2026 Rosh Hashanah Morning

In a moment, I am going to give you 10 seconds to look around the sanctuary. I want you to make note of anything you see that is brown. Ok, go. (8 … 9 … 10)

Humor me for a moment and close your eyes.

Now, think about everything you just saw that is red.

Obviously, you saw a lot more brown, didn’t you? Because you’re looking for it. Now open your eyes, and look for red. You found more red this time. Because you were looking for it. Once you develop a belief, you find what supports it.

Going even further, I bet some of us quietly stretched the definition of “brown” the first time around. You looked at something that was more of a beige and thought I’ll count that. Tan too. And when you looked for red, you probably let in some burgundy or pink. How many of you counted our Gates of Repentance Machzor?!

This is how our minds work. We don’t simply see the world. We see the world through the stories, expectations, and fears we carry with us. The well-known Tony Robbins says this: None of us experiences life. We experience the life that we choose to focus on.

And whatever we focus on is what becomes self-evident, and what each of us considers to be true.

In the Rosh Hashanah Morning Torah portion, Abraham only focuses on fulfilling God’s command to sacrifice his son. He is so focused, in fact, that he almost doesn’t hear God yelling at him to stop. At the last minute, he does, and as the Torah says in one of its most beautiful phrases, he lifts up his eyes.

Notice what almost happened to Abraham. He was so locked onto the one thing he had decided was true that a voice out of heaven could barely reach him.

That is what deep focus sometimes does to us. It isn’t that we see the wrong thing; it’s that we stop being able to see anything else.

This text of Abraham on the mountain is a story of just one person who has narrowed the world down to a single thing. The book of Judges shows us what happens when it happens to a community.

In that book, two tribes of Israel, the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, are at war with one another. After a battle, the Gileadites take control of the crossings of the Jordan River. They then face a new challenge: they need to go back and forth across the Jordan, but they don’t want to allow their enemy to do the same.

So they figure out a test. It’s just one word.

Shibboleth.

You see, their enemy, the Ephraimites, spoke with a different accent. They could not quite make the sh sound. So what came out was sibboleth.

This was enough to determine who would cross, and who would be killed.

Interestingly, that one word, Shibboleth, is a real word. It’s an agricultural term for an ear of grain. It can also be a flowing stream. But at the river, the guards didn’t care. The use of that one word was enough to identify one thing and one thing only: friend or foe.

Zionism and anti-Zionism are modern-day shibboleths.

When we hear someone self-define as a Zionist or an anti-Zionist, we immediately know where they stand with us. Some of us won’t support candidates who take money from AIPAC. Some of us will only support candidates who proclaim Zionism as a core value. If someone says they are a Zionist or anti-Zionist we know immediately if we want to engage with them or take them seriously. We know whether they are intelligent or know all the facts or are naïve.

Like shibboleth, it’s not that these words don’t mean anything. But like the Ephraimites and the Gileadites, many of us have determined that these words decide if someone is allowed to cross the river.

I’ve joked before that for a religion with only one God, we sure do have a lot of names and interpretations of God. Father, King, Creator, HaShem, El Shaddai, S’chinah. If we were to go around the room and ask each of you to define God, there would be dozens of definitions for the same word. When we say God, we talk about different things.

It’s exactly the same with Zionism and anti-Zionism. These words do have meaning, and they absolutely have power. But we have to stop reacting to the labels and start questioning how people are using them.

Factually speaking, there are many different kinds of Zionism. And, there are many different kinds of anti-Zionism.

Dr. Andrew Rehfeld is the President of Hebrew Union College, and he recently talked about Zionism like this: The Jewish people has a right to exist in the land of their historical origins. AND, the Jewish people have a justified claim to sovereignty as a means of defending their right to self-determination.

When I self-define as a Zionist, as I do, this is what I mean. Zionism is a liberation movement; it is not a political leaning, and it has nothing to do with any particular Israeli government or its policies. And in my version of Zionism, Jews have a right to exist in Israel and have sovereignty in Israel NOT because God said so, or because it says so in the Torah, or because we’re the chosen people. Israel’s existence is predicated on the thousands of years of antisemitism, hatred, and yes, genocide, that the Jewish people have endured.

But this is just one version of Zionism.

The truth is, Jews have been talking past each other regarding Zionism well before October 7th.

In 1890, Nathan Birnbaum coined the term to mean a movement to establish a Jewish state in the historic land of Israel. This is what I might call a Zionism in principle.

Zionism in practice involves politics and policy. Growing up, I learned that Israel was David fighting against all of the Goliaths that wanted Israel wiped off the map. And I still believe that to be true. But, the reality is FAR more complex, and I think that far too often, we are unable or unwilling to see those difficult truths.

Paraphrased from a Forward article written in February by Rabbi Jay Michaelson:

I was raised to believe that the tensions amongst Jews and their Arab neighbors and Palestinians were a result of Arab rejectionism and terrorism, with the inclusion of a few bad right-wing apples in the Israeli population. I was educated in a pre-internet world that presented a very partial view of history. I never learned this history from a Palestinian point of view. I never learned about the Nakba.

I grew up thinking that Arabs called the Independence of Israel the Nakba because they hated Jews so much that our independence was equivalent to their catastrophe. Starting on May 14, 1948, 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes, and have not been allowed to return. Regardless of how much I love Israel, and I do, this is a reality I must acknowledge, similarly to how many of us acknowledge that here in our homes, we are on land that was taken from Native Americans.

It’s understandable that for many people, Zionism is no longer the liberation dream of Herzl, but rather the sometimes-unfortunate reality of Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and extremist Israeli settlers. Again quoting Michaelson, The Zionism that a Gen Z or young Millennial American has known for their entire life is totally different from the Zionism that I learned about in Hebrew School.

Jewish Federations of North America conducted a survey this past March. From its conclusions, 88% of Jewish Americans firmly believe in Israel’s right to exist. But only 37% identify as Zionist.

I don’t think that this is because people are afraid to define themselves as Zionist, or because people don’t know what it means. I think it’s because for many American Jews, Zionism implies a level of support for the Israeli government and its policies that they don’t have.

Jewish life is incredibly difficult these days. None of us want to walk into a synagogue where the first thing we see are armed guards. None of us deserve to question our physical safety just by subscribing to Judaism, a religion that fights for peace and justice for all peoples. Antisemitism and hatred are at levels not seen in generations.

And still, we are safe here in a way Israelis are not.

In Israel there is a guard at the door of every shopping mall, at entrances and exits to college campuses, even at the grocery store. We walk in and out of these places with barely a thought about security or safety, which is why it might feel odd to have security guards at our door.

We don’t know what it is like to have missiles constantly flying over our heads, so much so that running into a bomb shelter with a newborn baby becomes a part of daily life.

In our community here, there are some of us who have lost loved ones because of hatred or war. In Israel, it is hard to find someone who did not know someone who was killed.

When I hear us talking about Israel, too often it sounds like we are yelling at each other across the river. I have been in too many Jewish spaces where Zionists say anti-Zionist Jews simply don’t know their history, or where anti-Zionists say that other Jews just don’t care at all about innocent Palestinians. Neither is true.

You cannot fact-check someone out of their conviction. You cannot debate someone out of their grief, or fear.

I know that some of you have children or grandchildren that call what is happening in Gaza a genocide. I know that some of you are those children or grandchildren, and that there are parents or grandparents that also argue that it is a genocide.

I do not call it a genocide. I call it horrible, tragic, and some of it, unlawful. But I would not call it a genocide. I have gotten into the same arguments that some of you have. They end with an unspoken agreement that we just won’t talk about Israel with each other anymore.

But here’s the thing: We are not going to heal the Jewish people by citing all the facts and then walking away.

Because when we talk about Israel and the Palestinians, it’s not just historical facts that we rely upon. It’s selection. Just as we chose what counted as brown in this sanctuary and made it our truth, we select different facts and different history as the basis of our truth, and then wonder in dismay, disbelief and anger when others don’t see it the same way.

Here’s a very specific example:

People who love Israel have often used this fact to convey Israel’s commitment to pluralism and democracy, and so have I: 25% of Israeli citizens are non-Jewish. They vote, participate in the government at all levels, and are an integral part of Israeli society.

This is absolutely true. But it is a selection … Israel controls the West Bank, and the people that live there, people who are not considered Israeli citizens, are under Israeli law and governance, but have no say in Israeli politics. I want to be clear about something: the occupation of the West Bank is complex, and I am not making any moral claim about whether Israel should or shouldn’t be controlling it. But factually, they are, and to mention that 25% of Israeli citizens are non-Jewish with full rights is a bit misleading.

Here’s another, that some might say is on the other side: Israel has unjustly kept Gaza under blockade for years.

Again, it is true. Israel has severely restricted the movement of people and goods into and out of Gaza, with enormous consequences for the people who live there.

But that is also a selection.

In 2005, Israel dismantled its settlements in Gaza and withdrew its permanent military presence. Hamas later took control of Gaza. Rockets were fired constantly at Israeli communities. Israel did not simply wake up one morning and decide, for no reason, to close Gaza off from the world.

But if everything is a selection, are all opinions equally valid?

Absolutely not.

I am not suggesting a kind of Zionistic relativism. If someone’s Zionism displays a lack of care for human rights, or if it agrees with Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir who recently said that some Palestinians are not even people, and not worthy of life, these are boundaries of moral clarity. And similarly, if someone calls themselves anti-Zionist and believes that Israel is not allowed the same rights of defense as every other nation on this planet, this too is unacceptable.

We all know far too well that these people exist. But they are not the person sitting next to you, and they are almost never the person you are about to stop speaking to.

There must be a way forward that includes dialogue and a search for greater understanding.

We can debate vigorously with and against one another on God, Torah, observance levels, and whether services should start at 6:45 or 6:15 (pause). We know how to do this. We understand that an argument in the name of heaven can be a holy act. Why can’t we also vigorously debate our thoughts on Zionism and Israel without dismissing one another?

In this time when Jews are targeted, at risk and afraid, we must care even more about one another and not feed into the reactionism of shibboleths.

Looking around the sanctuary and focusing on the colors of items in the sanctuary is trivial. But looking around and seeing the pain in the Jewish community is not.

On this morning when we celebrate Abraham lifting up his eyes to see something previously undiscovered, I challenge all of us to do the same. May we find healing, strength, and comfort in one another. We need each other to cross the river.