What Makes Jews Different
a sermon by Rabbi Gary M. Bretton-Granatoor
Congregation Shirat HaYam, Nantucket
Rosh HaShana Morning 5787
This morning we read one of the more disturbing stories in Torah, the near sacrifice of Abraham’s beloved son Isaac on the top of Mount Moriah. We have unpacked and analyzed this story countless times. But today I want to offer a different way of thinking about this text, which applies to a great majority of Torah writ-large. One of the most important aspects of the study of Torah is to learn to see our world, and our purpose, in ways that separate us, as Jews, from others. This differentiation helps us understand our world and what makes us different from others. While many might look at the universe as the result of random forces, Torah opens with the idea that the universe is ordered and is the result of a plan. While others may see humanity as without guidance, Torah offers us a purpose: to perfect the work of creation, and care for the world around us. While others reserve special rights and privileges to the first born, Torah upends the notion of primogeniture — Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph elevated over his elder brothers, David the youngest of Jesse’s sons anointed king. And this morning’s Torah reading rails against human sacrifice, the very practice that surrounded our ancestors on every side — at the moment the knife is raised and the angel’s voice cries out, Al tishlach yad’cha el-ha’na’ar “Do not raise your hand against the boy.”(Genesis 22:12) Engagement with Torah is one of the most important ways we help define the contours of what makes us who we are.
This is not accidental. This is the point. Torah does not merely tell us what happened; it argues, on practically every page, for a way of seeing that is not the world’s default way of seeing. And nowhere is that argument made more plainly than in the words of a man who was not even one of us.
In the Book of Numbers, the pagan prophet Balaam is hired by King Balak to curse the Israelites encamped below him. He climbs the heights, looks down at our ancestors’ tents, and instead of the curse he was paid to deliver, out of his mouth comes a blessing: hen am l’vadad yishkon, u-vagoyim lo yitchashav — “There is a people that dwells apart, not reckoned among the nations” (Numbers 23:9). And then, he blesses us with the words we used to begin our morning service: Mah tovu ohalecha Ya’akov, mishkenotecha Yisrael! “How wonderful is your community O Jacob, Your tents O Israel!”(Numbers 24:5) It is worth contemplating that this description of Jewish distinctiveness was not written by a Jew. The very first attempt in our textual tradition to answer the question of what makes us different comes from someone looking at us from the top of a mountain, trying to make sense of what he saw. He saw a people that did not fit the categories available to him. He saw a people unique among all others he had experienced.
What were those categories, and how did we come to sit outside them? Consider the year 325 of the Common Era, when the bishops of the church gathered at Nicaea and produced a creed — a fixed statement of belief, to which every Christian would thereafter be required to assent, on pain of heresy. It is a reasonable, even an elegant, solution to the problem of holding a far-flung community together: you write down what must be believed, and you believe it. Judaism, meeting at almost exactly that same historical moment in the academies of Babylonia and the Galilee, produced something else entirely — the Talmud, a document that does not resolve its arguments so much as preserve them. Open a page of Talmud and you do not find a creed. You find Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai disagreeing, and the text, remarkably, telling us that: aylu v’aylu divrei Elohim chayim “both are the words of the living God,” even as it rules practically with Hillel.(TB Eruvim 13b) You find the extraordinary friendship of Rabbi Yochanan and Reish Lakish, study partners so devoted to argument that when Reish Lakish died, Yochanan could not be consoled — not because he had lost someone who agreed with him, but because he had lost the one person capable of raising twenty-four objections to his every teaching, out of which a third, deeper truth, would emerge that neither of them had held alone. Judaism has no Nicaea. We have no dogma — no single sentence you must recite to remain within the covenant. Even a Jew who denies everything Jewish (unless they convert) is still “a part of the tribe.” We have argument, preserved on the page for two thousand years, on the theory that truth is more often found somewhere between two sharpened opinions than settled by decree.
Valuing study and debate over a single dogma consistent over time and across Jewish communities, is the reason the person who leads a Jewish community is called, in the language of the Talmud, mara d’atra — “master of the place,” a local authority whose rulings apply here, in this community, and may differ entirely from what your cousin’s rabbi rules three towns over. A rabbi is not a priest. A priest, in the ancient world and in traditions that still carry priestly structures today, mediates access to the sacred through an office that is passed down, transmitting something inherent, almost mechanical, in its power. A rabbi has no such transmitted power. A rabbi is simply the one who has studied longer and argued harder, and whose authority exists only so long as the community continues to find the arguments persuasive.
Valuing study and debate over a single dogma consistent over time and across Jewish communities also helps explain the Jewish distinction between kodesh and chol, the holy and the ordinary. In many religious systems, certain places, certain objects, certain people, are holy in themselves, intrinsically, the way gold is intrinsically valuable. Judaism teaches something stranger and, I think, more demanding: nothing is holy in and of itself. The seventh day is not holy — it becomes holy when we sanctify it, vayekadesh oto, God “sanctified it,” an act, a verb, not a static fact. A place becomes holy through what happens there and how we treat it. A marriage becomes holy — kiddushin — through the deliberate elevation two people perform for each other. Holiness, in Jewish thought, is less a substance than a relationship, something we make happen through attention and intention, which means the responsibility for holiness in the world sits, uncomfortably and permanently, in our own hands.
Valuing study and debate over a single dogma consistent over time and across Jewish communities also helps explain chosenness itself, that most loaded of Jewish ideas. When God offers the covenant at Sinai, the language is conditional, not automatic: v’atah im shamoa tishme’u b’koli, u-shmartem et briti, v’hiyitem li segulah mikol ha’amim — “Now, if you will obey Me faithfully and keep My covenant, you shall be to Me a treasured people among all the nations” (Exodus 19:5). Notice the grammar. Not “you are chosen; therefore you must obey.” Rather: if you choose to take up the commandments, you will become treasured. “Am segulah – a treasured people.” Chosenness is not a status bestowed on us like a birthmark. It is closer to a relationship we renew by choosing, generation after generation, to keep choosing it back.
And what, historically, have we done with that choosing? My teacher, Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, addressed this question directly in a letter to his students, and his reasoning has stayed with me. He asks what the Jewish “go-to” has been across history when trouble arrives — and rules out the stereotypes first. Not money; for most of our history, most Jews had none. Not power or force of arms; we rarely had that either. What we had, he writes, was books, and “Jews threw learning at everything” (Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, Letter #88, August 12, 2026). Traditionally that meant Talmud folios spread open at the back of the sanctuary and a community that measured itself not by attendance at prayer but by devotion to study. When traditional learning receded for many modern Jews, Hoffman notes, we did not abandon the instinct — we redirected it into universities and graduate schools, into a near-religious faith in education even among Jews whose faith in God has grown uncertain, or even absent. He contrasts this with what he calls the Christian ideal type, the monk whose day is divided by eight fixed hours of prayer, where churches still measure their strength by counting who shows up to worship. Jews, he observes, have historically rushed through the Shabbat morning service at breakneck speed and then spent an hour arguing over the Torah portion in the middle of it. We are not a people without prayer — our machzor is full of extraordinary poetry, and our cantorial tradition is one of the glories of Jewish culture. But if you want to know what a people reaches for instinctively in a crisis, look at what they built first. We built houses of study.
This is not incidental to who we are; it may be closest to the whole answer. A people that throws learning at its problems is a people that has decided the world is neither random nor finished — that it can be understood, argued over, and, eventually, repaired. It is a people that will not accept a single fixed creed, because the work of understanding is never finished either. And it is a people that knows, in its bones and not merely its books, what it feels like to be the outsider that Balaam looked down upon from the hillside — which is why Torah insists, more than thirty times, more often than any other commandment, that v’ger lo toneh v’lo tilchatzenu, ki gerim heyitem b’eretz Mitzrayim — you shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the heart of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. We know that heart, not as a theological abstraction, but as an inherited memory, close enough to touch, and it obligates us every time we are tempted to look away from someone else’s suffering.
What does this means for us, sitting here, on this particular morning, in this particular year? We are not asked to prove our difference by being louder than everyone else, or by retreating from everyone else. We are asked to keep practicing the specific disciplines that have carried this difference for three thousand years: to argue rather than merely agree, the way Yochanan and Reish Lakish argued, trusting that the friction itself produces something neither side could possibly reach alone; to treat holiness as something we make rather than something we find lying around already finished; to remember, every time we are tempted to harden our hearts toward someone unlike us, that our own foundational memory is of being that very stranger, unwelcome and vulnerable in someone else’s land.
None of this is abstract. It shows up in which board we choose to serve, which cause we choose to fund, which argument at the Shabbat table we choose to have with our children instead of simply telling them what to believe. A people that dwells apart earns that description one choice at a time, not once and for all at Sinai, but daily, the way Exodus 19:5 insists — im shamoa tishme’u, if you will choose to listen.
So, when the knife is raised over Isaac on the mountain this morning, and the angel’s voice interrupts it, we are watching more than the rescue of one boy. We are watching Torah insist, at its very foundation, on a different account of what the universe wants from us than the one the ancient world assumed. Order rather than chance. Purpose rather than drift. The last-born favored over the first. A voice that stops the knife rather than one that demands it. A people that dwells apart not because it prizes its own isolation, but because, page after page, argument after argument, it has been formed by a text that keeps asking us to see the world differently — and then to act on what we see.
L’shana tova tikatevu v’techatemu — may we be written and sealed for a good year, a year in which we keep choosing what was once merely offered to us, and keep throwing our learning, our arguing, our stubborn insistence on repair, at whatever the world sets before us.
Amen.