Rabbi Julie’s sermon for Rosh Hashanah: Empathy, Grace, & Kindness

When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the rabbis wanted to understand when the unraveling began.  Was it when Nebuchadnezer breached the Temple walls?  Or was it when Moses came down the mountain and saw the people dancing with the golden calf and smashed the Ten Commandments to smithereens?  Ultimately, the rabbis say the Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam, because of internal animosity.

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We are living in a time when people are shot and killed because someone doesn’t agree with their political views.   In the words of Utah Governor Spencer Cox, “This is our moment.  Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp?”^[1]   Something is profoundly broken right now.  In the words of Jamil Zaki, author of Building Empathy in a Fractured World, “if you wanted to design a system to break empathy, you could scarcely do better than the society we’ve created.”^[2]   What’s missing is something Sarah McBride, the freshman congresswoman from Delaware, calls grace, the ability to “create room for disagreement, to assume good intentions, to assume that the people who are on the other side of an issue from you aren’t automatically hateful, horrible people…it’s a kindness that just feels so missing.”^[3]

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The Mishnah teaches that 5 calamities befell our people on the 17th of Tammuz, the day that marks the beginning of the end of the Temple in Jerusalem.  One of them was bittul tamid, the sudden termination of the daily burnt sacrifice known as the Tamid.   What was it that happened on 17th of Tammuz to make the offering that was counted on every morning and evening, the sacrifice literally named ‘always’, cease to exist?

According to the Talmud^[4], there were two brothers, both descended from the Maccabees, living in Jerusalem under siege.  To say they didn’t always see eye to eye was an understatement.  When their mother Queen Salome died they started a civil war to fight for the throne and for the position of High Priest.  They disagreed not only on politics but also on religion.  Hyrcanus II, the elder brother, was part of the progressive party, the Pharisees who believed Jewish law could evolve through the Oral Torah, that Torah values could be harmonized with their own ideas and conscience.  The younger brother, Aristobolus II was part of the conservative party, the Saducees, who believed only in the original words of the Torah, and nothing else, taking ‘eye for an eye’ literally.

Each faction was trapped on opposite sides of the walls that surrounded the ancient city of Jerusalem.  The aristocracy, the priestly class, with Aristobolus, was trapped inside with access to the Temple, but because of the siege, they had run out of animals to sacrifice. And the common people, together with the scholars and Hyrcanus, were trapped outside the city, with access to the animals, but no way to enter the gates of the city to ascend to the Temple Mount.  Despite the stone walls between them, the two factions found a way to continue the Tamid offering.  Each day, from the top of the walls of Jerusalem, the Saducees lowered a basket containing gold and the Pharisees placed two lambs in the basket.  The gold was lowered, the animals were raised, the gold was lowered, and the animals were raised, and the ‘always’ offering continued in the Temple despite their substantial differences of opinion.  But then one tragic day, they lowered the gold, but they placed two pigs in the basket.  They did not even manage to raise the basket halfway up before the pigs clawed the walls of Jerusalem, nullifying the Tamid sacrifice, until ‘always’ was no more, heralding the destruction of Jerusalem.

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I’ve been wrestling for some time with how to pray for our country, for Israel, and for the safe return of the hostages, given the diversity of people and political views in our congregation.   If I’m honest, at the beginning, praying for Palestinians wasn’t even a question on my mind; I sensed for myself and others that the pain and the trauma of October 7th was too raw.   But as the death toll on the Palestinian side rose, and more and more families were displaced and hungry, and as some of the hostages came home, and as Israel achieved significant military victories in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, something shifted in me.

I would print out alternative prayers, but leave them at home.  I would stand before the congregation, thinking about saying something, but remain silent.    I wanted to model an ability to hold in our hearts concern for the humanity and heartache of both peoples, but I couldn’t find the words that wouldn’t speak to some while alienating others.   At the end of the summer, I finally realized I couldn’t figure this out by myself, so I asked for help.  Seven congregants with vastly different views on prayer and the conflict gathered one evening to talk about the words and phrases that resonated in the prayers and what was missing.  There were some common and complementary themes, but mostly starkly opposing views that couldn’t easily be reconciled.  I left the meeting agitated.  On the one hand, we had been open and honest and respectful, no small achievement given the topic and the players, but on the other hand, we didn’t seem to have common ground.  It was hard for me to go to sleep that night.  I was wrestling with the question, should I write the prayer that speaks to me, or should I write the prayer that keeps everyone in the room?

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According to the very latest research, empathy is like a muscle that can be strengthened and trained.   More like a skill set than a fixed trait, our ability to be sensitive to the feelings and experiences of others can grow or shrink.  Stanford professor,  Jamil Zaki explains, everyone is born with an empathy set-point, but two-thirds of our ability to empathize is in our own hands.   Yes, some people are naturally better at empathy than others, but research shows we can increase our empathy on purpose, through our actions and even through our beliefs.   “In any given moment,  we can turn empathy up or down like the volume knob on a stereo.”   If we believe it’s possible to grow our empathy like any other skill, we are more likely to “dig in” and try to empathize when things are hard.^[5]

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Here at Shomrei, I sense a hunger for more grace in our conversations with each other.   People have told me they love to come together for Kiddush, across the generations, but sometimes they’re hesitant to speak openly and honestly about divisive issues.  We are searching, they tell me, for a safe place to talk about what’s happening in our country, and in Israel and Gaza, and in our lives, in a way that feels vulnerable and open-hearted.  We want to be able to disagree with each other without someone jumping down our throats or jumping to conclusions about who we are.  We don’t want to be judged or pigeonholed; we want to be heard and seen as complex people with hopes and fears and not just viewpoints.  Most of all, we don’t want to lose our sense of belonging here at Shomrei, but we also don’t want to lose our ability to speak our truths.

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At the end of October, we’ve invited the nationally-renowned organization, Resetting the Table, to teach a workshop at Shomrei called “Different Opinions, One Community.”  Resetting the Table was founded to help Jewish communities break through toxic conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and now brings their conflict resolution and empathy-building expertise to faith communities, the film and TV industries, and higher education.  I experienced first-hand at Princeton, during highly charged times, how shockingly transformative their workshops can be, but I didn’t even think about bringing them to Shomrei until Debra Caplan recommended it after her friend raved about the workshop at her synagogue in Brooklyn.

Debra’s friend, who is also the president of the Park Slope Jewish Center, described the workshop this way: “Everyone seemed to take it very seriously.  There were tears and a lot of laughter, and no one screamed or yelled at anyone despite being in sometimes very significant disagreement.  The “deep listening” format was rather moving and generated a lot of real empathy and fellowship among people who surely would have clashed in other contexts.” She said, “I left feeling hopeful and encouraged and really grateful to have had the chance to sit in community and talk about this without resorting to screaming and insulting and hurling things at each other.“^[6]  I urge each of you to take advantage of this special opportunity, to invest three hours on a Sunday, to flex your empathy muscles, to build trust, to learn new skills, and to transform conversations across difference for Shomrei.

* * *

We are living in a time when empathy and grace in personal and public discourse are at such an all-time low that our friendships, our communities, and our country are at risk.    In such polarized times,  it might seem like a remarkable achievement if we can put aside our differences enough to keep the synagogue operating, like the opposing factions who lowered the gold and raised the animals to keep the Temple running in Jerusalem.   But let us not forget that ideally, we wouldn’t be living with walls between us.   It is precisely in a time like this, when the human decency we had counted on morning and evening, day after day, is no longer with us, that we need to remember we do not aspire be like Hyrcanus and Aristobolus, barely keeping our sacred communities functioning from opposite sides of the walls between us, but rather we want to be like Hillel and Shammai.  We want to be like the ancient rabbis who disagreed on everything, but nevertheless took the time not only to understand each other’s points of view, but even to teach the other person’s point of view before their own.   May this be a year where we “take the off-ramp” and where we “refuse to believe the world has to be this way.”^[7]  May this be a year where we still believe in our ability to grow in empathy and in grace and where we work together as a community to change the conversation.  Shanah Tovah.

^[1] abcnews.com ‘This is our moment’: Utah governor’s impassioned plea after Charlie Kirk shooting. 9/12/25

^[2] Jamil Zaki, Building Empathy in a Fractured World, p. 8.

^[3] The Ezra Klein Show, ‘Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights’, 6/17/25.

^[4] Jerusalem Talmud, Ta’anit 4:5.

^[5] Jamil Zaki, Buidling Empathy in a Fractured World, p. 15, 23, 27.

^[6] Email from Elizabeth Wollman, March 17, 2025.

^[7] Krista Tippet interviewed by Rabbi Sarit Hurwitz, Hartman Institue in New York, Elul 2025.

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