2025 Rabbi Edwards HHD Sermon

Rosh Hashanah

There’s a big difference between iced coffee and cold coffee. Iced coffee is a refreshing, live-giving elixir. Its natural habitat is an August day in 95 degree heat at 2:00pm. It is the perfect complement to a 20 minute break. It is motivation in liquid form. But cold coffee, let me tell you about cold coffee. Cold coffee is the kind of coffee that is brewed at 6:00 in the morning and consumed at 10:00. It sits idle on the counter, lying fallow while the rest of the morning tasks swirl around the house like a tasmanian devil. It is consumed purely for the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen compound known as caffeine. It stares at you for hours, descending in temperature, degrading in taste, and detaching from time. 

Evie and I sipped our fair share of cold coffee beginning on December 2nd of this past year. I noticed a paradox in that magical, trying, all-consuming first month of our daughter’s life. The non-negotiables of our daily routine like coffee, water, and hygiene all became secondary to the first-time parents that we were and are. Our days consisted of caring for a baby, caring for ourselves with whatever energy remained, and, as my dad put it, running an Amazon fulfillment center out of our garage. 

I really don’t remember a lot from that first month; maybe that experience is what our liturgy in U’netane Tokef is pointing toward when life is described as a passing shadow, a vanishing cloud, a chalom ya’uf, a fleeting dream. But then I take a sip of cold coffee, and I’m transported back to that fleeting dream in December. 

And I can transport back even further, to the day that Evie and I found out that with God’s help, our family was expanding. It was a day of unbounded gratitude, of dreaming and imagining what then seemed like the impossible. What would this baby be like? What would we call her? Would she be a good sleeper? How can we teach her to be a good person? When should we start teaching her Hebrew? There were some things we could prepare for ahead of time, like an expecting parents class on zoom where we practiced diaper changes on our dog’s stuffed elephant toy, but there was much, most things actually, that would have to wait. It was within these precious nine months and 10 days that I truly came to understand how little we are in control, especially as the non-birthing parent. These nine months were spent praying, hoping, and wishing for a healthy pregnancy, a healthy delivery, and a healthy baby. Something ultimately, that neither of us could guarantee. And something that many friends are still praying for. In those moments that I so desperately wanted control, I was forced to let go of the steering wheel - only to realize that I was never even driving the car to begin with. And once that baby comes, and I think other parents can attest to this, you realize you’re not even in the car. You’re standing on the curb, watching the vehicle speed off into the distance, trusting that the road will take them where they need to go. Even at the ripe old age of nine months, there are so many things we have had to let Esther figure out on her own. How to eat, how to drink from a straw, how to crawl, how to fall.

Our Rosh Hashanah liturgy speaks of today as a moment of conception, the day the world was conceived - hayom harat olam. I never fully understood this line until this past year. Within the metaphor of Rosh Hashanah, God is the expecting parent and we are in the womb. Rosh Hashanah exists in that pocket of time prior to the first word of the Torah. The world has been conceived, but not yet created. God has dreams and we, the people, are those dreams - born into existence whether or not the world was truly ready. And once we are born, humanity is at once completely in control and utterly helpless, just like our children. 

On this day, then, the previous year is gone and the coming year will arrive at any moment. This liminal space of Rosh Hashanah, the moment of the year’s conception, is time for us to dream for the sake of the generations that come after us. Part of our dreaming, as Jews, always involves reaching back into our familial memory. Tracing the stories of those who came before us that helped shape who we are today. 

Esther never knew any of her great-grandparents. All 8 of them were born in the United States. But of their parents, her great-great-grandparents, 9 of the 16 were born in Europe. They left long before the Nazis rose to power but nonetheless fled their homeland to escape persecution, economic disenfranchisement, and pogroms, vigilante mobs of civilians, empowered by the state, to terrorize and drive out Jewish communities. So they left and they dreamed. I can only imagine that moment of conception for them - on a ship headed to New York harbor - fantasizing about the world they would soon enter. 

When they arrived in America, it was by no means a perfect fit. Some came while our country was in the shadows of the Civil War - its aftershocks still shaping the nation. On a trip with our B’nai Abraham teens this past May, we visited the Legacy museum in Montgomery, Alabama. An incredible, disquieting museum on the history of slavery in America that will tear your heart into a thousand pieces. There was one exhibit in the museum that struck a particular chord with me. Displayed to the ceiling was a wall of newspaper clippings from the early to mid 1800s; they excerpts from slave auction ads selling children as young as one year old separated from their families - a common practice thought to generate greater productivity. 

At that moment I had the unbearable thought of being separated from my own child. I thought about Esther’s great great grandparents, fleeing Europe with nothing but their family, at least they had their family. I thought about the cruelty of it all. Playing with human life as if it were not our most sacred gift of all.

I often wonder: What would Esther’s great great grandparents think of our country today? Would the division we have all come to know be familiar or foreign? Would the divisiveness and rhetoric be expected or unheard of? They would probably be proud of the grandson the rabbi, but even prouder had he been a doctor.

How would they feel about unmarked federal agents snatching people off the street in broad daylight and flying them halfway across the country?

How would they comprehend the deterioration of our sacred democracy? 

How would they feel knowing that the programs which allowed them safe passage to America no longer exist? How would they react to the terrifying uptick in politically motivated violence, left, right, and center, to which no ideology is immune?

We are going down a very dangerous road in our country and I think that’s something we all feel. I’m worried for my daughter’s generation and I want to keep her safe. I want to be in control or at least have the agency to do something. We are staring down a strong current of intensifying violence.  

The question of what to do when danger and violence flood the world is as old as the Torah itself. Today we read arguably one of the most violent texts in the Torah, the binding of Isaac. 

In our story, Abraham is asked to do the unthinkable, to sacrifice his son Isaac. The son he and Sarah prayed and prayed for, and were finally able to have - at ages 100 and 90 respectively. 

In the previous chapter, which we read yesterday morning, Abraham is instructed by his wife Sarah to cast out his maidservant Hagar and the son he bore with her, at age 86, Ishmael. The Torah tells us that Abraham is hesitant, this is hard, but he ultimately honors Sarah’s wishes.

We might then expect Abraham’s only remaining son, Isaac, to be protected at all costs. And yet, just a few verses later, we reach Genesis 22, the Akedah, the binding of Isaac. Not only is Isaac not protected, he is sentenced to a death to be carried out by his own father.

Could it be that Abraham will lose his heir, and the story of the Israelites will end before it truly begins?

There seems to be no good way out of this. Either Abraham disobeys God’s command, or he murders his own son. What do we do when the tension between the options that are presented to us is so great that we are left helpless and deadlocked? This is a man who was told to leave his father’s house, to journey to an unnamed land, now told again to lech l’cha, to journey to an unnamed mountain to give up his son. For a moment, it seems like Abraham is destined to be a childless, parentless wanderer, groping in the shadows for his ephemeral destiny. 

Then suddenly, a voice rings out from on high. Avraham, Avraham. Child on altar, knife at the ready, Abraham’s hand is stayed. In that moment, the rabbis teach that Abraham prayed the following prayer: O Lord our God, may it be your will that when Isaac’s children are in trouble, you will remember the binding in their favor and be filled with compassion for them.” 

At that moment of extreme tension, on the threshold between life and death, Abraham prays. He dreams, with a bit of chutzpah. Knife in hand, he still finds the capacity to dream of a future for his child, that is about to die, and not only his child, but his children’s children. The story of a near sacrifice is transformed into a narrative of compassion and mercy for generations to come. 

There is no such thing as the point of no return. 

Dreams and prayers cannot stop violence. Dreams and prayers cannot save our loved ones. Dreams without responsibility are just wishful thinking. But dreams of purpose, dreams where we wake up from our sleep and do, there’s power in that. 

Family Therapist Terry Real says the following about the passage of trauma from one generation to the next: Family pathology rolls from generation to generation. Like a fire in the woods taking down everything in its path, until one person, in one generation, has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children to follow. 

The Akedah is often read as God testing Abraham. But perhaps Abraham was testing God. “Are you really going to make me do this? Is this truly what my God desires?” Abraham stood up to the flames. The knife was in his hand. And God said okay, maybe this isn’t what I desire. We do not have to live by the sword. Isaac, emblematic of future generations, should not know violence, Abraham, like you do. Put the knife down. Breathe. 

We all have a responsibility to leave the world in a better state for future generations than it was for us. How could we not want that? How do we put the knife down in our own time? 

We are facing a barrage of fear, uncertainty, and tension in our world and in our country. Rosh Hashanah, the day of the world’s conception, is calling us to act from a place of courage, a place of chutzpah, a place where, when at knife’s edge, we are still able to dream, to conceive of a better world. We are decidedly not in control of how the generations after us will act or what decisions they’ll make. But today still matters. In 5786, let your dreams carry into your actions. It’s ok from time to time to let your coffee go cold; let it remind you that the present moment won’t wait.