One Day…

Notwithstanding the punchline, I am not sure that I know the way out. Like many of you, I am struggling mightily with events in the world and I have been finding myself deeply de-stabilized.Three choice examples:

• First-There is the ongoing assault on American democracy and the fear of where all of this may lead.
• Second-Israel knows no peace. Israeli hostages have been in Gaza for almost two years and the horrific humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues to get worse. I am torn between my love for the State of Israel and its people and the dictates of my conscience.
• Third-The body politic is being poisoned by the words of our leaders. Words matter. They shape public culture. They affect the way people behave with one another. They inform character development in children. In 1989, George Bush declared in his inaugural address that he was committed to making America “a kinder, gentler nation”. Now I was not a big fan of George Bush’s presidency, but I appreciated that framing of what our country could and should be. Today, the message from the Trump Administration is: “Bullies call the shots”. More than any policy decision that has come down in the last 10 months, that message has made America a crueler, meaner country and it threatens every sector of our society as well as each of us, personally.

But, as the joke suggests, we, as Jews, know a bit about despair and I wanted to share some perspectives from our tradition. The big idea that I want to develop I telegraphed by the title of this sermon, “One day…” Those who are familiar with the Jewish liturgy will know that the last line of the aleinu, one of the closing prayers of every service, comes from the book of Zecharia: “One day, the world will be One and God’s name, One.”

What in the world does that mean? It is our sages’ language for pointing to a Messianic era, a better day to come. When we are in a funk, as so many of us are, the first step out of that funk is to be able to imagine the world as it could be/should be. Only then do we have some chance of working towards it and attaining it. Some rabbis think that the Messianic age will be a time when evil will be vanquished from the world and only goodness, think “God”, will reign. But more nuanced rabbis interpret “one day” differently. The Hasidic master, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, suggests that this future “one day” will come about when humanity learns to live each day with a vision of what Cosmic Oneness or God’s oneness looks like. That does not eliminate evil from the world. Rather, it changes the way each of us responds to hardship, adversity and fear.

I found this teaching so helpful and, not unlike so many other Hasidic teachings, much more consistent with my Reconstructionist theology and worldview. Let me then offer three strategies that might hasten the coming of this, aspirational, “One Day”.

First strategy: Spiritual Activism. I put those two words together, advisedly. Activism is the commitment not to close our eyes to the pain and injustice in the world. It is the work of organizing, of attending rallies, of raising money and canvassing for good candidates for public office, of educating ourselves on the issues, lobbying public officials, of supporting non-profits doing good work and much, much more. It is about being an “upstander” and not a “bystander”.

But these strategies alone, are not enough. What history has taught us is that the most powerful weapon in fighting tyranny, is courage that is married to deep spiritual commitments. Some examples:

• In 1930, Mahatma Ghandi led a 240-mile Salt March, from his ashram in Ahmnabad to the Arabian Sea where he defied the British law against Indians collecting or selling salt. British soldiers beat Indian peasants who refused to resist. Ghandi was arrested along with 60,000 other Indians who joined the non-violent civil disobedience protests. The march and the arrests attracted international media attention. It was the beginning of massive Indian resistance to British colonial rule and it paved the way to Indian independence from Britain in 1947.
• Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, AL in 1965 was met with ruthless violence by Alabama state troopers. It raised the conscience of this nation against racism and discrimination and led to the signing of the Voting Rights Act in that same year.
• A personal example: My own political activism was triggered by the role model of Natan Sharansky. Sharansky was a Russian Jew who was denied an exit visa to Israel by the Soviets in 1973. He became the most famous of all Soviet Jewish “refuseniks” and a regular source for the international press stationed in Moscow. The KGB arrested him in 1977. They put on a “show trial” watched by the world, but the guilty verdict was pre-determined. He was sent to prison for 9 years, much of that time in solitary confinement. But Sharansky’s single-minded courage in standing up to Soviet authorities and his insistence on having the right to live as a Jew and move to Israel, rallied thousands of Jews and non-Jews to his cause and led to his release in 1986. Sharansky’s book, Fear No Evil, chronicled his historic resistance to Soviet tyranny; it was a book that shaped my entire path to activism and to the rabbinate.

A Hindu, a Christian and a Jew, each deeply committed to their faith, which informed how they would stand up against oppression and injustice. What was common to their acts of spiritual activism was a vision of “One Day”, a time when all human beings in the world would be seen as equal, because every, single human being is a reflection of Divine Unity. This is another way of understanding the Biblical principal of tzelem Elohim, humans in the image of God. Consider: What would it look like if each of us lived our life informed by the belief that every human has infinite value? 

Second strategy: Resilience. There is not a person in this room who has not lost a loved one, experienced disappointment and failure, or lived in the face of adversity. Such setbacks are part of life, and, as sure as the sun will set tomorrow, we will face such setbacks again in the future. We will never live without adversity; but we can cultivate resilience which is, essentially, a re-affirmation of life, even in midst of despair.

The mourners kaddish does not mention death. Instead, it is the mandated prayer Jews say after suffering the death of a loved one, because it affirms life. Yitgadal, ve-yitkadash, shmay rabbah…. We say, “may the presence of God be made larger in the world” precisely because when someone dies, a piece of God is lost in the world. It is up to us, the survivors, to replace the loss of a loved one with acts of hesed and tzedakah, acts of kindness and charity, as a tikkun, as a repair, to the brokenness we feel in our hearts, and in the world.

My personal Rebbe of resilience is Pastor Johnny Felix. Pastor Johnny is the founder and principal of the K-9^th grade, NICL school in Leogane, Haiti, which Adat Shalom has now supported for 12 years, both with financial contributions which provides scholarships to students, and with the work of our hands, provided over the course of five service missions Adat Shalom has sponsored to Haiti in the last 10 years. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the country is as close to a “failed state” as there is in the world. Despite this, Pastor Johnny has grown his school from a dozen students to close to 400 students in the time I have known him, overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.

This past year we started to have monthly calls with Pastor Johnny as he shared with us that the gangs that have taken over the capital, Port au Prince, were now just a few miles away from Leogane, the town where he and his family live. He reported that dozens of families were already fleeing the city, with all their worldly possessions, piled high on the roof of their cars. Pastor Johnny told us that the calls from me and the leadership of Adat Shalom’s Haiti Project, gave him the courage to meet this challenge facing his family and his school. Through it all, Pastor Johnny stayed strong because he knows how many children and their parents look to him for courage and as a role model. When I confront my own despair, I often think of Pastor Johnny and realize how my troubles pale in comparison to the realities of his life.

There may be no place on earth that requires more resilience than the State of Israel. Here is a story that first shocked, and then, inspired me. Marla Bennett was an American Jew studying at Hebrew University when, in 2002, she was killed alongside eight other students when an Arab terrorist detonated a bomb in a Hebrew University cafeteria. At the time, Marla was engaged to be married to another American exchange student named Michael Simon.

When Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, another young, engaged to be married Jewish couple, were gunned down in front of the Capital Jewish Museum, right down the road from here last May, an Israeli named Claire Sufrin wrote an article in the Times of Israel. She shared the fact that, four years after the murder of Marla Bennett, she married Marla’s fiancé, Michael Simon. Here is an excerpt of her article, which tells us more about resilience than anything I can say:

“Sometimes I wonder: how did Michael and I do it? Why did I take a chance on this ‘broken man’? How did the pain and confusion contract enough that there was space for new love to grow from fragile to strong, for a good marriage, two sweet children and lives devoted to serving others?…I want to say that the answer is hope, that there is always hope, that hope is what brings us forward from pain to possibility… My story-my family’s story-is a very small piece of a much larger story, the story of the Jewish people.”

One footnote to this story of resilience. In January of 2025, the Arab terrorist who set the bomb that killed Marla Bennett in 2002, was released as one of hundreds of prisoners exchanged for several Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.

Third strategy: Hope and Faith. You might now expect me to make a pitch for religion. I won’t. There is as much “bad religion” out there as there is “good religion” and that is true in every faith community on the planet. I also know that there are many, non-religious places where people can find hope and faith. If you find a faith community that helps you feel hopeful about the future, consider yourself very lucky.

What I can share anecdotally, though, is that the most powerful religious experiences I have ever had was when I attended a religious gathering among people who were facing the most difficult life circumstances. I recall attending a Black Baptist Church on North Broad St. in Philadelphia, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. It was two blocks south of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College when I was a rabbinical student. After driving by it more than 100 times, I decided to attend their services on one Sunday morning and it was a “Wow”! The place was packed, the music and gospel choir was spectacular and, when they passed the plate, people who were struggling to make ends meet, were generous in their tithings. People facing desperate circumstances were coming to church to find hope and faith. I had similar experiences, several times, attending church services in Haiti.

I’ve had powerful spiritual experiences in Jewish spaces as well. A lot of them have happened, here at Adat Shalom. But I also recall Jewish gatherings at times of great communal trauma—after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. After the Tree of Life murders in Pittsburgh in 2018. After the October 7^th atrocities in 2023. Each time, as our world was turned upside down and we could not even make sense of the given tragedy, there was support, and solace, and even some hope conveyed through communal prayer and song.

This is why we need one another. This is why we need Adat Shalom. A community of faith and hope that offers us a vision for the kind of world that we can create, if we band together.

The Jewish writer and activist, Leonard Fein, who also founded Mazon, once said that Jews are not optimists, rather we are “prisoners of hope”.  A people whose history is filled with as much tragedy as our own, could not but survive without being “prisoners of hope”. In a similar vein, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who was the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom wrote: “To be a Jew is to be an agent of hope in a world serially threatened by despair.”

How fitting that, after 1900 years of wandering, of persecution, of the horrors of the Holocaust, the national anthem adopted by the new State of Israel in 1948 was called Hatikvah, the Hope, based on a 19^th century poem by Naftali Herz Imber.

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I want to close by returning to the teaching of R. Levi Yitzchak. He suggested that the way we get closer to the Biblical aspiration of “One Day” was not by waving a magic wand so that all evil disappears from the world. Rather, we bring about that better, “One Day” by changing the way we respond to despair and to adversity. It parallels the words of Victor Frankel, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he writes: “Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Spiritual Activism. Resilience. Hope and Faith. Three strategies that are within our power to internalize and to achieve. All necessary for us to navigate the current reality and get closer to the vision given to us by the Jewish tradition: Bayom hahu, yiheye Adonay Echad, ushmo, Echad. “On that ‘One Day’ we will experience a Cosmic Oneness as envisioned by the generations that came before us”. May it be so for us. And we say, Amen.