Rosh Hashanah 5787
When I first came back to Princeton four years ago to become the Executive Director of the Center for Jewish Life, one of the great surprises for me was how completely I was blown away by the Jewish life I found here. I had spent most of my career as a congregational rabbi, and those of us who spend our lives in the Jewish community can sometimes become professional worriers about the future of the Jewish people. We worry about whether the next generation will care, whether they will show up, whether Jewish life will mean enough to them to carry it forward. And then I arrived here.
I remember my first Friday night at the CJL. I walked through the building and could hear three different services happening at once. Upstairs, there was guitar and singing coming from Kesher, our Reform community. Koach was davening with its own melodies and nigunim, and downstairs I could hear the Orthodox minyan praying in yet another musical language. All of it was wafting through the building at the same time. Students were singing and dancing and rushing through the hallways to find their friends. There was so much ruach, so much joy, so much sheer Jewish energy in that building that I remember thinking: Oh. We are going to be okay.
And it wasn’t only Friday nights. Everywhere I looked, I encountered these extraordinarily bright, searching young people who were taking Judaism seriously, arguing with it, learning from it, bringing their friends into it, and making it their own. For someone who had spent decades hearing about the ever-dying Jewish people, it was almost intoxicating. I felt as though I had somehow landed in the future of Jewish life, and the future looked vibrant. It renewed my faith in the Jewish people. Truly, it was soul-refreshing.
That is why, at the end of my first semester, I wrote an article for the Times of Israel called “Why I’m Still Kvelling After My First Semester as Princeton’s Rabbi.” I wanted to tell people what I was seeing. If you are worried about the Jewish future, I wanted to say, come to Princeton. Come spend a Friday night in this building. Come meet these students. I had the extraordinary privilege of getting to bask in that future every day, and I was kvelling.
And I still kvell. I still walk through this building and feel enormous pride in these students and in the Jewish life they create here.
But then October 7 happened, and everything in the Jewish world suddenly shifted. Seismically.
It is not that our students stopped being brilliant, passionate Jews. But everything around all of us changed, and for some students it became harder to inhabit that passion as they once had.
I think of one student I met during my first summer here, long before October 7. He had become deeply involved in Kesher, our Reform minyan, and he spoke with such pride about coming to services every Friday night, about how much he had grown, and about the kind of Jew he was becoming. I remember leaving that dinner thinking: this is exactly why I came back to Princeton. This is what Jewish life can do.
After October 7, I noticed that he was no longer around. I reached out, but I did not hear back. Eventually I came to understand that the pain, polarization, and rancor of that period had made Jewish spaces feel alienating to him. Everything had become so entangled with politics that the place where he had once felt proud and at home no longer felt like home.
That broke my heart. I had watched this community help him become more fully himself as a Jew, and then I watched the world make him withdraw from the very place that had helped him flourish.
Since October 7, the emotional ground beneath Jewish life has shifted. Back then, I heard so much fear, confusion, and uncertainty in conversations with students and with alums that were not there before. And I know how often I tried to reassure others while privately thinking that I need some reassurance myself.
Perhaps some of you know that feeling. You still love the same people, places, and ideals. You still believe in them. But you no longer know how to believe in them with quite the same confidence.
That is the place from which I stand before you this Rosh Hashanah. I still believe, with all my heart, in the Jewish people, in Israel, in democracy, in justice, and in the possibility of human beings learning to see one another more fully. The love remains. The covenant remains. What has changed is the ease with which I once trusted that all of it would hold.
I have found myself thinking about the person I was when I first came to Princeton in the late 1980s. The world was not simple then. The first intifada began while I was a student. Apartheid still ruled South Africa. AIDS was devastating an entire generation. The Cold War still shaped the world. Yet I remember believing that progress, however imperfect, was durable. I believed our institutions could learn. I believed education could widen the human heart. I believed that certain moral lessons of history had been learned.
I do not think that hope was foolish. But, like many of us, I no longer assume that progress sustains itself, or that institutions will always recognize hatred when it appears in a new form, or that people who disagree profoundly will necessarily recognize one another’s humanity.
Now I don’t want to bum you out too badly here! I’m not here today to suggest that everything has fallen apart, it’s over, and let’s pack up and get out of dodge. I’m not here to say that everything we trust and love betrays us. The end!
No, I’m here to say something very different. Judaism can sustain us through these times of shattered hopes and dreams. It always has! Judaism can point a way forward. The Torah knows this place where everything we thought we could count on seems to be falling apart. This isn’t our first rodeo! Judaism knows what it is to stand amid the fragments of something sacred and wonder whether covenant can survive what has happened.
Remember the story of the smashing of the Ten Commandments? At Sinai, Moses ascended into the cloud and received two tablets of stone, inscribed by the finger of God. The stone came from God. The writing came from God. Revelation descended complete from heaven. But while Moses was on the mountain, the people made the golden calf. When he descended and saw the calf and the dancing, he hurled the tablets from his hands and shattered them.
I find myself imagining Moses in the silence after the stone has broken. He has spent forty days in the presence of God. He carries the tablets down the mountain believing that the covenant is secure, only to discover that it has already been betrayed. I wonder whether beneath the anger there was heartbreak. Whether he looked at those fragments and thought: I believed this was going to hold.
Perhaps at this moment in history, we know something of that feeling.
So then what happened next? The first tablets were smashed. But after the anger, the pleading, and the grief, God calls Moses to ascend the mountain again. This time the command is different: “פְּסָל־לְךָ שְׁנֵי לֻחֹת אֲבָנִים כָּרִאשֹׁנִים,” “Carve for yourself two tablets of stone like the first ones.”
The first time, God made the tablets. The second time, Moses must carve them himself. God will write the words again, but Moses must prepare the stone upon which they can be written.
I find that difference deeply moving. Moses is no longer merely the recipient of covenant. He becomes God’s partner in renewing it. The first covenant came as a gift. The second requires his labor. The first was received before he knew how badly the people could fail. The second is made with full knowledge of what has happened.
This is not a lesser covenant. It may be a deeper one. The second tablets do not possess the innocence of the first, but they contain something the first could never contain: the knowledge that sacred things can break and that we may still choose to begin again.
Perhaps that is where we are now. We cannot go back to the Jewish world as it felt before October 7. We cannot go back to the first tablets.
But perhaps we are being asked to carve the second.
I still love Princeton. I still love the Jewish people. I still love Israel. I still believe in democracy, justice, pluralism, and the dignity of every human being. Loving these things now requires me to love them without pretending they are perfect, and to tell the truth about their failures without surrendering their possibilities. Yes, we Jewish people have committed sins over the past few years, Israel has struggled mightily for the good, but along the way, it has also failed some critical moral tests. And, likewise, democracy in this country has also faltered and failed and shown us to be so much more fallible than we ever would have imagined a generation ago. All these failures are real. But now we must choose them all again, nevertheless. Despite their failures!
The rabbis teach that the Ark of the Covenant contained not only the second, whole tablets, but also the broken fragments of the first. Israel carried both through the wilderness.
We carry broken tablets into this new year. We carry the lives taken on October 7 and in the war that followed. We carry Israeli families and Palestinian families whose lives will never again be what they were. In this country, as well, we carry friendships and communities broken by politics, and moments when fear made us smaller or certainty made us unable to hear another person’s pain.
Rosh Hashanah does not ask us to pretend that those fragments are whole. It asks what we will place beside them.
Our tradition tells us that during these Days of Awe, teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah can help us meet the severity of this moment. This year I hear them as instructions for how to carve the second tablets that we are going to place by the fragments of the world we used to know.
Teshuvah means return. Not return to the world as it was, but return to what matters most. Beneath all the anger and fear, what do I still love? What kind of person do I still want to be? What values will I refuse to let this moment take from me?
Tefillah, prayer, is now, for our world, the refusal to give up on hope. To pray is to continue addressing the future as though transformation remains possible, to insist that cruelty is not inevitable and hatred does not have to triumph.
And tzedakah means righteous action. At the CJL, this means that we call the student who has gone quiet. We invite someone to Shabbat who does not know whether they belong. We refuse to let a friendship become collateral damage in a political argument. We create one small corner of the world in which another human being is seen more clearly and treated more gently.
None of this restores the first tablets. That is not the point. Every act of return, hope, and righteousness becomes another stroke of the chisel by which the second tablets are formed.
This is what Rosh Hashanah is asking of us this year: to recognize that we are not merely the inheritors of covenant. We are its makers and renewers. The stone is in our hands now, and every act of teshuvah, every prayer offered in hope, every act of courage and generosity, helps carve a world more truthful, more compassionate, and more whole.
And perhaps, because we do this work, a student who feels far away from Judaism will walk through the doors of a Jewish community unsure of who he is and discover there a home, a voice, a people, and a way of becoming more fully himself. You see, our students are already carving those new tablets at the CJL. Our students haven’t given up making the music rising from different rooms, their friends are still rushing through the hallways to find one another, and you can still feel the joy of a tradition spacious enough to receive even those who feel broken by the troubles of the world.. Perhaps that student who, right now is alienated, will look around and think: Oh. I can really be okay, and we are all going to be okay.
When I first arrived back to Princeton, I believed that we will be okay because of what I saw already flourishing at the CJL. Today I believe it with a deeper faith. I’m here to say I’m k’velling even more than I possibly could back 4 years ago before the tragedy and trials of October 7th. Every day, I am reminded that we are going to be okay because the Jewish future–our students–have never stopped carving. We have never stopped carrying one another. We have never stopped turning memory into hope, hope into action, and action into blessing. That, in fact, has been the secret to our survival all along.
The stone is before us. The chisel is in our hands. Together, may we carve words of courage, compassion, justice, and love. May we carry them proudly into the year ahead. And may the covenant we renew together become a source of strength, joy, and blessing for our people and for our world.
Shanah tovah.
