by Frances Degen Horowitz, delivered at Minyan M'at

Like Eleana on Shabbat, on the beautiful occasion of her becoming formally Bat Mitzvah, having written this d’var Torah in the week before the massive deed of raw evil shook- literally and figuratively - the very foundations of the ground on which we walk, and many of the assumptions to which we have been clinging, I wondered whether it made sense to discard the pages and just start over again. I held off doing anything. I wanted to sense the mood of the Minyan on Shabbat and my own mood as some days passed and I tried to assimilate the magnitude of what had been perpetrated.

So, on Motze Shabbat, I sat down to look over what I had written. Surprisingly, I concluded that - with some additions - my ruminations on today’s parsha and the central question with which I was wrestling were still relevant - perhaps the more so.

It is said that we read today’s parsha because Yitzhak was born on Rosh Hashana, because as Rosh Hashanah marks a new beginning, so too did Yitzhak’s birth signal a “new and momentous stage in the unfolding plan of the history of a people” - the Jewish people. And because it is said that when Sara spoke the words “tsahok asah’li elohim,” - and “God hath made laughter for me” - it implied that with Yitzhak’s birth more light was added for the world - a “brilliance was added to all heaven and earth.” [Genesis Rabbah, 53:7]
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The parsha itself is brief, dramatic, bare of details, staccato in its tempo, recounting with little adornment the news of an improbable impending birth, a seemingly last minute reprieve from eternal bareness, the report of laughter for happiness, perhaps nervousness, the birth itself and the promise, the convenential Brit, and weaning, and then Ishmael making sport, signifying to Sara rivalrous portent, perhaps the influence of idolatry, and so jealousy and worry prevail, banishment is demanded, and there are more promises.

Thus Yitzhak becomes the main hope for insuring the continuity of seed and of a people who shall establish a great nation. But only, initially, from Sara’s perspective. Avraham would have been just as content to see the inheritance of the nation shared by Yitzhak and Ishmael. At Sara’s insistence and with the back-up of God’s voice, Avraham reluctantly agrees to the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael, comforted by the promise that Ishmael shall too be the progenitor of a great nation in its own land. Thus, it was said, with no shared inheritance of the land there would be no cause for friction between the two great nations - the one derived from Yitzhak and the one derived from Ishmael. (Hertz commentary)

Well, it obviously didn’t quite work out that way. Reading the parsha, preparing for what I would say today, I focused on the promise to Ishmael and the reason for it, my senses on high alert, recalling that exactly on last Rosh Hashanah in this very room, how at the conclusion of our davening, Michael Paley felt the need to give first and early voice to the angst that infused that day and the days of awe to follow and in the whole year since -with eretz Yisrael being increasing made into a pariah

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state, and with terrible violence having made another and this time what has turned
out to be an enduring visit on the land and on the two peoples. I recall the terrible feeling of visceral distress that overcame me on Rosh Hashana last year when in some foretelling way I seemed to know that it was going to remain with me in the whole of the year to come. As it does even today, the events of last week expanding that sense of chronic distress to disbelief and horror.

Today’s parsha with its recounting of Yitzhak’s birth and the promise of continuity for the Jewish people touches on the deepest well of Jewish identity, of history, of a people, of a nation. On rights to land and legitimacy of claim. Were we to try to write a symbolic drama of the present set in the past we could do no better than this parsha from Breshit.

Is the parsha a literal transcription of the divine plan? Is it a written account of true historical events. Is it a tale that will be found to have some trace elements of historical corroboration? Or is it a myth of nation creation that, like many myths, is used for emotional purposes - in our case, for the foundation of a story of heritage and peoplehood, that will evolve into symbol, beliefs, tradition, ritual, ethics - and endless argument and discussion - emotional trademarks and hallmarks freighted with meaning and memory that is profoundly soul stirring.

The story we recount today is that we, the Jewish nation had our triumphal roots in the promise that only Yitzhak would make a nation on the land. Yet, the morality of those roots is not entirely without blemish. The Rambam questioned Sara’s dealing so harshly with Hagar. So too, today are there the choirs of voices questioning the
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symbolic and actual banishment and punishments visited on the other people who see the land as their inheritance denied.

We are living midst an awful reality - Yitzhak’s descendants in battle with Ishmael’s descendants over land, over nationhood - attack and revenge in a ghoulish pas de deux that has all too ghastly consequences for each of these peoples. And we are living midst the awful reality of a relentless demonization of Israel - terrifyingly reminiscent of so many demonizations past, one just seventy and more years ago when relentless demonization led to such disastrous and unimaginable consequences. And we are living midst the terrible recent reality - yet to be fully assimilated - that at once brings the meaning of terrorism so close to home - ironically the better to understand the rock and the hard place position that has so bedeviled all of us who care deeply for eretz Yisrael.

So, how, under circumstances that sear our souls, are we to celebrate on this Rosh Hashanah? How do we celebrate the promise of Yitzhak’s birth? The promises of continuity, of nationhood, given the beliefs in the historical threads of those promises that have taken on mythic proportions and are used to rationalize so much of the violence today. Shall we focus on the hope that, as Rosh Hashanah is considered a new beginning, so too we can imagine new beginnings down different non-violent paths to some resolution of the current conflict.

Or shall we yield to the understandable temptation on a Yontif and indulge just not thinking about the current state of affairs - just for today and tomorrow - and

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celebrate the narrative of pride and love of people - Yitzhak’s birth and the promise, and the foundation of nation. And what followed over the course of our long history - the development of an ethical system, the Mitzvoth, the imperative to do justice, to remember, the commitment to Clal Yisrael, to community, to caring. Shall we dwell only on the wonder of the endurance of a people without place for so many centuries. Shall we, with Aviva Zornberg , see in “The birth of Isaac [the initiation of a] period of feasting and laughter, [a period full] of the bearable lightness of being.” (Zornberg, A. Genesis: The Beginning of Desire, 1995, p. 101)

The bearable lightness of being - reaching for the ethereal joy of new beginning, of promise. Shall we block out the terrible reality of what is happening in eretz Yisrael and now here, and confine our celebratory thoughts to our immediate family/community, in Minyan M’at, where we regularly have so much bearable lightness of being - incredible joy, with each brit, with each naming,- new beginnings, new life wanted, cherished - no one need be banished. And with each Bar and Bat Mitzvah - watching the babies become children become young adult to take on the Mitzvoth. Only to qvell.

But it is really not an option. Our tradition demands that we not deny reality - however painful - in our personal lives and in the life of our personal community of Minyan M’at, that we may not make ourselves nisht visendich, unknowing, about the other side of the bearable lightness of being - Kundera’s unbearable lightness of being - the exquisite unbearable sensitivity of exposed nerve endings, to the pain in our community - of loss, illness, vulnerability, unbearable sorrow that seems at first

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to have no end until bits of healing creep into lives, almost without detection, slowly weaving a coat of resilience around our hearts. And hope. And re-generation.

For it is inherent in what it means to be a Jew to deal with that which is the unbearable lightness of being not only in the personal sorrows of our lives but in our history and in the larger community of sorrow and pain. So it seems obvious that as we celebrate Rosh Hashanah today we must recognize the unbearable lightness of being that is consuming two peoples with shared origins but very different historical narratives. Easier said than done when our gut wrenching sympathies are for our people struggling with no good choices and near despair even as we are challenged to retain our humanity to understand and care about and for the descendants of Ishmael - even as the wisdom for solutions to this heart-rending struggle remains so elusive.

Mulling over all of this, much before last week, I found my thoughts reaching back to what was, for me, the most searing of the divrei Torah in the Minyan of the year that is passing - Jonathon Jacoby’s discussion of pain - the pain of the descendants of Ishmael - even as we all feel so fully our own pain as the descendants of Yitzhak. I thought about Jonathan’s methodical examination of the need for Jewish nation building, and of the sacred bond that so many of us feel with Israel and then of his plea that we see and try to understand the unbearable lightness of being that our nation building elicits or has been made to elicit - depending upon your political bent - among the descendants of Ishmael.


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And so I said to myself again, how do we celebrate Rosh Hashanah - this particularly difficult Rosh Hashanah when we long still for peace - when there is yet no sign of reciprocity in the understanding of pain, and now, when evil forces have succeeded so spectacularly and so many lives have been lost. Slowly, through several drafts, I came to the realization that we don’t really need a Rosh Hashanah to celebrate that which has as its essence the bearable lightness of being - where celebration and joy are inherent. What we need from Rosh Hashanah is the renewal of the will to feel joy, to know hope, to resist despair, to be emboldened to resolve to retain our sense of humanity, while at the same time grappling with the pain of the unbearable lightness of being.

What we need from Rosh Hashanah is time for wrestling - for God wrestling as some have suggested - to engage in ideational, oftentimes neurotic arguments, about the things that get us in our kishka - a form of combat for which being Jewish seems to suit one particularly. Where we question how we shall formulate our pleas to find the strength to deal with the unbearable lightness of being - to a literal God; to God as metaphor; to God as all good and seeing; to a God who cannot be a God and permit so much sorrow? Perhaps this God fits more comfortably with a rational mein of mind when thought of as blessing, as a concept that is a metaphor for the energy of hope with the power to be transformative.

What we need from Rosh Hashanah and from the Yomim Nor’aim is the healing and transformation that we, in Minyan M’at can find in our davening together - long and intense and building in cumulative momentum whether or not the words are taken as literal - our davening that is a collective poem, a long song with melodies ancient and new, sung plaintively, sung for discovery, the better to reach down into our very being, to organize and re-organize that being - no matter the translations -
whether to take comfort in Adonoi as the energy of hope, or to have unquestioning belief, to find in our davening together not only the buoyancy inherent in the bearable lightness but to experience the transformative in confronting the unbearable lightness- as our tradition demands, in our own personal lives, in the life of our people, past and current -and now so much in the life of this city, and this nation. To reinforce our personal and communal and historical capacity to endure, to understand that we can prevail in the struggle with the unbearable lightness.

For if we are to wrest from the parsha any meaning for this Rosh Hashanah and from the davening together in this year, and for overcoming the trauma of this past week, it is that we can be made, as Hagar was, to open our eyes, not just to see but, as the Rambam suggests, to take new perspective on possibilities.

May we, as we daven together, as we sing the songs, celebrate the idea of the brilliance that Yitzhak’s birth added to all heaven and earth, by vowing to employ that metaphorical light and energy to acknowledge the unbearable lightness of being, and to have our eyes made open, to better see possibility and thus to grab on and hold tight the cord of hope -- that for each and every one of us and for our people, the descendants of Yitzhak, and for the descendants of Ishmael, and for the land – to believe that it will eventually come to pass, as we sing from Psalms: “Hinei ma tov u-ma-na’im, shevat achim gam yachad” - Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to dwell together in unity. And to that end we must hope that healing and transformative wisdom will be ours in the year we begin, 5762; that it will be a good year; a Shana Tova.

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