What is the spiritual work of Rosh Hashanah? If you look in the Torah, you’re not going to find much of an answer:

וּבַחֹ֨דֶשׁ הַשְּׁבִיעִ֜י בְּאֶחָ֣ד לַחֹ֗דֶשׁ

In the seventh month, on the first day of the month

 מִֽקְרָא־קֹ֙דֶשׁ֙ יִהְיֶ֣ה לָכֶ֔ם

you shall observe a sacred occasion

 כׇּל־מְלֶ֥אכֶת עֲבֹדָ֖ה לֹ֣א תַעֲשׂ֑וּ

you shall not work at your occupations

 י֥וֹם תְּרוּעָ֖ה יִהְיֶ֥ה לָכֶֽם

 You shall observe it as a Day of T’ruah

The text says nothing about this being the Jewish New Year. Nothing about judgment, repentance, forgiveness, self reflection, prayer, charity – all the things we’ve come to associate with Rosh Hashana. The Torah doesn’t even give the holiday a name.

Which leaves the ancient rabbis of the Talmud, our oral tradition, scrambling to define the nature of this holiday. What are we supposed to be doing on the first day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei? The only hint we have is that last line: 

 י֥וֹם תְּרוּעָ֖ה יִהְיֶ֥ה לָכֶֽם

 You shall observe it as a Day of T’ruah

T’ruah is often translated as a loud blast – which many of us now associate with the shofar. But the rabbis read something deeper here. In the Talmud volume focused on Rosh Hashanah, they argue that the word Truah is translated as “yevava” – ״to cry.״ And to prove it, they bring this verse:

בְּעַד הַחַלּוֹן נִשְׁקְפָה וַתְּיַבֵּב אֵם סִיסְרָא

Sisera’s mother looked through the window and cried (vateyabev), 

So that word – vateyabev, from the same root as yavava – is seemingly key to understanding what we’re supposed to be doing on Rosh Hashanah. In fact, it may be the only key that the Torah gives us. And this verse, according to the Rabbis of the Talmud, tells us how to do it. So I think it’s worth digging a little deeper into this verse – which is a very strange verse for the rabbis to quote in this context. Who is Sisera, who is his mother, and what do they have to do with Rosh Hashanah?

The verse comes from Shoftim, the Book of Judges, when the Israelites have settled in the land of Canan but are being oppressed by the Cananite King Jabin and his brutal military commander Sisera. God sends the fiery prophetess Devorah to defeat Sisera’s army. It’s a wild story worth reading, but suffice to say that the story ends with Sisera fleeing the battlefield alone and taking refuge in the tent of a Midianite woman named Yael, who kills him with a tent peg to the forehead. 

As an epilogue to the story, we’re told of Sisera’s mother sitting by her window, waiting for her son to return home from battle, anxious that he is late and wondering what might have happened to him. And as the verse quoted in the Talmud tells us, vateyabev: she begins to cry. 

And it is this scene – poetic, stirring, and seemingly unrelated to Rosh Hashana – that the rabbis argue is the underpinning of the Jewish New Year observance. What can we make of this?

I find it particularly striking that the rabbis selected a verse that evokes empathy for the mother of one of our greatest enemies. That even someone who has murdered countless Jews has a mother, and that mother will be heartbroken when she finds out her son has been killed. The scene is painted in such a wrenching detail that we can’t help but feel her sadness. And perhaps this empathy is the spiritual work of Rosh Hashanah. 

***

This year has provided too many opportunities to test our ability to have empathy for those we might see as on the other side of the battlefield. 

One year ago this week, on October 7, many of us woke up to the news of a terror attack in Israel. As the details emerged, we were confronted with a scale of murder, rape, and kidnapping in one day unprecedented in Israel’s history – unprecedented for Jews since perhaps the Holocaust. Babies, children, the elderly – no one was spared. Particularly devastating was the bloodshed perpetrated on hundreds of young revelers as they danced at a music festival in Southern Israel not unlike the Sukkot on the Farm festival I was celebrating on October 7 with many of you. In the wake of 1189 dead, 251 hostages, and countless wounded, an Israeli population that had already been traumatized by decades of attacks had their scars ripped open anew, their sense of safety demolished, generations of trauma reawakened in a matter of hours. 

After days of mourning, over a thousand funerals, Israel responded in turn. It bombarded the Gaza Strip with bombs and entered with ground troops – seeking to rescue the hostages and dismantle Hamas’s terror infrastructure to prevent a future attack like this. As Hamas militants intentionally hid amidst civilian populations, storing their weapons in hospitals and schools, tens of thousands of innocent Gazans were killed and injured in the crossfire. Almost 2 million more have been uprooted, forced to flee from their homes, living in squalid refugee camps, without access to sufficient food or basic health services. The devastation continues today.

As I was finishing writing this teaching yesterday, I received frantic text messages and video chats from my siblings in Israel, dashing to their bomb shelters as Iran launched over 200 missiles at cities across Israel. I fear what might happen to my family while I am offline for the next three days.

As we near the one-year anniversary of October 7, there seems to be no end in sight for this violence, and if anything, the situation may get worse before it gets better. There will likely be many more mothers waiting at their windows, not knowing if their children will be coming home. 

***

Who is to blame for all this violence? Over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time learning about the spiritual practice of holding multiple perspectives at once. That we can condemn the heinous Hamas attacks of October 7 and also the enormous death counts in Gaza. That we can grieve both Israeli and Palestinian casualties. That we can support Israel’s right to defend its people as well as the need for an independent and viable Palestinian state. 

Chochmat HaLev has taken a stand to be a community that welcomes the full range of perspectives, while creating a space that encourages nuance and complexity. Other communities have enforced a standard line on one end of the spectrum or the other, making many of their members feel unwelcome. Many of you tonight came to Chochmat over the past year from those communities. Some communities as diverse as ours have torn apart by their differences over the past year. I’m proud of how we’ve navigated this conflict together – holding our diversity as a source of strength.

We can see that call to empathy in the story of Sisera’s mother. We as Jews must be outraged by the scores of innocent Palestinian deaths in Gaza as we are by those Israelis brutally killed on October 7 and continue to be killed by Hezbollah attacks. As said by Rabbi Eliyahu Kitov, author of Sefer HaToda’ah, in his commentary about this story: “When a mother laments over her son’s anguish, she experiences compassion for other mothers who likewise weep over their children’s death.” 

That ability to hold nuance and complexity, to lament and condemn both Israeli and Palestinian suffering, has been essential over the past year, and will remain essential as the conflict continues to rage on. And tonight I want to add another layer to our spiritual practice.  

The Rabbis of the Talmud argue about the exact nature of Sisera’s mother’s yevavot, her cries. Some of the rabbis argue that the cries were יַלֵּיל (yalel) – a whimper one makes over the suffering of someone else, a lament. And some of the rabbis argue that her cries were גַּנַּח (ganakh) – a moan that someone makes when they are sick, expressing their own pain. Both interpretations stand in the Talmud.

So what might Sisera’s mother be teaching us? Perhaps, as evident in this rabbinic pairing, there are two parts to this spiritual practice of Rosh Hashana. We need to open ourselves to  יַלֵּיל  – to having empathy for the pain of others, even when they might seem like our enemies, as we’ve been endeavoring to do for the past year. But also essential is גַּנַּח– we need to be able to cry for ourselves. 

Amidst so much death and devastation in the region, focusing on our own pain can feel self-indulgent. Some of us might even be holding the message that we don’t deserve to feel our own pain – or that feeling our own pain detracts from our empathy for others, or is a distraction from the outrage at what is happening in the region. 

But as Sisera’s mother teaches us, it is not a zero-sum calculus – we can, and must, do both. As we near the one year anniversary of October 7, having spent a year immersed in news reports and images and stories coming from the region, we owe it to ourselves to also reflect on how this year has been for us too. Feeling our own pain is a necessary part of feeling pain for others. So tonight we’re going to resist the temptation to talk about what is happening in Israel or Palestine, or even in Lebanon or Iran. We’re going to talk about our experiences, here in America, and give ourselves permission to feel the toll of the past year on us. 

And as the Rabbis teach through Sisera’s mother, this self-reflection is core to the spiritual work of Rosh Hashanah. 

***

Over the past year, I’ve sat with hundreds of you in one-on-one spiritual counseling sessions about the war. We’ve sat together in tears and laughter and rage and heartbreak and despair. 

For many of us, the past year has been clarifying. We’ve learned who we can count on. Where we feel safe. What is important to us. 

It’s also been confusing. What does it mean to be a Jew? Where do we belong? What do we stand for? Some of us have questioned our political allegiances, our spiritual communities, our friend groups. We’ve lost family celebrations and holiday dinners to bitter debates and hurt feelings. We’ve had our Jewishness questioned from both sides of the ideological spectrum. 

People who we thought were our friends may have been silent when we needed them most – or even worse, reposting simplistic memes or incendiary headlines. We hope that they’re just ignorant of the anti-semetic dog-whistling or tribalist war-mongering. But we also quietly wonder if maybe they agree with those sentiments. We wonder if they’re thinking of us when they post those things – or maybe they aren’t thinking of us at all. I’m not sure which is worse. We risk losing friends if we say something, we don’t want to start a fight, we don’t want to be that person – but are these even friends worth keeping?

Many of us have spent years building allyship with other marginalized and vulnerable communities, only to be disappointed when those communities have not shown up for us in our time of need. And as we watch our friends jump on the bandwagon of the latest cause de jour, it might have made us wonder what causes we may have supported without doing our homework. Or when you’ve seen all your friends line up on the other side of this issue, maybe you’ve questioned your own position. 

We also may have heard from friends who we haven’t spoken to in years. “I saw what happened in Israel, I see the devastation in Gaza, I see what’s been happening in Berkeley – just wanted to check in to see if you are okay.” And it has felt so good to know that people are thinking about us, that we are seen. 

Many of us have felt physically unsafe. People are being attacked on the streets for being visibly Jewish – maybe it’s happened to friends or family of ours. Synagogues and menorahs are getting vandalized right here in the East Bay. It’s difficult to find a street in Berkeley that doesn’t have graffiti or a poster or a sticker that inches up to that line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. 

You may agree with the literal message of “Free Palestine,” supporting an independent Palestinian state, with dignity and autonomy for the Palestinian people – but you also may be uncomfortable with the way a two-word slogan has become short-hand for delegitimization and hatred of the only Jewish state in the world. “Free Palestine” is easy – the details are the hard part, but they don’t fit on a bumper sticker. 

College campuses have become warzones, with public spaces taken over by activists, some of whom are earnestly fighting for end to Palestinian bloodshed, some of whom proudly wave Hamas flags. Kids in Berkeley public schools are being spat on, bullies are giving the Nazi salute as Jewish kids walk by, students are being pressured to join “walk-outs” and protests, teachers are organizing unauthorized “teach-ins” of one-sided propaganda, parents are needing to explain what the word “kike” means, perhaps for the first time in decades. 

Many of us have been jarred when walking into bakeries, restaurants, book shops and are confronted with signs declaring “From the river to the sea”, wondering if they realize that phrase is used to call for the genocide of Jews, wondering if we should say something, wondering if we should stop spending your money there. 

Maybe you wondered whether you should read into the fact that Trader Joes has stopped selling that Israeli feta you love, maybe the shipment was delayed or maybe you should say something to the manager or maybe you’ll just buy the other brand and since when did buying feta cheese become a political act? You resent the dirty look you got from the woman at the cash register wearing a kafiyah – or was it your imagination? 

Maybe you’re newer to Judaism, and this war is the first time you’ve had to seriously grapple with Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Maybe you’ve felt shame at not knowing enough about the region or who to trust. Maybe you love the spiritual parts of Judaism but struggle with the ethno-nationalist parts. 

Maybe you’ve received dirty looks or been made to feel unwelcome in Jewish spaces when you’re wearing a kafiyah as a way to stand up for Palestinian independence and an end to rampant bloodshed. Maybe the past year has made you feel reluctant to identify as a Jew, or made you wonder how Israeli treatment of Palestinians aligns with the Jewish values you were taught as a kid.

And whether we’re new or not to this conflict, many of us have struggled with the concept of “Ahavat Yisrael” – the sense that because someone is Jewish, even if they live on another continent, we feel more of a connection to them then a random person the street, a responsibility to them, a kind of tribal solidarity, because in our not-too-distant past, we couldn’t rely on others to protect us. We feel ambivalent about feeling this way, maybe even embarrassed, since no human life should be worth more than another. 

And we look at what is happening in Israel, the genocidal vitriol coming from the mouths of Israeli cabinet ministers, the steady erosion of womens’ rights and gay rights and minority rights, the creeping theocracy and corruption – and we start to question how much in fact we do have in common with our tribe-members on the other side of the world, and whether we can stand by their actions as the death toll rises in Gaza. After almost 1200 Israelis were killed on October 7, Is 10,000 Palestinian deaths too much to prevent another attack? How about 20,000? 30,000? 

And we feel the tension when we’re told to butt out of Israeli decision-making because we don’t live there, but then we as Jews all over the world are held accountable for the actions of the Jewish State. And maybe, in the quietest of whispers, we start to ask ourselves whether Israel’s existence, in its current iteration, with its current leadership, is making Jews around the world more or less safe – or both. And in the dark corners of our heart, maybe we wonder if there is anywhere we can be truly safe. 

***

I invite you to close your eyes, take a deep breath, and look back on the year since October 7. How has the war impacted you? How has this past year been different from every other year before it, because of this war? One year later, what have you lost? What have you gained? What have you learned? 

Give yourself permission to feel the weight of the past year. Maybe allow yourself to feel it for the first time this year. On this Yom Truah, this day of sounding, I invite you to give it a sound right now – perhaps a sigh, a moan, a wail, a yevava.  

Maybe none of what I shared resonates with you. Or some of it does and some of it doesn’t. But based on the hundreds of conversations over the past year, I imagine many of you can relate to many of these experiences. So if that includes you, know you are not alone. You’re not being gaslit or overly sensitive or paranoid. It’s been a hard year. 

And if you don’t relate to any of this –  hopefully it’s helpful to know what many of your friends and community have been going through. Notice what it feels like to be having a different experience from others in the community. Notice what is coming up for you as you reflect on the past year – and know that your experience is welcome here, that you are fully embraced in this community, even if I didn’t tell your story tonight. It’s been a hard year for you too.

Sisera’s mother is here to remind us that when we are crying for others, we need to cry for ourselves too. When we see others suffering, it might trigger our own suffering. So if you’ve been judging yourself for being so distraught over a geo-political conflict happening thousands of miles away, know that the wars around us can be a canvas for the wars inside us. For Jews in particular, our inherited trauma, from generations of oppression and dispossession, exacerbates our own personal wounds and the way they get triggered during times of crisis.  

The sages of the Talmud are inviting us this Rosh Hashanah to have compassion for ourselves by engaging in both גַּנַּח and יַלֵּיל. Feel the grief, outrage, fear, devastation or whatever else may come up as you look at what is happening in Israel-Palestine. And also give yourself space to tend to your own wounds too. Moving through our own pain helps us have the capacity to feel the pain of others too. 

****

I’ll share one last thought in closing: While Sisera’s mother lets out her גַּנַּח and יַלֵּיל, crying for herself and crying for others, the verse tells us a seemingly extraneous detail – that she is is looking out the window. According to the Talmud, when Sisera’s mother looks through that window, as she cries both her cries, she is able to see into the future. What she sees is that her offspring will become great teachers of Torah wisdom – thus ending the bitter feud between the oppressed and the oppressors. 

At a time when hope is in short supply, it feels audacious to dream of a better future. But as our sages instruct us to learn from the mother of one of our greatest enemies, that the pathway to peace runs through crying for our own pain so that we can cry for others. 

And so I offer a blessing to all of us as we head into the new Jewish year:

Mi’Sheberach Avoteinu V’Imoteinu, may the sacred Oneness that blessed our ancestors bless us with a window. 

That when the world around us is feeling dangerous and intense and overwhelming, may we have a window to open that can offer us a waft of fresh air, a respite, a breath, the space to feel our feelings, to cry for our own suffering.

And when we feel our own pain, may we be blessed with the courage and the strength to look through that window and see things from other people’s perspectives. 

And when we gaze out that window, having fully felt our own pain so we can have the capacity to have empathy for the pain of others, may we be blessed to see a glorious future beyond victim and oppressor, a future of peace, b’meheira byameinu, swiftly in our times, Amen.