A sermon by Rabbi Gary M. Bretton-Granatoor
Congregation Shirat HaYam, Nantucket
Erev Rosh HaShana 5786
Twenty-four years ago, Jews were still trying to figure out how Rosh Hashanah and the anniversary of 9/11, a catastrophe forced upon us, might speak to one another. NY city was still covered in ash, literal ash. Did you see it? Twenty-four years ago, we were bowed but not broken.
Twenty-five years ago, this Rosh Hashanah eve, we knew exactly where the blow came from. It came from outside — nineteen men, a hijacked morning, a hatred imported and unleashed on a clear blue Tuesday. Whatever else was uncertain in the weeks that followed, that much was not: the wound was inflicted upon us, from without.
This year is different. Not because nothing terrible has happened — God knows enough has happened — but because I cannot point, the way I could in September of 2001, to a single hour, a single enemy, a single external blow that explains where we now find ourselves. What we are living through instead is a slow accumulation: the fraying of our own civic fabric here in the United States, where neighbors have become adversaries and where political violence, once absolutely unthinkable, has become almost expected. It is the ongoing rupture in Israel — a nation now three years into a war that began with the horror of October 7th, but also a nation whose own citizens have spent recent years marching against each other over the character of their courts, their government, the soul of their democracy, before a single rocket ever fell. It is Ukraine, invaded by the nation that once liberated Auschwitz, grinding through a war of attrition that much of the world has simply stopped watching. It is the fracturing, in capital after capital, of a post-WWII order we assumed — perhaps naively — was permanent.
And for us as Jews, that distinction cuts especially deep. After September 11th, we understood ourselves as fellow victims of a hatred aimed at the West broadly — Americans grieving alongside other Americans. Today, in the wake of October 7th and everything since, American Jews have discovered that some of the coldness, some of the doubt about whether we belong at the table, comes not from a foreign enemy but from people who share our zip codes, our university lecture halls, our own political coalitions. We are asking, again, where we fit — in American life, on the world stage — but this time the question is being asked of us by people standing uncomfortably close. Twenty-five years ago, the forces arrayed against us stood outside our gates. Today, so much of what unsettles us rises from within our own house — within our own democracies, our own coalitions, our own family group chats.
Our tradition has a name for this shift, though it does not use the language of “without” and “within.” It speaks of tzarei chuts — troubles from outside — and tzarei bayit, troubles of the house. {Malbim Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Wisser – focuses on this issue} The prophets of Israel were far more frightened of the second than the first. Isaiah did not lie awake worrying primarily about Assyria; he worried about a people who had stopped seeking justice for the orphan and the widow. Jeremiah did not save his sharpest words for Babylon; he saved them for a Jerusalem that had learned to perform its rituals vacuously – without religious passion or heart. Our sages understood something we are relearning the hard way: an enemy at the gate can, paradoxically, unify a people. An enemy — or something enemy-shaped — discovered within the walls is far more corrosive, because it forces us to ask who, exactly, we are.
And yet — and this is the part I want us to sit with tonight — our tradition never once concluded that troubles from within meant despair was the appropriate response. Quite the opposite. Every single time our sages diagnosed a sickness of the house, they followed the diagnosis with a prescription, and the prescription was always some version of the same instruction: you, the ones who see the sickness most clearly, must become the source of the cure.
We say of Rosh Hashanah, HaYom Harat Olam — today the world is conceived. That is what we say tonight and tomorrow. Not “the world was created,” past tense, finished, done — but “conceived,” a process still underway, a birth that has not yet completed. Twenty-five years ago, a city was trying to repaint itself after the ash. Tonight, the work in front of us is not repainting — it is midwifery. Something is still being born, and we do not yet know its shape, and our task is not to mourn the loss of the world we thought we had, but to help deliver whatever is coming next. Like Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, who witnessed the destruction of the Second Temple – the very locus of Jewish solidarity – and knew that something new must be created to draw our people together in the absence of the Temple. He set off for Yavneh, created the Academy, but had no idea if that would keep our people together. He stood on shifting tectonic plates – unsteady and still reeling – and tried to do whatever he could.
We, too, are standing on unsteady ground. What can we do, what can we create? What might be coming next? What might that look like, practically, for us? I do not think it looks like retreating into an armed camp, certain that everyone outside our walls is an enemy — that would be to mistake tzarei bayit for tzarei chuts all over again, and to close ourselves off from the very people, Jewish and not, who remain our partners in repair. Nor do I think it looks like pretending the trouble is not real, that if we simply keep our heads down through one more election cycle, one more news cycle, the fever will break on its own. Rabbi Tarfon’s teaching feels almost unbearably relevant right now: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” (Mishnah Pirkei Avot 2:16) None of us, alone, will heal the rift in American civic life, or resolve the anguish inside Israeli society, or end the war in Ukraine. But every one of us is responsible for the piece of the work that is actually in front of us.
That piece is smaller, and more local, than the headlines suggest, and I think that is a mercy rather than a disappointment. It is the conversation we have not yet had with the family member who voted differently than we did, or who has landed somewhere on Israel that makes our stomach turn, where we keep choosing the silence of avoidance over the risk of an honest conversation. It is the neighbor, the colleague, the fellow congregant here on this island, whom we have quietly filed away as “one of them” rather than “one of us,” without ever actually testing whether that filing was fair. It is the discipline — and it is a discipline, not a feeling — of assuming good faith in a stranger’s political opinion until they have actually earned our suspicion, rather than granting suspicion up front because of which side of an aisle they happen to stand on.
I do not say any of this glibly. I know some of you, as have I, have relationships that political division has genuinely fractured this past year, in ways that grief alone cannot describe. I know some of us have looked at Israel this year and felt something closer to heartbreak or revulsion than pride, or pride braided together with heartbreak in a way that has no clean name. We should not try to pretend that the wounds are healed. I am asking all of us to notice that in every single one of those wounds, our tradition puts the tool for mending back in our own hands, not somewhere out of reach.
There is a teaching, offered in the name of the Baal Shem Tov, that when a person sees a fault in another, it is in some measure a mirror — that what troubles us most in someone else’s failing is often a distorted reflection of something we have not yet reckoned with in ourselves. I do not offer that to shame anyone in this room tonight, myself very much included. I offer it because it is, in the end, an enormously hopeful teaching. It means the work of healing tzarei bayit — troubles of the house — does not require us to first fix everyone else. It only requires us to start with the mirror in front of us, which is the one piece of this fractured moment that each of us actually has the power to address.
Twenty-five years ago, we were struggling through darkness, trying to shake off the ash, and we labored to restore the color to a once vibrant city. I do not think the image tonight is quite so simple, because this darkness did not arrive all at once, and it will certainly not lift all at once either. But I do believe, as I believed then, that we are not without tools, and we are not without each other. Al-tira “Fear not — do not be afraid,” Fifty-one times this command is found in the Hebrew Bible. God says it to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to a frightened people at the edge of a sea that would not part itself. It did not part itself. It parted because someone — tradition calls him Nachshon ben Aminadav — was willing to be the first one to wade in.
So here is what I want us to carry out of this room tonight, as clearly as I can say it. Twenty-five years ago, the dark hour came from outside, and it taught us that community, gathered together, could hold a grieving world upright. Today, the dark hour comes largely from within — within our politics, within our own Jewish family, within ourselves — and it is teaching us something harder but no less true: that the same community which once held a grieving world upright must now do the far more demanding work of healing the house from the inside. The resolution has not changed, even though the source of the wound has changed. We are still the ones called to be the source of healing — not someone else, not the next generation, not a different, less exhausted version of ourselves. Us. Now.
May this new year be one in which we have the courage to look inward before we look outward for blame, the humility to tend our own house before we despair of anyone else’s, and the strength to keep wading into the water even before we can see it part. Ken yehi ratzon — may this be God’s will, and may we be the ones who help make it so.
L’shana tova tikatevu — may you all be inscribed for a good year, a year of healing, from without and within.