Rosh Ha-Shanah Shacharit 5786
The cycle turns, and here we are on Rosh Ha-Shanah morning, embarking on another New Year. We feel a complex mix of emotions as we reflect back on the past year, and as we look ahead. For now, we are together sharing this moment of beginning again.
Rosh Ha-Shanah marks the New Year for years (Mishnah Rosh Ha-Shanah 1:1), but it is so much more than that. Its various names teach us that ‘the head of the year’, which is a literal translation of Rosh Ha-Shanah, is ha-yom harat olam, the day which is the ‘birthday of the world’, yom ha-din, ‘the day of judgement’ and yom ha-zikaron, ‘the day of remembrance’. Throughout our service today, and in particular, during the musaf, the ‘additional’ service, when we will listen to the voice of the shofar, the ram’s horn, the messages these names proclaim will resound loud and clear. Today is the day when, acknowledging that the Eternal One is the Creator of all, Jews across the world are called to give an account of ourselves, individually and collectively, and to remember our deeds and misdeeds of the past year. The task before us is much too daunting for us to get to grips with it on one day. Rosh Ha-Shanah is the first day of aseret y’mei t’shuvah, the ‘ten days of return’ that conclude on Yom Kippur. Before the New Year begins in earnest the day after Yom Kippur, the shofar summons us to examine ourselves, take steps to make amends for the hurts we have inflicted, and the wrongs we have committed, whether unconsciously or consciously, and to repair our relationships.
It is a tall order. But although each one of us is summoned to interrogate our own life, we are not alone. We stand together in community. We are not even alone existentially; on this birthday of the world, we are reminded that we do not exist independently of one another; each one of us is woven into the web of Life. Hopefully, this reminder is reassuring. But it has its downside. It means that our responsibilities are not limited to our own lives, personal relationships, families, communities. Our responsibilities extend to ‘others’ whom we do not know.
In rabbinic literature the principle of responsibility for others is expressed in several references to the teaching that ‘All of Israel are responsible, one for the other – Kol Yisraeil areivim zeh ba-zeh’.[1] During the past almost two years since the massacres, atrocities and abductions orchestrated by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, engulfed by the depravity of that monstrous day, we also continue to be overwhelmed by the catastrophic impact on the civilian population of Gaza of Israel’s retaliatory war. We are thousands of miles away. And yet, as our screens transmit horrifying images of death and destruction day after devastating day, we are witnesses. We feel helpless, but we do what we can do. We join our voices to the calls for an end to the war, the release of the remaining hostages, sufficient aid and medical supplies for the people of Gaza. As progressive Jews, acknowledging the pain and suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians, we resist binary mind-sets that deepen divisions, by amplifying the voices of those Israelis and Palestinians who are working together for a better future, and by supporting organisations such as Standing Together, the Parents Circle Bereaved Families Forum, Combatants for Peace – and this congregation’s namesake village of Jews, Christians and Muslims, Neve Shalom – Wahat al-Salaam – Oasis of Peace.
Of course, we are not responsible for the ongoing catastrophe in Israel and Gaza – not forgetting, the West Bank, where the occupation is expanding, and, unchallenged by the military authorities, settler violence against Palestinians has become increasingly rampant. But we are not simply bystanders, either. Again: ‘Kol Yisraeil areivim zeh ba-zeh’ – ‘All of Israel are responsible, one for the other’. The reality is that in the war between extremists – death-cult Islamist terrorists bent on Israel’s destruction and an ultra-right Israeli government with a messianic vision of total Jewish domination – moderate Jews across the globe, like moderate Muslims across the globe, are challenged to call the extremists to account. As Jews, we are called, specifically, to speak up for ethical Jewish teaching and the practice of Jewish ethical values. Remembering, as the Torah points out, repeatedly, that we were oppressed and persecuted as slaves in Egypt, and that we ‘know the nefesh – the ‘inner being’ – of the stranger (Exodus 23:9), we are called to articulate a different Jewish narrative of compassion and respect for others, in particular, the vulnerable and the marginal.
That different Jewish narrative can be found both in the Torah’s legal codes and in its tales of our ancestors. Most of the Jewish world, including Israel, observes Rosh Ha-Shanah on two days. Today we will be reading the Torah portion that is traditionally set aside for the first day of Rosh Ha-Shanah, Genesis 21. The chapter relates the birth of Isaac. It also tells the story of the expulsion of Isaac’s older brother, Ishmael with his mother, Hagar, Sarah’s Egyptian maid-servant. An earlier story in Genesis 16 relates that finding herself barren, Sarah handed over Hagar to her husband Abraham in order to have a child through her. Genesis 21 relates that after Sarah has finally had a child of her own and weaned him, seeing Ishmael ‘playing around’ with his younger brother and protective of Isaac’s inheritance of the covenant, Sarah persuaded Abraham to ‘cast out that slave woman and her son’ (Gen. 21:9-10a). It is a shocking story. As shocking as the one that follows in Genesis 22, which is traditionally read on the second day of Rosh Ha-Shanah. Genesis 22 relates that having already abandoned his eldest son, instructed by God to sacrifice Isaac (22:2), Abraham does not demure, and his knife raised, it takes an insistent heavenly voice to stop him (22:11-13)
At the very beginning of the covenant narrative related in Genesis 17, when God told Abraham that he was making a covenant with him and his descendants, astonished that his barren wife, Sarah, was to bear a child, Abraham’s immediate concern was for the son he already had: ‘Oh that Ishmael might live before you’, he pleaded. God reassured him that although the particular covenant would be inherited by the son that Sarah would bear, God had heard him. We read (Gen. 17:20):
‘And as for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I have blessed him I will make him fruitful, and I will multiply him exceedingly; twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.’
As we find, when we read the first Hagar narrative related in Genesis 16, God had already heard Hagar and given her a similar reassurance. When pregnant, Hagar ran away from Sarai’s harsh treatment into the wilderness, the Torah relates that a Messenger of God found her by a well of water and told her that her son would be called Yishma’eil, ‘because the Eternal One has heard your affliction’ (16:11). Yishma’eil means: ‘God will hear’.
God heard Hagar. God heard Abraham. And in Genesis 21, our Torah portion today, we read that, although when Hagar was banished to the wilderness with her son, he is silent and she is crying (21:16), God ‘heard the voice of the lad’ (21:17). Completely desolate, Hagar was reassured with a Divine message. We read (21:17-18):
And God heard the voice of the lad; and the Messenger of God called to Hagar out of heaven, and said to her: ‘What is [going on] for you, Hagar. Do not fear; for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. / Arise, lift up the lad and grasp him by the hand; for I will place him as a great nation.’ Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink. / And God was with the lad, and he grew; and he dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer.
The thrice-repeated message that God has ‘heard’ reflected in Ishmael’s name could not be clearer. One family. Two sons. Two Divine inheritances.
What are we to make of this? We cannot simply embrace our particular covenant with God through Abraham and Sarah, without recognising the Divine promise made to the descendants of Abraham and Hagar. Given that the Torah includes stories written down centuries after the events they describe and that it became the first repository of teaching for the Jewish people, the inclusion of the tales of Hagar and Ishmael in the Torah teach us that their story is part of our story, and reminds us that although heir to a separate inheritance, Ishmael was the son of Abraham, just as Isaac was the son of Abraham. Indeed, Ishmael was his first-born. It also reminds us that Ishmael and Isaac were brothers; and that their descendants – the Jewish and Muslim peoples – are kin.
I have recently completed a book I have been working on since I retired called Breaking Binaries. It includes a chapter, entitled, ‘Beyond Israel verses Palestine’. In this chapter, in an effort to challenge the prevailing binary approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, I investigate a little-known, but significant player in the history of Zionism, the bi-national Zionist movement that developed in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s before the establishment of the modern State of Israel on 14 May 1948. Passionate Zionists, the likes of Progressive Rabbi, Judah Magnes, who became the first President of the Hebrew University, and the philosopher and biblical commentator, Martin Buber, had a vision of the renewal of the Jewish people in our ancient homeland alongside the Arab people who lived there. For them, Zionism did not imply the denial of the rights of the Arab inhabitants to the land. Brit Shalom, ‘Covenant of Peace’, the first Zionist organisation exclusively dedicated to a bi-national objective was established in April 1925. On 14 August 1925, four days before the 14th Zionist Congress opened in Vienna, Robert Weltsch, one of the founder members of Brit Shalom, wrote an article in his journal Judische Rundeschau that expressed the approach of bi-national Zionism. In it, he made this statement:[2]
There may be a people without a country, but there is no country without a people. Palestine was not given to us as a national home but we are to build a national home in Palestine. Palestine has a population of 700,000 souls, a people who have lived in the country for centuries and rightfully consider this country their fatherland and homeland. That is a fact which you must take into account. Palestine will always be inhabited by two peoples, the Jewish and the Arab. Which of them represents 51% and which 49% is irrelevant. The future of Palestine, its peaceful development and welfare can only be maintained by giving it a political system in which both peoples may, with equal rights, live side-by-side, bound through the natural ties of communication, economic and cultural relations. We do not want a Jewish state, but a bi-national Palestinian community.
Again: that statement was written on 14 August 1925. One-hundred years ago. Needless to say, the bi-national Zionists did not win the argument. But their assessment of the need for Jewish-Arab cooperation in order for the Zionist dream of Jewish renewal in the land to be realised fruitfully and peacefully, was irrefutable then, and it is irrefutable now. On August 5, I attended a Zoom meeting organised by Combatants for Peace with CfP co-founders, and former combatants, Avner Wishnitzer and Souli Khatib. Souli told us that from the age of fourteen, he was in and out of Israeli jails. He went on several hunger strikes during the periods of his incarceration, and having been part of the armed resistance, Souli learned the power of peaceful resistance. ‘Violence breeds violence’, he said. Over the years, he ‘learned to be a bridge’. He learned to see things ‘holistically’, from ‘different points of view, rather than ‘good and bad’. His new awareness, Souli said, has ‘grounded’ him ‘during the hardest times’.
Combatants for Peace was founded twenty years ago during the second intifada. The past two years have been among the hardest of times, and yet the experience of the last two years has strengthened the resolution of Combatants for Peace that there is no other solution but non-violence. ‘Violence is not going to free anyone’, Souli told us. ‘I’m not losing hope.’
Souli’s co-founder, Avner, who has refused army service since 2004, was less hopeful. ‘I’m speaking to you from the heart of darkness’, he said. Avner also talked about the effort it took for Combatants for Peace to stay together after the horrors of October 7, 2023, and in the early months of Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas because of the devastating impact on the people of Gaza. But after engaging in separate meetings, the former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian militants met, and after ‘crying’ together over the fifty years that had passed since the Yom Kippur war, over the decades of ‘dead bodies, loss and pain’, they held more joint meetings, and over a period of weeks, decided to keep going.
For Avner, ‘hope is dependent’ – dependent on the reality on the ground changing in a positive direction. For him, ‘meaning is more important than hope.’ Being part of Combatants for Peace gives Avner meaning. Towards the end of the Zoom meeting, Avner mentioned the Arabic word, ‘sumad’, which means ‘clinging on to’, and is used to express the determination of the Palestinians to cling on to the land, and also in the context of Combatants for Peace, the determination to cling on to humanity. Souli then added that his sister’s name is Sumad. She was born when he and his brothers were in jail, and she was given that name as a way of expressing the family’s steadfastness and resilience.
Souli and Avner: the descendants of Abraham, bridging the gulf between their two peoples. Isaac and Ishmael, the sons of Abraham, were divided from one another, heirs to separate Divine promises. But the Torah records that the estranged brothers came together to bury their father, Abraham in the Cave of Machpelah (Gen. 25:9), where Abraham had buried Sarah, and which he had purchased from the Hittites as a burial site for the family (23:3-20). To this day the Cave of Machpelah, which is in the ancient city of Hebron, is sacred to both Jews and Muslims because Abraham is buried there.
As we have seen with the repeated references in the Torah to the meaning of Ishmael’s name, names are important signifiers. Combatants for Peace are demonstrating sumad, the steadfastness and resilience needed for former Israeli and Palestinian combatants to continue their commitment to nonviolent resistance, and to continue holding on to the vision of a different future for Palestinians and Israelis, a future in which both peoples acknowledge their shared antecedence. In these desperate, heart-breaking times, inspired both by their example, and by the reunion of Isaac and Ishmael as they mourned the loss of their father, let us recommit ourselves to supporting all those grief-stricken Israelis and Palestinians who are continuing to work together for a just peace.
And let us say: Amen.
Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah
Leicester Progressive Jewish Congregation
Rosh Ha-Shanah Shacharit
23rd September 2025 – 1st Tishri 5785