Leadership Messages

The following is the text of a sermon I gave on Erev Simchat Torah:

In the early hours of this morning, the moments we have been waiting for finally arrived. Our living hostages were returned home from Gaza. For over two years, we have been breathing with shortened, halting breaths, hoping that our people’s husbands, wives, and children would be returned, that our people could return to their homes, that Israelis could sleep and carry on their days without rocket sirens, that Jews throughout the world could walk their streets and pray in their synagogues without the acts of hatred and the darkness of rising antisemitism.

This morning, we could breathe in and exhale joy for the first time in over two years—almost exactly two years on the Jewish calendar. Tonight, Erev Simchat Torah 5786, we can dance with the Torah as we did on Erev Simchat Torah 5784, without the heaviness of hostages missing from the midst of Am Yisrael, and without the immense weight of ongoing war.

Yet as we hold the Torah in our arms tonight—and all of us must, tonight of all nights, take the opportunity to hold the Torah in our arms, hold it high if we are able—we must ask ourselves: what does this Torah demand of us now, in this moment of relief and renewal?

As we lift the Torah high tonight, we should lift it as the guiding light of our people, a beacon light to the world.

Before returning the Torah to the Ark we recite these verses:

For I give you good instruction;
do not forsake My teaching. (Prov. 4:2)
Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
and all her paths are peace. (Prov. 3:17)

Each and every one of us should hold the Torah tonight, feel its weight, feel its energy, its light, and the love that it has brought our people and the world for millennia. Hold the Torah so that it might inspire us in the coming year to make it our personal mission to learn the wisdom that is the light of Torah. Learn not for ourselves, but for the sake of the world.

God gave us a mission transmitted through Isaiah. It is our responsibility to fulfill this mission.

Adonai, my God, has been my strength

“It is too little that you should be My servant
In that I raise up the tribes of Jacob
And restore the survivors of Israel:
I will also make you a light of nations,
That My salvation may reach the ends of the earth.” (Is. 49:5-6(

Isaiah does not say this mission belongs only to prophets or leaders. He says you meaning the collective—each one of us—will be a light to the nations. Not through grand declarations, but through how we live, how we treat others, how we embody Torah’s wisdom in our daily lives. Each of us is charged to be a carrier of this prophetic light.

This prophetic vision is not ancient history. It was reaffirmed in modern times on May 14, 1948—the 5th of Iyar 5708—by David Ben-Gurion and the other 35 members of the People’s Council in Tel Aviv, who established the State of Israel declaring that “it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.”

They wrote further: “We extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.”

Israel is poised once again to extend its hand in peace. We must believe that peace is possible, for we are a people of hope, Hatikvah…

So long as within the inmost heart a Jewish spirit sings,
so long as the eye looks eastward, gazing toward Zion,
our hope is not lost—
the hope of two thousand years:
to be a free people in our land,
the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

 May it be that all of the world leaders who gathered today in Sharm El Sheikh find a way, with firmness of intent and strength of heart, to grasp that hand, that the State of Israel, Medinat Yisrael, and the people of Israel, Am Yisrael, can fulfill their Divinely given human purpose to be beacons of hope, Hatikvah, to the world.

And what of us? We cannot negotiate peace treaties, but we can be ambassadors of hope. We can study Torah and share its wisdom. We can reach across divides in our own communities. We can refuse to let hatred and fear define us. We can choose, each day, to be carriers of prophetic light—not waiting for peace to come, but creating it through our actions, our words, our unwavering commitment to the vision our prophets gave us and our people have sustained for millennia.

This is not just the end of a war. This is the beginning of our sacred work.

כֵּן יְהִי רָצוֹן
May it be so.

 L’shalom,

Rabbi Marc