Kabbalat Shabbat Kavannah | Rabbi Felicia Sol | October 17, 2025

In these two years.

Since October 7th, 2023,

there has been so much grappling in the dark.

The horror, the trauma, the war,

the hostages, death

and death and death and death,

and so many questions about how we will be

or have been changed by it all.

Israel and the Jewish people at large.

Rachel Goldberg, Poland and John Poland

in the most devastating of circumstances, with their first child

son, their son Hirsch kidnaped and then nearly a year later executed,

have risen above the merciless ness of it

all to display some nobility.

Rachel just wrote a piece in Macau is shown,

which is a religious Zionist paper.

It's called here only at Sha Hara.

Coming.

Show me the gate of compassion.

I don't know how to contain it all, she wrote.

So I'm looking for compassionate people who I believe will understand

this impossible mixture that we are forced to put in our cracked bowls.

And the Jewish tradition we have precedent for being able to contain

two contradictory experiences at the same time.

At the peak of joy under the altar, under the.

We remember to break a glass.

And this is just a small parable.

May those who suffer from amongst us be

comforted by the love of the happy,

and may the joys of our people shower compassion, mercy and grace

on those who didn't get the ending we all prayed for.

May we hear the congregation and know how to live simultaneously.

A time to cry and a time to weep

in grace, blessing, and holiness.

And she concludes the peace.

God, I beg you, help us to do this.

Cover us with grace, mercy, and compassion.

Praying to end all the suffering.

Just love.

She so powerfully articulates

the complexity of this moment,

and in many ways, how sensitive

and in some ways dangerous

it is for us to reduce this time to only one thing.

She rightly also begs of us,

all of us, to understand how quickly

we might turn against one another,

to lack compassion for the other, to only be in touch

with our only our own lived experience of suffering or pain or joy.

And also, of course, all the unfinished business.

And indeed, we are in a very delicate moment,

in the beginning of a new stage and the beginning of a new book.

Literally and figuratively, in trying

to find the way forward with so,

so many emotions and thoughts.

A story was told when Rabbi Levy El

Anger returned from cuts to his father.

Rabbi Shlomo La asked him, what did you learn in cuts?

He answered, I learned three things.

One, that a human is a human and an angel is an angel.

The second,

if a person wishes to, he

or she can become greater than an angel.

And three in the beginning

God created Beresheet bara elohim.

God only created the beginning

and left the rest to humankind.

First of all, like many stories

in the tradition, this is a journey story.

Wherever we go, whether cuts

or some travels in the mind or the heart, or literally in our travels.

There is some learning to be had.

Of course, the learning on the one hand, acknowledges

in this story that there is a distinction between the divine world

and the human world.

We are all only, of course, human

and angels are angels.

They live in their realm, and we here on earth in all its messiness.

And yet humans,

he taught, have the ability to transcend,

to cross some kind of boundary.

We are not locked in our station of humanness.

We have something divine in us

that allows us to rise, to eclipse

in some way our status and express some nobility.

And finally, of course, in this story, God began it all.

But it is we who have the ability

to carry this story forward.

It is, of course, about the race.

And we enter this new cycle of the Torah of 57 and 86

with profound gratitude

for the return of the 20 living hostages and a cease.

And please, God, an end to this terrible war.

But we are also carrying so very much those who have yet to return.

Just as I was shutting off my phone for Shabbat, a coffin of a remains

of a hostage was being transferred from the Red Cross to Israeli hands.

The IDF.

So much

processing of the trauma that we have experienced.

So many questions

that remain over how to move forward.

We are on a journey not to cut,

and I don't know where we will be going.

But I do beg God that we have the fortitude

to open the gate of Raneem,

to be gentle with one another,

that we will find love in our hearts, not only for ourselves

and those who we identify with, but for others,

and that we will not move out of this time

more hardened, but more porous.

And with the recognition that we will all live more full

with the gates of love and mercy open rather than closed.

And I do pray and beg of God and of us,

that on this journey we will learn something,

that we will seek to understand who we have become and at all.

And what made me want to change about our people,

about the Jewish people, about our love and commitment

to the land and people of Israel in the state of Israel,

and our commitments, of course, to humanity and the dignity of all.

And I do pray and beg of God and of us, that for all

our fallibility

as human beings, and living in this realm of reality,

that we rise up to ask the question

might what might nobility look like in this moment?

How might we strive for more?

How might we weigh our words and our actions

to a more divine realm than sink

to a more beastly place?

How might we rise?

And finally, I do pray and beg of God and us

to let this beginning not be our ending.

To have faith and the resolve and the grit

and the audacity and the courage

to want a better ending.

One that dreams of a humanity

of love and dignity and justice and peace.

Beresheet.

Baron Elohim in the beginning, God created.

It is our turn now.