This was my D’var Torah for the second day of Rosh Hashanah 5786 (2025).
In a piece in Slate about the TV show Ted Lasso, Amanda Prahl wrote: Kindness is the vanilla of emotional concepts. It has the reputation of being safe, two-dimensional, passive, and utterly bland. Ask any culinary expert, though, and they’ll tell you that vanilla is actually one of the most complex, active flavors and spices around.
The first part is why I had a hard time locating a D’var Torah about kindness for this day.
What changed my mind is a colleague and a sort-of relative in Yerushalayim, Rabbi David Goodman. David is my sister-in-law’s husband’s nephew, and he has been one of my guiding stars since October 7. David serves a sister Conservative congregation in Jerusalem, in Talpiot Mizrach-Arnona. It’s is called Moreshet Avraham, very similar to our shul’s name! Right after October 7, their community immediately began taking care of people displaced from the Gaza envelope, and their shul became a home-away-from-home especially for the children. And at the same time David has been helping to sustain an inter-religious coalition of clergy in Israel including Jews, Muslims, and Christians, who never interrupted their work and who continue to meet and have even organized public marches when it is so, so hard to do that in Israel right now.
We keep in touch, and I saw David at a family simcha this summer in Atlanta. He wears on his face all the pain of this time. So I asked him what he planned to speak about on Rosh Hashanah, and to my surprise David said: Kindness. Gentleness. With all that is going on, he feels it’s the foundational thing to survival and to unlocking everything else.
Kindness. In Hebrew the overarching word is chesed, usually translated as “lovingkindness.”
But isn’t kindness the vanilla of emotional concepts? … safe, two-dimensional, passive, and utterly bland?
I am sure no one here doubts that love and kindness are important. But we do doubt them. We doubt that they play on the big stage of the world. Our culture more often believes the line attributed to Leo Durocher, pugnacious baseball manager of the ‘40s and ‘50s: “Nice guys finish last”. So we put kindness in a corner. It’s just a personality trait that you have or you don’t. It’s what we focus on because we’re so powerless about the world overall.
But that can’t be the whole of a Jewish perspective. The book of psalms says the whole universe is built out of lovingkindness, olam chesed yibaneh. That’s not just poetry, that’s theology.
And overlooking kindness, its presence and absence, also blinds us to the nature of what is going on.
A defining characteristic of our time is brutality. Public policies that are brutal, or enforced with extra brutality. Rhetoric from many political groups and leaders, in growing pockets on the left and the right, pervaded with menace and exclusion, even among the most educated people.
And it is very hard to find a refuge from this. I think about it in terms of some classic studies in social psychology from about twenty years ago, in which participants were given a description of a person, and asked to make judgments about whether or not that person was generous or warm. Or they were given a short task and had the opportunity to claim a gift for themselves or leave one for a friend. But the experiments actually began when the participant was met downstairs by a research assistant making a show of juggling a clipboard and papers and a drink, who then asked the participant to hold their drink for a moment so they could pull their things together. Sometimes, the drink was a cup of warm coffee, and sometimes an iced coffee. After a minute or two the assistant would take back the drink and escort the subject to the research room.
The subjects who held the warm drink were more likely to rate the person they read about as warm or generous. To give something away rather than collect a reward for themselves. Those who held a cold drink tended to describe the same person as cold, or to take gift for themselves. This external physical factor influenced their perception in ways they weren’t aware of. In psychology it’s called the priming effect.
Our time has been basically been one ice-cold cup of coffee after another — for two years since October 7 and five years since the onset of Covid and even longer. Ice cold, or maybe I should say red hot. We are primed in ways we don’t realize, by the palpable touch of what’s in the air.
And as Jews right now, our reality is so primed by brutality. By war. By the sufferings of our people and how we can get through it; and by the sufferings of Palestinians and how much we decide we can justify it. Professor Susannah Heschel at Dartmouth wrote an article recently proposing that at the core of the campus protests has been an enjoyment of watching Jewish students’ pain. These are the primings piled on top of primings for us Jews in particular.
We are all being handed scalding cup after scalding cup after scalding cup of coffee, and then asked to judge and to choose how to act. If we accept that as the background condition of life right now, we will never be at our best. And I worry we will lose ourselves as Jews.
Yet in the research, there are people who don’t do what the priming would predict. Who hold a cup of coffee so cold, and keep their wits and judge fairly.
Who are those people? The ones grounded in chesed. It may be vanilla, but: Ask any culinary expert… and they’ll tell you that vanilla is actually one of the most complex, active flavors and spices around.
So while kindness has always been important, it’s time to understand it more, what makes it complex and active beyond what we think.
We have a Jewish master story about the complexity and power of chesed. It’s about our ancestors Avraham and Sarah, and it is exactly a story of kindness in a brutal world, and the power of chesed to push justice into the world.
It’s all in one glorious chapter of the Torah, Chapter 18 of Genesis, Bereshit, two stories in a single day in Avraham’s and Sarah’s life. In the first, Avraham and Sarah welcome three unknown travelers into their tent. In the second, Avraham argues with God over the fate of five cities so evil that God is considering destroying them entirely, including Sodom and Gomorrah.
Genesis 18 begins when the sun is high and hot. Know this about Avraham and Sarah: lovely people, but not exactly sweet. According to midrash, as a kid Avraham was brash and kind of sassy when it suited him. And in the Torah he and Sarah are so serious that the one time each of them laughs, the Torah stops to tell us about it. So maybe less Ted Lasso than Roy Kent.
And on this particular day Avraham is not feeling well. He is recovering from a painful medical procedure, and he should be inside in his tent.
But he’s not. He’s sitting at the opening. One midrash says God is there with Avraham, engaging in bikkur cholim, visiting the sick, to help him take it easy. Yet Avraham keeps looking out his tent flap and when he sees three people, he says to God “Excuse me, thanks for coming, I have something important to do.”
What he has to do is chesed – it’s kindness.
The Torah says: Avraham lifted up his eyes and whoa, three men were standing over him, and he saw and he ran toward them from the opening of his tent and he bowed to the ground (18:2). Avraham felt that he should make the effort to go up to them, even though they were already there. Not stand over them, as some kind of lord, or like the other wealthy shepherds would. Even though he was already sitting and they were standing, he got up and ran to them and bowed down to the ground, so they could see him actively treat them with honor, look upward at them with intention.
Then Torah uses over and over the word maher, hurrying. Picture Sarah as such an excellent cook and baker that she could make their fanciest dishes and breads in record time. They didn’t stop to find out anything about these people until they could offer them some water and food, and refresh their feet. Until they could treat them gently.
These aren’t random travelers but divine messengers — but at the start Avraham and Sarah have no idea about that. This is the edge of the desert, and who knows if these three guys are bandits. Also they’re not that far from Sodom and Gomorrah, where the people are known to be generally vile – maybe these three people come from there?
Sarah and Avraham aren’t manifesting a personality trait. These people need something now and there isn’t anyone else around to look after them. Or maybe they really are from Sodom, and this encounter could be the one that will turn them around.
So Avraham and Sarah choose kindness. Extraordinary chesed.
In our tradition this story becomes the paradigm of kindness. To teach that kindness is a weighty thing. It is work; it can be risky. It’s something you’ve thought about hard, and somehow also effortless. You do it even when you’re not feeling it, when you’re not generally at your best.
That all is a good enough lesson right there, and a good account of how kindness is not bland and not safe. But my claim is bigger – that kindness equips us for more, that chesed is the thing with the power to go at a brutal world.
So in Genesis 18, kindness draws Avraham out from his tent. He can’t just let the visitors go unescorted, so he walks with them to the mountain ridge overlooking Sodom and Gomorrah. There God lets Avraham in on God’s plan to possibly obliterate the cities.
And quickly Avraham gets up in God’s grill. “So you will even sweep away the innocent with the guilty?” Avraham posits this scenario of fifty tzaddikim, innocent or righteous people, and tells God, “It would be profane for You to put to death tzaddik and rasha, innocent and guilty, and the tzaddik would be just like the rasha. Profane for You – the Judge of all the world will not do justice?”
And they have this negotiation which ends with an agreement to save the cities if there are ten tzaddikim, ten righteous people or just innocent people.
Now in this part of the chapter, Avraham is displaying different things than the first part. He deals with people as numbers, abstractions. He talks about death and destroying. Some of this is potentially dangerous for the soul.
And I have no doubt that he’s angry. About communities that are so the opposite of everything he is trying to build in the promised land. I bet he wishes he could keep on avoiding these people, their evil majority and their vile leaders and even the potential innocents and righteous among them he hasn’t bothered to consider until now. But once God opens that door, now Avraham has to take a stand for them anyway.
This is not easy. Avraham has to transform that anger, to recenter himself in chesed, in concern for these people who just like the three visitors have no one else but him to stand up for them and protect them.
The Torah puts these two stories together, to teach us something. There is no way that Avraham could have the soul-strength for this discussion with God, about good and evil in this brutal world, had he and Sarah not been the kind of people who would welcome the three strangers.
The only way for Avraham to have the moral imagination to conjure an alternative future without fire and brimstone is from a deep root of chesed. Of kind acts up close, and a default orientation of love toward the world.
Amanda Prahl again: “Kind” characters are often treated as sweet, naïve idiots too dumb to realize that others don’t deserve their kindness. But the secret… is they know perfectly well who does and doesn’t deserve to be treated with kindness, and they do it anyway.
Looking at all of Genesis 18 — Avraham is no pushover. Even he has a limit; he doesn’t say the guilty of Sodom and Gomorrah are righteous. Lovingkindness is not sugary or weak. It’s a struggle and an effort, both up close and from 10,000 feet. It is not a simpler path than brutality or anger or hate. It is mighty.
And again, if Avraham could do what he did for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, surely we can for people and communities in our orbit who are innocent, and who have no one to stand up for them but us.
There is no way to redeem our country, or to support healing and peace in Eretz Yisrael, that is not fundamentally grounded in chesed. That is not led by people of chesed.
How do we believe not just that love and kindness are good in our own lives – but are foundational and redemptive for our world?
Let me suggest something spiritual and something political.
In Judaism the traditional practice right when we wake up is to say Modeh Ani or Modah Ani, “Grateful am I” – acknowledging that our being alive is itself a kindness from the Divine. And then very soon we say, “I hearby take upon myself the Creator’s mitzvah: Love your fellow person as yourself, v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha.” Those two statements become the warm cup of coffee we hold before anything else we do in the day. They prime us before we even sit up; they are the first step for us to become the primes that shape everyone we will encounter that day. For the past couple of years, this has been my spiritual practice – never to read about the world until I have said Modeh Ani.
If you have a cause you believe in, make sure it’s telling a big-hearted story. Some say that the only way to meet the brutality of the moment is for “our side”, quote-unquote, to get more skilled at harnessing fear and anger. But that’s wrong at the level of values, and nothing enduring for the long haul can be built on a foundation of cruelty.
If you have a cause, don’t follow a leader who speaks or acts in its name with brutality, even in language. We have to make clear that no politics of justice — in any vision progressive, conservative, Zionist — can be built by leaders and rhetoric that are not kind. We have to challenge any leaders like that to do teshuvah, even our own leaders, and acknowledge if they truly do.
And when the causes that matter most to you are led by people who are profoundly kind, full of love, let them know it matters. Treasure that and invest in them.
You may think the problem is only far away on the political spectrum. But there is plenty of it close by all of us we could work on. And even if we just keep filling our part of the political world with chesed, there will be less oxygen left for the opposite. Be the warm cup of coffee everywhere you can, and you can change the world around everyone you encounter.
Don’t think that kindness is passive, or safe, or bland. And don’t lose hope on days it feels like it’s not enough. Avraham didn’t save these cities in Genesis 18 — but he did save the next one he and Sarah came to, two chapters later, and then once more after that.
On the day Avraham did two extraordinary things, he was not feeling great. It was the day after his bris, so he didn’t feel physically like himself, and I think he was carrying in his body the weightiness of the covenant that God had just reaffirmed to him.
That’s exactly us right now. So whatever pain you are feeling right now, about the country and the world and the Jewish people, know that it is covenantal pain. It comes from the same place as your deepest chesed. Avraham and Sarah found extraordinary chesed in themselves precisely when they were not feeling like themselves. So can we. So will you.
Shana Tova.
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