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Rabbi Jacqueline Ninio OAM 2024 RH sermons

Rabbi Jacqueline Ninio OAM

Emanuel Synagogue

Yonatan and Galya stood beneath the chuppah, staring at one another, tears in their eyes: tears of joy mingled with tears of deep sadness. Yonatan had limped to the chuppah, his leg injured in a battle he fought on October 7th. He answered the call of his commanding officer that anyone with a weapon should come. He went. Five hours he fought with just a hand gun, saving lives, before he was wounded and taken to hospital. Galya’s tears were for her parent’s community. A kibbutz in the Gaza envelope. On that fateful day, her fiancée fighting, she waited for news of her family. Trapped in a safe room, she hoped and prayed they and Yonatan would be ok. Their kibbutz was one of the few spared. They were evacuated on October 8th and survived the terror and horror suffered by neighbouring kibbutzim.

Before he went to fight, Yonatan stopped at his brother Daniel’s base in Nachal Oz. His tank was gone, so the family were sure he was alive and they prayed that he would be safe in his metal shelter. But as the days went by, there was no news from Daniel, and then the IDF found his tank. One of his tank mates was dead inside, the others, including Daniel missing. The family, the community, began to pray for Daniel and all the captured and missing. Yonatan and Galya were due to be married four days later. What were they to do? How could they celebrate in the midst of the grief, uncertainty, trauma. They were in the deep dark shadow of October 7th, thousands of lives lost, people violated, wounded, the soul of Israel shattered, and their beloved brother, son, missing.

Yonatan and Galya decided they would continue with the wedding, that they should continue with the wedding, it was what Daniel would have wanted, it was what they needed. Yonatan, still struggling with his injuries, made it down the aisle, there were no crutches available, so many wounded and injured, and he stood with his bride. Beneath the chuppah prayers and psalms were said for Daniel, for all those absent and missing. Tears poured down all their faces, wrenching sobs and then a shift, to celebrate the bride and groom, to dance at a chuppah, to find joy even in the midst of the sorrow and the unknowing, to find it because of the sorrow and unknowing.

Yonatan’s sister Shira said: “it was very powerful but also happy. I have never experienced being so happy and sad at the same time. It was one of the most spiritual experiences I have ever had. It was so holy and beautiful. The idea that we could still be happy during this unimaginable situation, to do what the Jewish people always do, and appreciate life and celebrate another bayit ne’eman be Yisrael. It was hard but beautiful” Yonatan and Daniel’s father said “it was the holiest, saddest, happiest chuppah…there was a tremendous amount of simcha, joy.”[1] A hundred and sixty three days into the war, Daniel’s family were informed that he had been murdered on October 7th and his body taken to Gaza, where it remains, nearly one year later.

Since October 7th weddings have continued to be celebrated in Israel, in fact, more than ever before. People bringing forward their wedding dates to ensure they are married before heading off to their army bases. Others continuing with already programmed dates, still others, proposing and marrying quickly, now. There is an urgency to connect, to commit, to celebrate, to find holiness and joy even amongst the deepest and darkest sadness. Weddings have been celebrated all over the country, some, like my cousin’s daughter, as planned, hundreds of people, bands and joyful dancing with a spirit of grasping every moment. Others gathering in back gardens and on army bases, one bride walking down a hastily constructed aisle in her full uniform with a veil. More babies have been born, weddings celebrated, moments treasured as the events of that horror day and the tragedy are still unfolding and they urge us all to not waste even a moment. To grasp every day and find the joy.

This year, many of us have wondered how we can celebrate Rosh Hashana, how we can taste the sweetness of the apple and honey when we feel such bitterness. When lives are still being lost in a war we did not ask for or want, hostages still captive and missing, trauma permeates every aspect of life for everyone who survived and continues to survive. When Israel is being bombarded with attacks from Iran, our family in bomb shelters instead of around their tables. How can we declare, “hayom harat ha’olam,” “today is the birthday of the world” and celebrate, when antisemitism is rising, when insidious hatred is once again revealing itself? How can we hear the sound of the shofar calling us to wake up when we are already awake? We have had our eyes opened to horrors we could not have imagined, we have seen such huge losses of innocent lives in Israel and in Gaza, we have felt the sting, the pain of living as a Jew in this world, so how can we now gather and celebrate with sweetness and honey?

How? How? We do it because we must. Because unless we can find the joy even amongst the sadness, we will be defeated, not by our enemies but by ourselves. People often ask how it can be that the Jewish people, after exile and pogroms, the Holocaust, expulsions, thousands of years of tragedy and disaster, continue to exist and thrive? How is it that the Jewish people are still here? We are here because we have learned that we need to find joy, that joy and hope are a revolution, they are our defiance, our way of lighting a path out of the darkness. It does not mean that we ignore, forget or do not experience the horrors and the pain, the mourning and the loss, but we refuse to see only that.

The greatest movement of joy in Judaism, Chassidism was born out of darkness. The Ba’al Shem Tov was teaching and preaching as the Jewish people were suffering all manner of pain from oppressors: pogroms, destruction of communities and the response to the struggle from the establishment was to turn to God, cry out from the depths of pain, to fast, repent and try and turn back the decree which had assigned to them this fate. But the Ba’al Shem Tov offered an alternative approach, he said after two millennia of exile and persecution, the Jewish people did not need more chastisement and rebuke, instead we should gather in joy, we must celebrate. He took the words from the powerful psalm of King David “ivdu et Adonai be Simcha” “Serve God with joy,”[2] and enacted them amongst his disciples. He argued that God did not want us to suffer, God wanted us to approach with joy. Despite the pain and struggle, the suffering and hurt, we should find a way to be with God in joy.

Viktor Frankl spoke about the horrors of his time in the Holocaust, and famously said that everything can be taken from a person except their attitude to a particular situation. Even in the depths of hell, he and others found moments of joy. He recalled an evening when everyone was resting on the floor of their hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand when a fellow prisoner rushed in and encouraged everyone to go outside and look at the sunset. He writes “standing outside we saw the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colours, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “how beautiful the world could be.”[3] Joy in the darkness.

Rabbi Gershon Winkler wrote: “this is the audacity of the Torah, which challenges us to dance on Simchat Torah with numbers etched into our arms, to dream tenaciously about Jerusalem in spite of 2,000 years of exile, to sing joyful melodies on Saturday, even if we know a pogrom is pending on Sunday. We are a people subjected to unimaginable tragedy, genocide, expulsion and conquest…(so for us, joy) is more than an emotion, it is a theology.”[4]

And the theology of joy teaches us that its power to touch God’s soul is deep, the Ba’al Shem Tov taught that if tears can open the gates of repentance, joy absolutely demolishes them! In fact, redemption will come only when we approach life seeking joy. The word moshiach and the word yismach “be joyful,” contain the same letters: joy is what will usher in the world of peace and the fulfilment of the visions of the prophets. And science backs up this teaching. It says that people who find joy are more compassionate. The Dali Lama notes that compassion is not empathy, empathy is connecting with the pain of another, compassion is connecting with that struggle and then acting to make the situation better.[5] Compassion and joy are entwined and when joy leads to compassion, it helps us to act and do in the world, to heal the brokenness and bring about a time of redemption. And how great is that need in our world right now? How much do we need to find that compassion, the ability to find moments of joy which can ignite our compassion for each other and the world, so that we go out with hearts full of hope, to make the changes we dream of and pray for.

But we do not do this alone. Rabbi Sacks points out that unlike happiness, simcha, joy, is not a lone pursuit.[6] In the Torah, the times we are commanded to be joyful are all connected with community. Ross Gay, in his book “inciting Joy” says that joy is about entanglement and it is when we can connect with others not only can we find moments of joy, but we can do so, even in our suffering, because we are not alone.[7] Archbishop Tutu says that when he is struggling to sleep, instead of fighting it, he thinks about all the others who in that moment are also unable to sleep. He connects himself with the myriad of people all over the world who are in the same darkness as him and he said it lifts a little of the pain.[8]

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav wrote and taught often about joy. He was a man who lived a mere 38 years and many of those were filled with suffering and struggle. He and his wife had six daughters and two sons. Two daughters died at birth, two sons within 18 months, leaving four surviving children. His wife then died of tuberculosis and his home was burned to the ground in a fire. Rebbe Nachman also suffered long bouts of crippling depression. But his teachings were filled with joy and the pursuit of it. He took an allocated time every day for sadness, and allowed himself to be in the depths of despair. And then he forced himself to find small joys, moments which could lift him from the darkness into the light. He recognised the struggle and the challenge, but he met it head on every day, until he found the light again. Rebbe Nachman said mitzvah gedolah lihiyot besimcha tamid, “it is a mitzvah to be joyous always.” He fought to find joy.

Rabbi Sacks quotes Kierkegard who says that it takes moral courage to grieve and religious courage to find joy.[9] Rebbe Nachman had religious courage. He taught that even when a person does not feel joyful, they should sing, dance, pretend until the joy comes. We need to find that religious courage, together, to stand in our grief and pain and also to find joy.

After the destruction of the Temple, where our people were murdered, exiled from their homes, kidnapped, lost, Nehemiah called on them not to mourn and weep but to enjoy food and drink, share with those who do not have. He said joy will be our strength.[10] Like our people have done, we need to find the courage, the audacity, the tenacity to grasp onto joy. To find even in our darkest hours, glimmers of light, which can help lead us to a place of hope and compassion.

It is not easy but the prayers of our High Holyday services help to guide us. We acknowledge that from dust we were fashioned and to dust we will return, that the decree, who will live and who will die, is not in our hands.  Rabbi Mordecai taught me the power of these verses, the surrender that we have to the fragility of life and our inability to control our destiny. So much is out of our hands and when we struggle and strive to dominate, to manipulate the world, we are endlessly frustrated and thwarted. We cannot bring peace, we cannot end antisemitism, we cannot free the hostages, we cannot heal the world, sometimes we feel like the task is too great, it is too overwhelming and we have no control. When we let go of our need to control, when we accept our sorrows, then we can find and embrace joy. But acceptance is not resignation, we do not stop trying to make the world better, we are called to use the pain and struggle, but not to give in to it. The tikkun, the resolution of the unetane tokef comes in the final words, uteshuvah utefilah utzedaka maavirin et roah hagezera, turning, prayer and righteous deeds can change the decree. As Rabbi Mordecai teaches, just when all is lost, when we feel hopeless and helpless, we are reminded that we do have agency, that we have a way out, our deeds and our actions, our response to the decree, can change our experience if not our fate. Like the family of Daniel Shwarts, all the couples who have been married and welcomed children, like the families of the murdered hostages, like the nation of Israel, like our people have done for millenia, we are called to grasp onto the moments of joy. To cling to life not death, to turn the decree to one where we bring one another to a place of healing and hope, and that will be by finding joy.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described Judaism as an “Ode to Joy” and if that is so, this year we need to play the notes together, to become a choir which sings the song of peace. We each have our part to play, but the power is when we join our voices into a chorus, lifting each other, giving one another the strength to catch the magical bursts of joy, even within the sorrow and challenges. This Rosh Hashana, we need to declare, “hayom harat haolam” today is the birthday of the world: our big, beautiful, broken world! Ze hayom asah Adonai nagilah venismecha bo, this is the day that God created, let us rejoice and be glad in it!”

[1] “A Time of Horror, a Time of Happiness: An interview with Rabbi Doron and Shira Perez” Mizrachi World News
[2] Psalm
[3] Mishkan Tefilah Holocaust readings
[4] “Ask the Rabbis: should Jews strive to be happy?” November 2014
[5] Pg. 252
[6] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Covenant and Conversation,
[7] Ross Gay, “Inciting Joy”
[8] Desmond Tutu and Dali Lama pg. 37 and pg. 99
[9] Rabbi Sacks “The Deep Power of Joy” Covenant and Conversation Re’eh
[10] Nehamiah 8 (9-10) in Jewish Journal, “Judaism’s Value of Happiness: Living with Gratitude and Idealism”

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