The Cries of Isaac and Ishmael | Rabbi Angela Buchdahl | Erev Rosh HaSha...

The Cries of Isaac and Ishmael | Rabbi Angela Buchdahl | Erev Rosh HaShanah 5786

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Senior Rabbi Angela Buchdahl speaks about the war on empathy and the painful way the Jewish community has become divided since October 7.

 "This war has tested our empathy. All of us. I see the ways that my fear has disabled my empathy response. I still struggle to find the emotional bandwidth to read the tragic stories coming out of Gaza while my extended family is still held captive, while calls to 'blacklist Z1on!sts' or to 'globalize the 1nt!fada' still ring around the world, and even this city. But who do we become when we harden our hearts?" 

To see more sermons by Rabbi Buchdahl, visit our website: 

https://www.centralsynagogue.org/worship/sermons/author/angela-w-buchdahl

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Transcript

I've been a rabbi for 25 years,
20 of them at Central Synagogue,
and I have never been so afraid to talk
about Israel.
I want to tell you about my
unconditional love for the Israeli
people and our belleaguered homeland.
still desperately struggling to bring
its hostages home, still trying to
eliminate Hamas, terrorists that not
only refuse to lay down their arms, but
intentionally trapped their own people
in a combat zone.

But if I tell you these things, all of
which I believe,
some of you will stop listening and
decide that I'm no longer your rabbi.

I also want to tell you how my heart
breaks over the civilian deaths and
tragic suffering in Gaza,
the shattering destruction of
Palestinian homes and cities. 

I want to
denounce settler violence in the West
Bank and the rhetoric from far-right
government ministers who talk about
annexation of the West Bank and
expulsion of gazins instead of ending
this war and bringing our hostages home.
But if I tell you these things,
all of which I also believe,
some of you will stop listening
and decide that I'm no longer your
rabbi.

This Israel conversation is ripping our
community apart, not just here at
Central, but across the Jewish world,
among friends, within families.
It's been the most painful experience of
my rebbitic life.
It's keeping me up at night watching the
world and so many in our community lose
all empathy for the state of Israel and
at the same time watching so many of us
lose all empathy for the Palestinian
people.

It now seems that any expression of
compassion for the other side is
regarded with suspicion as disloyal or
even threatening.

Is our capacity for empathy so finite?
Are our hearts so small that if we
increase our empathy for certain people,
we need to reduce it for others until
one day we conclude that other side is
not deserving of any compassion any
regard.
This zero sum empathy calculus has
encouraged us to diminish and demonize
each other.

And not just in Israel's war, but in
ideological battles being fought in our
nation every day.
I'm terrified not only by the chilling
rise in anti-semitism, frequent mass
shootings, and the contagion of
political violence, but also by people's
responses.

Over and over, I see a shocking lack of
decency or compassion even for murder
victims.
People feel emboldened to say they
deserved it.

It's a cottage industry of Shodenfrod,
vengeance, even glee.
Not only do people act as though their
empathy is finite, some people want us
to believe that empathy is actually
dangerous.
Once upon a time, empathy seemed as
unobjectionable and wholesome as
motherhood and apple pie.
Who could be against it?

But in the last few years, an unlikely
coalition of politicians, professors,
even pastors have used it as a political
weapon, called it toxic, and are waging
a war on empathy.

A Christian theologian published a book
this year entitled the sin of empathy.
Empathy, he argues, demands we inhabit
the feelings of another person, which
doesn't help the sufferer. He offers a
simple analogy. If someone is drowning
in the river, empathy asks us to jump in
alongside him, putting us both at risk.
Whereas sympathy says, "I'll keep my
distance, stay on firm ground, and throw
you a life preserver." His analogy may
might sound reasonable on the surface,
but in practice, it has been wielded by
many to dismiss the cries of victims and
to excuse indifference and cruelty.
It's also used to justify some strange
policies. For example, the pastor claims
that women's natural tendency to
excessive empathy is the is why they
shouldn't be permitted to be ordained.
I confess, despite being a woman, I
don't have much empathy for that
argument.
But there are powerful people speaking
out against empathy. This past winter,
while leading an effort to eliminate
much of our nation's foreign aid, Elon
Musk declare declared that empathy is
the fundamental weakness of Western
civilization and that empathy was
enabling quote civilizational suicide.
Judaism says otherwise.

Our tradition reveals that the real
danger we face is not that we have too
much empathy. It's that we might not
have enough.
Our compassion, like God's, should be
without limit, and we must extend it
beyond our side to encompass care for
the other.
The challenge of empathy is starkly
illustrated in the Torah narrative we
are instructed to read tomorrow on
Russia Shana morning, the story of Hagar
and Ishmael.

God promised our first ancestors Abraham
and Sarah that they would multiply and
be a great nation. But after many years
together, they have no offspring. So
Sarah offers Abraham her Egyptian
handmaiden Hagar to create an heir. When
Hagar becomes pregnant, she acts
disrespectfully towards Sarah. And the
relationship between the women becomes
so strained that Hagar flees.
But with God's encouragement, Hagar
returns and gives birth to Ishmael,
Abraham's first son.
Years later, Sarah finally gives birth
to Isaac,
and begins to worry that Ishmael is a
threat to Isaac and his inheritance. So,
she demands that Abraham cast out Hagar
and Ishmael.
Abraham reluctantly agrees and he
banishes them to the scorching desert
where Hagar, who cannot bear to watch
her son starve, weeps from a distance.
A child is expelled from his home, left
to die of hunger and thirst, while our
ancestors seem to exhibit shocking
indifference.
We know Sarah bears some culpability for
this terrible situation and Abraham too.
We could even fault Hagar for her early
scorn of Sarah. But one thing is clear.
It isn't Ishmael's fault.
How could Abraham and Sarah not feel
empathy for this starving child?
We know God does.
God hears Ishmael's cry, opens Hagar's
eyes to a well of water, and promises
her that Ishmael will become the father
of a great nation, which the Abrahamic
faiths recognize as the Arab people.
This story might feel a little too close
to home right now. And let me assure
you, this Torah portion wasn't selected
by an overly empathetic female rabbi.
Our
ancestors selected it centuries ago to
read on rashash shana also known as yom
haden the day of judgment.
We read this story as our tradition asks
us to take ashbon hanesh an accounting
of our souls.
How do you hear its message this year?
How many of us, our hearts so aligned
with our Israeli brothers and sisters,
so finely attuned to the dangers they
face, have become callous to a
generation of Ishmael's children, cast
from their homes, wandering in the
desert, many of them without enough to
eat or drink.
It's clear to me that Hamas is
fundamentally culpable for today's
devastating situation. For starting the
war on October 7th, for embedding
themselves in civilian populations under
hospitals and schools, for executing
hostages and refusing to return the
remaining ones, and for stealing
humanitarian aid to fund their war.
I also pray that the Israeli government
is doing an accounting.
So much criticism of Israel has been
biased, even blatantly dishonest.
But Israel made no secret of its food
blockade from March to May, justifying
its decision based on the abundance of
aid delivered during the ceasefire.
That blockade was an unsuccessful and
unwise attempt to force Hamas to
surrender.
and Israel is responsible for its
consequences.
Some of you only fault Israel for this
situation and some of you only blame
Hamas. But one thing is clear,
it isn't the children of Gaza's fault.
They did not start this war. They aren't
responsible for anti-semitism at the
United Nations or unreliable numbers
from the Gazin Health Ministry. They
didn't choose what photograph would be
printed on the cover of the New York
Times.
Whether the hungry children of Gaza
number in the hundreds or in the
hundreds of thousands matters far less
than the simple fact that there are
children who are suffering, exiled,
and desperate.
We must not look away.
And yet, when U.J.A. Federation of New
York recently made a million-dollar
donation to Isra, a trusted Israeli
humanitarian organization working with
the support of the Israeli government in
Gaza, many in our extended community
publicly denounced this effort to feed
hungry Palestinians.
Even though U.J JA has given over $300
million to support Israel since this war
began. Some even went so far as to
pledge that for this sin of empathy, we
should never give another dollar to
U.J.A.
What happens when we stop caring?
And I don't mean what happens to society
or the world. I mean what happens to our
souls?
It is not only some of Israel's
defenders who need to find more empathy.
Many of Israel's critics also need to
search their souls this rashana.
Within our community, there are those of
us whose understandable grief for
civilian suffering in Gaza has led us to
take the worst accusations against
Israel at face value and for some to
abandon the entire project of a Jewish
state.
Too many of us cannot muster any empathy
for Israeli families who have lived for
2 years under direct attack from Hamas,
Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran.
literally from every direction who have
faced security threats since the very
founding of the state.
Too many of us cannot spare any regard
for Israeli reservists who have been
away from their family for hundreds of
days to defend the only Jewish state we
have.
Too many of us ignore that 80% of
Israelis themselves want to see the
hostages home and the war over.
They have been in the streets weekly to
protest the actions of their own
government.
Instead, too many of us label all
Israelis occupiers and support
boycotting Israeli academics,
filmmakers, artists, musicians, and
scientists.
There are members of our own
congregation who are disturbed by our
weekly prayer for Israel
or who object to the Israeli flag on our
beimma even though the empty chair it
covers stands for the 48 remaining
hostages whose families desperately
await their return.
We need to understand that feeling
empathy for the other is not a betrayal
of our side. It is not disloyalty.
We can feel brokenhearted for the
suffering of the children of Isaac and
Ishmael.
Indeed, we must.
The biblical scholar Tikba Firmky
writes, "The story of Sarah and Hagar is
not a story of the conflict between us
and other, but between us and another
us.
We are all the children of Abraham.
Hagar's name has the same spelling as
Hagar,
the stranger.
She is the ultimate other, an Egyptian,
a slave.
But only a few generations later, it is
the Israelites who are slaves in Egypt.
We are the stranger. We are the other.
Our Torah insists we never forget this.
Our origin story as a people reminds us,
quote, "Do not oppress the stranger, for
you know the heart of a stranger. You
were strangers in the land of Egypt."
We recreate that memory every Passover.
And when we feel glee at the deaths of
our enemies in the Red Sea, God rebukes
us.
My children are drowning and you're
celebrating.
And on this holiday, Rosha Shaah, we are
instructed to read this story of Hagar
and Ishmael so that we can begin our new
year with an honest accounting of how
have we treated the stranger, the other,
the child.
Rabbi Jonathan Saxs of Blessed Memory,
the former Orthodox chief rabbi of
England, warned that quote, "Fear of the
one not like us is capable of disabling
our empathy response."
That is why this specific command to
love the stranger is so life-changing.
It even hints that this was part of the
purpose of the Israelites exile in Egypt
in the first place.
This war has temp has tested our
empathy.
All of us.
I see the ways that my fear has disabled
my empathy response.
I still struggle to find the emotional
bandwidth to read the tragic stories
coming out of Gaza while my extended
family is still held captive.
While calls to blacklist Zionists or to
globalize the inifat still ring around
the world, even in this city.
But who do we become when we harden our
hearts?
Rachel Goldberg Poland, whose son Hirs
was taken captive on October 7th, held
in tunnels for nearly a year before he
was executed by Hamas. She more than
anyone would be justified in losing
herself to rage.
But instead, she had the courage to say,
"I can feel bad for the innocence in
Gaza because my moral compass still
works. You do not need to choose."
This Rosha, we are invited to create the
moral universe we want to inhabit. One
where empathy is not finite but
expansive.
Where we see the suffering of the other
and we do not harden our hearts.
The opponents of empathy might call it
weakness.
Our Torah sees it as our superpower.
Judaism teaches us that this feeling of
otherness which we are all feeling right
now, there is a purpose to that exile.
It's how we forge the heart of a
stranger. A heart of many rooms, our
tradition calls it. A heart that is big
enough to care for our own and the
other. A heart that is strong enough to
respond to the cries of Ishmael and
Isaac.
A heart with empathy enough for all
God's children.
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
What do you do?
[Music]
Oo.
[Music]
Oo.




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