5787 Rosh Hashanah Sermon: We Don’t Waste Tragedy

We Don’t Waste Tragedy

I want to tell you about John Feal.

John was an ordinary New Yorker, an Army veteran and a construction worker who had spent years specializing in large demolition jobs. He knew steel and rubble. He knew how to take things apart safely when they needed to come down.

And then, one September day, John was called upon for a complicated site.

His company needed people to supervise a demolition cleanup in the Financial District. There was twisted steel to remove. Mountains of debris. A job that required exactly the kind of experience John had spent his career developing.

So he went.

Five days into the job, roughly 8,000 pounds of steel came loose and crushed his left foot.

He was rushed to Bellevue Hospital. Gangrene set in. Eventually, doctors had to amputate about half of his foot.

The job site was Ground Zero.

The date was September 17, 2001. Erev Rosh Hashanah that year, for those keeping track.

John had gone there after September 11th because he believed his skills could be useful. Instead, he became one of the thousands of people whose lives would continue to be altered long after the towers fell.

And then John needed help.

He couldn't work. He had medical bills. He had lost part of his foot cleaning up Ground Zero.

And he kept hearing no.

But as John fought for himself, he discovered something much bigger.

He wasn't alone.

Firefighters, police officers, construction workers and volunteers who had shown up when their country needed them were getting sick, losing jobs, fighting insurance companies and struggling to get the help they needed.

So John did something about it.

He founded the FealGood Foundation.

And he spent the next two decades fighting for them, helping lead the effort that ultimately secured permanent federal health care and compensation for the 9/11 community.

Yesterday marked twenty-five years since September 11th.

As a Jewish community we have always known: we refuse to deny tragedy. we refuse to let tragedy have the final word.

We don’t waste tragedy.

We don’t ask for tragedy. We don’t manufacture it. We don’t hope it onto ourselves or onto this world.

That is what I mean when I say we don’t waste tragedy.

We don’t honor the tragedy. We honor our story by refusing to discard the painful chapters.

Nearly two thousand years ago, the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.

It’s difficult for us to fully appreciate what that meant. The Temple wasn't simply a synagogue. It was the organizing center of Jewish religious life. Ritual, sacrifice, pilgrimage, priesthood, all oriented toward this one place.

And then it was gone.

The operating system of Judaism had been destroyed.

First, our ancestors mourned. They built a ritual around remembering what had been lost.

Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av, is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar.

It commemorates not one tragedy but a convergence of tragedy. Tradition holds that both Temples, destroyed centuries apart, fell on this same date. Over time, other catastrophes were folded into it as well. The day became something like a magnet for Jewish grief, pulling tragedy after tragedy across centuries of history and holding it all on one date.

It is, by design, the one day of the year when Jewish tradition tells us to stop managing the feeling and simply sit inside it.

And there is real psychology behind what the rabbis built here. Research into grief and ritual has found something our tradition seems to have understood intuitively: ritual gives grief a container.

Grief needs a container, or it starts running everything. Tisha B’Av is that container. One day. Sundown to nightfall. You let the weight of what was lost come down on you. And then the day ends. The very next Shabbat, tradition puts a different word in our mouths:

Nachamu. Comfort.

That is not Judaism telling us to move on quickly. It is the opposite of denial.

A grief with no edges can eventually become the whole house you live in. A grief with a door and a schedule becomes something you can begin to carry.

Tisha B’Av doesn’t ask us to rush past our worst day, and it doesn’t ask us to live inside that day forever. It asks us to let grief do its work. Fully. Honestly. On purpose.

And then, somehow, to begin moving forward.

The rabbis were bold enough to imagine this in perhaps the most literal way possible. There is a rabbinic tradition that says that on Tisha B’Av, on the very day of destruction, the Messiah is born.

Think about that image. The Temple is burning. The people are devastated. The future they imagined has disappeared. And somewhere, on that very day, redemption is being born.

Not because the destruction was good. Not because the Temple needed to burn. But because even on the worst day, Judaism refuses to believe that destruction gets the final word.

Because sometimes what has been destroyed becomes part of the soil.. Because even the remains of what has been broken can become nourishment for what comes next. We refuse to leave the ground barren.

And that is exactly what our ancestors did.

They built.

The Temple was gone. Sacrifice could no longer be the center of Jewish life. The priesthood could no longer function as it had. The sacred geography around which Judaism had been organized was inaccessible.

So our ancestors did not simply rebuild at 110% what had been destroyed.

They reimagined Judaism.

Sacrifice gave way to prayer. The Temple gave way to synagogues and houses of study. Priests gave way to rabbis, teachers, and learners. Torah was studied, debated, interpreted, and expanded through Mishnah and Gemara into the vast tradition we call Rabbinic Judaism.

And perhaps the most radical change of all was this: Judaism became decentralized.

Holiness no longer depended upon access to one building, one priesthood, or even one place on earth. Judaism could now be practiced around a table. In a synagogue. In a house of study. In a home.

The tragedy that scattered us forced Judaism to become portable. And that portability became one of our tradition’s greatest attributes.

Torah can travel,         Shabbat can travel,         memory itself can travel.

And because they can travel, Jewish life can take root almost anywhere. Different melodies, foods, customs and languages emerged, with communities carrying the same ancient tradition in their own way. So much of the Judaism we love became possible because our ancestors built a faith capable of being carried.

The tragedy did not make Judaism beautiful. But faced with tragedy, our ancestors built a Judaism that could flourish beyond the walls that had once contained it.

We don’t waste tragedy.

They didn’t rebuild the Judaism they had lost. They built a Judaism capable of surviving its loss.

For most of my life, I understood these as stories about them. Our ancestors. Generations of Jews who watched their world disappear and somehow figured out what to carry forward.

I don’t hear those stories quite the same way anymore.

Because for the last 18 months, I have watched you.

Look around this room.

Look at how gorgeous this building is.

Look at what it has already become: a beacon of light for this community. Something Cantor Frenkel has spoken about for decades, echoing even more brightly now.

We built this.

And the building has happened far beyond these walls.

I am SO proud of you.

Members of KI are serving on seemingly every committee, every board, every organization working to build back our beloved Palisades, speaking up, sharing truths and holding accountability.

You are fighting for neighbors, solving problems and creating systems that did not exist before.

You are taking knowledge you learned the hard way, raise your hand, if you did not expect to become an expert and insurance and construction budgets, … and handing it to the person behind you so their road might be just a little easier.

You have been safeguarding hope for an entire community, often while still trying to safeguard it for yourselves.

We are refusing to let destruction be the only thing destruction produced.

But I need to be careful.

Because “Look at everything we built after tragedy” is not the same as “Look at all the good that came from tragedy.”

Im sure many of you would happily give back what I have learned if it meant none of us needed to learn it. But we don’t get to make that trade.

I don’t believe everything happens for a reason. But I have come to believe that almost anything can be given purpose afterward.

Those are not the same thing.

A reason looks backward and tries to explain why something happened. Purpose looks forward and asks what we might do now that it has.

I don’t need to believe the tragedy was necessary to believe that what I do with it matters.

There is a difference.

And the Kabbalists gave us language for this.

Shever and tikkun. Breaking and repair.

Jewish mystics imagined divine light pouring into vessels that could not contain it. The vessels shattered, scattering sparks of holiness throughout the world. Tikkun is the work of gathering those sparks.

Our building, our homes, so much of the Palisades shattered too. And for the last 18 months, we have been gathering.

 But the fire is not everyone’s shever.

For some of us, the vessel that broke was a relationship. A dream. A sense of security. And for some, it was the loss of someone we deeply loved.

There is a Hasidic teaching often attributed to the Kotzker Rebbe: “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

I think there is something profound in that paradox.

Because a heart that has never known the ache of loss is missing an entire dimension of what a heart can experience. To love is to become vulnerable to loss. To grieve is to discover just how much that love occupied us.

The broken heart is not whole because it has been repaired.

It is whole because even heartbreak belongs to the fullness of a human heart.

Here we say, zichroneinu livracha, may our memories be a blessing.

And if memory is to be a blessing, then that has to mean all of memory. Not just the photo album moments, but the losses we would undo in an instant.

Judaism does not ask us to call those moments blessings. It asks us what we can do with their memory so that memory might become one.

Think about Kaddish. The prayer we associate more than any other with death never mentions death. It does not explain the loss or tell us why it happened. Instead, from inside the brokenness, we stand and say, Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei rabbah.

May God’s name be magnified and sanctified.

The loss remains a loss. The heart remains broken. And still, somehow, we create something sacred from within it. 

We don’t waste tragedy.

There are things life teaches us that we would gladly unlearn if we could undo what taught them to us.

We didn’t ask for those educations. But once life has taught us something at that price, Judaism asks us not to waste the tuition. And tikkun is not a test.

There is no deadline for tragedy to become meaningful. Sometimes surviving is the tikkun. Sometimes all we can do is gather one spark. And maybe that is enough.

We cannot always prevent the shever. But we can participate in the tikkun.

Which brings me back to John Feal.

John spent his life tearing things down. He was a demolition worker.

And then tragedy taught him how to build.

He could not undo what happened to him. He could not make the breaking necessary. But he could take what he learned and build something that would hold others.

That is tikkun. Not repairing the world as though nothing ever broke. Building from the pieces.

We don’t waste tragedy.