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“What we love, we inherit.  What we fail to love, we lose.”

Those words come from a d’var Torah that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks gave on Parshat Pinchas back in 2018.  In it, Rabbi Sacks tells the story of an eccentric man who spent his life collecting paintings.  When he died, his children - who had no regard for their father’s collection - put the whole thing up for auction.  One particular painting that went for $200,000 was actually a lost work by a great master.  The buyer - who loved art and knew what he was buying - subsequently sold it for nearly $6,000,000.

Rabbi Sacks uses this anecdote to illustrate the lesson he wants to draw behind two contrasting Bible stories. The first is that of the spies sent by Moses to scout out the promised land.  They report that, while the land is good and fruitful, its inhabitants are too powerful for the Israelites to overcome - despite God's assurances that they will.  Because of their bad report, the Israelites refuse to conquer the land and they wind up wandering in the desert for forty years - until all in that rebellious generation die off.

The second story is that of the daughters of a man named Zelophehad who died, leaving no male heir.  The status of women as second class citizens is rarely challenged in Torah, but in this case, Zelophehad’s daughters do just that.  Why, they ask Moses, should they lose their father’s inheritance in the Promised Land just because he didn't have a son? Moses takes the case to God who declares their cause just, perhaps the first recorded legal victory in the fight for equal rights for women.

Rabbi Sacks uses these stories to illustrate his point.  The spies do not love the land, so they lose it.  The daughters of Zelophehad do love the land, and they gain it as their inheritance.  Thus his conclusion: what we love, we inherit.  What we fail to love, we lose.

When I read this commentary several weeks ago, it crystallized so much of what has been going through my mind during the year we are now leaving behind.   5784 has been the most tumultuous year for the Jewish people in my lifetime.  All my life I have associated the word pogrom with names like Kishinev or Kristallnacht.  And yet neither of those infamous moments in Jewish history compares in magnitude or sheer brutality to October 7.  The war that has followed has been longer and more painful than any that Israel has fought since the War of Independence.  And the antisemitism that has exploded around the world and in our own backyards is of a virulence and intensity that most folks of my generation believed impossible just a year ago.

Through it all, the question of what we Jews inherit from all this has been foremost in my mind.  Will people back away from their Judaism - seeing it as too much trouble, as a burden they can easily discard through assimilation?  Will they abandon Israel as being too hard to defend against an onslaught of condemnation?  Or will they double down on their Jewish identity, seeing in this multi-front fight their moment to defend an inheritance passed on to them through countless generations of love?

I worry about what we as a congregation will inherit and I have tried my best, over this past year, to provide sufficient opportunities for us to process what is going on as a community.  I have also done my best to provide a level of prayer, study and engagement worthy of a rich, meaningful Jewish lifestyle.  I hope I have done an adequate job in all this.

But my main concern has been with my own family.  How securely had my children inherited the Jewish identity Terri and I have tried to pass on to them?  As we first, hesitantly, tentatively hinted at our fears for Jewish life in America, would they understand, or would they dismiss us as alarmists?

The answer soon became clear.  Our kids were following the news out of Israel every bit as closely as we were.  Our anxieties were their anxieties.  Our nightmares, theirs as well.  And more than we, they were paying the price of their beliefs in blocked social media relations and lost friendships.

But it was something else entirely that showed how secure was my children’s Jewish inheritance.  This summer, we spent our family vacation in Vermont.  I spent a part of that time reading Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s essay, The Lonely Man of Faith.  Rabbi Soloveitchik’s premise is that faith itself is a lonely experience.  We are like the Adam of the second chapter of Genesis.  God brings every living creature to Adam and yet no helpmate can be found for him.  In the end, he has to give up part of himself to find a partner in this world - someone to ease his loneliness.

We are very much the descendants of that first man.  We look up to the heavens and we are defeated by a vastness that has no interest in looking back at us.  We seek the redemption that comes from linking our brief, fragile lives to that which is eternal, enduring.  We know that God is there, but He remains always out of our sight.  So we are lonely, seeking the community of those who share our loneliness and who will work with us to bring God into our small circle.

At the end of our vacation, our kids had tickets to a concert by the singer-songwriter Regina Spektor.  A refugee from the Soviet Union at age nine, Ms. Spektor is the sort of artist who wears her Judaism on her sleeve.  Her music tends to display the brashness, the quirkiness, the self-reflection, or the humor that I think of as distinctively Jewish.  Terri and I decided to tag along with our kids, and they did a credible impression of not minding.

With the exception of one song when she was joined on stage by her guitarist husband, the concert was just Ms. Spektor and her piano.  No more was needed.  This petite woman fills the stage and the theater with her rich and expressive voice.  Unlike other performers who spend a lot of time telling the stories behind their songs, only once did Ms. Spektor really talk with the audience.  It came late in the concert and when she did, her voice was surprisingly like that of a little girl.  She spoke hesitantly as if she were choosing her words with care, worried about saying the wrong thing.  She commented on what a difficult year it had been, though the particular difficulty to which she referred went unmentioned.  That is, until she turned back to her piano and began to sing again.  She sang Avinu Malkeinu with a voice that captured the desperate plea at the heart of that prayer:

Our Father, our King, be gracious and answer us, though we are without deeds of merit.  Treat us with charity and kindness and save us.

I was trembling as she sang.  

But in truth, it wasn't that song that left the deepest impression on me.  Rather, it was one she sang earlier in the concert, a song with which I was familiar, but to which I never really paid enough attention.  In it, Ms. Spektor sings of walking home alone when God calls to her saying “let’s grab a beer.”  For God, this is a simple act of companionship.  But Ms. Spektor has a question for the Holy One.  She asks “why doesn’t it get better with time?  I’m becoming all alone again.”  Then, most poignantly she adds the plea, “stay, stay, stay.”

As I sat there, it occurred to me that I was listening to the essence of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s essay distilled into a few heartbreaking verses.  We are alone and we need God’s presence in our lives to redeem that loneliness and bring us a sense of the value of our existence.  

Afterward, none of us asked what we thought of the concert.  The power of what we had seen required no comment.  Nor did one need to note that the source of that power was its Jewishness. This is the stuff to which my kids listen.  This is the type of performer they pay to see.

A week or so later, I read Rabbi Sacks’ commentary on Parshat Pinchas and his observation that what we inherit is what we love.  And I realized when I did that my kids’ obsessive concern with the war in Israel, their fears over the spread of antisemitism, their willingness to lose friends on account of the conflict all came down to one thing: they have inherited a Jewish identity.  And they have inherited that identity because they love it.  They love it through its endless anxieties.  They love it through its countless joys.  But most of all, they love it through the profound loneliness that needs redemption through holiness.  They love it because it anchors their lives.

What we love, we inherit.  And what we fail to love, we lose.  So what do we love, and what do we fail to love? This past year, amid all that has followed in the wake of October 7, Terri and I have been to Central Europe and twice to Israel.  That traveling has brought us face-to-face with what we love, what we have lost, and what we are trying to hold onto.  I hope over these holidays to share with you some of what I have learned.  But I will also ask you - challenge you even - to think about what you love and what you are afraid to lose.  Because this, I believe, is the great question facing American Jews today: What  do we love?  What will we teach our children to love?  And what are we willing to sacrifice for that which we cannot afford to lose?