Because submission to God’s will is one way to look at bowing fully down on the Yamim Noraim…but what if we are taking a bow, an end-of-the-year curtain call, so that God can applaud us for all we’ve endured? This was written as an introduction to the Alenu during musaf on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Take a bow, my friends. In a moment, we will take a bow.

Take a bow for every moment this year you did not want to live—and somehow, you lived it anyway.
Take a bow for the demotion.
Take a bow for the grades you couldn’t get up no matter how hard you studied.
Take a bow for the oncologist’s office—for sitting in that chair, hearing those words, and getting through what came next.
Take a bow for that day you sat on the tarmac for two hours – in the middle seat. Because some suffering is existential, and some suffering is Newark Airport.

Take a bow
For all the you-know-what you put up with.
For all the meetings you did not want to go to.
For every time your spouse left the cap off the toothpaste and you didn’t say a word.
Take a bow for every time you brought your kid one more glass of water before bed. 
Take a bow for the patience you did not know you had.
Take a bow for the anger you learned to carry without letting it carry you.

Take a bow for the grief.
Take a bow for the nights you lay awake wishing the person who used to drive you crazy was still there to drive you crazy.
Take a bow for learning to sleep with the empty space in the bed beside you.
Take a bow for getting out of bed the next morning.

Take a bow for showing up.
For enduring.
Take a bow because you are still here.
After everything this year brought to your door—
after everything it took from you,
after everything it asked of you,
after every single time you thought, I cannot do this—
Look at you.
You did it.
So take a bow.

The Great Alenu is next. We are going to all take a bow. 
Because yes we bow down to God in submission
for all we have endured 
But you know what? 
I think God is cheering for us.

We have put up with a whole lot this year. God wants us to endure, to overcome. 

Someone once said to me: I wish you could see yourself the way God sees you.

So today, I’m imagining Alenu as a grand curtain call. We bow to God. God bows back to us. And then God rises, applauding: Look at you. Look what you made it through.

And look at you, still standing, ready for another year.

Rosh Hashanah 5787 Day 2 Sermon

Click HERE to watch Rabbi Treu’s full sermon on Rosh Hashanah Day 2.

I … did something… really bad this summer.

I didn’t mean to. It was something that had been brewing, I guess, for many years, and someone finally said the thing that brought it to a head, and I made a judgment call and I thought I was doing the right thing but it turned out that it really wasn’t. It turned out that I really hurt someone. Not just “someone” – I hurt a friend that I cared about and wasn’t trying to hurt, not consciously anyway. I lost a friend, which feels terribly sad, but also good, in some weird way, because I hurt this person and so I guess I should suffer too, the way they are suffering, and maybe that’s my punishment, losing my friend.

Except that I don’t believe in that, really. I don’t believe in losing friends nor do I believe in punishments in any karmic sense. But I do believe in making mistakes, and having things turn out not the way you intended.

Rosh Hashanah 5787 | Day 1 Sermon

Click HERE to watch Rabbi Treu’s full sermon on Rosh Hashanah Day 1.

[Singing unaccompanied: “Where do you belong? Where do you belong?”]

That song has been stuck in my head for lo these many months. Name the show! [Mean Girls]. Mean Girls follows Cady, a teenager raised in Africa by zoologist parents, as she enters public high school in Illinois and discovers that the social ecosystem is surprisingly similar to the savannah, complete with predators and prey.

The song comes in Act One, as Cady is led on her first day of school through that most terrifying of watering holes: the high school cafeteria. As her two new friends pass by the tables pointing out the athletes and the mathletes, the dance team and the junkies, they warn her to choose her lunch table very carefully:

Where do you belong? Where do you belong?
Where do you belong? Where do you belong?
You’ll be judged on sight and made to fit.
So find a clique and stick with it.
Say, where do you belong?

Where do you belong?

This may seem like a question about high school, but it’s not. It’s one of the deepest questions we human beings ever ask.

·      We ask it when we’re children, hoping someone will pick us for their team in gym class.

·      We ask it as adolescents, when we want more than anything to be added to the group chat…and to the party.

·      We ask it as adults, when we move to a new town and don’t yet know our neighbors or which golf club to join.

·      We keep asking it: as our children grow up and suddenly the friendships that revolved around carpools and soccer games begin to dissolve.

·      Where do we belong, we wonder, when we retire? When we lose a spouse, a sibling, the friends who knew you when you were young?

Belonging is something we keep searching for, over and over and over again, our whole lives. It isn’t a one-and-done thing. The word itself denotes something deeply human: we yearn to belong, we be longing, we long to belong a long, long time. Over and over and over again.

Where do I belong?

I have been thinking a lot about that question.

It started a few years ago. A new member showed up in my office. Her family had just joined Oheb. The kids were at Zeman, and they were really trying to make friends here. But somehow, it wasn’t happening. They came to First Friday once or twice—and sat at their own table. “It’s great that so many people have these longstanding relationships here,” she said. “I want that, too. But it seems like everyone else has their friends already.”

Fast forward to a few months ago. A longtime member showed up in my office. Someone who’s been here for decades—and no I’m not telling you who it was and it doesn’t matter, that’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is: he told me that he looks around at, say, Simchat Torah or First Friday and feels like he doesn’t know half the room. “It’s great that so many new families have joined these past few years,” he said, “but now—well, it seems like everyone else has friends and I just feel left out.”

How is it, I’ve been wondering, that these two people could be looking at each other and both feeling like they are the ones left out of some inner circle?

And there is another reason the question has been on my mind. I think we are especially thirsty for belonging right now because so many of our old answers to the question “Where do I belong?” are shifting.

For many American Jews, this has been a profoundly disorienting few years. We thought we understood the deal. We were Jews and Americans. Proudly both. Many of us were politically progressive or liberal or card-carrying Democratic voters. Or maybe we voted Republican but either way, we understood that we belonged, because we shared an approach to certain values: concern for the vulnerable, opposition to bigotry, commitment to pluralism, women’s rights, civil rights, human dignity.

But then October 7 happened. And in the years since, some of us have found ourselves standing in the cafeteria wondering where to sit.

People with whom we thought we shared a moral language suddenly seemed to be speaking in tongues we didn’t recognize. Groups we had marched with were no longer interested in marching with us. People who knew exactly what to say when another minority was threatened were suddenly silent when Jews—the world’s tiniest minority of all!—were under attack.

Harder yet is what’s going on within the Jewish community. Sometimes we look at other Jews and wonder how we belong to the same tribe. Because we don’t agree about Israel, or Gaza, or Iran. Or the Israeli government. Or the American government. Or how to handle antisemitism. Or what safety requires. Or what justice demands.

Even within the Jewish community, the question nags at us:

Where do you belong?

So this is not just a synagogue problem, or, God forbid, an Oheb problem. It is a Jewish problem…and it is a Jewish problem because it is a human problem.

Long gone are the days when we lived on the same block as our cousins, in a three-generation house with our grandparents. Telephones became texts became posts on social media sent to entire groups at once. The average American moves 11 times in their life and has 13 jobs over the course of a career. And that is all before we had to grapple with AI, which pushes us to reconsider our jobs, our brains, our relationships, what it means to be human.

No wonder we wonder where we belong.

Abraham Maslow famously put belonging right there in his hierarchy of human needs. First come our most basic physical needs, then our need for safety. But right there up next: the need for love and belonging. Before esteem, before achievement, before self-actualization, we need friendship, intimacy, family, connection.

We need a sense of belonging.

So how do we get it?

Rabbi Julia Appel, a fellow at CLAL, teaches that belonging is built in stages: Naming, Noticing, Known. We need people to know our names. We need people to notice us. Eventually, we need to be known beyond the small talk.

But it was her fourth stage that stopped me.

Needed.

Needed!

Maybe we have it all backwards.

Because we tend to imagine belonging as something other people do for us.

·      Will they invite me?

·      Will they come over and talk to me?

·      Will anyone save me a seat?

·      Will somebody notice if I’m not there?

·      Will someone want me?

But what if the deepest sense of belonging doesn’t come from somebody making room for me?

What if it comes when I make room for you? What if instead of spending our lives asking: Where do I belong? we began asking:

Who will belong because I was here?

**

There is an ancient Jewish teaching I have been thinking about differently because of this.

Pirkei Avot says:

קְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר — k’neh l’cha chaver.

Acquire yourself a friend.

What a strange verb. Not find a friend. Not: wait until somebody notices you. Not: keep checking your phone and wondering why nobody invited you. Acquire yourself a friend. Invest. Risk. Show up. Do something.

You want to belong? Learn somebody’s name. And then remember it the second time—which is terribly hard and I’m terrible at it, but I really really try.

Notice who isn’t there. Make the call.

See somebody standing alone? Walk over.

There’s an empty chair next to you? Move over.

Somebody new walks into the room? Don’t wait for the Membership Committee. You are the Membership Committee. Say: Sit here. Say: Come with me. Say: I was hoping I’d see you. Say: I need your help.

Because this is the other half of it. Don’t just make yourself useful.

Let yourself need somebody.

Ask for the ride. Text for the recipe. Ask the teenager to show you how to do the thing on your phone. Ask somebody what they think. Ask somebody for help.

Because – get this – research shows that we consistently underestimate how happy it makes other people to help us.

Jennifer Wallace discusses this in her book Mattering. When we refuse to ask for help because we’re afraid of being a burden, she says, we may actually be depriving someone else of an opportunity to feel useful, valued, connected.

Letting another person help us can reinforce their sense that they matter.

Think about that.

You need a ride—and you think you are imposing. You ask for the ride—and the person driving gets to know: I matter to you.

Wallace tells the story of Daniel, who every Tuesday and Friday calls his dad. He asks how to fix the leaky faucet. How to handle something difficult at work. How to cook a steak. Daniel could Google all of it. That’s not the point. His father is retired. He has struggled to find his place in the world. And Daniel can hear it: when he asks the question, when his father has something to teach him, when his son needs what he knows—the energy comes back into his father’s voice. Because he is needed. He matters. He belongs.

The fact that we need each other is not a weakness.

It is a gift.

And maybe that is what the rabbis meant when they taught:

כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה — Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh.

All Israel are arevim for one another.

We usually translate it: all Jews are responsible for one another. But an arev is a guarantor. Your obligation becomes my obligation. Your trouble becomes, in some small way, my trouble. Your need makes a claim on me. And mine makes a claim on you.

We are bound up with one another.

That is belonging. Not everybody knows my name. Not everybody agrees with me. Not everybody invited me to dinner.

But: I need these people. And these people need me.

That is the gift I want us to give one another in 5787.

Over the past several years, nearly one hundred new families have become part of this congregation. That is extraordinary.

But membership is not belonging. Membership can be entered in a database. Membership can be quantified in dues and dollars and headcounts.

Belonging can’t. You can pay dues and not belong. You can come twice a year and belong profoundly. You can have been here for thirty years and suddenly feel like the place is changing around you. You can have joined three months ago and already know: These are my people.

So the question isn’t how many people belong to Oheb Shalom. The question is:

How many people belong more deeply in this world because you are here?

Because you noticed them. Because you called. Because you moved over. Because you asked them to help. Because you gave them something to do. Because you looked at another human being and said, in one way or another: I need you.

Do you know what power you have?

You can do that. You.

·      You can walk into a room and change somebody’s experience of that room.

·      You can see the person nobody else seems to see.

·      You can call the person who has quietly stopped showing up.

·      You can sit next to the person who came alone.

·      You can ask the retired person what they know.

·      You can ask the teenager for help.

·      You can ask the new person to bring something.

·      You can ask the person who has been here for fifty years to bring something.

You can look at somebody who has begun to wonder whether they matter and give them the answer:

Yes.

Yes, you matter.

·      Yes, I noticed you.

·      Yes, there is something here that only you can give.

·      Yes, this place is different because you are part of it.

Yes, you belong.

**

That is why this belongs on Rosh Hashanah.

Because we come here every year asking:

·      How can I be better?

·      How can I live differently?

·      How can I change the world?

And sometimes changing the world sounds so enormous.

This isn’t enormous.

Notice one person.

·      Make one call.

·      Move over one seat.

·      Ask for one favor.

Let one human being know that their presence makes a difference in your life…And you have changed their world.

And if enough of us change one another’s worlds— we change the world.

So yes, this is about Oheb. But it is not just about Oheb.

·      Take it to work.

·      Take it to your block.

·      Take it to school.

·      Take it to the dinner table.

·      Take it to the person in your family who has begun to wonder whether anybody still needs them.

·      Take it to the person who just moved here.

·      Take it to the person who lost the person they always sat beside.

·      Take it to the person whose politics make you crazy.

·      Take it to the person standing at the edge of the room pretending to look at their phone because they don’t know whom to talk to.

Go get them. Bring them in. Give them something to give. And then—this matters—let them give it to you.

Because belonging is not something some magical community bestows upon us once we’ve been here long enough or attended enough programs or finally gotten invited to the right dinner.

We make belonging.

We make it for one another. And every time you help another person know that they matter, every time you help another person feel needed, every time you help another person belong— something happens to you, too.

You belong more.

So at the beginning of this sermon, I stood up here alone and sang a question: Where do you belong? But I don’t want to end this sermon alone.

Because I think I finally know the answer. The answer isn’t: I belong.

The answer is: We belong.

And the most important word in that sentence may not be belong.

It is we.

·      We—who have been here forever and who just got here.

·      We—who agree and disagree.

·      We—who are Jewish and other things, too.

·      We—who sometimes feel utterly at home and who sometimes walk into a room and think: Where is my table?

·      We—who still yearn for the home we left three houses ago and who cannot imagine living anyplace but here.

·      We—who help.

·      We—who need help.

·      We—who make the call.

·      We—who answer the call.

·      We—who move over.

·      We—who say:

Sit here. I see you. I need you. You matter. You belong.

That is community. That is belonging. Not something somebody gives us.

Something we give each other.

So stand up, if you’re able. Look around this room. Really look. These are your people. And somewhere in this room is somebody who needs what you have to give. And somewhere in this room is somebody who has something you need. Don’t leave it here today. Find them. Need them. Let them need you. Help them belong. And let them help you belong.

At the beginning I sang alone. I don’t want to end that way. Because this year, 5787, I don’t want us just to sing the words. I want us to live them.

Not: I belong. We belong.

[Band strikes up Pat Benatar’s “We Belong.”]

לשנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו

May this year be sweet.

May we notice one another.

May we need one another.

May we make room for one another.

And may we know, deep in our kishkes:

We belong together.

As published in TAPInto SOMA.

Last week’s public statement condemning the removal of the Israeli flag from the exterior of one of our town’s synagogues was one visible example of the often unseen work of our elected officials do on behalf of our community.

In another era, it would have been unremarkable for town officials to write a public letter condemning vandalism that many members of the Jewish community experienced as an act of intimidation or hate, regardless of what investigators ultimately determine about the motive.

There were several decades in American life in which it would have been no big deal for elected officials – especially in politically progressive towns – to name their support for the Jewish community, to publicly state that they are “united in condemning the disturbing removal of the Israeli flag” from the exterior of one of the town’s synagogues, and to condemn antisemitism.

But in 2026, such statements are, sadly, remarkable. They are a very big deal and are deeply appreciated by the Jewish community and, I hope, the broader communities of South Orange and Maplewood as a whole. 

Increasingly, public officials choose language that condemns hate in general while avoiding naming Jews specifically, particularly when the incident involves Israel. Naming a community that has been targeted, expressing the understanding that the flag taken down is a “symbol of Jewish faith and identity” does not diminish anyone else’s suffering. It tells the community that it has been seen, and is valued and supported.

Loud voices are pulling us toward division in our beautifully diverse community. Some wish for stronger public responses. Much of the work elected officials and law enforcement do, however, necessarily happens outside public view. Others see the conflict in the Middle East as their primary lens. But local government has a different responsibility, and so do we as friends and neighbors.

Our task here in Maplewood and South Orange is not to resolve the Middle East crisis. Our task is to decide how we treat one another as neighbors here, in this little corner of New Jersey. 

How grateful we all should be that our elected officials care enough about each of us to do the work—seen and unseen—to make South Orange and Maplewood a place where not only hate has no home, but where shared values of tolerance, peace, and relishing differences are a source of strength, pride, and celebration.

I didn’t mean to freak out. Especially just a day after I’d sent out a message encouraging us all to keep calm.

Nonetheless, when an unmarked white van pulled up in front of my home a few days ago, I noticed my heart beat a little faster. From an upstairs window I watched the driver place a package at our doorstep, and then run back to the van. It’s possible I tried to catch the license plate number. It’s possible my mind raced to the worst: why would he be running back to the van, unless…? Good thing I meditate enough to be able to notice the thoughts as they come (sometimes, anyway) and then give my imagination a solid round of applause for another terrific performance.

I guess we’re all pretty jacked up. I mean, it’s hard not to be. Two thousand years of intergenerational trauma and that’s not counting the slavery in Egypt part. It’s in the DNA, biologically and figuratively speaking.

Two thousand years ago (1,956 to be precise), the locus of our religion and people was destroyed, Jerusalem burned, and the Jews evicted. Thus began the Diaspora, bringing us as a people to the four corners of the earth and beyond, since it turned out the world was round; perhaps that’s part of why we ended up back in that same Promised Land just a generation later, even if we wouldn’t be able to govern there again until 1948. Unclear how that part of the story will go, and what its next chapter will be.

What is clear is this: that this Wednesday night, Jews all around the world will gather to read the one Biblical book devoted entirely to mourning the destruction of the Temple. It is the start of a fast day, Tisha b’Av, the 9th of the month of Av, the national day of grief and mourning for the Jewish people. The only other full, 25-hour fast day in the entire calendar is Yom Kippur. On Yom Kippur, we atone – together as a people – for our individual shortcomings. On Tisha b’Av, we sit together and let the fear, the sadness, the pain of the Jewish people from generation to generation be with us in the room.

What a genius move. With the Temple gone, Judaism could have and logically should have been extinguished along with the flames of the fires set that day in 70 CE. The Torah contains an invincible weapon, though: the calendar. The rabbis added this day of commemoration to the holiday cycle given to us in the Torah, and they placed it so that it would help us in every generation turn back to our people and our roots.

Tisha b’Av always falls seven weeks before Rosh Hashanah: seven weeks of consolation, these weeks are called, and on Day 50 – we gather again, in our finest clothing, tables laden (please God) with food, and we blow the shofar to celebrate the New Year for the Jewish people.

Because no matter how afraid we may feel, no matter how anxious we get in our kishkes about the package arriving on the doorstep or the stranger walking into shul; no matter how angry we grow over the normalization of anti-semitism or how bewildered we feel by friends and neighbors we once considered trustworthy allies… the Torah’s got us.

Not because Torah promises that nothing bad will happen. Lots of bad things happen to the Jewish people (and by them, too) in the Torah and throughout Tanakh, the Bible.  What Torah gives us is the promise that we will never have to face whatever comes without a way to make meaning of it, without practices to steady us, and most importantly, without each other.

So these days leading up to Tisha b’Av, we are allowed to freak out a bit. And then, after a gathering and a fast, let’s let the calendar do what it has done for nearly two thousand years. Let it carry us toward consolation, toward hope, toward the sound of the shofar calling us back from the ancient source of our people. 

An unmarked white van, a flag torn from our shul in the middle of the night, and so much else sets off in us fear, anger, and a host of other emotions. All of it is part of being human; all of it is part of the Jewish story. Torah carried our people through the destruction of the Temple, through exile, and through every generation since. It will carry us through this moment too, and through all the other freak-out moments large and small along the way.

If you’re wondering, it was the opposite of scary: an item I’d purchased from Nordstrom’s, delivered to my home when they were out of stock in my size in the store. A blessing on every level. No reason to freak out, only to give thanks.

Rabbi Abigail Treu

P.S. Oheb Shalom comes together with our neighboring synagogues for Tisha b’Av services this Wednesday night, July 22 at 8 pm.

P.P.S. On Thursday, July 23 at 6 pm, join me at Oheb Shalom as we remount the yellow star required by the Nazis to be worn by all Jews; it was removed for the renovations to Founders’ Hall last year and will be put up as part of the history display next to the Holocaust Torah from the Czech Republic.

Surprise, and no surprise: the Israeli flag was taken down from our building by vandals at some point this past weekend. It was up over Shabbat, and when I stopped by this evening after a weekend away, I saw that it had been torn down. It looks like someone cut it off the building. What does it say that they left the American flag and the Pride banners intact? The message is loud and clear.

First and foremost, know that the South Orange police are investigating, and all the protocols we have carefully put in place are now under way. If and when there is more information to share, we will share it. Know that our President Doug Magid is in close touch with the staff and leadership, monitoring the situation for the safety of all. Before we jump to conclusions or make accusations, let’s give the investigation time to fact find.

Pavel and I were away this weekend in the Berkshires. Walking around the sweet New England towns, I was struck—as I always am—by the wide-open doors of the churches. The main streets lined with churches of various denominations, doors propped wide open to the summer breeze and to welcome all passersby. Not a single guard or police officer in sight. Just… people going to church, for spiritual uplift and to be with other big-hearted people in their community.

I found myself thinking about the impact of our vigilance. We, the Jewish people, seem to be constantly on the verge of panic. We have security committees (thank you to those who serve), board members trained for emergencies (thank you, too), guards at the door for services, school, and communal gatherings. The staff keeps the doors locked. In fact, the doors are always locked. I can’t imagine ever leaving them wide open to the summer breeze and anyone who wants to wander in.

This makes me really sad and really curious about what it does to our spiritual lives and parasympathetic nervous systems. Being on high alert isn’t good for us as a baseline state.

So let’s choose not to be.

Let’s choose to take a deep breath and to be grateful — so very deeply grateful — for the law enforcement, staff, and volunteers working on this. And everyone else: just show up, as a proud Jew, or spouse or parent of a Jew. This Shabbat we welcome a church group, one so Zionist that they have Israel as part of their name. They wanted to experience Jewish worship services with us. Come join us.

Light Shabbat candles this Friday night and post it for everyone in your universe to see. Take a deep breath in, giving thanks for this community, this circle of love and support. Then exhale, and choose to let the worry go, dissolving it instead into a vision of what Oheb Shalom is at its core: a place of love and of peace, for Jews and for everyone who loves us. There are so many good and kind neighbors surrounding us. We do so much as a beloved part of this community, and while the loudest voices may frighten us, it is the quiet 99% that matter. We may not be able to fling our doors wide open to the summer breeze, but we can fling our hearts wide open—to one another, to our neighbors, and to everyone who comes seeking love and peace.