Sermon Text:

A word as we begin this morning. If you have been waiting to see if, like Rabbi Rubin did so beautifully on Rosh Hashanah morning, I will be speaking about Israel, this, my friends, is what I have to say about Israel. If you’ve been wondering whether I’d be addressing the state of American democracy, this sermon is what I have to say about that, too. And if you’ve been wondering if I have any advice about how to deal with a family member or friend who leaves you at a loss for words because of their political perspectives, I hope you’ll find counsel in my words this morning as well. 

I want to try an experiment– don’t worry– it won’t hurt, and it will only last for a moment. I do want to ask you to join me in the experiment, though; there’s a chance that we will each be changed for the better if we do it together.

Close your eyes and imagine an apple. What do you see when you close your eyes? Can you see the apple– its color, its texture, where it is located? Could you describe to another person what you see?

Ok. You can open your eyes; the experiment itself is over. 

This summer, I realized that I experience the world differently than about 96% of the rest of humanity. Because when I close my eyes and try to imagine an apple, I see nothing. 

I understand the idea of an apple; I know what an apple is and what it looks like, but I can’t see it in what you might call my “mind’s eye.” For the record, when I close my eyes, I can’t see my wife’s face; I can’t see Masada even though I’ve been there dozens of times. I can’t see a panda bear. I can’t see the Big Dipper. I can remember holding an apple, but I can’t see it when I close my eyes. 

Just for a brief moment, raise your hand if, like me, when I asked you to close your eyes and imagine an apple, you also did not see anything.

It turns out that I, and a few other people here in the sanctuary, experience a brain phenomenon called aphantasia, which literally means, “not seeing.” It’s a phenomenon that scientists tell us is experienced by somewhere between 1 and 4 percent of humans.

When I first learned about this this summer– from a podcast, of all places– I was worried that there was something wrong with me. Do I need to go to the doctor? I honestly had never imagined that anyone else did see an apple, or anything else for that matter, when they closed their eyes.

There are other similar phenomena, like the percentage of people who experience synaesthesia, people who experience one sense through another– like hearing colors or tasting shapes. Yes– that’s a thing!

And there are folks who experience prosopagnosia– they have an inability to recognize faces, even of people they know well.

Please note what I’ve also learned: these phenomena are normal variations of human experience; they are not conditions that require treatment. I have, I’d like to think, many other gifts; I have many other ways of perceiving the world.  Maybe some of them are even heightened by the fact that I also experience aphantasia– I don’t know.

But here’s the bottom line: we human beings literally see the world differently one from another, sometimes based on how our brains work, sometimes based on our life’s experience. 

As I spoke about on Erev Rosh Hashanah, we each have a unique story that informs how we see what we see, and, no doubt, that informs our perceptions of the larger world in important ways. And we are all here together today, trying to make sense of our lives, trying to make sense of the world, trying to be our best, unique selves.

When you think about that, it’s pretty amazing and remarkable.

As author John Green has said: 

As human beings, we are stuck for the whole time we’re here inside of one consciousness and one way of looking at the world, and, it turns out, my consciousness is different than yours, and yours is different than the person sitting next to you or behind you.” Green says, “That is both cool and interesting and strange and important for us to understand… We will never really know what it’s really like to be someone else.¹

In the last six months, I’ve had more than 100 individual meetings with members of the congregation. I wanted hear from you about your stories, how you are feeling, and how you see this convoluted time in which we live. 

And I’ve never been more moved in my rabbinate than I have been by these conversations. You have opened your hearts and sacred stories to me, and I feel so privileged to have listened, to have been shaken and stirred by the nuance and complexity of some of the perspectives of our teens, our college students, our twenty and thirty somethings, the parents of our nursery school students and religious school students, our empty nesters and seniors in our community. The life stories and journeys and experiences of all of these members of our community are each unique, and all of those factors inform how we view the world. No two stories were the same. 

This morning, I want to share with you just a fraction of the stories I’ve heard from people who are sitting in this sanctuary and online, just about the war that was thrust upon Israel last October 7. While I won’t share their names, I have asked and have been given permission to share their stories. I imagine that some of the stories will not surprise you; others may be harder for you to hear. Please stay with me as I hold up this mirror to share with you some of what this beautiful, holy, variegated congregation looks like.

Among the people I’ve had coffee with have been a number of college students and academics who have felt terrified and alone because the pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses make no space for Israeli rights, or Jewish rights, or in many cases, space for Jews at all.

I met with a group of college students who grew up in this congregation who came to tell me about a protest they had helped organize against Israel’s policies.

I took a walk with a congregant in his 70s who was recently wrestling out loud here at the synagogue with the death of innocent Palestinians in this war when he found himself being called a disloyal, self-hating Jew by another congregant;

I had coffee with a congregant in his 40s with Israeli family who is passionate about his Zionism, and who is worried about whether Israel will be able to survive this war.

I sat with a congregant in her 50s who told me that, based on the way Israel has conducted this war, she has given up hope that Israel will ever be an important part of her otherwise strong Jewish identity.

I spent time with more than a few congregants who have been made to feel by friends and co-workers as if their support for the hostages is equivalent to ignoring the rights of Palestinians.

I heard from more than a few congregants who feel abandoned by people they thought were friends who haven’t once reached out to ask how they were feeling following Hamas’ brutal attacks, who now find themselves questioning for the first time why we’d ever waste time building interreligious cooperation as a congregation;

And I also spent time with more than a few congregants who have reminded me that, when Jews are alone in the world, it never turns out well for us, so that interfaith relationships are still worth fighting for.

And these are just a few of the stories I heard about the war in the Middle East.  I also heard diverse stories about what you believe about God, about why your feel the way you do about the city of New York, about your experiences of antisemitism, about the state of our national politics, about how you feel about unhoused people and immigrants, about the upcoming election, and so much more.

In some of these conversations, congregants and I found ourselves largely in agreement on many topics; in others, we profoundly disagreed. In the latter cases, we rarely changed each other’s minds about the subject at hand, but I know for my part, in many cases my heart was opened because I came to understand why congregants felt the way they felt; I came to understand the lenses through which they see this world, and I believe that in most cases, they came to understand how I do, too. 

Although I profoundly disagreed with certain things I heard, I thought alot about how we might stay together as a community without tearing ourselves apart.  I have often been reminded in some of the more difficult conversations of the teaching of 17th century Rebbe Nachman of Bratislav who taught, “It’s not hard work to distance yourself from another person; the real work is to draw them close.”²

As I shared my general experiences in these meetings with Rabbi Rubin, she pointed me to a TED talk given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author of the 2013 award-winning book, Americanah. In her talk, entitled “The Danger of a Single Story,”³ Adiche asks, “What stories do we write in our heads about other people based on a tiny bit of information?”

We see or hear that someone is poor; we see the color of their skin or have a perception of their gender; we hear where they were raised or their religious background, and we immediately, subconsciously, have an entire script written about them in our heads. 

As Adichie says: 

We can feel sorry for someone even before we meet them. We can feel a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity for someone about whom we know almost nothing; we can feel arising a kind of primal disgust or fear or hate of someone based on one tiny detail about their lives– either something we can see about them, or something they reveal. 

We write whole stories about “the people who watch that news channel,” or “the people who voted for that person, or “the people who went to that rally.” 

And when we write a story like that, we often write it in such a way that it casts the other person as outside our tribe; we feel nothing but instant pity, fear, distrust, or even hate for them. 

And such stories we write leave no room for us to be open to the possibility that they are just another person trying to make their way through a complicated world, just like we each are. 

As I shared parts of my story with many of the people I met with in recent months, I had a happy childhood with parents who loved me. I had joyous Jewish experiences as I grew up, and role models who inspired me to be a rabbi. I met an incredible life partner who has been a blessing in my life for 32 years of marriage, and I have two amazing kids who keep me on my toes and who challenge me to be the best version of myself.  

I also have experienced traumas and loss in my life that inform who I am and how I see the world. One of my best friends in high school died of a heart attack when we were 18 years old. My first time living in Israel was in the lead up to the first Gulf War, and I was given a gas mask and taught how to create a sealed room in my dorm in Jerusalem. My grandparents were Holocaust refugees who lost almost all of their family members to the death camps. My father, as most of you know, was murdered 25 years ago. 

All of these stories– the joyful ones, the painful ones, and a million others– make me who I am.

Each and every one of these stories is a part of my own personal Book of Life. And if someone else were to insist on one aspect of my story as being the only lense through which they saw me, well, I’d like to think they were missing the forest and the trees. They would be flattening my experience and overlooking the many other stories that formed me.

As Adichie says: 

When all we know about another human being is a single story, we rob them of their dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It leads us to stereotype the other, to pigeon-hole them, to discount them and anything they might have to teach us. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.⁴

And as Jews, we know all too well how a single story creates stereotypes. 

As Adichie continues,

The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Show a person or a people as one thing– only one thing– over and over again– and that is what they become.⁵

But having intentional conversations with so many of you has led me to resolve that I am going to interrogate the single stories I’ve written about other people that I thought I knew in their fullness. I’ve learned so much– not only about you and what you believe and think, but about the messy, contradictory, joyful stories of your life that inform who you are and what you believe and think. 

You, too, everyone in this sanctuary and those watching online, you each are grateful for the blessings in your life; you each have painful experiences and losses you’ve endured. Some of your journeys have been of your own making, while others were imposed on you. Each of your memories are different, each of your family histories are different, each of you literally sees the world with different eyes.

There is something about being human, though, that seems to incline us towards seeing difference as a pathology, feeling almost instinctively as if people who are different than us need to be fixed or treated or repaired in order to make them worthy of being in our orbit.

As Ken Burns recently put it, we have “a preoccupation with always making the other wrong.”⁶

But there is another counter-cultural choice we can each make.

When we are inclined to dislike or distrust or even hate another person or what they have to say, why not ask ourselves: how many stories do I know about them? And if the answer to that question is “less than three,” might we consider learning two or three more stories from them directly before writing them out of our narratives? If we were to stay for one more minute, if we were to elicit from them one more story, perhaps we would learn that they are indeed a terrible, dangerous, scary person that we should stay away from– that might happen. 

But my experience tells me that, more often than not, there might be other stories– stories that inform how they see the world, the experiences that formed them, even curiosity that they bring around our story– that might soften our hearts to their humanity. 

You might come to understand and even appreciate that they are, on the most essential levels, wrestling with the same fears and same longings as you are. You might come to understand that what they hope for in life is, below the surface of what you thought you knew, the same thing that you hope for.

Look– I know that it is impossible for me to know every story in the life of another person. I have been married to Elyssa for 32 amazing years, and while I know what it’s like to love her and to be loved by her, I will never know what it’s like to actually be her.

But what I have learned from all of these 100 conversations is that it is impossible to engage fully with another person– even, or perhaps especially with a person I disagree with– without engaging with as many of the stories of that person as I can.

Let me share with you just one more example from my conversations. 

There’s a congregant I’ve gotten to know well over these last nine years. We have been together for joyous occasions and sad ones too. We disagree with each other about many things politically– especially around the Israel conversation. And I am so grateful that he is in my life, and I think he’s grateful that I am in his. And we have a routine now; when he hears me preach about something he disagrees with, he calls me and says, “I guess it’s time to have coffee again.” And we do. And we don’t generally change each other’s minds. 

But by sharing the fulness of our stories with one another, we’ve come to understand each other’s humanity. We’ve come to understand that we each care about Israel, and that we’re each living with the joyous, historic, messy mosaic of this place that we love so much, and that we’re each trying to figure out how to help it be safe and secure and righteous.  

For two people who could have easily given up on the other– he definitely could have decided to join another congregation– but for two people could have written each other off, we’ve decided, again and again, to stay in it with each other, and to listen as much as we talk. We’ve each made a conscious choice to stay in relationship because I think we both know that we need each other, that the Jewish people need both of us, that Israel does.

These conversations have taught me this lesson again and again. And I really like coffee, so I am going to spend as much time as you will allow me to continue to listen to and learn your stories, and I hope and pray that perhaps you’ll continue to reciprocate, to bring your curiosity, patience, and interest in my story even, perhaps especially, when you disagree with me. On your way out, the staff will be handing out cards that you can redeem for a cup of coffee, or tea, or hot chocolate, or bourbon with me sometime in the coming months.

What you are helping me understand, and I humbly hope I can help you understand in these difficult times, is that we need to truly come to know one another, not only because we are each created in the image of the divine, but also because our struggles and our stories and our destinies are inextricably intertwined, even if we might wish sometimes that they were not. Our people is too small for us to excommunicate those we disagree with. 

Each of our proud Jewish stories– our voices, our values, our struggles, our joys– we need them all to be a part of the larger Jewish story, because if they’re not, someone else will write a single story about us, and I bet that we won’t like that experience, either. 

The story someone else will write about us starts like this: 

“All Jews are like this,” or “all Jews are like that.”  Haven’t we heard that story before? And how did it turn out the last time? The last 100 times?

As we sit in this liminal space, before the Gates of Repentance close, twenty five days before the election, still in the middle of the unfolding war in the Middle East, with tensions rising on campus once again, we are divided as a people and as a nation in deeply profound ways.

Here’s what I know from lots and lots of coffee. We don’t all agree with each other; we don’t all agree with our rabbi; we don’t all agree with what I’ve said in this sermon. And yet, we are Jews who have decided to stay in it together, because we are Jews who know, deep in our hearts, deep in our stories, that we need each other. 

What if the solution to what Robert Putnam and other political scientists warn us is a fast-moving descent into an era of “inequality, political polarization, social dislocation and cultural narcissism⁷” started with us being willing to stay in it for one more story when the conversations we have with others get hard? 

Now there’s so much we might like to fix in society at large in this regard, but why don’t we start in this place, with the people in this room?

We, here on the corner of 79th and 2nd, already have a shared sacred story, a shared commitment to Jewish life, and we are already in relationship with one another. We are sharing this space of our own free will, knowing, as we must know, that the people sitting next to us, behind us, and in front of us, see the world with eyes, with perceptions, with a diversity of stories and perspectives that are different from our own, and that we will never comprehend if we don’t ask.

We have in this community of meaning, connection, and purpose, a laboratory where we can experiment, speak to other people differently than the harsh and crass ways we sometimes might outside of these walls; a laboratory where we can choose to learn from one another at a time when so much of our world seeks to separate us into our own ideological tribes.

To be clear– I do not advocate surrendering to the views of your ideological opponents, or even compromising. I am not advocating that we put ourselves in danger by engaging with someone who seeks to physically harm us. Nor do I believe that sitting together is some kind of panacea. 

But I am advocating for sitting with one another and not walking away even when we disagree, even when we hear things that make us feel uncomfortable. I am arguing that, if we can sit with a perspective that we don’t agree with for one more minute, that discomfort won’t actually break us in half; it won’t destroy our souls or ruin the rest of our lives. But it might just open our hearts. It might just change us in ways the world needs so badly.

My friends, the society that we live in feels like it is tearing itself apart. 

And the society we need involves making space for the many stories that make up each beautiful, nuanced, contradictory one of us. 

As Rabbi Sharon Brous writes in her beautiful book The Amen Effect, 

We need to learn to see those with whom we disagree not as enemies, but as fellow human beings, flawed and striving. Not as a path to capitulation, but instead toward the sacred recognition of each other’s humanity.⁸

Over many eras of human existence, stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, to break the dignity of individuals and peoples. We’ve been reminded of that as Jews all too often in the last year. But stories can also humanize, can also repair broken dignity, can also connect us to one another in ways we didn’t imagine were possible. 

The Torah portion that we’re about to hear, from the book of Deuteronomy, begins this way: “Each and every one of you are called this day before Adonai your God– your tribal heads, your elders, your officials… your children, your wives… from the woodchopper to the waterdrawer, to enter into the covenant of Adonai your God.” 

And the rabbis ask: why did the Torah have to list all of those individual groups of people within the community? And in good rabbinic tradition, they answer their own question. They say, each person among the Israelites experienced the revelation at Sinai in their own way, and still, they each needed to be seen as a part of the covenant; they each had a role to play, and the Israelites needed to be able to rely on each and every one of them.⁹

Let us in this new year choose to reject the single story, to realize that there is never a single story about any person, and never only one way to see the world. Let us be curious and counter-cultural in leaning in to the complex and powerful narratives that make each of us who we are, that make each of us see the world as we do– not to change one another’s minds necessarily or to fix what’s “broken,” in another person but to open one another’s hearts, and to appreciate one another’s unique gifts. Rebbe Nachman was right: “It’s not hard work to distance yourself from another person; the real work is to draw them close.”¹⁰

May this be a year in which we draw near, even to those with whom we disagree. Because there is a sacred human story that is larger, more beautiful, and so much richer, when we weave into it the sacred stories of each and every one of us.

G’mar chatimah tovah.

1 Interview on the podcast Radiolab, July 31, 2024.

2 Likutei Etziot, Netiz Tzadik 31.

3 TED Talks, The Danger of a Single Story.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Keynote address to Brandeis University, 2024.

7 The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 8.

8 The Amen Effect, page 174 in Kindle edition.

9 Ramban on Deuteronomy 29:9.

10 Likutei Etziot, Netiz Tzadik 31.