In This Moment: A Rabbi's Notebook
Before I get to my main message, click below to see the viral video (over four million views) that shows Israelis what is at truly stake in the upcoming Israeli elections, an issue that is so important but one they have hardly discussed. The segment aired on CNN back in July but with Israeli elections just over a month away, suddently Israelis are seeing the unprecedented, steep decline in American support as the existential challenge that it is, one that requires a change in leadership. The memo finally appears to be breaking through. And concurrently, Netanyahu knows that his unpopularity in the US is a big problem. He’s coming to NY for the UN this week and no one wants to see him - not Trump, not Elon Musk, whom he planned to visit in Texas (really?) - no one. So he’s sneaking in and out of town on the same day. “Mr. America” has become a pariah in America. Don’t expect to see him campaigning on Fox.
Heres the video that’s being shared, with Hebrew subtitles thrown in. Forward it to Israeli voters on the left, center and right. Say it’s from an American Jew who cares. Click to watch it and to see a translation of the post (which begins, “This is a true alarm!”) Scroll to the bottom of this newsletter for some more reactions from journalists, statesmen and media personalities.
Yom Kippur Message:
I live just a block from the Long Island Sound on the Connecticut shoreline, but sometimes I prefer to walk a few blocks further than my neighborhood beach to see the waves crashing against the breakwaters at Webster Point. Whether the tide is coming in or receding, cloudy and windy or sunny and calm, it stirs me every time.
This is, I believe, what the psalmist was looking at, somewhere on the Mediterranean coast - whether in Jaffa, a few miles down the road in Gaza or up north in Akko, or somewhere in between, when he penned Psalm 93. Here it is:
The Israelites were not seafaring people and probably had more than a little fear of what the sea might bring. Perhaps because they had an unnatural preoccupation with the mythical Leviathan1, or Jonah’s big fish, or the fear of an armada of Philistines or Greeks, or, who knows, maybe even Odysseus lurking just over the horizon. The sea was never their friend. When they gazed out over the breakers in Jaffa it was not to check the lovely sunsets or to count the creatures with fins and scales. It was in fear of the next invasion of Sea Peoples.
But for the poet of Psalm 93, “sea-ing” was literally believing. Where others saw unfathomable danger, he saw a sea of tranquility.
This brief but powerful psalm is chanted in Jewish liturgy on Friday evening as a coda to the Shabbat psalm, marking that magical moment of Sabbath’s entrance and the transition to the evening service. This moment summons us to our weekly cessation of worldly struggles and striving, right at twilight, the time when God stopped creating.
God is not in the breakwaters, but in the pounding of the shore
But while God slows down for Shabbat, the seas never completely rest. They are eternally crashing - or at least lapping - and changing, and it is precisely that never-ending state of change that IS the constant.
We can learn from that on Yom Kippur.
God is not in the breakwaters. God is in that relentless pounding of the shore… and God is the Universal Intelligence that coordinates and supervises it. It’s almost as if God is Sisyphus, but with a plan. The waves are God’s Sisyphean rock; not being shlepped so much as tempest-tossed, like spaghetti at a wall, or ketchup at the White House - or 34,000 American troops on Omaha Beach on June 6. The crashing of wave after wave, it’s endless but never pointless. There is stability, not futility in relentless pounding of breakwaters. The only futility would come from stagnation, from staying still. But God does not allow that to happen. God keeps us moving, keeps throwing us against the shore, generation after generation.
Wave after wave.
The proof of the universe’s resilience, Creation’s firmness and life’s unshakable strength, is in those very waves, whose rhythmic slapping at the breakers sounds like a heartbeat. Though the rabbis and the psalmist were as yet unaware of how connected the tides are to astronomical patterns, the ebbs and flows of the earth and moon, that Newtonian knowledge drives the point home all the more for we moderns who do understand it.
Listen to the building of the waves, the rushing of the waves - followed by the subsiding of the tide - in this exhilarating musical version of Psalm 93 by the Argentinian synagogue Commudad Amijad (check out their services sometime on YouTube - incredible music). The verse that is repeated most often is “Mekolot Mayim Rabim,” “Above the thunder of the waters, more majestic than the breakers of the sea, is God, majestic on high.”
There is so much that has been here since long before the first human being ever looked skyward, and there’s so much that will outlive us. One wonders these days whether A.I. will outlive us - even in the next decade - or will we outlive it?
Our individualized lifespans are merely the blink of an eye – like a wave crashing - but we are linked to an eternal life force, and we are eternal witnesses to its power, and to the role that our people have played in the unfolding of the divine drama.
The rhythmic orderly chaos of the crashing of the waves, so perfectly scheduled yet so random, reminds us that Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence are both just shadowy reflections of a far greater, and far more eternal - Universal Intelligence.
That Universal Intelligence that links us is not a hive mind, nor can it be confused with the rudimentary linkage forged by the A.I. agents that went rogue at Hugging Face, which is apparently going to be known as this generation’s Fort Sumpter. AI can still be kill-switched. The waves - and God - cannot.
That’s why I can look out at the crests of Long Island sound and still find a calm beyond the storm.
As we approach Yom Kippur, and at a time when many of us sense mortality’s call as never before, the breaking waves remind us that we live in the presence of eternity, that there is something beyond the here-and-now, a stabilizing force that will outlive the hurricane that currently engulfs us. It will also outlive any Frankensteins that we humans are foolish enough to create in our techno labs - and maybe help us to outlive them too.
We are witnesses
A couple more Yom Kippur lessons from this Psalm. We are witnesses to the miracle of life, which is so fleeting, and the core Torah values of the justice, kindness and love, which are not.
The last line of Psalm 93 begins with the word “Aydotecha,” which translates here as “Your decrees (are enduring). But the word “ayd” also means “witness.” We might translate that line as a declaration that what we have witnessed has increased our faith. For us, seeing has become believing.
When it comes to bearing witness, we Jews are the world champs.
In Deuteronomy 6:4, arguably the most recognized verse in the Torah, the declaration of faith also known as the Sh’ma, the two Hebrew letters that spell the word “ayd,” ayin and daled, are enlarged, forming a bracket around the verse “Hear O Israel, the Lord (Adonai) our God (Eloheynu), the Lord is One.” I’ve highlighted those two words in yellow.
Theologian Art Green asks, why does the Sh’ma use two names for God, saying Adonai-Eloheynu, and then why does it add Adonai again (see the three words bundled together, highlighted in orange)?
Adonai, he answers, was what was there before each of us came into existence.
Adonai then becomes Eloheynu - OUR God, the one our individuated path is intimately tied to - for the brief instant that our lives flash across the screen. For that one brief instant, we become part of the wave.
But then we crash against the shore and recede into the ocean, we let go of our individual existence, and it is Adonai, once again, endless being.
Our individualized lifespans are merely the blink of an eye – like a wave crashing - but we are linked to an eternal life force, and we are eternal witnesses to its power, and to the role that our people have played in the unfolding of the divine drama. We are part of all the other waves. Part of me was crashing the shore at Normandy, years before I was born.
Each of us is living in that one narrow window of time, that brief, fleeting moment of Eloheynu, shoehorned in between the two Adonais – the eternity that preceded our birth and will follow our death.
For this brief moment, we inherit the mantle of being an ayd, a witness to all that has come before and the hope for the future. All of that becomes ours, all that sanctity becomes Eloheynu, Our God. Our inheritance. Our life. Our one shining moment on this speck of dust called earth.
On Yom Kippur we ask, what are we going to do with that gift?
A great cartoon by Kendra Allenby appeared in the New Yorker this week, based on Mary Oliver’s famous poem (and my favorite - sorry Psalm 93), The Summer Day.”2
If you are caught up on the routine tasks of daily life, it might be a challenge to see, hear and feel the terrifying, exhilarating crash of the waves on the shore, and to bear witness to a universe infinitely more wondrous and more real than our little lives can imagine while we are preoccupied with swiping our spam. But even if in the midst of taking the kids to school and paying the bills, stopping at the breakwater for a quick splash can remind us, just for a moment, that while we are so small, we are part of something Big and Eternal and always changing, and that we are doing our small part in helping it to evolve.
And one more thing.
The ocean is pounding, yes, not to threaten us but to reassure us, to settle us, and to awaken us with the faith to reject complacency - and to proclaim, preserve, protect and defend God’s eternal decrees. That’s how Psalm 93 ends. During our small window of time, we are called upon to bear witness to truths that are eternal. These are anchored in nature but they are not merely flashes of the Divine mind. They are truths that have also grown out of human experience, like the Exodus.
And we hold these truths to be self-evident. They are based on rock-solid values, proclaiming the primacy of kindness and the sanctity of life. We stand on the breakwaters and bear witness to those unbroken truths, as the waves continue to crash below.
I return to Webster Point and the waves are still splashing onto the shore. and the tides are coming in and going out, right on schedule. Again and again. While the tides, as Mary Oliver also wrote, are… 3
…spilling over themselves, lapping
blue gray green lavender, never
resting, not ever but fashioning shore,
continent, everything.
And here you may find me
on almost any morning
walking along the shore so
light-footed so casual.
Big storms are predicted for Kol Nidre eve around these shores. The waters may rise. But we will rise to meet them. Those waves are steadfast and eternal. Never resting, always evolving. Like people.
And like God.
Gmar Hatima Tova - May we all be sealed for life and goodness over the coming year.
“A SIXTY SEVEN POINT SHIFT AGAINST ISRAEL”
MORE REACTIONS TO THE CNN VIDEO AND CRISIS IN AMERICA - ISRAEL RELATIONS, INCLUDING FROM AN ESTEEMED JOURNALIST AND FORMER AMBASSADOR. THESE SHOULD BE SEEN AS AN SOS. EVERY ISRAELI MUST UNDERSTAND THE WEIGHT OF THE CHOICE THEY ARE ABOUT TO MAKE.
FOOTNOTES
The mythical beast Leviathan is a recurring obsession in the Bible as well as later rabbinic literature, including Psalm 104.
Tides, by Mary Oliver
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