For rabbis writing High Holiday sermons during the Israel-Hamas war, procrastination pays off

(JTA) — On the morning of Oct. 7, Rabbi Erez Sherman was preparing for the Yizkor memorial service at his Conservative synagogue, Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. He had written a sermon, somewhat presciently, about memory. It was titled “Hard to Say Goodbye.”

Then he received a text message from his predecessor, Rabbi David Wolpe, who was three hours ahead in Boston: “Change your sermon.”

News had broken about Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel, and while Sherman said he typically doesn’t use technology on Shabbat and holidays, it became clear that this was no typical holiday. For his sermon that day, Sherman ended up reading text updates from someone in a shelter in Ashkelon, near the Gaza border.

Now, as rabbis across the United States prepare their sermons for the upcoming High Holidays, the first since Oct. 7 sent shockwaves across the Jewish world, many are acutely aware that similar last-minute changes could be needed yet again. As the Israel-Hamas war continues and the U.S. presidential election approaches, the volume and pace of news show no sign of abating. For any rabbi interested in preaching on current events, that uncertainty presents a challenge.

But as Rabbi Nicole Guzik, Sherman’s wife and co-senior rabbi, points out, it’s a challenge with which rabbis are — often somberly — familiar.

“I hate to say it but look what has happened during the months of September and October,” Guzik said. “What was it like to be a rabbi during 9/11? What was it like to be a rabbi during the Yom Kippur War? Being a rabbi is being able to pivot and to give meaning and significance and the grounding of Torah to current events.”

Rabbi Jennifer Frenkel, the senior rabbi at Congregation Kol Ami, a Reform synagogue in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, said High Holiday sermon-writing often boils down to “the art of procrastinating.” That’s especially true, she added, when the holidays fall as late as they do this year — Rosh Hashanah begins Oct. 2, nearly three weeks later than it did last year.

“I think clergy have learned a lot since 9/11, since all these things tend to hit around the holidays, about being open to needing to scrap everything we’ve thought of and start again,” Frenkel said.

Frenkel, who plans to speak about current events for one of her High Holiday sermons, said she has been collecting resources and brainstorming with colleagues. But while in a typical year she would likely have an initial draft by this point, Frenkel said she has not yet started writing that sermon.

“That process, I imagine, is going to start much later than it has,” Frenkel said. “Certainly, with the situation in Israel ever evolving, the political climate in the country. So that’s kind of where I am — not very far at all. But I think that’s the best place to be right now, just staying open to the meaning that we’re finding in the day to day.”

Guzik, who is planning to speak about the Gaza war on Rosh Hashanah, said the conflict has actually simplified rabbis’ preparations in one way — when it comes to choosing sermon topics.

“You know you’re going to speak about Israel,” Guzik said. “I would be shocked if one of the five sermons that people deliver, [if] one’s not about Israel, that would be a very hard thing for me to hear. I think it kind of relieves that uncertainty. I think the question will be the direction.”

Rabbi Ariel Rackovsky, who leads Congregation Shaare Tefilla, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Dallas, said he has recently been writing his Shabbat sermons later than usual and, where possible, avoiding references to specific events that could quickly become outdated.

For the High Holidays, he said, he plans to keep his sermons focused on broader subjects that can be written ahead of time with little risk of requiring changes, and when he talks about Israel, current events will not be “the sole focus” of his remarks.

“Given that the specific reality may change, not just from one day to the next but from one hour to the next, my discussions are going to focus on the types of themes that you can prepare for in advance, that you can anticipate,” Rackovsky said.

Michele Lowe, a playwright who advises rabbis across the country on their sermons, said many of the rabbis she is working with ahead of this High Holiday season are planning to speak about the war and antisemitism, even if they gave similar sermons last year or in the months since Oct. 7.

Lowe is advising roughly two dozen rabbis on 37 sermons for this fall — her largest workload since she began moonlighting as a so-called “rabbi whisperer.” Most of her clients are Reform rabbis and the majority are women, she said.

Lowe said that any rabbi who chooses to speak about the war knows that they will likely need to continuously edit their sermons until the day they deliver them.

“Because this is something that is unfolding literally by the day, I think that if they are going to be preaching about the war, for example, they know that,” Lowe said. “It’s absolutely not a surprise.”

Lowe said the current moment reminds her of another recent crisis that accelerated ahead of the High Holidays: the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, even as vaccination rates increased, the spread of the Delta variant cast uncertainty over how synagogues would approach the holidays.

“Everyone thought in July of 2021, everybody’s going to stay healthy, things are going to be OK,” Lowe said. “And then what ended up happening was, the more the summer came on, a lot of those sermons had to get rewritten.”

On the plus side, Lowe said, giving a sermon about the war or other current events during the High Holidays provides rabbis a luxury often not available to them on a typical Shabbat: Time.

While she usually encourages brevity — “I’m of the belief nobody ever complained that the sermon was too short,” she quipped — Lowe said High Holiday sermons are often closer to 20 minutes, sometimes twice as long as a typical Shabbat offering.

As rabbis tackle — or revisit — these topics on the High Holidays, length is not the only factor to weigh. There’s also the question of navigating the political climate in one’s own congregation, a reality that differs in each community.

At Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, Sherman said the clergy have historically tended to steer clear of politics — an approach that drew criticism when Wolpe argued for it.

“We don’t give political commentary, we give spiritual food for the soul, and I think that’s an important aspect,” Sherman said. “Anybody can go read the news on whatever site they would like to, but when you’re going to come to a synagogue on Shabbat, on holidays, on High Holidays, I think people want to feel connected three ways: To each other, to a deeper sense of themselves and to God.”

Sherman said his community includes members of all political stripes, and that he and his colleagues “really try to present ideas of how to think and not what to think.” That apolitical approach does not apply to Israel, however, which he said has been a topic of conversation and education “literally every week” since Oct. 7.

In fact, that’s a practice Sherman said his congregants have validated. About five or six months after the war began, Sinai Temple’s rabbis asked lay leaders whether they should stop talking about Israel.

“When we asked our leaders, should we go back to what we were doing pre-Oct. 7, they said, ‘No, we’re not enjoying what you’re doing, but we crave it,’” Sherman said.

To Frenkel, the appeal of an Israel sermon — for both the rabbi and the congregation — is the opportunity to use Jewish tradition and text to draw meaning out of a difficult situation, an exercise that can be repeated, even on the same topic.

“For many [congregants], they haven’t been in the synagogue to hear every Israel sermon that we’ve given, or every sermon on antisemitism, or every sermon on the meaning that we find in community right now,” Frenkel said. “These sermons are kind of the heavy hitters. Are we going to echo some of the things that have already been said this year? Absolutely. But I think there’s always a new angle.”

Rackovsky has experience revising his sermons quickly. In 2018, American-Israeli activist Ari Fuld, whom Rackovsky knew personally and who had a relationship with Rackovsky’s synagogue, was stabbed and killed by a Palestinian teen in the West Bank days after Rosh Hashanah. Rackovsky said he found a way to incorporate Fuld’s “legacy and what he stood for” into his Yom Kippur sermon that year.

If he has to adapt his sermons this fall, he hopes it’s for a brighter reason.

“I hope that that pattern doesn’t hold up this year,” he said. “But on the other hand, there’s already been so much bad news that it’s not like you’re starting from a place where you’re talking about how great things are and suddenly they’re not.”

While last-minute changes to High Holiday sermons have historically been prompted by tragedy — 9/11, COVID spikes, war in Israel — Guzik isn’t ruling out the possibility that good news could throw a wrench into her sermon this year.

“Say suddenly on erev Rosh Hashanah, I get news that — God willing it happens much earlier — a deal has been reached and the hostages are being released, you better believe that my sermon is changing,” she said.