Kol Nidrei Resnick - 5786/2025 Rabbi Leder

I apologize in advance if I offend you.  But real change is possible only if we are honest about the failures of our past.  So please, bear with me… I know I need to take a breath…because I am so angry.  

I am angry at the Jewish establishment in America.  They have failed us.  Jewish organizations on campus watched the cancer called Students for Justice in Palestine metastasizing on their watch for the past 25 years.  This hate was right under their noses.  

I am angry at the Jewish establishment that raised money for decades to fight Jew hatred from the far right, while ignoring the no less dangerous threat from the far left.  

I am angry at settlers and ultra-orthodox rabbis who consider territory the highest value in Judaism.  It is not.  Life and peace are the highest of all Jewish values.  

I am angry at liberal rabbis who were used for decades by so-called allies and still cannot own up to their naivete.

I am angry at the liberal Jewish movement in America whose social media since the crisis has been mostly fluff, summer camp, a Hebrew word for the day, and recipes.  Their advice in the midst of our horror?  “When life gives you lemons, make the Israeli drink Limonana.  It’s so refreshing.”  

I am angry at the heartlessness of Jews on the right who consider it necessary to, you know, “Do what you gotta do.” I am angry that Jewish fanatics with a tiny handful of seats in the Knesset can determine the destiny of our homeland. 

I am angry at myself too.  When the rabbi who spoke after me on a panel asked the audience, “What’s happened to us that we don’t care about a dead baby anymore?”  That assumption astounded me.  I wanted to wring that rabbi’s neck.  Of course, we care about dead babies.  The problem is that Hamas does not.  We are not the problem.  Hamas is the problem.  Liberal rabbis drink the poison of our enemies.

But this is Kol Nidrei…our quintessential moment of truth.  And the truth is, that I do sometimes look away from the suffering of Gazans whose lives and freedom have been hijacked for a quarter century by Islama Nazis.  Sometimes, I do shrug my shoulders when the innocent suffer.  We know who started it.  We know they will never say yes to peace.  We all know war is ugly.  But that is no excuse for an ugly soul.  Al Cheit Shechatanu…for the many ways, we have shrugged and looked away.  

Teshuvah does not really mean repentance.  It means re-turn.  Can we?  Can we admit our most base, inhumane feelings and turn from anger?  Can we turn toward hope?  I know we can.  Not because of any inside knowledge, but because of a well-known theory called punctuated equilibrium.  

If you ask most people to symbolize evolution, they draw a constantly ascending line, as if evolution is a slow, steady, upward dynamic.  But there is an alternative theory held by many biologists called Punctuated Equilibrium.  This theory posits that species achieve a stasis—we plateau.  Then, something disruptive happens, something punctuates that equilibrium, and that disruption causes a rapid evolutionary gain.  In other words, bad things lead to very powerful changes.  There is always an upside to the down side.  

It's like the joke about Mrs. Cantor, a widow for over 40 years, sitting at the water's edge in Miami Beach bemoaning her lonely life.  Next to her sits a gentleman in obvious need of some color.

Mrs. Cantor asked, "So how come you're so pale?"

"I've been in jail for 28 years," he replied.

"Twenty-eight years! For what?" she asked.

"For killing my third wife," he explained.  "I strangled her."

"What happened to your second wife?"

"I shot her."

"And, if I may ask, your first wife?"

"We had a fight, and I pushed her off a building."

After taking a few minutes to absorb the information, Mrs. Cantor leaned closer to the man and whispered, "So, that means you're now a single man?"

Theodore Herzl was a secular Viennese journalist covering the Dreyfus trial in France in 1894.  Witnessing the blatant, phony anti-Semitic charges against Dreyfus, and the Jew hating masses, inspired Herzl to write The Jewish State, literally creating modern Zionism, leading to the establishment of Israel.  Every generation of Jews gets its wake-up call.  We are in the midst of ours.  While we would give anything to turn back the clock to October 6^th, 2023, we can’t.  No one can have a better past.  But we can come out of this hell with a better future.  In some ways, we already have.   

Yes, Jew hatred is festering in America and around the world, and/but, there are so many new, vibrant, passionate leaders and philanthropists stepping up.  They are not taking the failures or mediocrity of the arthritic Jewish establishment lying down.  Two of the 7 college students who testified before congress about campus antisemitism, were our WBT kids.  One now works for AIPAC and the other has started an alternative to Hillel on 30 campuses enabling Jewish students to advocate for themselves without apology.  My friend Archie started Jewbelong…she is the force behind those pink and white billboards all over America calling out Jew haters.  This campus was reborn out of adversity, and look at it now, and look at all of us here, and look at all the beautiful families in our schools here.  

This all give me so much hope.  It has changed my feelings about the T-shirt I saw for sale at a farmers’ market in Omaha when I was there to speak last month.  At first, I considered it the most un-Jewish sentiment ever printed on a shirt.  It simply said, “What’s the best that could happen?”  But optimism is deeply Jewish.  We are witnessing some of the best that could happen again and again.  

This is part of a Purple Heart medal, earned by my friend Claire’s father in WWII.  He wasn’t a Jew, but he was a prisoner; a paratrooper caught behind enemy lines.  There was precious little food in the POW camp.  At one point the Nazis dragged a dead, rotting horse into the camp and told the prisoners there would be nothing else to eat.  They choked down what they could and within hours became gut wrenchingly sick in every way you can imagine.  The next day, they were so desperate for food, they ate more.  

“Steve,” Claire said to me just days after October 7^th, “I am so sorry for what happened and I just didn’t know what I could say or do.”  Then, she placed this in my hand.  “My father received this for fighting the Nazis.  I want you to have it.  I want you to know, I care.  A lot of us care.”  It was a gesture of such profound compassion.  With it, Claire pierced my amour of anger.  Her light of empathy in this purple heart touched my broken heart so deeply.  During the worst of life and loss, some people are kind…many even.  There is always hope…        

Eli Sharabi was held hostage in Gaza for 491 days.   The moment I was kidnapped, I will never forget the fear in my daughters’ eyes,” it was horrible.  The first mosque we saw, we entered, they opened the door on the floor and we climbed down something like 30 meters.  It looked like a perfect grave for me under Gaza.  They broke my ribs.  I couldn’t breathe properly for 2 or 3 months.  My friend needed to help me stand to go to the bathroom.  They undressed us every two weeks to ‘look for things.’ It’s very, very humiliating.  We were shackled with iron chains.  Every step you make is no more than 3 inches.” Eli lost 66 pounds.  

The handover was terrifying.  He heard this from the social worker greeting him in Israel, his mother and sister were waiting for him.  “Just bring my wife and my kids,” he pleaded.  She said, “Well, your mother and your sister will tell you.” Now, Eli says, “I don’t have the privilege to break.  I am very grateful for my second chance.  I think about my wife and my daughters.  The life I missed.  But I love life.  I love life.  People say to me, ‘We lose simple things.  But you lost your brother, your wife and your daughters, and you are smiling today.  How is that possible?’  I can’t do anything to bring back my family.   So, the best thing I can do for their memories is to be optimistic and to be strong and to rebuild my life.”

If Eli can move from suffering to optimism, so can we.  If he can transcend anger, so can I.  Do you know what the Torah portion the rabbis chose for us to hear tomorrow commands us to do?   Chose life!  If Eli can choose life, so can we.  

Believe me, I am not campaigning for it, nor does the job exist, but if there was such a job as Comforter and Chief of the Jewish People and I held that job, here is what I would say to all of us about our anger and our opportunity.  I would remind us all that day begins at midnight, the darkest hour, and that we see light through our pupil, the darkest part of our eye.  I would remind us all that there really is a time for everything.  A time to weep and a time to laugh.  That our people have sown with tears, but have reaped in joy.  The sages required even a blind person to recite the blessing over a new moon.  Why?  Why command someone to affirm what they cannot see?  Because we are a people of faith even in, especially in, the darkness.  

We are all imbued by God with the power of the sunflower.  Young sunflowers are heliotropic; meaning throughout the day they turn toward the sun, and each night, they reorient to face east in anticipation of the morning.  We too can turn.  We can evolve.  When we fall, we can rise.  Like Eli, we can emerge from the darkness; a buried seed bursting forth, turning toward the sun.   We can use this agonizing puncture, this piercing of our hearts, to leave our stasis behind and create something better.  We can turn.  From anger to action, from failure to change.  With Torah, each other, and our faith, we can all, choose life.