Kadima Blog

October 06th, 2024

10/6/2024

The following was delivered by Rabbi David Basior at Rosh HaShanah morning services at Kadima on Thursday, October 3, 2024.

I’m not gonna lie, folks. The project of writing a dvar torah for Rosh HaShanah this year was hard. Harder than I have experienced in some time, and maybe the hardest in the dozen+ years I’ve dared to do such a thing. Ultimately, I realized, I have been grappling with an existential question for this season: is teshuvah even possible this year?

You can likely hear the battle with despair that I am having in even asking such a chutzpadik, such an audacious question this time of year. After all, the gates are open. And teshuvah, one of Judaism’s greatest gifts – available to us everyday of every year – is in this season exponentially supported, encouraged, and expected of us by our collective and communal focus on it for these holy 10 days of awe. We give teshuvah a good go on an individual level, strengthened by the fact that we are all up to some version of the same project, and that collective action, we hope, makes a difference.

But, when you think about the state of the world at this hour and our position to make change in it – or perhaps lack thereof, maybe I am not alone in questioning the feasibility of the teshuvah project this year?

I have defined teshuvah in different ways this and past years. Literally translating to return or response or repentance, it has a connotation of transformation, resiliency, repair, and the process of seeking and requiring forgiveness. And on an interpersonal level, I don’t mean to say these might not be as available to us this year as they are any other year – or any other day, even. This sort of interpersonal teshuvah is not only possible, but I believe it is necessary for us to try if we are going to have a fighting chance against the other, societal, collective wrongs that to me at least, are feeling so overwhelming.

There is not a single one of us – myself very very much included – who hasn’t harmed, messed up, ignored, avoided, dismissed…you name it and collectively, we’ve done it. Nine days from now on Yom Kippur we will take account together for all the things each of us did and call all of those individual actions things we all did. We are all responsible for each of them and for each other. And in a community of 300 or so justice-pursuing Jews and friends, that feels manageable to me, barely manageable, but manageable. Looking around I think I can say, yeah, I take responsibility for what we all did and have some trust that you are doing that too, with me in mind, creating a web of bonds that exponentially strengthens our ability to pull this off as a community.

Oh, if only, though, I could keep the bounds there. Sometimes, I’ll admit, that I dream about how much easier, on some level, this would be if we, the people in this room, were the only ones who called themselves Jews. Oh, how in some ways that would be easier.

But it is not reality, and I am ultimately both tremendously grateful and wholly responsible to that fact. So when I think about the web of bonds that exponentially strengthen our ability to pull off collective teshuvah as a Jewish people – when I think about that in circles bigger than this room, out to colleagues and neighboring synagogues and so called defense organizations and on and on, the web is clearly broken in some spots, has huge holes, even chasms between other parts, and is just too fragile between others where there is still some connection. Admitting that our web, our collective teshuvah safety net, is too fragile and would be wildly ineffective for the kind of collective teshuvah that is needed now. We are not in any shape for this as a people, and I am in mourning over it. This year forces me to accept that reality that has likely been true for a very long time.

It is impossible to ignore that the difference for me this year is the State of Israel, or Der Judenstaat as Theodore Herzl called it in 1896 Germany. It is actually a bit unsettling and uncomfortable for me to admit that what Israel does, how it behaves, and what happens to it affects me and my Jewishness and my ability to do Judaism. I’d like to think of myself as a diasporist – a Jew who does not center my Judaism in or around Israel, but instead where I am, where I call home, my corner of the Diaspora, under the Ashkenazi Bundist principle of do’ikayit – or “hereness,” so eloquently brought back to the fore of progressive Judaism by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz in 2007. Do’ikayit is the principle of investing in wherever we are as Jews, in solidarity with others who are there and investing in it too, to make the here and the now continuously better and more just.

But, as a Diasporist on October 7, 2023, I did not know exactly what to feel, how to react when hearing about Hamas’ attack while I was setting up for our Simchat Torah celebration that morning. Was this news different from hearing about a violent attack anywhere else happening to anyone else? And was this happening to Israelis and residents of Israel or was this happening to Jews and those who reside with Jews? And why did this distinction of narrative seem to matter to me?

In attempting to find answers, I feel lucky to have found a written interview with our very own Professor Devin Naar, chair of the University of Washington Sephardic Studies department (who, two years ago gave Kadima Rosh HaShanah morning dvar torah with his partner Andrea). In this 2020 interview with Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel about Sephardic identity, Angel asked Naar about the Ashkenazi idea of do’ikayt. And while he spoke about his resonance with it, he also named some of its limitations. He believed that the inclusion of other approaches might serve our US-justice-pursuing-Jewish framework in how we define ourselves in relationship to the “here” that we find ourselves in relationship to the land and/or State of Israel. After all, do’ikayt came to us as an immediate response and parallel track to Zionism, as the Bund first convened itself in 1897, which eerily happened on October 7 of that year.

Speaking of another possible approach, Naar brought up the work of Edgar Morin (originally Edgar Nahoum). Naar has called this renowned thinker and author who turned 103 this July “a philosopher, resistance fighter, communist, and Paris-born son of Salonican Jews.” Morin, as Naar writes “considered his family’s multiple affiliations across the generations—as Salonican, Sepharadi, Jewish, Turkish, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French—not as a symptom of irremediable alienation, but rather as a promise of ‘multi-rootedness.’”

Morin’s multi-rootedness could be another way to understand our relationship to Israel and perhaps Jewish identity writ large vis a vis place – less the binary of “here” and “there” which do’ikayt operates within, and more as Naar says, “by saying that there can be multiple ‘heres.’” That a Sephardi experience of multiplicity and inter-cultural cosmopolitanism can help us realize who we are outside of the pitfalls that both Zionism and Diasporism operate within.

As a Jew of Ashkenazi ancestry myself, who has some under-researched genealogical origins in Spain before the 400 years my Basior ancestors spent in Poland, this Sephardic perspective is comforting and helps me grapple with my own mulit-rooted identity generally, but also how and why I have been unsure and unsettled, to say the least, on and since October 7.

It helps me with the fact that for me, Israel – visiting there, working there, falling in love there, learning there, briefly raising a child there, having friends and distant family there, is a part of the Jewish identity I forged for myself and my kids over the last two and a half decades. I cannot deny it and find liberation and ease in accepting it. I do not mean to set up some standard as so many Jewish leaders and their red lines do. No Jew must have these lines on their resume in order to be authentic nor valid as such. As a rabbi myself, let me underscore this. But I do. I do. And operating in justice-pursuing Jewish community makes that truth complicated and at times feel contradictory. I am still working it out.

So what is this dvar, I asked myself a hundred times this month? Is it a lesson in historical sociology? A talk of despair toward hope? A transparent account of where I am at this New Year in the hopes that others might relate or at least be inspired to find a way to transparently account for your own? Turns out, yes to these. Stay with me.

While I am working out my relationship to the communal fractures which, as far as I can see it, cannot escape the effects of hundreds of years of European Christian and Civic antisemitism including Christian Zionism and including the Nazi Holocaust; nor the 100+ years of colonial history of European Jews in Palestine inspired to address the above; nor the hundreds of generations of indigenous history of Palestinian, Arab, Sephardi, and African and Asian Jews in, and in-and-out, of the land that is Israel/Palestine; nor the hundreds of generations of indigenous history of non-Jewish Palestinians, Arabs, Druze, Bedouins, and more. It is real and it is all part of the knot in my insides that has tightened this year. And I am probably leaving some out. And I am sorry every time I do. Morin’s mutli-rootedness, through Naar, his messenger, gave me space, at least, to breath in the fact that as someone who is rooted here, I am indeed, also rooted there. That ‘there’ is one of my ‘heres’ and there are many other ‘heres’ as well.

Which, it turns out, provided the necessary cushion this Elul, to address my despair. My former teacher in Jerusalem, Rabbi Avital Hochstein recently published an article that caught my attention. I was comforted to see another rabbi willing to admit that teshuvah might be in jeopardy in this season. In her article “Can We Envision a Different Future?” she wrote “the events of October 7 may have…undermined our ability to do teshuvah (repentance). Without a belief that things can be different and for the better, the very foundation of teshuvah crumbles.”

Two weeks early on Rosh HaShanah, Rabbi Hochstein brings the Book of Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, the megillah or the special reading for Sukkot. Focusing there, she highlights verse 11:2 in her article and at first, it perhaps sounds ominous. It reads:
תֶּן־חֵ֥לֶק לְשִׁבְעָ֖ה וְגַ֣ם לִשְׁמוֹנָ֑ה כִּ֚י לֹ֣א תֵדַ֔ע מַה־יִּהְיֶ֥ה רָעָ֖ה עַל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃
Ten chelek l’shiva’ v’gam lishmonah ki teida’ ma yihye ra’a ‘al ha-aretz
“Distribute portions to seven and also to eight, for you cannot know what misfortune may occur on the earth.”

The pshat, or simple understanding of this verse might be: prepare for the calamities that very well might happen. Put your resources in various places, diversify your portfolio, to take precautions for we do not know the when and the what of the harshness, evil, bad that could be coming. It implores us to be proactive and prepared. To not put all our eggs in one basket. And to take actual steps, this verse might be pleading with us, don’t sit back and wait thinking “I will deal with it if and when it comes” or “phsa, things will be okay.”

We don’t know. Today is October 3. Do you remember last year on October 3? October 4? 5? 6? As I went to bed last year on October 6, a Friday night, chag erev simchat torah and shabbat, I did not know what misfortune may occur on earth. And when I set up for our collective Simchat Torah Shabbat services the next morning, I was informed of the misfortune that had begun. That night I was informed of the misfortune that had befallen Hayim Katzman among 1200 dead and hundreds captured. That week, I learned of the misfortune that would be dealt out to the people of Gaza. The misfortune that has only increased and is still ongoing, even as more and more fronts of the atrocity of war are opened disregarding life along the way. All in one of my multi-rooted places of hereness.

Rabbi Hochstein reminded me that teshuvah is not possible when there is no hope, which here I will define as the presence of possibility. Reading the Ecclesiastes differently, we might find this presence of possibility, or at least uncertainty – not knowing – [happily] “for you cannot know what misfortune may occur on the earth!” This reminder that indeed we do not know might enable some part of us to release from despair. If despair is the certainty that calamity is upon us or right around the corner if not already here, then the author of Kohelet is also saying: stop your hubris! You do not know!

And here I felt connected to our Rosh HaShanah torah reading. Sarah, before mistreating and ultimately banishing Hagar, is eager to have a baby. She is quite sure it will not happen, a thought perhaps that would go without saying except that in the prelude to today’s ready, in Genesis chapter 18, her innate certainty is challenged by a guest in her own home declaring that indeed she will bear a child, and in G-d’s name, the voracity! Sarah famously laughs. And it is not completely clear in the text if she is scoffing to dismiss this impossibility or if some part of her is tickled by the joy, the possibility, the perhaps laden but unextinguished hope. In this uncertainty of promise, both of the text and perhaps in Sarah herself, speaks to the same uncertainty of calamity presented in the Ecclesiastes verse above. In fact, Sarah’s laughter becomes the name of her promised son – Yitzchak – but also the reason for the calamity to befall Hagar, echoed in Sarah’s questionable interpretation of Ishmael laughing at Yitzchak in our reading today.

Do you remember the last time you laughed?

I do. I have figured out ways to do it this year. Miraculously. Sometimes with a twinge of guilt, and sometimes with an attitude of resistance, and sometimes simply because I was having fun or something was funny. Each time it was a release and increased my health. Even the times I felt guilty for doing it

So here we are, on the precipice between the year that has now been with the certainty of the perfect tense, the past. What was once sheer possibility, blank pages of our year, became full and is now sealed. And another year, full of the same uncertainty, the same promise, but also the same worses that could happen, is not yet written. Not at all sealed. And we dwell in these 10 days of charting paths, aiming our bows, refining our trajectories. Both 100% promise and 100% no guarantee. And as I enter these days I find myself surprised. Perhaps teshuvah is possible.

Ecclesiastes and Genesis together open us to this season. Let us prepare ourselves for what could be, certainly, but let us also find possibility – liberation from the despair of any false certainty of what misfortune will befall us next. In these 10 days of elevated unpredictability, there is space for teshuvah. Space for action. Space that holds cynicism at bay and allows us to be partners in the continued creation of the world. No judgment if you find yourself unable to dwell there, but I do dare us all to peek and question what we think we know. Such uncertainty could breed the possibility which might beget action and bring about teshuvah. It just might make you laugh, and I invite you not to feel guilty if you do.

L’shanah tovah, u’metukah, v’chalukot u’ltzachek – toward a year of good, of sweetness, of proper planning, and the laughter of surprise hope.

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