Preface

By Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz

The following is an excerpt of the preface of Despite Everything, a collection of sermons written and edited by Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz. It will be released as a complete volume in several weeks.

At 8:15 on the morning of October 7th, there was a knock at my door. I found it strange; our building’ s staff would never bother us that early on a Saturday. Standing outside was my neighbor, with a very distressed look on his face. “There was an attack in Israel,” he said. I acknowledged the news, and was getting ready to say goodbye; a terror attack in Israel is sadly not too uncommon. Seeing my reaction, he added that “it was a bad attack.”

I paused, unsure what “bad” meant, still expecting to return to my regular pre-synagogue preparations. Then he explained that although no one yet knew the full extent of the attack, hundreds were dead. Right then, I completely stopped everything else I was doing and focused on Israel.

In a moment, everything had changed; for Israel, for the Jewish people, and for our community.

Like so many others, I was obsessed with the news, waking up in the middle of the night to check for updates. For the first few days, it was not completely clear if the State of Israel could survive if the West Bank exploded, and Hezbollah, Syria and Iran joined the attack. My heart was filled with worries and queries. What would happen to the Jewish world if Israel collapsed? What would I tell my children and my congregation if Israel disappeared? What would I tell myself?

On a daily basis, our hearts oscillated between grief, pride, hope, and every other possible emotion. It was an emotional struggle Each week, as I wrote my weekly email d’ var Torah, I brought those struggles to the words of the parsha; it was inspiring to see how familiar passages suddenly took on new meaning An obscure passage about a conflict between Isaac and the Philistines looked very different after I realized that those age-old events had taken place less than a mile from the site of the Nova Festival An unusual command about how to world’ s reaction to the attack. Timeless wisdom about life lesson The antisemitic storm unleashed by Ham recalled a medieval lesson from Rashi’ s grandson.

As the year went on, these weekly emails became a chronicle of how the Torah offers renewed enlightenment in times of crisis. They are often a snapshot of the moment they were written; my moods, our moods, would fluctuate from week to week, and the assumptions of what might happen next were constantly changing. Certain themes and ideas were repeated; other times, I changed my mind as the year went on. But together these essays create a mosaic, a unified picture of a year when spirituality was both a struggle and a strength. For that reason, they are now being published together in this book...