We belong to each other

Rosh Hashanah 5787 || September 12, 2026

This morning, I want to talk about the people                 you didn't choose.

Not the people you chose as friends.

Not the people you fell in love with.

Not even the people you chose to sit next to here in the sanctuary.

I mean the people who somehow became yours.

The person you don't know very well, 

but whose name you know because they had surgery last month.

The family whose kid you barely know, 

but you find yourself looking for at the oneg 

because you know they've had a hard year.

The person whose politics make you crazy.

The person who sends emails that begin, 

“Just one quick thought,” and then somehow contain seven paragraphs.

The person who, if you were designing a community 

from scratch, probably would not have been top of your list.

And yet.

There they are.

And somehow, they're ours.

That's one of the strange things about belonging 

to a Jewish community: you don't get to choose all the people you belong to.

Some of them are people you would never have chosen.

And then, one day, you realize you're worried about them.

You're keeping an eye out for them.

You're wondering how their kid is doing.

You're bringing them soup.

You're showing up.

Not because you chose them.

And yet here we are, bound to them anyway.

The Jewish political scientist Daniel Elazar described North American Jewish identity as resting on two different kinds of belonging: kinship and consent.

Consent is “belonging because I have chosen it”. I have agreed to join. I have said yes.

Kinship is different. Kinship is belonging through family, tribe, peoplehood, nationality. It is the belonging that says: these are my people.

Jewish life in America contains both.

Some of us were born into Jewish community. 

Some of us found our way here. Many of us are some combination of the two. And both forms of belonging have their limits.

You can be born Jewish and feel profoundly disconnected.

You can choose Jewish community and remain essentially a consumer of what it offers.

The Torah calls us B’nei Yisrael—the children of Israel—a term of birth, not preference.

And yet Jewish peoplehood has never meant that Jews are all alike.

We are not.

The history of the Jewish people is full of arguments, divisions, migrations, different languages, different ways of practicing, different ways of understanding what it means to be Jewish.

What holds a people together cannot simply be sameness.

Perhaps it is something closer to knowing that the person on the other side of the disagreement is still, somehow, yours.

Torah is deeply concerned with our most proximate relationships. And one of the words it uses over and over is achicha—your brother.

Not necessarily your literal brother.

The Torah uses that word to describe your fellow Jew: the person who shares a community with you, a people with you, a covenant with you.

And notice what that word does.

It doesn't say: your friend, or someone you like.

It says: your brother.

The Torah takes a person who might otherwise be a stranger and gives you a familial obligation toward them.

Your brother.

Someone whose life is now, in some way, your concern.

And the rabbis take that idea even further:

Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh.

All of Israel is responsible for one another.

Responsibility.

Not fondness. Not agreement. Not even comfort.

Responsibility.

Which is a much more inconvenient word.

Because responsibility has a way of finding you when you're busy doing something else.

Someone is sick.

Someone is grieving.

Someone has disappeared from the book group or the meeting or Friday night services for six months.

And suddenly the question is not, “Do I know this person?” It's not even, “Do I like this person?”

It's: What do I do now that I know?

I think that is one of the great questions of Rosh Hashanah.

We come here to take stock of our lives. We ask who we have been, what we have done, where we have failed, where we have grown.

But our tradition doesn't let us stay alone with our spiritual inventory for very long.

We come into this room together.

And then, in the middle of all our private accounting, the tradition starts asking us about other people.

Who have you noticed?

Whose life has become bound up with yours?

In other words:

Who is your brother? Who has become your kin?

And the unsettling answer Judaism gives us is:

Maybe more people than you think.

This morning we read the Akedah: the binding of Isaac.

But the Akedah is almost a nightmare version of the kind of kinship I am talking about.

Abraham and Isaac are bound to one another 

by the most fundamental bond there is: parent and child. 

And yet the story asks us to watch what happens 

when being bound to someone 

does not lead us to protect them.

Abraham is bound to Isaac. 

And yet, in the story as we have it, that bond does not stop Abraham from raising the knife against his own son.

And that distinction matters, because being bound to someone is not, by itself, a guarantee of care.

Kinship can tell us who is ours. 

It does not tell us what we will do with that belonging.

In fact, the Akedah forces us to make a distinction: 

there is a kind of binding that simply describes a relationship,  and there is a kind of binding that asks something of us. The question is what kind of people we become once we understand that another person's life is bound up with ours.

Your life is bound up with mine. 

What happens to you changes the world I live in.

Your flourishing is connected to mine. 

Your freedom makes more freedom possible for me.

Judaism has an old word for this kind of relationship: b'rit. Covenant.

Not simply an agreement, but a relationship that changes what we owe.

The yes doesn't stay a yes because we renew our enthusiasm for it every day. 

It stays a yes because we keep showing up.

Our tradition offers us a beautiful story, encoded in the biblical Book of Ruth, about what happens when consent becomes kinship.

Ruth is not born into the Jewish people. 

She has every reason to go back to Moab—to her own gods, her own family, her own future.

Instead she says to Naomi:

Ameyich ami, v'Elohayich Elohai.

Your people will be my people. Your God will be my God.

She doesn't promise merely to attend Naomi's gatherings or support Naomi's causes.

She says: your people will be my people.

She doesn't simply join a community.

She becomes kin, by choice.

That is consent doing the work of kinship.

But Ruth's “yes” is not consequential simply because she says it. It becomes consequential because of what she does next.

She makes a life with Naomi. She makes sure there is food for them to eat. She looks after her. 

In other words, choice can begin a relationship, but practice is what makes the relationship real.

This is where the connection between community and kinship becomes important.

Community is who is in the room. Kinship is what we do with the fact that they are in the room.

That is very close to what I hear in kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh.

Responsibility is something you practice, week after week, whether or not you are in the mood.

And that responsibility is not only for the moments when someone is suffering. 

It is also what allows us to rejoice in another person's joy as though it were somehow our own.

We don't get to choose whether this is a complicated time to be Jewish.

But we do have some choice about what kind of Jewish community we want to be in the middle of it.

And when the things that ordinarily hold us together are themselves under pressure, belonging cannot simply mean agreement. It has to mean relationship.

The point of Jewish community is not simply to preserve Jewish community. It is to become the kind of people who can remain responsible for one another, even when belonging becomes difficult.

If that is true—if kinship is something we make through repeated acts of responsibility—then we should be able to see it. And I have seen it here.

At Hevreh, we use the word “community” all the time.

It is literally our name.

But over the past year, I have seen something emerge that feels deeper than community.

I have seen what happens when community works.

Someone is sick or has surgery, and a blanket and soup appear at their door.

A family is living through a period of uncertainty, and carpools are organized, groceries dropped off. People make sure they are not alone.

A young person prepares for B'nai Mitzvah while life around them is uncertain, and the community provides: a ritual is created, an oneg is planned, and joy becomes possible.

And when, as happened here over the last year, the unimaginable does happen, we learn that showing up is something so much deeper than attendance.

We have had remarkably painful practice this past year in knowing how to stand by one another in grief.

But we also show up for joy.

For baby namings and B'nai Mitzvah. For 90th birthdays and college acceptances, wedding anniversaries, for school musicals and cross country meets, consecrations, conversions and confirmations.

And in all of those moments, the word community starts to feel inadequate.

Because people are not simply participating or attending, they are acting as though other people's lives are, in some meaningful way, their concern.

That is a different thing.

That is kinship.

Our own Hevreh Congregational Covenant makes this remarkably concrete.

It begins with “Love your fellow as yourself” and the idea that every person is created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.

And then it says:

“A covenant is a statement of agreement about how all members of the Hevreh community choose to be in relationship with one another and the community.”

Choose.

That word matters.

Our covenant does not assume that community simply happens because we joined a synagogue.

It asks us to choose how we will be with one another.

And what it asks is not particularly complicated:

Respect.

Listen.

Care.

Take responsibility.

Show up for one another.

In other words:

Don't just belong here—be responsible for one another.

I want to share with you perhaps my favorite example of what that looks like in practice here at Hevreh. We have committees for all kinds of things: ritual, membership, finance. All the good stuff. But the largest committee in this congregation is the Caring Committee.

I love that about Hevreh.

Because care is not peripheral to what we do here. It is not an extra program, or something we get around to when everything else is finished. Care is one of the ways we understand what it means to be a community. Actively caring for one another is how we move from community to kin.

The Caring Committee's work is, in some ways, very simple: to notice when someone needs us.

And someone notices.

Someone calls.

Someone brings soup.

Someone sits beside them.

Someone shows up.

Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, writes, “I believe that the heart and majesty of Jewish community, when it works, is a commitment to care.”

The heart and the majesty; that is what I see here.

In addition to elevating our commitment to care, our covenant does something else that feels particularly important right now.

It does not require agreement.

It makes room for makhloket l’shem Shamayim, disagreement for the sake of Heaven. It asks us to listen to perspectives we don’t share. It asks us to speak honestly, even when it is hard.

So perhaps our covenant gives us a way to think about kinship in three different moments: when someone needs us, when someone disagrees with us, and when we have hurt one another.

The test of a community is not whether we can love one another when we agree. 

The harder test is whether we can remain responsible for one another when we don’t.

Can we disagree honestly and deeply while still choosing relationship over consensus?

Our covenant says that this is what we have agreed to try to do.

And then it makes room for t’shuvah.

People hurt one another. Communities hurt people. Mistakes happen.

The answer is not to pretend that nothing happened.

It is accountability. Conversation. Repair. The possibility of returning to relationship.

Covenant does not mean that we will always get it right.

It means that when we get it wrong, we don’t simply walk away.

We try to repair.

We try to become capable of being in relationship again.

That, too, is kinship. Not the absence of rupture, but the willingness to do the work of return.

Perhaps that is why Rosh Hashanah brings us together.

Because the work of becoming a better person is not only about becoming better at being ourselves.

It is about becoming better at being with other people.

Rosh Hashanah asks us to reckon with the fragility of human life. And if we take seriously the idea that our lives are bound up with one another, then the question is not only who we are. It is what we will do with the lives that have become connected to ours.

Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh.

All of Israel is responsible for one another.

Our kinship, like our lives, is being made this year—not simply remembered from the last one.

May we enter this year knowing that responsibility not simply as a burden, but as one of the ways we make a life together.

Shanah tovah.