This sermon was delivered at our service on November 21st, 2025. You can listen to this drash on Contact Chai Podcast or watch it on our YouTube channel.
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I’m so glad to be back here. I’ve got to say, if ten years ago you had told me that I would be genuinely happy to spend my Friday nights in prayer services, I would not have believed you. Growing up, my family lit candles on Shabbat, but I went to temple for Hebrew School on Wednesdays and Sunday School on Sundays. And it was… fine. Thankfully Jewish education has changed a lot since the 90s, but mine was comprised largely of tracing the aleph-bet in workbooks, reading gray photocopies from a children’s edition of the Torah, and every so often listening to a class read aloud, usually historical fiction featuring a kid coming of age during the Inquisition or pogroms or the Holocaust and having to stowaway on ships or hide in barns.
Understandably, these books captured my imagination far more than the xerox’d Torah stories. They were exciting and dangerous and reminded me of the stories I grew up hearing about my grandparents, who were refugees from Nazi Germany and Tzarist Russia. Perhaps because of these books, we learned one line of rabbinic text, which felt like a direct tie in — a quote from Rabbi Hillel, which I later learned comes from Pirkei Avot in the Mishna: B’makom sh’ein anashim, hishtadel l’hiyot ish. In a place with no humanity, you must strive to be a human.
We didn’t just discuss this line — we sang songs about it. We learned that it meant to do the right thing, even if no one else did, and that if we ever ended up somewhere with a corrupt government, it would be up to us to speak out and prevent the Holocaust or the Inquisition or general injustice from happening again. Countries can be evil, we were taught, but we always have the power to make a difference.
This teaching and my core belief in it shaped my adolescence and informed how I approached everything from school bullies to the Iraq War. It helped inspire advocacy and activism in my 20s and it felt especially important to me here at Mishkan, when we grappled with the refugee and immigration crisis in the years before the pandemic. As our country failed to meet its greatest ideals, I saw my grandfather’s face in the images of children detained at the border, and I heard Hillel’s words as news anchors announced one moral crisis after the next.
Separately from all this, I was on a very gradual path to rabbinical school, rooted not in a call to change the world, but rather in the ways in which I had experienced Judaism here, as a tool for healing and transformation. I was passionate about justice but it wasn’t necessarily a driving force for my rabbinate.
But in 2021 when I found out I’d be starting school in Jerusalem, the pandemic was raging and Israelis and Palestinians were precariously positioned in a lull between wars. I thought back on Hillel’s words and the ways they obligated us to speak truth to power and prevent catastrophe, and I was flooded with confidence. I would move to the Middle East and document life while I studied there, determined to share the pain and nuance and day-to-day life. I had it all planned out — my Instagram posts would be meaningful yet direct and just snarky enough to go viral and I would heal our broken world one artistically filtered photo at a time. I was so certain. And I was so wrong.
I landed in Jerusalem and was immediately overwhelmed by my workload, by navigating Covid guidelines in a foreign country, and by a palpable agitation across neighborhoods and cultural groups, hinting that the simmering tensions would soon boil over. I assisted with the olive harvest in targeted Palestinian towns, while settlers with military rifles watched us through binoculars. In Hebron, I witnessed violence against Palestinian children, instigated by soldiers who were simply bored. I documented everything, but when I got back to my apartment, instead of posting my way into world peace, I laid down on the floor and didn’t get up for a long time.
And I found myself encountering the same severity of suffering no matter where in the world I went. A trip to Europe supporting Ukrainian refugees exposed me to a dark underside of humanitarian work, as I met manipulators and traffickers trying to capitalize on the chaos of war. Returning to the US showed me how much the fentanyl crisis had intensified, as people passed out on the sidewalks of my neighborhood. And the past few months have been just as hard, as ICE rolled through LA and Portland and especially Chicago, putting thousands, including my Latino extended family at heightened risk.
Where was this grand change-making promised to me in Pirkei Avot? Surely my Sunday School interpretation of Hillel was a great misconception – that evil happens far away from us, that we always have the power to make a difference. Each crisis was bigger than me, and bigger than the people I assembled with. The places and moments devoid of humanity were the ones where we had the least agency, not the most.
In the Torah this week, we read about Isaac, who knows a thing or two about lacking agency. Isaac is best remembered for surviving a sacrifice attempt in his youth by his father, and for being tricked in old age by his son. He could not be more different from either of them. He is not, like Abraham, a faithful traveller who advocates for strangers. He is not, like Jacob, a decisive trickster who goes through spiritual transformation. And interestingly, Isaac’s name is not like either of theirs — it remains the same throughout his life. Abraham was Avram before he entered God’s covenant, and Jacob becomes Israel after wrestling with an angel. But Isaac? He’s just Isaac. And we rarely see him outside the context of other people’s choices.
Isaac is on the periphery so much that he’s barely the protagonist of his own story. The times when he has control over his life largely happen off the page. We know from last week’s reading that Isaac loves his one wife, Rebecca, in an era when having more wives meant more social capital. And we know that he gets along with his one brother, Ishmael, despite a past estrangement that split their childhood home. But we don’t see his reasoning for these Biblical anomalies, or really for anything he endures.
In one of the few moments this week where Isaac takes the lead, we find him clumsily retracing the steps of Abraham’s adventures, with zero subtlety or finesse. When passing through rival territory, he tries to prevent jealousy by claiming his wife is his sister, as did Abraham – but they are easily found out when the king catches them hooking up by the palace window. Later, when the region is hit by drought, Isaac digs the same wells that Abraham found a generation earlier – but local tribes claim it’s their land, and Isaac says “Okay!” and leaves. And when his sons Jacob and Esau grow up and he sees their relationship as one of volatile opposites, much as he and Ishmael were to Abraham, Isaac says nothing, allowing one of great family dramas to unfold, where Jacob disguises himself as Esau to steal his birthright. And Isaac, upon realizing he’s been tricked on his deathbed, still blesses them both.
For his era, Isaac is too loving with his wife, too understanding with outsiders, too patient with his sons. He’s not sneaky or bold — he’s quietly bumbling, and this seems to have troubled the early rabbis. They ask, why was Isaac silent as his father bound him for sacrifice? Why didn’t he push back when he was told to leave the well? Why was he tricked by Jacob, why does he accept Esau’s failure, and why does he still bless them both? The rabbis are so taken aback by Isaac’s permissiveness that they craft new, pious and even daring stories around him. Anything to counter the image of Isaac as a fool.
And yet, perhaps he is one. In Hebrew, Isaac is Yitzchak, from the word Litzchok, which means to laugh, and he’s named it because of Abraham and Sarah’s laughter upon finding out they would have a child in old age. But with the same root is the word Letzachek, which means not to laugh, but to joke, to mess with, to fool around, with all the same implications of the phrase as we use it today. And while Isaac’s name never changes in his story, the context around it does, influencing his journey along the way.
So when elderly Abraham doubles over vayitzchak — and laughs — at the thought of being a father, we feel his amusement. And when Sarah fears that kol ha’shomea yitzchak li everyone who hears about it will laugh at her, we see her concern, which grows disproportionately for years. She notices Ishmael metzachek — fooling with, pestering Isaac, and banishes him [ISHMAEL] to the desert, leaving us nettled too. And when Isaac survives sacrifice into adulthood and fumbles an opportunity because he is metzachek-ing Rebecca, fooling around with her, we laugh again, and time carries him forward until he is an elderly father who cannot see and is fooled by Jacob pretending to be Esau. And still it might be funny, until Isaac and Esau realize what has happened, and the room is not filled with yitzchak, their laughing, but one letter shifted — yitz’aak tz’aakah — loud wailing cries.
Over and over the world attempts to diminish Isaac, but it does not redefine him. Through horror and hardship, he remains consistent, not as a hero seeking glory, but as the human being he is, able to understand the needs of the other, able to see victim and perpetrator alike as fully human, able to hold the full spectrum of our existence, the comedy and the tragedy of it all.
So often lately it feels to me that life is presenting itself as if through a funhouse mirror, full of distorted reflections of what ought to be, a reality that would be ridiculous were it not cruel. And when the world feels warped and the image we yearned for will not come into focus, when there’s nothing we can do to make adequate change, I hear the words of Hillel calling. B’makom sh’ein anashim — in a place with no humanity — in our moments of powerlessness — hishtadel l’hiyot ish — we tap into what it means to be human, controlling not how successful we are in changing the world, but how loving and present we are as we try.
So we show up for each other, we blow whistles, we do what we can.
And when we find ourselves in a place where we lack agency, may we be like Isaac and persevere. And fall in love. And grieve. And bless our children. And bumble along, as the humans we are.
Shabbat shalom.