What is Rosh HaShanah to the Jew in 5786?: notes on endurance
The following sermon was delivered by Rabbi Ariana Katz on Rosh HaShanah morning 5786, 1 Tishrei 5786 | 23 September 2025.
Art for this year's High Holy Day season created by Naomi Rose Weintraub
Hinenu logo and custom font created by Miranda Cohen
Sermon coaching from Jon Argaman
Videography by Danny Schwartz
What is Rosh HaShanah to the Jew in 5786?
(With gratitude to Frederick Douglass, of course.)[1]
What are our apples and honey, our prayers for a sweet new year, our comforting tunes, or dreaming of the future, the pleasure of beloved community? What is Rosh HaShanah to the Jew in 5786, in which we pledge the best of ourselves to the best of each other; in which we reach for comfort from every earlier version of ourselves dissolving into every ancestor that came before us until we’re in the dark, warm, wet mud of the Garden? What is this year to us, as we imagine what is to come and pray for its blessing, when the year has been filled with so many curses?
What is Rosh HaShanah to the Jew in 5786, as the world shakes and burns around us?
Rosh HaShanah, the head of the year, the birthday of the world, promises hope. A fresh start. But this year, hope for a renewed world feels immature, unrealistic. Last year I stood before you and said that we needed to learn from Hanna, how she showed us she can can pray and weep in the Temple, refuse to leave it despite the cruelties done to her there, the violence made possible by the Ark– by which I meant refuse to surrender that which brings us strength and comfort from our tradition, despite the harm done by those who claim to speak for us.
But this year, two years into a world-recognized genocide in Gaza, as ground troops invade and push Palestinians into a death march that looks like the long forced marches our people have known all too well, as the remaining Israeli hostages were forced to dig their own graves and die abandoned, a United States fasicistic regime that now shamelessly shows us how much they want us all to die, that is trying to designate our trans kin as violent extremists, that seeks to trap and kidnap immigrants between peril and peril, the lynchings of two young black men in the last two weeks, a war that continues in Ukraine, a genocide that continues in the Sudan, the rupture in our own families and relationships to each other, jobs lost, plans put on hold…I don’t need to remind you of the weight on our shoulders, but I do need to name it. The endlessness. It is grueling. How exactly do we stay in any Temple?
On our ancestors
Our ancestors left us this gorgeous tradition, with so many trapdoors and water slides. They etched this tradition into their bones, which we buried and promised to not leave in the land of exile. They left us this incredible cast iron pan of tradition, seasoned with continents worth of grandmothers telling you to eyeball it, you’ll know what to add next.
And we broke it.
We–by which I mean the people who claim Torah, the people we agree with, the people who are committing unrecognizable harm, we the generation of the living [4], we and those who are alive and who inherited the same Judaism as we did. We who are one link in the chain connecting the generation before to what we pray is to come.
We broke it. And our ghosts are so angry. And so scared.
We promised them never again. We promised “not in our name.” We promised, “if I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, then when?’ and then later, doubled down–‘and, if not with others, how?”
They dreamed of us. They made love in fields under the vice grip of slavery, knowing that we would be born. They traversed land and sea, by choice or by force, passing through checkpoints and lying to immigration. They withstood violence inside their own homes and at the hands of the state. They dreamed that we would be here, one day, holding their Torah, understanding the secret messages they left for us. They dreamed that it would get better. That they could leave us the tools they needed and we would know how to work them to build what we needed. That we would heal them through our action, and sanctify their names.
But instead, we broke it.
We, and our parents, and their parents, our neighbors and our foes, we broke it. Our ancestors gave us a tradition full of chances to fail, and we fell for every one. This is the second Rosh HaShanah in a genocide, committed by Jewish people, the Jewish state.
To endure
So today, I want to talk to you about endurance. How we keep on praying in the ruins of the Temple, how we must, how we owe it to our past, and our future, to the dignity of our present to keep going.
I tell you this at the top: our collective process of surviving this year will be grueling. I want to speak to the slog. This unending slog of horrors, and the immobilizing grief and fear; the cynicism that floats up like byproduct as bone grinds against reality. This is not a sermon about hope, or how we’re going to get free. This is about being in the midst, the wilderness, the awful middle part.
This year, we need to honor the demand for endurance. We bear it all, because we owe it to our ancestors, and to our inheritors–by which I mean our children and our students and our art, and the children, students, and art that will flow from them.
That quality of endurance is known as netzach, which has a timelessness to it, an eternity. Netzach is among the closest-to-earth of the Divine traits, the ones we might aspire to most likely understand even a glimpse of. As Jay Michaelson teaches, netzach, often translated as “endurance,” stretches longitudinally, over time and distance–eternity. Hod, its counterpart, often understood as glory, is the vertical stretching, toward the numinous, divine, transcendent. While hod reminds us what could be, netzach asks us to stay in what is. But the two promise us that there is always movement. And that when we are in the middle place, we must know it as such.
As we begin I want to speak directly to you who have endured too much. Who know all too well about hanging on through chronic illness, through chronic pain, through disease. Who know all too well how to endure suicidality for another day to make it to the next day. Who know how to endure the grip of addiction to a transcendent future promised where the grip is not so tight. You who know far too well what it takes from a heart to carry on, push through, live while living just barely. You hold the Torah here, and this time, I fear, demands even more of it from you. Please teach us.
Endurance is an act of prophecy. It is knowing that there is (or should be) something different on the other side, that life is worth protecting, that this world is worth our fight. [2]
Palestinian poet Hala Alyan wrote:
We owe Gaza endurance. Endurance might feel impossible right now…All relentless entities depend enormously on a few things: your fatigue. Your hopelessness. Your turning away…We belong to long, gorgeous lineages of endurance. We are all here because someone, somewhere, endured. When it feels impossible, find land. Find breath. Find each other. Find songs and poems of endurance…This feeling (of despair, of rage, of unreality) is what helps us seek and preserve truth…Bearing witness is an honor…We witness so that we may tell the truth.
Sumud, the Arabic word for steadfastedness, doesn't guarantee life, or ease, but a commitment to existence, a future, a life that you are proud to have lived. It is core to the Palestinian consciousness as the unwavering faith in the people itself, a continuing forward as an act of faith in the world, a refusal to accept the reality we are in.
The word “l’olam” means, most commonly, forever. But you may know Olam Chesed Yibaneh, from Psalm 89:3, “I will build this world from love” also translated as “Your steadfast love is confirmed forever.” In Strong’s concordance, the go to understanding of the frequency of words and their usages, the term olam shows up to mean ever 272 times, everlasting 63 times, old 22 times, perpetual 22 times, and world, 4 times (as well as bunch of other things between.) I offer that our endurance feels like it is forever, that it is a requirement to exist in this lifetime. But also that it is on behalf of the world and our deep adoration for it.
In Ann Heberlein’s biography of Hannah Arendt, “On Love and Tyranny,” she writes:
Loving the world means taking care of life so that it can continue to exist. As we reflect, we must therefore, Hannah argues, pay attention to what has happened, to what is happening, and what may happen in the future. We must never forget, but neither must we lose ourselves to nostalgia. We must be able to love the world as it is, in all its imperfection; we must live with our memories and remember what we have to be thankful for.
For those of you who are checked out (hey, Shanah tovah! Stay there, or just gimme an ear for a sec) because this reads to you like spiritual bypassing (as in “oh, does this hurt? You just have get used to it and keep going!”), I hear you. And pain hurts, it doesn’t have to have a profound spiritual lesson embedded in it. But we need a reason to keep going. So maybe its your love for the world, for the things that grow in it and on it and above it. Maybe its your love for a specific person who grows on the world. Or an idea of what the world could, or SHOULD be. Maybe its because the alternative is worse–numbing out, checking out, abdicating responsibility, losing connection with everything. Netzach is about length of time–its not about pretending that everything is ok within that time. But knowing it stretches far out behind us and far out before us, and it cannot be like this always, and it is Netzach’s specific power that I think we need to make it through this time. [3]
Shoreshim of Netzach
I want to reach into the roots of netzach with you, the core structure and configurations of traits of the Divine that requires us to think in God like consciousness of time, ever expanding, ever continuing. By working with the shoresh, the root structure of our Hebrew words, we understand more of the facets of the idea, as we turn them in the sun, the light glints off them in different ways. By reaching into the roots, I hope to bring up nourishment from the heart of netzach, that we try to endure through this middle time that the year calls for.
Kohenet Ketzirah Lesser, a priestess, artist, and comrade in DC, does deep work with the ilan hasefirot, the tree of Life, the emanations of the Divine as understood by Jewish mysticism. Her working definition of netzach is the “gateway of endless possibilities.” Working with the shoreshim, she offers a range of possible definitions:
To endure, to make everlasting, to be victorious, to conduct an orchestra, to shine, to make everlasting.
The feeling of needing to endure this time is so complicated, endurance is so complicated, so we use many words to understand the many parts of it and many strategies for it.
To endure: Resist writing the story while you’re living in it
A quality of netzach is understood as “to endure,” the quality of being in the middle, of holding tight, of waiting and seeing, of staying the course. Netzach is endurance that stretches over the course of a long time, requires patience, requires us to resist declaring how the story will end up, declaring the ending before we’ve arrived. This facet of netzach doesn’t know if it is going to work or not, knows it is going to be hard. All the same, it teaches you that you’re free from writing the conclusion and summary of the story. It is just too early. Stay in the midst.
Maybe late March 2020 I found myself having lots of conversations with people saying “I want to get off this ride. I don’t want to do this.” It was the shock of our new reality, what we would have to give up, and our powerlessness amidst it. And for those of us who lived through the 9/11, the Iraq War, the 2008 recession, the COVID-19 pandemic, and this time, we know that feeling of drowning in history all too well.
For the sake of our endurance, we must limit how far we stretch into meaning making. We are in the wilderness, the sand stretches out forever. It is impossible to know if we are there yet. It is impossible to know what each of these moments means for us, or what coherent narrative will be crafted about this time. I would encourage us to stop making sense–this is a moment when making sense is the hardest. We know just of what is true, now.
And hyperspecifically, we are a part of a blossoming Jewish Left that, in my humble opinion, is one of the ways we will smuggle out our ancestors best hopes and tools into the future. There are so many different attempts bubbling up, so much blooming, and often the question is asked in our periodicals and our endless organizing meetings, what is the future we are building?
Far be it from me to tell us not to dream of the future and build it now–but I want to encourage us to focus on the doing, rather than the extrapolating. Because we are in a moment of “fairly intense incoherence,” living through actual history happening around us, and to structure a strategy while we are still experimenting and gathering the pieces is like expecting Rabbi Akiva, cackling in the crumbling remains of the Holy Temple, to be able to imagine you, sitting in this Quaker Meeting house, praying in jean shorts.
So, a tool for netzach: own the feeling, wait on the meaning. History is what you describe after it's over.
To make everlasting: Know deep time
A quality of netzach is understood as “causing something to be everlasting”–the hiphil, for you nerds. Of investing in the infrastructure needed to support the everlasting presence of a people, a story, a value, a truth. This emanation of netzach believes not in the ways endurance is painful, but in the ways we build things to last. To patina. To season over time.
When I was 14 years old, firmly obsessed with my grandmother Gail (Gram) of blessed memory, I remember sitting at the diner table and realizing she was alive in New York during the Shoah. In school, my days were spent immersed in graphic images of mass graves and forced starvation of the sunken faces that looked like mine and my classmates. We were subject to the Holocaust education of the 90s that felt if Jewish children weren’t traumatized early and often, they would forget the greatest mass suffering of our people. Then, that night at dinner, I realized while Jewish homes in Eastern Europe were being ransacked and our people being murdered, she was crocheting socks and hats for the US troops overseas. When I put this together–that these strands of history could be happening at the same time, I could barely breathe.
How could I possibly fault Gram now, now that I am living a lifetime parallel to hers, quietly knitting socks and shouting in megaphones, inert in the face of mass genocide, this time, even closer to home, the gun in our peoples’ hands?
This will be a season of the Rosh HaShanahs our descendants tell stories of. One in which the frame keeps shifting, from hope, to despair, to accountability, to revenge, to understanding, to complexity, to simplicity, to apocalypse, to the world that is on her way.
If I could behave as the ancestor I want to be now, it would be with compassion for my grandmother, just like me, living across the sea from a genocide, with tears for my child self realizing how cruel the world is, and the courage those two beings offer me.
Our ancestors know from waiting in the narrow place–we love to tell the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, leaving Egypt, but we really do zoom through the first 200 or so years of enslavement in which our people felt totally tricked, forgotten, alone. We know from being in the midst, crying out from pain, demanding to be heard.
So you can, however you can: sink into the earth so that you can grow–instead of pushing through the snow storm, root deeply in the midst, in order to grow into the future.
To be victorious: marking wins even in the horror
In a moment I’m going to share a line that depicts the horrors of the Palestinian genocide on children. This is an invitation to leave the room–it is short, but long enough to shatter our very souls with the harm that this world has witnessed. If you need to tend to the fence around your heart, please take a short break in the hallway!
A quality of netzach is understood as “to be victorious,” to mark wins even amidst the war. This is easier said than done, certainly we know as we live amongst multiple endless wars.
How dare we mark wins, when Palestinian Journalist Taher Herzallah writes,
The stories we are hearing out of Gaza are heartbreaking and soul-crushing. A 10-year-old child in Gaza City was asked what his hopes are for ending this war. His response: “I only hope for one thing–to find my dad’s body and to bury him.” This is the extent of the boy’s hopes and dreams. To find consolation in burying the body of his father, who was killed at a GHF distribution site.
This child endures simply to honor his dead.
How dare we mark wins, when just one month ago many members of this holy community gathered with 300 other Baltimoreans to pray with Kilmar Garcia Abrego and his wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura before watching him walk into the George Fallon Building, only to be again ripped away from his family. But before being taken away, Kilmar said: “Promise me you’ll keep fighting, praying, believing in dignity and liberty, not just for me, but for all.” Our neighbor asked us to keep fighting, to be victorious.
How dare we mark wins, when they feel like a pebble against a tornado?
By rooting into netzach, we become consumed with the knowledge that we will win. And that the small wins and the big wins alike are propelling us to ultimate liberation, victory. So when the small wins come–an Enoch Pratt union contract, homicide rates in Baltimore that have fallen 40% since 2020–memorize them, imprint them on your body, tattoo them on your shoulders. [4] It gets us through the losses, and gives us a map of the feeling we are trying to get to.
So you can, however you can, Bless the Wins, these words from from Marge Piercy, from “The Art of Blessing the Day”
This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.
To conduct an orchestra: Make art
And a last quality of netzach is understood as conducting an orchestra or leading song. So many of our Psalms begin addressed to the menatzeah, the conductor in the Temple. This time requires the netzach that sustains ourselves with art, with story of other times and places of peril and survival, of peril and disaster. Netzach allows us to titrate despair, taking it in, in small enough ways we can digest it, continue moving, endure.
With enough art to help us endure through the narrow straits, we will tell one another the stories and sing one another the songs to make us bold enough to continue on. Pleasure is an endurance practice.
So wherever you can, however you can, sing to the artist, care for the caretaker, make art because the world needs it to keep going.
Keep going.
We are in the middle of learning to cry and pray in the temple, that is why it feels so bad. Chana did it all at once in a cathartic moment, but that is the cleaned up version. We’re in the part where Eli is shouting in our face, and tears are streaming down, and we’re misunderstood, and we’re waiting for a baby.
We’re in the awful middle. Beloveds: You have to keep going. Keep going to get to the end where we invent a new way to pray. Beloveds: we must endure. Because…
We owe Palestine endurance
We owe Torah endurance
We owe our children endurance
We owe the world endurance
I am sorry that it is broken. I am sorry you have had to watch human beings live through impossible pain. I am sorry you have had to endure impossible suffering, and still go to work to try to make rent. I am sorry the future promises alongside its delights and joys and glimpses of the face of the Divine such great suffering, because suffering is in our present and in the future.
I am sorry that you need to find a way to netzach, but you must. Simply because life matters too much. Because this planet matters too much. You must find a way to stay alive, even if it is the success of making it to another day, borrowing the netzach of another to get to the next one. You must find a way to keep fighting back the fascism and nihilism and decay that knocks against our windows all night long. There is no other choice than the hard one, and for that I am sorry.
But it is in the doing that we find the meaning.
We broke so much of what our ancestors left us. And they are so, so afraid for what is to come for us. But our ancestors could also imagine us and what we could do, so they built a tradition inextricable from the way to save itself. Judaism is created to regenerate, reimagine itself, reinvent to meet the time. It allows us to endure. To fix the broken plow, and plow forward.
We broke it. But our ancestors also left us a task, to keep fixing it. Or trying. And that is the work that we must put our shoulders against, and push forward. To do the work of Judaism is to endure the brokenness, even if we don’t see the fruits of its repair. To be scolded, to pray a new way, without knowing that all those to come from us would be shaped by our corrections to a broken tradition.
What is worth enduring for? The world. The imagination of what could be different. The faith that it could be. The chance to see it change.
It won’t be all slog all the time
I cannot promise you we will win or it will work
That you’ll see the fruits of anything. You might.
The doing is the prayer, the praying is the point.
We owe the world endurance because of our love for the world.
But here we are weeping in the temple and trying to figure it out.
May you be blessed with creativity, courage, stubbornness, humility, suppleness, rigidity, hope, despair-held-gently, collaboration, and generosity.
May you be blessed with the strength to endure. And may you go from strength to strength, to see a world redeemed. May you and all who you love and all that you love be inscribed in the Book of Life for Goodness and Peace in the year ahead. Amen. [5]
Footnotes
1. On July 5, 1852, the great Frederick Douglass z”l, spoke to the hypocrisy of a holiday in “What to the Negro Is the Fourth of July?” “Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America.is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.”
2. Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov said, "When you are attached to one of the Four Worlds with no extraneous thoughts, you can then receive a thought very much like prophecy... Sometimes you hear a voice speaking and it can reveal future events."
3. Ann Heberlein, On Love and Tyranny: the life and politics of Hannah Arendt: “Amor mundi–why is it so hard to love the world?” Hannah asks in her intellectual diary. What does it mean to love the world? Is it even possible? In The Human Condition, she writes, “Love by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but apolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all apolitical human forces.”
4. This, and so many other turns of phrase in here (that I will indicate after the holiday is over) are credited to poet and prophet Aurora Levins Morales. Her words live in me next to my cells.
5. Any clarity, skill, or insight in my High Holy Day sermons should be credited to Jon Argaman who coached me in my sermoncraft again this year, and bring insight, heart, and skill not just to the act of writing, but to the corralling existential rabbinic meltdowns into Torah.