On Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, Stephen Wise Temple Rabbi Josh Knobel delivered a sermon for Rosh Hashanah, entitled “Everyone Matters: The Stories We Don’t Tell.” Below is the transcript. You can view and read other High Holy Day sermons, music, and photos on our High Holy Day Highlights page.
Shanah Tovah. My first job out of college was in the United States Army, serving as a telecommunications lieutenant in C Company, 40th Signal Battalion. Midway through my time with the company, we changed commanding officers.
Our outgoing commander, David, a West Point graduate and a veteran of the 82nd Airborne, was everything I’d expected a commander to be. A witty, broad-shouldered white male who exuded self-assurance and bravado, David had crafted a command climate—a story about who we were as a company—that demanded excellence, regardless of circumstances; that clearly defined roles and distinctions between officers and soldiers; and that portrayed confidence in every situation.
Our incoming commander was different. A petite woman of color with a warm and expansive smile, Melissa began to weave a new story for our company, one that sought, first and foremost, to acknowledge and care for each soldier and officer as an individual human being, even if it occasionally relaxed some standards or blurred the boundaries between officers and soldiers.
As a 22-year-old lieutenant, I found it difficult to reconcile these two narratives. Melissa’s casual approach permitted too many mistakes, I thought, from soldiers and officers alike. Rather than open my mind to the story she wanted to write for our company, I held tight to the narrative David had taught me, bristling or even ignoring Melissa when she made choices I felt were inconsistent with the approach I inherited from him.
It took far too long for me to recognize that in my determination to preserve the story David had authored during his command, I was sabotaging Melissa’s attempt to write her own, one Melissa—as our commander—deserved to share, and one our soldiers would desperately need when we deployed to the Middle East.
Our tradition teaches that each of us has a unique and precious story we are meant to share with the world. “It is the obligation of everyone in Israel to recognize they are unique,” the Hasidic masters teach. “There has never been a story like theirs in the world, for if there had been, then there would have been no need for them to be in the world.”[1]
But as I learned firsthand in the sands of Kuwait and Iraq, the dynamics of storytelling can prove precarious. Told from our limited, human perspective, our stories often overlap or contradict one another, creating a cacophony of clashing identities, each seeking to be heard in a world filled with a perpetually growing number of voices.
Navigating this cacophony and the ensuing struggle between stories represents the quintessential task of our age, for when we human beings decide whose story gets told, we also decide who gets to enjoy the accompanying benefits of authority, legitimacy, sympathy, and trust. When we choose whose story gets told, we’re really choosing who matters and who doesn’t.
What do we do, then, when someone else’s story questions the legitimacy of our own? The answer depends on how we’ve written our stories. If we’ve written our stories in pencil, then we can listen, openheartedly, to this new and challenging tale, using it to reexamine and—if necessary—to edit the details of the story we’ve already written. But if we’ve written our stories in ink—if we attach too much of our essence to our own narrow viewpoint—then we have no choice but to silence the stories of others when they conflict with our own. Unfortunately, if history is any indication, it appears that we humans mostly imprint our stories indelibly, using our influence to erase any tales that challenge ours.
Even our own Jewish literature is rife with examples of potentially rich and meaningful human stories silenced for daring to contradict the tales of those in power, including the traditional Torah reading for this first day of Rosh Hashanah. The passage commences with Abraham and Sarah celebrating the birth of their baby boy Isaac, but celebration quickly turns into tragedy. Upon noticing Ishmael—Abraham’s son with their maidservant, Hagar—Sarah orders Abraham to, “Send away that maidservant and her son, for that maidservant’s son must not inherit alongside my son, Isaac.”[2]
To preserve the integrity of her story—one that prioritizes her dignity as a new mother, as well as the inheritance of her child— Sarah quickly uses her status as matriarch to remove Hagar and Ishmael, whose developing stories had grown inconvenient. Though Hagar had been her maid for years, Sarah refuses to even refer to her or Ishmael by name, because the moment their story encroaches upon hers, they cease to matter. And so, Hagar and Ishmael are sent packing, forced to survive in the wilderness with nothing more than a loaf of bread and a skin of water.
To preserve the integrity of her story, Sarah robs Hagar and Ishmael of their inheritance, of their livelihood, of their safety, and—very nearly—of their lives, and why not? After all, once we’ve decided that someone else doesn’t matter, then what happens to them doesn’t matter.
By the same token, when we use our status to stifle the stories of others, we too may cause irreparable harm, either directly or by perpetuating systems of oppression that deprive people of what they need to survive and flourish.
When we rationalize poverty by blaming the impoverished, we’re telling poor people that they don’t matter. When we dispute reports of gender violence or dismiss women’s complaints of misogyny or discrimination as mere hysterics, we’re telling women that they don’t matter. When we scorn complaints against police brutality and systemic racism, we’re telling people of color that they don’t matter. When we’re told that Israel is nothing more than an apartheid state or that the Holocaust didn’t happen, we’re being told that we don’t matter.
And, like Hagar and Ishmael, when your story doesn’t matter, then you typically have little or no recourse against the perils surrounding you—from the countless, nameless women whose silent struggles and successes remain absent from the pages of human history … to the myriad Africans taken against their will to sweat in the tobacco plantations and cotton fields that helped give birth to this nation… to the natives and immigrants who died in order for it to flourish … to our fellow Jews who, in every century, became the convenient scapegoat for the world’s shortcomings…
But that’s not all. When we dismiss the stories of others, we deny ourselves and the world something precious and sacred. Who knows what Hagar’s or Ishmael’s stories could have taught our people? Who knows what beauty, what innovation, what revelation lay unrealized in the stories we casually discard along the way? Instead, we’ll never know… because their stories are lost, excised from the pages of history by people unwilling to even consider that their own stories might require revision, people like us.
How, then, do we learn to make space for the stories of others? How do we learn to write our stories in pencil, rather than ink, so that when new and different stories challenge us, we can embrace them and learn from them?
To do that, we must fulfill the words of our tradition’s foundational prayer, one we recite twice each day to remind us of its significance. Sh’ma Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad. “Listen Israel: Adonai is our God, Adonai alone.”
Listening—not believing—represents the beginning of authentic Jewish faith because listening acknowledges just how little we humans really know. Only through listening may we begin to comprehend something beyond ourselves. Only through listening may we enrich the story we’ve authored with the Divine revelation that awaits each of us, and only in a world of listening can we hope to be truly heard.
Today, on Rosh Hashanah, we ask God—Sh’ma Koleinu—listen to our stories, praying all the while that the record of our shortcomings will be edited before it is sealed in the Book of Life and Death. Today, we want nothing more than to learn that we still matter. But, if we wish to matter, then shouldn’t we be prepared to grant that same privilege to others?
No, it’s not always easy. Opening our hearts to narratives that challenge our understanding of ourselves and the world is hard, complicated work, but we know it can be done. After all, we’ve done it before, long ago, when our people learned to embrace a new story, even at the cost of their traditions.
When the Moabite widow, Ruth, vows to accompany her widowed mother-in-law, Naomi, to her hometown of Bethlehem, she has little reason to expect a warm welcome. After all, our Torah explicitly forbids any Moabite from joining the Jewish community, even 10 generations removed.[3]
But the Jews of Bethlehem, inspired by Ruth’s loyalty to her mother-in-law, embrace her wholeheartedly, providing her with a safe space to gather grain, with sufficient food to eat, and with an invitation to become part of the Jewish people, even though the Torah forbids it. By listening with an open mind to Ruth’s tale and willfully editing the details of a story our people had already written to consciously exclude Moabites from our narrative, our ancestors end centuries of bigotry and bequeath us our tradition’s definitive tale of kindness and loyalty, showing us the transformational power of listening.
When we learn to truly listen, we not only open our minds to new possibilities. We help create a world in which everyone and every story matters. As the essayist Rebecca Solnit suggests, “We are as a culture moving on to a future with more people and more voices and more possibilities. And some people are being left behind, not because this future is intolerant of them … but because they are intolerant of this future …”[4]
Thankfully, our incoming commander, Melissa, patiently waited for me to learn how to listen… to make space for her story as our commander. In doing so, I had to make some difficult changes to my own story. Namely, while the narrative I had learned about command under David had taught me meaningful lessons, it wasn’t gospel; and if C Company were to make it home safe from a wartime deployment that stretched from six months to 14, then we’d have to accept some informalities, and maybe even some imperfections, along the way; and, finally, our commander—not I—had the answers we needed. I just needed to let her share them.
Shanah Tovah.
[1] Martin Buber, The Way of Man according to the Teachings of Hasidism, (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 2003), 12.
[2] Genesis 21:10.
[3] Deut. 23:4.
[4] Rebecca Solnit, “Whose Story (and Country) Is This? On the Myth of the Real America,” Literary Hub, April 18, 2018.