“Why Should This Matter to Me?”

ROSH HASHANAH 5787

 

Derasha by Rabbi Tom Cohen
Kehilat Gesher, the French-American synagogue of Paris

 

Shanah Tovah. I mean that. It really is good to see you.
Look around. Some of us have seen each other all year—on Shabbat, in classes, at community events.
For others, it has been a little longer. And then there are those of you whom we are welcoming for the
very first time. Perhaps you are new to Paris, perhaps visiting family, or perhaps you found yourselves
here for the holidays—which, I have to say, is not bad work if you can get it. Whatever brought you here
tonight, we are very happy that you are here.
Tonight is, in many ways, a return: a return to this place, a return to familiar melodies, a return to faces
we’ve missed, a return to a rhythm that is older than any of us.
And perhaps that is what I’ve been thinking about as I prepared for tonight. Not only those of us for
whom being here is obvious—those who wouldn’t know quite what to do with themselves on Rosh
Hashanah if we weren’t in synagogue. I’ve also been thinking about those for whom coming here was
less obvious. Maybe you’re not even sure you are the person I’m talking about. Maybe your mom or dad
asked twice, and you didn’t want the fight. Maybe a spouse said, “We’re going,” and you lost that
argument.
I know—You’ve got a good life. A career you worked for. People you love. A conscience you trust to tell
right from wrong without consulting a text three-thousand-years-old. And perhaps part of you is
wondering why any of this should matter to you at all. So let me ask the question the way you might ask
it. Why should any of this matter to me?
You can live a decent life without a synagogue. You can be generous without keeping kosher. You can
care about justice without knowing a word of Hebrew. So why show up? That’s not rhetorical.
I think it’s one of the great questions facing Jewish life today. But notice something about the question
itself. It treats Judaism almost as a commodity, a service we are deciding whether to purchase or not:
Does it improve my life? Does it meet my needs?
That is a perfectly understandable modern question. But Judaism begins somewhere else. It was never
simply a private philosophy designed for an individual. You don’t only inherit ideas. You inherit a people,
a history, a set of memories, and a relationship with other human beings. That doesn’t make the
individual question less important. It simply means “What does this do for me?” isn’t the only question
worth asking. Still, the individual question is real, and I don’t want to dodge it by hiding behind the
collective one.
The challenge isn’t that people are hostile to Judaism. It’s that many simply don’t feel it is necessary. A
younger generation looks at an inherited identity and asks why it should define their future. Why not just
be human?
And then there are the obstacles, thickets. God, for one—a fairly large one. Many people don’t believe,
or don’t know what they believe. Then there is ritual: stand now, sit now, say this in Hebrew, don’t eat
that. And finally, there are the Jews. Sometimes the hardest thing about being Jewish is the Jews—
institutions, leaders, and Jewish politicians who disappoint us with a rare and competitive talent for it. No
names; this is a pulpit, not a roast. There are moments when we look at what is done or said in
Judaism’s name and think: if that’s Judaism, count me out.
I understand. Here’s what I won’t do tonight. I won’t tell you you are wrong. I won’t tell you that you can
not be a good person without Judaism. And I won’t pretend you have secretly built an empty life without
noticing. You may have built something real without a Jewish community to build it for you.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether Judaism can rescue a life that doesn’t need rescuing. Perhaps the
question is simply whether it still has something to offer a life that is already good. And that, I think, is
worth asking. Not because you’ll agree with everything you’ll find. You won’t. I don’t either. But before
deciding that Judaism has nothing to say to you, perhaps take a second look.
There is an old Hasidic story about Rabbi Zusya.

Near the end of his life, Zusya told his students he was afraid. They were puzzled—Zusya was known
as a humble and righteous man. “Why?” they asked. “Surely you are not afraid they will ask why you
weren’t Moses.” “No,” Zusya replied. “I’m afraid they will ask me why I wasn’t Zusya.” I’ve always loved
that story.
It contains the question underneath everything I want to say tonight. Judaism doesn’t ask you to become
someone else. Not Moses. Not your grandparents.
Not even someone else’s idea of what a good Jew looks like. The question is what you will do with what
you have inherited. Tonight, as we begin another year, that question feels especially apt, because
tonight also marks twenty-five years since September 11th. We gather to remember a morning when
thousands of people began an ordinary day and never came home. For some in this room, September
11th is history. For others, you remember exactly where you were. I do.
We remember the images, the disbelief, the moment we understood that what we thought we knew
about the world was no longer quite true. There are moments that divide life into before and after.
September 11th was one of them. And perhaps one of the things the past twenty-five years—and
certainly the past few—have taught us is how dangerous it is to assume the world we know is
permanent. Certainties can evaporate.
A morning can become history. As Jews, we know something about before and after. We carry
memories that happened before we were born and yet continue to shape who we are. We tell stories
about things we never experienced ourselves, and somehow, they still belong to us. The first thing
Judaism so often asks us to do is remember. Zakhor. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt.
Remember Shabbat. Remember where you came from. A modern person might reasonably ask: why
should events that happened to people I never knew have anything to do with me? I think that is exactly
where the conversation should begin. Because none of us actually begins with ourselves. We speak
languages we didn’t invent. We carry names we didn’t choose. We inherit histories we didn’t ask for.
Every one of us arrives in the middle of a story already underway.
That can be difficult to accept in a culture that tells us identity is something we build alone, from scratch.
But the question was never whether we inherited something. We all already did. The question is what
we do with it. Every generation inherits Judaism—and then argues with it. Translates it. Sometimes
changes it. Sometimes preserves something precisely because the world around it has changed.
We’re not here to become our grandparents—though I suspect they’d have opinions about some of our
poorer choices. We’re here because they handed us something. And now, it’s our turn to decide what to
do with it. To be a Jew is, in many ways, to inherit an argument and then join it. Judaism was never
primarily a list of answers.
It is a three-thousand-year-old conversation about how to live, how to grieve, how to forgive, how to
build a just society, how to understand God—or how to live with the fact that we cannot fully understand
the idea of God. One of the remarkable things about Judaism is that it kept the disagreements. Abraham
argues with God. Moses argues with God. Job demands answers and gets a whirlwind instead. The
rabbis of the Talmud disagree so relentlessly that a famous joke writes itself: put two Jews in a room,
and you’ll get three opinions. We call ourselves Yisrael—the one who wrestles with God. Not the one
who understood God. The one who wrestled.
I sometimes think modern Jewish life gets this backwards, as if belonging requires agreement first—as if
before you can call yourself Jewish, you need to have settled what you think about God, Israel,
halakhah, everything. Imagine inviting someone to dinner and telling them they must first agree with
everyone who has ever sat at the table. Who would come? Perhaps belonging begins not with
agreement, but with caring enough to wrestle. The person who says, “I have questions,” may actually be
standing at the center of the conversation.
But questions alone aren’t enough. You can have questions about Judaism and never walk through the
synagogue’s doors. So why gather? Why ritual?
I don’t think the answer is that Judaism tells us things about right and wrong that we don’t already know.
We know cruelty is wrong. We know dignity matters. At least, we know these things in theory.

The hard part is remembering them when it costs us something. We all believe in justice—until justice
becomes inconvenient. We believe in human dignity—until we are afraid. Values are easy to affirm and
much harder to live. This is where Judaism offers something we still need—not necessarily new ideas,
but practices, structures, reminders. We like to think we become who we are because of what we
believe. But much of the time, we become who we are because of what we repeatedly do. Judaism
understood that long before there were psychologists to explain it. If you want gratitude to be more than
a passing feeling, practice it.
If you want rest to be more than an aspiration, protect it. Judaism doesn’t simply say rest matters—it
says: Stop. It doesn’t simply say be grateful—it says: Bless. It doesn’t simply say care for the stranger—
it says: remember that you were one. It gives us a day like today and says: stop everything, look at your
life, what have you become, what needs repair.
That is what tonight is. Judaism’s great annual interruption. And you don’t need to have resolved every
theological question to understand the profundity of that. Most of us don’t. Sometimes we do the ritual
while still wrestling with the meaning. We say words before we fully know whether we believe them.
Sometimes the meaning catches up with us later. There is one more obstacle, perhaps the hardest of
all: particularism. Why should being Jewish matter especially to me? Why not simply say: I’m human,
and that’s enough?
There is something beautiful in that instinct. But I don’t think the answer to the dangers of particular
identity is to pretend we have none. Judaism refuses two temptations: believing that only my people
matter, and the comforting abstraction in which everybody matters equally—and therefore nobody in
particular is my responsibility. None of us learns to love “humanity” all at once.
We learn love through particular people—a parent, a child, a friend, a community. Perhaps particular
responsibility works the same way. My love for the Jewish people does not require me to believe other
people matter less. But Judaism asks something uncomfortable: am I willing to feel responsible for
people I have never met, simply because their fate is bound up with mine? The rabbis put it this way: Kol
Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh—all Israel is responsible for one another (TB Shevuot 39a). Not admiration.
Not agreement. Responsibility.
Universal concern becomes real somewhere—it begins with actual relationships, actual human beings.
The challenge is to hold the particular and the universal together. How do I remain loyal to my own story
without pretending it is the only one? How do I care deeply about my own people without becoming
indifferent to others? I’d rather belong to a tradition that forces me to struggle with these questions than
a philosophy of life that lets me ignore them.
And I can’t speak about belonging tonight without naming the last three years. For many Jews—
especially younger Jews—the horrors of October 7th and the devastating war that followed have
profoundly complicated what it means to belong. We are living through a time when complexity has
become almost intolerable, when we are constantly asked to declare ourselves, choose a side, reduce a
history to something that fits on a screen. But little about October 7th, or its aftermath, fits into a slogan.
For some Jews, these years revealed a connection to Jewish identity they did not know they possessed.
For others, the experience was almost the opposite—they were angered or heartbroken by things said
and done in the name of Judaism, Zionism, or the Jewish people, and began to wonder whether they
wanted any part of it. I understand that. Walking away from that pain is not necessarily cowardice or
betrayal. From the inside, it can feel exactly like integrity. I don’t think less of anyone who has felt that.
But before you walk away, I would ask one question: what exactly are you walking away from? If you
disagree with a government, are you rejecting Judaism? If you are angry about a war, are you rejecting
three thousand years of Jewish history? If another Jew says something you find intolerable, why should
that person get the final word on what Judaism means?
I am not asking you to agree with me politically, or to abandon your moral judgment, or to call something
right simply because a Jew—or a Jewish government—has done it. Judaism has never asked us to
surrender our conscience to power; the prophets made sure of that. I’m asking something else: don’t
hand your inheritance over to whoever shouts loudest. If you think Judaism should mean something
different, say so. Join the argument. Wrestle. That is not leaving the conversation. That is how the
conversation has always worked.

So why are you here tonight?
There may be a dozen reasons, half of which you may not be able to name. When the service ends, you
may still not know exactly what you believe. That’s fine.
You may still disagree with me about Israel, Zionism, God, politics, or anything else. You may still decide
synagogue isn’t really your thing. I am only asking you to not decide everything tonight.
There is a story about Franz Rosenzweig that I have always found deeply moving. Rosenzweig was a
brilliant, highly assimilated young German Jew who had seriously considered converting to Christianity.
Before doing so, he decided he wanted to experience Yom Kippur once more as a Jew. Something
about that encounter brought him back into Jewish life—not because all his questions suddenly
disappeared, not because he possessed certainty, but because the conversation was not over. At least,
not yet.
And perhaps that is the phrase I want to leave you with tonight. Not yet. Sometimes “not yet” is a
profoundly Jewish answer. Not yes. Not certainty. Not everything resolved. But not yet.
I am not ready to close the door. I am not ready to say this has nothing to offer me. I am not ready to
walk away from a conversation that has been going on for thousands of years.
And perhaps that is enough.
We often judge a forest by the thicket at its edge. Judaism certainly has its thickets: the difficult texts, the
ancient language, the rituals we don’t understand, the arguments that never end, the things said in
Judaism’s name that embarrass or anger us. The Jews. Always the Jews.
But we shouldn’t assume the thicket is the forest. Beyond it are generations of people asking questions
that have not gone away. How do we live with loss? How do we find hope in a broken world? How do we
forgive? How do we begin again?
What if this ancient, complicated, frustrating, beautiful tradition still has something to say to us?
Tonight, on this twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th, we remember how quickly the world can
change, that what seems permanent may not be, that we do not know what the year ahead will bring.
Perhaps there is something meaningful about beginning a new year not by pretending we have all the
answers, but by returning to the questions too important to abandon. Who am I? What do I owe other
people? What have I inherited? What will I pass on? Who am I being asked to become?
Rabbi Zusya was right.
The question is not why we weren’t Moses, but whether we were willing to become ourselves—not by
inventing ourselves from nothing, but by honestly taking what we have inherited, wrestling with it,
questioning it, changing it when necessary, and adding our own voice to the story.
So perhaps you came tonight because someone asked you. Perhaps because you didn’t want to argue.
Perhaps because, despite yourself, something in you was curious. And perhaps when you leave tonight,
nothing will be resolved. Good. It doesn’t have to be.
Judaism has survived for thousands of years without requiring everyone who entered its doors to have
the same answers. So don’t decide tonight whether you believe everything. Don’t decide tonight whether
you are going to become more involved.
Just don’t close the door, not yet!
Not yet is an answer.
The door is open. The conversation is still going on. And there is room for your voice.
Shanah Tovah u’metukah.