Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova!
One of my favorite moments in this sanctuary is Friday night, when I ask you to turn to the people around you and wish each other Shabbat Shalom.
Let’s do it now. Turn to your left. Turn to your right. Turn around if you have to. Just find someone and wish them a shana tova. And if you’re joining us on the livestream – wave at the screen.
I love that.
A stranger reaching across an aisle. A hand extended. A hello from an old friend. That’s how community begins: we turn toward one another.
Some of you probably did a smaller version of this on your way this morning— in the lobby, on the stairs, finding your seat.
It went something like this:
“How are you?”
“Fine. How are you?”
We say it without even thinking. Almost more of a reflex than a conversation.
But even when we do exchange more information, it’s often not much more. We can know someone’s name. What they do for work. Where their children go to school.
And still not really know their story.
I’m no exception.
People often ask: “Do your parents still live up in the suburbs?”
“Yes,” I say.
That answer is true, but not in the way the person means it. My mother, Keryl, died giving birth to me. My father, Scott, who raised me, died ten years ago. They are both buried in Arlington Heights. And Brenda, the woman I have called Mom for over thirty-five years — who also raised me — lives in Northbrook.
I am not trying to deceive anyone. But I am deciding, usually in the space of a few seconds, how much of my life I am prepared to introduce into this particular conversation. Is this the moment to explain that both of my parents have died? Do I want to watch the other person’s face change as our ordinary exchange suddenly becomes about grief and loss? Or do I simply want to answer the question and keep moving?
Most of the time, I keep moving.
We all have answers that allow us to do that.
“I just moved to the neighborhood” may be easier than explaining that a marriage ended badly, and that beginning again has been harder than you imagined.
“Our child is staying with us for a little while” may leave out the parents’ fear that a child will never find a way forward.
“We really like it here” may be easier than saying that the move to assisted living came after a fall, a stove left on, and the painful realization that home was no longer safe.
These aren’t lies. They’re edits to a larger story, true enough to keep a conversation moving, chosen for legitimate reasons. Another person may turn our grief into pity, our uncertainty into advice, or our choices into judgment.
A friend of mine recently shared a new part of her story with me. When her son was born, he spent time in the NICU. She held off posting anything on social media — not only because of her child’s health, but because she already felt like a failure as a mother.
So she waited until the day they were going home. And only, then did she post the photograph, the name, the good news, as though nothing difficult had happened. Her joy and relief were real. But she waited until the hard part had passed.
That instinct makes sense. Some things are easier to tell once we know how they end.
But there’s a cost to us and to everyone watching. When we wait until the danger has passed, we lose sight of how much of life happens in the middle. Each edit makes sense on its own. Together, they add up to paint a picture cleaner than any life actually is.
We may begin to imagine that everyone else became a parent without difficulty. Everyone else moved because they wanted to. Everyone else seems to have the kind of family the question assumes. Our private discomfort or even shame can unintentionally preserve and perpetuate public myth.
What is often a common human experience begins to feel like an individual failure. And because we do not know what people are going through, well, then, we do not know how to support them.
The stories we hesitate to share are not only about suffering. Good news can be lonely too. We may worry that our happiness will sound like bragging or that people will see only the outcome and not what it took to reach it.
That’s because life is messy — harder to sort, and harder to tell, than “good news” or “bad news.” We can be happy and worried at the same time. Grateful for what we have and sad about what we have lost. Relieved that something worked out, and still affected by what it took to get there.
The Talmud imagines a wedding procession and a funeral procession meeting on the same road. The funeral procession steps aside so that the wedding procession can pass first. Joy is given precedence, but grief is still present. And if you actually picture it — two processions meeting each other — groups of people might even intermingle.
It’s actually why we break a glass beneath the chuppah, remembering destruction even at the height of joy. It’s why we name a newborn child for someone who has died. Our joy and our grief, mingling in the very same breath.
The ancient rabbis place our matriarch Sarah’s story at the heart of Rosh Hashanah, teaching that she was remembered on this day.
Sarah is old, long past the age when she thought she’d have a child. When an angel tells her she’ll finally have a son, she laughs b’kirbah, within herself. Quietly. Half in disbelief. Not a word out loud.
Years later, Isaac is born, and her laughter changes completely. This time, she wants everyone to hear it. “God has made laughter for me,” she declares. “Everyone who hears will laugh with me.” She isn’t just announcing her own joy. She’s inviting the whole world into it.
The first laugh, she kept to herself. The second, she wanted the world to share.
But you can only really laugh along with Sarah if you know what that first laugh cost her — the years of waiting, the disbelief, the laughter she once had to keep silent.
Sarah needed to be known before she could be understood. Sometimes we’re the ones who need to go first.
I remember a moment on our women’s retreat years ago when one woman spoke about her son’s struggle with mental health. Another woman began to tell the story of her own son, who was much older by then. Their circumstances were not identical, and the second mother could not promise the first how her child’s life would unfold. She could not fix what that family was facing. But she could tell her: I see you. I know something about this road, and I won’t leave you on it alone.
One woman’s willingness to speak made it possible for another woman to speak.
And maybe that is the harder part of being known. It requires some amount of vulnerability. Not with everyone. Not about everything. But with someone, we have to be willing to share the part of the story we usually leave out.
You tell me something true, and it becomes a little easier for me to do the same.
This is particularly complicated in a synagogue because people do share their stories with the clergy. I may know why Friday is a particularly difficult day for you, while the people sitting near you do not. I may know why your adult child has moved home, while the friends who might offer support or a useful connection do not.
I can call.
I can listen.
I can show up.
But I cannot create community around a story no one else has been told.
That is why being gathered in one place is not enough. Not even at Sinai.
The Israelites gathered at the foot of the mountain together, all in the same place. But proximity is not what made them a people.
The Torah tells us that Israel camped there. The verb is singular even though the people were many. Why? Rashi answers: they stood there k’ish echad b’lev echad, like one person with one heart.
They arrived at Sinai with different histories, different worries, different ideas about where they should go next.
But at Sinai, someone else’s hunger, someone else’s loneliness, someone else’s grief made a claim on them. Their lives had become consequential to one another. They were no longer individuals who happened to be standing in the same place. They were becoming a people.
We, too, are Sinai.
Our Sinai should be more than the building where we come for services, religious school, a lecture, a lifecycle moment. Those things matter. But they are the vehicle, not the destination. They bring us into the same room so that something can happen between us.
We truly become Sinai when the person sitting three rows away is no longer simply another member of the congregation, but someone whose life has become consequential to ours.
We truly become Sinai not by sharing one story, but by letting each other’s stories change how we care for one another.
Allowing another person to know us remains a risk. If I tell you I lost my job, will you distance yourself? If I tell you something in my family is falling apart, will you judge me? If I tell you that the birthday I just celebrated was a sobriety anniversary, will you get uncomfortable?
Beneath those questions is the same fear: If you know me, will you still accept me?
On these Days of Awe, we face the ultimate version of that fear. We stand before a God who knows the whole story, every part of it. The book is opened. Judgment is real.
And yet God’s throne has already been established b’chesed4, in lovingkindness, before the judgment even begins.
If the ultimate judge can know us fully and hold us close, surely we can do the same for each other.
Since my parents died, I’ve learned that people sometimes hesitate to bring them up, worried they might make me sad. But mentioning my parents does not remind me that they died. I haven’t forgotten. It reminds me that they lived, and that someone else remembers them too.
There may be days I don’t want to talk, and I can say so. But sometimes caring means risking the question.
Still, asking is only the beginning. How do we respond when the answer is more than “fine”?
The Talmud tells of Rabbi Elazar, who is sick and lying in a darkened room when his teacher, Rabbi Yoḥanan, comes to visit. Yoḥanan sees that Elazar is crying, and he begins to guess why.
Is it because you did not learn as much Torah as you hoped?
Is it because you struggled financially?
Is it because of the children who have died?
All of those things are true about Elazar’s life. But none of them explain his tears.
Finally, Elazar speaks: I am crying because everything beautiful in this world will one day disappear.
Yoḥanan does not try to talk him out of it. Instead he replies: For this, there is reason to cry. And they cry together.
Only then does Yoḥanan say, hav li yadach, give me your hand. Elazar gives him his hand, and Yoḥanan lifts him up.
Nothing was fixed. Mortality was still mortality. But Elazar was no longer alone in it. That is chesed. Lovingkindness.
This morning, I have told you part of my story. But if this sermon ends with you knowing something more about me, then it has not yet done its work.
The question is: Who knows you?
Who knows the story beneath the answer you usually give? Who knows why this joy feels so enormous, what makes certain days hard for you, or what you lost in order to arrive where you are?
This is the community I want Sinai to be. Not a community in which everyone knows everything about everyone. But one in which none of us has to carry the most important parts of our lives entirely alone.
And that will require something from each one of us.
It will require the courage to tell a little more of the truth. And it will require the chesed to receive someone else’s truth without rushing to fix it, explain it, compare it, or turn away.
This is what these ten days are all about. Teshuvah. To turn. To return — not once, but again and again, until it becomes who we are.
Maybe no one here knows the fuller version of your story. This year, choose one person and share a little more. You might simply say, “There’s something going on in my life that I haven’t really talked about.”
Maybe you already have that person — but you haven’t gone as deep as you could. This year, say to them: “I know you’re aware of what’s been going on, but I don’t think I’ve really told you what it’s been like for me.”
Or maybe you’re the one who’s known well by others. This year, practice becoming that person for someone else. Reach out and say: “You’ve been on my mind. How are you, really?” Then remember what they tell you. Check in on the day they said was hard. And when the good news comes, tell them: “I know what it took you to get here.”
Teshuva begins when we stay turned toward one another long enough to say: Tell me your story. And when someone finally does, may we have the courage to answer as Rabbi Yoḥanan did. Hav li yadach.
Give me your hand.