Sermon by Rabbinic Intern Jacob Lipkin’s for Parshat Vaera, January 25, 2025
.ברוך אתה ה׳ אלוקינו מלך העולם, מתיר אסורים
Blessed are You, Hashem our God, Ruler of the World, who frees captives.
It might surprise you to hear, especially for those of you who have been gracious enough to give graciously of yourselves to Shomrei, that the most difficult professional challenge of my career did not take place in a synagogue. The most difficult work situation I’ve faced, and this is surprising to me as well, did not even include Jews!
I’ve shared with some of you that my first job out of college was as a 6th grade history teacher in a Brooklyn public charter school. In addition to the courses I taught on world history, I was also the homeroom advisor for 15 utterly rambunctious boys. On Fridays in our school, we engaged in a quasi-spiritual practice called “circle time”. The core of circle time was that, each week, a few people would step forward and share personally and extensively about a difficulty from this past week, and the rest of the group would affirm them. However, my advisory never got around to that part, because circle time begins with a quick go-around of everyone stating what they are currently feeling. It’s mean to be as simple as saying “I’m Jacob, and I’m feeling vulnerable.” Yet, to my bafflement, my 6th graders were totally incapable of this seemingly simple task. Most of them would only say “I’m tired,” which, psychologists would note, is not technically an emotion. So we made a rule banning “I’m tired” – you weren’t allowed to be tired! But my boys would sooner have a full-on meltdown than articulate a feeling. Kids whom I knew to be easygoing would abruptly misbehave and disrupt when it came time to share feelings. I even printed out the “wheel of emotions” and handed out copies to guide folks’ naming of emotions, but it was all for naught.
Why was it so hard for these 11 year old boys to talk about their feelings? An experienced colleague illuminated for me that what I was witnessing was, in some ways, developmentally appropriate. Prepubescent kids, and boys in particular, often struggle to identify what it is they are feeling. Developmental psychologists have noted that the skill of identifying and articulating emotions is a hallmark of maturity. I suspect that many of us, even when we’re feeling down or any range of negative emotions, are nonetheless able to voice in some capacity what it is we are feeling.
If naming emotions is a sign of maturity, then I will confess that I suppose I have had a somewhat immature week in the wake of the deal last week that returned Emily Damari, Romi Gonen, and Doron Steinbrecher to Israeli hands. Shira and I were in a mall on Sunday when I happened to glance at my phone and saw the Times of Israel headline that the 3 hostages were back on Israeli soil. I read the headline to Shira, and she asked me, in true social worker fashion, “how are you feeling?” But instead of answering her, I simply began to cry. I was totally unable to give words to my emotional state. I was not totally joyful, because I couldn’t help but think of the 94 hostages who have yet to be freed. I was not relieved, because I know that their lives will never be normal again. And I wasn’t hopeful, because it is only now that we can even begin to comprehend what nightmares these young women endured in captivity.
I want to share with you a bit of my personal connection to the hostages and to Romi in particular. The term “Parasocial relationships” refers to the phenomenon of people feeling a personal connection to celebrities by knowing lots about them and encountering them extensively despite having no real interaction with them. Two sociologists coined the term in 1956 initially to describe how people connect to performers and musical artists, but its usage has been extended broadly such that people will speak of parasocial relationships with podcast hosts, tv news anchors, and even fictional characters. But unfortunately, through a year of living in Israel last year, I discovered a new angle through my developing a parasocial relationship with many of the hostages. Due in large part to the ubiquitous hostage posters and their prominence in Israelis’ collective psyche over the last 15 and a half months, I’ve gotten to know many of the hostages fairly well. With Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Omer Neutra in particular, two Americans with New York connections, many mutual friends, and a shared affinity for Camp Ramah, I felt a parasocial tie particularly powerfully.
But there was no hostage I got to know as well as Romi Gonen, who turned 24 while she was in captivity. Last year on the fast of Esther right before Purim, I had the privilege of reading Torah at a public mincha service and ceremony for the hostages. Right after the Torah reading, a special speaker was introduced – Romi’s sister, Yarden. She stood just feet away from me with a large white dog leashed at her side. As we stood just feet apart, Yarden began by saying that she’s not a dog person. People were briefly puzzled, until she explained that she was actually holding Romi’s dog, and that she had adopted her while Romi was captive. Yarden told us all about Romi – how she was always smiling, how she loved music, how she gave great hugs, and how she adored her dog. She even said, quite memorably, “And if I’m being honest, she’s a little psycho!” Yarden concluded with a simple sentence that has stuck with me ever since: “I want to see her smile again.”
One way of describing what Yarden and so many others experienced is “ambiguous loss,” wherein a person lacks the full information to be able to determine the precise nature and extent of their loss. Omer Neutra’s parents, who spent over a year praying and advocating for his safe return only to learn that he had been killed on 10/7, were victims of ambiguous loss. A particularly painful manifestation of this phenomenon that I witnessed was seeing the ages on hostage posters, typically to the right of a person’s name, crossed out and replaced with a new age to reflect a birthday “celebrated” under Hamas captivity. But the crossed out ages were not the most heartrbreaking; what was most heartbreaking was seeing an age crossed out and replaced and then crossed out again to reflect two birthdays in captivity. It is unfathomable.
Given the week’s news, it was perhaps only natural that I read this week’s parashah with an eye toward emotional complexity. A particular interest of mine, as of late, has been reading Torah narratives with a focus on considering characters’ interiority, their emotional states. After God tells Moses to relay to the people that their freedom is approaching, the text compactly narrates that “they would not listen to Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage” (6:9). What sort of despair, depression, dispiritedness filled them that such happy news had no effect on them?
We can all too easily forget, since we know how the story ends, how there were so many hints, so many previews of Exodus – fake-outs if you will – prior to the grand departure. Unlike the dramatized story we retell at Pesach, the drawn out Exodus narrative that the Torah continues to narrate in this week’s portion contains moments of profound emotional ambiguity and uncertainty. In 8:4, after the second plague, Pharaoh beseeches Moses to intercede with God and has an abrupt change of heart “I will let the people go to worship!”. When the Israelites heard this news, how did they feel? And when that taste of freedom was all too quickly seized from them, what avalanche of feelings arose for them? Just a few verses later, in what the text implies is within less than a day, “when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he became stubborn and would not heed them.” The brutal yanking between freedom, or redemption, to use Rabbinic tradition’s language, and oppression was, I suspect, an intolerable state, one of immense emotional complexity and ambiguous loss. I imagine that the Israelites were just like my 6th grade advisees, unable to land on the right words to characterize what was transpiring in their hearts.
Yet even when the full Exodus occurs in a few chapters, there are many midrashim that suggest it was not wholly joyous. An ingenious midrash from Sanhedrin 22a in the Babylonian Talmud offers a clever textual emendation to reflect this complex state. Psalm 68, in celebrating the Exodus, describes God as מוציא אסירים בכושרות- God brings out prisoners into prosperity. Rabbi Yohanan said that we were misreading it. This is a plausible claim, since Biblical texts on scrolls are written without vowels, and in antiquity they only had our oral tradition to go on. So he suggests that we should put in the vowels slightly different and add a space so that it read בכי ושירות – with crying and songs. When God freed the Israelite slaves, their departure was marked by both crying and singing at the same time. What emotion could we possibly call that?
At our wedding, Shira’s aunt, Rabbi Yael Splansky, shared with us the wisdom, perhaps informed by this midrash, that a Jew is often found with tears in both eyes. But these tears are not like other normal tears. One eye cries tears of joy while the other cries tears of sorrow, and both are crying at the same time. We are leaving Egypt, finally – we cry with joy. But not all of us are making it out of Egypt – we cry with sorrow. It’s 3200 years later and three young women are returned home, free, after 471 unimaginable days – we cry with joy.
I want to suggest what we are experiencing now is, in a manner, the inverse of ambiguous loss. What we are living through is ambiguous gain. We actually don’t understand what it is that we’ve accomplished. We don’t know if Hamas will rise again to terrorize us. We do not know what state Emily, Doron, and Romi are in, or what sort of lives they will be able to return to. We have no idea if there are only the first to return or if, God forbid, the deal will collapse and it will be longer before the rest come back. I wrote this yesterday with news reports forecasting that Hamas’s intended hostages for release today violate the deal’s terms but without knowing what that means for today. I speak to you now about the deal in the uncomfortable state of not having yet read today’s news. Our ambiguous gain is painful.
Redemption and freedom – these do not come all at once. For the Jewish people, they never have. There will be no total victory for Israel in the war, for there is only this, whatever this is – partial successes and partial failures comingling. I am forced to conclude that the absence of total joy ought not prevent me from feeling partial joy, so I will share with you all, and invite you to join in, my joy that Romi is back with her dog, that Emily is back with her mother, and that Doron is back with her sister. I am overjoyed that Yarden Gonen can see Romi’s smile again.
Redemption may not be total, but it can be communal. Whatever we are mourning, whatever we are celebrating, let us commit now that we will do so together. If I could be so bold as to speak directly to our 94 remaining hostages, I would speak simply. The “together” that I just mentioned includes you. It must include you, whether, and it pains me deeply to concede this, you are presently in life or death. We cannot wait to be reunited with you. To paraphrase the words that the congregation responds after birkat hagomel, the blessing recited upon surviving a challenging ordeal,
.מי שגמלכן כל טוב הוא יגמלכם כל טוב סלה
May the one who was gracious to you three with goodness – may that One be gracious in all good things to all of you who remain hostage. Amen.
Video Archive
Livestreams and an archive of all Shomrei videos is available on our YouTube Channel at shomrei.org/video
- Parashat Vaera: Naming our Complex Emotions - Thu, Jan 30, 2025
- Parashat Vayetze: Jacob’s Adult Theology - Thu, Dec 12, 2024
- Why I stayed: A Remarkable Year of Rabbinical School in Israel - Thu, Oct 10, 2024