Think back to this year’s High Holiday services, right when the rabbi was about to give the sermon. Try to remember what you were thinking and feeling.
Maybe you were eager to hear what they had to say? Hoping for nourishment? Nervous? Bored? Fidgety? Were you worried that the sermon would go someplace tender and painful at a time you already felt raw — someplace you weren’t ready to go? Were you worried that the rabbi was about to say something alienating, maybe profoundly alienating? Perhaps you were going to services in a new place. Perhaps certain things people in your community said and did in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023 (or the things they didn’t say and didn’t do) made you feel like that community no longer had space for someone like you.
Or maybe you weren’t at services at all.
My experience in my little progressive corner of the Jewish community was that almost everyone I know walked into services with a mix of anxiety, dread and deep exhaustion from a shattering year. What might make my experience unique, however, is that I’m also a writing coach who helps rabbis with their High Holiday sermons. This year I worked with 15 rabbis, so I had the unusual experience of having 15 sets of sermons all swirling around in my head.
The High Holidays are my favorite part of the year as a writing coach. I get to work with deeply learned, brilliant and compassionate people to help them find the Torah they are called to teach and to help them to weave it into something that will nourish their community. And (sometimes) I get to help bring some healing to their relationship with writing itself. It turns out, a lot of rabbis are terrible procrastinators, just like the rest of us.
If you came to High Holiday]services feeling anxious, tense, even fragile this year, there’s a good chance your rabbi felt the same way.
Taken together, this year’s sermons and the writing processes that went into them tell a story.
And part of that story is that I can say with some confidence that if you came to services feeling anxious, tense, even fragile this year, there’s a good chance your rabbi felt the same way.
A shattering year
In the weeks leading up to the holidays, my professional life was almost totally consumed by sermons: Every day, I was on calls with rabbis; I spent hours in Google documents making comments and suggestions, asking questions, digging up potentially useful Torah. I was thinking about sermons every day: at home and on the road, when I woke up and when I lay down to sleep. I called it my private homiletical house of mirrors because I was seeing so many people grapple with similar themes and questions from completely different angles.
Even in a “normal” year, the High Holidays are tough for congregational rabbis. It’s a 10-day marathon of services with unique and complex liturgies, a major fundraising push and the biggest crowds that show up all year. And amid all that, they also need to somehow find time to write two to four sermons for those crowds; the stakes can feel daunting. This is their chance to write something that’s spiritually nourishing, brings in the themes of the holidays in a way that’s relevant to people’s lives, doesn’t put anyone to sleep, and challenges people and pushes them out of their comfort zone in the spirit of teshuvah (but not too much, or they will complain to the board). All in about 15 minutes.
It’s a lot, even when you’re just trying to figure out something new to say about forgiveness. And this year was not a normal year. This year, almost everyone I worked with was grappling with what to say nearly one year after Oct. 7, which my own rabbi called “the horrifying yahrzeit that rewired the Jewish psyche.”
More than once what I was doing felt as much like therapy as like writing coaching. The rabbis I worked with were in different situations: some had communities that were (mostly) unified; some had communities that felt tense and brittle; a few felt like their communities were on the edge of breaking apart. They had different commitments, affiliations and priorities. Some were afraid to say anything at all about the war because everything they could think of seemed like it would do more harm than good. Others knew they had to but didn’t know what or weren’t sure how to step into the gravity of the moment. Others knew more or less what they wanted to say, though they weren’t sure how forcefully to say it or what their community could handle.
Almost everyone I worked with knew that this was something they had to get right but were deeply unsure what “right” meant.
Contraction
I had so many conversations with clients that amounted to, “What can I say? What does my congregation need right now? What can they handle?”
Or:
“It feels so hard to say anything because even tiny word choices, turns of phrase, words you use or don’t use, puts you on a ‘side,’ and some fraction of the kahal (community) mentally checks out. Do I talk about the ‘war’ in Gaza? The assault on Gaza? Do I talk about terrorism, mass death, antisemitism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, genocide? Who do I center? Where’s my frame? Who am I going to lose?”
In a lot of ways, the ones who had the hardest job were rabbis of congregations that are on what, for lack of a better term, I’d call the progressive end of the spectrum because those had some deeply painful divisions. Take my social-justice-oriented congregation: As our rabbi once put it, its spectrum of opinion about Israel/Palestine runs roughly the gamut between the New Israel Fund and Jewish Voice for Peace. It contains people who consider themselves as liberal Zionists, non-Zionists, anti-Zionists, diasporists and probably a few other labels as well, but we’re pretty much all on the left side of the American Jewish community.
Before Oct. 7, Israel/Palestine was always a bit of a third rail, and we found out that a crisis is a challenging time to start having those “hard conversations” we’d been putting off. People had left the community or were thinking of leaving. The possibility that one wrong word from the rabbi could push beloved community members over the edge was real.
And I could tell that a lot of my clients felt that acutely. But there were differences. Some knew, more or less, what they wanted to say or what they felt they had to say. The challenge was how to say it while still holding a pastoral role rather than a polemical one. In other words, how can I teach what I need to teach without abusing the pulpit or cracking my already-strained community?
A few of my clients had a different and deeper problem: They didn’t know what to say. They weren’t sure what the right thing to say was, and they were paralyzed by the thought of saying the wrong thing. That challenge took me a while to notice or understand because on the surface, it looked different from person to person. When I scratched at it, it was invariably the same kind of contraction: not having enough space to find their Torah, let alone express it.
Sometimes, it looked like a classic case of writer’s block: an individual who was usually a productive and timely writer who just couldn’t get started.
Sometimes, it was because what they wanted to say was hidden behind layers of anxiety. I’m trained to notice when a piece of writing is vague but also fraught — like the writer talking around something heavy without saying it — and I read a few early drafts like that.
Whenever I see something like that, I ask about it, and every time this year, the answer was more or less the same: There was something specific, authentic, viscerally powerful — an experience they’d had, a piece of Torah — but they worried it was “too much” or “divisive,” and semi-consciously buried it in abstractions.
Other times, it showed up as someone who completed a whole draft — sometimes several whole drafts, but they hated it. And I agreed. The draft(s) didn’t work. When I pushed them on why their sermon didn’t work, it was because they were saying something they didn’t really believe, either something felt forced or too vague, like talking about “hard conversations” or “multiple truths” without getting too deeply into what those conversations or truths were. It was what they thought their communities needed, but something was missing.
I remember in one conversation I found myself pushing hard trying to find that missing something: I asked, “OK, imagine you had a magic wand and you could say exactly what you wanted, and everyone would receive it ecstatically, and nobody would be mad at you and at the end of your sermon, they’d give you a medal. What then would you say?”
“I don’t know,” they said. “I just don’t know.”
Inner space
What so many of my clients needed and didn’t have was the same thing everyone needed but didn’t have this year: space.
The year after Oct. 7, 2023, was nonstop for clergy. There was so much to do, so many congregants in crisis, so much organizing and counseling and holding space and mourning to do. The intensity of Tishrei 5784 never waned. There was no lull in Heshvan or any other month. And everything kept evolving so fast; more than one client didn’t want to write anything about Israel/Palestine until the last minute because they were sure that events would render anything they had to say obsolete. In such an environment, lurching from one crisis to the next, it’s incredibly hard for anyone — even a rabbi, especially a rabbi — to get clear on what they think and what they need.
But, as far as I can tell, you can’t write a good sermon about the war and its many horrifying consequences if you’re only thinking of what you think your congregation needs. You can’t easily find your Torah if you haven’t been able to give your own needs and fears time and space, or if you’re walled off from yourself because you are afraid that what you will find if you look too deeply could create or deepen a rift in your community.
When rabbis decided to trust their communities and share what was really in their hearts, it became possible for something new to begin to emerge.
As soon as I realized that many of the rabbis I was talking to (not all, but many) hadn’t had enough space to sit with their own needs, grief, fear and rage, my priorities as a coach shifted. I started assigning my clients “homework” not just to write, but to davven (pray), meditate, exercise — anything that they could commit to. I started asking much more directly in sessions, “What do you need right now?” Our conversations became more about creating the space from which to connect to themselves and their inner world, which is necessary before one can figure out any of the “classic” writing questions about crafting sentences and paragraphs.
The break
The more my clients and I could create space, the more they seemed to me to find their voices.
Even though many of them were worried in one way or another about breaking something, or fraying already-strained community fabric, I didn’t work with a single client for whom the right answer for writing their sermons was to successfully “thread the needle” with their communities.
The ones who did the best — where “best” means both how they felt about the sermon and how their community received it — were willing to let something break because something was already broken. They were sincerely trying to hold everyone in their communities and provide concrete teachings about staying in community across difference and profound devastation, but they were willing to trust their communities to hold the brokenness with them.
Oct. 7 and its aftermath created and exacerbated so many fault lines inside the Jewish world and outside of it. Acknowledging those fault lines and speaking to them directly, sincerely and concretely, even if it risked alienating people, was what led to the best sermons. I learned that trying to avoid breaking something in a situation that was already so broken, and where more cracks were appearing every day, doesn’t work. I felt it at an almost energetic level; so many of my clients were trying to hold or contain the brokenness within themselves to protect their communities. Doing that cut them off from their own Torah, and, ironically, from the needs of their communities. It also led to terrible writer’s block.
When they decided to trust their communities and share what was really on their hearts, it became possible for something new to begin to emerge.
Glimmers
I checked in with my clients after the High Holidays. I was pleased to hear that their sermons had gone well. They’d gotten a lot of positive feedback. “This is more feedback and interaction than I ever get,” some reported. “People came up to me crying and hugged me,” others shared. Words that are music to a writing coach’s ears.
At the end of the day, what I do is hold my clients’ writing processes with them. We create a container so that they’re not in it alone, so they have a thought partner, an editor and a coach who is there to help them create something that they’re proud of and, as a consequence, have more ease and agency in their writing process in the future. This year I did a lot of that “normal” kind of writing coaching I’m proud of: I helped with planning, drafting, deadlines. I gave feedback to help sermons be tight and exciting, funny and moving, to be a clear and authentic expression of each rabbi’s particular Torah. And (maybe most importantly for the rabbis’ sanity) I helped a lot of them be done, earlier and with less angst than otherwise might have been the case.
But what I’m most proud of from this year is the work I did with those clients who needed the space to even find what they needed to say, and (sometimes) the courage to say it.
In our check-ins, many talked about having found a certain steadiness this year. All that work to create inner space paid off; they were able to find their Torah and their feet in a deeply dislocating year, and they felt able to hold both the positive and negative feedback from their communities from a pastoral place rather than a reactive or frightened one. I was even happier to hear that for many, the High Holidays had been a genuine source of renewal and reconnection for their communities — that little glimmers of healing had begun.
They showed me what it was like to sit with deep brokenness and still work every day to co-create with their communities the first glimmers of what something better might look like.
For me personally, going to High Holiday services was a release and a catharsis — a time when it felt possible to feel my fear and grief and community. After the holidays ended, however, the war(s) just kept going. As I write, the situation in Israel/Palestine has, to my mind, gotten worse even since October, I see no end in sight, and the divisions here in the United States feel even more entrenched.
To be honest, I am deeply pessimistic and frightened about the future for everyone. I think it’s going to be a long time before the damage that was done in 5784, and is still being done in 5785, can heal, if it ever does. Some of what is carrying me through my anxiety and anger is the example of some of the rabbis I worked with whom I appreciate deeply. They showed me what it was like to sit with deep brokenness and still work every day to co-create with their communities the first glimmers of what something better might look like.
