Rabbi Shulman Rosh Hashanah Sermon
Am Yisrael Chai
Rabbi Sarah Shulman, Rosh Hashanah Day 1 Sermon 5785/2024
The day was April 20th, 1945. The man was British Jewish Army chaplain Rabbi Leslie Hardman. The place was Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. And the occasion was liberation. Rabbi Hardman strode into the camp and witnessed a light of hope emerge amidst a sea of darkness as he was surrounded by woops and prayers, tears of joy and words of HaTikvah sung from the mouths of emaciated Jews whose lives would never be the same, but now would go on. At the conclusion of HaTikvah, The Hope, there was only one appropriate phrase to share at such a powerful moment of life in the face of death. So Rabbi Hardman opened his mouth and yelled out proudly “Am Yisrael Chai” – the People of Israel Live! And all around him voices joined in.
Am Yisrael Chai – Since 1945 this phrase has ricocheted through the Jewish community as a rallying cry for the liberation and life of our people. When Golda Meir visited the Great Synagogue in Moscow in 1948, a crowd of 50,000 ecstatically welcomed her with shouts of “Am Yisrael Chai!” as if to affirm in spite of everything “We are still here!” These same words that energized the Soviet Jewry movement in the 1960s were chanted when Golda Meir received an honorary degree from Yeshiva University in 1973 and when Israeli and Soviet basketball teams faced off in Moscow in 1989. In 2009, Prime Minister Netanyahu visited Wannsee Villa in Berlin, where the Final Solution for the destruction of Europe's Jews was planned in 1942 by Hitler and leaders of the Third Reich. In the visitors' book he wrote just three words in Hebrew and then translated them into English. What words might those have been? “Am Yisrael Chai – the people of Israel live.”
When I visited Israel for the first time at the age of 17 for a summer study program with Alexander Muss High School in Israel, we shouted these same words from the top of Masada. Perhaps you have shouted them too.
Member Don Skupsky told me about how he will never forget hearing these same words on his first trip to Israel in the Summer of ‘69. He arrived alone at the Kotel, full of anxious energy, and sat in the back to observe the hustle and bustle around him. Then, a young redheaded man with long, curly payot sat down near him, opened his guitar case and started strumming Jewish songs. When this man started singing “Am Yisrael Chai,” Don’s senses reacted like a shock of electricity. “Here I am in the State of Israel, at the holiest site, and we, the Jewish People, after all the trials and tribulations in our history, after all the pogroms, exiles and antisemitism . . . we are still here! Compared to everything the Jewish People have overcome, Don realized his own problems and worries were trivial. Wow! He took in this important moment of perspective. And even to this day, when he has something pressing, Don returns to Kotel, either in his mind or while in Jerusalem, and remembers . . . Am Yisrael Chai. If we, the Jewish People, can overcome so much and survive, I can overcome whatever is troubling me.
Just three words –but they capture a message that we all need to find our way forward together in a world that was forever changed for us on October 7th and that continues to shake us even this week with ballistic missile attacks on Israel from Iran. We are not ok. We may not even be hopeful. But we, the people of Israel, will live. Am Yisrael Chai.
These words remind us that we can and we must muster the spiritual strength and endurance to rise, to reach out, to return, and to restore. What Rabbi Sharon Brous in her new book The Amen Affect calls – “True hope – True hope doesn’t patronize or deceive. It doesn’t pretend that everything is ok when it’s clearly not. Instead, it’s honest and clearheaded about the dangers, helping the person suffering find the strength to endure.”
It goes without saying that since 10.7, many of us have come to have a different relationship to the words Am Yisrael Chai and what they represent; we’ve heard them, we’ve struggled with them, and we’ve needed them in a new way. I know I have. For I was born into a world in which the State of Israel has always existed. And I, like many in my generation, took the words Am Yisrael Chai for granted until this year. Now, I have sung these words with nearly a million others in Washington DC at the March for Israel in November and with strangers on the ski slopes of Colorado. I have chanted these words as a new child in our community was welcomed into the covenant and given the Hebrew name Amichai, meaning “my people live” at his bris, and during long sleepless nights of missile attacks.
And in doing so, I have come to rely upon them and the sentiment of Chai – not as a slogan of power but as a commitment to life in the face of death, freedom in the face of captivity, solidarity in the face of abandonment, and strength in the face of challenge. I resonate with the lyrics of Israeli singer, Eyal Golan, in his release of “Am Yisrael Chai” on October 19, 2023. Translated into English:
“Because the eternal people never fear
even when it's hard to see
we're all together, no one here is alone
when the wars burn
Am Yisrael Chai - The people of Israel live
if we'll not forget always to be united
The people of Israel live
during ascents and during declines, even during the hardest hours.”
In this way, Am Yisrael Chai is a message of solidarity and life even amidst incredible pain and loss. What our Torah reading teaches us today is that we can choose life even when the odds are stacked against us, even when it is excruciatingly difficult. Our Torah reading for Rosh Hashanah could have been picked from anywhere in the Torah – from creation or from among the biblical references to Rosh Hashanah or from a narrative of teshuvah, of return and repentance. But where do we begin reading today?
With the long-awaited birth of Isaac, a story of continuity of our first family. With life in the face of odds against us. With life in the face of infertility and desperation. With life as a manifestation of strength and continuity. It’s an Am Yisrael Chai moment – for we only say these three words when we have the odds stacked against us. Our Torah today offers us a story of outreach from angels to lift a family out of despair and into life. Three angels arrived to share the news of Isaac’s birth to Abraham and Sarah. And a fourth angel of God reached out to Hagar after she was sent into the wilderness to ask Ma lach – how are you doing? Continuing, don’t be afraid, kumi se’i at ha’naar v'hachaziki et yadech -
ק֚וּמִי שְׂאִ֣י אֶת־הַנַּ֔עַר וְהַחֲזִ֥יקִי אֶת־יָדֵ֖ךְ׃
“Come, lift up the boy and strengthen him by the hand.” Then God opened her eyes, and she suddenly saw for herself a well of water from which she filled her cup and fed her child.
“Lift up the boy and strengthen him by the hand.” We have an opportunity to see one another in pain and reach out a hand - to lend strength and support. Am Yisrael chai is not just a rallying cry for our voices, but an activation of our inner strength, our grit, and our ability to act as a bridge to possibility, yad b’yad – hand in hand.
In the words of Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel: “One must wager on the future. I believe it is possible, in spite of everything, to believe in friendship in a world without friendship, and even to believe in God in a world where there has been an eclipse of God's face. Above all, we must not give in to cynicism. To save the life of a single child, no effort is too much. To make a tired old man smile is to perform an essential task. To defeat injustice and misfortune, if only for one instant, for a single victim, is to invent a new reason to hope. Just as despair can be given to me only by another human being, hope too can be given to me only by another human being. Mankind must remember too that, like hope, peace is not God's gift to God’s creatures. Peace is a very special gift--it is our gift to each other. For the sake of our children and theirs, I pray that we are worthy of that hope, of that redemption, and some measure of peace.” We all have tremendous capacity, when rooted in a shared future, to strengthen and elevate one another; that is our holy work.
And that is the holy work of Yaron Bob, whose life’s work is an example of how one person’s inner strength can buttress others. Yaron is an artist who lives along the border with Gaza. He has had several close encounters with death amidst rocket attacks on his home. But rather than surrender to fear and silence, he decided to choose to create beauty out of destruction. How?
Armed with only an anvil, hammer, and furnace, Yaron collects the remains of rockets, and then melts, molds, and sculpts them into fine jewelry and Judaica. I was touched to be gifted one of his pieces this summer by the Kaufmans that they acquired while in Israel. [Hold up] On one side it says “Rockets to Roses,” the name of his line of jewelry and art. And you know what is says on the other side? “Am Yisrael Chai.” Of course. That’s what you call an instrument of death resurrected into a work of art and resilience.
Throughout Israel there are thousands of stories of everyday people like Yaron with remarkable inner strength – who saved strangers on October 7th; who have delivered support services, therapy, and donations to victims of terror; who have stepped up to fight and to feed. And in America as well, we ourselves have witnessed so many acts of inner strength from those who have supported Israel and our local community, joined the security team, or traveled to bring supplies and support.
Today I want to raise up Am Yisrael Chai not just as a banner for the heroes in our midst, but as a reminder that we all, both individually and collectively can find that inner strength. For that’s precisely what the journey of teshuvah demands of us – the strength to change, the strength to act, the strength to forgive, and the strength to live. That is what we see in Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Chana.
That is what I have found I have needed to get through this year. Every day I pray that when I open my eyes, there will be wells to be found, like there were for Hagar. When all appears broken or dark, I pray I will turn an instinct to turn inward into an opportunity to turn outward to lift the hands of others. If I have learned anything this past year it is that strength is not about being superhuman, it’s about being human. It’s not so much about bouncing back as moving forward, together. May God always train our eyes to see and guide our hands to reach out and to hold.
Today the shofar wakes us up as the ram did to Avraham to see where we must reach out a hand. The shofar is a cry for help, for hope, and for change. It’s a call out to God – hey, it’s broken down here. I’m broken. And I’m here – hineni, moving forward, nonetheless. Because “Hope is inseparable from teshuvah,” states Rabbi David Arnow, and community is inseparable from life. The power of this season lies in the fact that even amidst incredible distress and fear, even amidst so much beyond our control, we have agency to change and persist, to connect and call out.
Am Yisrael chai is a call for kinship amidst difference. We have seen Jewish communities that have fractured generationally this past year, and we have experienced our own fractures amidst many changes in our HEA community over the past few years. Am Yisrael Chai is a message of coming together. Of being one people and one Alliance of many unique individuals. It’s a message that we can access fortitude, honesty, and true hope in difficult times. That we can find strength in one another to move forward again.
Rabbi Soloveitchik taught that the Hebrew word Am, nation, spelled ayin-mem is identical to the Hebrew word Im, meaning with. Our fate of unity manifests itself through a historical and contemporary indispensable union… Whether Religious or secular, born Jewish or Jew by choice, conservative or liberal, we all are included in one Am, standing together in an often antagonistic world.
Im Yisrael Chai. I invite us to engage in a spirit of connection hand in hand with one another in this New Year. With one another this year let’s come together and listen, learn, and grow. With one another this year let’s sing and pray, celebrate and commemorate. With one another this year let’s reach out and help out.
I reach out to you today, as THE rabbi of HEA, a role I never anticipated I would be in. This has been a year of big changes for me, as it has for you. I’m not going to pretend that we haven’t been through something difficult and depleting together this year on multiple levels. I want you to know how grateful I am to serve and lead HEA in a job that is so meaningful in a community I’ve come to love dearly. Being the only rabbi of a congregation that has had two rabbis for twenty years is, well, a big job. But, I have to tell you, the most inspiring thing happened when our community dropped down to one rabbi in August, and that is that so many people have offered to help – to give a guest sermon, to visit someone in the hospital, to write thank you notes, to welcome new members on the phone or at our doors, to drive a senior to shul, or to sponsor or support a program. That is who we are as a community; that is who we are as a resilient people. Amidst a daunting amount of change, I honestly have never felt so supported. I pray that you can feel that too and so I officially invite you to join me with your unique gifts in the inner reaches of this community im HEA, with one another towards our bright future.
May we each find the strength to call out ourselves, as Rabbi Hardman once did in the barracks of Bergen-Belsen, “Am Yisrael Chai” and the audacity to listen, to lengthen our reach, and to live on together.
Shana Tova