In Parashat Vayigash, we continue tracing Judah’s moral evolution as key to the story of Joseph. When Joseph, still unrecognizable to his brothers, threatens to send Benjamin to prison for theft, Judah offers to go in his stead in order to spare his father’s suffering. This act of obligation and love is a moment of moral redemption for Judah, who has left his earlier resentments behind. Judah’s story reflects the classic American idea that all people are capable of change, that we can commit ourselves to a future that will redeem the past, and that our capacity to transform as individuals represents the potential for the full-scale redemption of our society.

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When Joseph’s brothers arrive searching for food in Parashat Miketz, they do not recognize him. This sets the stage for a series of dramatic familial and personal redemptions. A character often overlooked in this section of Genesis is Judah, who takes responsibility for Benjamin’s safety in Egypt, even though he was the brother who sold Joseph into slavery earlier in the text. Like Judah, Jo March, in the great American coming-of-age novel Little Women, also evolves and discovers a new sense of obligation to her family.

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Parashat Vayeishev begins with the story of Joseph, Jacob’s favored son, betrayed and sold into slavery by his jealous and resentful brothers. This story reveals the depths to which people can fall when they are so motivated by hatred that they can justify any decision or outcome. The 20th-century writer and intellectual James Baldwin wrote about hate as a socially and spiritually destructive force in America after World War II, particularly in the context of race.

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In Parashat Vayeitzei, Jacob marries Rachel and Leah and conceives children with both women, along with their handmaidens, Zilphah and Bilhah. The middle of this Torah portion deals with the politics in Jacob’s family around fertility and childbearing in a way that modern readers might find immoral and dehumanizing. In America today, questions of birth control and family planning divide society. However, it is only because of the medical and social progress made possible in a liberal democracy that we are able to debate these questions of agency and bodily autonomy, as made clear in this 1918 address delivered by Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood.

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Parashat Tol’dot raises questions about the Torah’s attitudes about masculinity. Jacob, the shepherd, and Esau, the hunter, are favored by different parents and pursue different means to achieve their goals. This contrast leads readers to consider what the text wants us to conclude about what manhood means and represents, while also forcing us to ask the same question about our own society. America’s idea of masculinity has developed and changed over time, emphasizing different characteristics as “manly” and “American” depending on the context.

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Parashat Chayei Sarah includes the first instance of public grieving in the Torah, when Abraham mourns the loss of his wife. Public grief is a feature of human society, allowing communities to collectively process loss and seek solace in each other. Additionally, besides creating a container for the emotions of the moment, public mourning allows a society to reflect on its deepest commitments and noblest aspirations. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address achieved all this and more in a few short paragraphs.

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Parashat Vayeira includes the story of Abraham’s bargaining with God to spare the wicked city of Sodom from destruction for its sins, arguing that it should be saved on account of even ten innocent citizens. In Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a city lives in a harmonious paradise in exchange for the suffering of a single child. Each of these stories confronts the reader with powerful questions about communal responsibility and our obligations to each other and to our. (When we looked at “Omelas” in the Daf for Parashat Sh’mot, we focused on the issue of invisibility. Now we return to the text from a different angle.)

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In Parashat Lech L’cha, God calls Abraham to embark on the journey that will create the Jewish people. Abraham is the first Jew, and rabbinic midrash teaches that Abraham’s readiness to enter into a covenant with God was in part because of his rejection of the idolatrous society into which he was born. In other words, Abraham was able to step outside of his own society and see that there was something taken for granted in its culture which prevented it from living by its own ideals. In America, we rely on artists, writers, and activists to fulfill a similar role, including the mid-20th century beat poet Allen Ginsberg in his poem, “Howl”.

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Parashat Noah concludes with the story of the Tower of Babel, when God divides humanity’s speech so that there is no longer a single language all of humanity shares. This episode is typically described as a fable-like story the ancient Israelites may have relied on to explain why human societies were fractured by language and culture. However, if we dig deeper, we discover a story about the power and importance of speech.

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The famous biblical moral question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, appears in Parashat Bereishit in the story of Cain and Abel. As evidenced by its appearance in the Torah, this question of human obligation has been with us since the earliest human societies. It is a question we must ask in all places and times, including in our own, where an eroding sense of community and deep inequality test the fabric of our democracy. John Steinbeck, a great American writer, took up this question in his short, gut-wrenching novel, Of Mice and Men.

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The vulnerability of Sukkot, of dwelling in the elements and the world as it is, creates space for creativity, energy, and growth. While Rabbi Gittelsohn’s experience on the battlefield was the opposite of the joy we feel during Sukkot, the intense vulnerability of the moment - for him personally and for the war-torn world - provided space for him to articulate a new vision for humanity.

Read the Daf

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Parashat Haazinu, the penultimate portion of the Torah, includes Moses’ closing address to the Israelites. Moses focuses on God’s relationship with the Israelite people, stretching back and forward in time, tested by Israelite sin, redeemed by God’s mercy. In appealing to their ancestral relationship with God, Moses urges the people to learn their history, to hear the stories of their forebears, and to seek meaning in them.

History is shaped by people and is therefore not immune to subjectivity. Recent revisions and removals of information at several National Parks, initiated by the federal government, highlight the limitations of relying on history as objective truth. These alterations de-emphasize the atrocities of chattel slavery and persecution of indigenous tribes in America, perpetuating this country’s record of historical revisionism–a prominent example of which is the Lost Cause narrative of the Confederacy, encapsulated in the 1914 address, “Wrongs of History Righted,” delivered by Mildred Lewis Rutherford to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

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Parashat Vayelech continues Moses’ long address to the Israelites as his role as a leader draws to a close. This portion includes a transition of power: Moses announces that God has appointed Joshua to succeed him and guide the Israelites across the Jordan River and into the Promised Land. Like other instances of leadership and succession in the Torah, this highly choreographed and pre-ordained transfer of power contrasts with the messiness of liberal democracy, for leaders serving in and out of elected office. Civil rights leader Bob Moses touched on this subject in his 1964 speech at Stanford University.

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Parashat Nitzavim includes Moses’ exhortation that the Israelite people adhere to their covenant with God; God has chosen the Israelites, and defying this covenant would be a rejection of this expression of divine love. The idea of being a chosen people is also part of the American story, which first found expression as a religious idea during the colonial era, as in the Puritan leader John Winthrop’s famous “City on a Hill” speech. Formally titled “A Model of Christian Charity,” it cites this week’s parasha. Over the centuries, this religious idea has made its way into our civic culture, where it raises challenging questions about what it means to be, or aspire to be, exceptional.

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The themes of the season are intricately connected to the problems plaguing liberal democracy in America and worldwide. The liturgy, Torah Portions, symbolism and rituals of both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur lend themselves to address the underlying forces that support rising authoritarianism. Consider this an opportunity not only to preach to the individual Jew in the pew, elevating democracy as a personal issue, but a chance to set the congregational agenda.

After all, we all work in little democracies, and we all face the ways that America’s corroding political culture seeps into our board meetings, committee work, and our local systems of deliberation. Cleric burnout is a major problem for every faith tradition right now, and the Holy Day sermons are a chance to limit the toxicity that shortens our careers (and dries up the pipeline of new clergy).

So here’s a list of High Holy Day themes that can help strengthen your local political culture, nourish the civic space around your community, and slowly turn back the forces of authoritarianism rising in the country as a whole.

Rosh Hashanah

Creation: The idea that "hayom harat olam” offers a chance for us to consider what we are creating in our society today. This ties back to David Foster Wallace’s This is Water speech, about the world we live in without seeing.

Knowledge of Good and Evil: Especially for those that read Bereishit, and for everyone who address the topic of tshuvah, awareness of sin requires knowledge of truth. This is a chance to address the relativism and misinformation plaguing our culture, and reinforce the Jewish notion that we seek truth communally, even if God’s Truth will always be just out of reach.

Being Created in the Image of God: a chance to reflect on the principles of the Declaration of Independence in this 250th year. Btw, human dignity extends to our political opponents as well despite what you see online.

Akedah: My take on this enormously difficult story is that Abraham was stuck in an echo chamber where idolatry and child sacrifice weres the norm. So he went along with the most horrific command. Are our congregations becoming echo chambers?

Akedah (option 2): Abraham needed an angel to break his information bubble. This is a chance to wonder who our angels will be. Can our congregations be places that break our informaiotn bubbles?

Malchuyot: This is what I’m preaching on this year. As moderns we like to think of ourselves as little sovereigns, but the liturgy, especially the Great Aleinu, insist that God is Sovereign of Sovereign of Sovereigns. Shai Held, in Judaism is About Love (160-163), describes how this creates a covenantal relationship for each individual with God, one that demands certain godly behavior. Not a bad way to describe civic norms and the healthy citizen behavior upon which liberal democracy depends.

Shofarot: We clergy like the call to justice. One of our colleagues once told me that we all secretly “want to take a selfie with Abraham Joshua Heschel.” Right now, the most just things we can preach are not specific policy issues, but rather the underpinnings of democracy: free and fair elections, rule of law, respect for institutions, freedom of speech and so forth.

Yom Kippur

Kol Nidre: This is the sermon that started my democracy work in 2018, that we are not living up to the promises we make as Americans. I used the Pledge of Allegiance as the oath we broke, but there are so many options to describe our failures as citizens to protect liberal democracy.

Kol Nidre (option 2): Just as Kol Nidre evolved in a world where Jews were not free to keep their promises (or so the mythology tells us), or alternatively just as Kol Nidre was used as an excuse by anti-Jewish-citizenship advocates in the eighteenth century, we can celebrate how America has been different, a place built upon the principle of absolute religious diversity and inclusion. This is the anti-Christian Nationalism sermon!

Unetane Tokef: We are living through a period of disorientation. The events of the world feel completely overwhelming like the list of potential blessings and curses written in the Book of Life. How can teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedekah help us ground us and help us regain a sense of truth and morality amidst the flood of toxicity, disinformation, and conflict we experience every day?

Vidui: Cancel culture and High Conflict are based upon the assumption that every action is potential cause for defriending and cutting ties. Vidui is a public establishment of the opposite assumption, that in our Jewish communities we accept that people will err and work to prevent repetition of the mistake.

Jonah: This is the story of the ultimate cynic, the one who would rather see his enemies die than change. The story allows us to teach the concept of meta-perception, and share the ways we misunderstand our political opponents, a problem within our congregations, and in the surrounding community and world.

I am sure there are more themes available to help us preach democracy. The season of the Yamim Nora’im are here to remind us all that we can improve our character and create a better world. No authoritarian is above the Melech Malchei Ham’lachim, and none of us are blameless. Not a bad place to start when refounding our sense of citizenship and civic responsibility.

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In Parashat Ki Teitzei, Moses begins to establish policies that will deliver the Torah’s core moral message–to care for the stranger, orphan, and widow in society, and to remember that we, too, were strangers in the land of Egypt–from rhetoric to reality. This moral message, at its core, is an appeal for radical inclusion; society’s marginalized must not be abandoned or driven further to the fringes. “On the Pulse of the Morning,” the poem Maya Angelou wrote and delivered on the occasion of President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, delivers a similar moral and rhetorical message for contemporary America.

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Parashat Re’eh focuses on rooting out idolatry, and this chapter focuses on the problem of false prophecy. This creates two interesting themes in relation to America. First, the parasha rejects the rights of the people in the land, calling their practices abominations. Eleanor Roosevelt, in her 1948 speech to the UN, by contrast, posits human rights as universal. Second, in the provided excerpt, Roosevelt mentions the tendency of those who claim to defend freedom to argue against individual rights for the sake of preserving governmental power. The claim of those people is a false prophecy - there is a grain of truth to it, but ultimately works against the divine universal dignity of human life.

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Parashat Re’eh focuses on rooting out idolatry, and this chapter focuses on the problem of false prophecy. This creates two interesting themes in relation to America. First, the parasha rejects the rights of the people in the land, calling their practices abominations. Eleanor Roosevelt, in her 1948 speech to the UN, by contrast, posits human rights as universal. Second, in the provided excerpt, Roosevelt mentions the tendency of those who claim to defend freedom to argue against individual rights for the sake of preserving governmental power. The claim of those people is a false prophecy - there is a grain of truth to it, but ultimately works against the divine universal dignity of human life.

View & Download Session 33

As always please use the comments section below to add feedback and ideas about how you used this study sheet in your community. American Scripture Project is a collaborative platform.