Defiance From Within

Rosh Hashana, 5786, Nehar Shalom Community Synagogue

In August, I prepared to participate in an act of civil and communal disobedience, calling for an end to starvation in Gaza. The action involved putting my body in the way of potential harm, and it involved risking arrest.

I decided to take these risks because at that time, forty percent of pregnant women in Gaza were severely malnourished, and because feeding myself and nourishing the life growing within me has been a challenging and reassuring experience of being pregnant - something I can and must actively do to care for myself and this new life.

I decided to take these risks because in our country, Republican and Christian leaders are deeply committed to taking agency and choice away from pregnant people (and many other people). Bodily autonomy, abortion policy, and trans rights were not the target issues of this action, but asserting that a pregnant person might choose to take a defiant risk was part of what called me to it.

And I was called by the urgency of the crisis and a desire to leverage my power as a rabbi in a moment when so much of the Jewish world was paying attention.

As I considered participation, people were surprised, concerned, even judgmental. Why would I put my pregnant body in harm's way? Why would I risk the potential discomfort and harm of arrest? Did the messages of the action really speak for me? Did they get it right? And what did anyone think this action would actually accomplish? Spoiler alert - the action got rained out. 

But those questions resonated with the wrestling I have had the privilege of doing alongside you for many months. We are, together, asking deep and searching questions about what resistance looks like in this moment. What are the ways we can refuse to cooperate with cruelty? What are the ways we can interrupt harm? What is required of us in a time of overwhelming repression? 

But also - what do we feel capable of? How do we measure the risks we are willing to take? How might we support each other to take bigger risks in order to protect more people from harm?

And - what can we do to cultivate readiness? What are the sources of strength that undergird that readiness? How might spiritual community help us?

I have heard you say you feel frozen, and have no idea where to begin. I have heard you say: I began with the neighbors on my block, and just getting together to talk about how we might keep each other safe feels so empowering. I have heard you wonder about the balance between taking bold action that makes waves, and doing the slow work of bringing people along. 

I have heard conversations about leaving the US. When is it time? Is it cowardly to leave? Is it defiant?

I have heard people both recognize and question the power of their individual voice, and ask, “how can I both join a movement with power and continue to speak in a nuanced way that feels true?”

I’ve heard despair and hopelessness; I have heard powerful kinds of commitment. On Shavuos, Shayle Sagan and I taught a workshop in Brookline about the LUCE hotline: when you see ICE cars or agents, calling the hotline will activate a community response. The folks who came to that workshop at 2 in the morning were not activists or organizers, but they were so ready for tools that might help them keep their neighbors a little bit safer. And they wanted to know what else they could do.

Dr. Sunita Sah is an expert in organizational psychology who researches authority, compliance, and defiance. She opens her book, called Defy, with a critique of the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of defiance, which is "to challenge the power of; to resist boldly or openly."1 To defy is not necessarily loud, public, and confrontational, she says. Her definition focuses, instead, on agency: to defy is "to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise."

Her research examines our inner psyches and the social dynamics that enable us to defy, or keep us compliant.

Her examples range from small acts without a lot of associated risk - refusing a pre-emptive x-ray in a doctor's office - to large and risky - Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the National Anthem, and the mother who ran into Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas to evacuate her sons' classrooms, when the police were not only not doing it, but preventing other parents from doing so.

Sah's examples range from spontaneous - the teenager who filmed George Floyd's murder - to planned and practiced - Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat on the bus.

And they range from unsuccessful - the engineers who thought the Challenger was not safe to launch, but were unable to stop it - to successful - the whistleblower who changed Big Tobacco forever.

Sah writes that defiance often begins with a feeling of tension, because there are many good reasons why we choose to comply even when it contradicts our values or who we understand ourselves to be.

"Inner tension,” Sah writes, “is your brain and body telling you that defiance may be necessary…that compliance would be a betrayal of our true ideals, of the person we truly want to be." 

When I start to pay attention to this inner tension, many examples come to mind. Saying yes to a plastic bag at CVS because I forgot to bring my own. Walking past someone on the street who is asking for money. Talking with a family member about any number of political issues, feeling sick to my stomach, and not saying anything. Reading a public email from an institution I support in some way, finding it lacking, and not saying anything. Continuing to pay federal taxes. What comes to mind for you?

In the months after the Trump regime was inaugurated, the Russian-American journalist M. Gessen wrote about how humans can become accustomed to war, and to shocking amounts of repression and cruelty.2 How can we "stay shocked," in their terms, enough to fight back? How can we sustain the tension as Sah describes it, and let it build momentum for true and effective resistance, without burning out or becoming engulfed?

Sah reminds us that true defiance is internally driven, not reactive. It's not ultimately about opposition, but truth and alignment - embodiment of one's own principles. She suggests a kind of deep structure from which instances of defiance can emerge. In Jewish tradition, this deep structure might be called emunah, faith. And it's not a coincidence that one of our mythic ancestors famous for his emunah, his faith, is also famous for his defiance.

In Genesis Chapter 15, "the word of Hashem came to Abram in a vision: "Fear not, Abram, I am a shield to you; Your reward shall be very great." But Abram said, "Adonai Elohim, what can You give me, seeing that I shall die childless?...God took him outside and said, "Pray look toward the heavens and count the stars; are you able to count them? And God said to him: So shall your seed be. וְהֶאֱמִן בַּה' וַיַּחְשְׁבֶהָ לּוֹ צְדָקָה׃ And he put his trust in Adonai, who reckoned it to his merit.

Martin Buber is one among many sages who reads this passage as a paradigm of Jewish faith, or emunah.3 The hifil form of the verb to put his trust in, or to have faith in, conveys ongoing action: it means that Abraham continued to trust God. It was not a new action, but rather a moment of particular strength in an ongoing relationship of trust and faithfulness. Relationship, claims Buber, is at the heart of a Jewish experience of faith. It's not about belief in external truths. In contrast, this relational experience of faith does not only make room for doubt - such as the doubt with which this story begins, Abram questioning God's promises - it in some sense emerges from and with doubt, because it is a dynamic relationship of seeking and continual recommitment.

There’s nothing simple or linear about Abraham’s emunah. It begins with God instructing Abraham, then called Abram, to leave behind everything known and familiar, everything to which he seems to belong. It develops through multiple encounters with God. They seem repetitive - multiple times, God tells Abraham that he will have a son; multiple times, God promises Abraham a multitude of descendants who will live in the land. And Abraham and his partner, Sarah, experience doubt, discomfort, and resistance to God’s promises. They laugh in disbelief. They decide that Hagar should bear Abraham’s heir and then treat Hagar and her son with cruelty - that is, they get it wrong. And, through the repetition, we get to witness emunah develop - and emunah both calls and supports them.

In August, in a time of immense heartbreak and despair, I was called to participate in the action by a high level of tension; doing nothing as Gazans starved did not feel like an option. But I was also supported to consider taking significant risk by a sense of possibility - what I might call emunah. My experience of pregnancy has been one of willingly taking on risk and discomfort in service of transformative creation. It’s not that I wasn’t afraid; but I was already immersed in the tension between risk, discomfort, and possibility. Being tapped into the possibility of change offered me a wellspring of energy.

Norma Wong is a Zen Master, Indigenous Hawaiian leader, and emerging elder who teaches about how to navigate this time of collapse.4 She, too, wants to know what enables us to refuse to cooperate with cruelty. To mobilize the strength we need to be ready to act. She calls this taking a leap. 

For Wong, less important than individually held values and principles is a shared practice of telling the story of the future, and then living into it. We all have what she calls "horizon stories," stories about what we think will happen, and what we want to happen, in the near and far future. These stories very powerfully shape what we are willing and able to do to reach those horizons - we will act in accordance with what we think is possible, and what we think is going to happen. So we have to practice articulating, sharing, and connecting with it, and as we do, we become ready to leap.

Leaping means leaving the safety of what we know, and leaning into constant change. “Without the initial leap,” she writes, “our imagination can be limited to the boundaries of our current possibilities.” Leaping requires courage. Leaping requires faith, which she describes as “what we have when we believe in ourselves and what it is we are about.” Faith is the tangibility of our horizon story, rather than its probability. Leaping requires trust in the people around us. And leaping requires appetite, a “magnetic pull toward that which needs to be done, must be done… Appetite makes perseverance possible, that internal resolve to weather the most confusing and chaotic days without losing our way.”

Again and again in Torah, God invites Abraham into a horizon story. First God asks Abram to leave behind the safety of what he knows; to take that initial leap that allows his imagination to transcend the boundaries of his current possibilities. This is lekh lekha. Then God literally takes Abram outside and asks him to gaze at the star-filled sky, to feel what he had previously been unable to imagine - a future people. Next, God gives Abram and Sarai new names, while reiterating the promise of descendants and land. Here, God asks them to take a new leap, to opt-in in a new way, by commanding Abraham to circumcise himself and all the males in his household. 

And finally, God sends messengers to announce Sarah's pregnancy. Abraham is resting under a tree; tradition teaches that he is recovering from his circumcision - processing and integrating a new sense of covenant, of accountability, of partnership. Three messengers approach him; Abraham and Sarah offer them lavish hospitality, and they announce that Sarah will become pregnant within the year. In the historical context of Tanakh, pregnancy is the ultimate horizon story, both the tangible next step and the beginning of the mythic future.  

It’s not happenstance that the very next scene is one of the most famous moments of defiance in Torah - when Abraham argues with God about the destruction of the cities of Sdom and Gmorrah, and asks “how dare you collectively punish these people?” Within a dynamic relationship of trust and faithfulness that has developed over time, Abraham is ready to stand up to God.

Emunah precedes defiance; defiance also affirms emunah. One of the most important lessons of Sunita Sah’s research is that we get better at defiance through practice. 

When the sages were establishing the three times for daily prayer, they looked for precedent to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - tefilot avot tiknum.5 Shaharit, the morning service, is inspired by Abraham, who, it is written, “went early in the morning to the place where he had stood in God’s presence;” and that place was where he had argued against the destruction of Sdom and Gmorrah. By now, the cities had been destroyed; Abraham witnessed rubble and smoke. His act of defiance did not work; yet he returned to the place, and in that return, created a practice of prayer, tefila. Like tefila, defiance requires practice. It requires both structure and intention. It requires community and relationship. And it is made possible by emunah. 

Emunah is the ground of our convictions; it is the relationship of trust that allows us to risk the unknown; and it is the appetite, the desire, the magnetic pull toward that which needs to be done.

Like Abraham, we have left behind the known world; unlike Abraham, it is not with a vision of hope. Instead, we face a strange and terrible new reality. It is on us to find and remember the horizon stories that make a different future tangible, and that motivate us to do the work to get there. It is on us to find the courage, faith, and appetite to take that leap, even while many of us face immense threats. It is on us to cultivate relationships: relationships of mutual care and defense amidst the threats. Relationships with people who will invite us to take bold action, and help us with the training and infrastructure we need to do it. 

It is on us to opt in to a bigger covenant: one of safety and mutual thriving. It is on us to risk defiance, and to return again to witness destruction when our first standing up does not work. It is on us to make defiance a practice, and to get better at it. It is on each of us to figure out what it is we will take risks for, and how we need to prepare ourselves to take those risks.

All of us will be asked to take on new risks this year. All of us will face new kinds of instability and danger. All of us will have opportunities to act from our true principles while being pressured to do otherwise.

May we rise to the occasion with faith and courage. May the wellsprings of our tradition fortify us as we seek and doubt; as we falter and recommit. May we offer ourselves and one another plenty of room to get it wrong, and try again. May we make one another brave, and offer comfort when we are not. When it doesn’t work, may we try again. 

And may it work - may our defiance be brave and bold, loving and principled, strategic and creative and effective. May the risks we take become a force more powerful, to turn the tide from repression to freedom, from violence to safety, from annihilation to mutual thriving, from greed to reciprocity. May the old year and its curses come to an end; may the new year and its blessings begin.

Shana tova.

1 - Sah, Sunita. Defy: The Power Of No In A World That Demands Yes. New York: One World, 2025.

2 - Gessen, M. Beware We Are Entering A New Phase of the Trump Era. New York Times, May 28, 2025. 

Gessen, M. The Beautiful Danger of Normal Life During an Autocratic Rise. New York Times, June 9, 2025.

3 - Buber, Martin. Two Types of Faith. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003.

4 -  She teaches in many contexts, including in this book: Wong, Norma Kawelokũ, When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.

5  Talmud Bavli, Brachot 26b.