The Sweat of Love and the Fire of Mitzvot
The following sermon was delivered by Rabbi Ariana Katz on Yom Kippur morning 5786, 10 Tishrei 5786 | 2 October 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
I believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.
― Assata Shakur, “Affirmation”
כִּֽי־קָר֥וֹב אֵלֶ֛יךָ הַדָּבָ֖ר מְאֹ֑ד בְּפִ֥יךָ וּבִֽלְבָבְךָ֖ לַעֲשֹׂתֽוֹ׃
No, the thing is very close to you,
in your mouth and in your heart,
to observe it.
―Devarim 30:14
I want to share a fantasy with you.
Have you ever been walking around in New York and seen the Chabad teens helping men lay t’filin and giving women Shabbes candles? They’ll walk up to you and ask, “are you Jewish?” Suddenly, if you answer yes, you’re in a compact–a chance for them to help you perform a mitzvah. You learn the blessing for laying t’filin, say it word by word, and suddenly you’re b’phyllactried. Mazal tov!
The implications of these sudden mitzvah doings are so profound: It stems from a statement in the Gemara that if all Jews lit Shabbat candles for two Shabbatot in a row, Mashiach would come. That liberation, the Messianic age, is so just around the corner that all that it is waiting for is us to do mitzvot. As such, these shluchim, emissaries of the Lubavicher Rebbe, are on a mission to get as many Jews doing mitzvot as they can. I mean, same. This feels like a very simple formula to get to liberation for the world– do good in it.
Now, its not just as wholesome as racking up mitzvah points and bringing people in, their kiruv is a little more complicated than that. Because the only people asked if they are Jewish look like white Ashkenazi cisgendered Jews, missing out on so many. Having had to hustle to be allowed to wear t’filin when I was 13 in my supposedly egalitarian community growing up, t’filin is a mitzvah particularly dear to me. So here’s the fantasy:
I set up a block down the street from where a few shluchim are stationed (we’d shmooze before of course.) I ask everyone who walks by who seems at all interested “are you Jewish? Have you put on t’filin today? Will you light Shabbes candles this Friday at XYZ time?” Catching the rest of us Jews, so we can partake in this mitzvah.
Where Chabad gets this right is urgency. We must work in unison, in generosity, and expeditiously to create the conditions where peace will happen. It is a resistance to individualistic spiritual practice that aims just to improve ourselves and our ~spiritual lives~ in a moment of collective dissolution. Our spiritual practice must concerned with collective liberation, which means that our individual practice must exist to serve our collective redemption.
And that means that sometimes, it’s going to be annoying. Painful. Require you to stretch you outside your comfort zone of tolerance. You’re going to have to do s*** you don’t want to do. But we must work in unison and with generosity to create the conditions where peace will happen, where liberation will come, and we must want that more than we want momentary comfort or self-importance. The idea of individual stake and individual practice is just anathema to how Jewish technology works.
Friends, this regime is working to keep us fractured and overwhelmed and confused and competitive. It wants us to be afraid every day. It wants to control the cortisol that rushes through our body, that narrows our field of vision, that gives us over to immobilizing despair, and it makes us think that in our pain we are solitary, and the solutions will only come from acting in our own self interest. Solitarily, friends, you are hurting right now because your government has designed it that way, because modernity has tricked you into thinking you don't exist in a vast ecosystem, that you breathe in what trees breathe out, that the water that makes up 60% your body didn’t also pass through the sky and the soil and the sea and your neighbor. This regime wants you to forget that your actions are inspired, compelled, and necessitated by the lives of others.
But we can resist those lies. Assata Shakur, z”l, taught, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” We don't actually have to look very far for help to remember we are duty bound, obligated to each other.
לְפִיכָךְ אֲנַחְנוּ חַיָּבִים: therefore, we are obligated
So obviously, what I hear you asking next is the obvious question:
RABBI! What is a Jewish understanding of chiyyuv, obligation?
Well, the blessings we say over mitzvot are “asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu,” classically translated “who sanctifies us with your commandments and commands us.” So I would say: we understand chiyyuv to mean…a lot.
Our community is not affiliated with a denomination. We use a Reform Shabbat prayerbook donated to us by Bolton Street Shul here in Baltimore. We use the Reconstructionist High Holy Day machzor donated to us by Kol Tzedek Synagogue in Philadelphia. I am a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical college, member of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and thereby bound by their ethics. Our sefer torah is on loan from Conservative shul Adath Jeshurun in Philadelphia. Sometimes you’ll see someone crying into a Koren Orthodox prayerbook in the back of the sanctuary. We do not do Musaf on Shabbat, which is the additional service that is recited on Shabbat and holidays, except we do do Musaf on the High Holidays. Hinenu affirms the Jewishness of patrilineal Jews and joyfully celebrates multi faith marriages. We livestream all our services (with great joy and mixed results) and use amplification on Shabbat. Our food is all vegetarian, cooked in a shared non-kosher kitchen. We celebrate Tu b’Av have deeply meaningful observances of Tisha b’Av and Yom Kippur (obv!) You could say that we have an ad hoc relationship to halakhah.
So, then to what do we feel a sense of chiyyuv?
Halacha, Jewish law, is the unfolding process of outlining Jewish practice and behavior in accordance with our understanding of what God and our ancestors, perhaps more importantly, would have us understand is life full of mitzvot following the commandments. Reconstructionism is referred to often as “post halachic,” a term coined by Rabbi Jack Cohen, the student of Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist ideology. As my teacher Dr Elsie Stern famously taught, “Judaism is what Jews do,” and so regardless of if any Jewish action is halachic or not, it is a Jewish choice.
The majority of our community is not shomer Shabbos in a halachic way, from what I can understand, might not keep kashrut, but clearly feels compelled to stay committed to the Jewish project. For some of you, halacha has no bearing on your decision making process, how you keep Jewish time, how you relate to mitzvot. For some of you, you make Jewish decisions based on what your family has done, what your community has done, and what your contemporary life allows or dictates. For some of you halacha offers you sense in a senseless world, and you work to integrate your practice into a heterodox congregation that might not prioritize what you do. And for some of you, you are non-halachic, but feel guilty about it, a unique and important third category.
Halacha, Jewish law, is a system that dictates individual behavior with an understanding of how we fit into the collective. So in a sermon I never thought I would give, I'm here to make an argument for a halachic life. By which I mean more specifically, and accurately, a life filled with obligation. I do not necessarily mean a life that counts the minutes between milk and meat, although I wouldn't tell you not to, but a life that understands that the decisions that we make in small ways are a part of a larger community that we wish to care for and to be a part of. And so today, I want to make the argument for you that committing to a halachic life, by which I would like to mean a life of rigor and seriousness, removes us from getting caught up in the myth of our individuality and continues to recenter our focus on the collective. Yes, you can davven three times a day, but without others to make a minyan–a quorum of 10, you cannot recite the barchu, or kedusha, or kaddish–you cannot fully bless, sanctify, or remember.
So this Yom Kippur, I'm calling on us to accept upon ourselves ol malchut shamayim, the yolk of the weight of heaven. Rabbi Shai Held said recently, “The very notion of commandment is a summons to a different world. To be commanded to do something is to be invited into a task of building a world.” And Grace Lee Boggs said “transform ourselves to transform the world.” Being called to mitzvot, feeling a sense of obligation, of duty, transforms us, and our world.
I want to call on us to feel obligated, to consent into obligation. Now, obligation is seen as a negative, as a pejorative, as a sense of doing something that you don't want to, and perhaps that's the case–who wants to be yolked to and pull a giant cart behind you? But we can consent to doing things that are hard and derive pleasure and meaning and access to our most high values from it, and so let us accept upon ourselves this feeling of obligation. Just experiment with it. Join me in the next year in collecting data.
I want to bring you to a daf in the gemara we have already spent time on together years ago, with the story of the Fox and the Fish, who’s punchline asks “Why would we abandon our Jewishness in a time that empire is promising us safety on dry land, out of the embrace of the waters of Torah and Jewish time?” A discussion then picks back up on the Shema:
We learned in our mishna the explanation of the verse: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5).
And Rabbi Akiva comes back in to explain that it means that “you should love God even if Gd takes your soul.” But then as the conversation continues, located in a time of empire and persecution, the time comes for Akiva’s execution, one of the ten Kedoshim, holy ones, we honor in the Yom Kippur martyrology. Though it is to be executed, it is also time to recite the Shema. And as they rake iron combs over his flesh, Akiva recites the Shema, accepting on himself ol malchut shamayim, the yolk of Heaven.
His students, as you can imagine, are incredulous.
“Our teacher, even now, as you suffer, you recite Shema?” But he answers, “all my days I have been troubled by the verse: With all your soul, meaning: Even if God takes your soul. I said to myself: When will the opportunity be afforded me to fulfill this verse? Now that it has been afforded me, shall I not fulfill it? He prolonged his uttering of the word: One, until his soul left his body as he uttered his final word: One.” A voice descended from heaven and said: Happy are you, Rabbi Akiva, that your soul left your body as you uttered: One.
Judaism would prefer you live, to do mitzvot, to do good, don’t let the tragedy of Akiva’s death suggest otherwise. But/and, Rabbi Akiva’s death we learn that our goal is to try to fulfill as many mitzvot as we can individually in order to fulfill Gd and our ancestors will, to bring down a better world into this world and hope that a liberated messianic world comes because of our work in this world
To be chayav on something is not a free floating sense of obligation and failure, ideally. You have fulfilled an obligation because you have done a tangible thing: prayed, heard megillah read, lit Shabbat candles. And for non-halachic Jews, I offer that this is our connection to halacha: simply feeling guilty because you’re not “being Jewish enough” is not a fulfillment of obligation–Mariya Strauss would like us to remember that worry is not a form of care. For non-halachic Jews, we can feel chiyyuv and fulfill those obligations with tangible actions. Whether or not the law requires you to mark the new moon or comfort mourners or respect sex and intimacy, they are commitments we have to which we are obligated, and we fulfil them with specific action. This requires understanding what and who we are obligated to, and what that then asks from us tangibly.
Something that Chabad knows is that obligation keeps us together. A shared project, an urgent project, keeps us working together despite the fact that he was rude to your wife last break fast or they screwed you over in a business deal this year. Without obligation, needing each other to do mitzvot, needing to do mitzvot, the group would fall apart. Structure is like medicine, especially in a chaotic world. So somehow paradoxically, to cultivate accountability to one another, collective mentality, we must resist individualism, but each of us feel deep ownership.
Implementation and Individuality
Activist, anarchist journalist, and Catholic Dorothy Day said it clearly: “Everyone wants a revolution, but no one wants to do the dishes.” Comrades, boy have I lived in that collective–the Baobab on Brainard Street in Allston, MA. Everyone shout out your disfunctional collective living house now! A house full of revolutionaries whose rent was subsidized by our parents, who did jail support and ran reading groups and hosted bird-themed fundragers and lived cooperatively…And whose sink was full of dishes with vegan slop caked on waiting for “someone” to get to, and fridges full of food that always somehow were cleaned out by women.
Everyone wants a revolution, but no one wants to do the dishes.
Revolution, Mashiach, whatever you want to call it, happens in the small, quiet application of our highest values. Keeping your mouth shut when you’re the only white person in the room. Not repeating what a woman said just because you’re a man and can’t listen. Not needing credit for giving generously or footing the bill because you have a trust fund. Correcting someone on another person’s pronouns, even if it feels uncomfortable. Taking out the trash. Asking “what can I do to help?” No–looking around, and seeing what needs to be done. Everyone wants a revolution–wants to see themselves on the barricades waving the flag, but who’s taking care of the children offsite?
And trust me, as the girl who in this season of her life is more often waving the flag then getting to do bedtime, I know its rich to hear. (Thanks, Ever, Lura, Jackie, Duncan, Bubbie, Saba, Magic.)
But the call to Do The Dishes is not meant to be a small making, shaming idea. It is an incredible gift, an amazing opportunity we have to take action. The world is absolutely crushing. Devastating. Disempowering and humiliating. It feels impossible to do anything to transform it, un-shut-down a government, protect our neighbors from kidnapping, stop a genocide. But there is work of our hands we can do, and work of our hands for which we are immediately and acutely responsible.
At the end of our Torah, Moshe reminds the people they must follow the mitzvot, and that when they do, they will be taken care of and successful. But the Israelites, like us (we come by it honestly), try to get out of it. And Moshe says in Devarim 30:11-16 (look at that, we’re in the same chapter as where Rabbi Akiva was teaching us.)
כִּ֚י הַמִּצְוָ֣ה הַזֹּ֔את אֲשֶׁ֛ר אָנֹכִ֥י מְצַוְּךָ֖ הַיּ֑וֹם לֹא־נִפְלֵ֥את הִוא֙ מִמְּךָ֔ וְלֹ֥א רְחֹקָ֖ה הִֽוא׃
לֹ֥א בַשָּׁמַ֖יִם הִ֑וא לֵאמֹ֗ר מִ֣י יַעֲלֶה־לָּ֤נוּ הַשָּׁמַ֙יְמָה֙ וְיִקָּחֶ֣הָ לָּ֔נוּ וְיַשְׁמִעֵ֥נוּ אֹתָ֖הּ וְנַעֲשֶֽׂנָּה׃
וְלֹא־מֵעֵ֥בֶר לַיָּ֖ם הִ֑וא לֵאמֹ֗ר מִ֣י יַעֲבר־לָ֜נוּ אֶל־עֵ֤בֶר הַיָּם֙ וְיִקָּחֶ֣הָ לָּ֔נוּ וְיַשְׁמִעֵ֥נוּ אֹתָ֖הּ וְנַעֲשֶֽׂנָּה׃
כִּֽי־קָר֥וֹב אֵלֶ֛יךָ הַדָּבָ֖ר מְאֹ֑ד בְּפִ֥יךָ וּבִֽלְבָבְךָ֖ לַעֲשֹׂתֽוֹ׃
רְאֵ֨ה נָתַ֤תִּי לְפָנֶ֙יךָ֙ הַיּ֔וֹם אֶת־הַֽחַיִּ֖ים וְאֶת־הַטּ֑וֹב וְאֶת־הַמָּ֖וֶת וְאֶת־הָרָֽע׃
אֲשֶׁ֨ר אָנֹכִ֣י מְצַוְּךָ֮ הַיּוֹם֒ לְאַהֲבָ֞ה את–ה׳ אֱלֹקיךָ֙ לָלֶ֣כֶת בִּדְרָכָ֔יו וְלִשְׁמֹ֛ר מִצְותָ֥יו וְחֻקֹּתָ֖יו וּמִשְׁפָּטָ֑יו וְחָיִ֣יתָ וְרָבִ֔יתָ וּבֵֽרַכְךָ֙ ה׳ אֱלֹקיךָ בָּאָ֕רֶץ אֲשֶׁר־אַתָּ֥ה בָא־שָׁ֖מָּה לְרִשְׁתָּֽהּ׃
Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.
See, I set before you this day life and prosperity, death and adversity.
For I command you this day, to love your God ה׳, to walk in God’s ways, and to keep God’s commandments, God’s laws, and God’s rules, that you may thrive and increase, and that your God ה׳ may bless you in the land that you are about to enter and possess.
Our Jewish tradition understands the individual's action as crucial to the wellbeing of the collective, and that we have in each generation all the wisdom and information we need to be able to apply it. If we are going to collectively survive this time, we need to take individual action that looks to our collectivity. The stakes are simply too high to believe the myth that we're in it alone.
Coalition as Chiyyuv
Which means we don’t just have to care for each other, but we actually have to work together. Damn. Chiyyuv is hard.
Bernice Johnson Reagon, composer, historian, activist, and song leader, said a version of the following at the West Coast Women's Music Festival 1981 in Yosemite National Forest:
Coalition work is not done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort. Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home!...You don’t get a lot of food in a coalition. You don’t get fed a lot in a coalition. In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home. You can’t stay there all the time. You go to the coalition for a few hours and then you go back and take your bottle wherever it is, and then you go back and coalesce some more.
This year I want to call us to be chayav, obligated, and to then therefore take small and consistent action to realize our values, to put them into practice. To not just express a value of solidarity, but go to a meeting with an organization with a different theory of change than you. What happens if you go and listen? Will you explode? Unlikely.
Let us not say that we believe in collaboration, compromise, diversity of perspectives and priorities, but only organize with people exactly like us. Let us not sit in our mutual disgust of one another. Let us do the work of going out into the world and being uncomfortable, out of our home-base, to grow coalitions and movements where everyone gets what they need, even if they don’t get everything they want.
Among the many devestations and cruelties of our time, it is a devastating time right now figuring out how to organize with the institutional Jewish community around issues like ICE resistance, when for the last two years we have not spoken to each other except through pointed op-eds about the Israeli genocide in Palestine. And yet, my rage at my landsmen cannot get in the way of the need for our shared power to be poured into clogging up the cogs of the deportation machine. Both are true. So know, like Bernice Johnson Reagon says, there is real grief to be felt and honored when working in coalition, being away from home.
Shabbes Kodesh
We are in a moment that calls us to be cynical, that asks us to lose hope and to think that there is no change coming. A cynical relationship to Jewish life and practice is one that keeps our time and our holidays, but keeps it at arms length. Sees everything as a metaphor, as a practice to achieve an idea, rather than the thing itself.
Friends we are not smarter than our ancestors, we just have more information. And this is something that is been really core to me for a long time, because there is a cynicism embedded in contemporary movements of Judaism that would say, “sure that worked when we were in the shtetl, but life is different now we've moved past it.” And of course, there are things that we must move past in our tradition, things that limit us from each other, that restrict who can access modes of devotion to God. But I want us to engage with the gift that is the boundaries of Jewish life and Jewish time as something that gives us what to push up against. That blesses us with the permission to have a container to play in. Far be it from us, to disrespect the wisdom of our ancestors, to say it is no longer relevant or worth being in conversation with.
I also am here to tell you I think God wants our mitzvot. I think something changes for us when we keep mitzvot. I think that our prayer actually does something, and it is not just for our health, and it's not just so that we don't feel guilty that we slept in from shul one day. Your prayer actually matters. Our keeping of Shabbos, yes, it does something for us individually, but it does something for the world too, to step out of the lies that we are told, and to step into a world of observance of its beauty and of what exists without fighting for it.
So when I say to you, as I am about to, that I think something would transform in our community at Hinenu and our neighborhood and in our city and in our world, if everyone in this congregation lit Shabbat candles every week...I mean it. It's not just out of the sociological phenomenon–of us being able to coordinate and prioritize the same things, but because it brings down the Perfected World into this world.
Please God, we should each and together be sealed in the book of life for goodness, just for another year. May this year is an opportunity to try again, to continue to take our values and put them into action, to not just express a desire for connection, but to reach out to someone and share a meal, to not just express our values around decarceration, but to have accountable conversation and hard conversation with people who have caused us harm or who to we have caused harm, to actualize our values of community by volunteering, by putting in hours to sustain something beautiful.
So how are we going to make this happen? Well, firstly, I want to challenge each of you to light Shabbat candles. Step out of the Restless World, as Dane Kutler calls it, and commit to the wisdom of Jewish time. Candles are being passed out as we speak at Homewood, and if you’re on Zoom and want me to mail you Shabbes candles I’d be thrilled to. I hope you’ll light candles this Shabbes–halachic time would dictate at 6:27pm this week in Baltimore.
Friends, this year, what if you lit Shabbat candles every week? Light them 18 minutes before sundown, light them when you finally finish your day’s work and it’s already pitch black outside but you’re done and rest is settling over you. What if you lit candles every week?
And if you already have a Shabbat practice that is built into your body and your week and how you structure your time, what else could it nurture? Could you invite one person that feels like effort to host around your Shabbes table? And what else will you do? How will you allow the wisdom of Jewish time not to be a metaphor that works upon you, but a truth that you know in your bones?
Mashiach Conciousness
I need you to treat this as seriously as the Chabad guys treat their Mashiach Consciousness. I want each of us to develop a Mashiach Conciousness-that the Liberated World is on its way, and that our urgent action is needed to do good in the world to bring it down to this realm. If you don’t feel chiyyuv to the acts of bringing this liberated world, why? How will you make it your business?
May our experience of being mechayev, obligated, be one in which we experience the sweat of love. The fierceness of love. May our experience of being mechayev, obligated, burn within us with like the fire of truth, and rhythm and steadiness of a rigorous joy.
May the sweat that falls on our work, like salt on challah, like salt on the offerings on the altar, sanctify our lives and bring about a world of true peace in the year ahead.
May you and all who you love, and all who yearn for peace, be sealed in the book of Life for Goodness and blessing. Gmar chatima tovah.