Long Path, Rosh HaShanah Day 2

Hilan Warshaw

“The directory is being rebuilt.”

There I was this past week, sitting in my home office, preparing the remarks that I am delivering to you now.

Like we all do much of the time, I was multitasking. While I was writing, I was also trading WhatsApp messages in Hebrew with my aunt and uncle in Tel Aviv; they were sequestered in a bomb shelter, where my cousin’s daughter was celebrating her 15th birthday, missiles flying overhead. I felt dread rise in my throat each time the single check mark next to my WhatsApp messages took a while to be joined by a second one and then turn blue. At the same time, I was also extracting hundreds of camera shots, one by one, from a recently failed hard drive— reclaiming a mass of material that I will need to hew into shape in order to finish my next two documentaries.

The software that I use to restore hard drives kept flashing the same message, “The directory is being rebuilt”— news bulletins from its successful campaign against chaos.

Well, I thought, exactly. After all, what else are these remarks about? Rebuilding the directory. Tikkun Olam. Arduously constructing an outcome whose future is uncertain.

It’s a theme that is meaningful to me personally. But I think it is also at the very core of our tradition as a people.

After all, Judaism itself is largely a story of gradual change, iteration, becoming. That begins at the very beginning, with the birthday that we are commemorating today on Rosh Hashanah. Our Torah starts with the words “Beresheet bara elokim et ha-shamayim ve’et ha-aretz.” Contrary to the slight mistranslation in the King James Bible, “beresheet bara,” or “beresheet
bra,” likely does not mean “In the beginning, God created the sky and earth” but rather “At the beginning of God’s creating the sky and the earth, the earth was chaos…” We aren’t told how much time preceded the decision to create this world, nor what existed before it. In this reading, then, this “beginning” was not the beginning of time and space; it was the beginning
of a project. And it was a mess.

The Torah not only describes a work in progress, but often seems to be one. Anyone who doubts that Judaism has always been a community of heterodoxy and debate has only to read the first two chapters of the Torah, which narrate the creation of human beings in two totally different versions, presented side by side. What’s going on there? As a reading experience, it’s
head-spinning. No sooner has God created the first person, then we’re back at the start of the scene, when people don’t exist yet. Did someone press the rewind button? Did the “director” ask for a different take, this time with a radical script change? Is it a glitch?

So the Bible demonstrates that life, all of us, and Judaism itself are evolving, a continuing discussion, containing chaos and contradictions. That we’re learning. And that that’s OK. I find this embrace of long-term becoming— the awareness that, like Moses, we may not live to see the fruition of all we labor for—very resonant on multiple levels.

Anyone who has been a parent understands this message in their bones. After all, we are giving our utmost for someone whom we hope and pray will long outlive us— bequeathing lessons whose full realizations we will not see (and don’t want to see).

A bittersweet aspect of my own life as a parent is that I have a beloved child who lives with me only some of the time. Here, then, is another level of long-term thinking. When I’m speaking with my son, I’m very conscious of planting seeds that I hope he will unearth in future moments — insights that can hopefully give him comfort, guidance, or perspective not only in the years but the days and weeks ahead, when he may not be with me.

In many ways creating artworks, which I do as a filmmaker, is much the same. You work terribly hard at making something that will hopefully survive you— that can inspire and perhaps inform people who may not know or care much about the coordinates of who you were. And once again, that’s OK. Because if you’re doing the job right, even if it comes deeply from you, ultimately it’s not really about you.

The lesson of long-term change is also, of course, deeply relevant to us as a people. There is no group that has suffered more trauma, more betrayal of trust, than the Jewish people. Jewish history often seems to be divided into the bad times and the not-yet-bad times. So we have every reason to look over our shoulders.

And yet, if we let this fact dictate our lives— If we treat every threat as if it’s existential, every year as if it’s 1938— if we base our Jewish lives around fighting anti-Semitism (necessary as that is), instead of also focusing on the positivity, the joy, the richness and rituals, the wisdom of our own Jewish stories— then our enemies have triumphed in a very sad way.

Of course, if one common symptom of trauma is the tyranny of memory, another one is denial — and sometimes even the subconscious desire to resemble or please one’s victimizer.

Painful as it may be, we cannot close our eyes to the insidiousness of anti-Semitism and how it has been both awakened and revealed since last Rosh Hashanah. Much has changed this year, and in the macro sense, this year has also shown how little has changed. After all, there’s surely something a bit— I believe the technical term is meshuggeh— about a political discourse that elevates “Zionism” (a concept whose relevance is restricted to a piece of land the size of New Jersey) to the status of a monstrous global evil— indeed, the very epitome of colonialism. Something we’ve seen before is happening when those who could muster no response to the Jewish killed and raped on October 7 — or who on October 8 and 9 rushed to excuse and “contextualize” the massacre— are now always eager not only to condemn specific Israeli actions but to advocate Israel’s entire eradication as a country.

And as surely as up is the opposite of down, we can be certain that if — God forbid— anti-Zionists get their wish and there’s no more Israel, the hostility would not stop there. It would find a new form; it always does. It’s just that, as in the 1930s and ‘40s, we would no longer have any country of our own that’s duty-bound to protect us, or simply take us in.

Far too many Jewish progressives have allowed their idealism to be coopted by this movement. Far too few have permitted themselves to interrogate the underlying reasons why such viscerally intense outrage is so easily marshaled against the Jewish state, as it is against no other country. It’s true that the social pressures can be overwhelming; the images from Gaza
are heartbreaking. But deeper forces are also at work. As Jews, we must be on guard here as well.

So, how do we let our history— whether personal, national or communal— educate our choices, while neither tyrannizing us nor driving us to denial?

There’s clearly no easy answer, but I think one key component is what the Torah teaches us in that first chapter: it’s a process. Don’t give up. The core potential of something is different from its imperfect current form. When God first started creating the world, it was a mess. 

It would certainly be self-defeating to stop trying when our larger communal commitments seem futile or disappointing. That’s definitely the case when it comes to two countries that mean a great to so many here, and that currently seem to be on a precipice: Israel and the United States.

As an Israeli-American and a liberal Zionist, I’ve spent decades feeling unrepresented by the country’s leadership. My pain is the pain of a frustrated partner, a true believer, of a family member who wants the other to fulfill all their best promises and be everything they can be. Because I’m in it for the long haul. We can and must stand with Israel as it faces contemporary blood libels and is besieged on most of its borders (and in the case of Iran and Yemen, from far beyond its borders), and still
urge it to live up to its ideals as a democracy; insist that it respect the human and civil rights of all who live under its control.

Praying as we do to  ׳אב הרחמן׳ —“the compassionate God”— it should not be too much to acknowledge that fellow human beings in Gaza, and now southern Lebanon, have been going through hell, even if we know others are also responsible for that. Or to point out that making every effort to protect civilians on the other side, and try to facilitate a better life for them—
particularly helpless people trapped by their cynical leaders, like the Palestinians in Gaza— is not only laudable, but also smart, showing the benefits of coexistence to those who might otherwise find little choice but to join the ranks of our adversaries.

I don’t know how to do all this, that’s for sure. And I know radical transformation won’t happen anytime soon. But we must not give up or stop trying— and doing so from love, and with love.

Then there’s America, a country which will soon decide at the polls what kind of new beginning it wants. In many ways, the U.S. has always been an even more worrisome work-in-progress than Israel. It’s a country that preaches democracy and equality to the world, and sometimes practices it, but that was built on the backs of slaves and the brutal dispossession of an entire continent’s native people.

This year, I made a film that addresses both American imperfections and the roots of Jewish trauma, Honorable Mr. Morgenthau. The film is about American immigration policy during the Holocaust, years when American attitudes were literally life-or-death matters for the Jewish people— and yet, America refused to abide by its own immigration quotas to let in refugees from Nazism. This film asks its viewers to face some harsh realities about our country: that there is nothing new or un-American about backlashes to immigration. That we have been not only the nation of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island but also, and more often, a country of harsh immigration laws meant to preserve America’s white Protestant hegemony: an attitude whose vigorous champions included Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a leader many Jews and progressives revere. That Hitler and the Nazis cited America as an inspiration because of America’s racially exclusionary immigration laws (for instance, the Chinese Immigration Act of the 1880s)— to say nothing of discrimination against blacks and Native Americans.

Yet I consider it a deeply patriotic film. Its climax occurs when Henry Morgenthau, the American Secretary of the Treasury and the only Jewish member of the Cabinet albeit a completely assimilated Jew, decides that pushing the President to fulfill the US’s best values is his duty— not as a Jew, but indeed as an American. His new activism led to the creation of the War Refugee Board, credited with saving as many as 200,000 Jews from the Nazis in 1944 and 1945— and showing that one person truly can make an enormous difference, even in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

I believe that with all my heart.

And so now, here we are.

What better setting for the next unfolding of continuous change than the familiar sensations of renewal, trees returning to the cool, fresh scent of autumn; another Rosh Hashanah.

It’s a reminder that the story continues, that we’re always given a new chance. Until, of course, we’re not. Because for each of us— hopefully very far in the future— there will eventually come a Rosh Hashanah that we won’t be there for. But as we’ve always known, that too is part of the story, of the world’s unfolding. And that which we will not live to see, we are also a part of.

The directory is being rebuilt.

Shana Tovah.