There is something so powerful about singing together. Whether you are invested in the lyrics or carried along by the melody, something really wonderful happens around us and to us when we attune to other people, listening carefully, breathing together, releasing sounds that become more powerful (and usually more beautiful) when they blend with other people doing the same.

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There are two explanations about what is happening when we sing together:

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Neuroscientists teach us that singing increases activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is connected to the limbic system that controls emotions, memories, and rewards. Singing releases neurochemicals like endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin, which can improve mood and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. Singing strengthens neural pathways and neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to adapt to new experiences. And singing together increases our sense of social closeness and belonging. Thanks science!

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Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav teaches us: "When Jews gather together to sing, even their simple melodies can elevate the soul to great heights. The joy of communal singing brings the Divine Presence among them." Thanks, Rabbi!

These two explanations are not in contradiction; they work together like warp and weft. When we sing, we have the opportunity to weave so many things together, from our neuropathways to our connections to each other and, ultimately, to God. 

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At the simplest level, that’s what we’re doing today: reweaving the fabric of a frayed and tattered year, binding together a new iteration of the Stanford Jewish community, tending and mending our broken hearts, our ragged world. In this work and these songs, we are exactly where God wants us to be.

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I am so grateful to Lior Ben Hur, to our students, faculty, and professional musicians, who lift us all on the wings of their talent and skill. But the danger of this venue, of holding services in a state-of-the-art concert hall, is that by sitting here, we mistake our purpose and lean into the temptation of being appreciators rather than participants. The work of today is happening up there, where you are, much more than it is happening down here, where I am. We few down here are the narrow opening of the shofar…it is you up there who need to make the great sound that opens the heavens for all of our prayers.

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In a very different-looking venue, the historic first train station in Jerusalem, I had a chance this summer to re-learn the soul-opening power of communal singing. As a rabbinic fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, I was living in a neighborhood called Emek Refayim. This is also the neighborhood where Hersh Goldberg Polin z”l lived. Though Hersh was then a hostage in Gaza, his smiling face was everywhere—on stickers, posters, and banners on every surface imaginable, along with the faces of other hostages, people murdered on 10/7, and soldiers who have died in this war. I had the privilege, and honestly, the chutzpah, to say that the presence of their absence sometimes felt suffocating, so when someone said there would be a community singalong to give chizuk, spiritual strength, to the hostages and their families, I hesitated for a minute. But when I heard that Hersh’s parents would likely be there, I pushed past the selfish impulse to take a night off. If my presence, even as a nameless stranger, could alleviate the tiniest part of their suffering, showing up and singing was the least I could do.

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There were probably 500 people there; roughly the number I would guess are here now. I didn’t know what to expect. It was very homemade…there were some plastic chairs, but not enough for all the tuchases. A small screen and home projector for the words, which people kept walking in front of, so we sometimes squinted to sing through their shadows. Neighbors greeted each other, there were hugs and smiles and tears, and a decent amount of it all happening in English, because it was that kind of neighborhood. I bumped into someone from Stanford, which was a joy because otherwise, I felt quite strange and a little out of place. Once we started singing, there were some songs I knew, but many I did not. When I recognized something, I tried to sing my heart out; when I didn’t, I mumbled through and hoped no one would notice. It was a good reminder of the awkwardness of being new in Jewish space, which happens for all of us, even professional Jews. 

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That night, I tried to mask how awkward I felt by googling the lyrics I didn’t know, which is what I was doing when people began singing “Acheinu, kol beit yisrael, han'tunim b'tzara uvashivyah, haomdim bein bayam uvein bayabasha.” 

אַחֵינוּ כָּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל, הַנְּתוּנִים בְּצָרָה וּבַשִּׁבְיָה, הָעוֹמְדִים בֵּין בַּיָּם וּבֵין בַּיַּבָּשָׁה, הַמָּקוֹם יְרַחֵם עֲלֵיהֶם, וְיוֹצִיאֵם מִצָּרָה לִרְוָחָה, וּמֵאֲפֵלָה לְאוֹרָה, וּמִשִּׁעְבּוּד לִגְאֻלָּה, הַשְׁתָּא בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב.

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That night, I did not know the tune, but I knew the words. “Acheinu” is the opening of a 900 year old prayer, which lives in our regular liturgy at this moment, when we are gathered together with the Torah.

 
"Our family, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress, or in captivity — who stand either in the sea or on dry land — may the Omnipresent have mercy on them and take them out from narrowness to expanse, and from darkness to light, and from oppression to redemption, now, swiftly, and soon!"

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In its movement from narrowness to expansiveness and darkness to light, Rabbi Eli Kaunfer notes that the text “echoes language we recite at the Passover Seder, which also mentions the emergence from darkness to light in recalling the original moment of the Israelites’ liberation from captivity. Significantly, the Haggadah tells us that God not only did this for those enslaved in Egypt but also for “us.” That is why the Haggadah similarly states that in each and every generation, we are required to see ourselves as if we personally went out from Egypt.” 

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I love our mythic Jewish stories, and until Oct. 7, retelling them is how I thought we knit ourselves into Jewish history. But every so often, something shifts, and we are no longer telling history; we are living it. That is what this last year has been. And so now, when we sing “Acheinu…“Our family, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress and captivity…” The image in our heads is not a medieval community at the mercy of Crusaders but of Hersh Goldberg Polin, the little red-headed Bibas brothers, and the young women whose job in the army was to be the country’s watchful eyes, who saw what was coming but whose warnings went unheeded.

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Acheinu—the families of the captives, were sitting right in front of us.
Acheinu—though we are not related, they are our family, too. 

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That night, the words of the siddur came alive like nothing I have ever experienced. We were all electrified, connected. By the second repetition, the tune lodged deep in my soul.

R. Menachem Mendl of Kotsk taught: "A true song is one that unites all voices as one, reflecting the collective soul of the Jewish people." This year “Acheinu” is our true song, and so we are going to weave it as a theme throughout these high holy days.

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But more importantly, I want us each to think about how to weave it as a theme into our lives. The text holds an ambiguity—it is about captives, and we pray for them, but it is also directed towards “kol beit yisrael,” the whole household of Israel…that is us.  

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In this case, “Yisrael” does not refer to Israel as the place but rather to Israel as the people. In the Torah, our ancestor Jacob wrestled with a divine messenger and extracted from the encounter the blessing of a new name: Yisrael, one who wrestles with God. Jacob’s 12 sons, the first B’nai Yisrael, were the sources of the 12 tribes of Israel, and ever since, “B’nai Israel” is our code word for “The Jewish People”—all of us.

 

The opening call to “Acheinu, kol beit Yisrael”—our family, the whole house of Israel— works on two levels—it asks what will we, the household of Israel, do for those among us who are captive, and what will we do for the household of Israel, all of us who are captive…because we are brothers and sisters, and our redemption is bound up together.

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The Israeli poet Haim Guri has a famous line that captures this feeling.  When asked “Ma shlomcha?” which means “How are you?” but is literally, “are you at peace?” he would answer “Shlomi/my peace?” “K’shalom ami/I am as good as my people are”…if they are at peace, I am at peace; and if not…not (knot).

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I think many of us experienced this sense of being tied together, the whole household of Israel, more strongly than ever before in the very hard year that is just ending. The sense of entanglement took many forms. 

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For some of us, it has literally been our families, of kinship and choice, who tie us into the events of the last year. We know people who were murdered, were hostages, or we are separated by only a degree or two from them because we are, at the end of it all, a very small people.

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Some of us answered the call to serve…returning to active duty, or answering the call to the reserves. Members of our Stanford community moved back to Israel to be close in her time of trouble, binding themselves willingly to her fate.   

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Some have traveled there temporarily to volunteer, picking fruits and vegetables, sorting supplies, entertaining displaced children so their frazzled parents get a few hours off, and going on missions of comfort and solidarity.

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Some of us have entangled ourselves digitally, reading Israeli news regularly when maybe we didn’t before, or taking on the tzevet adom/red alert app on our phones so that we also received the warnings when missiles were eminent (I actually don’t recommend this, but I know people have done it).

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Some of us stepped into leadership here, creating programs to educate our peers on campus or advocating for our community’s needs with senior administrators and sometimes with our own RAs. Jewish students, faculty, and staff, and especially the co-chairs Jeff Koseff and Larry Diamond, devoted hundreds of hours to create the report from the Stanford subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which is a national model for not just how our campus can come back stronger after this terrible year, but how all campuses could do the same.

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Some of us steeled ourselves to step into hard conversations with colleagues, roommates, friends, and even strangers…to be vulnerable in new ways, but to share honestly the pain of our, and our community’s, experience.

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Some of us saw a need in the moment and, without fanfare or ego, just stepped forward to do something or say something. You weren’t looking to lead, but something important needed to be done, and you did it.  These things happened publicly and privately; some were honored, and some came with real costs. As the Hillel director, I had some special visibility into some of these moments, and they are honestly what kept me going personally through so much of last year.  You made me so proud to be part of this community, this acheinu, and renewed my determination to keep pushing forward together, for all of us.

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But let’s notice that “all of us” is complicated.  Beit Yisrael—the Jewish people-- are fractious and fractured.  It takes effort to attach ourselves to it, and from the other side, it is possible to pull the cords of connection in ways that cut others off or cause them to stumble or even to strangle.

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In the last year, some of us struggled to feel connected. We know we are Jewish individuals, but it doesn’t always feel like we have a place or a stake in the Jewish collective. Maybe this is because we were new, or it felt like our personal story or our Jewish practice or our political opinions were too great a deviation from the norm. We wondered if our voices were welcome in the collective song.

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Some of us might have felt silenced by others in the community. On top of everything else, this has been a year of judgments and litmus tests, and sometimes a brand of unkindness and even ruthlessness towards each other that would make our enemies cackle with delight. These internal struggles were some of the worst parts of the last year and are not worthy actions among Beit Yisrael.  If I silenced or othered you, either in my personal capacity or in my role as the director of our Hillel, I am sorry. If you did that to someone else, you need to make it right. There are so many points where we can legitimately disagree and so many ways to do that harmoniously; we owe it to each other to strive for them and to attempt to repair them when we fall short.

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A final way to understand our responsibility to free the captive is to recognize who is missing. Who isn’t here today or at some other moment in our communal Jewish life?  If we take Acheinu’s call seriously, we should allow it to push us to ask ourselves who isn’t here, and why not, and is there something each of us can do to bring them in? Are you a veteran faculty member who could extend yourself to welcome a new colleague to campus and connect them to Jewish community? Are you a returning student who can do the same for someone new? Are you someone who can build an affinity circle, or weave a new friendship, or teach a Jewish skill, or do something else to make sure our communal chorus is as complete and well-rounded as it can possibly be? 

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And one step further…what would it take for each of us to make room someone who belongs in acheinu, but whose presence in it troubles us? In a time when we are feeling so challenged, do we have the strength and confidence to welcome in fellow Jews who might feel isolated or alienated? And if we are feeling on the outside, do we have the courage to step in and say, “I want to be here. Let’s build together”?

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I think about all of our Torah and haftara readings for Rosh Hashanah—Isaac and Ishmael, Avraham and sacred messengers, Sarah, Hagar, and Hannah.  They are stories of flawed people longing to connect, to do right, to make a difference, to matter, and to not be alone and isolated in the world. Many of these people literally cry out—to each other, to God. Like us, they are often in deep pain. Like us, they hurt each other. Like us, they make mistakes. Like us, they strive towards a better vision of the world. Like us, they are a family.

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We can learn so much from each of their stories. But maybe the deepest thing we learn is that our story is built on theirs. Just as their voices are each a thread in this magnificent tangle of a people, each of our voices matter too. And what matters most is not the notes from any one voice, but the song we sing together.

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Dean Steinwert often shares a teaching by William Stafford called “The Way It Is:”

"There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread."

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The shofar moves us because it contains all of our cries, the broken and the whole, from our ancestors to today. The Jewish People, being Beit Yisrael, is the thread. We hold it, tend it, and pass it together.

So let’s sing together, and let our voices show us the way to build greater harmonies with each other, to move from narrowness to expanse, from darkness to light, from oppression to redemption, now, swiftly, and soon!

אַחֵינוּ כָּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל, הַנְּתוּנִים בְּצָרָה וּבַשִּׁבְיָה, הָעוֹמְדִים בֵּין בַּיָּם וּבֵין בַּיַּבָּשָׁה, הַמָּקוֹם יְרַחֵם עֲלֵיהֶם, וְיוֹצִיאֵם מִצָּרָה לִרְוָחָה, וּמֵאֲפֵלָה לְאוֹרָה, וּמִשִּׁעְבּוּד לִגְאֻלָּה, הַשְׁתָּא בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב.

"Our family, the whole house of Israel, who are in distress, or in captivity — who stand either in the sea or on dry land — may the Omnipresent have mercy on them and take them out from narrowness to expanse, and from darkness to light, and from oppression to redemption, now, swiftly, and soon!"