Rabbi Andrea Kulikovsky is Assistant Rabbi of The Ark Synagogue. This sermon was delivered at The Ark on Rosh Hashanah morning. You can watch it here.
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If you rest your hand on your heart, do you feel the pain?
In each beat, with the faint echo of your breath, can you feel something that seemingly does not belong to your body, but still, somehow, beats with your heart?
Our sages tell us that we were all standing at the foot of Mount Sinai when we received Torah. But what if our inheritance had already begun to take shape on another mountain?
This morning we heard that moment. A father. A son. A mountain. A knife, raised, and then, at the very last possible moment, not lowered.
Isaac lives.
But the story does not end on the mountain.
Sarah is absent from the story. We don’t know what she knew. But the rabbis could not ignore what happens next. The very next chapter announces her death, and a midrash imagines that the shock of hearing what happened on Moriah is too much for her.
The knife does not fall. And yet, somehow, the wound remains.
The Israeli poet Chaim Gouri wrote about this moment, and about what it left behind.
The ram came last of all. And Abraham
did not know that it came to answer the
boy’s question, first of his strength
when his day was on the wane.The old man raised his head. Seeing that it was no dream and that the angel stood there, the knife slipped from his hand.
The boy, released from his bonds, saw his father’s back.
Isaac, as the story goes, was not sacrificed. He lived for many years, saw what pleasure had to offer, until his eyesight dimmed.
But he bequeathed that hour to his offspring. They are born with a knife in their hearts.
“They are born with a knife in their hearts.”
We carry the knife. We carry Sarah’s silent pain. We carry Isaac’s terror. And we carry the wounds accumulated by the generations who came after them.
Today we call some of this intergenerational trauma.
We know that what one generation experiences can affect the next. Trauma can travel through family behaviour, silence, stories and patterns of fear.
But Judaism did not need the language of psychology to recognise that human beings inherit more than names, property and the colour of our eyes. Genesis already knew.
And yet Isaac lives.
He builds a home. He loves Rebecca. He has children. He digs wells. He moves. He tries again. He becomes old.
The knife remains part of his story. But the knife does not become his whole story.
We are commanded, again and again:
Zachor. Remember.
And we have remembered. Slavery. Wars. Expulsions. Exile. Persecutions. The Inquisition. Pogroms. The Shoah.
Every change in the course of Jewish history seems capable of touching an old wound and making it hurt again.
It’s there. Can you feel it?
But I have been thinking about all this trauma we carry.
There is a controversial therapeutic practice called Family Constellations, which tries to make visible relationships and wounds that stretch across generations. I am less interested this morning in the therapy than I am in the image.
A constellation.
People from different generations brought into the same space. Those whose stories we know and those whose names have disappeared.
And I began to wonder: If we could create a constellation of our Jewish inheritance, what would we put in our sky?
Would we bring only the wounds? Moriah? Egypt? The expulsions? The pogroms? The Shoah? The seventh of October?
Would our Jewish sky become one enormous constellation of pain?
Because if we are going to bring our ancestors into the room, surely we have to bring everything they gave us.
They handed us the knife. But they also handed us songs.
They taught us how to mourn. But they also taught us how to dance.
They taught us Zachor. And they also taught us L’chaim.
Maybe this is why we are still here.
Not because suffering made us who we are, but because generation after generation found ways to live beyond it.
Our ancestors moved. They changed. They adapted. When Judaism was forbidden, some hid it inside their homes. When communities were destroyed, they built new ones. They wrote books. They composed music. They raised children. They fell in love. They argued with one another. They argued with God.
They buried their dead. And then they made dinner.
They survived. But more than that:
They lived.
And here lies the question I bring to you today.
Genesis tells us what Abraham bequeathed: covenant, blessing, land, descendants. Gouri asks what Isaac bequeathed.
A knife.
Inheritance is not always a gift. Sometimes a wound travels forward too.
We are inheritors. But we are also ancestors.
Someone will inherit something from us. Our children. Our grandchildren. Our students. Our community. People we may never meet.
And so the question is not whether we can prevent ourselves from inheriting the knife. We already have it.
The question is:
Must we pass it on unchanged?
Recently my dear friend and mentor, Rabbi Joseph Edelheit, reminded me of a Hebrew verb that can be translated in many different ways.
At the end of Genesis, after Jacob has died, Joseph’s brothers are frightened that he will finally take revenge for what they did to him. They ask him to forgive them.
The Hebrew verb translated here as “forgive” is:
נָשָׂא, nasa.
Nasa can mean: to lift, to carry, to bear, to take away.
And here, to forgive.
The Hebrew refuses to separate these ideas neatly.
Forgiveness does not mean that what happened suddenly weighs nothing.
Forgiveness begins when we learn to carry differently.
It doesn’t mean every relationship must be restored. It doesn’t mean forgetting. It doesn’t mean pretending that what happened was acceptable.
Some things may even feel unforgivable.
But the unforgivable does not have to decide our future.
We can remember without allowing memory to become our prison. We can carry a wound without turning it into a weapon. We can bear a scar without handing the knife to the next generation. We can heal even when reconciliation is impossible.
And that is nasa.
We carry. And sometimes, little by little, we lift.
This is why the journey of these weeks is so demanding.
From Elul to Simchat Torah, we don’t jump from pain to forgiveness.
We recognise. We name. We remember. We repent. We pray. We repair what can be repaired.
Tefillah. Teshuvah. Tzedakah.
And then we build a fragile tent where we rejoice. Eventually, we begin Torah again.
The Jewish calendar refuses to allow pain the final word. And neither should we.
So, on this first morning of the new year, let us look again at our constellation.
Let us put the wounds there. We must.
Zachor. Remember.
But let us also put there everything that kept our ancestors alive. Their stubbornness. Their humour. Their wisdom. Their music. Their courage. Their tenderness. Their questions. Their capacity to begin again. Their love.
And now, put your hand over your heart again.
The knife may be there. Some wounds do not disappear because a new year begins.
But feel what else is there.
A heartbeat.
Life.
The inheritance of everyone who came before us and somehow kept living, loving, building, praying, arguing, laughing, creating and beginning again.
We did not choose everything that was placed into our hearts. But we can choose what leaves our hands.
Zachor.
Remember.
Nasa.
Carry it differently. Lift what can be lifted.
And live.
May this be the year in which the knife is not the only inheritance we pass on.
May we pass on memory and courage. May we pass on joy and love.
And when our children put their hands over their hearts, may they feel everything that came before them.
But above all, may they feel their heartbeat.
Shanah tovah.
