Words Without Goodbye
a sermon by Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor
Yom Kippur 5787
Congregation Shirat HaYam, Nantucket
For the better part of this summer, and for two weeks still to come, Jews around the world have been reading the Book of Deuteronomy — from the Latin for “second telling of the law.” In Hebrew, we call it Devarim — “words.” It is Moses’ last address to the people he has led for forty years, delivered as they stand poised to cross into the land promised to their ancestors. He reminds them of their history. He recounts their travels and their trials, their tribulations and their triumphs. He reiterates Aseret HaDibrot – The Ten Commandments. Weren’t they powerful enough at Sinai? But this new generation needed to hear them again, from the lips of the man who uttered them that first, awe-inspiring, earth-shaking, time. He teaches them, one more time, the contours of the covenant that is meant to hold them together long after he is gone.
And he uses a great many words to do it — 14,294 of them, to be exact. But not one of them is “goodbye.”
Moses knew, long before he opened his mouth to speak this final speech, that he would not cross the Jordan with his people. And yet the Midrash Rabba on Devarim tells us something remarkable: that the man who once protested to God, “I am not a man of words” (Exodus 4:10), became, by the end of his life, a man whose words marched at the very front of the nation. His devarim — his words — became the road the people walked on. His essence was woven into the fabric of the society they were about to build, even though he himself would never live inside its walls.
Today is also a day of words. Today we recite the Vidui, the confession, over and over — Ashamnu, bagadnu — not once, quietly, but publicly, communally, rhythmically, beating our chests in unison. Yom Kippur does not ask us to feel guilty in silence. It asks us to say things. Out loud. Together. Because Judaism has never fully trusted feeling without language. We are a tradition that believes that if you cannot say it, you have not yet fully done the work of meaning it.
So let me tell you about an experiment: Gary Rosenblatt, the former editor and publisher of The Jewish Week, gathered the writings of a range of prominent rabbis and thinkers from across the denominational spectrum — people who don’t often agree with one another — on the challenges facing Jews today. He fed them into an AI model and asked it a simple question: If Moses were coming down from Sinai with Ten Commandments for Jews living in 2026, rather than in biblical times, what would those commandments be?
I want to share those ten commandments with you this morning — not with Rosenblatt’s explanations, but with my own. Because on this day when we take an accounting of our souls — a cheshbon hanefesh — I think these Ten Commandments give us exactly the kind of accounting the prophet Isaiah would have demanded: not a list of feelings, but a list of obligations. {if you would like to read Gary Rosenblatt’s original article, which offers the sources of each of the commandments and accompanying explanations and commentary, here is the link.
1. Remember that you are in covenant — with God, with the Jewish people, and with humanity. My teacher, Rabbi Dr. Eugene Borowitz, z”l, taught that to be a Jew is to live in a constant, contractual relationship with the Holy One — a covenant first established at Sinai and renewed every moment since. That covenant asks not “what do I believe?” but “what am I going to do?” Many of you came to Nantucket to escape pressure and tumult. That is fair. But our obligations to community and to the wider world do not cease because we sought refuge here. So, find ways to live here in fealty to the values of Torah, and build on programs already established here, like the recent “Tikkun Olam Shabbat on the Porch,” where worship was wedded to action, and worshippers made personal hygiene bags to be distributed through the Food Pantry.
2. Honor the divine image in every human being — including the person who is not like you. God did not create a people in Genesis; God created humanity. Even those who worship differently, vote differently, live differently than we do. Martin Buber, in Ich und Du — badly translated as “I and Thou,” better rendered “I and You,” the intimacy of a relationship, not a formality — taught that to look into another person’s eyes is to see God looking back. We are not asked to abandon our particularity as Jews. We are asked to let that particularity produce, in Borowitz’s language, a universal moral consciousness.
3. Choose life — and protect it. Pikuach nefesh, the saving of a life, is one of Judaism’s great organizing principles — so central that it overrides nearly every other commandment in the Torah. Isaiah’s fast is a fast that feeds the hungry and shelters the homeless. That is not metaphor. That is the assignment. This congregation’s support for the Nantucket Food Pantry and Nourish Nantucket is well known, and it matters. But there are other organizations on this island doing work that needs our attention too — supporting victims of domestic violence, providing emotional support, sheltering the unhoused through the cold months. There are groups already making inroads here; our task is to learn more about them, lift them up, and help wherever we can. The work is not glamorous. It rarely makes the news. But it is what God wants of us.
4. Love your neighbor — and refuse to become indifferent to the stranger. Nantucket thrives because of the many people who make up its infrastructure, people who are, in Isaiah’s word, among “the oppressed” — they wash our dishes in the restaurants, prepare and cook our food, tend our gardens, fix, paint, and build our homes, clean our homes. They are both visible and invisible. The Torah does not command us to love the stranger once. It commands it thirty-six times — more than any other mitzvah in the entire text — because the rabbis understood how easily this particular commandment gets forgotten. When ICE threatened this island, there was not enough outcry. Yes, there were those who gathered at the rotary. But given the devastating impact this community would feel if the kind of raids we have watched unfold elsewhere in this country happened here, too little was done. We need to protect our neighbors on Nantucket — perhaps by finding ways for this congregation to assist and support the Immigration Resource Center run by our host community, the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House. Lo tonu, the Torah says of the stranger — you shall not oppress him — “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20). We are commanded to remember, on the day we remember everything else, that we know exactly what it feels like to be the stranger.
5. Make your Jewish life an act of responsibility, not merely an expression of identity. It is not enough to feel Jewish. Judaism is a covenant of deed. Having been part of this congregation for so many years, I recognize how unique it is — a truly pluralist community that embraces all who seek Jewish connection and learning. But ask yourself, honestly, in this hour: does your Jewish life connect you outward — to the Jewish community at large, to the North American Jewish institutions, to Israel — or does it only reflect back your own preferences? Spend time considering how to deepen those ties.
6. Honor Torah — but keep learning, questioning, and arguing. We were fashioned, the sages liked to say, with two ears and one mouth, and we would do well to listen twice as much as we speak. Questioning Judaism is not rebellion against Judaism. It is, as I have said before and will say again, the most Jewish thing a person can do. The Talmud does not record a single opinion on nearly any subject; it records arguments, unresolved, on purpose, for us to keep having.
7. Build and preserve Jewish community. No Jew sustains Judaism alone. “I’m spiritual, but I don’t need Jewish community” may be a sincere sentence, but it is also a sentence that makes Jewish continuity a great deal harder. Lo tov heyot ha’adam levado — it is not good for a person to be alone (Genesis 2:18) — was said of the first human being, and it has never stopped being true of the Jewish people. This community has, for more than four decades, created many points of entry for people to find their way in. As the possibility of a dedicated home for this congregation on Nantucket becomes more real, make sure that space offers just as many ways to welcome both Jews and the wider community. Just as others have opened their sacred spaces so this congregation could worship and learn, you must do the same when you have a space of your own.
8. Remember where you came from — and teach it to those who come after you. Rosenblatt put it plainly: “Modern Jews live with a peculiar danger: unprecedented freedom combined with unprecedented historical amnesia.” We have, as we learn from Dara Horn, taught our children a great deal about what has been done to us, and far too little about what we have made: the learning, the art, the ethical imagination, the sheer stubborn beauty of this civilization. We cannot build a Jewish future only on the foundation of the pain inflicted upon us. We have to build it, also, on what is worth loving.
9. Seek justice, even when justice is inconvenient to your own side. Tzedek, tzedek tirdof — justice, justice shall you pursue (Deuteronomy 16:20) — the word doubled, the rabbis say, because pursuing justice only when it is convenient, only when it indicts someone else, is not pursuit at all. Tochecha, rebuke, is not optional in our tradition; it is a mitzvah (Leviticus 19:17). We are asked to hold our own people to the highest standard, and everyone else to that same standard, without exception, without flinching, and without waiting to see who is comfortable with the answer.
10. Do not merely inherit Judaism. Renew it. We are meant to bring the wisdom of the past into conversation with the truth of the present, not to preserve the past in amber. “Tradition” is too often simply defined as “whatever I grew up with.” But a Judaism that stops growing ossifies. So, sing the songs you knew and learn new ones. Say the words of the prayers recorded in the prayer book, and then stop, mid-sentence, and actually consider what they mean. Mark the moments our ancestors could plan for, and invent new blessings for the moments they never could have imagined. Make Jewish life dynamic — meaningful, vibrant, challenging, and yes, even joyful, on the very day we are commanded to afflict our souls.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, z”l, offered something that might as well be an eleventh commandment: “To be a Jew is to be a blessing to others.” That is not a metaphor either. It is, I think, the entire purpose of the ten that came before it. Go out from this room, this day, and continue to be that blessing — proudly, boldly, and without apology — on this island, and wherever else you may dwell.
Like Moses atop Mount Nebo, who could see the land in the distance but would not walk on it himself, none of us will complete this work. That was never the assignment. The Mishnah says it best, in words I return to every year at this season: “Lo alecha hamlacha ligmor, v’lo atah ben chorin l’hibateil mimenah” — it is not upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to walk away from it (Pirkei Avot 2:16).
Moses never said goodbye to the people he loved because, in the deepest sense, he never left them. His words marched ahead of the nation into a land he would never see. That is, in the end, what teshuvah asks of every one of us on this day: not a goodbye to who we were, but a resolve loud enough, specific enough, embodied enough, that it marches on ahead of us — into the year, into the lives around us, into the hands of the people who come after.
But our tradition also warns us, on this very day, that words alone are not enough. The haftarah — Isaiah 58 — is God’s blistering response to a people who had perfected the words of fasting and repentance while ignoring their substance:
“Is this the fast I have chosen? A day for us to afflict ourselves?… Is this not the fast I have chosen: to loosen the fetters of wickedness, to undo the bonds of oppression, to let the oppressed go free… to share your bread with the hungry, and to bring the homeless poor into your house?” (Isaiah 58:5–7)
Isaiah is not interested in whether we said the right words. He wants to know what we did with them.
And when the Children of Israel heard the words uttered on Sinai, those Ten Commandments – their response to this contractual relationship embodied in the Brit – the Covenant — was not “We hear you” but “Na’aseh v’nishma” “We will do, AND we will listen (heed) (pay attention).”
In like manner, as I close my final sermon to you after thirteen years, I hope that if my words endure, it will not be only on paper, in recordings, or even in your memories, but will endure in your deeds – even if you forget their source. I hope some of my Torah, what I have taught and what I have tried to model, will stay with you as you forge ahead and write the next chapter in the story of Congregation Shirat HaYam.
So instead of goodbye, let me offer you l’hitra’ot — may we see each other again. Hatzlacha — good luck. G’mar chatimah tovah. May you be inscribed, and sealed, for a good year. Lechu l’shalom — go forth toward wholeness, and toward peace.