Rosh Hashanah 5784

It’s been a complex, difficult year, this one that now finally draws to its close. Tension in Israel between those either side of the PM’s efforts dramatically to diminish the power of the Supreme Court made some wonder if Israel would in the future the same place it was in the past. Tension on the West Bank rose and continues to rise precipitously—both the kind related to violence directed against Jewish settlers in the heartland of ancient Eretz Yisrael and the kind directed against Palestinian Arabs who too live in that place and have for centuries. On the home front, anti-Semitic incidents reached a new peak in our nation’s history. A full quarter of our nation’s Jewish college students reported having witnessed or been the victims of anti-Semitic assaults on our nation’s campuses. And both of our nation’s major political parties have made room in their ranks for overt anti-Semites, both the kind who hide their bigotry behind a thin veil of anti-Israelism and those who don’t bother hiding it at all. So it would be easy to look back and say, basically, good riddance to a year filled with worry, anxiety, and violence.

Nor does the future feel particularly inviting these days. The year to come could well be the year that Iran finally becomes a full-fledged nuclear power, an eventuality both President Obama and President Trump promised explicitly (and on multiple occasions) that our country would prevent from ever happening and yet which seems to be about to happen nonetheless. The United Nations, once a true force for good in the world, continues apparently to have nothing to do with its time (and its gigantic budget) other than to work to support the enemies of Israel. In our own nation, gun violence will surely continue to increase—and we are already at the point at which a mass shooting in which no record is set with respect to the killed and wounded is not considered front-page news. The political turmoil in Israel will surely continue until there are new elections—and then only if Bibi is sent on his way and coalition representing a large majority of voters (and not a razon-thin majority of them) is put in place. And there is no reason at all to expect the dramatic changes in weather—the extreme heat, the rising seas, the shrinking ice caps, the unprecedented wave of forest fires and smoke pollution—there is no reason at all to expect that all just to go away on its own now that we’ve all had more than enough of it.

It would be easy—more than just easy—to throw up our hands and declare defeat. I feel that way all the time! And yet I also feel—and truly believe—in the power of the few to alter the course of the many. And I believe as well the power of the individual—and not just the famous ones like Rosa Parks or Malala Yousafzai, but regular, garden-variety individuals like ourselves—to alter the course of history, one good deed at a time.

I was reading a terrible story in the paper the other day, the story of the Ulma family, people of whom I had never heard and probably would never have heard of had the Pope not beatified them as potential saints of the Church last week. But their story has to do with Jews, not with other Catholics: Josef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children were murdered by the Nazis on March 24, 1944, for the crime of having hidden two Jewish families who would otherwise have been deported to their deaths in the camps. (The eight Jews they hid, seven adults and a child, were murdered the same day and by the same execution squad.) Also, Wiktoria Ulma was pregnant at the time and her unborn child too was beatified. (There is something both strange and very stirring in that detail as well: because the unborn child was obviously not baptized, it should theoretically not have been a candidate for beatification. But because the thought that the family would be honored but not its soon-to-be born youngest member was unacceptable, the Pope determined that the child had indeed been baptized…in the blood of its murdered mother, a woman whose sole crime was refusing to be party to the murder of Jews. Whether that decision can be justified with respect to canon law, I have no idea. But the thought of the Church recognizing the concept of an infant being baptized in the blood of a woman paying with her life for having hidden Jewish people from their more than willing executioners is particularly moving to me.)

I have read a thousand stories like this—each tree on the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem represents a similar story about regular, everyday people risking everything so as not to be party to evil—but I never fail to be moved by them. Would I have had that courage, that moral stamina? I’d like to think so. But which of us really knows what he or she would do in such a situation, one in which acting bravely and nobly requires putting your own children’s lives on the line as well as your own?

And so I return to the power of the individual. The Nazis had the guns and the ammunition, as well as the depraved indifference to the value of human life necessary to murder children. The Ulmas had no weapons at all and were armed solely by their faith and their absolute refusal to be party to evil. Yet which of us would say that that Ulmas did not alter the course of the world with their actions? And, yes, I say that fully aware of the fact that the people they protected did not survive, as did they also not. Nor am I troubled in this by the fact that until this week I hadn’t ever heard of them. Instead, I find myself certain that the world itself exists in our day because of their willingness to do good in theirs. And, no, I can’t prove that. But it’s still what I think.

Single acts by decent people possessed solely of the will to do good in the world—that is something we are all capable of…if we find the courage to act. The world is awash in violence, but I truly do believe that the Jewish woman who lights her Shabbat candles in the privacy of her own home, consciously ushering light into the world and bearing witness to the presence of God in that space—that that single person has the capacity to alter history far more profoundly than masses intent on doing evil.  And communities of faith exist precisely to foster that kind of behavior. And that worldview as well.

And so, as 5784 dawns with all that it will bring us, I invite you all to join me in stepping into that picture. The world is awash with haters, bigots, racists, and anti-Semites. We can throw up our hands and declare defeat in advance. Or we can address evil in the world by lighting a candle, by putting a coin in the pushkeh, by coming to shul, by saying a chapter of the Psalms, by reciting the Shema…and so forth. We belong to a community dedicated to the finest Jewish values, to tradition, and to the foundational belief that the redemption of the world will be triggered not by demagogues haranguing their audience and not by generals leading their armies into battle, but by children reciting the Shema, by women lighting their candles, by people willing to stand up and be counted on the side of righteousness, justice, and decency. And that, in a nutshell, is what these High Holidays soon to be upon us are about.