L’Dor Vador, Halleluya
A Sermon for Rosh HaShanah 5785
Rabbi Caryn Broitman
October 2, 2024
Look around you for a moment. There are people in our community from young children to elders approaching their 100th year. What a miracle that all these generations are here together, celebrating our 3000-year-old tradition on this New Year. L’Dor vador, from generation to generation.” Halleluya.
I want to talk about this idea of l’dor vador today. For if there is one phrase from our liturgy that speaks to people universally, it is that phrase—L’dor vador.
L’dor vador expresses the feeling we have when we see children of the community come up to the bimah, open the ark and touch the Torah in wonder and awe.
L’dor Vador expresses the feeling we have when we teach a child something about Judaism—a food, a song, a belief, a mitzvah. It is the feeling we have when we see our own child, or any child we love, come up to the bimah at their Bar or Bat Mitzvah, hold the Torah and recite the Shema.
The feeling is beyond words but may be described as something like–“I’ve done it.” “We’ve done it.” “We have helped to pass on the tradition that was passed on to us. I take my place in this chain of tradition and in this flow of time.”
This feeling is not limited to Judaism, of course. There is an almost universal yearning in each of us to pass on some legacy to the next generation. Each person has a life legacy to pass on by teaching or modeling our values to those who are younger. We can pass on a legacy through our relationships, our work in the world, and our deeds. In whatever way we engage in l’dor vador, it is a mitzvah going back to our beginnings, Abraham and Sarah, the founders of Judaism, about whom we read in today’s Torah portion.
The name Abraham/Avraham, includes the word for father, av. Traditionally, we refer to Avraham as Avraham Avinu, Abraham our father. Parentage here is meant expansively. For those who have chosen Judaism in their adult lives, their Hebrew names are (their chosen name), the son or daughter of Avraham Avinu and Sarah imeinu, Abraham our father and Sarah our mother. Whether we are Jewish by birth or by choice we are a family.
And that is why Judaism is so darn complicated.
It’s complicated because families are complicated—at their best. And more than that, it is complicated because there is a paradox at the core of Judaism, at the core of this idea of l’dor vador. And that paradox is that while Judaism began with father Abraham and mother Sarah passing on their legacy, their truth, to the next generation, that 100-year-old father Abraham had been a son once as well. A son, in fact, who had rejected his father’s beliefs. A son who, according to the midrash, had worked for his father’s business selling idols and ended up smashing the merchandise because he could not believe in it. A son who was an iconoclast in the most literal sense, who challenged his father Terach with an idea, monotheism, that Terach had never heard of and could not possibly have understood.
So you could say that Judaism started not with a passing down between parent and child, but with a huge argument between parent and child. And that too is l’dor vador. So how do you reconcile one generation’s yearning to pass on, with the next generation’s yearning to move on. How do you act according to the value of l’dor vador in a way that honors both?
Before I explore these questions, I want to share with you why the mitzvah, indeed the miracle, of l’dor vador speaks to me at this moment, both in my life and in the historical time we find ourselves in. This past spring, Brian and I celebrated our first grandchild’s Bar Mitzvah. After years of having delightful conversations at seders at which our grandchild asking interesting and challenging questions about the Passover story, we saw him come into his own in his own Jewish community, expressing a Judaism most meaningful to him. One of our dear friends attended, a rabbi and teacher who is 91 years old. He was in tears after the ceremony. Why? They were tears of gratitude, he expained–gratitude that we, all of us, have passed this heritage on. And I share this noting that our grandson’s Judaism at this moment is different from our own and from our friend’s. The nakhes was not that we had replicated ourselves. The nakhes was that we had passed on a tradition in which our grandson could find himself.
I have felt this blessing of l’dor vador in my work as a rabbi as well. Not all rabbis have the good fortune of leading a community for more than a generation. Because I have this great blessing, the children and teenagers I first met when I arrived here are now either in college or in their 20’s and 30’s. This past fall, I officiated at a wedding of one of the first teens I met in our congregation, and I officiated at a naming ceremony for the child of another. I have had meaningful conversations with many of our young members this past year, especially since October 7th, about their Judaism in this very difficult time in Jewish history. Listening and learning from them, as well as celebrating their simchas, has absolutely been one of the greatest privileges as a rabbi.
And speaking of our lives as Jews since that devastating day of October 7th, we must acknowledge a crisis, a brokenness within our Jewish world that is painful. Among the many aspects of this pain is divisiveness within families and communities. According to a Pew Research poll conducted this past February, 47% of young Jews have stopped talking with someone because of what that person had said about the Israel-Hamas war.[1] Disagreements about Israeli policy and the role of the state of Israel in Judaism have touched parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, siblings and friends. At its worst, there have been not only arguments but ruptures. And while each generation is far from a monolith and has its own diversity of opinion, it is also true that there has been a sense of incomprehension among some of the older generation at the views of some of the younger generation. It feels like some of our beliefs and truths are being smashed, echoing the biblical iconoclasm of Abram. And it only aggravates the pain we already feel for the horrific attack on Israel on October 7th that all of us are grieving.
Is this a difficult time to think about l’dor vador? Yes, which is why it is exactly the right time to talk about it. It may be easier and gentler, however, if we begin by talking about another divisive time in Jewish history, similar but distant to our own, giving us some perspective. I want to focus on two families who lived (and argued) around 1917: the family of Gershom Scholem who became one of the most important scholars of Jewish mysticism of all time, and the family of Chaim Weizmann, who became the first president of Israel.
Gershom Scholem, who was born Gerhard, grew up in Germany in an assimilated Jewish family, the youngest of four brothers who each went in a very different political direction.[2] Gershom was not satisfied with a Judaism as assimilated as he experienced it growing up. He sought out ways to study Hebrew and Jewish literature as a young teenager and was drawn to Zionism, which upset his father tremendously. And his father wasn’t any happier with his middle son, Werner, who was a communist activist. The oldest brother, Reinhold, was a German nationalist like his father.
It was 1917, WWI. Gershom and Werner were both against the war, and Werner, a soldier at the time, went to an anti-war demonstration in his uniform, ending in his arrest for treason. Two days later, when his father found out that Werner was in prison, he flew into a rage at the dinner table, and in Gershom Scholem’s words, “said he had now had enough of the two of us, that Social Democracy and Zionism were all the same, anti-German activities which he would no longer tolerate in his house, and that he never wanted to see me again. The following day I received a registered letter from him in which he demanded that I leave his house on the first of March and henceforth shift for myself. He said that he declined to have any further dealings with me, and that since I was going on twenty he was no longer obliged to support me.”[3]
Gershom was forced to leave his father’s house but he would not leave Zionism. He moved to Palestine in 1923 where he lived as a progressive Zionist for the rest of his life. His brother Werner served for a short time in the German Weimar parliament representing the communist party. He was later arrested and murdered in Buchenwald in 1940. Gershom’s brother Reinhold remained a German nationalist even after WWII. With the hindsight of more than a century, I don’t think any of us would say that Scholem’s father handled this well. Gershom’s mother was more tolerant of different points of view, but did not prevail.
Chaim Weizmann grew up in Belarus in the Russian Empire and joined a proto-Zionist movement in high school. Many Eastern European Jewish families at the time were torn ideologically between traditionalism, assimilation, secular socialism and communism and Zionism. (Remember Sholom Aleichem’s Fiddler on the Roof.) Chaim Weizmann’s brother, Shmuel was a part of the Socialist Labor Bund movement, a movement that valued the diaspora and emphasized both a living Jewish culture and working for justice wherever one lives. It was directly opposed to Zionism, the idea that the future of Jews and Judaism would be in the land of Israel. The two brothers, Chaim and Shmuel strongly disagreed. How did their mother, Rachel, handle it? She would say: “Whatever happens, I shall be well off. If Shmuel is right, we shall all be happy in Russia; and if Chaim is right, then I shall go to live in Palestine.”[4]
So how do we understand l’dor vador in such a context of historical upheaval. When are the Jewish paths of our children a rejection or even a betrayal, and when are they a continuation or reworking that are a response to challenges of a new era? Gershom Scholem’s father, for example had a strong German identity, but one that had little room for Judaism, Zionism or antiwar liberalism. Did that mean he was more “German” than Gershom, or that Gershom was “anti-German?” Scholem after all was part of a large circle of German Jewish intellectuals who reflected very much the German intellectual tradition of philosophy and scholarship. One could argue that Scholem’s expression of German-ness was as “German” as his father’s pro-war patriotism of WWI. He was just a German Jew who wanted to live in Israel and was against the war. And yet his father accused him of betrayal. This is a point to take in and reflect on, given how many of our young people are called antisemitic by fellow Jews.
Chaim’s Weizmann’s mother, however, modeled a different way. Both her children strayed from their traditional upbringing. And yet she saw neither of them as breaking away. She had the humility to understand that she could not see into the Jewish future any more than her sons could. She celebrated the integrity and commitments of both her sons, and felt her legacy was being passed on regardless of their differences.
Thinking about the question of whether a new generation’s path is a rejection or a kind of continuation, we can revisit the Torah’s founding story of parents and children, the story of Avram and his father Terah. It’s a shame we don’t have mothers and daughters here, but we will work with what we have and add our stories to theirs. In chapter 12 of Genesis God tells Avram to “go forth from your native land, from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you.” Avram is told to leave his family and everything he knows. This seems like a break from the family. And the midrash reinforces that, as I mentioned, by imagining Avram smashing his father’s idols before leaving. And yet, the Torah itself offers another way of understanding it. Just before the verse in the Torah where God tells Avram to leave his home in Ur for Canaan, there is an interesting verse that says: “Terah took his son Avram, his grandson Lot…and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Avram, and they set out together…for the land of Canaan…” (Gen. 11:31). In other words, they started the journey together to the new land together, “but when they had come as far as Haran,” the Torah continues, “they settled there.”
So Avram’s father had actually begun the journey to Canaan but hadn’t complete it. It was up to Avram the son and Sarah the daughter-in-law to pick up from where the father left off. This opens up a whole new possibility. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggests,[5] maybe the story is not about Avram the iconoclast who breaks away from his family. Maybe it is about Avram the son who continues his family’s journey, albeit in a very different way.
So how do we go about seeing the journey as a whole rather than fearing the difference of the parts. Generations in Jewish history have had to weather many radical changes. In the last century alone, secular Zionism itself was a radical change, followed by other changes including feminism, intermarriage, and LBGTQ inclusion. All of those changes have become an important part of a living and thriving Judaism. A new generation, some of whom are non-Zionist and are seeking to revive a diaspora Judaism, will also help Judaism to thrive, as will young people for whom Israel is central.
But what do we do with the feelings of anger and rejection as we hear viewpoints that don’t seem to honor our life’s experiences. The older generation, after all, is closer to the Holocaust, and to the experience of our people being on the very brink of survival. We are closer to an Israel that seemed to save us from physical and cultural extinction. And yet, there are those in the younger generation who are on the same journey but are responding to the challenges of a different terrain, one where powerlessness is mortal threat, but so is power, for it can be abused. It’s the same journey, even though we tend to separate its parts. All our life experiences reflect only a part of the whole.
I am reminded of the Cat Stevens song that was part of the soundtrack with which I grew up, “Father and Son.” The father is saying “stay, stay, stay.” The son is singing “away, away, away.” They are literally talking over each other, not listening to each other at all. The song was released was in 1970, and spoke to yet another time of war and generational upheaval. And yet it is able to convey the humanity of both father and son. Cat Stevens said about the song: “Some people think that I was taking the son’s side. But how could I have sung the father’s side if I couldn’t have understood it, too?”[6]
We need to listen to each other, with open hearts and open minds. It is perhaps a tall order to listen to friends and family with openness and love when our hearts are heavy with trauma, fear and grief. And yet, how can we ensure our future without doing that? How can we pass on our heritage to the next generation with anything less than an expansive openness and humility?
Sometime after October 7th, I increasingly found myself supporting families in crisis over disagreements about Israel and Palestine. I heard from rabbis struggling with the impossible task of keeping communities together in the midst of intense disagreements. And as things began to heat up on college campuses, I knew that what I wanted most was to listen. I wanted to talk with college and graduate students and young working people in our congregation as well as students I met on campuses and hear their stories and experiences. I get lots of chances to talk in my job. But it was clear to me that the privilege now was to listen. I try, however imperfectly, to remember what the Talmud teachers: “who is wise? The one who learns from every person.”[7]
And so I spoke with some Jewish college students from Hillel, Chabad and Jewish Fraternities and Sororities both from the Island and off-Island. And one day when I was on campus at Harvard for an event, I walked by the encampment in Harvard Yard and noticed something surprising. There were homemade signs in Hebrew expressing Jewish values. I stopped and read them, and told a student there that I was a rabbi and would love to talk to a Jewish student about the signs. She called over a Jewish student, who was so appreciative that a rabbi wanted to listen to her. She was from the Midwest, and said something to me that moved me. She said, “My rabbi at home would never come here. But I’m here because of what I learned in Temple—tikkun olam.” As one of our speakers said this summer, these Jews were there not in spite of their Judaism but because of it.
The student then told me that they were holding weekly Shabbat services at the encampment and invited me to come. And one Friday, I was on campus for a conference, and there it was, about 75 people singing together in a traditional Shabbat service led by three young women, one of whom gave a beautiful d’var Torah, and another led a traditional service, followed by an oneg that included homemade challahs that students had baked for all to share.
I looked around with some disbelief. I went to Harvard at a time when student activists, many of them Jewish, took over the Yard for different causes. There was never, however, and I would never have imagined, a Shabbat service as part of a protest in the Yard with Jewish students explaining to their non-Jewish friends a traditional service. I looked around and it struck me, this is l’dor vador. At the same time, there were services at Hillel and Chabad as well, and they too were l’dor vador. They were all l’dor vador.
And suddenly, some of my despair that I had been feeling for months melted away. I continued to feel sorrow because of our painful, violent, war-torn present. But the despair I had was about something else. It had come from being fearful for the future—for the future of Judaism. But I no longer felt fear. Whether or not one agrees with those students’ ideas, their commitment to creating a Judaism that was real and meaningful for them, that came from them, was unbelievably moving to me.
And so was talking to Jewish students of different points of view. I have spoken with young progressive Zionists for whom Israel is core to their Jewish identity and who work for their dream of a just Israel with equal rights for Palestinians. I have spoken with young people involved with Boston Worker’s Circle, an heir of the old Socialist Labor Bund, committed to a non-Zionist diaspora Judaism and involved in Yiddish music and culture. I have spoken with young Jews in Israel and parents of IDF soldiers who are putting their lives on the line for their people, and who at a young age are grieving friends murdered or maimed or kidnapped. And I have spoken to young Jews here who grew up with little to no Judaism and are embracing their identity for the first time, either out of ethnic pride or out of left politics. I am sure, that if we let them, this generation will take Judaism on paths that we could not have imagined. That we can’t imagine it shouldn’t stop them.
L’dor vador. We have the privilege of passing on Judaism to the next generation. We do not have the privilege of controlling it. As it is said in our Amida prayer, blessed is the God of Abraham and Sarah, the God of Isaac and Rebecca, and the God of Jacob, Rachel and Leah. Why, the rabbis ask, is the phrase “the God of” repeated for each generation? Because each generation forges its own path to God. While l’dor vador depends on our communicating our deepest values, it also depends on our letting go, listening, learning and marveling at the spirit of Judaism that transcends our own personal experiences. So if you have the opportunity of having a young person or older person that you love disagree with you, consider it a blessing. It may be a manifestation of the divine that you would not have been able to see otherwise. L’dor vador, Halleluya.
And that is the openness and tolerance that I want our community to embody. A community that sees blessing in our differences, when they are expressed with love and respect. A community that listens to their young people in their differences, and makes room for a Judaism that they create. A Judaism that, like Chaim Weizmann’s mother, makes room for Zionists, diasporists, traditionalists, and atheists. Because really, who knows whose vision will the one that helps to save us.
May this New Year be a year of connection, listening and love within our families and communities. May we each strive to embody curiosity, tolerance and humility. May we together help to move our world to wholeness and peace.
L’dor vador, Halleluya
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/02/how-us-jews-are-experiencing-the-israel-hamas-war/
[2] https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2014-12-05/ty-article/.premium/1897-a-man-who-made-kabbala-accessible-is-born/0000017f-dc60-d856-a37f-fde005ed0000
[3] Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), p. 84.
[4] https://www.commentary.org/articles/commentary-bk/the-autobiography-of-weizmanns-zionismthe-road-from-motol-to-jerusalem/
[5] https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation-family-edition/lech-lecha/journey-of-the-generations/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_and_Son_(song)#cite_note-RS_Issue_143-3
[7] Pirkei Avot 4:1.