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Rabbi Dean Shapiro 2025 RH sermon

Rabbi Dean Shapiro

Beth Shalom, Auckland NZ

The world was born as chaos. That’s what the Torah tells us:

בְּרֵאשִׁית†בָּרָּא†אֱלֹהִׁים†אֵת†הַשָּמַיִׁם†וְּאֵת†הָּאָּרֶץ∫†וְּהָּאָּרֶץ†הָּיְּתָּה†תֹהוּ†וָּבֹהוּ†וְּחשֶךְ†עַל־פְּנֵי†תְּהוֹם

At the beginning of it all, as God began to create the Heavens and the Earth, the earth was TOHU vaVOHU, and darkness lay upon the surface of the deep.

Tohu va Vohu. These words, in ancient Hebrew, aren’t perfectly understood, but they point to a primordial tumult. Rashi, the great Medieval French commentator, translates the powerful and mysterious words as the “desolate void.”

For Rashi’s contemporary, Ibn Ezra of Spain, they evoke a howling wilderness. I’ve seen no better description of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran this past year, nor of my own inner maelstrom: “a howling wilderness.” Since 7 October, we have been lost with no way through. We are all of us howling.

This past year, it seems as if the tohu va’vohu, the seething chaos that lies beneath the apparent order of the world, has been unleashed. What’s true and what’s false? Where is the solid ground we can stand on? Up is down, victims are perpetrators, friends are opponents. Was it ever thus, and we just couldn’t see it?

This whole year has been TOHU VaVOHU – chaotic, maddening, torn, and frayed.

Here are some things I think are tohu vavohu about the current situation:

  • That we didn’t take time to mourn our dead properly. I wish we had observed a global shiva.
  • That the hostages come from 23 countries but only Israel, it seems, is fighting to bring them home.
  • That the world seems more upset at the Government of Israel for killing innocent Gazans during its military action than it does at Hamas for failing to provide safe shelter – shelter that exists literally under foot, in tunnels built with international aid dollars – and using its own people as human shields.
  • That there is so little room among Jewish circles to acknowledge the tragedy that is the death of innocents in Gaza. Surely we are sufficiently schooled in suffering to empathize with all who hurt.
  • That Zionism, the yearning for self-determination and a homeland for a storm-tossed people, is seen by so many as the paradigm of Settler Colonialism and has become conflated with one particular Israeli government.
  • That Radical (so-called) Progressives are MORE concerned about Palestine than about years of vicious oppression and atrocities in places like South Sudan, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran…
  • That Jihad has been mistaken for political protest and Hamas is hailed as a liberation movement.
  • That Israel’s primary and sustained response has been a military one, in a desperate bid to project a certain type of strength and regain its “deterrence.”
  • That Far Right members of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet and their messianic followers are so callous, so obstinate, so avaricious.
  • That Diaspora Jewry has been so unwilling to criticize Netanyahu.
  • That Netanyahu, however corrupt he may be, is blamed by some as the sole reason the hostages remain in captivity.
  • That the terror, murder, rape, and torture unleashed on October 7 has created – or exposed – such deep rifts within Jewish families and communities.
  • That Iran remains a shadowy actor in all of this, even as it clearly pulls so many strings in the Middle East.
  • That the media collapses and flattens the complexity of the situation, so that no one knows what’s really happening.
  • That everyone, everywhere, is suddenly an expert on Israel, and knows just what to do.
  • That Israel is under active threat, now, from every side.
  • That we talk about two sides when, actually, there are countless sides and no sides except for us, human beings, who seek to live our lives with dignity and in safety.
  • What are we to do? How can we hold ourselves together in the midst of the howling wilderness?

According to the Torah, before the beginning, before there was even possibility or potential, God was alone. What did God do in that eternal moment? Alone, God paused. Listened. Breathed.

Can we, too, hold tight to the knowledge that something else is possible, even as we are poised above what Rabbi Rachel Timoner calls a “pregnant darkness over the depths of the not-yet”?i

Perhaps we, on these turquoise and emerald isles, secure in our homes and civil rights, so far from the hot zone, can serve as witnesses, can see the foolishness and bigotry and hardened hearts all around, and name the chaos for what it is. Perhaps we are called to do just that.

There is a story of a far-off land, where the people were descending into a lunacy that would last an entire generation. A doctor, seeing what was to come, created an antidote.

The antidote was dearly precious, a tea made from a leaf of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the single leaf that Adam spirited away with him when he was banished from the garden. There was enough for one cup, just one dose. No more could ever be made.

“Drink this,” the doctor told the king. The king refused. He didn’t want to see his people in their madness. He wanted to be with them, to experience what they were experiencing.

“You must drink this,” the doctor told him, “so that one day, when the insanity wears off, there will be one person who can remind us of who we used to be. No one can do that but you, Majesty.”

The king took the cup, and drank.

For Jews, the role of witness has long been sacred. In the Torah, no one could be convicted of a capital offense except on the testimony of two witnesses. Famously, we are forbidden to bear false witness in a court of law, so dire are the consequences.ii We have often seen ourselves as witnesses to history – whether as participants or observers – as people who stand apart, witnessing the actions of others, comparing those actions with true and immutable values. The great call of the Holocaust survivor has been to live and bear witness to the horror, the cruelty, the kindness, and the survival.

In a very real sense, the Torah itself is a witness, a record of the unfurling Cosmos and of how human beings treat – or ought to treat – one another.

That Torah contains a most precious verse, Deuteronomy 6:4, called the “watchword of our faith”: the Shema. ShemA Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai EchaD. In the Torah, just as in our Machzor (find it on pages 110-111), the letter Ayin of ShemA and the letter Dalet of EchaD are written bigger than the others. Why?

If you put the two together, they form the word EID – Witness. This is our sacred task, bearing witness to God’s unity.

How, then, are we to witness? I believe it is, first and foremost, by listening. “Real listening has become rare in our time,” Martin Buber wrote in 1952.iii Listening is difficult. It requires focus. It requires respect. It requires openness and curiosity and empathy.

Conjure, for a moment, how good and how right it feels when someone really listens to you. When they pay deep attention without interrupting or trying to fix things. You feel like the centre of the world.

That kind of listening summons deep contemplation. We feel whole after someone truly listens to us. Being listened to is healing.

Sacred Listening – true witnessing – lets others know that they are not invisible. They are seen. Their lives and deeds have impact. The future takes note. Witnesses can speak, but they can also be silent. Witnessing honours loss and pain. Witnessing declines to engage in competitive suffering, because it acknowledges the validity of each person’s pain.

It takes practice to learn to listen like that. That’s why we practiced earlier today, and last night. We’ll practice Sacred Listening again on Yom Kippur afternoon. The world needs more listeners.

Throughout this year, the vast distance between us and Israel has been challenging – especially for those of us with family there. But perhaps it’s beneficial, too. Perhaps distance allows us to witness the madness that appears to be enveloping the globe, and to enact the values, goodness, and justice that have always been the antidote to madness. Distance provides us the space to care about all people on God’s earth while still loving our own people.

We are witnesses when we engage with the news thoughtfully, when we ask good questions and listen deeply to people involved in this conflict. We bear witness when we seek out radio shows, websites, and podcasts that bring us the voices of people we rarely, if ever, hear. As witnesses we can identify the values that the actors in this conflict profess to uphold and those that, in fact, they embody. We can honour the sacrifice so many good people have made.

We can witness ourselves, as well. What stories, images, voices are we drawn to, and which do we push away? What is it, truly, that we experience and name when we engage with the events of 7 October and all that’s followed? Can we sit with our experience, pausing to witness ourselves before we react, or respond? If we can, then we are maturing as human beings.

What have you witnessed this year? Is it only the atrocities of 7 October, or have you seen the wider tragedy? Have you seen only the cataclysm, or have you also seen the bravery of the father who drove into a gun battle to save his son and grandchildren? The fortitude of young people who returned to the music festival to aid strangers? The joy when hostages were returned home safely? The courage of Gazans who dare to speak out against Hamas? The pain of the Palestinian families whose children have been killed?

Are we strong enough, big-hearted enough to hold the ALL of it?

The world began as Tohu vaVohu, but it did not remain so. The Torah teaches that God paused, breathed, and brought order to the chaos, day by day, through creation: light and cycles, life and generations, rhythms and regularity, the bounty of the garden.

We know that whenever we, as a people, are knocked down, we get back up. We seek and find our friends. We build something better, and we will again.

The world may seem mad, but it is not really. Not entirely. The wilderness is howling, but the howling is not all there is. There is also the garden of love, justice, compassion, and order. We, the people in this room, can expand the garden, grow it further, through our witness, through our action, day by day by day.

i Breath of Life, Paraclete Press, 2011, page 4

ii Num. 35:30; Deut. 17:6

iii Eclipse of God, Buber, Harper Torchbooks, page 4

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