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by Rabbi Nathan Kamesar
It is distressing to witness a significant part of the world at war. At the center of the current conflict is the clerical regime governing the Islamic Republic of Iran — a regime that has fomented death and destruction throughout the world for decades, and whose supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on Saturday.
Some examples of this regime’s carnage stretch back decades. In 1983, Iranian-backed attacks on the US embassy and the US Marine barracks in Beirut killed over 300 people. Similar attacks in 1992 and 1994 on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires and a Jewish community center there killed more than 100. Iranian-backed antisemitic arson attacks took place in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, as recently as 2024. These sit alongside the massive proxy network Iran funded to surround and attack Israel, a country whose destruction is a central plank of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s foreign policy; a clock in a central square in Tehran publicly counts down the days to the end of Israel’s existence.
In this context, it is understandable why a nuclear program in Iran would be viewed as untenable by Israel’s citizens. Meanwhile, Iranian citizens themselves deplore this regime. A recent wave of anti-government protests erupted in Iran, to which the government responded with a large-scale violent crackdown, with estimates ranging from 3,000 to 30,000 protesters killed. As Thomas Friedman wrote, “there is no single event that would do more to put the whole Middle East on a more decent, inclusive trajectory than the replacement of Tehran’s Islamic regime with a leadership focused exclusively on enabling the people of Iran to realize their full potential with a real voice in their own future.”
Still, there is no clear pathway from current conditions to regime change. There is little doubt that the current military action by the United States and Israel has significantly degraded Iran’s capacity to foment violence in the region — a tactical achievement. But translating that to long-term regime change in Iran, in which its leadership no longer desires the destruction of Israel and no longer violently represses its citizens, is more difficult to realize.
In any event, even in the most optimistic of projections for how this plays out, we mourn the loss of innocent life all across the region. We have members of the Society Hill Synagogue community in Israel now, and many extended family members in Israel, regularly taking shelter as missiles fly overhead crashing throughout the country. In addition to Israel and the West Bank, where residents often lack the security offered by bomb shelters, retaliatory Iranian strikes have hit residents of Cyprus, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. We know that six US service members have been killed, 10 Israelis, nine of whom were in a shelter in a synagogue in Beit Shemesh, and hundreds, perhaps over 1,000 Iranians, including 165 people killed in an attack on a girls’ elementary school, whose surrounding circumstances are being investigated.
We pray for the ultimate cessation of war, an aspiration central to Jewish life, as evinced by those timeless words from the prophet Isaiah, “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not take up sword against nation; they shall never again know war” (2:4). Ken yehi ratzon, may it be so.
Next follows the D’var Torah (teaching of Torah) I delivered last Friday night on the eve of both a Bat Mitzvah celebration, and the celebration of an auf ruf, marking an upcoming wedding in our community:
Laid out before us this evening, in a sense, is much of the scope of the Jewish life cycle journey.
We have Talia celebrating becoming Bat Mitzvah. Becoming Bat Mitzvah, as developmental psychologists would teach us, comes at a transition point of two life stages. In childhood, we are learning to believe in ourselves and what we are capable of, sometimes questioning it: “Am I good enough?” “Can I do this?” The Bat Mitzvah experience comes to allow Talia to demonstrate to herself, “absolutely!” You are a child of God, like we all are. On top of that, you’re capping off the first stage of a learning journey in which you’ve learned how to read and decode a three-thousand year old language, the language of our people, chanted through not one but two different musical systems; you’ve learned how to study a sacred text and weave its words into a teaching relevant to the lives of our community.
And oh — by the way — you’re doing the thing that people regularly rank as the thing they most fear. Ahead of heights, and ahead of bugs, the thing people most commonly cite as the thing they fear the most is public speaking and performance, and here you are doing that, too. So to the question of “how capable is Talia Rosen Vance of doing hard things,” we all already know the answer, and hopefully she’s beginning to feel it, too: the answer is, “very. Very capable.”
As she transitions over time from childhood into adulthood, Talia will also find herself taking real ownership over her life in ways she hasn’t before, navigating complex social and moral dynamics. And we pray and know that this Bat Mitzvah experience — all the preparation she’s done, not only technical preparation, but human preparation, values preparation, identity preparation — all the strength of character her mom and her tradition and her community have instilled in her, teaching her to trust herself and her values — we pray and know that all of this helps provide the foundation for her to do what she is capable of, which is to be a person of strength, courage, and goodness in this beautiful yet broken world.
And the life cycle journey continues. Further down the road a little bit, we’ve got Hannah and Jacob’s Auf Ruf.
Hannah and Jacob, remember adolescence? Remember your chapters of the journey that Talia is on right now, your Bat and Bar Mitzvah experiences?
Well, you’ve now reached a different stage, which you may be profoundly grateful for, and which also presents challenges of its own.
In a couple of months, you’re going to sign your k’tubah, your sacred marital contract, which signals a fuller realization of something you’ve been carrying out already: the importance of intimacy in your life, of fully opening yourselves up to one another, of centering not only yourself, which we’re all prone to do if we’re not too careful, but another loved one, too. Of fostering an open connection with another — not losing our sense of self, but being invested and committed to sharing that sense of self with another, and receiving their self in turn. As it says in Bereshit (Genesis), husband and wife are called to davak — to cleave to one another, fostering intimacy and connection.
This mutual commitment brings you to a new chapter of your life, one that you’ll navigate together, one in which you’re called upon to transmit who you are together, the values you share, the heritage and the legacy you forge together, to the next generation — through family life, through work life, planting seeds for the next generation to reap and sow. On your wedding day, you’ll sign that k’tubah, that marriage contract signaling the values you hold together; you’ll circle one another, establishing your foundation together; you’ll step under the hupah, representing the home you’re building together, and you’ll have a sense of shared values that you’re ready to transmit throughout your lives together to the world around you — ken yehi ratzon, may it be so.
And while we’ve named the two lifecycle moments we’re celebrating here this Shabbat, they are not the only ones present today. This Shabbat also invokes the next chapter of the Jewish life cycle journey, after childhood and adolescence, after relationship building and family building and working life, into what’s beyond all that, and that is because this is Shabbat Zakhor, the Shabbat of Zakhor, remembering.
As we move further into life, that is part of our task, to some degree, on this earth: remembrance.
This week is called Shabbat Zakhor because it is the Shabbat before the holiday of Purim, and on it, we are called upon to read a special selection of the Torah, which Talia will chant for us, jumping out of the normal order of the Torah reading, which begins Zakhor: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt.” Who is Amalek? For our purposes, it doesn’t really matter, except that tradition understands Haman, the villain of the Purim story, to have descended from Amalek, hence the connection between this portion and Purim.
But what’s interesting and relevant is that the passage we’re called upon to read goes as follows: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt” — it goes on to describe what Amalek did to the Israelites on their journey, and then it says. “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!”
What we may have here is an ambivalent relationship to a traumatic experience. On the one hand, remember what this tribe did to you; on the other hand, blot out the memory of them; on the third hand, do not forget.
We have an ambivalent relationship to a traumatic experience. We want to let go, but we have to engage with the memory in order to move on.
Our final chapter often calls upon us to look back and make meaning of our lives. To weigh all of our investments and regrets, our accomplishments and our missed opportunities, what’s happened to us and what’s been done by us, to come to a sense of integration and peace. At a certain point in time, these past moments are beyond our control. And yet Jewish tradition says, Zakhor. Remember. Make meaning of what’s come before you. Make peace with it. And if you need to, let it go.
As scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes in Zakhor, his seminal book on Jewish memory, “the Hebrew Bible seems to have no hesitations in commanding memory… Altogether the verb zakhor appears in its various forms in the Bible no less than one hundred and sixty-nine times, usually with either Israel or God as the subject, for,” as Yerushalmi writes, “memory is incumbent upon both.” We’re all called upon to remember.
On this Shabbat Zakhor, Shabbat of Remembrance, we’re blessed to have the opportunity, like Moses at the end of his journey, to look back across the expanse of the Jewish lifecycle — from childhood to adolescence, on to adulthood and the formation of a new home, coming to the end of our lives looking back across it all.
May we all, no matter our chapter of life, be blessed with the capacity to navigate our journeys with wisdom and grace, and with remembrance.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi K.
