I want to share with a personal story about my dad and me today. And I’m sharing this personal story because in some ways what happened between my dad and me is a story that has played out in families all across this country over the past decade. Politics came between us.
Over the final years of my father’s life, his political views began to differ sharply from other members of my family. His views became more rigid, and his allegiance to them became louder, more combative, and more consuming. He believed that the political choices he was making expressed his patriotism, his concern for Israel, and his understanding of what it meant to defend the things he loved. Many in my family, however, experienced some of those choices very differently.
I tried to play the role of peace-keeper. I warned him that this was costing him something. I told him that the way he spoke, the certainty with which he spoke, and his unwillingness to hear how deeply some of his views wounded people were alienating members of his own family. I tried to tell him that he could win every argument and still lose people he loved. But he would not hear me.
Our conversations became increasingly predictable. Before either one of us had finished a sentence, the other already knew what it meant. We knew which arguments would come next, which facts would be dismissed, which defenses would go up. We were no longer only talking to each other. I experienced him as if I were talking to a brick wall, and I guess he experienced me the same way.
And then, in 2021, my father died.
His death was painful simply because he was my father and I loved him. But it carried another kind of grief as well. So much had come between him and my family, and between him and me by then as well, that I was afraid I would not know how to mourn him, that the distance between us had become too large to see past.
I was the rabbi in the family, so of course I would be the one to write and deliver his eulogy. As I sat down to write, I was filled with dread! How could I eulogize him when so many in the family were alienated by his views. I realized that I knew his political map of the world almost by heart. What frightened me was that it had become my map of him. Had the conflict of his final years become so dominant that it was now obscuring the whole man?
So I became very still.
I began to think about the full arc of his life. I thought about my grandparents and great-grandparents, about the world from which they came, and about what it meant for my father to be the first generation of our family born in the United States. I thought about the enormous power that America held in his imagination. America represented safety, arrival, dignity, and the possibility of success. He had inherited a family story of immigration and dislocation, of people leaving one world behind and trying to become fully rooted in another. He developed very clear ideas about what success should look like, what loyalty should mean, and what it meant to be a true American and a secure Jew.
As I wrote, I began to see that the map by which my father understood the world had not suddenly appeared during the final years of his life. Its outlines had been drawn before he was born. It had been shaped by his parents, by immigration, by Jewish vulnerability, by the desire to belong, by gratitude to this country, and by a lifetime of striving to prove that he had arrived.
Understanding where his map came from did not mean that I agreed with where it led him. It did not undo the pain. It did not erase the ways in which his rigidity had damaged relationships. But as I wrote, something happened. My father became visible to me again. The older man whose politics had so consumed our relationship was still there, but so was the child of immigrants. So was the young man trying to find his place in America. So was the man who worked so hard to be the best husband, father and grandfather he could be.
The wound was still real. It simply was no longer the only truth I could see.
I have been thinking about that experience because we are living through a time in which our maps of one another are becoming frighteningly complete.
Think about all we have lived through as the Jewish people in recent years. There was October 7, and we now carry the burden of increasing antisemitism in the world. We have seen Jewish suffering denied, distorted, or treated as morally suspect. We have watched legitimate criticism of Israel sometimes become a doorway into something far older and darker. We have felt the pressure to defend Israel, to defend the Jewish people, along with other peoples who suffer in this world, and we are exhausted.
Here in America, these years have also brought a deepening political cruelty. Disagreement has become contempt. Political opponents have become enemies. We increasingly approach one another already convinced that we know what the other person believes, why they believe it, what kind of person they must be, and whether anything they say deserves to be heard.
The modern world is hardening our hearts.
Our map of each other has become so complete that there is no room left for the human being.
I recently listened to a podcast in which psychologist and neuroscientist Norman Farb described the mental maps our brains create. The mind cannot approach every experience as though it had never encountered anything like it before. We construct models that help us recognize patterns, interpret situations, and anticipate what is likely to happen next. These maps help us move through the world. When there is danger, they can protect us.
But maps can become rigid. We begin to process what is happening through what we already expect to find. Rather than allowing new experience to reshape our understanding, we fit the experience into a story that has already been written. We no longer encounter what is actually before us. We encounter our prediction of what must be there.
This is why, together with social media and the internet, there is so much polarization in our world. We divide the world into who is like us, and therefore safe, and who is not like us and therefore the enemy who must be erased, cancelled, or even destroyed.
Indeed, the world we live in is turning our hearts to stone. So is that it? Are we destined to be destroyed by our own hearts of stone? Is there no hope? Of course there is hope! Judaism insists there is always hope!
The prophet Ezekiel speaks in the name of God and offers one of the most extraordinary promises in all of the Tanakh: וַהֲסִרֹתִי אֶת לֵב הָאֶבֶן מִבְּשַׂרְכֶם וְנָתַתִּי לָכֶם לֵב בָּשָׂר “I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”
A heart of stone is not necessarily a heart without feeling. It may be filled with feeling. It is often furious, frightened, filled with grievance, passionate, and fiercely devoted. The heart of stone is the heart that has become incapable of receiving anything that does not confirm what it already knows. It is a heart that can no longer be surprised. It cannot be revised by reality. It encounters people only through the categories into which it has placed them.
A heart of flesh also has sensation. It also registers pain. It knows when it has been wounded. It also remains capable of healing. It responds to the living world around it.
A heart of flesh does not require us to abandon conviction. It does not ask us to minimize what is wrong, to excuse hatred, or pretend that all claims are equally true. It does not ask us to stand in some imagined neutral center, safely removed from moral urgency. A heart of flesh can be clear, discerning, loyal, and brave.
But its convictions have not destroyed a heart of flesh’s capacity to encounter reality.
A heart of flesh can say: I remain devoted to Israel, and to democracy in this country, and what I am seeing in both places disturbs me. I stand for the suffering of all peoples who are oppressed, but I also proudly stand against rising antisemitism of my people as well. A heart of flesh says, I know what I believe, and I remain capable of discovering that my map is incomplete.
This is one of the hardest demands of Yom Kippur: we must, today, right now, ask ourselves if we have a heart of flesh, or a heart of stone!
The day asks what our convictions are doing to our souls. It asks what our fears have taught us to see and what they have made it impossible for us to see, whether our anger is guiding us toward responsibility or hardening into an identity we no longer know how to relinquish. It asks us to notice whose suffering we have trained ourselves not to recognize because recognizing it would complicate our story.
Yom Kippur demands that we question our personal map of ourselves as well. If we walk around with a personal script that says: I am the victim here. I am right. I am justified. And everyone else is wrong and the enemy, then our personal map has turned our heart to stone.
Then Yom Kippur makes an extraordinary, revolutionary demand on us: We must beat our chests. Do you see what we are doing? We are transforming our hearts of stone back to flesh! And we say, Ashamnu. We are guilty. Bagadnu. We have betrayed our shared humanity. Gazalnu. We have stolen from the truth. Dibarnu dofi. We have spoken falsehoods in our desire to be right!
The confession is in the plural because no one stands outside the human problem. If you think that sin belongs only to the people whose politics, religion, nation, or moral vocabulary you oppose, that’s just the heart of stone talking again. If you say “But I didn’t steal!” Think again. In what ways might we have stolen from the joy of another to make ourselves powerful, or stolen from the truth to make ourselves right?
Teshuvah begins when we allow ourselves to become truly reachable to others again.
Perhaps this is why the ancient image of the Ark is so powerful. Last week, I talked about how, within the Ark, our tradition teaches, rested both the whole tablets and the broken tablets. Above the Ark stood two cherubim, facing one another. The Torah tells us that the divine voice emerged from the space between them.
God’s voice did not belong to one cherub alone. It did not emerge because one had conquered the other. The cherubim did not merge or cease to be distinct. They faced one another, and the space between them became sacred.
The heart of flesh is what allows that space to exist.
What is so brilliant about the cherubim, is that they never cease facing each other, seeing the other fully, despite the fact that they see the world from totally different perspectives! They may disagree. They may even argue and struggle, but they will never cease to fully see the other as a being made equally in the divine image.
If we are ever going to repair all that is shattered in our world, we must return our hearts to flesh and let the space between us become sacred ground.
When my father died, it was the middle of the COVID pandemic. He had been living in an elder-care facility, and by the time of his funeral, I had COVID myself. I could not attend my own father’s burial.
There were very few people at the cemetery. They stood six feet apart. My brother called me on his cell phone and held the phone so that my voice could be heard. A rabbinic colleague whom I barely knew was there to officiate because I could not be.
I could not stand beside my father’s grave. I could not place earth upon his coffin. I could not see the faces of the people who had gathered. All I could do was send my voice across the distance.
I read the eulogy I had written. I spoke about the whole arc of my father’s life, about the child of immigrants, the first generation born in America, the man shaped by striving, patriotism, Jewish vulnerability, success, and the longing to belong. I spoke about the father whom I could truly appreciate, even though so much between us remained unresolved.
Later, the rabbi who had officiated called me from his car. He told me that he had been deeply moved by the eulogy. Then he said something I had not expected.
“What struck me,” he said, “was that you found it within yourself to forgive your father.”
I had not sat down intending to forgive him. I had sat down trying to see him whole. But right then and there I realized that my telling the whole story about the whole human being my father was, I really did forgive him!
I cannot tell anyone else when forgiveness is possible or what forgiveness must require. I know that some wounds cannot be reconciled, and that some relationships are not safe to restore. I only know that as I wrote my father’s eulogy, something in me changed.
Forgiveness did not mean deciding that the hurt no longer mattered. It did not mean deciding that my father had been right. It began when the hurt was no longer the only truth I could see. And I had hardened my own heart in those final years from seeing the whole man he was.
By the time I could see him whole again, he was gone. And yet, across a telephone, across the distance of a pandemic, across years of anger and disappointment, I found myself facing him again. Panim el panim. Face to face. Like those cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant.
This is what I pray for us on this Yom Kippur. May we defend what is precious without allowing fear to determine everything we are capable of seeing. May we confront the challenges in this country and around the world without losing our moral imagination. May we oppose what is dangerous in our country without surrendering the humanity of those whom we oppose. May we allow the people we love to become larger than the stories we have told about them.
The tablets must be stone so that the covenant can endure. But the heart must be flesh so that the covenant can live. May we have the courage to see one another whole, to turn our living hearts toward one another, and to make the space between us sacred once more, so that the voice of God may be heard among us again. Amen.
