Congregation Rodef Shalom

Join us on November 15th at 10:30 am for a provocative, relevant and educational experience with Denver's esteemed women Rabbis. Enjoy a lovely brunch and a stimulating panel to discuss and reflect on a number of relevant topics, as they relate to Jewish women in today's world.

Rabbis participating are Sara Gilbert, Congregation Beth Israel; Birdie Becker, Shalom Park; Melissa Scholten-Gutierrez, Community Leader; Sarah Shulman, Hebrew Educational Alliance; Ruth Gelfard, Congregation Har Hashem; Elizabeth Sacks, Temple Emanuel; Rachel Kobrin, Congregation Rodef Shalom and Kim Harris, Congregation B'nai Chaim.

Tickets are $46 and you can register at https://west.hadassah.org/event/dmr-or-greater-denver-chapter-women-rabbis-discussion-panel/e838100/register/new/select-tickets

Location information will be provided upon registration.

My Brother’s Keeper: Elevating Our Humanity in a Time of Fear
Rabbi Rachel Kobrin
RH Day 1, 5787

A few months ago, I received an email from a congregant.

"I've decided to stop wearing my Star of David necklace," she wrote. "I've been wearing it for twenty-five years, since the day of my conversion. I love that star. I feel incomplete without it. But I'm scared."

I hate speaking about antisemitism. Truly — it’s the last thing I want to talk about. I tend to believe that when we spend too much time talking about those who hate us, we risk losing sight of the joy, beauty, and responsibility of living a Jewish life.

But this Rosh Hashanah is different.

Antisemitism has exploded across the political spectrum. It has become louder, more public, and more socially acceptable than at any point in my lifetime. I imagine many of us in this room feel similar to that congregant: proud to be Jewish, deeply connected to our tradition—and, at times, quite scared.

I know I do.

For years, whenever I traveled, I loved telling strangers that I was a rabbi because I enjoyed the conversation that usually followed. Yet this summer when I traveled abroad, I found myself hoping no one would ask what I did for a living.

One of the bewildering and suffocating elements of this moment is that the hate is not coming from one direction -- rather, it’s germinating both on the far left and the far right, and then pollinating into mainstream discourse, making many of us feel, for the first time in our lives, politically homeless. What do Nick fuentes and Hasan Piker have in common? Hate speech directed at the Jews.

Yossi Klein Halevi shares that again and again throughout history, Jews have become the screen onto which civilizations project whatever they fear or despise most. In Christian Europe we were "Christ killers." In N**i Germany we became "race polluters." In Marxist thought, we were the “ultimate capitalist.” Today, for many, the Jewish state of Israel has become the vessel into which every anxiety about colonialism, nationalism, and global injustice is poured.

It has been alarming to watch Israel’s mere existence skyrocket to the top of the political agenda in ways that demand not just criticism of Israel’s actions, but maximalist condemnation of Israel itself and its role in Jewish life. It is this characteristic that sets current criticism apart from any other legitimate protest against American involvement or complicity in injustices abroad. The demand is not just to end American support; it is to end Jewish life and self determination and in the Land of Israel and, further, it makes that position a litmus test for political figures in this country.

The American obsession with Israel doesn’t stop with politicians. Words from leaders trigger brutal rhetoric online and in the streets which in turn leads to a dangerous uptick in harassment and violence. “The gas is on and the ovens are ready” shouted a man from his Range Rover in Winston Downs this past July. Whatever imagery is used, whatever ways the rhetoric is disseminated, antisemitic tropes have this in common: they work to convince the world that we Jews are beyond the boundaries of ordinary humanity.

So in this moment, we are faced with a startling question: When others try to strip away our God-given humanity, how do we respond and who do we choose to become?

I believe the answer is this: We respond by becoming even more fully human. We become more human by caring for one another, by refusing isolation, and by claiming and elevating our moral voice.

The Torah gives us a framework for how to do this.

In the opening chapters of Genesis, we meet Cain and Abel—the first brothers. Cain and Abel each make an offering with God, and God likes Abel’s gift more. Cain feels his jealousy raging and he tracks down his brother and kills him. God confronts Cain ”Where’s your brother?”

Cain responds with perhaps the most infamous question in all of Torah: "Am I my brother's keeper?" The remarkable thing is that God never answers.

Instead, the Torah spends the rest of Genesis trying to answer that question for us. Isaac and Ishmael do not protect one another. Jacob and Essau are corrupted by trickery and fear. Joseph’s brothers throw him in a pit and sell him into slavery.

But then we see the shift. At the very end of the book, Judah has a second chance. He stands before his brother Joseph, though he does not yet know Joseph's identity. Benjamin—his father's beloved son—is about to be imprisoned. Judah could save himself, but instead he says: "Please. Take me to prison instead. My father will not survive losing Benjamin."
Dr. Tal Becker teaches that without ever saying the words, Judah answers the question Cain asked generations earlier.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I am my brother's keeper.

The Torah asks one question at the beginning of Genesis and spends the rest of the book teaching us the answer.

We learn from this that we too must be our brother’s keeper. When hatred grows outside of our community, we must work to strengthen what exists inside of it. To build vibrant, engaged Jewish communities where we know and care for one another, where we gather weekly for Shabbat, where we celebrate each other’s joys, carry one another's grief, debate with one another with love, and show up for one another again and again. To be our brother’s keeper — that is what we at Rodef Shalom are called to be. Not to be simply a synagogue, but to be a covenantal community, where every person knows that someone else is keeping watch. This is one of Judaism’s great tools of spiritual resistance.

But the Torah's answer does not end there. Because while we are called to strengthen Jewish community, we are not called to hide inside of it. Fear has a habit of tempting us toward isolation. It whispers that no one else understands us and that no one else cares. But that has not been my experience.

Being our brother’s keeper necessitates that we also build relationships beyond our Jewish community -- both to find the vital support we need, to find friends who see our humanity, and also to support others -- to proclaim their humanity. This act of reaching out keeps us human.

When Hasan Piker came to Denver, our partners at Together Colorado stood beside us. They organized meetings, spoke with candidates, and took our concerns seriously — making them their own. Their solidarity mattered. When I wrote an oped expressing alarm about Melat Kiros’s candidacy, I received emails and texts of support from our Together Colorado friends, telling me that my words stretched them to go deeper in solidarity with the Jewish community and to stand alongside us. That is one of the many reasons these partnerships are so vital.

Back in May, I found myself at a high school graduation party. Adin has a friend whose parents, Elora and Matthew, are ministers at a church they started in Park Hill. At the party, we became absorbed in conversation about Jewish and Christian theology and practice.

Then they asked me the big question: “Has your congregation experienced antisemitism?"

I told them about the sw****ka carved into the mailbox outside our building. The hateful phone calls. The need for full-time security. The students in our congregation who have experienced antisemitism at school and on their sports teams.

As I spoke, Pastor Elora began to cry. "I am so horrified that anyone would want to hurt your community," she said. Then Pastor Matthew looked at me and spoke: "Please know that we support you and that we are here, if there is ever anything that we can do."

Those simple words uplifted my humanity and made me feel seen and supported as a Jew.

One of the greatest dangers of being dehumanized is that in our own pain and vulnerability, we have the potential to begin to see others as less fully human. We know how quickly that negative instinct can take hold, but reaching beyond assumed boundaries can temper this.

After October 7, people in New York and also right here, in Crestmoor Park, tore down posters of Israeli hostages. It was an antisemitic, deeply dehumanizing act. It said, in effect: These Jewish children are subhuman, and their faces are inconvenient to the story I want to tell.

But in bold contrast, there was my Israeli friend Rabbi Haviva Ner David, whose children are campers and counselors right here at Camp Ramah in the Rockies. She attended protests on Saturday nights in Israel, carrying photographs of Palestinian children who had been killed in Gaza. Rabbi Haviva wanted those Palestinian faces to remain visible. Her message was simple: These children, too, are human and must be part of our story.

That is what resisting dehumanization looks like. It is refusing to let another person's suffering disappear because it complicates our own narrative. It is insisting that our grief for our own people never requires us to stop seeing the image of God in someone else's child.

The people who I admire most right now in Israel are the ones doing this holy work.

When I was at Hartman this summer, I met an extraordinary woman named Elana. Elana's son Yannai was killed on October 7 while serving as an officer on his army base. Yannai saved countless lives on the base and prevented terrorists from reaching the neighboring kibbutz. When Elana spoke about her son, she didn't begin with the tragedy of his death. She began with the beauty of his life. "He loved people," she told us. "At night on the base, when all the other staff members had collapsed from exhaustion after a full day, he would spend hours sitting with his soldiers at their guard posts. He asked them about their lives, their families, their goals. He tried to understand the mindset of each and every one of them, their pains and their dreams.” Yannai genuinely wanted to understand and connect with people who experienced the world differently than he did. “He really believed in seeing the humanity in each and every person he met” and he worked to make people feel valued and loved.

During shivah, Elana wrote to her Palestinian friends across the green line in the West Bank, sharing her grief, and expressing her worry and care for them in this treacherous time. In her worst moments, instead of choosing to hunker down, Elana chose to reach out.

Today Elana is a member of the Parents Circle, a group of bereaved parents who have lost their children in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. They speak to one another across difference and listen with open hearts. They have become true allies in each other's darkest days, using their grief as a catalyst to elevate their ability to recognize one another’s humanity.

After Yannai was killed, Elana gathered Yannai’s closest friends and asked them an unexpected question. "What was the most annoying thing about Yannai?" His friends laughed. "He was always leaving half-finished cups of Turkish coffee everywhere," they said.

At the shloshim, Yannai’s family and friends brought Turkish coffee to his grave. They drank together, and then, smiling through their tears, they left the cups with the sludge behind—a small act of loving revenge against the habit that had driven them crazy while he was living.

But the Turkish coffee came to mean something more. Unlike a Frappuccino or even a latte, Turkish coffee isn't smooth or polished. It leaves grounds at the bottom of the cup. It is rich, strong, and a little messy.

Elana said that real conversation is like Turkish coffee. It isn't neat. It doesn't end with everyone always agreeing. It leaves residue and asks us to sit with complexity.

Yannai’s story inspired his parents to partner with Elite Coffee in Israel. They created a campaign inviting people to share a cup of Turkish coffee with someone whose opinions were different from their own—to resist the temptation to retreat into our own silos and instead choose the harder work of genuine curiosity and empathy.

Over these last two months, I have thought about Elana often.

In a moment when so many voices are telling us to stop listening and to sort one another into enemies and allies, she offered a different vision.
Perhaps one of the holiest things we can do this year is to have more Turkish coffee conversations—to sit with people who have different backgrounds and may see the world differently than we do, to listen with curiosity, to speak honestly, and to remember that complexity is not weakness. It is often where truth begins.

We have recreated special cards and attached to each of them two packets of Turkish coffee. We hope you will take a card with you when you leave today, and that it will inspire a holy conversation.

Cain and Abel were some of the first humans, but they lived generations before Abraham, the first Jew. Cain and Abel were not Jewish and the command to be our brother’s keeper was never meant to apply only to our own people. We need to build relationships with others who will stand by us, and we need to step out and stand by them, too. Our pain never releases us from the commandment to love both our neighbor and the stranger. And we remain obligated to stand with communities who face hatred of their own.

Finally, being fully human means refusing to surrender our moral voice.

This is perhaps the most difficult of my prescriptions.

Speaking with courage means saying all the things about Israel — both positive and negative — that we are called to articulate, even when it feels that the audience doesn’t want to hear them.

Sometimes that might mean speaking to a hostile and uninformed audience about the strengths of Israeli society. About our need, as Jews, for self determination — some control of our own destiny in a world that has persecuted us for over 2000 years. It may mean calling colleagues or friends or political representatives into conversation when they speak about Israel in ways that are inaccurate or unfair, or work to delegitimize Israel’s existence.

But moral courage doesn’t stop there. It also calls us to speak out about the injustices that are being committed by the Israeli government and Israeli citizens, in Israel’s name. It calls us to speak about the suffering of Palestinians, about abuses of power, and about policies or actions that violate our deepest Jewish commitments to human dignity, justice, and the sanctity of life.

I have to tell you, even for me — a person who has critiqued Israel over these years and sometimes has done so in a bold fashion — even for me, this can feel difficult. There have been moments when I have wanted to publicly criticize policies of the Israeli government, or the devastating human cost of the war in Gaza and occupation in the West Bank—and I have hesitated. Not because I feel tentative about the critique. But for two reasons — one, because I know I might upset some of you, who feel vulnerable right now, and who feel uncomfortable and even angry when I, your rabbi, shine a light on the parts of Israel that are ugly. I never want to cause members of our community pain.

I have also hesitated for another reason — because I know there are people who would seize upon my words without any interest in complexity, without any love for Israel, and without any concern for the Jewish people. When criticism of Israel is so often weaponized by those who deny Israel's very legitimacy, it becomes frightening to speak.

And yet. And yet.

If fear from either direction determines what we are willing to say, then fear has already begun to shape us. If antisemitism — or fear of antisemitism — prevents us from speaking with moral courage and honesty about our own people when they profoundly disappoint us, then fear has done more than frighten us. It has begun to steal our voice and even, I dare say, our soul.

We cannot let that happen.

Caring about Israel has never required us to believe that Israel is incapable of error. And real love and real care never asks us to abandon our morality or our voice. It asks us to speak with honesty and nuance, even when it is difficult. That is what Judaism demands of us. That is what Israel deserves from us. That is what it means to refuse to give up on our Jewish homeland and to refuse to compromise on morality. And that is what it means to remain fully human.
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"I love my Star of David," she wrote. "It is a part of me. But I'm afraid."

The question before us this year is not whether or not we are afraid.
Many of us are indeed afraid, and it is important for us to be able to articulate that.

Whether to wear a Star of David or a kippah is a deeply personal decision, and each of us must answer that question in the way that feels right in this moment, without judgment.

But perhaps the deeper question is this:

What will fear invite us to become?

Will it cause us to turn inward and close ourselves off?
Or will it call on us to celebrate our Judaism and become our sibling’s keeper?

Will it convince us that complexity is dangerous?
Or will it deepen our capacity for curiosity and empathy — and friendships beyond religious and cultural differences?

Will it silence our moral voice?
Or strengthen our commitment to speaking with honesty, humility, bravery, and love?

Fear is understandable, but fear cannot become our identity.

My prayer for us this year is that whatever fears we carry, we never lose sight of what Torah asks of us: May we be blessed to celebrate and watch over our community, to connect broadly with others across difference and beyond the walls of this congregation, and to courageously speak our moral truth.

And may we always remember that our humanity is not something we earn from this world and it is not something that anybody can take away. It is something God placed within us from the very beginning.

7th Day of Pesach is one of the sweetest moments in the cycle of our holidays. On Seder night, we celebrate our liberation from slavery, but it’s on the 7th day that we celebrate crossing the sea and embracing new possibilities. Each year, I imagine myself standing with my ancestors at the sea — facing the newness with a mixture of fear and yearning, hope and wonder.

This is a bit of an extra nudge to come to shul tomorrow and Thursday for a joyful celebration of the end of Passover!

Services will begin both days at 9:15 a.m., with babysitting at 10 a.m., kids programming at 11:00 a.m., and Tot Chag at 11:15 a.m.

Tomorrow, we will participate in the chanting Shirat Hayam — the song of the sea — and we will partake in a Hasidic water ritual that invites us to allow the story of our people to transcend time and space.

On both Wednesday and Thursday, lunch will be served. This is an opportunity to make the most of the end of the Pesach holiday by eating together and enjoying Lynn and Simone’s catering. On Thursday, we will enjoy our annual Pesach BBQ.

I am looking forward to being together, and to embracing all the feelings we have today, as we cross the sea.