Rosh Hashana 5785
One of my teachers talks about the fall of 2001. That year, the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center happened just one week before Rosh Hashana. All of the rabbis who had left their sermon writing until the last minute felt eminently justified. All the rabbis who had written their sermons ahead of time had to write new sermons. The world had been remade, and they had to figure out how to respond to it.
In some ways, we rabbis have had an entire year, rather than just a week, to write this sermon. The Jewish world was remade on October 7th. We have been grieving, processing, and responding to it all year long. And, the world continued to change, continued to take our breath away. Some of our worst fears have been realized, and it continues to get worse.
So here I am, still trying to figure out what to say.
A few weeks ago, I asked a bunch of Nehar Shalom members - what do you need to hear from the bima on these chagim? The responses I received were so heartfelt. They included, I need you to help us use the tools of cheshbon nefesh and teshuva to process a full year of genocide happening in our name. They included, I am tired of hearing about Israel/Palestine, I hope you will talk about climate change. They included, I might be too scared to even show up. I’m afraid the rituals will not mean anything; I’m afraid to open the well of feeling that lives in the same place as tefilah.
The needs of our community are vast, and are contradictory. They are beautiful, and powerful. We all deserve to hear things that will be healing and encouraging today. That first Shabbat, on October 13th, in my dvar Torah, I wrote about silence and speech. And I wrote, “There is only one thing I know stronger than my desire to not cause anyone in this community pain with my words, and that is that silence is not an option. We are Jews. In this world, we know how dangerous silence is.”
So today I am going to reflect on the commandment to not stand idly by as our neighbor’s blood is shed.
I am going to reflect on it because I believe that the only possibility for Jewish safety in the world is one in which we take the lead in refusing to stand aside while anyone’s life is in danger.
I’m going to reflect on it because I think Jews take enormous pride in this mitzvah, and rightly so. Our tradition embraces life, and prioritizes life. This value deeply animates Jewish practice, culture, and community, and is perhaps more universally held across different expressions of Jewishness than any other. Regardless of relationship to halacha or obligation to mitzvot, many, many Jews feel obligated to this mitzvah.
Al taamod al dam reyecha...from Levitcus 19, the holiness code. Do not stand aside when a fellow person’s blood - by which the Torah means a fellow person’s life - is at risk.
Since October 7th, for so many Jews, our commitment to this mitzvah has been activated, and what it means to understand it thoroughly and commit to it with integrity, has been tested.
Whose blood will we stand up for? How can we actually do that? Will they stand up for ours, too? And to what lengths will we go?
The classical understanding of this commandment is that if you are witnessing an emergency situation in which another person’s life is threatened, you are required to intervene. The commandment applies when you are in direct proximity to the emergency. The examples given in the Talmud involve one who sees someone drowning, being dragged by a wild animal, or being threatened by bandits. The one who sees is required to take action to save the endangered life.
Maybe you have had this experience, of seeing someone in immediate danger, and intervening. You know what the adrenaline feels like. You know the questions you have to ask, and the ones you have to ignore. You know that things sometimes get damaged in the process, and that it may not be only the one who was in danger who needs to recover.
When the rabbis read lo taamod al dam reyecha, the scenarios they could imagine were directly proximate. Haroeh - one who sees someone drowning. The medieval halachic codes add two scenarios: the one who hears people conspiring to harm their friend, or one who knows that a dangerous person is approaching their friend, and they could intervene to deescalate the situation. One who sees, one who hears, one who knows, that life is endangered more or less in front of them.
Those rabbis could not imagine the world we live in today in which the suffering of people all across the world happens, in a sense, right in front of us, because of what our communications systems make possible. They could not imagine a world where we might be able to see a child buried in the rubble of their home, and not be able to help lift that rubble away and rescue the child.
I believe that the mitzvah to not stand idly by lives deeply within us, in our souls and in our bodies, and regardless of how close we are, when we see, or hear, or know that life is at risk, it activates something very powerful. Our job is to figure out how to respond to that call; our job is to create a collective framework that enables us to respond together; our job is to regulate our nervous systems so that we can keep showing up - even when we are at risk, even when it costs us something, and even when it doesn’t work. And it is also our job to examine who is our reya, our neighbor, our friend.
In discussing how to respond to the call of this mitzvah, and what it requires of us, the rabbis start with the most extreme scenarios - should we give our lives to save another’s life?
The scenarios these questions bring to mind today are devastating. They are the kinds of questions that war forces civilians to face. Should I go out to find food or fuel or medical care for my children, for my elders, and risk my own death, by bomb, by gun, by capture? The doctors who show up at hospitals every day, knowing they are targets for airstrikes.
The rabbis agree that we are not obligated to die in order to save someone. They recognize that some will be compelled to make that choice. And they do obligate us to intervene even if it poses a risk to our lives, if doing so might save someone whose death is certain if we don’t.
From far away, knowing that people, humans just like us, are facing such impossible choices, raises the stakes for us. Makes us want to show up with more power, to give more money, to fight with more strength. Our tradition wants us to feel activated in that way. The rabbis were trying to create legal and ethical conditions that would both remove obstacles to taking action and compel us emotionally. And our history compels us with even more emotional force - so many of us have a story in which someone, Jewish or not, risked their life to save our ancestor, and thus the entire world that descended from them.
The Talmud and halachic codes also discuss how much of our resources we are required to give in order to save a life. And again, in a case where someone is starving in front of you, it is easier to legislate that you should spend everything you have in order to feed them. What about when half a million people are starving across the globe? When the GoFundMe requests to help a single family flee are endless?
The tradition suggests that we should give between ten and twenty percent of what we have to those who are in need. But it also tells us that for the sake of pikuach nefesh, in order to save a life, we should give everything. And further, in order to avoid transgressing a negative commandment, which includes lo taamod al dam reyecha, we should give everything we have, even if that includes selling our own house.
But here’s the thing - as Rabbi Asher Weiss, a contemporary halachic authority, reminds us - that circumstance should be extremely rare, because the entire community shares the obligation, and thus the burden, of fulfilling this mitzvah. No one should have to sell their house, because the community should meet the need together.
It is upon each of us to figure out how to respond to this mitzvah for ourselves, but that only becomes possible when we respond together. In that sense, I actually fulfill my obligation to the mitzvah by building the community that can and will respond to it together.
Figuring out how to show up individually and together this year was so, so hard.
It was hard because the collective opportunities to show up were so often alienating, and the collective voice so often did not hold the full spectrum of our experience or the fulness of our truth.
It was hard because we are all limited, and because many other issues demanded our attention and because we each lived our own full lives.
It was hard because we did not know what would work, and because so much of what we tried did not work.
Despite those challenges, you showed up this year. You showed up individually, and collectively. You gave money. You supported your loved ones who were grieving, traumatized, and scared. You called politicians daily. You stopped traffic, interrupted the UN, sat down in a congressman’s office and refused to get up. Maybe you went to Israel, or Palestine, or both. You collected poetry. You prayed. You said mourners’ kaddish. You took risks at work. You had hard conversations with friends, family members, and co-workers. You supported your staff or supervisees or students who wanted to take action. You nurtured new relationships, even ones that were challenging. You asked your boss, or your rabbi, to say something they had failed to say. You cried and grieved and changed what you were reading and what you were listening to and changed the way you observed holidays and Shabbat and maybe birthdays. Whoever you are, and whatever your positions on this war, you did some of those things.
As they discuss the possible financial impact of intervening to save a life, the rabbis acknowledge that things can get damaged, or even broken, in the process. They ask, if a rescuer breaks a vessel while they are trying to save someone, does the rescuer have to compensate whoever owns the jug that got smashed, the fence that was broken through, the clothes that were torn? The answer is no, they do not, because “if we did not rule this way, no one would save their friend from an attacker.” The rabbis did not want fear of financial consequences to keep people from intervening. But what about when we are afraid of breaking not a jug or a fence, but a relationship? What about when, in standing up for another’s life, we disappoint someone we love?
We experienced such breakage in Jewish community this year. Many of us felt a sense of betrayal by fellow Jews. Many of us felt alone in new ways.
Some of us had our fears activated that if and when our lives are in danger, there will be no one to protect us; some of us wondered - when Jewish lives are at stake, will even our fellow Jews stand up to protect them? Some of us were told that our expression of concern for Jewish safety, and Israeli life, compromised our solidarity with the oppressed.
Some of us were told that our expression of concern for Palestinians’ safety, and our expression of grief for Palestinian lives, made people we care about feel unsafe. Some of us were criticized, ostracized, doxxed, for refusing to stand aside as Palestinians were killed.
The very terms of this most deeply held commitment, to not stand idly by, were contested between us; and sometimes, inside ourselves. And it hurt. It hurts.
I wonder if we can build a bridge by honoring the depth of one another’s commitment. If we can cultivate empathy by witnessing one another fighting, giving, showing up, not standing aside, even when the positions we take create vast distances between us. I wonder if we can find each other in this mitzvah, even if we practice it differently.
I also know that in times of crisis, things sometimes need to break. And after a crisis has calmed, mending is revealed as possible that had been completely out of reach. In this time of crisis, I hope that our fear of breakage will not get in the way of us taking action and fighting for life. And I hope that when, God-willing, this crisis has eased, has transformed, we will reach for healing. I am choosing to trust that we will.
Sanhedrin teaches, nivra adam yechidi, the first human was created alone, in order to teach you that anyone who destroys one soul from Yisrael, it is as if he destroyed olam maleh, a full world. And anyone who sustains one soul from Yisrael, is credited as if he sustained olam maleh. Not one soul from humanity; one soul from among our people. But the passage then offers another reason the first human was created alone -- mipnei shalom habriot, for the sake of peace among people, so no person might say to another, my father is greater than yours. It is universal. We come from the same source; our lives are equally worthy.
Both voices are applied to lo taamod al dam reyecha. A clear thread in the tradition says it means we are obligated to save the lives of Jews. And another clear thread says it means we are obligated to save the lives of everyone.
In peace time, those differing interpretations don’t necessarily conflict. In war, we are told that they do. In peace time, I think this tension between the universal and the particular can be generative, pushing us to think with clarity and integrity about our obligations to one another, across different kinds of kinship, and across difference. In war, we are told that we have to choose. We are told that choosing both is a betrayal of our own people. We are told that survival through endless violence is the only option.
Rabbi Joachim Prinz, speaking just before Dr King delivered his I Have a Dream speech at The March on Washington in 1963, said this: “Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man's dignity and integrity.”
Reya is a moral concept. There are conditions in which it expands, and there are conditions in which it narrows.
Did it narrow for you this year? Maybe it narrowed for you when someone you care about hesitated to unapologetically grieve the deaths of Jews. Maybe it narrowed for you when someone refused to condemn terror against Jews out of hand. Maybe it narrowed for you when images from October 7th in Israel made you think of violence that was perpetrated against your ancestors. Maybe it narrowed because you cannot see a way forward.
And maybe the question of reya, of who is your neighbor, expanded for you. Maybe it expanded for you because your heart broke open. Maybe it expanded for you when a bomb printed with the words Made in the USA tore through a kindergarten classroom. Maybe it expanded for you when the Israeli state claimed to be fighting for the safety of all Jews everywhere. Complicity also makes us neighbors.
In the Biblical dictionary, one of the definitions for reya is another person, with whom one stands in reciprocal relations. What will it take for us, as a collective Jewish community, to accept the reality of reciprocal relations? Not just with Palestinians, but with everyone who lives on the earth?
We are taught as Jews that we must fight for our own people, and we must fight for others. But what if we were taught, instead, that fighting for our own people is fighting for others, and fighting for others is fighting for our own people? What if the risk we were willing to collectively take were to say we will sacrifice no one. Were to say, the only way to understand reyecha is everyone. Were to say - we will only survive if we are in reciprocal relations, and we will take the risk of offering that first.
In 5785, I pray that we have the courage to break what needs to be broken.
I pray that we have the fortitude and generosity to mend what needs to be mended.
I pray that our people become safe and free in a world where all people are safe and free.
I pray that we continue to build a community of reyim, neighbors, friends, people in reciprocal relations,
a community that rises up together, that fights for the lives of our people and all people,
a community that rises up to life, to justice, to peace.
Ken yehi ratzon. May it be so.
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