moment of fear, unsure that Moshe would ever come back down the mountain, they choose a new story and a new path. And Moshe here, becomes the bearer of option #3, the proto-rabbi. Choosing to do something radical and rupture-making, for the sake of preserving that which is most sacred, Jewish peoplehood. In breaking the Luchot, Moshe saves us from certain death, from having to start our story over from the very beginning. According to this Midrash, it is precisely because Moshe shatters the tablets, that the Jewish story, that our wanderings through the desert, that our covenantal and ever-changing relationship to who we are becomes uniquely possible. 

In his 2023 book, Who Are the Jews and Who Can We Become?, Rabbi Donniel Hartman observes that:

Rabbinic tradition notices that while G-d commanded Moshe to descend the mountain, G-d nevertheless leaves the Commandments in Moshe’s hands. Moshe decides to shatter them- and to the Rabbis, this story is not about anger, but about love. Moshe wants to return the Torah to G-d because he realizes that if he gives it to the people in their current idolatrous state, he will be condemning them to death given the Torah’s prohibition against idolatry. So where does Moshe’s primary loyalty lie? With the word of G-d or with G-d’s people? Moshe chooses the latter, with shocking ramifications: his obligation to the people’s well-being takes primacy even over G-d’s Torah. 

To me, the thread that our people and our leaders weave through each of these distinct moments in our history is the miraculous and beautiful alchemy of equal love for the Jewish people and the Jewish tradition. And I sometimes wonder if what makes our current moment so difficult to understand and even more difficult to live through, is that we often prioritize one over the other, sometimes pitting one against the other. When we prioritize the people over the tradition, we run the risk of diluting the richness and the depth of Jewish culture and religion. The things that, however you practice or observe, or don’t, bind us to one another. And when we prioritize tradition over our own people, we forget that the Jewish tent has always been wide– like Abraham and Sarah’s tent, open on all sides. That there has always been plenty of room for everyone. 

We forget that our tradition is not only resilient enough, but specifically designed to contain disagreement, departure, and conflict. And this is the hard part. This includes anti-Zionist and Zionist Jews alike. Queer Jews. Politically conservative and progressive Jews. Jews in interfaith families. Reform, Conservative, Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Every single Jewish person, past present, and future, regardless of identity, affiliation, or political commitment. It’s why the Torah was given to everyone, and why we so eagerly accepted. Because we understood our acceptance in that moment to mean that we were becoming responsible for a tradition and a people that would change and evolve over time. What a weighty and exciting commitment! 

I don’t think we’re headed for another crash, but I know it feels like we are. I know it feels like we’ve lost our center, that we’ve become unmoored and disconnected from the most precious things that have kept our people grounded for thousands of years. I know it sometimes feels like Judaism is slipping right through our fingers. 

Through the muck of all this heartbreak, we have forgotten that our Judaism can hold it all. And maybe some part of our compassion and our expansiveness has been gobbled up by the cruelty all around. But if we allow our Judaism to be subsumed by perceived crises; if we let ourselves as Jews be defined by the most excruciating parts of our story, we’ve given up, and we’ve written the final chapter of the story the Rabbis started writing for us 2000 years ago.

So this year at OZS, we will embark on a collective journey to reclaim our Judaism, and all that it contains. To learn about Judaism’s most essential teachings– Shabbat, Kashrut, the Jewish Holidays, Prayer, and lifecycles. To rededicate ourselves to the sacred work of choosing option #3 over and over and over again. Please, find your place here. Bring your questions here. Add your voice and your heart and your mind to the learning that keeps our people going.