Rosh Hashanah Morning 5787 Sermon and Torah Reading Introduction
2 Tishrei 5787 / September 12, 2026
Rabbi David Edleson | Temple Sinai | South Burlington, Vermont
Narcissus and the Rabbis
Since last year, I have talked about how important it is that Reform Jews know more about the Talmud than we often do, so it is only fitting that I start this morning’s d’var with a famous story from the Babylonian Talmud. This particular story is found in Tractate Bava Metzia, the tractate that deals with civil law, property rights, business ethics and defamation.
In the middle of an argument about the legal consequences for defaming a Torah scholar, they digress into a debate about which rabbi was most beautiful. The leading contender is one Rabbi Yohanon. One rabbi explains that to even come near understanding Yohanon’s beauty, a person would have to buy a shiny silver goblet brand new from the smithy and fill it with red pomegranate seeds, and place a diadem of red roses upon the lip of the goblet, and position it between the sunlight and shade. That luster, they said, is a semblance of Rabbi Yoḥanan’s beauty.
Rabbi Yohanon agreed. He announced that he alone remained of the beautiful people of Jerusalem. It also turns out that he had a creepy habit of going and sitting at the top of the stairs where women exit the mikvah, so that when women came out from their monthly immersion, they would see Rabbi Yohanon, and the miraculous power of his beauty was so great, it would cause these women to have beautiful children.
One day, Rabbi Yoḥanan was bathing in the Jordan River when the leader of a group of bandits saw him and jumped into the river to pursue him. Rabbi Yoḥanan said to this man who was built like a Roman Gladiator, “Your strength is suited for Torah.” The bandit replied, “Your beauty is overwhelming.
Well, they talked and talked some more, and I guess they liked what they saw. Rabbi Yohanan ended up teaching the bandit Torah and he becomes one of the greatest rabbis of his generation, Reish Lakish. He married Rabbi Yohanon’s sister, who even Rabbi Yohanon admitted was prettier than he was, and the two rabbis became close friends, and famous teachers and debaters of Jewish law.
One day, they were arguing about a fine point of Jewish law: when a dagger or spear becomes eligible to be made ritually impure. Rabbi Yohanon said it was from the moment the metal was in hot in the fire. Reish Lakish said it wasn’t. It came later when the hot metal is tempered in water. “Well, you should know,” Rabbi Yohanon shot back. “A thief knows his craft.” Reish Lakish was hurt. “Why did you bring me to Torah if it was only to insult me because of my past?” Then Rabbi Yohanon got offended, and they unfriended each other.
Reish Lakish fell ill. Rabbi Yohanon refused to pray for his health. His sister begged him to pray for her husband’s health, but Rabbi Yohanon refused and Reish Lakish died.
Rabbi Yohanan was inconsolable. His colleagues became very worried about his state of mind, and so they agreed to send a nice menschy rabbi to go and comfort him. This rabbi, Elazar ben Pedat went and sat with Rabbi Yohanon and no matter what legal question he would ask about, Elazar ben Pedat would say, “there is a good source that supports your opinion.”
This infuriated Rabbi Yoḥanan who said, “You are no substitute for Lakish. With him, when I would give an opinion, he would raise 24 challenges to my position, and I would respond with 24 arguments back. Through this, law became broadened and clarified. All you can say is “there is a source that supports me? Don’t I already know that my opinion is well-founded?”
All this support only made Yoḥanan more upset, and soon he was going around tearing his clothes, weeping and saying, “Where are you, Lakish? Where are you, Lakish?”, until at last his mind was taken from him and then he died.
There is so much to unpack in this story, but more than anything, it is the love of debate and argument that in our tradition rises to the transcendent. That is such a radical and counter-cultural idea in almost every period and place in history; we remember the few exceptions and we are no longer living in one of them.
Social media and the algorithms that govern it are flattening our discursive world and our ability to stay focused on one thing long enough to ask 24 questions.
The evidence is becoming overwhelming.
(Micah Goodman, Our Technology Sickness and How to Heal it?, 2026)
In studying the Talmud, we’re enjoined to grapple with all sides of a dispute but in the end to live our lives in accord with only one of those sides. “An anti-Talmudic world.”
But polarization is far from unique to Israeli society. It is a global problem. Twenty years ago, political identity did not demarcate our intellectual or social horizons. Today, however, in contrast to the Talmudic ideal of nurturing an intellectual world wider than one’s practice, our intellectual world has shrunk to fit the narrower dimensions of policy and practice. The books we read, the lectures we hear, and the videos we watch are all produced by people in our own camp. In short, we have sunk into an anti-Talmudic world.
In his book The Upswing: How We Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020), Robert D. Putnam, who teaches public policy at Harvard University, presents a fascinating study on polarization. In the 1950s, Americans were asked whether they would be bothered by their son or daughter marrying a person of a different race. About fifty percent responded in the affirmative. They were also asked if they would be bothered by their son or daughter marrying a person who affiliated with a different political party. About ten percent answered yes. When the same questions were posed in the 2010s, fewer than ten percent said it would bother them if their son or daughter married someone of a difference race, but over fifty percent said it would bother them if their child married a person with opposing political views. In other words, Americans are growing more open to people of different races and growing more closed to those who hold different political views.
Another study asked people who identified as left-wing to rate their level of sympathy for right-wingers and people who identified as right-wing to rate their level of sympathy for left-wingers. They rated their feelings using a one-hundred-point scale: 0 represented absolute hatred, 100 represented absolute love, and 50 represented lukewarm feelings, neither love nor hatred. In 1995 the average score was 40. Republicans did not particularly like Democrats, and Democrats did not particularly like Republicans. Their emotional temperatures were low, but far from a deep freeze. The researchers repeated their study twenty years later: the average score dropped from 40 to 7.1 Within twenty years, Americans began to hate those who hold opposing political views. Similar polarization is happening in England, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, Argentina and many other countries. In recent years it has become a global epidemic.
Precisely when we seem most connected, we are most distant; precisely when we have all the tools to free ourselves and gain exposure to the wider world, we find ourselves imprisoned and disconnected. A new economy, equipped with new technology, has created very old politics. Tribal politics.
Tim Wu, a scholar of media at Columbia University, explains how this new medium has led to the political polarization of society.3 Human attention, he says, is increasingly being funneled into the neck of a digital bottle. In the early days of Google and Facebook, we all wondered why they would distribute their products for free. But over time the answer became clear: we are not receiving a product from these technology companies; we are giving a product to them: our undivided attention. In turn, they monetize that attention by selling it to advertisers, to great profit. In fact, Wu shows, the value of Facebook and Google today far exceeds the value of the major oil companies in the United States.
If political tribalism is a threat to our democratic wellbeing, self-isolation threatens our mental wellbeing. Our public life is under attack from the virus of polarization; our private lives, from the virus of loneliness, alienation, and—not least—envy. Digital technology is causing both viruses to mutate more quickly.
Because of the digital revolution, our lives are being transformed by three grand bargains. The intellectual bargain: we have more knowledge but less capacity to concentrate and focus. The social bargain: we are much more available but much less attentive. And most importantly, the emotional bargain: we are much more connected, but much less empathetic. When we trade away skills for power, attention for availability, empathy for connectivity, and quality for quantity of relationships, we sign up to a Faustian pact that we do not even know exists—one that gives us more control over the outside world, but less control over our inner world.
The West’s aspiration for freedom translates into a persistent cultural aspiration to have ever more options from which to choose. But a surplus of choice has a paralyzing effect. We do not get excited by the huge range of options but overwhelmed. Paradoxically—an increase in choice comes to the detriment of the chooser.
Yet the most devastating damage is not the difficulty of choosing but the difficulty of being happy with whatever one has chosen. When one is faced with a wide choice of possibilities and invests time and energy in weighing up the pros and cons of each, this investment might help one make a better choice—but it also guarantees that one will enjoy less whatever one chooses. This is the paradox: the more time people invest in choosing, the better their choice but the less their enjoyment from it. That is the tragic nature of human choice.
IF WE WANT TO FIGHT BRAINROT, look up from the phone. Have a shabbat.
If we want to fight antisemitism, extremism, and polarization, we must gain more control and transparency over those algorithms. We keep trying to win the argument, but in the face of choices being made for us, where we are the products not the consumers, we don’t stand a chance. Especially in the face of bots from China, Russia, Iran and other countries that flood Tik Tok and social media with extremism. This is on top of the already all-too-human tendency to tribalism and wanting to enforce who is in and who is out of our tribe.
INTRODUCTION TO TORAH READING: Genesis 22:1-19
Last night I spoke about loneliness and how much it is part of the human condition. The section of the Torah we read this morning, the Akedah, or the near-sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, is, I think, among the loneliest stories in the Torah.
The classical rabbis try very hard not to see that. They make this an unexpected story about faith and connection. In their reading, Isaac is an adult and aware of what is going to happen and so when the text tells us “the two of them walked on together”, it means they were in it together, spiritually united, a father-son team.
But that is not how I read it. Here we have a happy, successful, connected if complex family, and in our portion, it all falls apart. First Sarah “cancels” Hagar and Ishmael and demands they be sent away. Then God tells Abraham to sacrifice his other son. They arrive at the mountain, leave their servants behind, and start the hike up. How lonely that walk is! Sarah has been left behind heartbroken and betrayed and dies soon after.
Abraham must feel betrayed by God who promised his descendants would come through Isaac. Isaac, who never says much, asks where the ram is for the sacrifice, and when Abraham gives a vague answer, Isaac seems to shrug. He doesn’t say another word. Imagine the loneliness of that walk. There is betrayal by the people you love on every level; even God is now ghosting you. Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah never speak to one another again.
Perhaps the story is read on Rosh Hashanah not because it is a tale of obedience and faith, but because it is a lesson on how easy our closest relationships can rupture, and how lonely that is. And the Jewish antidote to that rupture, is “t’shuvah,” or reflection, forgiveness and change.
T’shuvah, which requires conversation, which requires taking responsibility, requires asking for forgiveness and forgiving others, is a Jewish spiritual technology to combat loneliness and self-isolation we see in Abraham’s family, and as we read it today, instead of focusing on God’s test, perhaps focus instead on the rupture of relationships, the lack of honest communication, and the inability of any of them to stop what was happening before an angel had to step in.
