Rosh Hashanah 5786/2025
We will not underestimate our power any longer
We know that together we are strong.
Like drops of water shape the rocks
As they rush down the falls
We know that together we are strong.
These words, written and composed by Rena Branson, a Jewish singer-songwriter who grew up in the West End Synagogue community, have echoed through my mind regularly since I first encountered them several years ago. I don’t know Rena personally— it’s wonderful to think that many people in this room do— but even without having a direct connection, these words and this tune have helped me to return to myself and get focused when I feel out at sea.
Several times, I’ve joked with colleagues that I wish instead of writing new sermons I could give last year’s 3 big drashot with an exclamation point at the end of each, because, sadly, many of the challenging dynamics of 5784 only worsened in 5785, and the lessons we must carry forward into 5786 are ones that we didn’t learn enough this year: Deepen into community. Engage with Israel and Palestine with an aim of wellbeing for the 14 million human beings who call the land home. Live with hope.
I’m not giving last year’s sermons, but I am moved by the same themes. On Kol Nidre we’ll be discussing Israel and Gaza at length. On Yom Kippur morning we’ll engage with the topics of life and death. And today we’ll be talking about building community, even when it feels like we have no strength left.
Look, we are exhausted. I feel it. Rare as it is for me to make sweeping statements, much less to speak in the second person, I know you feel it too. There is a fog hovering over our society, like the Ruach Elohim, the wind of God hovering over the null and void tohu vavohu at the very start of our creation story but inversed, with emptiness trying to smother the beauty of creation. Our world feels full of danger, and it seems that too many people with too little care for others hold too much power.
When we look at our Torah reading today through the lens of power, the dynamics are straightforward. In our first Jewish family, Abraham holds the bulk of the power, his wife Sarah a bit less, Ishmael less still as a minor but posed to outstrip Sarah one day, and Hagar, as Abraham’s servant or slave or at best “second wife,” less than everyone else including her son. Once Isaac enters the picture, power becomes more complicated. On one hand, he is the son of Abraham and Sarah, the child who was promised. On the other hand, he is technically a second son.
Lorna spoke beautifully about fear in the narrative of Sarah and Hagar. I’d like to invite us to look at Sarah and Hagar with fear in mind, and look specifically at how Sarah’s fear paralyzes connection.
As we know, when Isaac is weaned, when he makes the transition in society from baby to child, Sarah’s fear of Hagar and Ishmael intensifies enough that she simply wants them gone.
Rabbi Ayelet Cohen writes about this:
“In Parashat Vayera we encounter Sarah and Hagar, two mothers who are more accustomed to scarcity than abundance and become trapped in their own fears for their beloved sons. After years of longing, Sarah receives the blessing of a son, of Isaac….But when we are accustomed to feeling empty, lonely, less than, it can be hard to stay in that place of joy. And so when Sarah becomes concerned about the behavior of Ishmael, the son of Hagar, towards her own son, Isaac, she reacts with seemingly unrelenting fury….Our fear that we and those we love will not have enough can make us regard others as competitors for the same scarce resources. We forget that generosity and connection are available to us. Instead of turning towards connection and generosity, which can lead to abundance, we turn away from them.”
You may remember that last year I drashed about how this family struggle could have gone better if Abraham had protested Sarah’s request to cast Hagar and Ishmael out. This year my question is different one: what if Sarah had allied with Hagar instead of with Abraham? What if, instead of pushing away those with less power to further solidify her position with the person who had more, she looked at things from Hagar’s vantage point? Such an exercise would doubtless be disconcerting. After all, the story Bereishit Rabbah tells about Hagar is that she was not only Egyptian but the Pharaoh’s daughter– a princess. Could Sarah even have imagined Hagar’s arc fully? Imagined her going from royalty to a servant or worse, being given to Abraham in some capacity and conceiving his son, facing such harsh treatment from Sarah during her pregnancy that she fled home, and then watching her son be displaced by the new baby?
If Sarah had been capable of such a visualization, maybe– probably— she would have approached Hagar differently. She would have seen the ways that Hagar was used by those in power, just like Sarah was used when Abraham twice passed her off as his sister instead of his wife to keep himself safe— knowing what she might be forced to endure as a result— and just like Sarah felt used when God said Abraham would have a son but for decades she could not conceive. Sarah would have perhaps noticed the ways that she and Hagar were both disadvantaged, albeit to very different degrees. And perhaps, rather than a rival wife and the mother of a rival son, Sarah would have been able to see Hagar as a mother who loved her child. If she had— if Sarah had truly seen Hagar as a parent just like her— surely she couldn’t have cast her out. Surely she would have found a way to connect across differences.
I can’t help but wonder how that would have impacted what came next. If Sarah and Hagar became allies, and Ishmael and Isaac grew up as brothers, would Abraham have been able to get Isaac to the mountain in the harrowing story we’ll read tomorrow?
Surely, before Abraham and Isaac set out on their journey, something was off. Something that made Sarah wonder. But Sarah had nobody to ask– nobody who knew her husband well enough to notice his ticks. And so, when Abraham told her that he and Isaac were going to the mountain, she had no choice but to confront him alone or to do what she did, which was to let them go. Alone, her power wasn’t great enough, nor was Hagar’s. They both needed community to stand with them. Today, so do we.
In 1944, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan reflected on his Rosh Hashanah sermon in his diary, writing: “Somehow many…can't get used to the idea that religion must concern itself with the same problems as those which are the subject matters of politics and economics. They expect religion to be other. They miss that otherness in my talks.”
I know that many of us would be glad to spend this holiday tucked away from the world’s woes, turning inward, cocooning ourselves in our tradition. Indeed, each of us must engage in our own personal reckoning. And I don’t blame anyone for wanting a break from the collective. As I’ve said, we are all exhausted. This summer, again and again, I heard variations on the theme of exhaustion. Not being motivated to go to shul, or to bookclub, or to volunteer. Not having the energy to meet friends for dinner. Not having it in us to enjoy the kinds of activities we normally look forward to during the longest days of the year. After years of “unprecedented times,” we are all so tired. But we also have an opportunity, when we are gathered for these sacred times, to find meaning in our tradition that transcends the text.
Recently, I attended a Zoom call hosted by T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights during which Rabbis from LA and DC told us about their experiences standing with their immigrant neighbors. One rabbi said: “It really is the times we’ve all been afraid of. It is happening now.”
It is happening now.
These are words that Jews have been forced to utter too many times. It is happening now. We need to hide our Stars of David and cover our kippot and tuck our tzitzit, now. We need to get our passports and get cash out of the bank, now. We need to run, now. In these times, with alarming levels of antisemitism, fear is a more than understandable response.
And right now, Jews are far from the only group in this country experiencing reasonable and overwhelming fear. Our undocumented neighbors, and those ICE are now somehow legally permitted to profile as “looking” undocumented, are terrified. Our trans neighbors, who are somehow both accused of not being real and simultaneously of being a pervasive negative influence on society, are terrified. Our immunocompromised neighbors, watching decision after decision create a society in which they are less safe from illness, are terrified. I could go on and on.
It may seem that there is nothing to do but keep our heads down and circle the wagons— try to make ourselves and our values small in order to keep ourselves and our most immediate circles safe. But together we are strong. We are strong even when we are scared, even when we are terrified. And while those in power would like us to stand against each other instead of in coalition, our most effective path forward is in community.
I was a history major, and in another life instead of rabbinical school I would have pursued academia with a focus on early America. One profound moment in early American, really pre-American history, was Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Up until that time, despite nearly 50 years since the first enslaved Africans were brought to the colonies, there were no legal distinctions between Black and white people. Nathaniel Bacon put together an illegal militia of white and Black indentured servants along with enslaved Black people, promising them freedom in exchange for their service. This militia proved so effective that they temporarily took control of Jamestown, and this frightened the elite so much that they began to legislate in a way to break down the alliance between poor white and poor Black people. According to Danny Duncan Collum, a professor at Kentucky State University,
“Bacon’s Rebellion represented the turning point in the evolution of race-based slavery and the ideology of white supremacy that came with it. The planters realized that indentured servants would not provide the stable, secure supply of cheap labor that they needed….That left the African slave trade as the only alternative….Africans were consigned to an inferior “other” category based…purely on skin color. At the same time, the colony took measures to improve the lot of freed white servants. In 1705, a new law guaranteed all freed servants severance pay in the form of ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings in cash, a gun, and fifty acres of land. So the commonality of interest between lower-class whites and Blacks was broken. They were divided and separated along racial lines. The poor whites were given material incentives to identify with the ‘big men’ of the colony as their allies and protectors against the Blacks. And so it has remained in America for three hundred years.”
This sort of “divide and conquer” technique has been wielded by those in power around the world, unfortunately with great success. In the United States, the definition of whiteness has shifted over time to encompass established groups of European immigrants while painting new ones— whether Irish, Italian, or Jewish— as the “other,” until such time as a new “other” supplants them.
It is telling that in a study published in 2023 by the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and based on data from 2009-2019, researchers found that the higher one’s education level and socioeconomic status, the more positive an attitude they were likely to have toward immigrants to the United States. Conversely, those with less education and less income were likely to be anti-immigration. When we look at the rhetoric employed by politicians whose support primarily comes from those with less education, we see a pattern of fearmongering based in scarcity. “Immigrants will take your jobs.” “Trans people will cheat and injure your daughters who are athletes.” “Muslim politicians will enact Sharia law.”
This sort of fearmongering has unfortunately inspired horrible acts, from the shooter at the Tree of Life who believed that HIAS and the Jews were going to replace white Americans with immigrants, to the shooter at an El Paso Walmart who specifically targeted Latino shoppers, to the far more mundane but still damaging microaggressions faced by people who are told to “speak English” or that their pronoun is wrong or that they should “go back to their country” when they were born in Brooklyn.
As Rabbi Rachel Barenblat points out, “Torah is a mirror of human experience. It's pretty common for someone who has been oppressed to oppress others in turn. Abraham made choices for Sarah without her consent; in turn, Sarah made choices for Hagar and Ishmael without theirs. One thing we learn from this story is that someone who doesn't have power over her own life may feel the need to assert power over someone else's.”
In the United States, as in most places, those with less money and less education generally have less power, and we are seeing wave after wave of legislation intended to keep the middle and working classes focused on other groups with less power rather than focused on the impact of the most wealthy and most powerful on their well-being. It’s harder to focus on the price of milk when we’re constantly being warned of violent criminals streaming across the border or men waiting to assault women in the bathroom. Rabbi Kaplan understood this political tactic well, writing in August, 1939:
The rulers in a mobocracy know that they can gain control of the masses by instilling in them hates and fears of some common enemy who has to be augmented to gigantic proportions if he is comparatively insignificant and harmless, and who has to be invented if he is non-existent. For their purposes mankind must be treated as broken up into classes or nations or tribes that are engaged in a mutual life and death struggle. The purpose of propaganda is to fan the flames of hate.
When Sarah told Abraham to exile Hagar, she did so with particular language. She looked upon the son of Hagar the Egyptian— only the second time her heritage is mentioned, the first being when she tells Abraham to have a child with her— and afterwards told Abraham to cast out the ama, the slave woman. Not Hagar. Not “your son Ishmael and his mother.” Not “your second wife.” The Slave Woman. The Egyptian. The slave woman and her son. Sarah chooses division. But we don’t have to.
While Sarah’s story has ended, ours is still being written. It is Rosh Hashanah and the book of life is wide open. We can choose to turn towards those who are facing struggles instead of away in fear. This is the time to look for those whom we have cast out, or are in the process of pushing away, who may have more to share with us than we think. While as individuals, or even individual groups, we may have limited sway, together, we are stronger than the few who seek to divide us.
We will not underestimate our power any longer.
