This is my D’var Torah from the first day of Rosh Hashanah 5786 (2025).
One of the best questions I was asked all year came at a training in April with an organization called Resetting the Table. Resetting the Table teaches people how to transform toxic divides into a shared future, and one of the exercises started with this prompt: Write a list of things in your life that shaped your moral compass.
We had a few minutes to ourselves. I wrote down about ten things, and they were all kinds of things.
One was a classroom discussion from my Hebrew High School when I was 16 or 17. Our teacher Earl Schwartz had presented a moral dilemma to discuss, which I’ll tell you if you promise not to reenact it. It about what an usher should do on Yom Kippur when a congregant, moved by the readings, stands up to challenge the rabbi to address a wrong in society right there and then. I chose the option I thought of as “observe and buy time to learn more” — but Earl challenged me to think about whether I really was doing was valuing social order over conscience, and if so why?
Another was from my toddlerhood, when my parents trained me so when they would say “Jonny, what do you think of President Nixon?” I would look down, hit my forehead and go like this.
Then there was in college, when I was writing a philosophy paper about equality in education. That was the moment I said to myself that I ought to become a teacher of young people in classrooms, even though I figured I wouldn’t be naturally good at it – I had tried it a little and it hadn’t gone great. But I convinced myself philosophically that it was important. I’m still not naturally good at it, but I have kept working at it for nearly forty years since that essay.
I’ve gone back over the list a couple times since the spring, and there are things I have added. Like when my sister Ellen was about to move to college, and my father was in the hospital after heart surgery, so I was the one who had to go with her to Best Buy and talk the staff into taking back something past the return date. Which was always Dad’s job. They said no, and I was about to give in — when I looked over at my sister and found a voice I never had before.
Our moral autobiographies are made up of all kinds of things –memorable conversations, individual acts of standing up or letting someone down, remarkable people we’ve met, philosophical reflections. Some of these foundations of our moral compass are always in our awareness. But others are only activated when someone invites you to answer: What occasions have been the moral foundations of your life?
In our time, when we are bombarded with moral dilemmas coming from every part of the world at once; when we swim in a sea of other people’s instantly articulated judgments and outrage swirling around us all the time – it is crucial to step back and take stock of our all of our own inner ethical resources. To retell ourselves our own moral autobiography.
The most robust moral resource we have right now is ourselves. Our own past actions and how we think about them; the thick stories behind them. Good in the world isn’t just made up of good acts. You and I might each been there for the same friend at a time of need – but only you know what got you there, what it was like, what feelings came naturally and which ones you had to pull yourself toward. And it’s only this knowing that helps you be there the next time, for the next person.
We often use the term teshuvah to mean going back to a wrong we’ve done. But teshuvah is also going back to our good moments; the meaty ones; the hard ones where we got it right or wrong; the moments of realization, regardless of what we did, that turned us better.
This is different from writing down a list of our moral principles. The stories help us see if we actually live by them, and if not why not. They surface nuances that a clear principle flattens. They help us tell the truth about ourselves. Perhaps our moral compass doesn’t always point clearly, or settle on one direction, and maybe there’s a story that gives us a good reason for that. Our moral autobiography helps us guard against self-righteousness and hypocrisy.
This is the Talmud means when it teaches that doing teshuvah can turn wrongs into noble acts. Going back over our moral autobiography strengthens the good in us.
We forget how many unique moments of moral importance we have had, and I think we especially forget the good ones! Which is why one of my favorite images of the High Holy Day liturgy is coming in just a bit, the Sefer Hazichronot, the Book of Remembered Deeds, where everything we have forgotten is written. In a book so magical that our whole story reads itself out, and no act of ethical significance is left out.
How do we access that moral autobiography? How do we get ourselves to make a good list when we think about the things in life that have shaped our moral compass? I think the road map is in the Torah of our ancestors Sarah and Avraham, whose story we read today and tomorrow.
When I look at their stories, I see a letter they left for us about their own teshuvah, their own look back on the moments that shaped their moral compass.
The midrash says that they experienced ten tests in their lives and passed them all. I don’t know that they always passed. But I take the midrash to mean that there were ten key moments that shaped their moral compass, each one linked to an ethical theme. And their moments and those themes should be next to us when we write down our own moral autobiography.
Sarah and Avraham began their lives began in Ur, the cradle of civilization, where they faced from childhood the test of conformity, as they saw the idols literally everyone worshipped. They saw the cost to people’s integrity from beliefs that the world was random and brutal and only materialist. Even their own parents believed these things. How long could Avraham and Sarah be part of that?
Eventually in Ur Avraham and Sarah decided to stand up to authority. King Nimrod and the traditional Mesopotamian gods said one thing, but the powerful voice inside them said another.
So they left, and when they arrived in Canaan, they faced the challenge of building authentic relationships – figuring out who really wanted to join them on their searches, who was just hanging on because of their wealth and prestige.
Then they faced separation, when during a famine they were displaced, and Pharaoh took Sarah away from Avraham. Then it was intimate disagreement, when they didn’t see eye to eye how to make their visions come true fast enough. It would play out between the two of them, and also between their sons Yitzchak and Yishmael as we read today.
They faced war and brutality, as two alliances of kings fought each other around them, and eventually their own nephew Lot was swept up in the war. Avraham had to figure out how to rescue him without himself becoming a warlord in the process.
They faced dilemmas of generosity, when three strangers passed their way and Sarah and Avraham couldn’t know if they were friendly or not, dangerous to bring home; they just knew they were travelers who would be hungry and thirsty and in danger along the roads.
They faced questions of justice – when the lives of the people down in the valley in Sodom and Gomorrah, were on the line, the lives of people whose ways were as much a threat to them and their vision as the people of Ur whom they had decided to get away from.
They faced the challenge of old age, trying to live with purpose when their capacities were not the same, trying to craft a legacy and wondering if there would be anyone to receive it. Avraham trying to go on after Sarah died.
And in tomorrow’s story of the Akedah, the Binding of Yitzchak, really they faced the question of moral coherence or absurdity. They had staked their lives on a path, and now that path seemed to be demanding of them the unthinkable. They had to figure out whether all their prior moral accomplishments and choices and values could still make sense, and if so how.
These are the kinds of themes to look to fill in as we reconstruct our own moral autobiographies. In the Torah it mostly unfolds in a sequence, because it’s been curated for us – but in our lives many themes circle back to us again and again. Knowing who we have been helps us gather up the ethical tools we need for the next time. Pinning down the story helps us understand why a certain principle has a hold on us, emotionally and not just intellectually. We can study our own ethical leaps, so we know what it takes for us to make the next one.
And there are critical times in our lives and the world when we especially need to do this kind of teshuvah, this going back to survey and gather all those moral resources. This is such a time.
And that is what I think the last test of Avraham and Sarah is about. The Akedah, the binding of Yitzchak, is not the end of Avraham’s life but our tradition calls it the final thing on his list of building blocks of his moral compass.
I have been thinking about the two-plus days where the Torah goes quiet, as Avraham and Yitzchak and their party hike together. I have been thinking about Avraham facing not only today’s challenge, but the question of the moral coherence of his life.
I imagine him as he walks weighing two things that each meant the world to him. The obligation to protect his son, which is not only obvious but also what his entire legacy depends on. The commitment he had changed his whole life for, a vision gifted to him from the Divine who had helped him make sense of his early moral biography in Ur. I know these were what he was writing in his mind, because the two words the Torah emphasizes amidst the otherwise quiet walk are — b’ni, my son; and Adonai, God’s name.
As Avraham was weighing these two things and others, surely he was creating the Torah we now have about who he had been — in Ur and Canaan, at war and near Sodom. Wishing no doubt he was walking and talking with Sarah, his partner in all of it, the one who could help him understand what each of those moments meant right now for his moral compass. Being honest with himself that it was he who was holding the knife, and he who was praying for and looking for a way to make sure he wouldn’t use it. Reckoning with the cost of those days of hiking and delay and quiet — what that could mean for his legacy, in the eyes of his son Yitzchak or in our eyes looking back at our ancestor.
We too as Jews have been walking for a couple of years now, trying to square two things in our own collective moral biography. Our solidarity with the Jewish people, especially in Israel those still held hostage and enduring war and the trauma of October 7; and our responsibility to a more just world, including in Gaza.
In America we Jews have been wrestling with whether to tell ourselves that we are a small group in danger with interests to protect, or that we are the surprisingly mighty builders of American ideals.
But really it’s each of us, one by one, who have our own moments in life when some or all of those things became important to us. In my own moral autobiography, that includes the year I spent in Jerusalem simultaneously planning to make aliyah and following my rabbis to meetings of Oz V’Shalom, the religious peace movement. And then the very next year when I came home and was surprised to feel so committed to America as a set of values and debates I couldn’t possibly leave behind. What about you?
We won’t make headway on the moral challenges of today unless we write down our own unique moral autobiographies. Our stories show us our leaps forward; what makes us committed, which we can build on; and what makes us stubborn in ways we might have to break out of.
So during these ten days of teshuvah, make some time to write your list: What are the things in your life that have shaped your moral compass? Go over your life; do that teshuvah, and make a list of ten things or many more. On a pad, in a Google doc, whatever works.
Then talk about these things with someone. It’s in the telling that you see more than you knew was there. Ask someone to tell you theirs.
You might not be able to do that between now and Yom Kippur. But look for the opportunity to try out a mussar group, a group of fellow members who will meet to work regularly on our moral development. Creating these groups is one of my goals for 5786. Watch for this to try out, and I promise that our moral autobiographies will be what the first session is about.
If you are worried, as I know many of you are, about your moral legacy in this world, find a young person in this community. A teen you know, or a student, or a child or grandchild or grandniece or grandnephew. Talk abut your list with them. Let someone else make your story part of theirs, so they can take your baton.
And look for someone who makes an appearance in your moral autobiography who you haven’t been in touch with. Give them back a piece of their story they might have forgotten.
I mentioned at the start that I got this prompt from the organization Resetting the Table. What they do with this is to help people talk whose visions of the world differ dramatically. Arguing about principles doesn’t work, and often makes everything worse. But when you talk about your moral autobiographies — for real, for a long time — the toxic recedes and possibilities might emerge.
We need to live in a world whose foundations are wider and deeper than the emotions of today and even core principles, no matter how profound. It is our stories that are those foundations. Write them and talk about them. It’s how you open the Sefer Hazichronotagain, the Book of Remembered Deeds, so it can read itself out on its own, your treasured moral autobiography told with lilt and joy. Listen to it, and you’ll discover how the things today that seem brand new to you and overwhelming maybe aren’t. You’ll see much you already have to bring to this moment in history.
Shana Tova!
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