ROSH HASHANAH 5787<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Derasha by Rabbi Tom Cohen<\/em> <\/p>\n Shanah Tovah. I mean that. It really is good to see you. Near the end of his life, Zusya told his students he was afraid. They were puzzled\u2014Zusya was known The hard part is remembering them when it costs us something. We all believe in justice\u2014until justice So why are you here tonight? \u201cWhy Should This Matter to Me?\u201d 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\u2014on Shabbat, in classes, at community events. For others, it […]<\/p>\n Lire l'article...<\/a>","protected":false},"author":153,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","class_list":{"0":"post-28229","1":"drasha","2":"type-drasha","3":"status-publish","5":"entry"},"featured_image_urls_v2":{"full":"","thumbnail":"","medium":"","medium_large":"","large":"","1536x1536":"","2048x2048":"","featured-image":""},"post_excerpt_stackable_v2":"
\nKehilat Gesher, the French-American synagogue of Paris<\/em><\/p>\n
\nLook around. Some of us have seen each other all year\u2014on Shabbat, in classes, at community events.
\nFor others, it has been a little longer. And then there are those of you whom we are welcoming for the
\nvery first time. Perhaps you are new to Paris, perhaps visiting family, or perhaps you found yourselves
\nhere for the holidays\u2014which, I have to say, is not bad work if you can get it. Whatever brought you here
\ntonight, we are very happy that you are here.
\nTonight is, in many ways, a return: a return to this place, a return to familiar melodies, a return to faces
\nwe’ve missed, a return to a rhythm that is older than any of us.
\nAnd perhaps that is what I’ve been thinking about as I prepared for tonight. Not only those of us for
\nwhom being here is obvious\u2014those who wouldn’t know quite what to do with themselves on Rosh
\nHashanah if we weren’t in synagogue. I’ve also been thinking about those for whom coming here was
\nless obvious. Maybe you’re not even sure you are the person I’m talking about. Maybe your mom or dad
\nasked twice, and you didn’t want the fight. Maybe a spouse said, “We’re going,” and you lost that
\nargument.
\nI know\u2014You’ve got a good life. A career you worked for. People you love. A conscience you trust to tell
\nright from wrong without consulting a text three-thousand-years-old. And perhaps part of you is
\nwondering why any of this should matter to you at all. So let me ask the question the way you might ask
\nit. Why should any of this matter to me?
\nYou can live a decent life without a synagogue. You can be generous without keeping kosher. You can
\ncare about justice without knowing a word of Hebrew. So why show up? That’s not rhetorical.
\nI think it’s one of the great questions facing Jewish life today. But notice something about the question
\nitself. It treats Judaism almost as a commodity, a service we are deciding whether to purchase or not:
\nDoes it improve my life? Does it meet my needs?
\nThat is a perfectly understandable modern question. But Judaism begins somewhere else. It was never
\nsimply a private philosophy designed for an individual. You don’t only inherit ideas. You inherit a people,
\na history, a set of memories, and a relationship with other human beings. That doesn’t make the
\nindividual question less important. It simply means “What does this do for me?” isn’t the only question
\nworth asking. Still, the individual question is real, and I don’t want to dodge it by hiding behind the
\ncollective one.
\nThe challenge isn’t that people are hostile to Judaism. It’s that many simply don’t feel it is necessary. A
\nyounger generation looks at an inherited identity and asks why it should define their future. Why not just
\nbe human?
\nAnd then there are the obstacles, thickets. God, for one\u2014a fairly large one. Many people don’t believe,
\nor don’t know what they believe. Then there is ritual: stand now, sit now, say this in Hebrew, don’t eat
\nthat. And finally, there are the Jews. Sometimes the hardest thing about being Jewish is the Jews\u2014
\ninstitutions, leaders, and Jewish politicians who disappoint us with a rare and competitive talent for it. No
\nnames; this is a pulpit, not a roast. There are moments when we look at what is done or said in
\nJudaism’s name and think: if that’s Judaism, count me out.
\nI 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
\nnot be a good person without Judaism. And I won’t pretend you have secretly built an empty life without
\nnoticing. You may have built something real without a Jewish community to build it for you.
\nSo perhaps the question isn’t whether Judaism can rescue a life that doesn’t need rescuing. Perhaps the
\nquestion is simply whether it still has something to offer a life that is already good. And that, I think, is
\nworth asking. Not because you’ll agree with everything you\u2019ll find. You won’t. I don’t either. But before
\ndeciding that Judaism has nothing to say to you, perhaps take a second look.
\nThere is an old Hasidic story about Rabbi Zusya.<\/p>\n
\nas a humble and righteous man. “Why?” they asked. “Surely you are not afraid they will ask why you
\nweren’t Moses.” “No,” Zusya replied. “I’m afraid they will ask me why I wasn’t Zusya.” I’ve always loved
\nthat story.
\nIt contains the question underneath everything I want to say tonight. Judaism doesn’t ask you to become
\nsomeone else. Not Moses. Not your grandparents.
\nNot even someone else’s idea of what a good Jew looks like. The question is what you will do with what
\nyou have inherited. Tonight, as we begin another year, that question feels especially apt, because
\ntonight also marks twenty-five years since September 11th. We gather to remember a morning when
\nthousands of people began an ordinary day and never came home. For some in this room, September
\n11th is history. For others, you remember exactly where you were. I do.
\nWe remember the images, the disbelief, the moment we understood that what we thought we knew
\nabout the world was no longer quite true. There are moments that divide life into before and after.
\nSeptember 11th was one of them. And perhaps one of the things the past twenty-five years\u2014and
\ncertainly the past few\u2014have taught us is how dangerous it is to assume the world we know is
\npermanent. Certainties can evaporate.
\nA morning can become history. As Jews, we know something about before and after. We carry
\nmemories that happened before we were born and yet continue to shape who we are. We tell stories
\nabout things we never experienced ourselves, and somehow, they still belong to us. The first thing
\nJudaism so often asks us to do is remember. Zakhor. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt.
\nRemember Shabbat. Remember where you came from. A modern person might reasonably ask: why
\nshould events that happened to people I never knew have anything to do with me? I think that is exactly
\nwhere the conversation should begin. Because none of us actually begins with ourselves. We speak
\nlanguages we didn’t invent. We carry names we didn’t choose. We inherit histories we didn’t ask for.
\nEvery one of us arrives in the middle of a story already underway.<\/strong>
\nThat can be difficult to accept in a culture that tells us identity is something we build alone, from scratch.
\nBut the question was never whether we inherited something. We all already did. The question is what
\nwe do with it. Every generation inherits Judaism\u2014and then argues with it. Translates it. Sometimes
\nchanges it. Sometimes preserves something precisely because the world around it has changed.
\nWe’re not here to become our grandparents\u2014though I suspect they’d have opinions about some of our
\npoorer choices. We’re here because they handed us something. And now, it’s our turn to decide what to
\ndo with it. To be a Jew is, in many ways, to inherit an argument and then join it. Judaism was never
\nprimarily a list of answers.
\nIt is a three-thousand-year-old conversation about how to live, how to grieve, how to forgive, how to
\nbuild a just society, how to understand God\u2014or how to live with the fact that we cannot fully understand
\nthe idea of God. One of the remarkable things about Judaism is that it kept the disagreements. Abraham
\nargues with God. Moses argues with God. Job demands answers and gets a whirlwind instead. The
\nrabbis of the Talmud disagree so relentlessly that a famous joke writes itself: put two Jews in a room,
\nand you’ll get three opinions. We call ourselves Yisrael\u2014the one who wrestles with God. Not the one
\nwho understood God. The one who wrestled.
\nI sometimes think modern Jewish life gets this backwards, as if belonging requires agreement first\u2014as if
\nbefore you can call yourself Jewish, you need to have settled what you think about God, Israel,
\nhalakhah, everything. Imagine inviting someone to dinner and telling them they must first agree with
\neveryone who has ever sat at the table. Who would come? Perhaps belonging begins not with
\nagreement, but with caring enough to wrestle. The person who says, “I have questions,” may actually be
\nstanding at the center of the conversation.
\nBut questions alone aren’t enough. You can have questions about Judaism and never walk through the
\nsynagogue\u2019s doors. So why gather? Why ritual?
\nI don’t think the answer is that Judaism tells us things about right and wrong that we don’t already know.
\nWe know cruelty is wrong. We know dignity matters. At least, we know these things in theory.<\/p>\n
\nbecomes inconvenient. We believe in human dignity\u2014until we are afraid. Values are easy to affirm and
\nmuch harder to live. This is where Judaism offers something we still need\u2014not necessarily new ideas,
\nbut practices, structures, reminders. We like to think we become who we are because of what we
\nbelieve. But much of the time, we become who we are because of what we repeatedly do. Judaism
\nunderstood that long before there were psychologists to explain it. If you want gratitude to be more than
\na passing feeling, practice it.
\nIf you want rest to be more than an aspiration, protect it. Judaism doesn’t simply say rest matters\u2014it
\nsays: Stop. It doesn’t simply say be grateful\u2014it says: Bless. It doesn’t simply say care for the stranger\u2014
\nit says: remember that you were one. It gives us a day like today and says: stop everything, look at your
\nlife, what have you become, what needs repair.
\nThat is what tonight is. Judaism’s great annual interruption. And you don’t need to have resolved every
\ntheological question to understand the profundity of that. Most of us don’t. Sometimes we do the ritual
\nwhile still wrestling with the meaning. We say words before we fully know whether we believe them.
\nSometimes the meaning catches up with us later. There is one more obstacle, perhaps the hardest of
\nall: particularism. Why should being Jewish matter especially to me? Why not simply say: I’m human,
\nand that’s enough?
\nThere is something beautiful in that instinct. But I don’t think the answer to the dangers of particular
\nidentity is to pretend we have none. Judaism refuses two temptations: believing that only my people
\nmatter, and the comforting abstraction in which everybody matters equally\u2014and therefore nobody in
\nparticular is my responsibility. None of us learns to love “humanity” all at once.
\nWe learn love through particular people\u2014a parent, a child, a friend, a community. Perhaps particular
\nresponsibility works the same way. My love for the Jewish people does not require me to believe other
\npeople matter less. But Judaism asks something uncomfortable: am I willing to feel responsible for
\npeople I have never met, simply because their fate is bound up with mine? The rabbis put it this way: Kol
\nYisrael arevim zeh bazeh\u2014all Israel is responsible for one another (TB Shevuot 39a). Not admiration.
\nNot agreement. Responsibility.
\nUniversal concern becomes real somewhere\u2014it begins with actual relationships, actual human beings.
\nThe challenge is to hold the particular and the universal together. How do I remain loyal to my own story
\nwithout pretending it is the only one? How do I care deeply about my own people without becoming
\nindifferent to others? I’d rather belong to a tradition that forces me to struggle with these questions than
\na philosophy of life that lets me ignore them.
\nAnd I can’t speak about belonging tonight without naming the last three years. For many Jews\u2014
\nespecially younger Jews\u2014the horrors of October 7th and the devastating war that followed have
\nprofoundly complicated what it means to belong. We are living through a time when complexity has
\nbecome almost intolerable, when we are constantly asked to declare ourselves, choose a side, reduce a
\nhistory to something that fits on a screen. But little about October 7th, or its aftermath, fits into a slogan.
\nFor some Jews, these years revealed a connection to Jewish identity they did not know they possessed.
\nFor others, the experience was almost the opposite\u2014they were angered or heartbroken by things said
\nand done in the name of Judaism, Zionism, or the Jewish people, and began to wonder whether they
\nwanted any part of it. I understand that. Walking away from that pain is not necessarily cowardice or
\nbetrayal. From the inside, it can feel exactly like integrity. I don’t think less of anyone who has felt that.
\nBut before you walk away, I would ask one question: what exactly are you walking away from? If you
\ndisagree with a government, are you rejecting Judaism? If you are angry about a war, are you rejecting
\nthree thousand years of Jewish history? If another Jew says something you find intolerable, why should
\nthat person get the final word on what Judaism means?
\nI am not asking you to agree with me politically, or to abandon your moral judgment, or to call something
\nright simply because a Jew\u2014or a Jewish government\u2014has done it. Judaism has never asked us to
\nsurrender our conscience to power; the prophets made sure of that. I’m asking something else: don’t
\nhand your inheritance over to whoever shouts loudest. If you think Judaism should mean something
\ndifferent, say so. Join the argument. Wrestle. That is not leaving the conversation. That is how the
\nconversation has always worked.<\/p>\n
\nThere may be a dozen reasons, half of which you may not be able to name. When the service ends, you
\nmay still not know exactly what you believe. That’s fine.
\nYou may still disagree with me about Israel, Zionism, God, politics, or anything else. You may still decide
\nsynagogue isn’t really your thing. I am only asking you to not decide everything tonight.
\nThere is a story about Franz Rosenzweig that I have always found deeply moving. Rosenzweig was a
\nbrilliant, highly assimilated young German Jew who had seriously considered converting to Christianity.
\nBefore doing so, he decided he wanted to experience Yom Kippur once more as a Jew. Something
\nabout that encounter brought him back into Jewish life\u2014not because all his questions suddenly
\ndisappeared, not because he possessed certainty, but because the conversation was not over. At least,
\nnot yet.
\nAnd perhaps that is the phrase I want to leave you with tonight. Not yet. Sometimes “not yet” is a
\nprofoundly Jewish answer. Not yes. Not certainty. Not everything resolved. But not yet.
\nI am not ready to close the door. I am not ready to say this has nothing to offer me. I am not ready to
\nwalk away from a conversation that has been going on for thousands of years.
\nAnd perhaps that is enough.
\nWe often judge a forest by the thicket at its edge. Judaism certainly has its thickets: the difficult texts, the
\nancient language, the rituals we don’t understand, the arguments that never end, the things said in
\nJudaism’s name that embarrass or anger us. The Jews. Always the Jews.
\nBut we shouldn’t assume the thicket is the forest. Beyond it are generations of people asking questions
\nthat have not gone away. How do we live with loss? How do we find hope in a broken world? How do we
\nforgive? How do we begin again?
\nWhat if this ancient, complicated, frustrating, beautiful tradition still has something to say to us?
\nTonight, on this twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11th, we remember how quickly the world can
\nchange, that what seems permanent may not be, that we do not know what the year ahead will bring.
\nPerhaps there is something meaningful about beginning a new year not by pretending we have all the
\nanswers, but by returning to the questions too important to abandon. Who am I? What do I owe other
\npeople? What have I inherited? What will I pass on? Who am I being asked to become?
\nRabbi Zusya was right.
\nThe question is not why we weren’t Moses, but whether we were willing to become ourselves\u2014not by
\ninventing ourselves from nothing, but by honestly taking what we have inherited, wrestling with it,
\nquestioning it, changing it when necessary, and adding our own voice to the story.
\nSo perhaps you came tonight because someone asked you. Perhaps because you didn’t want to argue.
\nPerhaps because, despite yourself, something in you was curious. And perhaps when you leave tonight,
\nnothing will be resolved. Good. It doesn’t have to be.
\nJudaism has survived for thousands of years without requiring everyone who entered its doors to have
\nthe same answers. So don’t decide tonight whether you believe everything. Don’t decide tonight whether
\nyou are going to become more involved.
\nJust don’t close the door, not yet!
\nNot yet is an answer.<\/strong>
\nThe door is open. The conversation is still going on. And there is room for your voice.
\nShanah Tovah u’metukah.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"