The Rabbi’s Sermons on Democracy

Temple Beth Sholom, Hamden, Ct

#8 Homer’s Odyssey in the Rosh Hashanah Sermon, 12 September 2026

Shanah Tovah.

On this first evening of Rosh Hashanah, we sit together in the quiet space between what has been and what is yet to come. We cross the threshold of 5787 bearing the full weight of a complex year—its joys, its quiet heartbreaks, its sudden ruptures, and its unfinished conversations. In this sacred pause, we are confronted by one of the most enduring, demanding questions of the human experience: When the ground beneath our feet shifts, how do we find our way forward?

To answer that, I want to look to a story that has belonged to humanity for nearly three thousand years: Homer’s Odyssey.

Recently, a major new cinematic adaptation of the epic was released, and it sparked immediate debate because it chose to break the traditional mold. For generations, we have comfortably remembered Odysseus as the archetypal heroic wanderer—the cunning tactician (polytropos), the mastermind behind the Trojan Horse, the swashbuckling adventurer who outwitted Polyphemus the Cyclops and escaped the clutches of Circe and the Sirens. We remembered him as a man of sheer survival and ultimate victory.

Yet the new film strips away that romanticized gloss entirely. It refuses to treat his ten-year voyage home as a thrilling series of heroic escapades. Instead, the filmmakers recast Odysseus as a man profoundly haunted by the psychological aftermath of war. The monsters he battles are no longer merely external beasts on distant islands; they are manifestations of his own inner devastation, the moral debris of ten years of bloodshed, and the crushing guilt of watching his entire crew perish along the way. He returns toward Ithaca not as a flawless conqueror, but as a traumatized veteran wrestling with the unbearable cost of violence and the agonizing realization that going home cannot simply mean returning to who he was before the war began.

Some purists have bristled at this change, arguing that it strays from Homer’s original tone. But in truth, this film is participating in a timeless literary practice as old as Western drama itself.

For the ancient Greeks, myths were never treated as rigid, unyielding dogmas cast in stone; they were malleable clay. When the great Athenian playwrights took up the Trojan War cycle, they constantly subverted and reinvented Homer's heroes to address the moral anxieties of their own generation:

·       Aeschylus took the brutal, swift betrayal of Agamemnon’s murder upon his return home—a story touched upon in the Odyssey and echoed in the new film—and elevated it in his Oresteia into a profound interrogation of generational trauma, divine justice, and the emergence of civic courts out of archaic blood-feuds.

·       Sophocles took the towering warrior Ajax and stripped away the glamorous battlefield romance. In his hands, Ajax became a portrait of a broken man suffering a profound psychological crisis—wrestling with wounded pride, deep alienation, and a changing world whose values no longer matched his outdated heroic code.

·       Euripides shattered heroic myth entirely by centering the voices of those trampled by conquest. In The Trojan Women, the glory of the Greek victory is laid bare as an anti-war tragedy told entirely through the grief and terror of captive, mourning mothers and daughters. And in Medea, he transformed a mythic monster into a complex, agonizingly real human being pushed to the brink by betrayal and societal displacement.

These ancient masters understood a fundamental truth: Stories survive only when they are allowed to change. When an ancient text is filtered through the lens of a new era’s pain and insight, its lifeblood is renewed, allowing its wisdom to speak directly to the living human heart.

If this dynamic is the lifeblood of literature, it is the very soul of Judaism.

Reinterpretation is not merely an intellectual pursuit for our people; it is the single reason we are sitting in this sanctuary tonight.

Think back two thousand years. The Roman legions set the Second Temple aflame. The center of our universe collapsed. The sacrificial system ceased to exist. Our homeland was laid waste, and our people were scattered to the four winds. By every law of historical antiquity, Judaism should have vanished into the dust of the Mediterranean alongside the Moabites, the Edomites, the Philistines, and the ancient Spartans.

Why did we not disappear? Because our sages possessed the spiritual daring to reinterpret our entire existence.

They did not abandon our sacred texts, but they refused to keep them frozen in the past. When they could no longer offer animal sacrifices on an altar, they opened the Torah and discovered that prayer (tefillah) could be the offering of the heart. When the Temple in Jerusalem fell, they turned the family dining table into an altar and every home into a Mikdash Me’at—a miniature sanctuary. They took an ancient, land-bound sacrificial cult and re-imagined it into a portable, vibrant, text-centered civilization grounded in mitzvot, study, and chesed (acts of loving-kindness).

Had our ancestors insisted that Judaism could exist only in the form of priests and altars, the Jewish story would have ended in the year 70 CE. We survived—and we flourished—because we had the courage to pivot, to reinterpret, and to redefine our sacred purpose.

Tonight, on Rosh Hashanah, that ancient demand turns directly inward.

The Days of Awe do not ask us to sit in judgment of history; they ask us to perform that exact same act of reinterpretation on our own individual lives.

Each of us arrives at this service carrying an internal script—an old story we have told ourselves about who we are, what we were supposed to achieve, and how our lives were supposed to look by now. Yet life rarely follows the original script. Unplanned detours, sudden losses, and shifting seasons constantly force us out of our comfort zones. To survive and truly thrive, we must possess the courage to redefine ourselves at every major threshold.

We must reinterpret our roles when our families change.

There comes a moment when our children grow up, pack their bags, and build worlds of their own. If a parent insists on remaining the day-to-day manager of their adult child’s life, friction and heartache follow. Thriving requires a conscious pivot—reinterpreting parenthood from control to presence, transforming from a director into a trusted mentor and a non-judgmental harbor. Conversely, when our aging parents reach a stage where they need our help, we face the heartbreaking, delicate pivot of becoming caregivers to the very people who once carried us. That shift demands a complete re-authoring of our patience, our boundaries, and our love.

We must reinterpret our identity when our circumstances unravel.

So many of us tie our entire sense of self-worth to a career, a title, or a specific level of productivity. But what happens when retirement arrives, when an unexpected layoff occurs, or when the physical body slows down? If our identity is entirely invested in the old role, the loss feels fatal. But if we can reinterpret the moment, we discover that our title was merely a costume we wore, not the soul underneath. We are liberated to ask: Now that this chapter has closed, what new gifts can I offer? What passions have I deferred? Who am I when I am no longer defined solely by what I produce?

We must reinterpret our scars and our pain.

Over the course of a lifetime, we all accumulate losses—a broken relationship, a business venture that failed, an illness that altered our plans, or a mistake that still makes us wince in the dark. The natural human temptation is to let that pain become a defining monument of bitterness, a chapter that permanently casts us as victims or failures.

Yet Judaism teaches that our past is not a prison. This is the profound, radical promise of Teshuvah.

We often translate teshuvah simply as "repentance," but its deeper meaning is "turning" or "returning." Teshuvah is, at its core, the spiritual art of reinterpretation. It is the bold declaration that our past errors and our deepest wounds do not have the final word on who we are. When we do teshuvah, we take the broken pieces of our previous chapters and say: This happened to me, yes. I made this mistake, yes. But it is not a dead end. It is the raw clay out of which I will craft a wiser, humbler, and more compassionate human being.

Like the Odysseus of this new cinematic vision, we are all wanderers carrying the weight of the journeys behind us. We cannot erase the battles we have fought, nor can we undo the losses we have suffered along the way. But we do not have to be trapped by an outdated version of our story.

The shofar will sound. Its piercing, wordless cry does not demand that we remain who we were yesterday. It calls out to shatter our rigid scripts, to awaken our slumbering souls, and to remind us that our greatest power is our ability to begin again.

May we, like our ancestors before us, have the daring to reinterpret our challenges.

May we have the resilience to pivot when life demands it.

And may we find the wisdom to redefine our lives, so that in the year ahead, we do not merely endure—we adapt, we heal, and we thrive.

Ken Yehi Ratzon—May this be G-d's will.

Shanah Tovah U'Metukah.

#7 Different Ways of Watching - and Celebrating - a Solar Eclipse (8 April 2024)

An article written by a father (Rabbi) and son (Astrophysics Professor)

Rabbi Benjamin E. Scolnic, Temple Beth Sholom, Hamden, Ct.

Dr. Daniel M. Scolnic, Associate Professor of Physics, Duke University

On April 8, 2024, there will be a total solar eclipse with a path of totality covering a large swath of the United States.  It is one of nature’s most spectacular events, and the next eclipse like this won’t happen for twenty years.  Historically, eclipses have been seen as revelations, messages from the supernatural. They are critical pieces of stories in nearly every religion and culture; they have even stopped and started wars.

Today, the explanation for eclipses is rather simple.  The orbital plane of the moon to the earth is 5 degrees off of the plane between the earth and the sun, so it is only with seeming rarity that the positions of the sun and moon align and the moon blocks out the light from the sun.  Scientists can predict eclipses that will occur thousands of years in the future, and similarly, can explain what people saw thousands of years in the past.

A logical question comes to mind: what happens when a miracle can be explained by science?  How does one discuss aspects of religion when they are actually predictable and understood? What happens when the supernatural is perfectly natural?

A trend in the scientific community over the last few decades has been to explain, with little sensitivity, that religion has things all wrong.  Proudly, some scientists boast about ‘militant atheism’. Yet if the hope has been to convince the general public about the truths of science and the fallacies of religion, one would be hard-pressed to find evidence that this strategy has been a success.  Today, only 57% of Americans think that science has had a mostly positive effect on society, the lowest it has been since first polls taken in 2016.  Our country seems further than ever from trusting scientific experts.  Only some presidential candidates say that they ‘believe in science’, a phrase deeply problematic in itself.

Perhaps it is time for a different plan, a new experiment.   We do not need current scientific understanding of eclipses, evolution, or the Big Bang to contradict the primary texts of certain religions.  Seeming contradictions can be found directly in the primary texts themselves.  In Genesis 1, the order of creation includes plants, animals, and then Men and Women, made equally in the image of God. In Genesis 2, however, the order is Adam (a male), plants (the Garden in Eden), animals, and then Eve (a female). If the Bible wants to present an account of the order of creation, why would it give us two accounts with different sequences and diametrically opposite understandings of the relationships of males and females?  Even if we postulate multiple Biblical authors, why would an editor give us texts that undermine each other?

A more appropriate reading of Gen. 1 and 2 is that these chapters are religious texts that are not supposed to be science or history. They teach religious lessons about how to be stewards of our planet and what the idea of equality might mean. Just as there are two different Creation accounts, there are different versions of just about every important text and event in the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, from why there was a Flood to the Ten Commandments. Are there texts that show warlike animosity between peoples? Yes, but there are texts that show us how to overcome our antagonisms and see ourselves as part of a human family. There is never just one worldview, because we need different perspectives at different points in history. We cannot be stuck in dogmatic positions when life is constantly changing. And if science definitively shows us more of what a believer should call God’s truth, we should be eager to learn all about it. 

Yet science also has clear limits; it cannot tell us what happened before the Big Bang or what’s outside our universe. The religious idea that God created the universe can be taken to mean that there is meaning and purpose to our world and our lives. When a loved one dies, it is not very helpful to hear a scientific viewpoint that we are on a big rock, floating through space all by ourselves, and that randomness and death are all one can expect. Religion can offer people offers a path, deeply needed by many, through randomness. To many, religion offers hope.

The late Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Jewish theologian, philosopher, and rabbi, understood this and offered us a path that combines religion and science. His idea was ‘radical amazement’.  We should all be in awe at how the world works and do our best to understand everything that can be understood.  We can bond[1]  in our wonder about everything from the smallest scales of the universe to the largest.  The texts of the Jewish and Christian Bibles, for all their differences, are consistent in their awe of our universe and our gratitude that we are here.

What does a path of radical amazement look like today? When something is within science’s boundaries, when science shows that its conclusion is provable and reproducible, religious adherents should accept these facts. However, the openness should go both ways. Scientists and atheists must also treat others with kindness and humility, recognizing that science itself cannot answer all we want to know about our place in the universe.  If people can bond[2]  over our common radical amazement, rather than be so militant in our atheism or our theism, maybe we can open up the space for understanding our place in this spectacular universe. 

When we look at the eclipse on April 8th, what should we see? Should we recognize that the orbital plane of the moon has aligned with the sun? Or should we simply appreciate this rare and glorious sight? Perhaps both, and something symbolic as well: the eclipse will only last a few moments. We are here in the vastness of the universe for such a short amount of time. We must regain our radical amazement, and approach everything we see with a sense of wonder. And some appropriate humility.

#6 Turning Curses in Blessings - On the Power of Words (8 December 2024)

TURNING CURSES TO BLESSINGS: ON THE POWER OF WORDS

#5 Equal is Equal

The Rabbi’s agitated thoughts on the attack on innocent Israelis these days and on the ongoing attack on human rights in America (13 October 2023).

Read here.

#4 How Much Damage Must Happen Before We Stand Up?

The Rabbi’s Sermon on ‘Own Goals and the Great Gatsby’ at Yom Kippur 5784 (25 September 2023)

Read here or stream on Youtube (at 2:44)

#3 This is What You Get When You Start Banning Books

The Rabbi’s Sermon on Bible Banning at Kol Nidre 5784 (24 September 2023)

Read here or stream on Youtube (at 1:01)

#2 Democratic Ideals in Early Israel

Hosted by Matthew Cobb & Kyle Erickson, University of Wales Trinity St David, Lampeter on 10 November 2022

The recording can be streamed on the Panopto Platform here.

#1 Let’s make a Deal, Or: Profiles in Courage

27 September 2022 (Rosh Hashanah 5783)

Do we have the strength to hold on to our dream, or are we OK to trade them for what is behind the curtain?

Read the full sermon