Rabbi Zvika Krieger, Chochmat HaLev
September 23, 2025

Rosh Hashanah is referred to in the Torah as Yom Teru’ah, the day of the horn blasts — signifying that blowing the shofar is an essential part of today’s spiritual practice. While the shofar is mentioned in the Torah as being sounded at Mount Sinai and to signal the coronation of kings, its primary association in the Torah is as a tool for war, such as to rally troops or intimidate enemies.

It feels difficult to center this military instrument at a time when our own police forces and government agencies are being militarized to deport immigrants, terrorize people of color, and intimidate anyone from speaking out. It is challenging to celebrate military prowess when tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have been killed over the past two years, and millions more driven from their houses and on the brink of starvation, when over a thousand Israelis were brutally murdered by Hamas on October 7, when dozens of Israeli hostages remain in captivity because of a war that even Israeli officials have declared to be ineffective, immoral, and serving only the interests of the politicians in power.

Our sages perhaps anticipated this tension, and so they prescribed that on Rosh Hashanah we read about Akeidat Yitzchak, the Binding of Isaac, like we just did. There’s no explicit connection to our holiday, but the rabbis of the Talmud link the ram in that story to the ram’s horn of the Rosh Hashanah shofar.

The ram comes at a critical point in the narrative: Abraham, who believes he was commanded by the Divine to sacrifice his beloved son, is stopped at the last minute by an angel, who pointed Abraham toward a ram as a sacrifice instead.

The ram is thus a symbol of resistance. It is the voice that says: No. No to sacrificing children. No to religious justifications for violence. No to passing down trauma from one generation to the next. The shofar is our call to stand up and interrupt, to intercede, to halt imminent bloodshed.

The Akeidah has become a prominent symbol in Israel amongst anti-war poets and writers, many of whom I studied with Israeli poetry scholar Rachel Korazim this year. The Israeli poet Raaya Hernik, who lost her son in the Israel-Lebanon war, wrote: ”I will not sacrifice / My first born / Not I // At night, God and I / Are calculating who gets what // I know / I am grateful / But not my son / And not / As a sacrifice.”

The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, in his poem “the true hero of the Akedah,” decries how this symbol of non-violence was later appropriated “to sound the blast of their vulgar celebrations.” He ends his poem by saying: “Abraham and God had parted ways a while back. But the true hero of this story was the ram.”

One of Israel’s most decorated poets, Chaim Ghouri, who was a fierce critic of the Netanyahu government’s military policies, wrote perhaps the best-known poem about the Akeidah, called Yerusha – the Inheritance: “The knife slipped from his hand…. But he passed down an inheritance that hour to his offspring. They are born with a knife in their hearts.”

I also offer this poem from the Palestinian poet Waddah Abu Jame‘, currently living in Gaza. We don’t know if he’s still alive: “I know children / Who only learned to count / From one to ten; / A number of them were killed. / A number they can’t even read.”

And lastly, Hanoch Levin, a prominent Israeli playwright, writes in his play Queen of a Bathtub: “And do not say that you’ve brought a sacrifice, because I was the one who brought the sacrifice. Dear Father, when you stand on my grave, old and weary and very lonesome, and when you see how they lay my body to rest, ask for my forgiveness, Father.” This feels particularly poignant on Rosh Hashanah, where we are called to ask for forgiveness for the ways we are complicit in harm caused to others.

It brings me no joy to condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza right now. Some of you know that my father and three brothers live in Israel; that my cousin was killed while serving in Gaza after October 7; and that many friends of friends were killed on October 7. I believe that Israel, like any country, has the right to defend itself and the right to make sure that something like October 7 never happens again. But like the ram in these poems, Rosh Hashanah brings upon us an obligation to join the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who every week are marching in streets to demand the return of the hostages and an end to a war that has turned from a war of defense into an unjust war of annihilation.

I always feel fear speaking out on this topic because I’m worried about saying the wrong thing. I want to open hearts, rather than close them. I worry that by sharing both Israeli pain and Palestinian pain, one of those will shut some people down, that I immediately become aligned with the “enemy”. But as we learned last night,  the spiritual work of Rosh Hashanah is turning toward each other, face to face, panim b’panim.

My prayer this Rosh Hashana is that our hearts can grow and expand to hold all the pain — that we don’t have to choose between grieving Israeli pain and Palestinian pain. As we prayed together last night: “דִּבַּרְתִּי אֲנִי עִם־לִבִּי לֵאמֹר אֲנִי הִנֵּה הִגְדַּלְתִּי וְהוֹסַפְתִּי חׇכְמָה עַל כׇּל־אֲשֶׁר־הָיָה לְפָנַי — I have spoken with my heart, I have grown and expanded wisdom to hold all that is in front of me.”

Shortly after October 7, I shared with all of you the story of my friend Abie, whose sister and brother-in-law, Deborah and Shlomi, were brutally murdered in their home in Kibbutz Holit. Their teenage son, Rotem, survived by hiding under a pile of blankets, his mother’s blood dripping down on him while he waited under her dead body for hours.

Abie sent me a video this week of Rotem’s sister, Shir, who also survived. Here is what she said: “Sometimes I want my Mom and Dad to tell me, you’re ok, it’s ok that you feel sorry for the children in Gaza, that doesn’t make you a lefty traitor or stupid, or naive, it makes you a human being. I need their approval because all I am hearing around me is that they deserve it, because of what they did to us. And then I say as the daughter of people who were murdered on October 7: Is what I feel okay? Shouldn’t I want revenge? And I don’t want revenge, I want the hostages back and I want this war to end.”

If the child of October 7 victims can hold pain for the suffering of others, so must we. We must try to access the empathy expressed by Rachel Polin-Goldberg, who I sat with in shiva last year after her son Hersh was killed as a captive in Gaza. Rachel wrote last month, “Give us back our 50 hostages. Some are alive and some are only alive in our souls. Let the innocent people who are in Gaza have a chance. We are tired. We are done. We are children of God.”

And so, as we blow the shofar today, we sound that horn not as an act of war — not to frighten our enemies or rally our troops — but in memory of the ram. May it inspire us to stand up for Jewish values. To stand up and say no: no to violence, both here in America, in Gaza, in Israel, and beyond. No to children being murdered, here or anywhere.

I call upon the prayer of Avraham at the end of the Akedah story we read today, when he names that place “Adonai Yireh, God will show me.” Let us pray for that clarity of vision: to see clearly what is happening both here and in Israel-Palestine. Let us pray for the humility to change our minds, as Abraham did — to be swayed by empathy. And let us pray for the strength in community to stand up for our values.

Rabbi Zvika Krieger is the spiritual leader of Chochmat HaLev. You can read more of his teachings here.