I want to start the new year by naming the elephant in the room.

This year some of us have been deeply worried about Israel and Israelis. We can’t stop thinking about October 7 and Israeli hostages in Gaza. Maybe we’ve lived in Israel. Maybe we have family or friends in Israel and they know someone who was killed or taken prisoner. Compounding all of that, maybe we feel like the world has turned on Israel, maybe on all Jews. We’re worried about Jews worldwide at increased risk. Every anti-Zionist slogan, or boycott of a Jewish or Israeli business, or campus protest, leaves us feeling like the world doesn’t want us to bring our whole Jewish self to the table.

And some of us have been a wreck because of Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon. Maybe we have a familial connection there, or maybe our families are Arab or Muslim. We yearn for a ceasefire; maybe we’ve been standing out for one in the Williamstown roundabout every Friday. Compounding all of that, we feel alienated from the sector of the Jewish community that seems not to feel what we feel. Maybe we aren’t comfortable with Zionism, or maybe with any kind of nationalism, and we wonder how to find home in a Jewish community that doesn’t see this the way we do.

These are composite people, but between them, they represent most of the conversations I’ve had this year. Some of us are feeling elements of both of these. And some of us are feeling just one – and alienated from whoever’s feeling the other. Many of us have been somatizing our grief, and rage, and hopelessness: experiencing them in the body. This is, it turns out, a trauma reaction.

When something activates trauma, time telescopes. Even if danger isn’t present here and now, the body feels like it is. The body responds with fight-or-flight, sometimes both at once. Cortisol and adrenaline go through the roof. Cue the wobbly legs, upset stomach, racing heart, tears, and inability to breathe. For many of us, this kind of trauma reaction has been a big part of the story of this year.

I used to think that as Jews, we had a problem with over-focusing on antisemitism. There is so much richness and vitality in our traditions, texts, cultures, music, poetry, ethics, and more. I want our Judaism to be affirmative! I don’t want anyone’s Jewish identity to feel based in how people have hated us throughout history… or how some people still do.

Lately I’ve been thinking that even when we talk about antisemitism, we haven’t paid enough attention to what we carry within us. For many of us, the Hamas attacks on October 7 aroused dormant trauma. And then we saw people seemingly rejoicing at the slaughter of Jews, and that aroused trauma too. So did (what felt like) waves of allies abandoning us. Many of us felt like the world just doesn’t care about Jewish suffering or Jewish safety, which awoke epigenetic echoes from the Shoah and from long before.

Many of us in the CBI community and extended family also feel these traumas from a different lens, or from multiple lenses. Arabs and Muslims also carry trauma, including impacts from American Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism after 9/11. Some of us are both Arab and Jewish. Jews with roots in Syria, Lebanon, or Iraq have different traumatic histories than the Ashkenazi history I carry in my bones.

Many of us have struggled this year with moral injury, damage to the conscience when one witnesses or fails to prevent something wrong. What we’re seeing has been so devastating. Meanwhile, emotional reactivity can make it much harder for us to relate to each other. Some of us are terrified for Israeli cousins called up for reserve duty. And some of us see an oppressive military force in those same reserve soldiers. Faced with that difference, we don’t know how to listen to each other.

Many of you have told me that you’ve been avoiding Jewish spaces because it’s too painful to encounter Jews who hold the “other” view.

Many of you have asked me, “How could anybody Jewish not see what I see happening right now?” These divisions can be exquisitely painful: within our families, within our community, within the Jewish community writ large. So we brace ourselves against the likelihood of being angry at each other, or disappointed in each other. But “braced against” is not a great way to be in community, and it’s not the spiritual posture I want for us at the start of a new year.

Instead I invite us to recognize our trauma reactions, name them, honor them, and learn to work with them – for our own emotional and spiritual health, and for the health of our community. For me, naming trauma reactions as trauma reactions helps me seek equilibrium. When I notice that I’m experiencing a trauma reaction, I use my senses to ground myself in the here-and-now, and I remind myself that I am safe. The main message I want to convey about this is: a trauma-informed therapist can help. The effects of personal or inherited trauma do not have to be forever.

My mother fled the Holocaust as a young child. I didn’t begin to reckon with the impacts of her story on me until after October 7. I am learning how important this work is – and what it feels like to heal enough to put things in perspective and not be reacting from a place of fear. This year I needed to put on my own oxygen mask. And now when I feel like I can remove that oxygen mask sometimes, I can better help others sit with the uncomfortable reality that multiple things can be true.

The Hamas attack of October 7 was the deadliest day for Jews anywhere since the Holocaust. Over a thousand Jews were killed, thousands were injured, and hundreds were kidnapped. As of this writing, Hamas still holds Israeli hostages in Gaza. And. The war in Gaza has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Starvation and disease are crippling Gaza – including, now, a resurgence of polio – and in the West Bank, attacks by extremist settlers and army raids are on the rise. Honoring one of these realities does not make the other less true.

Some of us feel that our grief and fury for Palestinians or Arabs isn’t welcome in Jewish community. Some of us feel that our grief and fury for Israel and Israelis isn’t welcome anywhere else. Some of us feel that acknowledging any degree of truth in a different perspective on the Middle East is a betrayal of people and values we hold dear. But I don’t think it has to be.

It is not a betrayal of the Israeli people to care about Palestinian self-determination. And it is not a betrayal of the Palestinian people to care about Israeli safety. The world is not a zero-sum game.

In the months after October 7, many of you asked me if we could learn more as a community about this. I heard a particular interest in learning about some of the words we often see in the news: what exactly does “the occupation” mean? Who are “settlers” in the West Bank, and what are they doing (and why)? As American Jews, what are the stories we don’t hear, and where are the gaps in our knowledge and understanding?

We began some of that learning together at our summer film series and in the heartfelt and vulnerable discussions that followed each film. And I hope we’ll do more together in the new year. On Sunday, November 3 – about a week after Simhat Torah – we’ll gather here in this sanctuary to talk about what kind of learning we want to do on these subjects in the new year. I hope many of you will join us for that conversation and for the learning. And, I affirm that all of this can be incredibly painful to talk about and learn about, especially in a time when both the Israeli and Palestinian people feel existentially under threat… and therefore, emotionally, maybe we do too.

This all feels like a “third rail” – you know: the one that electrocutes whoever touches it. But not talking about it doesn’t feel tenable anymore. I am here to gently urge us not to turn away – from these realities, or from each other.

It is not a betrayal of solidarity with either people to recognize that in order for one people to thrive, the other needs to thrive too.

One of my role models in this is Rabbi Haviva Ner-David. She is part of نقف معًا | עומדים ביחד | Standing Together, a grassroots movement bringing together Arabs and Jews to organize against the occupation and for justice and peace. R. Ner-David has shared posts on her Facebook about Palestinian and Israeli teens learning together, about visiting the mourning tent for a Bedouin neighbor killed in Gaza, about learning Arabic with her neighbors, about Israelis and Palestinians protesting together and together countering despair. They’re doing the difficult and holy work of building community even in this terrible year.

Sally Abed, a Palestinian who is one of the leaders of Standing Together, says, “We need a new story. Our mission is to build a new majority around peace, equality for all, and ending the occupation.” She acknowledges that, “peace right now is a very, very radical word. But it’s also the only option. I think in very deep crisis, you also have great clarity.”

I keep returning to this short poem by Mahmoud Darwish: “She said: when do we meet? I said: after a year and a war. She said: when does the war end? I said: after we meet.” Genuinely meeting may feel impossible – but it doesn’t have to be. Not for Israelis and Palestinians on the ground there; and not for us.

It is easy to get caught up in where we feel different: one’s focusing on a ceasefire, the other’s focusing on the hostages, so we feel like we’re in opposition. We divide into camps based on where we place blame and with whom we feel kinship. I encourage us to go deeper and plumb the Jewish values at the heart of our yearnings. The one who’s grieving for this side and the one who’s grieving for that side actually have a lot in common, if we can let ourselves feel it. Trying to feel-with each one of you has been my profoundest spiritual practice this year.

All year long I’ve urged us to consciously cultivate empathy for whichever “side” doesn’t feel easy for us. I know that some of us object to that posture, seeing it as implying moral equivalency between victim and perpetrator. I believe that empathy is our ethical obligation. And empathy leads us to take action.

The Hebrew אֶמפַּתִיָה is a transliteration of the Greek εμπάθεια. So is empathy really a Jewish value? Of course I’m going to say yes. French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that we are infinitely responsible in the face of the “Other.”

In other words: in a genuine encounter, we feel with someone and therefore we have a responsibility to them. We feel, and because we feel we are obligated to act.

In midrash we read that, “A human being, mere flesh and blood, cannot hear the cries of two individuals simultaneously. However, the Creator can. Even when all of the world’s inhabitants cry out at once, God hears every individual cry.’” (Yalkut on Ps. 62) Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersch Weinreb goes on to say, “No [one] can feel the pain of two different individuals at the same moment. The emotional effort needed to truly empathize with one other person is all-consuming, and there is no room left within us to feel the pain of yet another person at that same time. Only the Almighty can ‘multi-task’ empathy.” He may be right about that. But I still believe it’s our job to try.

Just as I’m asking us to strengthen empathy for both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, I’m asking us to strengthen empathy for each other here. We need each other to make a minyan, to celebrate our births and uplift our teens and dance at our weddings and bury our dead. If someone is gathering ten for kaddish, there is no political litmus test for participation.

Talmud teaches that כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה, “all Israel is responsible for one another.” (Shevuot 39a) We are Yisrael: God-wrestlers, after our forebear Jacob who wrestled with the angel. If we can wrestle and dance with God (whatever that word means to each of us), we can do the same with each other.

And in an election year shadowed by Christian nationalism, community fragmentation is the last thing we need. Project 2025 poses real dangers for Jews. One lawmaker from my birthplace remarked this summer that he’d like to “ethnic cleanse” people like me. We’ve all heard the Hitler-style argument that immigrants “poison the blood of our country.” Neo-Nazi and far-right groups are increasingly vocal.

All of this can activate our anxiety and our trauma, too – and reinforces for me that as Jews we need each other, even when we disagree. Christian nationalism threatens us whether we stand in solidarity with Israelis or with Palestinians (or both).

That we can be in community even when we disagree is not a new idea. The sages of the Talmud share page space across fierce disagreements. Hillel and Shammai are the paradigmatic example of disagreement “for the sake of Heaven.” In R. Danya Ruttenberg’s words, they “engaged in earnest debate, sometimes jabbing in jest, sometimes possibly angry and hurt, sometimes just… living in community, and disagreement.” She goes on to note that the house of Hillel and the house of Shammai,

[H]ad directly contradictory rulings from one another, but they still lived as though the other’s ruling was kosher: They were popping in and out of each other’s homes! Borrowing each other’s stuff! Marrying each other’s people – they were family! They were community! These contradictory rulings about what God said was OK to do and not to do – and the long fights and debates that accompanied them – didn’t preclude the bread-breaking. [emphasis hers]

We may be conflict-averse, but Hillel and Shammai weren’t. They were “conflict-adept.” And they understood themselves as part of a single community. So can we.

This is a recent cover from The Canadian Jewish News, which is not a progressive publication. It shows a family celebrating Rosh Hashanah, sharing pomegranates as a symbol of blessing in the new year. I see a mom taking a selfie with her daughter, people gesticulating animatedly, joyful smiles. I see a grandmother standing between two granddaughters, one of whom is wearing a kefiyyeh and watermelon earrings, symbols of support for Palestinians. That grandmother is a Zionist, wearing a yellow “bring them home” pin. And they are family and they are celebrating together!

At the bottom of the frame I see maybe a mom with her head in her hands, and someone looking at war news on their phone. The sorrow and suffering of the world is still here. But we find ways to celebrate together even across our differences, in this broken world, and in these painful times. Because that is what it means to be Jews.

As we sang earlier this morning, “The world stands on three things: learning, prayer / service, and acts of loving kindness.” (Pirkei Avot 1:2) I invite us to learn, and pray, and take care of each other with bravery and hope and curiosity. Bravery, because it takes courage to show up with our whole selves when we know someone in the room is different from us. Hope, because in Mariame Kaba’s words (now framed on the wall of my office) hope is a discipline – it’s a muscle we have to keep strengthening. And curiosity, because Pirkei Avot counsels us to see one another through generous eyes.

Instead of assuming the worst of people with whom we may disagree about Israel and Palestine, can we seek to learn with open hearts – can we, in Ted Lasso’s words, “be curious, not judgmental”?

I think that if we can do that, we’ll discover common ground where we can gather to celebrate and to mourn, to mark the rhythms of the Jewish year, to teach and learn Torah. We can feed the hungry and care for the vulnerable. We can do these things for and with each other even though we don’t all hold the same views on Israel and Palestine. And as we do, we can learn from and with and about each other.

I mentioned Hillel and Shammai. There’s a story in Talmud (Eruvin 13b) where Hillel and Shammai argue something for three years, and then a voice from Heaven calls out, “.אלו ואלו דברי אלהים חיים הן, והלכה כב”ה” – “These and those are the words of the living God, and the halakha follows the house of Hillel.” Why does the voice from on high favor Hillel? According to tradition, it’s because Hillel’s students learned both Hillel’s and Shammai’s opinions. Are we brave enough to follow suit?

I believe that the only way we get to a better world is by building one together… and if we only build with people with whom we are perfectly aligned, a lot of important building work isn’t going to get done. But the needs are too great for that. The stakes are too high for that. The world needs us to figure out how to work together. And our hearts and souls need that, too.

In 5785, as a community, may we be curious, not judgmental.

May we work through our own trauma so we can do right by each other.

May we lean in to shared values even when we disagree.

May we press for a world of justice, human rights, and safety for all.

And may we be there for each other in sorrow and in joy, in sickness and in health, for all of our days to come.

This is the sermon that Rabbi Rachel offered on the first morning of Rosh Hashanah 5785 / 2024. (Cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.)