“Did my parents tell you my favorite food used to be stone crab?”
They had not.
But they had told me the important part. Sometime after October 7, she decided she wanted to start keeping kosher. She was only nine years old.
So I asked her why. Of everything she might have reached for after October 7, why kashrut?
She looked at me as though I had made a very simple question unnecessarily complicated.
“To connect to the hostages.”
She knew exactly what she was reaching for.
I’m not sure I ever did.
When I was in rabbinical school, I decided I wanted to keep kosher. I thought it mattered to try it seriously, not only to study the laws but to live inside them for a while.
And for a time, I did.
Eventually I stopped.
Partly because it was inconvenient. Eating out was harder. Traveling was harder. Ordinary choices required more thought than I wanted to give them. And somewhere along the way, the inconvenience began to feel like evidence: if this practice were really meaningful to me, surely it would not feel like this much trouble.
—
I want to invite you to think for a moment about inheritance.
We can inherit a set of dishes and leave them packed away for years. Or a box of photographs filled with faces we can no longer name. We did not choose these things. They came to us simply because we belong to a family. Sometimes years pass before we understand what we have been given.
Families pass down more than objects. They pass down ways of living.
At the end of Deuteronomy, Torah describes itself in exactly these terms:
“Moses commanded us Torah, a morashah, an inheritance, of the congregation of Jacob.”
Morashah. An inheritance.
Judaism does not wait for us to understand it, to know what we will do with it, or to decide what it means to us.
I do not become more entitled to Judaism because I went to rabbinical school.
Someone who reads Hebrew fluently does not receive a larger portion than someone sounding out the letters.
The Jew who keeps kosher has not inherited more Judaism than the Jew who does not.
It is ours because we belong.
Some of us were born into this people. Some of us chose Judaism, and in choosing it became fully part of a story that began long before any of us arrived. If you became Jewish as an adult, this inheritance is not on loan to you. It is yours.
And some of you sitting here tonight are not Jewish. You are married to Jews, raising Jewish children, building Jewish homes, sitting beside someone you love on Kol Nidre. I would not presume to call this inheritance yours if you do not call it your own. But you, too, help shape what gets carried forward.
Sounds pretty good, right?
It is. And yet, our tradition does not let inheritance be the last word.
Because Pirkei Avot says something that seems to contradict everything we have just heard: “Prepare yourself to learn Torah, because Torah is not an inheritance for you.”
Torah is our inheritance. Torah is not our inheritance. How can both be true?
A nineteenth-century Hasidic teacher, the Sefat Emet, offers a way to hold both truths. He turns to an old rabbinic play on the word morashah.
Don’t hear only morashah, inheritance, the rabbis say. Hear me’orasah: betrothed, bound in relationship.
Morashah, an inheritance, can remain packed away and still be ours.
But me’orasah, relationship, cannot. A relationship asks us to draw near.
No one else can draw near for me.
Yet much of American Jewish life is organized around people whose job it is to know. Rabbis study the texts. Cantors know the music. Teachers prepare the lessons. We translate the Hebrew, explain the rituals, tell people what page to turn to.
That expertise matters. It is part of my job.
But it can also make it easy to leave our Jewish inheritance in someone else’s hands.
We might tell ourselves that Jewish life is for people who already know what they are doing.
People who can follow the Hebrew. Who know when to stand and when to sit. Who seem completely at ease with all of it.
So we wait. We tell ourselves: I’ll reach for it when I know enough.
But for inheritance to become relationship, it has to pass into our own hands.
Picture a beit midrash, a traditional Jewish study hall. People sit together with an open text between them. They point to a word, ask questions, disagree, misunderstand, and try again.
The point is not that they have mastered Judaism. The point is that the text is in their hands.
Having Judaism in our own hands matters especially now, because too often, it is the world around us that reminds us we are Jewish.
A swastika appears. Israel goes to war. Someone asks you to answer for something another Jew has done. Your child comes home from school with a question you did not know they were going to have.
These days, being Jewish is consequential almost all the time. The world gives us little choice about that.
The question is whether we know what within Judaism we can reach for in response.
That nine-year-old did.
She reached for kashrut.
“To connect to the hostages.”
She was letting what happened to other Jews shape how she lived. When being Jewish mattered, she knew where to turn.
That is one direction of a relationship: we reach for Judaism.
I know that direction well. I want Judaism to comfort me when someone dies. I want it to help me understand why Israel can break my heart, why antisemitism can shake me, why something that happens to Jews I have never met can feel personal.
But if me’orasah truly means relationship, it cannot be only about turning to Judaism when we need something from it. A relationship moves in both directions.
Yom Kippur asks me a harder question: Have I let Judaism reach back?
Have I let it challenge me when I am not in crisis?
Have I let it complicate what I think I already know?
Or have I mostly asked it to confirm the person I already am?
Our inheritance is larger than the parts of Judaism that already sound like us.
I know how easily I can forget that. I did it with kashrut. Somewhere along the way, a choice I had made became a verdict: This has nothing more to say to me.
How many other verdicts have I rendered that way?
About the prayer I skim while I’m already thinking about what comes next.
About the word “God,” which I can say from this bimah but can barely say at my own dinner table.
About the Jew in the next row whose kippah, certainty, or politics make me want to change seats.
About the kind of Jew I decided, years ago, that I am.
And maybe those are the hardest verdicts to notice, the ones that sound like:
“I’m just not the kind of Jew who…”
Sarah Hurwitz, who once wrote speeches for Michelle Obama and now writes and teaches about Judaism, spent years thinking she knew what kind of Jew she was.
Then, as an adult, she began to realize that the Judaism she had inherited had been highly edited.
Social justice. Being a good person. Remembering the Holocaust. That was the Judaism she knew.
She could tell you exactly what the Catholic Church taught about abortion. But she had never once asked what Judaism taught about it.
She thought she knew the Judaism she was choosing.
Justice matters. Community matters. Being a good person matters. But they are not the whole of Judaism, nor do they belong uniquely to us.
You do not need Torah to care about justice. You do not need a rabbi to tell you to be a good person.
What Hurwitz discovered was not a different Judaism. It was more of her own inheritance.
Texts we did not write. Rituals we did not invent. Obligations we might not have picked. Questions we might never have thought to ask.
We inherit before we decide what to keep, what to wrestle with, and what to leave behind.
But none of it can reach me if I have already decided which parts belong to me and which do not.
Sometimes, “I’m just not the kind of Jew who…” is simply a description. We make choices. Of course we do.
The problem is when “I don’t do that” quietly becomes “That has nothing to do with me.”
Because then a choice has hardened into a verdict.
That is the part that worries me.
Not that I might try a practice and decide it is not for me. Not that I might wrestle with a teaching and reject it. Jews have been arguing with our tradition for as long as we have had one.
The danger is deciding that the encounter is over.
I did that with kashrut.
“I no longer keep kosher” became “I already know what kashrut has to say to me.”
Those are not the same sentence.
Teshuvah means return.
But return does not always mean resuming a practice I left behind. Sometimes it means being willing to encounter it again.
Am I going to start keeping kosher again? I don’t know.
But her answer has made me reopen the question, not only as a rabbi who teaches Judaism, but as a Jew still trying to let Judaism shape the way I live.
For me, this year, teshuvah begins with refusing to let the verdict be final.
Relationship does not mean Judaism becomes whatever I want it to be. It means I remain willing to hear what it has to say and knowing that what I hear may change me.
The truth is, as long as we are alive, we are not finished – not as people, and not as Jews.
Sadie was nine when, after October 7, she made the choice to keep kosher. She is twelve now, preparing for her Bat Mitzvah.
I asked her recently, now that the hostages had come home, whether she had gone back to eating stone crab.
She looked surprised.
No.
She told me she does not really think about stone crab anymore.
What she reached for at nine had become part of her life.
These days, she is wrestling with different questions.
That is what a relationship does. It does not hand us one answer and let us stop. It continues to ask something of us as we grow.
And that is what I hope for all of us.
Tonight, complete this sentence for yourself:
I’m just not the kind of Jew who…
Name the prayer, the practice, the teaching, the question you decided had nothing to do with you.
Let this be the year you encounter it again. Open the text. Try the practice. Ask the question you stopped asking. You do not have to promise where it will lead. You do not have to change your mind.
Just refuse to let the verdict be final.
Take the period at the end of “I’m just not the kind of Jew who…” and turn it into a question mark.
In this new year,
may we not simply possess our morashah—
the inheritance already ours.
May we live it as me’orasah—
a relationship we are still growing into.
G’mar chatimah tovah.