This sermon was delivered at our Rosh Hashanah 5787 service. You can watch it on our YouTube channel or listen on Contact Chai Podcast.
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“To be a Jew is to be part of two civilizations,” Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan wrote close to a century ago, as he tried to make sense of what it meant to be an observant Jew in a non-Jewish country like America. To be Jewish is to live on the lunar calendar for Jewish holidays and yahrzeits, and the Gregorian calendar for work, school and buying airplane tickets. It’s to navigate my son’s little league season having games on Day 1 AND 2 of Rosh Hashannah. Throughout history to practice Judaism meant to eat kosher food in the midst of societies that didn’t, to rest on the sabbath in the midst of societies that worked, to believe in one God, in the midst of societies that believed in the trinity or other truths handed down by prophets more recent than Moses — truths that us pesky Jews insisted on denying. To be part of two civilizations is a great blessing, because each one gives us critical perspective on the other, and it reminds us we’re not just one thing.
When I was a kid, I had a sense of being somewhat untethered to an important but blurry part of myself. I was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, like my dad. I knew that his parents left Germany as teenagers, but I didn’t know much about it because they didn’t talk about much, and I didn’t even know which questions to ask. I chose to study German in school, and spent three full summers in Stuttgart on exchange with German families, yet I never quite found the sense of belonging I was looking for (tho I did make one great friend, Ima Drohlshagen, who I’ll tell you more about later). By high school I had shifted my focus away from German civilization and toward Jewish civilization and in fact discovered that deep sense of belonging. Hineni… here I am.
It turns out that children who have a sense of where they come from do better emotionally than kids who don’t. Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush at Emory University studied resilience in children and found that kids who know their family’s story — know the story of how their parent broke a bone, immigrated to a new place, lost their parent at an early age — these kids tend to be more confident, resilient, and comfortable in the world around them. Duke posited that all family narratives take one of three shapes: the ascending narrative (“We came here poor, we worked hard, we did well”). There’s the descending narrative (“We used to be comfortable, then we lost everything”). But the most healthful narrative is what they called the oscillating family narrative that tells of the ups and downs in a family. “Children who know that lives take all shapes are much better equipped to face life’s inevitable disruptions,” because when they experience them they won’t see themselves as uniquely prone to victimhood, or to good fortune, for that matter — they’ll understand, that’s just life.
We Americans like our stories to have ascending narratives, happy endings. We like believing that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, and thank God for the people in every generation who lovingly bent it — people like the civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson and women’s rights giant Gloria Steinem, who both died this year, may their memories be blessings. Jewish culture holds the oscillating narrative much more naturally because we’ve had a turbulent history, and yet Judaism has maintained the vision of a day when God’s care and justice will extend to all peoples of the earth (we will actually sing about it in musaf as we bounce up and down). We’ve carried this vision for thousands of years in our suitcases.
But we are living in what feels like a time of descending narratives, as Americans and as Jews. Rosh Hashannah coinciding last night with the 25th anniversary of one of the most iconic and destructive acts of terrorism in history only drives the point home more forcefully. The reality of polycrisis — of multiple interlocking, worsening crises, which our government is ignoring, exacerbating or monetizing instead of fixing, burning down its relationships with our allies, dismantling hard won rights and freedoms that have defined America’s upward trajectory over the decades — all of it, is taking its toll on our psyches.
And compounding that is the psychic weight of merely being Jewish right now. Everything has become a referendum on your views on Israel and Palestine, and what that says about the entire rest of your identity, whether or not you follow or know anything about the issue — it’s seeped into everything, from local politics to water cooler conversation at work to academic and professional settings, your profile on dating apps. It’s also become a source of stress in many of our homes, as married partners, parents and children, otherwise easy-going friends, have a hard time talking honestly about these issues because the emotional stakes feel so high. Meanwhile, incidents of actual antisemitism have skyrocketed. Last week we had to pull an ad for High Holidays off Facebook because of all the vile antisemitic comments it was generating — not nasty comments about Israel… nasty comments about Jews. I get paid to think about this stuff all the time, but for all of you, it’s just plain exhausting.
And I’ll speak personally here. Part of my exhaustion is that my heart hurts, a lot of the time, over the place where half my people live, where I have family and spend a month every summer. Among the many other human rights issues happening in the world I know I’m not alone as Jew in being so deeply troubled by, embarrassed by, angry at, members of my own tribe attacking, displacing, even killing Palestinians in their homes in the West Bank and Gaza — in a bastardization of Jewish tradition that places Jewish ownership of land above basic Jewish values, a bastardization that has been allowed to fester at the highest levels of Netanyahu’s government for years now. I’m frustrated that Jews, including Israelis in Israel, who express concerns like mine are often made to feel like they’re traitors to our people, when they are in fact giving voice to the deeply Jewish ethos of care for one’s neighbors and the stranger in one’s midst — the same ethos that drove dozens of you out to the streets with whistles last Fall here in Chicago to protect our immigrant neighbors.
Emotions like frustration and anger are entirely appropriate for the times we live in, but I’d also like to give us permission to feel grief, as a sense of loss is usually what’s underneath rage (go back to Rosh Hashannah 2024 to hear that sermon). And there are a lot of losses to grieve — if we each made our own top five list I imagine they’d each be a little different and would include personal losses as well. Mostly though, I think we need space, time and community to grieve the loss of the belief that everything will turn out ok.
Jewish folklore tells of a phrase King Solomon wore on a ring to keep him humble in moments of ascension, hopeful in moments of decline. The phrase was “Gam zeh ya’avor,” this, too, shall pass. That idea — the truth of impermanence, the ever-oscillating narrative — should actually feel comforting to us as we move through this moment in history, when there is so much to grieve. It’s not to say we shouldn’t feel grief, but we should remember that nothing stays the way it is forever.
And here we are at the Jewish New Year, where we explore how we might live our best lives, in dialogue with the stories we read each year in the Torah. When we read about Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Ishmael, Hagar — we of course want to see them in a positive light, to be inspired by their examples of courage and resilience. Then again, it’s become popular of late — and I’ve been guilty of this myself — to frame our story as a descending narrative, culminating with the greatest of moral failings — Abraham’s willingness to slaughter his son (even if, as Rabbi Julie explained in her beautiful drash last night online, everyone else was doing it).
But what if we’re handed these stories not to shoehorn our way into seeing them either as a hero’s journey or a moral tragedy, but as training for embracing the oscillating narrative, to be able to hold multiple ideas in our heads at once as part of a larger, truer reality?
Abraham and Sarah have great material and professional success, and they can’t have children. Abraham and Sarah were famously hospitable to strangers, and they oppress Hagar their maidservant, exiling her and her son Ishmael. Sarah miraculously has a child, and Abraham comes within inches of slaughtering him. Abraham is a successful spiritual leader and inflicts lasting trauma on his children and wives. After the incidents we read about on Rosh Hashannah, everyone who he ever loved moves away or dies. And yet, the aliyah we closed with today shows us a scene that takes place many years later, in which after Abraham dies, his two estranged sons come together to bury him — a family reunited, by grief. Ours is an oscillating narrative, neither a pure ascending nor descending one. A complicated story in which multiple things are true at once. Like our world.
Another way the narrative oscillates is that the roles of victim and oppressor change. Rabbi Shai Held picks up on the fact that the same words we see in the book of Genesis that describe what Sarah the first Jewish woman does to Hagar the Egyptian slave, are the very same words used in the Book of Exodus to describe what the Egyptians do the Israelites — innui, to oppress, avdut, to enslave. And of course Hagar means the Stranger, which is the quintessence of who the Israelites become in Egypt. Rabbi Held asks, “Why does Genesis tell us of an Egyptian slave being oppressed by an Israelite? In order to teach us that the roles of victim and victimizer are not set in stone.” How true we know this to be. And so, knowing that we will play every part in the story, we ask ourselves, how we wished we had been treated when we were on the bottom, so that we’ll behave that way when we’re on the top. The way things are is not always how they have been, nor, how they have to be. Gam ze ya’avor. The oscillating narrative is an invitation to agency, not resignation.
I never really let go of hoping, at some point, to discover a more complex narrative than the one I inherited about my German family, in which they left a place that was full of people who don’t want Jews, and came to a place they did, and never looked back. So this past summer I decided to stop in Germany and visit the towns where my dad’s dad, Julius Heydemann, was born and raised. (And I want to give a shout out to Robbie Dembo for inspiring this trip, through sharing his own genealogical research, and giving me some helpful tips).
In Aachen, the town my grandfather moved to at age 11, there wasn’t much to see — though I did learn from a monument in the grass that before her family moved to Amsterdam, Anne Frank stayed with her grandparents who lived two doors down from my Grandpa Julius. Small world.
But it was the town where my grandfather spent the first decade of his life, a little place called Brühl, where I felt the threads of my life braid inside of me in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. From the first email I sent to the archivist of the city, it was clear that they were excited to welcome a Jewish descendant of the town back to learn about her history. Enter Ima Drolshagen, my German best friend. She traveled 7 hours on a train to join me for what was feeling more and more like a sacred pilgrimage. Since high school we’ve maintained a really beautiful friendship, which might surprise some people because, well, her grandparents were Nazis and my grandparents were Jewish. So it was all the more meaningful to have this experience with her riding along.
Our first stop was the Mayor’s office, who joined us for an hour-long press conference with coffee and pastries, as two archivists who had been working on my case for the past month, presented a PowerPoint showing the generations of my family’s history in Brühl, going back to the mid-1800s. City officials then walked us through the town, showing us places my family lived, worked, drank beer, were buried.
Up until that point, as far as I knew, all the German Jews in my family were scientists, doctors and engineers, i.e. secular people — and I, with my strange interest in Judaism, was a mutation of Heydemann genetics. But standing in the Mayor’s office, surrounded by black-and-white photographs of the city’s past, he brought me over to a picture of a large domed building with a Star of David on top, surrounded by smoke, burning. The date read November 10th, 1938 — Krystalnacht.
I’d seen many pictures like it before. But then, the Mayor says, “This is the synagogue your great-great-great-great- grandfather built.” They show me his signature on the 1880 deed to the land. I can’t really describe the feeling of standing there learning, first, that I’m not actually the first Jewish community leader in my family, AND understanding in that very same moment that the synagogue my great great great great grandfather built is gone, and that community is gone, and there are no Jewish people they know of left there — only stone monuments telling of their past and their murders.
Yet, there I was, very much alive — a grandchild of this town, and a rabbi, no less (and a rabbi who had met the Pope — a very big deal for them). I am a living monument to the Jews of that town. Those officials rolled out the red carpet for me, not only to share my history, but the Jewish cultural events and visiting rabbis they’ve been hosting for decades, trying in their own way to make teshuvah, to repent, for the sins of their parents and grandparents, and write a new story arc in the narrative. It is brave and powerful to take a descending narrative handed to us and turn it around, with ripple effects for generations. Germany is now home to the fastest-growing Jewish population in Europe, including thousands of Israelis unironically seeking refuge there. Since 1945, Germany has made a more sincere, material effort to repair harms to our community in crimes that it openly acknowledges it committed, paying billions of dollars in reparations to Jewish people, communities and the State of Israel. After the Second World War, Germany wrote a constitution whose purpose was to stave off any future in which the story of victimhood could ever again but used to hurt the dignity of another person or people.
And. The pendulum continues to swing. All is not well there now, as this week’s elections there made clear. Extreme, bigoted right wing nationalistic populism is a light sleeper in an increasingly unstable world, whether in Germany, or here, or in Israel, or in many democracies around the world. But the welcome that I received in Brühl was a microcosm of a larger story, of an oscillating narrative, less a story of systems and more about people seeing one another as people. The tears I cried when I stood in the Mayor’s office were tears of feeling in my bones our shared story having descended to unimaginable depths, but also, not being over. The tears of both profound loss, and the simultaneous experience of repair. I felt like God was crying with me, over the incalculable losses and also, over seeing Her children do teshuvah: make up and treat each other with dignity and care and wanting this for all God’s children.
Teshuvah can’t go back in time and undo the damage that was done, but it can heal the breach for future generations. And sometimes, like a broken bone that has been set properly, the site of rupture can become even stronger and more resilient than before.
Gam ze ya’avor. This too, shall pass. The truth is, there’s never been such a thing as an exclusively ascending narrative. There’s never been a time when it’s all been ok, when we could rest on our laurels and bask in our progress, as if progress were permanent. It’s all oscillating, and so yes, some of our old stories are crumbling, and maybe they needed to crumble. And new ones — both better ones and scarier ones — are being written. And we have the choice to help write them. And this is how the moral arc has been bent toward justice — not on its own, but by people who bent it. In small, every day kindnesses, and in advocacy and organizing and courtrooms and justice work, as so many of you, people in this room, do every day. It all matters.
And I know you’re tired. I am too. But as the great Ruth Messinger would say, despair is not strategy. We need to embrace the agency we have, wherever we have it. And our tradition has some powerful tools for fortifying our hearts and community while we work. As fraught as it may be to be Jewish in 2026, I have moved again and again by the ways you have built strength and community, by showing up for minyan, for shivas, services, to form small groups, to do your own learning, to protest, and just generally draw on time tested Jewish tools for gratitude, grief, celebration, and justice that have carried our people through difficult times before. We need them and we need each other.
We are inheritors of a people who have toggled between oscillating stories for millenia. It’s both our pathos and our superpower. I pray that we find in that tension courage, creativity, compassion and commitment to the vision of the healed word that our ancestors have carried wherever we’ve lived. May we draw on their strength, and find our own, so that we may write the stories our descendants will tell with gratitude and pride, come what may.
L’shannah tovah.