Rosh Hashanah Day 1 2025

“Living in the Space of Unfulfilled Promise”

We often begin our greeting to one another with the words Shanah Tovah—may this be a good year. But I wonder: what punctuation mark should we place at the end of that greeting?

Should it be a question mark? Was this past year good for you, for the world, for the Jewish people, for Israel? Will this new year provide tova, good and goodness?

Or perhaps a period: a simple, steady wish, neither too certain nor too doubtful.

Or maybe an exclamation point: This will be a good year—for you, for the world, for the Jewish people, for Israel!

Truth be told, we enter this new year with mixed feelings. Some of us come with overflowing joy at being together again, with family milestones and blessings to celebrate. Others arrive carrying burdens of grief, worry, or fear. This is the paradox of Rosh Hashanah: it proclaims the majesty of creation, and yet it demands that we face our most human vulnerabilities.

And maybe that’s why “Shanah Tovah” needs all three punctuation marks. A question mark, because so much feels uncertain. A period, because sometimes the simplest wish is enough. And an exclamation mark, because despite it all, we dare to hope.

But hope doesn’t come easily.

Many of us look at the state of the world and feel despair. If we are honest we feel different textures of despair. Not despair in God—but despair in human nature. Despair in the  antisemitism we experience in our daily lives and in political discourse. Despair at Israel, under constant threat, still searching for security and moral clarity. Despair as we witness the United Nations General Assembly convene on this first day of Rosh Hashanah with several nations publicly declaring a Palestinian State, while Hamas remains in power in Gaza, holding Israeli hostages and its own people hostage. Despair at the polarization in American life. Despair at economic uncertainty—whether retirement savings will last, whether our children will be able to afford homes or build secure futures.

Rabbi Tali Adler names this tension powerfully: “We live in a world where the gap between the world we see and the world our religion and values promise us is sometimes too much to bear.”

Our Torah and our prayers describe a world of justice, compassion, and peace. And yet when we open our eyes, we see violence, cruelty, poverty, and suffering. That dissonance is real.

It is not new. In our Torah reading today, God’s promise seems fulfilled: Isaac is born to Abraham and Sarah. Joy at last! But immediately, that joy is complicated—Isaac’s survival means that Hagar and Ishmael are cast out. One promise fulfilled leads to another promise deferred.

What we glean from our Torah reading this morning is that  one has to be careful with promises fulfilled. Abraham’s joy in the birth of a son turns into much challenge and choices that not only affect the individual making those choices, but with how these choices, have a domino effect upon others as well. In our Torah reading for this morning, we find Abraham’s choices to protect his son Isaac,  causes much havoc and pain for his son Ishmael and for Hagar, Ishmael’s mother. We can see that same reality in the continuing war in Gaza, in the decision to build new Israeli settlements in the West Bank. And it is that pain that we not only see within the Arab population, but amongst the Jewish world  and modern thinking Israelis as well.

As we read the story, a gap opens for us, asking us to deal with not simply the promises fulfilled, but those unfulfilled.  Should we throw up our hands saying: if the world looks nothing like God’s promise, then perhaps the promise was never real at all?

And beyond today’s reading, the Torah shows us another version of this struggle in the quarrel between Lot and Abraham.

Rashi explains (Genesis 13:7) that Lot’s shepherds grazed their animals on land that was not yet theirs, saying: “God promised this land to Abraham, and since he has no heir, Lot will inherit—so it is already ours.” Abraham’s shepherds objected: not yet. The Canaanites and Perizzites still dwelled there.

Lot could not tolerate an unfulfilled promise. Either the promise was true now, or it was meaningless. So eventually, Lot left.

Abraham, by contrast, had the spiritual patience to live in-between. He could believe in the promise even when it was not yet realized. That is why his purchase of the Cave of Machpelah, where his wife Sarah is buried, was not just a transaction—it was a statement of hope. Abraham did not seize the land. He acknowledged reality, paid for a burial plot, and trusted that more of the promise would one day unfold.

Rabbi Adler asks a very poignant question for us all today which points out  a fundamental difference in opinion and how individuals view our own personal situation in the world today.  Do we only see “God’s word as a binary: the promise is true, or it is not. If it is true then it must be true now….” . It is the question of whether we have “the ability – or the lack of ability – to live in the space of unfulfilled promise.”

That tension is captured powerfully in today’s Torah and mirrored in our world.

Just a few weeks ago, Holocaust survivors marched in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square alongside families of Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. Having endured unspeakable horrors, these survivors draw a direct line from their past to our current moment — reminding us that hope is not passive or naive, but active, even amid tragedy.

Their presence is a living testament to the fiery endurance of hope. These survivors—bearing memory and moral authority—stand with hostage families, insisting that despair not be the final word. They have known broken promises and incomprehensible suffering firsthand, yet they refuse to give up on human dignity, on rescue, on redemption.

Might we convince ourselves that this world, with all its brokenness is already as good as it will ever be? And that perhaps during these past five or six years from Covid until today, we have lost our ability to reflect hope in our own internal psychological well-being. We seem to lack a sense of what is the truth of America today and what is truth in Israel today, no matter where our politics and religious philosophy guide us.

This brings to mind a parable:

A king’s star gazer once saw that the grain harvested that year was tainted. “Your Majesty,” he warned, “whoever eats from it will go insane.”

“What can we do?” asked the king. “We cannot destroy the crop, for we do not have enough grain stored away to feed the entire population.”

“Then let us set aside enough grain for ourselves,” said the star gazer, “so at least we will remain sane.”

But the king replied: “If we do that, we will be considered mad. For if everyone else behaves one way and we act differently, we will be the abnormal ones. Instead, we too shall eat of the grain. But—we will make a mark upon our foreheads, so that whenever we look at one another, we will remember that we are insane.”

This parable holds profound truth for us. Like the king and his star gazer, we must carry a mark that we will not forget who we are, that we live in the in-between. We carry unfulfilled promises. And we must decide: will we give in to despair, like Lot? Will we pretend everything is fine, as though the promise has already been fulfilled? Or will we, like Abraham, live faithfully in the waiting—honestly naming the brokenness around us, while still taking even the smallest steps of hope?

This is what Deuteronomy teaches when it calls God אל אמונה, Eyl Emunah, “a God of faith” (32:4). The Sifrei, a midrashic commentary,  reads this verse in a startling way: “A God who has faith.” Notice not a faithful God, but a God who has faith! Not just a God we are called to believe in—but a God who believes in us, who believed in this fragile, flawed world enough to bring it into being. Creation itself is an act of divine hope. God has hope for the world!

Vaclav Havel, writing from prison, described it this way: hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.…. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or a willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”

Think of the Israelis who, in the midst of rocket fire this past summer, still plant trees, start families, and argue passionately about the society they want to build. Think of Jewish students who have just arrived on campuses where they sometimes feel unwelcome, still wear a Magen David or Chai necklace, attend Friday night Hillel Shabbat dinners, or study Torah. And each is a statement that this life, this love, this faith is still worth tending. When we see the pictures of life in Israel and the tragic unfolding of the war in Gaza and the plight of the innocent victims, we might recognize the despair, but also the desperate plea of hope, hope for the hostages that remain, hope for a new government, hope for an Israel transformed,  and hope for the innocent civilians in Gaza, where our moral convictions of the Torah are not solely about maintaining of the mitzvot in the Torah but in ahavat olam, in loving God’s world, God’s people, and building a foundation of trust and peace.

On this Rosh Hashanah, may we resist both the temptation to give up and the temptation to pretend all is well. May we live instead in the holy space of hope—not optimism, not denial, but the stubborn faith that the world can be more than it is, because God believes it can. And may we, with that hope, link our lives to the work of repair, so that in this new year we move one step closer to the world God dreamed into being.

Shanah tovah—with a question mark, with a period, but most of all, with an exclamation point.