From The Narrow Place — Rosh Hashanah 5786
Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Author | |
Date Added | |
Automatically create summary | |
Summary |
Min hametzar karati Yah — anani bamerchav Yah
I called out to Yah, to God, from the narrow place — and Yah answered me from the expanse.
We sing this verse from Psalm 118 during the shofar service, and the imagery echoes the shofar itself: we blow air through the constricted, narrow end of the ram's horn, and beautiful sound pours out from the expansive, open end. This is the movement we seek in these days of teshuvah — from constriction to expansiveness; from limitation to possibility.
Min hametzar karati Yah. I call out from the narrow place.
We are truly, in this historical moment, in the metzar, the narrowest of narrow places. There is all we are facing here in this country, as every day, it seems, we move closer and closer to authoritarianism. I want to acknowledge the fear, the anger, the agitation, that accompanies this. There have been and will continue to be very real effects on members of our own community. On Yom Kippur, I will talk about how we can foster spiritual resilience in the face of these threats - how we can care for and strengthen ourselves, individually and collectively, for the long haul.
This morning, I want to address another source of profound pain, grief, and anger – all that is transpiring in the land where the stories we read this morning took place – the good land, that contested land, eretz Yisrael, historic Palestine.
Min hametzar karati Yah. I call out from the narrow place.
There is a photo that I keep on my fridge, a photo of a little girl, maybe 2 or 3 years old. She is wearing a shirt that says "Beauty," and is holding a hand-painted sign on a piece of cardboard, which says, "I Matter." I received this postcard 4 or 5 years ago, from the Israeli-Palestinian group Combatants for Peace. The little girl, whose name I do not know, is from the Palestinian village of Uja on the West Bank, where Combatants for Peace built a playground for the children. It is one of the villages currently targeted by settlers and the Israeli army. I do not know if this little girl is still there, or if her family has been displaced, their home destroyed. I pray that she is okay.
As I have been thinking about speaking with you this morning, trying to figure out what I can possibly say, I keep looking at this little girl's face, and the sign she is holding. I matter, she tells me. And that demands something of me. As I look at her beautiful, innocent face, I want to speak today from my heart, and pray that my words be accepted with open hearts. For her sake. For the sake of all children.
Min hametzar karati Yah. We are calling out from a narrow place. I want to begin by naming some of the pain and grief that I know members of our community have been experiencing. You may share some, or perhaps all, of this pain.
There is the trauma of October 7, 2023, the murder of 1200 people by Hamas, including many advocates for peace; the atrocities and sexual assaults, the capture of 250 hostages, the destruction of entire communities, that still reverberates. This pain is compounded by a sense of abandonment by those unwilling to acknowledge the horror of that day. There is deep pain and grief at the ongoing trials of the hostages being held by Hamas and the trauma their families have had to endure, including the indifference of their own government. As anger at Israel has grown, there is the very real pain of being shunned for simply being Israeli or having a connection to Israel. There is ongoing concern for loved ones in Israel and their vulnerability to attacks, to bombs, and the deep dismay at the unraveling of what many once believed Israel to be, at the hands of the Netanyahu government. Israel is in profound crisis, and those of us who have deep connections to Israel are in crisis as well. Min hametzar karati Yah.
I want to name the trauma of the catastrophic and intentional horror, the atrocities that have been perpetrated by Israel in Gaza for these past two years, as well as the escalating violence and oppression on the West Bank. The grief for over 60,000 people killed in Gaza, including 20,000 children, numbers that do not include those who have died for lack of medical care or from starvation. 70% of the structures in Gaza have been reduced to rubble. Every university has been demolished. 94% of the hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of journalists and medical professionals have been targeted and killed. The Israeli government has restricted the entry of food and medical aid, leading to famine and disease. And all of this has occurred with the active support of the U.S. government.
While the suffering that the people of Gaza have experienced from blockade and military incursion did not begin on October 8, what has occurred since then has risen to a level beyond what many of us could imagine. Min hametzar karati Yah.
It is traditional at this time of year to do cheshbon hanefesh, a "soul accounting." This year, we are confronting a profound cheshbon hanefesh as a Jewish people. The state of Israel, the Jewish state, now faces charges of genocide, and we must take these charges seriously. There is a growing consensus among human rights organizations and genocide scholars, including Jewish and Israeli scholars and human rights experts, that Israel's actions in Gaza fit the legal definition of genocide, which is: an attempt to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, religious or racial group.
Beyond the legal definition, there is the cry of the people of Gaza, of Palestinian people everywhere, asking us to recognize this atrocity for what it is. As a people who have experienced our own genocide, and have had to face those who want to deny what happened to us, it is incumbent upon us to hear these voices, however difficult it might be. The war crimes committed by Hamas on October 7 do not justify war crimes in response. And in this moment, as members of the Netanyahu government openly talk about their plans to transfer the population of Gaza, to build new Jewish settlements on the rubble, the word genocide is hard to deny.
These facts on the ground have led us to a profound crisis within the American Jewish community, and for the Jewish people as a whole. I heard recently an interview with Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, the former Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship institution of the Conservative movement. Rabbi Schorsch is now 90 years old, having escaped Germany with his family right before the outbreak of World War II. In an essay this summer, he wrote that our current challenge as Jews is "to make sure that Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state. The unremitting violence against helpless Palestinians in Gaza and their wholly innocent coreligionists on the West Bank will saddle Jews with a repulsive religion riddled with hypocrisy and contradictions."
In the interview, Rabbi Schorsch called what we are witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank a hillul Hashem, "a desecration of God's name." This phrase refers to actions taken by a Jewish person in public that bring shame not just to that person, but to the Jewish people, and ultimately to God. Rabbi Schorsch spoke about the actions of the Netanyahu government in the West Bank and Gaza as a desecration of Judaism itself.
Hillul Hashem, a desecration done in our name. And so, as the Palestinian people experience an assault on their very existence, we in the Jewish community are experiencing perhaps the most profound spiritual crisis we have ever faced. It is a crisis that we will be dealing with for years to come. In this moment, all I can offer are a few thoughts about how we might begin to address it, how we might begin to move from the metzar, the narrow place of grief and despair, towards the merchav Yah, an expansive, Godly place of healing and repair.
The Unetaneh Tokef prayer that we chanted earlier this morning imagines a heavenly throne, established with the quality of chesed, lovingkindness, upon which God sits in emet, truth. Truth and love, love and truth. These two qualities are crucial to our spiritual response in this moment.
The challenge and the invitation of Truth: The mainstream American Jewish community is suffering from an unwillingness to reckon with the truth that this moment demands. There has been a determined refusal by our leadership to acknowledge what is happening in Gaza and the West bank, and to even charge that anyone who uses the word genocide is automatically an antisemite. These attacks on those who dare to speak the truth have had very real, very damaging effects on both Jews and non-Jews. Our Jewish pain is being turned away from empathy and towards the dehumanization of others.
For some of us, there is not overt denial but a numbing, a turning away from the truth, to keep ourselves from really taking in the extent of what is happening. This denial is understandable, because the truth is difficult to bear. For many, it tears at our understanding of what Israel is, and what it has meant to us. But when we abandon the value of emet, truth, it causes us to ignore or deny the realities that Palestinian people are confronting every day.
A commitment to truth also entails a willingness to hold multiple truths at once. Last fall, I taught a class in which we explored Vent Diagrams, overlapping circles that bring together two truths that seem contradictory, and yet which we can hold at the same time — whether we hold them as individuals, or as a community. The authors of the materials we used explain the Vent Diagrams in this way:
"For the world we know to be possible, we and our movements must be able to hold contradiction and complexity. We must be able to acknowledge and honor Jewish pain and fear in a time when there are some Jews who wield tremendous power and are participating in and enacting systemic oppression and brutal violence. We must be able to critique those in power, and understand them as humans who are shaped by systems that set all of us against each other. We must remember that Jewish safety and dignity is bound up with Palestinian safety and dignity, and that none of our liberation is mutually exclusive to another." [Tzror: Moving Through Contradictions About Israel & Palestine]
In the class, we explored these pairs of truths, among others, and what happens in the overlap:
Israel has a right to defend itself.
Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
Antisemitism can show up in progressive spaces.
False claims of antisemitism are used to silence progressive movements.
Israel is a haven for Jewish people and culture.
Israeli policies make Jews around the world unsafe.
[You can see an example of Vent diagrams used in the class here]
So much of the discourse within the Jewish community for the past two years has centered on denying one side or the other of each of these pairs, instead of building our capacity to hold a fuller, more expansive truth — one that does not paper over difficult realities, but allows us to go deeper in our understanding. As we go forward, may we have the courage and the capacity to hold the multiple truths of the Palestinian people, the multiple truths of the Jewish people, for the sake of our collective liberation.
The challenge, the invitation of chesed: One definition of the word "chesed" is "covenantal love." A few years ago, I spoke of the obligations that Jewish state power entails — an obligation to affirm the humanity and wellbeing of all of those who dwell in Israel and Palestine. For those of us dwelling outside the land, I called this mitzvah ahavat yoshvei ha'aretz — covenantal love for all who dwell there. This is the foundation of collective liberation — understanding, on the deepest level, that the fates of Jewish people in the land and Palestinian people in the land are completely intertwined, and that the wellbeing of one cannot be achieved without the wellbeing of the other.
As we address the spiritual, the moral crisis of Judaism, we are invited to examine the ways in which we cause damage and are ourselves damaged when we dehumanize others, when we diminish or deny their history, their reality, their humanity.
The dehumanization of Palestinians in the Jewish community has been ongoing for decades, in ways both overt and subtle. It is present in the erasure of Palestinian history and culture in our learning about Israel, an ignoring of the reality of people whose history is intimately intertwined with ours. It is there in the assumption that only a Jewish majority, fortified by an army and guns, can achieve Jewish safety, because it implies that Palestinians are inherently dangerous, and that they must be controlled for the sake of Jewish security. It is there when we value Jewish lives over Palestinian lives, or when we suggest that Palestinian mothers do not grieve just as Jewish mothers do the loss of their children. There is an invitation here to examine the ways in which we, even unconsciously, devalue and deny the humanity of Palestinians.
To refuse to erase the history, the reality, the humanity, of all who dwell in the land also means resisting the dehumanization of Israelis. It means not reducing an entire society to an epithet, and not dismissing the importance that the land of Israel and the creation of a Jewish society holds for so many. It means being sensitive to how antisemitism comes into play when Jews have power and abuse that power. There is an agitation, a heat, around Israel that arises, I believe, not only because of its actions, but also from the ways in which we have internalized problematic messages about who is a "good" Jew, a Jew worthy of existing. The invitation here is to reject the demonization of Israel, however much we condemn its actions.
For me, the mitzvah of ahavat yoshvei ha'aretz does not entail false equivalences. It does not mean ignoring the very real power imbalances between Israelis and Palestinians or the historical context that led to this moment. But it does require that we resist the temptation to reduce Palestinians or Israelis to an epithet or a faceless category. It means remembering that every person caught up in the horrifying machinations of those in power was once just like the little girl on my refrigerator, beautiful and innocent, a precious human life.
So. Where do we go from here?
Min hametzar karati Yah; anani bamerchav Yah. From the narrow place I call out; I am answered from the Godly expanse. What is this expanse? It is the structures we create, internal and external, through which the Godly powers of justice and love can be made manifest. It is the voice of the shofar, calling on us to enact those values.
How might Dorshei Tzedek be a place of such expansiveness? As a community, we have the opportunity to access an expansive truth that no one individual can achieve alone. From our members of color, we can learn how the dehumanization of Palestinians – and the violence it entails – speaks directly to the dehumanization of Black and brown people here in the U.S. and the violence they have experienced. From our Israeli members, our members with lived experience in Israel, we can connect to a Jewish reality that is very different from the American Jewish experience.
Our Board has made a commitment to fostering ways in which we can more productively talk and learn across our differences in the coming months. I am hopeful that we can do this not just for the sake of fostering connection within our community, and not just as a way for us to deepen our understanding, but also as a model for what a Jewish community committed to truth and lovingkindness, to justice and peace, to the wellbeing of Israelis and Palestinians, might look like. I invite you to begin to imagine how we might create and invite this expansiveness.
It takes a great expansiveness of heart to hold the suffering of everyone, Palestinians and Jews, in the land. It can be overwhelming, and for many reasons, it may simply not be what each of us wants or is able to do. But perhaps as a community we can create an expansive circle of care, knowing that beyond the borders of my caring, someone else will pick up the thread. Care for the people of Gaza, who are enduring genocidal violence; care for the hostages and their desperate families; care for Palestinians terrorized and displaced in the West Bank; care for the Israelis fighting for the soul of their country — can we, collectively, hold all of this?
Our diversity also brings an expansiveness in the realm of action. Many members of CDT have been engaged for years, working for equality, justice and peace in Israel and Palestine. Some do this as part of their Zionist commitment, others as an expression of their non-Zionism. In these painfully divisive times, when the world around us demands uniformity of thought and action, my hope is that we can continue to be a home for people taking action in a myriad of ways, and honor the different paths to justice and peace that we each choose to take. The enormity of the crisis demands a response that is beyond the limitations of any one organization, any one viewpoint, any one tactic.
Over the course of these High Holydays, there are opportunities to engage in different ways with all that I have spoken about this morning. This afternoon, at the Tashlikh gathering in Jamaica Plain, there will be an opportunity to explore what it means to take responsibility for collective complicity for the genocide, the hillul haShem, in Gaza. On Yom Kippur, there will be opportunities for grieving and for naming our transgressions, and sessions in the afternoon to explore Israeli poetry and song, and to lift up Palestinian voices that speak to the suffering and the resilience of the Palestinian people. In the months to come, we will be endeavoring to build our capacity for difficult conversations and deeper understanding. We hope to use this capacity to create a statement of values that will express as fully as possible our commitments around Israel and Palestine, to make clear not only what we stand against, but what we stand for.
May we, individually and collectively, be answered from the narrow place in which we find ourselves. May the expansiveness of our understanding increase. May our hearts widen and our circles of care continue to grow. May we know, as we experience the inevitable discomfort and disagreement along the way, that we do this for the sake of Judaism, for the sake of the Jewish people, the Palestinian people, for the sake of a world in desperate need of healing and repair.
Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Rosh Hashanah 5786
Fri, October 17 2025
25 Tishrei 5786
Upcoming Learning Opportunities
-
Sunday ,
OctOctober 26 , 2025Learn to Read Hebrew!
Sunday, Oct 26th 10:00a to 11:00a
-
Thursday ,
OctOctober 30 , 2025Fostering Spiritual Resilience in Difficult Times with Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Thursday, Oct 30th 7:00p to 8:30p
-
Saturday ,
NovNovember 1 , 2025Shabbat Morning Torah Study with Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Shabbat, Nov 1st 9:00a to 9:45a
-
Sunday ,
NovNovember 2 , 2025Learn to Read Hebrew!
Sunday, Nov 2nd 10:00a to 11:00a
-
Thursday ,
NovNovember 6 , 2025Fostering Spiritual Resilience in Difficult Times with Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Thursday, Nov 6th 7:00p to 8:30p
-
Sunday ,
NovNovember 9 , 2025Learn to Read Hebrew!
Sunday, Nov 9th 11:00a to 12:00p
-
Thursday ,
NovNovember 13 , 2025Fostering Spiritual Resilience in Difficult Times with Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Thursday, Nov 13th 7:00p to 8:30p
-
Thursday ,
NovNovember 20 , 2025Fostering Spiritual Resilience in Difficult Times with Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Thursday, Nov 20th 7:00p to 8:30p
-
Sunday ,
NovNovember 23 , 2025Learn to Read Hebrew!
Sunday, Nov 23rd 10:00a to 11:00a
-
Monday ,
DecDecember 1 , 2025Introduction to Mishnah with Rivka Nechemya Thrope
Monday, Dec 1st 7:00p to 8:30p
Zmanim
Alot Hashachar | 5:37am |
Earliest Tallit | 6:09am |
Netz (Sunrise) | 7:00am |
Latest Shema | 9:44am |
Zman Tefillah | 10:40am |
Chatzot (Midday) | 12:30pm |
Mincha Gedola | 12:57pm |
Mincha Ketana | 3:43pm |
Plag HaMincha | 4:51pm |
Candle Lighting | 5:42pm |
Shkiah (Sunset) | 6:00pm |
Tzeit Hakochavim | 6:42pm |
More >> |