Dvar Torah: Between the Script and the Choice

I must acknowledge tonight that there is something weird for me about the beginning of today’s drashah. Twenty-eight years ago, today, my father, Avraham Noach ben Yitzchak ve’Rachel z”l, passed away. And today, the drashah will reflect on what happened after another of our fathers, Yaakov, died. 

When a father dies, something may shift. Old wounds resurface. Questions that were kept quiet suddenly demand answers. The presence that held things together, however imperfectly, might be gone. And in that absence, we discover what was actually holding us in place—was it love, or was it fear?

When the text, at the end of Parashat Vayehi, tells us that Yaakov had died and been buried, it explicitly lets us know also that Yaakov’s sons, Yosef’s brothers, are terrified. For years, they have lived under the fragile peace of their father's presence. Now that he is gone, they fear Yosef will finally take his revenge.

They send a message claiming Yaakov's dying wish was for Yosef to forgive them. In his commentary, Rashi doesn’t believe them and suggests they invented it for the sake of peace.[1] Whether true or fabricated, what matters is Yosef's response. In just one verse, the Torah gives us layers of theology to unpack:

"Have no fear! Am I a substitute for God? Besides, although you intended me harm, God intended it for good, so as to bring about the present result—the survival of many people."[2]

Yosef refuses the role of judge. He acknowledges his brothers' intent was evil, yet insists God's intent was good. The harm and the blessing somehow occupy the same event. This is not moral relativism; Yosef does not say "it's all okay now." He says something far stranger: you chose evil, God chose good, and both were real.

This is where we hit the wall. If God intended the outcome, were the brothers really free to choose otherwise? If their cruelty was part of a divine plan to save Egypt and the whole region from famine, how can we hold them accountable?

Consider an earlier moment in Genesis. In Parashat Lech Lecha, God tells Avraham: “Know well that your offspring shall be strangers in a land not theirs, and they shall be enslaved and oppressed four hundred years.”[3]

So the arc was foretold. Long before Yosef's brothers sold him, long before Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites, God spoke of exile and oppression. Egypt's cruelty was predicted. Does this mean the Egyptians had no choice? Does it mean the brothers had no choice? If the outcome was guaranteed, where is the space for human freedom, and how can we speak of justice, reward, or punishment?

The Mishnah in Pirkei Avot gives us the classic Jewish formulation of the dilemma: "All is foreseen, yet freedom is given."[4]

It is a maddening sentence. It refuses to resolve the tension. Instead, it holds both truths at once, like Yosef himself, refusing to collapse the paradox into an easy answer.

One way our tradition tries to navigate this is by distinguishing between the decree and the details. Yes, God may have foretold that Avraham's children would be enslaved. But who enslaved them, how they enslaved them, and how far they went—those were human choices. Rambam, in Hilkhot Teshuvah, argues that a decree about history does not force any particular person to become its agent. Egypt was not punished for "playing a role," but because real people chose oppression.[5] Ramban adds that they also exceeded the decree, turning servitude into cruelty.[6] The Torah can foretell exile without drafting villains.

But even this explanation leaves us uneasy. Because the deeper question remains: if I am inside circumstances I did not write, in what sense am I free?

And this matters because providence-language cuts two ways, both of them dangerous.

On one hand, it can lock people into suffering, making oppression feel divinely ordained. If slavery was "decreed," then the enslaver bears no guilt. If exile was "foretold," then the one who exiles can claim to be an instrument of heaven. History is filled with this theological move. In Genesis, Noah curses Canaan, the son of Ham, to be "a servant of servants."[7] For centuries, this verse was twisted to claim that Africans—said to be descendants of Ham—were cursed by God to servitude. Slavery, then, was not a crime but the fulfilment of scripture. Providence became a permission slip for unspeakable cruelty.

On the other hand, providence-language can be claimed by those who hold power after suffering. "God raised me up from the pit," becomes "therefore my use of power is beyond question." Past victimhood becomes present entitlement. The suffering I endured purifies whatever I do next.

Yosef refuses both moves. To his brothers, he says: "You intended harm"—your choices were real, not excused by any decree. And to himself, he says: "Am I in the place of God?"—my suffering does not give me the right to play judge. Providence may have brought me here, but I am still accountable for what I do with this power.

This is the ethical tightrope the Torah walks. It acknowledges that God works through history, yet insists that human beings remain responsible. Neither oppressors nor survivors get to hide behind divine plan.

Here is where Viktor Frankl becomes essential. Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote Man's Search for Meaning after his liberation from Auschwitz. In it, he describes the radical insight that saved his life in the camps:

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances."[8]

Frankl is describing precisely what Yosef discovered. Yosef could not choose whether his brothers would sell him. He could not choose whether Potiphar's wife would frame him, or whether he would spend years rotting in an Egyptian dungeon. Those were the decrees of his life, the circumstances imposed on him. But he could choose what kind of person he would become inside those circumstances.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik offers us language for this distinction. In his essay Kol Dodi Dofek, written in the shadow of the Holocaust, he speaks of goral and yi'ud—two different relationships we can have with our lives.[9]

Goral means "fate" or "lot." It is what happens to us, the circumstances we do not choose. It is the accident of birth, the trauma inflicted by others, the historical moment we inherit. Goral is passive. We are its object, not its subject.

Yi'ud means "destiny" or "purpose." It is what we do with those circumstances. It is our response, our choices, the meaning we create. Yi'ud is active. Here, we become the subject of our own story.

Think of it this way: you did not choose your parents, but you choose what kind of parent you will be. You did not choose the body you were born into, but you choose how you will inhabit it. The circumstances are goral. The response is yi'ud.

The pit, the prison, the palace—those were Yosef's goral. Slavery, exile, and loss were imposed on him by his brothers. But his response, his refusal to become bitter, his decision to use his power to save rather than destroy—that was his yi'ud. He could not rewrite the past, but he could choose what kind of future he would build from its ruins.

This is what Yosef is teaching his brothers at the end of Vayehi. He is not absolving them. He is not saying their choice did not matter. He is saying: you chose to harm me, and that was real. God chose to use your harm for good, and that was also real. I could not control what you did to me, but I could control who I became because of it. You gave me goral. I chose yi’ud.

And yet, we must be honest. Last week, I stood here and criticized Yosef's policies during the famine—how he used the crisis to consolidate Pharaoh's power, how he reduced free Egyptians to servitude in exchange for grain. Yosef's yi'ud was real, but it was not perfect. He transformed his fate into a destiny of leadership, yes, but that leadership had costs, especially for those with no power.

This matters. Because the call to choose yi'ud over goral is not a call to moral perfection. It is not a guarantee that we will always get it right. Yosef fed the hungry and created an oppressive system. Both are true. He chose compassion toward his brothers and made decisions that harmed others. The freedom to choose our response does not mean we will always choose well.

Perhaps this is why the Torah gives us Yosef whole—his mercy and his mistakes, his transformation and his blind spots. The call is not to be Yosef. The call is to keep choosing, to keep asking, to refuse the comfort of saying "I had no choice."

So where does this leave us?

If we are honest, we all live in the tension Yosef names. Some of the circumstances of our lives were set before we arrived. We did not choose our parents, our genetics, the country or century we were born into, the traumas that shaped us, or the privileges we inherited. These are our goral, the unchosen facts of our existence.

And yet, we are not puppets. Inside those constraints, we still choose. We choose whether to forgive or nurse a grudge. We choose whether to hoard power or share it. We choose whether to let bitterness harden us or crack us open into compassion.

The rabbis refuse to resolve the paradox between divine plan and human freedom because life does not resolve it either. Every day we wake up inside circumstances we did not choose, and every day we are asked: what will you do with this?

Yosef's brothers intended harm. That was their choice, and the text never pretends otherwise. But Yosef refused to let their choice be the final word. He chose something else. He chose to act rather than to simply react with revenge. His choices were imperfect—as we have seen, some caused real harm. But the choice itself, the refusal to be defined only by what was done to him, that was his yi'ud. He chose not to become his brothers, even if he could not always avoid becoming like Pharaoh.

And perhaps that is the answer Parashat Vayehi offers. Not a philosophical solution, but a lived one. The question is not whether we are inside circumstances we did not choose. The question is: what will we do with the part we have been given?

This week, as we close the book of Genesis, I invite you to ask yourself: where in my life do I feel stuck inside circumstances I did not write? Where do I feel that the situation is fixed, the outcome inevitable, and my freedom an illusion?

And then ask the harder question: inside those circumstances, what choices do I still have? What kind of person am I becoming because of what has been done to me? Am I using my pain as an excuse, or as a doorway?

Yosef could not change his brothers. But he could change himself. He could not rewrite the past. But he could choose the future.

All is foreseen. And yet, freedom is given.

Shabbat Shalom.

[1] Rashi on Genesis 50:16.

[2] Genesis 50:19–20. 

[3] Genesis 15:13. 

[4] Mishnah Avot 3:15. 

[5] Rambam, Hilkhot Teshuvah 6:5. 

[6] Ramban on Genesis 15:14. 

[7] Genesis 9:25. 

[8] Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), p. 66.

[9] Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Kol Dodi Dofek: Listen—My Beloved Knocks, trans. David Z. Gordon (Jersey City: Ktav Publishing House, 2006).

The Courage to Be Yaakov

Twenty years earlier, in a tent dim with the haze of old age, a father asked his son a simple question: "Who are you, my son?"

The son, desperate for a destiny he felt he deserved but was not given, lied. “I am Esav, your firstborn,” Yaakov told his blind father, Yitzchak. In that moment, Yaakov stole a blessing that was not intended for him. He walked away with the prize, but the cost was exorbitant: the loss of his home, the hatred of his brother, and two decades of life spent looking over his shoulder, living in exile.

Now, in this week's parashah, Vayishlach, the bill has come due. Yaakov is about to meet Esav again. He is terrified. He sends gifts ahead, he divides his camp, but ultimately, he is left alone in the dark on the banks of the Jabbok River.

It is there that a mysterious figure—identified in the text only as ha'ish, "the man"—ambushes him. Our Sages debated who this figure might be. Some say it was an angel, others the guardian angel of Esav, yet Yaakov names the place Peniel, ‘I have seen God face to face.’

They wrestle until the break of dawn. The struggle is undeniably physical, Yaakov's hip is wrenched from its socket, but it is also something more. Before the stranger can depart, he asks Yaakov a question eerily similar to the one his father asked twenty years prior:

"What is your name?"

This is the pivotal moment of Yaakov's life. He could have lied again. He could have claimed to be someone stronger, braver, or more noble. But this time, he does not flinch. "Yaakov," he answers. He admits to being Yaakov: the heel-grabber, the supplanter, the trickster. He recognizes himself for who he has been.

As Rabbi Cheryl Peretz notes, this was a necessary prerequisite for his survival. "Did Jacob know who he was? After all, he had lied to his father... To have any chance of reconciliation with his brother, Jacob had to acknowledge that he had, in fact, done wrong; he had to wrestle with the guilt and disappointment in his own actions. He had to take an honest look in the mirror." [1]

Perhaps this is why the text identifies his opponent simply as "a man", because on the banks of Jabbok, Yaakov wrestled with more than an external adversary. He grappled with his own conscience, his fear, his shame, and yes, with God. The wrestling is both outer and inner, physical and spiritual at once. And it is only in the honest light of that confession of being "Yaakov" that he receives a blessing that is fully his. He is given a new name, Yisrael, one who wrestles with the Divine and prevails.

We often face similar moments that demand self-reflection. Like Yaakov, we wrestle with difficult questions: Who are we? What have we done? As Rabbi Peretz suggests, "Only through honest self-evaluation will we ultimately walk away renewed and transformed." [1]

The transformation, however, leaves a mark. The text tells us that when the sun finally rose, Yaakov limped because of his hip.

In our modern world, we are conditioned to view injury as failure and wholeness as perfection. But the Torah offers different, radical wisdom. Rabbi Yael Shy teaches that "although limping and in pain from the fight, Jacob emerges as who he is meant to be—Israel." [2] The limp is not a defect; it is a record of the experience. It is proof that he stayed in the fight. As Hannah Weizman (Plotkin) beautifully puts it, "That limp is not a sign of defeat but of blessing; it represents the profound change born from struggle." [3]

I suspect many of us carry our own limps, visible or invisible. Old mistakes we cannot undo. Harsh words that cannot be unsaid. Ideals we failed to live up to. Trauma that still echoes in the body. Some of those wounds came from things done to us; others, if we are honest, from things we did. Vayishlach does not promise that faith will erase any of that. What it offers is a different hope: that if we dare to wrestle, to answer truthfully when asked who we are, then even our limps can become signs of blessing.

This week, as we read of Yaakov walking into the sunrise, limping but renamed, perhaps we can ask ourselves a quiet question: Where in my life am I still trying to live on someone else's blessing? And where might God be waiting, in the dark corners of my story, to ask me one more time, "What is your name?"—inviting me to embrace my true self, walk forward, limp and all, into the light of a new day.

It is there, in our authentic, wounded, and wrestling selves, that we finally find the capacity to say: "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved."

Shabbat Shalom

Dvar Torah: Reading our book of life in time to change it | Yom Kippur Shacharit, 5786

(A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "Lendo nosso Livro da Vida a tempo de poder mudá-lo")

My late father spent virtually his entire professional life working for the same construction company. In an era without smartphones or high-resolution computers, he had a tool that helped clients imagine what a tile they liked would look like when repeated across a wall. It was a set of four foldable mirrors that enveloped the tile, creating the illusion of an infinite background in that same pattern.

Today, with virtual reality headsets, major architectural projects can allow us to “walk through” buildings that haven’t yet left the drawing board, giving us the feeling of physically being there.

Jewish tradition, with far less technology at its disposal, has for centuries developed strategies to help us experience scenarios far removed from our everyday lives. Shabbat, for example, is referred to as me’ein shel olam haba — a “taste of the world to come.” For 25 hours, we live as if the world were perfect. Yom Kippur, on the other hand, is described as a rehearsal for our own death: some people wear a kittel, reminiscent of the tachrichim, the shrouds in which we are buried; we abstain from many acts that belong to the realm of the living — we do not eat or drink, we do not have sex, and we avoid other pleasures; we recite vidui, the confession of our transgressions, just as we are commanded to do before we die.

Living for 25 hours as though the world were whole on Shabbat inspires us to bring some of that ideal into the week that follows. Experiencing Yom Kippur as a dress rehearsal for our death invites us, paradoxically, to reflect on what we value most in life. Rabbi Alan Lew expresses this concept in the following way:

This is what Yom Kippur asks us today. What is the core of our life? Are we living by it? Are we moving toward it?

We shouldn’t wait until the moment of our death to seek the answers. At the moment of death, there may be nothing we can do about it but feel regret. But if we seek the answers now, we can act in the coming year to bring ourselves closer to our core. This is the only life we have, and we all will lose it. No one gets out alive, but to lose nobly is a beautiful thing. To know the core of our being is to move beyond winning and losing. [1]

Being able to walk through a house before it has even been built may give us the courage to greenlight the project. Experiencing the world as if its brokenness had already been repaired can empower us to fix what we can. Imagining ourselves at the end of our lives enables us to focus on what truly matters, to see past the fog of the everyday that often clouds our vision. Paying the cell phone monthly bill, taking the clothes to the dry cleaner's, finishing the project you've worked on for two months, studying for the exam that will determine your final grade — all important tasks, but none of them define who we are or what our role in the world might be. Yet, all too often, we allow them to claim the best of our time and energy.

But what if we could see our lives from an even broader perspective? What if we could, for example, access the Book of Life we speak so much about on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur? What if God were to step out of the room for a moment and allow us to read everything written about us — how we were born, how we’ll die, our greatest loves and deepest disappointments? How might that change the way we live?

Some time ago, I encountered a story that resonated deeply with the metaphors of these High Holy Days — especially the metaphor of the Book of Life. It was a short story called Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang. [2]

The story is about alien spaceships arriving at various locations across Earth. A linguist is recruited to communicate with them and gradually discovers that these beings experience time in a non-linear way — something we humans find difficult even to imagine.

Time, for us, has a set rhythm. Every second, the second hand of the clock ticks forward, and there’s nothing we can do to rewind it or speed it up. It’s as if our lives are a film in a cinema, where we can’t pause to go to the loo or skip through a violent scene. But what if life were like a short story collection — one we could open to any page and read freely? First the wedding, then adolescence, then the details of our birth… What if we could even see how we will die?

That is what the linguist learns from the aliens — she begins to read her own life as a book of interconnected, but also self-contained, stories. If you had that power, how would it change your choices?

In the story, she sees that she will marry a man she hasn’t even kissed yet, and that they will later separate. Their daughter will suffer from a rare, incurable disease and die young. And even with this foreknowledge… she chooses to love him. She chooses to have that child. And she loves them as though she didn’t know how the story would end.

This is the heart of the Yom Kippur challenge. If we could see the entire arc of our own story, what would we learn? We would see chapters of profound joy and connection, and others of pain and loss. We would see the people whose lives intertwine with ours — our partners, our children, our friends — and the complete story of our relationship with them, from its beautiful beginning to its inevitable end.

The question the linguist faces is the question we face today: knowing that love can lead to heartbreak, that commitment can lead to disappointment, and that life itself leads to loss, do we still choose to live fully? Do we still open our hearts? If you could read your Book of Life, and see a relationship that will bring you a decade of true happiness but end in sorrow, would you still begin it? If you could see a choice that will lead to great professional fulfilment but also your greatest failure, would you still take that risk?

We live in a time when our decisions are increasingly shaped by fear, particularly fear of pain. I know people who got up to all sorts of mischief as teenagers but who now won’t let their own children go out alone, or play contact sports — for fear of what might happen. If we could foresee that a relationship would be full of intense emotion and meaningful joy but would end tragically, I suspect many of us would opt out, thereby forfeiting all the good that could have been. In our fear of suffering, we end up choosing emotional mediocrity.

The story’s great revelation is not that the future is knowable, but that even with full knowledge of the pain that awaits, the protagonist chooses love. She chooses to live. She rejects emotional mediocrity born from fear.

This is the ultimate lesson of the Book of Life. It is not a divine ledger designed to frighten us into compliance. It is a mirror, like the one my father used, showing us the pattern of our lives. Yom Kippur gives us the chance to pause, to look into that mirror, and to decide if we like the pattern we see.

We cannot know the future. We cannot read the story of our life from beginning to end. But we can decide, here and now, what kind of story we want to write. Acknowledging that our time is finite, and that joy and sorrow are inextricably linked, how can we choose to live more bravely, more lovingly, more meaningfully from this day forward?

This Yom Kippur, may we have the courage not to fear the difficult chapters, but to write a story filled with connection, purpose, and love. May we be inspired to live so fully that when our book is finally closed, it will be one worth reading.

Gmar Tov!

[1] Alan Lew, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, p. 230.

[2] Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others. The film is available on Netflix here: https://www.netflix.com/br-en/title/80117799

Dvar Torah: Giving Life to Our Metaphors for God | Rosh haShannah 5786

(A previous version of this text was published on this blog in Portuguese under the title "Dando vida às metafóras sobre Deus. Rosh haShaná 5783")

I want to begin with a Chasidic story that I love to teach, and which I came across in a book by S. Y. Agnon [1], the Israeli author awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966.

One day a chasid visited his Rebbe, the Rabbi Elimelech of Lizensk, during the days between Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur, and asked whether he could watch how the Rabbi performed the kapparah.

For those unfamiliar with the term, kapparah is an old tradition in which a person’s sins are transferred to a chicken on the eve of Yom Kippur by waving the animal over the person’s head. The animal is then slaughtered, along with the sins of the person, and donated. Over time, and with concern for animal welfare, some people have done a version of this ritual in which the sins are instead transferred to money, which is then donated. Let it be clear that these practices are no longer observed by the great majority of the liberal Jewish world.

The Rabbi’s answer surprised the chasid somewhat:

“I am honoured that you wish to see me carry out the mitzvah of kapparah, but I must tell you that in this particular mitzvah, my performance is nothing extraordinary. If you want to see someone who does it in a special way, go and see Moishe, who runs the hostel.”

On the morning before Yom Kippur, the young chasid went to Moishe’s home to observe how he did kapparah, peering through a window.

Moishe began by sitting in a wooden chair in front of a small fireplace in his living room, with “his two books of teshuvah” by his side. Moishe took the first book and said:

“Ribono shel Olam [Master of the World], the time has come for us to settle accounts for all our transgressions of the past year, for kapparah applies to all Israel.”

He opened the first book, read what was written very carefully, and began to weep. The young chasid listened closely while Moishe read a list of sins (all apparently rather minor) that he had committed in the previous year. When he finished reading, Moishe took his notebook, soaked with tears, held it above his head, then threw it into the fire. He then took the other book, much heavier than the first, and said:

“Ribono shel Olam, before I listed my transgressions; now I will recount all the transgressions that You have committed.”

Moishe immediately began to list all the episodes of death, suffering, disease and destruction which had occurred over the previous year to members of his family. When he finished listing them, he said:

“Ribono shel Olam, if we were to calculate precisely, You owe me more than I owe You. But I do not wish to be so exact in our accounting, for today is the eve of Yom Kippur and we are all obligated to make peace with one another. Therefore, I forgive all Your transgressions against me and my family, and You also forgive all my transgressions against You.”

With that, Moishe took the second book, also soaked with tears, held it above his head, and threw it into the fire.

He then poured vodka into his cup, made the blessing, said “L’chaim!” loudly. He sat down with his wife and had a good meal in preparation for the fast.

The young chasid, shocked, returned to his Rebbe and recounted the heresies Moishe had spoken to God. The Rabbi said to him:

“Know this: in the heavens, every year God and all the Divine court gather to hear with keen attention the things Moishe says. And as a result, there is joy and satisfaction in all the worlds.”

As I said, I love teaching this story because there is in it a fundamentally Jewish element of protest which we have allowed to fade over the past century and a half. When I offer the first class in an Introduction to Judaism course, I tell the students that whereas, in most other religious traditions, being a devout person means saying “Yes, Sir” to the Divine message, in Judaism a committed Jew responds to God’s call with “how dare You ask me such a thing?!”. That was how Avraham, the first patriarch, responded when God instructed him to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah [2]; that was how Moshe responded when God said He would destroy the people after the episode of the Golden Calf [3]; that was how the rabbis responded when God attempted to intervene in one of their rabbinic debates [4]. The name most often given to the Jewish people in the rabbinic tradition, Yisrael, reflects this perspective: “one who wrestles with God”. The most amazing thing is that God does not seem disturbed by our questioning of God’s actions; on the contrary: in one story in which God's opinion is rejected by the rabbis, God comes away smiling and saying “My children have defeated me” — proud, like a parent whose daughter defeats him at chess.

When I teach the story of Moishe performing his extraordinary kapparah, people seem to appreciate it, and I think the reason is that they admire his conduct. But the truth is I believe they also identify with the chasid, who thinks it (what Moishe is doing) is heresy.

We want a new model of relationship with the Divine, yet we have immense difficulty giving up the current model, even when it deeply troubles us.

In preparation for this sermon, I was reading a book called God the What? What Our Metaphors for God Reveal about Our Beliefs in God, by Carolyn Jane Bohler. Early in the book, the author offers a questionnaire about our beliefs and suggests that readers fill it out before reading the book, and again after finishing it.

Personally, after all my years in rabbinical seminary, I consider myself someone with a sophisticated Jewish education; someone whose understanding of God is in no way based on what I call “Santa Claus God” — the long white-bearded image, sitting on a throne in the sky, watching every detail of our lives. My understanding of the Divine is fluid, but much closer to Mordecai Kaplan’s, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement (who defined God as “the power that makes for salvation”), or to those who see God as a process; or to Maimonides’, the rationalist philosopher for whom humanity could never assert with certainty what God is, only what God is not — for example, that God does not have a body. And yet, by the end of Bohler’s questionnaire (which includes statements like “God continues working in us, shaping us”, and “God and humanity share power and responsibility”, and “God takes what is and, again and again, seeks to create the best with what He has”), I was surprised to find that most of my responses still assumed “Santa Claus God”, the God I don’t believe in. I asked myself: why is that, if that is not how I believe the Divine to be?

Because the context that surrounds us matters, and repeated context matters even more. Perhaps some of you followed a few years ago the controversy around the live-action Little Mermaid film, in which the title role is played by Halle Bailey, a Black actress. On one side, fans upset that the Little Mermaid in the film would not have the almost-white skin of the original cartoon version. On the other, Black children moved to see that their hero would be portrayed looking like someone similar to them. I have never met a mermaid, nor do I know anyone who has. I do not know what colour her skin or hair would be, her height, or her tone of voice — and even without knowing a mermaid, no one complained when Hans Christian Andersen’s 19th-century character was portrayed as a red-haired white woman in a Disney cartoon. Without denying that many of the complaints had racist inspiration, there is also the truth that, after being portrayed white and red-haired in many children’s movies, that image becomes engraved in our consciousness. Dolls, Disney animations and other studios’ productions, clothes, many items hammering that idea into our heads since 1989, when the animated feature was released. That repetition of an image turns what might once have been only one possible way to read the character’s appearance into the only way people feel it must be.

The same phenomenon occurs with our theological perceptions. Within the Jewish world, whenever we recite a brachah we use the formula “Baruch Ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-Olam” — “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, King of the Universe.” Many aspects of the Divine are implicit in this short formula: God is “other”, whom we address as Ata (You) — and so is not part of us. God is male. God is hierarchical, our King and of the whole universe. In the wider culture, when God is a character in a film, it is in the vast majority of cases portrayed as an old white person with a deep voice. Even the comedians who deconstruct religious tradition, who question religious perspectives, portray God this way — other, male, hierarchical. When God is presented outside that mould — and there have been several attempts in recent years — the reception is like Moishe’s kapparah: it’s heresy!

Some time ago, I led workshops with groups of educators and students: I asked them what attributes they would ascribe to God based on the way God is depicted in the Torah and in Jewish liturgy. Most of the responses were far from welcoming: “punitive”, “egocentric”, “dogmatic”, “fearsome”, “violent”, “misogynistic” were some of the words used. However, when I asked what they personally believed about God, I received entirely different answers: words about being welcoming, partnership, horizontality. From the texts we read, the prayers we say, the cultural reality in which we live, we have come to accept that the “correct” perspective of God is one in which many of us no longer believe.

“No longer believing” also needs qualification, because it is implied in that phrase that once Jews believed in this God literally. Rabbi Larry Hoffman is one of the principal — if not the foremost — experts in Jewish liturgy in the liberal Jewish world. He challenges the idea with which we have been convinced: that our ancestors believed these texts literally. In his words:

“Complicating matters is our still very poor understanding of our ancestors, whom we envision as humorless saints who did not have to suffer the problems with prayer that plague us. But what if they were more like us than we think? Did the same prayers that bother us bother them – an all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing God who lets innocent children die, for example? When they encountered these liturgical claims, did they take them literally? Or had they already come to terms with the inexpressibility of the profound? Did they have to await modern literary criticism to develop what we now call “readership strategies”—or did they already know enough to read the way we do, recognizing the poetics of simile, hyperbole, personification, and the rest? That they lived in medieval times makes them neither childishly naïve nor mentally incompetent, after all. Some of them were geniuses like Maimonides, who denied God’s corporeality and anticipated our unease with prayers that treat God as if God were an all-too-human judge requiring pacification by prayer and petition. But was Maimonides the only one who thought such “heresies,” or was he just a particularly prominent person who dared say them out loud? Great writers do not always provide ideas that no one has ever entertained so much as they couch them in words that evoke knowing nods from readers who more or less suspected these truths anyway but had no way of expressing them.”

“What shall we say, similarly, about the authors of these prayers? How would we know if they wrote ironically, rather than literally, for example? Their Hebrew was unvocalized, leaving us, the readers, to guess at punctuation like commas and periods, but also exclamation points for intensity, question marks to denote rhetorical uncertainties, and quotation marks to warn against a literal understanding of what they bracket. What if we have been getting all this wrong? We can see, for example, how frequently they cited the Bible; but if their primary concern was quoting, how would we know if they intended the quotes as literal truths? We quote Shakespeare‘s “seven ages of man” to get across the idea of human development, but not to say that there are specifically seven such ages that “men,” say, bur not women, go through. If someone writes “divinely,” we do not mean they really write like God. What if our most gifted writers of prayer almost never took their writing literally? What if they were gifted the way writers are today—able to stretch language imaginatively enough to convey what ordinary conceptual thought will never quite arrive at?” [5]

Some time ago I read an article reporting that a skeleton was found in Borneo, Indonesia, with a leg amputated between knee and foot 31,000 years ago. The marks on the bones show that this was not an accident, but a surgical amputation. The surgery took place when the individual was 14 or 15 years old, and he lived until about 20. According to the article’s author:

“What seems obvious to me is that this discovery will force scientists to reconsider the technological and cultural development of those peoples. Since these populations did not know writing and did almost not build architectural works, all we know about them comes from excavating the places in which they lived and studying bones, paintings, remains of food, and the few artefacts found. With so little information, it is natural that we underestimate the progress of those societies. A discovery like this will force us to re-evaluate the knowledge and the technologies these people already mastered.” [6]

For more than 30,000 years, human beings were already capable of surgical amputation, but we continue to imagine that our ancestors believed the Torah literally and that our rabbis composed the Jewish liturgy without any poetic licence, without use of metaphor, without irony. All of those would be modern techniques to escape a theological reality with which we cannot quite reconcile ourselves.

In her book Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, Sallie McFague argues that reading religious texts as if they had a single literal meaning is to engage in what she calls the “idolatry of religious language”:

“The ancients were less literalistic than we are, aware that truth has many levels and that when one writes the story of an influential person's life, one's perspective will color that story. Our is a literalistic mentality; theirs was a symbolical mentality.” [7]

What if a symbolic reading were within our reach? What if we allowed ourselves a generous and radically metaphorical reading of the liturgical poems we will read in these Days of Awe, the Yamim Noraim?

In the book about religious metaphors that I mentioned earlier, the author suggests techniques for us to use these metaphors intentionally, without feeling that we are submitting to a theology that is not ours — and also to recognise that some of these metaphors do not work for us, that we should seek others. In one example where the reinterpretation was possible, she discusses the image of God as a potter, which is part of the liturgy of Yom Kippur—and which used to be dear to me, yet also troubling. I was troubled by the idea of God as a potter because it placed me in a passive, clay-like role, without agency, subject to the will of my Creator. Carolyn Bohler relates in her book that her son works with clay, and what she learned from him is that many attempts are required before the final product is ready. She continues, saying that the Divine Potter enjoys being creative, editing us, shaping us, giving us form.

With such a generous reading — not violating the sense of the text but nor presuming that its authors intended we adopt a literal reading — I have been able to see a way in which the Divine, dwelling within me, in a non-hierarchical way and without assuming any gender, helps me to transform all the time, in dialogue with me, as together we strive for me to become the best version of myself. The author herself recognises that not all metaphors leave room for this kind of symbolic seeking. In the book of the prophet Hoshea, for example, God compares Godself to an abusive husband — an image perhaps impossible to reclaim, especially for survivors of domestic abuse. Many others, however, have been thrown out like the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

In the best sermon I have ever read, Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig depicts God as an old woman waiting for her children to visit on Yom Kippur. At one point, God complains about the postcards her children send, with printed words written by others, in which they merely sign their name — toward the end of the text, it becomes clear that these postcards are the pages of the machzor, the High Holiday prayer book of Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur — words we repeat as if they were ours, as if we meant what they express, without even stopping to reflect upon their meaning.

Moishe, the hostel-owner, showed the radical courage to perform cheshbon hanefesh, accounting of the soul, both for himself and for God — thereby giving meaning to the ritual of kapparah. Could we too find that kind of radical courage, and transform the experience of these awe-filled Days into something truly meaningful and transformative?

Shanah Tovah! May the year 5786 be transformative and very sweet for all of us.

[1] S. Y. Agnon, “The Account,” Yamim Noraim, Part II, ch. 22.
[2] Genesis 18:25.
[3] Exodus 32:11-13.
[4] Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzia 59b.
[5] Larry A. Hoffman, “Prayers of Awe, Intuitions of Wonder,” in Who by Fire, Who by Water: Un’taneh Tokef, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman, Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2010, pp. 4-12.
[6] Fernando Reinach, “A mais antiga perna amputada”, Estado de São Paulo, 17 de setembro de 2022.
[7] Sallie McFague, Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, p. 23 (e-book).

Dvar Torah: The Courage to Rise | Rosh haShanah 5786

Yesterday, we spoke of t’shuvah as a deeply personal act of self-creation, of turning away from the paralysis of shame and toward the agency of authorship. Today, our focus shifts. We must now speak of t’shuvah as a collective act of hope, of turning toward a future that feels fractured and uncertain.

Before we speak of turning, we must be honest about where we are turning from. We stand today weary, perhaps even wounded. The last few years have demanded a reckoning with profound trauma, sorrow, and deep, often paralyzing, rage. We have weathered the grinding psychological weight of a global pandemic. We were plunged into new depths of anguish after the horrific Hamas attack on October 7th, a day of unspeakable cruelty that shattered the fragile sense of safety for Jews worldwide. This was followed by the devastating Israel-Gaza war, an ongoing tragedy that has brought profound suffering and division to our homes and hearts. In this moment, we are asked to hold multiple griefs at once, and the image of God in every life. Simultaneously, we are confronting a frightening resurgence of antisemitism and hate. We see oppression, inequality, and environmental degradation, problems that seem intractable. Our shared sense of truth is badly eroded as, it seems, is our capacity to engage diverse opinions without demonizing those with whom we disagree. And on top of it all, many of us have had to face our own private family ills and personal tragedies. When faced with such monumental suffering, the spiritual task of finding hope can feel not just difficult, but irresponsible, or perhaps utterly impossible.

It is easy to sink into despair. And a moment of despair is understandable; it is human. But our tradition teaches that to remain there is the greatest sin against life. The work of Rosh haShanah is to find the courage to get up again. Judaism gives us the spiritual framework for rising. The very word for hope in Hebrew, tikvah, comes from the root for a line or cord. It reminds us that hope is not a gentle feeling; it is a stretched rope, something taut and enduring, that we hold onto to pull ourselves out of the depths.

To grab hold of that rope, we must first look at a very strong metaphor for our time: the Broken Tablets. When Moshe descended Sinai and saw the Golden Calf, he shattered the luchot, the tablets he was carrying. It was a moment of absolute despair, the ultimate fall. Our collective tablets feel shattered today. Our faith in progress, in safety, in a shared sense of humanity—so many of our certainties lie in pieces at our feet. The temptation is to believe that because the tablets are broken, the covenant is void. The story is over.

But what did our ancestors do? The Talmud [1] teaches that the broken fragments were gathered up and placed in the Holy Ark, carried alongside the second, whole set. This is a very profound Jewish metaphor for hope. Hope is not about pretending the brokenness didn't happen. It is the sacred and difficult work of carrying our broken pieces with us, right next to our wholeness, as we build a new future. To rise, we must first have the courage to gather the shards.

This journey of gathering the shards happens in what storytellers call the Second Act. [2] It is the difficult middle, the moment when we are in the dark, too far from the start to turn back, but not yet close enough to see the light. This is the desolate space where the Israelites wandered for forty years, carrying an ark filled with both wholeness and brokenness. It is where we find ourselves now.

This is not a new challenge for us. For generations, in our darkest moments, we have held onto our stories as tools for survival. The scholar David Arnow reminds us that Judaism possesses a "deep reservoir of resources—ideas, texts, practices, and stories—that have helped the Jewish people over the ages to choose hope over despair." These narratives are not mere fairy tales; they are potent spiritual technologies. Enslaved peoples in the Americas, hearing our story, sang of Moshe and Pharaoh, finding in our liberation a promise for their own. The story of Exodus—of a people moving from absolute degradation to freedom—became a universal hope narrative, proof that the tyrant does not get the final word. Our entire history is a collection of these stories: Abraham and Sarah having a child at an impossible age; Esther saving her people from a planned genocide; the Maccabees achieving an improbable victory. These stories, as the psychologist Shane Lopez explains, help us see pathways where others see brick walls. They are the tools we use to navigate the darkness. [3]

So, how do we navigate this darkness, using the tools our tradition has given us?

First, we must be honest about the stories our fear is telling us. In the darkness of the Second Act, our first instinct is to tell a story of absolute despair: "The world is entirely against us," or "Nothing will ever be right again." We must get this story out of our heads, speak it aloud, and see it for what it is: a raw, messy, emotional first draft, not the definitive truth.

Second, we must fight against what some call "comparative suffering." [4] It is easy to dismiss our own pain by saying, "My sadness is nothing compared to the loss experienced by others." But compassion is not a finite resource that gets used up. Every time we honor our own struggles and the struggles of others with empathy, we open the gates of healing wider for everyone.

Finally, in this Second Act, we write a new ending. This is the revolution of hope. It begins by reclaiming our agency. As the Czech dissident and president Václav Havel once wrote, “hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” [5]

Our hope is not dependent on a guaranteed outcome. It is rooted in the meaning of our actions. We find that meaning in the foundational principle of our faith: olam chesed yibaneh—the world is built on loving-kindness. [6] This is a radical declaration. It asserts that despite all evidence to the contrary, the fundamental building material of the universe is goodness. Our task is to act in a way that aligns with that goodness, to become builders alongside God. If loving-kindness is the world’s building material, hope is our willingness to lay the next brick.

Our faith requires us to act. When the Israelites were trapped at the Red Sea, with the army closing in, God did not say, "Wait for a miracle." God said to Moshe, "Why are you crying out to me? Tell the people to move forward." [7] Our task is not to wait for salvation, but to be the inspired action.

Elie Wiesel expressed this idea in poetry:

Created in the image of [God] who has no image, it

is incumbent upon

our contemporaries to invoke and create hope

where there is none.

For just as only human beings can push me to

despair, only they can

help me vanquish it and call it hope. [8]

Rosh Hashanah is the birthday of the world, and this year, it feels like we are being asked to help rebuild it from its broken foundations. The fall was real and it was brutal. But our capacity to rise is just as real. When we stand up again, we are transformed. We carry the broken tablets with us, and they make us not weaker, but wiser and more compassionate.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks made a crucial distinction: optimism is the passive belief that things will get better. Hope is the active belief that together, we can make things better. [9] Hope is a Jewish virtue precisely because it is born not of certainty, but of courage in the face of uncertainty. That courage is contagious. When we choose to rise, we inspire those around us.

This year, let us take the hard-won wisdom of our collective falls. Let us step into the new year, carrying our broken pieces not as a burden of despair, but as a testament to our resilience. And with that resilient strength, let us begin to write a better, truer, and more compassionate next chapter to our story.

May we have the courage to gather the fragments, the resilience to rise from the fall, and the commitment to transform our losses into goodness and light for the year to come.

In the shofar we hear our path: tekiah—the wholeness we long for; shevarim–teruah—the fractures we carry; tekiah gedolah—the long breath of a people who refuse to stop at broken.

Shanah Tovah!

[1] Talmud Bavli Bava Batra 14b

[2] Brené Brown, Rising Strong

[3] https://reformjudaism.org/blog/choosing-hope-times-trial

[4] Rising Strong

[5] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/vaclav_havel_392717

[6] Psalm 89:3

[7] Exodus 14:15

[8] https://reformjudaism.org/blog/choosing-hope-times-trial

[9] https://rabbisacks.org/quotes/optimism-and-hope/