This sermon was delivered at our Friday Night Shabbat service on November 8th. You can listen this sermon on Contact Chai podcast or watch it on Mishkan’s YouTube channel.
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Perhaps it was naive of me to go to bed on Tuesday with a sense of optimism. We all knew it was going to be a close race. But among the people in my life there was sufficient enthusiasm (or, for many of my leftist friends, political pragmatism) for me to believe that Kamala Harris would be our next president. And on the eve of the election, pollsters and political analysts I trusted had been posting maps with enough states colored blue (maybe even Iowa?!) to secure a win, and so even when North Carolina was called for Trump, I thought that I would wake up to history in the making. Instead, I woke up to a country I felt like I didn’t recognize. How could this be happening? So many people I know, so many activists I admire, had been working for the past eight years to loosen the grip of Trumpism on our nation, and instead MAGA had been given an uncontestable mandate.
I’m not going to talk about how we got here, although — like so many others — I have plenty of thoughts on that. A sober retrospective will be necessary for the fight to come, but I don’t think it’s helpful at this hour. Right now, what we need most, is to sit with what is and allow ourselves the space to hold the sadness, the anger, the disappointment, the exhaustion, the overwhelming sense that we don’t know what lies ahead (which is scary) — all that we might be feeling tonight.
This is hard. This is hard because these last few months have felt like a battle for the soul of America, pitting the best of who we are — tolerance, compassion, care for the common good – against the darkest impulses of tribalism.
This is hard because Trump (and others like him) ran on a campaign of divisiveness, discrimination, and disinformation. Many of us found ourselves, and the people we love, in the crosshairs of his vitriol. We worry, and for good reason, how the hate that shaped his rhetoric will remake this country in its image. It was only six years ago that a shooter murdered eleven Jews at the Tree of Life Synagogue, motivated by anti-immigrant conspiracy myths. We know where Trump’s words can lead, and it’s terrifying to imagine more of it.
This is hard because it is not just about us versus them, but us and the people in the town next door, our neighbors down the street, maybe even family members who will be sitting across the table from us this holiday season. This week, as we held each other in grief — as my friends who immigrated to this country wondered if this election signaled the countdown for their deportation; as my Black and Brown friends, as my female friends, mourned the election of a racist, a convicted felon and rapist over a qualified woman of color; as my queer and trans friends shared information for mutual aid and crisis lifelines — I watched people I know, colleagues and cousins of mine, celebrate the resurgence of MAGA. I kept returning to a quote by Dr. Anthony Fauci, which has been making its way around social media again: “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care for other people.”
I began to wonder if this is how Abraham and Sarah felt, back when they were still called Avram and Sarai, when they first heard God’s call to become the progenitors of a people who would walk through this world in a new way. We read the beginning of their story this week: Lech lecha, God tells them, go out from your native land, from your birthplace, from your ancestral home to the land that I will show you. God reveals to them the promise of what might be: a goy gadol, a great nation — not defined by might, nor by power, but shaped by its ethical tradition and guided by the audacious claim that all humans are imprinted with the divine stamp of a single creator, and therefore beings of inherent dignity and worth.
We’re told that Avram is 75 years old when he leaves Haran; Sarai, 65. Which means they have been living in Mesopotamia for decades, and (according to the Torah) quite comfortably as well — having amassed wealth, a household of slaves and servants. Then one morning, they wake up to a new possibility: that the idols they had been worshiping, that the social structures they had benefited from, that the norms they had become accustomed to were not only false, but fundamentally flawed. The dissonance between the possibility of what could be and the reality in which they found themselves became unignorable. How unbearable it must have been to see their friends and family go about like there was nothing wrong, or worse guard and maintain systems that (at least to Avram and Sarai) were clearly in need of reform – if not revolution. Suddenly, the place that they had called home for their entire lives didn’t feel like home at all.
And so Avram and Sarai set out for the land of Canaan. In the Torah, it’s a journey that spans two verses; topographically, this is a distance of about 500 miles (and I looked this up: for the average person, with breaks to eat and sleep, this would take them at least a month by foot). I share this to underscore the fact that their decision to leave Haran should not be taken lightly. This was millennia before maps could tell us where we were or where we were going. They were quite literally walking into the unknown, chasing the promise of a better that had no guarantee of coming to fruition (remember, they had only just met the character of God; unlike their descendants, they did not have the ancestral memory of God fulfilling God’s promises).
When they finally arrive in Shechem, God says: “See this land? This will be the place where your children will live and grow old, and your children’s children, and their children as well.” And I can only imagine how relieved Avram and Sarai must have felt, after such a long journey. Somehow, the incredible risk they took paid off. And so Avram builds an altar in thanksgiving. They travel a bit further to Beit-El, to the beautiful hill country west of the Jordan River. And Avram builds an altar in thanksgiving there. Little by little, they wander across this promised land and make their way to the Negev — when suddenly, there is a famine. This famine is so terrible, so devastating that they are forced to flee their new home and travel hundreds of miles more across the desolate wilderness to Egypt.
In this moment, I feel their despair. They had worked so hard to reach this place. And for what, an unfulfilled promise? They are homeless and childless, strangers in a strange land. I understand how this could have been the end of their story. Yet rather than hold on to what they had hoped would happen, once the moment for that hope has passed, they meet their new reality and change course — guided by the promise of what might become, what might still happen in what the writer Rebecca Solnit calls “the spaciousness of uncertainty.” They navigate a hostile environment in Egypt. They somehow make their way back to the Negev. They survive war between the great nations of that time. They fight and make peace with their neighbors. They hold each other through the heartbreak of infertility, and attempt to repair their broken home. And at the end of our parashah, still waiting for the birth of their child, they receive new names in recognition of their persistent pursuit of what was promised: you will be called Abraham and Sarah, God says, a sign of the covenant between us — just as you have upheld your faith, I will uphold mine.
I’m reminded of a saying that was taught to me by a tour guide in Jordan many years ago. She was a remarkable person, the first woman to become a state-certified tour guide in her country. She said that God will meet you halfway, but only if you go halfway.
This is not the time to give up. We haven’t reached halfway yet. When she conceded the election on Wednesday, Vice President Harris reminded us that “[she] would often say “when we fight, we win. Sometimes the fight takes a while.” As Jews, we are the inheritors of the long fight. So are women. So are people of color. So are people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. So are queer folks. We stand on the shoulders of countless people who could have given up hope, who instead of taking the next step on their journey could have sat down, stayed where they were, and ended the fight out of exhaustion. I don’t think any of us would have blamed them, given their circumstances. Yet here we are, because of them.
Now I can’t speak as a woman, or a person of color, or a person with a disability or chronic illness, or the many other people who find a story of insistence and persistence woven through their DNA. But I can speak as a Jew. And I can speak as a queer man. The columnist Louis Staples wrote shortly after the election, “Strangely, it’s moments like this that I feel most lucky to be queer. I think about our elders. How hopeless they must have felt. How easy it would have been to give up. But they fought for the life I get to live today. What an insult it would be, to them, to succumb to despair.”
I think about our elders, Abraham and Sarah who wandered from place to place until they died — not knowing that as they walked, they marked a path for their children, and their children’s children, and the many generations to follow. And I think about their son Isaac, who set out on a journey of his own and rebuilt the trail of altars that his father has left behind. I think about Jacob who, with his family, is forced to migrate to Egypt following the path walked by his grandparents — and there becomes a nation atzum v’rav, many and numerous. And his son, Joseph, who not only saves his people but the entire region from famine — when only four generations earlier, a similar disaster had meant death. None of them lived to see the fulfillment of the promise that compelled Abraham and Sarah to leave Haran. But each of them walked us a little bit closer to its demand for collective liberation, its vision of a world shaped by justice and compassion. And not only were they transformed by this journey. We all were, both the people who helped them along the way and the people who stood in their path. All of us, for the better.
I can’t tell you what tomorrow will bring. Nor can we predict what will happen over the next four years — although we can be prepared, by strengthening our communities and showing up for one another even when we disagree, because we will need to be in sometimes uncomfortable coalitions to meet the darkness ahead of us. We are looking down a difficult road. And after the year that we have had, as individuals and as a people, I am sorry for that. I had hoped for easier times ahead (or at least one less dumpster fire to contend with). Reflecting on living through unprecedented times (again), Rebecca Solnit says that we should be neither optimists, who think everything will be fine regardless of what we do, nor pessimists, who think nothing will be okay regardless of what we do. She writes that now is the time for hope: “the belief that what we do matters even through how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.” What you do matters. We know this is true, because this is the lesson of our history (and maybe that’s why the rabbis insist we keep reading it, on repeat each year, to remind us of this fact — knowing that this would be especially needed in times like these).
So I want to ask you, in this moment when it all feels like it is crashing down around us: what is your prayer for the world? Maybe it’s the same prayer you had earlier this week, and now you’ll have to find a new way to get there. Or maybe your prayer has changed. When the darkness feels overwhelming, may your prayer be a light — guiding you to take the next step, knowing that it matters, not only for you and for us — but also for the person, perhaps generations from now, who will set out on their own journey toward a better future, finding that the path has already been marked for them.