Rosh Ha-Shanah sermon presented by Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah to Sukkat Shalom on 2nd October 2024 / 29th Elul 5784.

The sun has set on the old year. Do we feel that a New Year has begun? Almost twelve months have passed since October 7. That devastating year continues for another few days. And what of October 8? We are longing for the horror of war to end, but we know that even the advent of a ceasefire, even the return of the remaining hostages, will not mean an end to the pain and suffering, grief and loss. The twelve hundred massacred on October 7. The 250 hostages torn away. The captives violated. The survivors bearing their losses, unable to return to homes ravaged by fire. The families of the hostages waiting month after month for the return of their loved ones. The tens of thousands killed and severely injured in Gaza during Israel's retaliatory war against Hamas, their bodies, minds and spirits broken. The bereaved, whose homes lie in ruins. An entire people living in daily terror, for almost 365 days now, subject to displacement again and again, with no hope of safe refuge. And then, there is the conflict across the northern border between Israel and Hezbollah. More than sixty thousand Israelis have been displaced from their homes for almost a year, and over a million Lebanese citizens have now taken flight, with at least one thousand killed and injured so far in the bombardments. And now, just yesterday, a terrifying escalation, with a large-scale ballistic missile attack launched by Iran against Israel.

Those who have lived through the torment of the past twelve months will continue to live in torment whatever happens in the coming weeks and months. And what of us? Although we are thousands of miles away, the continuous news coverage means that we have been and continue to be witnesses. And of course, as Jews, we are more than witnesses. Some of us have family and friends in Israel. And even without that kind of tangible connection, we our part of the people Israel, which includes the Jewish citizens of the State of Israel. We are also Progressive Jews, committed to the values of justice and peace. Our hearts break for both Israelis and Palestinians. And so, we, too, feel the torment, as we continue to struggle with feelings of helplessness, and ask ourselves: What can we do?

The question itself is tormenting. The sky is dark. The New Year has barely begun. Before we consider setting ourselves the task of doing anything, we have to address ourselves; we have to examine our lives over the past year. As we struggle with our feelings of helplessness alongside our desperate need to discern the possibilities for renewal in the New Year, we have to ask ourselves more immediate questions: Are we, ourselves, prepared and ready to change? Do we feel able, as individuals, to change? Hebrew is a very concise language. Unlike English, which proliferates words that basically share the same meanings, Hebrew proliferates meanings out of single words. And so, it is with the word ‘change’ in Hebrew. Rosh Ha-Shanah, means, literally, ‘head of the year’, and many of us will utter the greeting, shanah tovah, and wish one another a ‘good year’. Interestingly, the root meaning of shanah, ‘year’ – means ‘change’, and also, paradoxically, ‘repeat’. When we consider what is entailed in a year, the paradox makes sense. A New Year signals change, and also continuity: every year we repeat the cycle of the sacred days; and as a new cycle begins, we also face the as yet unknown future that lies ahead, and the challenge to change.

Repetition and change. As we look back on the past year, do we long for change? Or do we long for certainty and stability? As I ask myself these questions, the words of Black American lesbian singer-songwriter, Tracy Chapman, come to mind. In her song, ‘Change’, which is the first item on her 2005 album, Where You Live, Tracy Chapman interrogates the listener in an effort to explore the circumstances that make us change. She does this by challenging us with a series of questions around one repeated question: ‘Would you change?’ It's a wonderful song, and if you don't know it, you can find it online. It's also very insistent. Tracy Chapman throws out challenge after challenge. The penultimate challenge hits hard:

If everything you think you know
Makes your life unbearable
Would you change?
Would you change?

This challenge gets to me because it seems that the response is obvious. If everything that I think I know makes my life unbearable, then, of course, I would change. But would I? Do we change when our lives become unbearable? Or do we feel that bearing the unbearable is more bearable than finding the courage we need to change? Which begs the question: Why is the prospect of changing ourselves so unbearable? Is it that, having tried to change on many previous occasions – not least at the New Year – and failed, we feel that we are incapable of changing? But if we do feel that we are basically incapable of change, how can we expect anything to change in the world around us? I'm sure many of us are familiar with the stock-phrase, ‘Be the change that you want to see’, which has become part of the self-help tool-kit in recent years. Like many of the other soundbite products of the market that has developed in response to our urge for instant self-improvement solutions, the call to ‘be the change you want to see’, does not address the difficulties many of us may feel in effecting change in ourselves and in our lives. One of the problems with it is that it doesn't address a major obstacle to personal change: fear. How can I be the change I want to see if I'm afraid of what might happen if I change? Will I be able to hold myself together? Will I be able to keep my family together? Will I be able to maintain my friendships and my relationships with colleagues at work? If I change, will they whole edifice of my life crumble around me? Fear, can be overwhelming. It can certainly hold us back from stepping out along new pathways. But let us not forget: Fear is not a pathological feeling. Feeling fear is essential to our survival. Without fear of real danger holding us back, we might run headlong into it: fall off the edge of a cliff, be hit by a speeding car. Fear helps us to navigate as we go about our lives. On the other hand, those who become overcome with fear as a habitual response, may end up not leaving their homes. The last song on Tracy Chapman’s Where You Live album speaks to this dilemma: ‘Be and be not afraid’. We have to be appropriately fearful, and also find ways of containing our fear, so that we are not immobilised by it. Our capacity to change hinges on this balancing act.

We find a lesson about what it means to be and not be afraid in the portion from the Torah that we will read tomorrow morning from Genesis 21 (:1-21). The portion tells the story of what happened when Ishmael, Abraham's first-born son, and his mother Hagar were banished from the household because Sarah wanted to ensure, as she put it, that ‘the son of this slave-woman shall not be heir with my son, with Isaac’ (21:10b). The narrative relates that Abraham gave Hagar bread and a skin of water, but as she wandered in the wilderness of B’eir Sheva, the water soon ran out. In desperation, Hagar cast her son under one of the shrubs, and went and sat down some distance away, saying to herself, ‘let me not look upon the death of the child’. Feeling completely desolate in such a desolate place, Hagar then ‘lifted up her voice and wept’ (21:15-16).

Hagar was alone with her child in the wilderness, fearing the worst. But the worst did not happen. The story continues with the intervention of a messenger of God, who ‘called to her from heaven and said to her: “What is with you Hagar; do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Get up, lift the lad and grasp your hand in his, I will place him as a great nation”’ (21:18). We read further that ‘God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and she filled the skin with water, and she made the lad drink’ (21:19). God came to Hagar’s aid – and what is more, the story concludes by saying that ‘God was with the lad, and he grew’ (21:20a).

As we reread this poignant story, we are reminded that God of our people is the God of all peoples. The God of Abraham, Sarah and Isaac, is also the God of Hagar and Ishmael. The message about humanity is equally clear. When we reread the tale of the expulsion of an Egyptian slave-woman and her son, it is easy for us to identify Hagar and Ishmael in one-dimensional terms as victims of persecution. But the narrative teaches us not to be so simplistic. Finding herself in victimising and desperate circumstances that left her feeling completely defeated and helpless, Hagar nevertheless summoned up the courage to look around her, see the well that in her despair she had not noticed before, pick herself up, draw water and save the life of her son. Reclaiming her volition, Hagar not only drew water from the well, she drew on her personal resources, and found the will to survive within herself. Abandoned to the desert, ultimately, Hagar did not abandon herself, or the son she had left under a bush because she couldn't bear to witness his death.

In the past twelve months, the screens of our TVs and devices have been filled with images of desperate people, the innocent victims of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. The story of Hagar reminds us not to reduce the victims of war and persecution to victimhood. Despite their anguish and suffering, and the depth of their unbearable losses, the people of Gaza remain determined to rebuild their lives, just as Israelis traumatised by the depraved acts of terror of October 7, are determined to rebuild their lives. At our Pesach family seder this year, I invited everyone to bring pieces of writing to share. My niece, Judith, my late brother’s middle daughter, brought a poem by Dr Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian writer, poet, translator and university professor from Gaza, whowas killed in an Israeli air strike along with his brother, sister and their children on December 6. Aware that it was highly probable that he would die, Refaat Alareer delivered a call to others to live and to hold on to Hope. The poem has the title, ‘If I must die’:

If I must die
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze –
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself –
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope

Hope. We are obligated to hope. Despite our sufferings as a people over millennia, we have always been, in the words of the prophet Zechariah, ‘captives of hope’ – asirey ha-tikvah. A few minutes ago, I articulated a question that so many of us have been carrying in our hearts as we witness the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza: What can I do? So, what can we do? As it happens, there is a lot we can do. We can support those Israelis and Palestinians who are continuing to work together in more than thirty different organisations, driven by the vision of a different future in which both peoples live side-by-side in peace and mutual respect. Feeling hopeless, we can find reasons to hope again in their example of courage and determination. We can do this. We must do this. As Jews in the diaspora, in particular, as Progressive Jews in the diaspora, we are obligated to stand up for Jewish values, and to support the efforts of those Israelis, both Jewish and Palestinian, who refuse to give in to nihilism and despair. As we enter a New Year, with the old year still holding us in its deadly thrall, let us resolve to grasp Hope for our own sakes, for the sake of our people, for the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians, and for the sake of the world.

May this be our will. And let us say: Amen.

Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah