The Ba’al Shem Tov lived in the 1700s in the pale of settlement. He is the person who we credit with the beginning of chassidut or chassidus, which is the emotionally aware strand of Jewish practice where we allow the spirit to be as important as the law.

It was legendary that the Ba’al Shem Tov loved the shofar and he wanted the shofar blasts to be absolutely perfect. He had many very esoteric kavanot (intentions), and you would have to study these kavanot very, very well in order to blow the shofar perfectly. One year he was holding tryouts for the shofar blower and there was a guy in town who had been working for years with the hope of being the shofar blower for the Ba’al Shem Tov. He'd studied every kavana and thought he knew them backwards and forwards. The day arrived and he waited in line with the other shofar blowers, worrying “Am I going to do it right?” 

When it was his turn to go before the Ba’al Shem Tov, his mind went absolutely blank. He felt his chest tighten and his heart break because he had worked so hard to get to that moment. He cared so deeply about getting it right, but in that moment, he had nothing to offer. And he just started weeping. 

Then the Ba’al Shem Tov said, "You're hired."

"What? How can this be?” He cried, “I failed the test." 

The Ba’al Shem Tov explained with an allegory that there is a palace that has many doors, and there are many keys to those doors, but there's one thing that breaks all of those doors open, and that is an axe. The palace is the world. The many doors are all of the different aspects of reality and of creation. The different keys are the kavanot which allow us to unlock each door. But the axe is the broken heart.

The thing that can actually break us all open is admitting that we have a broken heart. B’nai mitzvah students are often nervous when they're approaching their b’nai mitzvah. In their nervousness, I see that they care. And we should care deeply about being Jewish people and upholding our tradition, especially today. 

I heard a beautiful teaching from Rachel Goldberg Polin, who is famous because she is the mother of Hersh Goldberg Polin, who was murdered by Hamas along with 5 other hostages. Rachel explained that the shofar has three different types of blasts: the tekiyah, the shevarim, and the truah. The tekiyah, the long note, is the coronation blast. That is what lets us know that God is in the house, that there is something bigger and greater than ourselves. The truah, the nine blasts, is like an alarm clock saying “Wake up. Wake up.” It's the alarm clock of the soul. But the shevarim, the three broken notes, that is the sound of our weeping.

The Rambam, 12th century rabbi, explained that the shevarim is the sound of the soul crying out. He describes the shevarim as the sobbing of the soul saying, “I want to change. I want to turn back to who I am at my soul. I want to know who I am at my core, at my essence.” 

I found myself thinking a lot leading up to these holidays. I wondered, “What am I going to say? How can I possibly have any teaching worthy of this moment, worthy of the Jewish people?” About 10 days ago, it clicked for me. I realized I do not have a thinking problem. I have a feeling problem. The thing that we are experiencing is a collective broken heart, and there's no thinking your way out of that. You just have to feel it and move through the pain. 

I've been carrying around so many uncomfortable feelings without really understanding what was in them. I decided that in order to prepare for the chagim this year, I would try to feel my feelings. I found myself weeping, deep, guttural sobs. I had this profound feeling that on the one hand it has been really painful to be a part of the Jewish people. And on the other hand, to be part of the Jewish people is the greatest gift I have ever had in my whole life. I was experiencing both of these feelings simultaneously: the pain of being a Jew and the absolute joy and gratitude for being a Jew. And it hurt. 

Really soon after October 7th, a parent reached out to me and said, "I don't know what to tell my kids." I didn't know exactly what this person was struggling with. I immediately offered some advice and he said, "No, no, no. That's not at all what I mean. What I mean is that I want to tell my kids that we're hated, but I don't want to tell my kids that we are hated."

Once I understood what was ailing him, the truth was immediately clear to me. “If you choose to tell them that we are hated, you also have to tell them what you love about being a Jew.”

When I work with our Madrichim, our teens who give up their Sunday mornings to be here at Adat Shalom, I try to give them space to understand their Jewish identities. I am constantly asking, “what does it mean to you to be a Jew?”

This year at our kickoff learning session, I asked them to reflect for a second on if, when they introduce themselves to other people, they identify themselves as Jew-ish or as a Jew. 

One of them responded honestly, "well, I identify as Jewish because being a Jew just has kind of like an ick."

This teen named something that I think so many of us can recognize. Simply owning and not qualifying the statement “I am a Jew,’" can bring with it a certain “ick.” I want to spend a moment unpacking that “ick” because this discomfort with our identity, this uncertainty of whether we would prefer to be Jew-ish, or being a Jew.

Let us think about this “ick” in two ways. One is the inheritance of so much of the American Jewish community and our efforts to assimilate. This is a response to millennia of antisemitism. Dara Horn, in her book People Love Dead Jews explodes the myth that many of our names were changed at Ellis Island. My own family didn't come through New York at all, but my last name, which was Nosanchuk, was changed by my grandfather to be Nosan. As a kid, I understood that that was about trying to fit in and not be too Jewish, but I didn't know how to feel about that.

Dara Horn explains that based on the many records of Jews going to court and going through legal name change proceedings, the majority of Jews changed their own names. So why did we pass along a story that our names were changed by others? Because we felt ashamed of hiding a part of who we were in order to try to belong. Part of this “ick” is about what it feels like when you combat that, when you turn your back on the effort to assimilate and instead lean in and say, "No, I am a Jew.” I'm going to accept myself for being who I am. 

There's also an element of not wanting to be seen as being too embracing of particularism. Ari Shavit, an Israeli author who wrote My Promised Land, observed that in 21st century American academia there are three major transgressions — privilege, power, and particularism — and Jews are accused of all three.

Particularism is being “other,” particularism is being a Jew. When you say, "I'm Jewish," you can get around particularism. You can say, "I pick the good parts of what it means to be a Jew." But when you say, "I'm a Jew," you are part of a collective that you are not in control of, and that is uncomfortable. Especially in western civilization, which emphasizes being an individual. 

Being a Jew is about belonging to a family — and families embarrass us. 

But the beauty of belonging to a family is that you are a part of something greater than yourself. You are who you are and you bring yourself to that family and, G-d willing, you find your place in it. That's hard work, but to me, it's an antidote to so many of the unhealthy ways that identity is playing out in our world. 

Something came up for me as I was thinking about this Torah, which was my own experience of being a child who grew up Jewish and not as a Jew. Being a Jew was a conscious choice that I made for myself. My inheritance was Jew-ish. As I was thinking this week, I realized that as a kid when I had my Holocaust education, the thing that truly haunted me, not descended from survivors myself, was the idea that people just like me, other Jew-ish people to whom being Jews meant little, were killed as Jews. That terrified me as a child because I was afraid of the idea of dying for something that I didn't understand, something that meant almost nothing to me. The rest of my life has been about trying to rectify that, searching to understand for myself what it means to be a Jew. Because from the outside I'm going to be this whether I like it or not — whether I know what it means to me, or not. 

To flip that from a negative identity into a positive identity is our work. That's what we want to teach the next generation. We can't control how we are seen, but we can know who we are. 

There's this t-shirt I saw on the internet that says, "Stop fighting antisemitism online. Preserve your energy." It's a picture of a guy davening at the kotel. I love this shirt because I think it's deeply true. I think many of us are getting stuck fighting antisemitism online. I would rather you come to shul or have a shabbos dinner or eat a challah or do something that feels good because that is actually just as, if not more, powerful than the act of fighting antisemitism.

Being a Jew is the most powerful thing that you can do in the 21st century. It gives us a future. It gives us hope. It gives us strength. It gives us something to believe in. 

I went to the Chabad in Detroit when I was meeting my husband Phreddy and they sang this song at the beginning of Shabbat and it blew my mind. It goes, “Just one Shabbos, come and join with me. Just one shabbos and we'll all be free.” I felt that in my soul. For the record, I was already engaging with Shabbos in my own life. But I felt, "Yes, Chabad. I agree with you. Just one Shabbos. It's good for our soul. It's good for our identity formation. It's good to simply be.”

What Chabad understands, what I would like us all to understand, is that there is a really core way that Jews do identity and it is different from what you might expect if you were raised in the general secular public of the US. For Jews, we are what we do. Our Torah teaches, Na’aseh V’Nishma, we will do and then we will understand. Behavior shapes us. When we do a mitzvah, when we do anything that is engaging with what God wants for the Jewish people. It changes us. Rav Kook, the first chief rabbi of what would become the state of Israel, what was at the time Palestine taught, “They made two promises in regards to this teaching, Na’aseh V’Nishma, the promise to do and the promise to listen. The Jewish people agreed to do and to listen and the order is crucial. They promised to keep the Torah even before knowing why.”

I'm not interested in perfect performance or orthodox observance of the law. What I'm interested in is practice. Practice, not performance, not perfection. Think back to the guy who wanted to be the shofar blower so badly, finally letting himself not be perfect, but be real. To allow his yearning to drive him. That's what I'm looking for. Making Jewish commitments, creating boundaries in our lives that will connect us, ground us, root us in the world to not let perfectionism and orthodoxy get in the way of your practice. 

I want to close by offering three simple mitzvot that I think you could try in the year to come.

One: Shabbat in any form, think about what it would feel like, even for one hour of your week. If you spent one of your 168 hours with your phone off, how good would you feel? There is nothing more urgent than learning how to be present. This is a crazy time to live in. The internet is totally nuts. We have never dealt with anything like this as humans. And the Jewish people have an answer. You do not have to be perfect or orthodox about your observance, but you can turn off your phone for one hour. Bonus if you do so for 26 hours.

Two: Bikur cholim — visiting the sick. How many times have we felt too busy to visit those in our lives who are suffering? Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Stop by for five minutes, to say, “Hey, just thinking about you.” That's a mitzvah. And it changes us. It changes our relationships. Mitzvot take something from us. But they also give us something in return.

The last one is a gimme. You're already doing it. The mitzvah of hearing the shofar. Rachel Goldberg Polin said that the shofar makes us cry because it returns us to ourselves and where we have been at this exact moment for every year of our lives. The shofar actually puts us back into our lives. The shofar returns us to ourselves whether we have been hearing shofar for a lifetime or whether this shofar is the beginning of a series of shofar that we will hear into our future. The shofar is something that carries us from year to year.

When we hear shofar, our Mishna, our rabbis’ earliest teachings from Year 0 to 200, questioned, "How would you fulfill that mitzvah if you weren't inside the synagogue?” If you're walking on your way outside, they realized that you had to be paying attention. You had to have kavanah, intention, towards fulfilling the mitzvah of shofar. However, if you come inside, if you just come into the synagogue like you have all done today, that also fulfills the obligation. You don't even have to be paying attention. You might be wandering around the lobby right now. Just being here, you are fulfilling the mitzvah of being amongst and a part of the Jewish people.

I hope that when you hear shofar today, you can recognize in it the opportunity to practice living a life as a Jew, to experience the grief and the triumph of belonging in this one crazy life, in this one crazy world.