Sermon Archives

Commemoration and Interpretation

Last Wednesday night I taught a shiur in Denver on behalf of the Wexner Heritage Fellowship. The students, all with leadership roles in the Colorado Jewish community, have already spent months learning together and traveling together and have formed a cohort that cares about one another and is invested in supporting each other’s contributions to the Jewish community. Because of those deep connections to one another they responded with openness and vulnerability when, as a sort of “ice-breaker,” I asked them to share their memories of that day, 23 years earlier, on September 11th, 2001. 

Ice-breaker questions don’t usually evoke tears but I’m so grateful that the participants responded with such honesty. They shared memories and reflections that I am sure are similar to what many of you could share. Some of them were in New York or in DC on that day with the added trauma that came from evacuating downtown neighborhoods and knowing one was a direct target of the attacks. Several of the students shared very poignant stories of being far away from their East Coast family on September 11th and struggling to check-in with relatives in an era when Internet communications were much less advanced. One shared a painful memory of being a graduate student far out west, far away from home,  and having a professor carry on with a pre-scheduled field trip. For an entire day she could not check the news or connect with friends and relatives and nobody who was with her could understand why she was not able to put aside news about something tragic that happened to other people far away in order to focus on the task at hand.

Many in the group connected their reflections to their more recent experience of Shimini Atzeret this past October 7th. I suspect most of us who remember September 11th can relate. News coming in that is too terrible to comprehend. As the scope and scale of what has occurred begins to set in, we realize that there has been a juncture in history and that we will always distinguish between what was “before” and what was “after.” But my students also expressed sadness and enduring disappointment that they did not experience this year, the support and solidarity and unity from their neighbors and non-Jewish friends that they remember as a silver lining of September 11th. 

Right now every Jewish community is planning its commemorations for the anniversary of the start of the war. Rabbinic listservs and Whatsapp groups are swapping programming ideas and sharing new liturgy that could be appropriate. Our shul is co-sponsoring a major gathering downtown with our DC Federation for the evening of October 7th itself and we will also offer a space in the building for those who cannot make the trip downtown and who wish to watch a live-stream broadcast with others from the community. 

For the past weeks I have had ongoing communications and meetings with a small team from the shul board to think through our own commemorations. We plan to offer the community a three-fold framework for this year’s commemorations modeled on the theme of the Yamim HaNora’im.  Teshuvah, u’Tefilah, u’Tzedakah ma’avirin et ro’a ha-gezerah. Reflection and introspection, prayer, and tzedakah can avert the worst of the decree. We typically think of them averting something terrible that may happen in the future. This year, we will tap into these modalities to respond to terrible things that have happened in the past. 

But this entire project raises challenging questions about which there are no satisfying answers. How can we commemorate something when it has not ended? This point was articulated sharply in a Times of Israel blog by a colleague who lives in Jerusalem who wrote about how he  is dreading the upcoming October 7th anniversary ceremonies. If the war is still ongoing, if the hostages are still in captivity, how can there be anything to commemorate? We are still in the middle and do not have the luxury of looking backwards in memory. 

Furthermore, every act of Jewish memory is an act of interpretation. This point, made by the late Professor Hayim Yosef Yerushalmi, is built on the observation that Jews stopped writing history and preserving history at the conclusion of the Biblical period because Tanakh provided us with a narrative that explained everything that had happened or would happen in Jewish history. Jews became historians in modernity only when we were no longer satisfied with pre-modern interpretations of history. 

But if every act of communal memory is an act of interpretation. How can we engage in collective memory when the meaning of recent events are so contested?

Passages in Parashat Ki Teitzei respond to ancient and more recent history and bind those memories with mitzvot. 

In Devarim chapter 23 the men of Amon and Moav are declared to be ineligible marriage partners. Those nations were callous and cruel when we marched through the desert. They did not offer us water. They hired Bilam to curse us. The trauma of their hostility is codified in a mitzvah that remains in the Torah centuries after the Amonites and Moabites have disappeared. 

And then the Torah pivots and turns its attention to two other ancient antagonists. 

לֹֽא־תְתַעֵ֣ב אֲדֹמִ֔י כִּ֥י אָחִ֖יךָ ה֑וּא לֹא־תְתַעֵ֣ב מִצְרִ֔י כִּי־גֵ֖ר הָיִ֥יתָ בְאַרְצֽוֹ׃

You shall not hate an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not hate an Egyptian, for you were a stranger in his land.

Rashi points out that this prohibition against enduring hatred emerges from an objective appraisal of our relationship with these nations. 

לא תתעב אדמי. לְגַמְרֵי, וְאַעַ"פִּ שֶׁרָאוּי לְךָ לְתַעֲבוֹ שֶׁיָּצָא בַּחֶרֶב לִקְרָאתֶךָ:

Do not hate the Edomite - entirely - Rashi adds - even though it would be appropriate to hate them because Esav, their progenitor, came to confront you with a sword. The Torah tells us to pay homage to the value of brotherhood but only after we have acknowledged the truth that by rights we should hate them and want nothing to do with them forever. 

And likewise, Rashi continues and says:

לא תתעב מצרי. מִכֹּל וָכֹל, אַף עַל פִּי שֶׁזָּרְקוּ זְכוּרֵיכֶם לַיְאוֹר. מַה טַּעַם? שֶׁהָיוּ לָכֶם אַכְסַנְיָא בִּשְׁעַת הַדְּחָק. 

Do not entirely hate the Egyptians - even though they did throw our male babies into the Nile - because they also provided hospitality to us at a time of emergency when Yaakov and Yosef’s brothers found shelter from the famine in Egypt. 

Rashi explains that the Torah calls for brutal honesty. But the Torah also demands an objective and fair evaluation. The Egyptians slaughtered our children, yes, but our relationship with Egypt  had a bright moment as well. We cannot forget that were  it not for them our family would have died in the famine. And for this reason we are prohibited from total hatred and rejection. 

Netziv understands this verse and its prohibition in an entirely different way. 

רצה הקב״ה להרגיל את ישראל במעלת הנפש. וכל שהנפש גבוה יותר מקרב את קרוביו. ע״כ צוה אותו לזכור אחוה לבני אדום:

The purpose of the Torah is not to codify objective fact into law. The purpose of the Torah is to elevate our character. And as souls become elevated, they reach out to their brothers and sisters and try to bring them close and so we are commanded to do so with our Edomite brothers. 

And he continues:

כי גר היית בארצו. גם זה מתכונת הנפש המעלה לגמול טובה ולא להיות כפוי טובה ונקרא נבל. ע״כ הרגיל הקב״ה אותנו במצוה זו:

And when souls become elevated they exercise hakarat ha-tov. Gratitude. Not out of an objective analysis of these good things which must be balanced against these bad things. But gratitude as a way of elevating our own character. So we seek out things to be grateful for, even if there is no objective need to do so because the Torah doesn’t care about who did what to us in the past. The Torah cares about who we become in the future. Jewish memory is harnessed as a tool for personal and communal growth. 

We cannot truly commemorate the anniversary of the start of the war because it does not lie in the past, we are still in the middle without the luxury of looking back and without the detachment needed to assess all facts to assign objective meaning to all that has occurred. But our actions along with our memories are also constantly recreating our own character and we dare not miss an opportunity to develop into the people we wish to become. 

As we reflect on the losses of a brutal year of massacre and war and dislocation and loss, as we remember, and as we mourn, we have an opportunity to become more sensitive, more compassionate, more committed to standing in solidarity with our brothers and sisters, and in partnership with all humanity. We are on the cusp of the season of teshuvah, tefilah and tzedakah. And while we can engage in each of these modalities alone, we magnify their potency and potential when we join together as a community.

Every chance we have to come together, on Shabbat, and of course at Shacharit, Mincha, and Maariv every day, is an opportunity for us, as individuals and as a community, to take steps in the direction of who we wish to become. Those opportunities are heightened and highlighted during the Yamim HaNora’im that will soon be upon us. October 7th and Shimini Atzeret will come again. Israel is likely to still be at war. It appears both inconceivable and all too likely that our hostages will remain in captivity. Some of our students on campus are likely to feel embattled. But one day the war will end. And one day we will look back on this year and on ourselves and the actions we have taken and on the commitments we will make.  How do you want to remember this year when asked to reflect upon it at an ice-breaker in twenty three years?