Jewish Survival, Ordered Responsibility, and the Moody–Nixon Election
This was my Day 1 Rosh HaShanah Sermon for 5787/2026
Do you know why I brought this airplane oxygen mask today? Not because I think I’m going to need oxygen on the bimah. I brought it because I’ve realized that almost every one of us who flies ignores one of the most important lessons about being a Jew today.
Every time we board an airplane, the same instructions are shared: “In the unlikely event of a loss of cabin pressure, secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.”
Even when I did pay attention to them, I never liked these instructions. Especially when I was a parent of young kids. Every instinct says: take care of your child first. Or how about the adult sitting next to you who needs a helping hand? Take care of yourself first!?
The instructions never sounded very “Jewish” to me. Judaism teaches us to feed the hungry. Welcome the stranger. Visit the sick. Comfort the mourner. Repair the world. Our instinct is to help someone else first. It’s in our DNA. We teach it. We celebrate it. And we should.
This summer, a wise friend pushed me to really listen to the mask instructions. She felt they had something important to teach the Jewish people. Specifically: “Secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.”
And so, as Cheryl and I flew from up north this summer, I listened to the flight attendant. Really listened. And it hit me. The instruction to put on our mask first doesn’t teach us to be selfish. It teaches us that responsibility has an order. Before we can help someone else breathe, we have to make sure we can breathe.
And this is a fundamental lesson for Jewish survival.
Prior to listening to the flight attendant deliver the mask instructions, I had taken part in a fellowship in Boston focused on a Jewish philosopher named Hermann Cohen. I knew his name. But this summer, I finally spent time wrestling with his ideas. And they got me thinking about Jewish survival.
Cohen believed something beautiful: because there is one God, there can only be one morality. Not one morality for Jews and another for everyone else. One God. One moral demand that applies to all.
Cohen believed the Jewish people had a particular responsibility to carry that universal moral vision into the world.
One challenge I had with Cohen was that he was suspicious of Zionism. He worried that if the Jewish people withdrew from the nations of the world and became a unique nation—with land, borders, an army, and political power—Judaism’s universal moral voice might become smaller rather than larger. He believed there was something sacred about Jews living among the nations, carrying Judaism’s moral vision with them.
But history exposed the danger in that vision. Cohen died in 1918. Before the Holocaust. Before the rebirth of the State of Israel. Before the Jewish people learned yet again that when we cannot protect ourselves, we cannot assume that others will.
For the Jewish people to be a blessing, there must be a Jewish people. And in the modern world that requires something Cohen feared. Jewish power.
Now, power is never Judaism’s highest aspiration. Our highest aspiration remains what it has always been: to live the covenant—the holy relationship—that began with Abraham and Sarah, who we read about every Rosh HaShanah. To build Jewish life. To teach it. To protect it. To pass it on. And yes, to bring its blessings and kindness and justice and equality into the world.
But none of that is possible if there is no Jewish people.
Sometimes survival is itself a moral obligation. Studying Hermann Cohen taught me that putting on our oxygen mask first is not selfish. It is holy—because no one else can breathe for us.
No one.
I know that some of you would like me to speak about the political and social issues consuming our country and the world. But I cannot begin there. Because on this holy day, in this sacred space, before I speak as an American citizen, before I weigh in on political parties or public policy, I am a rabbi. I am a Jew. My first responsibility is to the Jewish people.
That does not lessen my responsibility to the world. But my responsibilities have an order. I cannot ask the Jewish people to help repair the world while ignoring the cracks in our own Jewish house. If I get that order wrong, I have forgotten my calling.
And that raises a bigger question:
As a Jewish people, have our responsibilities gotten out of order?
Somewhere along the way, we began acting as though Judaism is primarily about what we do for the world. And just recently, we heard an extraordinary example of exactly what I am talking about.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, herself a Jew, spoke to a gathering of Jewish leaders and invoked the story of Queen Esther, the heroine of the Purim story. She suggested that Esther teaches us to be willing to sacrifice our own comfort, our safety, our security—even the future of our own people—for the opportunity to save humanity.
I read what she said and thought: No!
That is precisely the way of thinking I am asking us to reconsider today.
Esther does not save humanity by sacrificing the Jewish people. Esther risks herself because the Jewish people are threatened. Esther says boldly who she is: a Jew. She refuses to disappear. She uses the power she has been given to save her Jewish people. And because she does so, there is still a Jewish people at the end of the Purim story. And because there is still a people, there can still be a Jewish future capable of healing the world.
Hear me clearly: Our responsibility to humanity is real. But Judaism does not ask us to save the world by surrendering the Jewish people. That is not ordered responsibility. That is abandoning the oxygen mask.
Of course, Judaism demands that we care about humanity and fight for justice for all. But it also demands that we care for the Jewish people: to know our story and live our values proudly, to teach our children, to build Jewish community, to protect Jewish life, to confront antisemitism head on, to stand with Israel—even if we passionately disagree with her government.
Judaism does not tell us to care only for ourselves. But it does teach us to begin at home. Our tradition speaks about shalom bayit—the need to ensure peace in our homes. And the Talmud teaches, עֲנִיֵּי עִירֶךָ קוֹדְמִין—aniyei irecha kodmin—those in need in our own Jewish village come first. Not because everyone else does not matter. But because Judaism recognizes an order of responsibility.
We cannot bring Judaism’s blessing to the world if we fail to sustain the people who carry that blessing. We cannot teach the next generation to care about everyone else’s story if they do not know their own.
And that means tending to our Jewish house first.
So what does this require of us?
For too long, too many of us have assumed someone else would do it.
Someone else would teach our children. Someone else would build our community. Someone else would defend Jewish life. Someone else would stand with Israel.
But Jewish life has never survived because someone else took responsibility for it. It survives because, generation after generation, Jews have said: This is mine to carry.
7 October.
Haven’t the horrors of that day and everything that has followed made it painfully clear: We cannot outsource responsibility for Jewish life.
Again, that does not mean turning away from the world. It means we stop apologizing for prioritizing our own people. Dayenu. Enough. Enough of believing that everyone else’s future deserves our passion while the Jewish future can wait. No one else can carry our responsibility for us.
And responsibility for the Jewish people also means responsibility to one another. Stop trying to prove who is the more authentic Jew. The more observant Jew. The more righteous Jew. The more patriotic Jew. Stop. We cannot strengthen the Jewish people while tearing the Jewish people apart.
Governments will change. Prime ministers will change. Presidents will change. Political parties will change.
The Jewish people must continue.
We can argue. We can disagree passionately. We can vote differently. But we still have a responsibility to one another.
I need to tell you something I almost never say out loud: I am tired. I’m tired because I’m a Jew in 2026/5787. And I’m tired because I’m a rabbi at an extraordinarily difficult moment in Jewish life. For more than a quarter of a century, I have tried to build Jewish life—twenty-four of those years with you. I love this work. I love being your rabbi. And I love the Jewish people. That is exactly why I am tired. And I know I am not alone.
So many of us are tired of sounding the alarm. Tired of begging Jews to show up. Tired of trying to convince our own people that Jewish survival matters.
And underneath that exhaustion is something harder to admit: We are scared. For us. For our children. For what Jewish life will look like in 10, 20, 30 years. Because the Jewish future has never been guaranteed. Every generation has had to decide whether Judaism will simply be inherited or intentionally lived. And that responsibility was never meant to rest only on some Jews.
It belongs to all of us.
If Jewish life is going to endure, each of us has to decide: What is my responsibility? What am I willing to do? We—all of us—are the ones who have to carry it forward.
This brings me back to Hermann Cohen. He was right to insist that Judaism calls us beyond ourselves. Our responsibility to the stranger still matters. Our responsibility to the suffering still matters. Our responsibility to pursue justice still matters. But ordered responsibility means that those obligations do not erase our responsibility to our own people.
Putting on our oxygen mask first does not mean abandoning the world. It means refusing to abandon ourselves.
Jewish life is worth protecting. What we have is beautiful. What we have is holy. And yes—what we have still has a blessing to offer the world.
Ordered responsibility asks something of us. Sometimes something uncomfortable.
Even in the voting booth.
Here in Florida, we are about to face a choice for the United States Senate.
On one side is Angie Nixon, a Democrat who recently joined the Democratic Socialists of America, whose positions and rhetoric on Israel fan the flames of Jew hatred, and who has aligned herself with people who promote ideas that put American Jews in the crosshairs.
On the other is Ashley Moody, a Republican whose positions on other issues—along with those of certain people and movements with whom she has aligned herself—reflect values that many find deeply troubling.
I know there are some in this room thinking: “I can’t vote for Nixon.” And some of you are thinking: “But I can’t support Moody.”
That struggle is real.
Sitting this one out does not solve the dilemma. It only avoids making the difficult choice. And this moment calls for difficult choices.
Today, as we consider the choices we will need to make in the voting booth, I’m asking you to examine the order of your responsibilities. When you cast your ballot, your values go with you. Your concerns about democracy, abortion, immigration, the economy, gender identity—all of them and more go with you. And your responsibility to the Jewish people must go with you, too. Your concern about Jew hatred, Israel, and the future of our people.
No, being Jewish does not require all of us to vote the same way. But being Jewish cannot be politically weightless. If we say that the well-being of the Jewish people is one of our deepest responsibilities, then it has to be more than something we affirm in synagogue. It has to matter when our political party—Republican or Democrat—and our Jewish responsibility do not line up neatly. And these days, sadly, this is our reality.
Ordered responsibility means being willing to reconsider which responsibility comes first. We have serious decisions to make in the weeks ahead. And that brings me back to where we began: the oxygen mask.
This year, put on your mask first. Because if we cannot breathe, we cannot pray. If we cannot breathe, we cannot raise the next generation of Jews. If we cannot breathe, we cannot pursue justice and equality. If we cannot breathe, we cannot repair the world. And if we cannot breathe, we cannot sound the shofar.
The shofar has no voice of its own. It waits for someone’s breath. That breath is life. That breath is Hineni—Here I am. Not waiting for someone else. Not hoping someone else will do it.
So this year, put on the mask first. Take a deep breath. Love your people without apology. Carry your responsibility. Stand with one another.
And join us as we make holy noise.
Leave a Reply