Ten days ago, on Rosh Hashanah, we celebrated the birthday of the world. We read the story of creation where God said, “Let there be light. And there was light.” God created the world through speech.
Recognizing the power of our words, our sages warned against using speech to harm. We just chanted, “Ashamnu. Bagadnu. Gazalnu. We have trespassed, we have betrayed, we have stolen.” And then… “Dibarnu dofi, we have spoken harshly.” If speech has the power to create a world, it also has the power to destroy, and our sages warn us time and again about using that power carelessly.
In the Ashamnu, our alphabetical list of ways we missed the mark this year, dibarnu dofi, we have spoken harshly, is one of the most interesting and perplexing. The first word, dibarnu, is simple – we spoke. The second word, dofi, is a bit trickier. It is a hapax legumina – a term for a word that only occurs once in the Tanakh/the Hebrew Bible and is thus not always easy to translate. The medieval commentator, Ibn Ezra links dofi to the root hadaf, to push or shove. According to the sages, dibarnu dofi is speech that pushes a person away. In these simple two words, our tradition is asking each of us to consider: How can I be more thoughtful in my speech and use words that bring others into conversation rather than push them away?
We’re celebrating another birthday this year. America is 250 years old. Not quite the 5787 or so years of the world, but an important moment to mark nonetheless. America came into being through words too. American Independence began with a document, the Declaration of Independence, argued over line by line, signed, and read aloud. And that arguing never really stopped. This country has been in one long argument over its own words since the ink dried on the Declaration, a positive feature of our American project rather than a flaw of it.
The Pew Research Center has been asking Americans for years how they see people in the other political party. In 2016, forty-seven percent of Republicans and thirty-five percent of Democrats said the other side was, in a word, immoral. Just six years later in 2022, those numbers had climbed to seventy-two percent of Republicans and sixty-three percent of Democrats who thought the other party was immoral.
And yet, when Pew asked respondents in 2022 if they’re still hopeful about the country’s future, close to seventy percent of Americans said yes! We are more convinced than ever that the people who disagree with us are evil. And yet, still, somehow, hopeful.
That’s the good news. We still have hope. We need hope – it’s what fuels our acts of justice. It’s what motivates us to get up in the morning and keep working for a better world. But hope alone isn’t enough. We need a plan for how to get from where we are to where that hope is pointing.
And it starts with something as small as the words from our confessional prayer, dibarnu dofi, how we open our mouths. The question that the Pew polls ultimately put to all of us is: How do we disagree honestly and respectfully, about things that matter, without giving up our convictions or our relationships?
Let’s start with a tomato. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? A tomato is a fruit. Botanically, this isn’t up for debate. It grows from the flowered part of the plant; it has seeds; by every definition a botanist works with, it’s a fruit. A tomato is also a vegetable. Ask any chef. It doesn’t belong in a fruit salad. By every definition a kitchen works with, it’s a vegetable.
Neither one is wrong. They’re using the word from inside two different systems built for two different purposes, and the argument only becomes dibarnu dofi if you insist there’s one right answer.
Something similar happens constantly in how we talk politics with each other. Two people can use the exact same word – freedom, safety, justice, family – and mean two genuinely different things by it, each one reasoning honestly from inside a different framework for understanding the world. Some of our worst arguments start before anyone’s actually disagreed about anything.
Maybe you can relate to having a misunderstanding with someone over words spoken harshly or not heard in the most generous way. Maybe you have someone in your life you aren’t speaking to because you both haven’t figured out a way to stay in the same room.
I was at a funeral last spring where two sides of the family stood on opposite ends of the grave, close enough to see each other yet not close enough to speak. Two brothers, in their seventies now. It started at a Thanksgiving table eleven years ago, when one of them said the other’s vote that November had hurt people he love. He meant it as an argument about a specific policy, something about healthcare, something he’d read that week and couldn’t stop thinking about. His brother heard something else entirely: you think I’m a bad person.
This is what happens when a disagreement over a policy gets heard as a verdict on a person’s character, and nobody goes back afterward to ask, “Wait, is that actually what you meant?” There was a door open at that table for about thirty seconds. One honest question could have defused the entire situation. Instead, two brothers spent eleven years building a wall.
Some of you were here for Rosh Hashanah, when I spoke about Priya Parker’s last book, The Art of Gathering, on what it takes to bring people together in meaningful ways. She has a new book out this month, called The Art of Fighting, and it’s the natural next step from The Art of Gathering because when people come together in meaningful ways, healthy disagreement can be a sign that the gathering worked. She argues that avoiding conflict is detrimental to a community’s existence. She writes about watching group after group mistake the absence of visible disagreement for health, when really it usually means people have stopped bothering to say what they actually think. The healthiest groups, in her telling, are the ones who’ve built enough trust to disagree, in the open, and still maintain their relationships.
A synagogue is one of the last places built for exactly this. Most of our country has sorted itself into silos, moved to the neighborhood with like-minded views, followed the feed that they already agree with. Understanding someone across a real line of difference has gotten optional almost everywhere else. It isn’t optional here. In this very sanctuary are people who will vote differently this fall, who disagree about plenty and still show up, week after week, to stand next to each other, to serve together at Breaking Bread on Broad, to argue over our sacred text at Torah study. We need this, not just in our congregation, but across our country because to understand others across lines of difference deepens community and counters polarization and mistrust. We need healthy argument for a healthy country and a healthy democracy!
A team of researchers at Duke and BYU wanted to see if technology could help us argue in a more productive way. Researchers put fifteen hundred Americans into online paired conversations, strangers, matched specifically with someone who disagreed with them, on gun policy. Half of them got an AI assistant with one job. Before they hit send, it would offer them another way to phrase what they’d just typed. Not a softer opinion. Not a compromise position. Just a different delivery.
Here’s the kind of thing it caught. Someone types, “Anyone who thinks assault weapons should be legal doesn’t care if kids die.” The assistant hands back an option. “I feel strongly that keeping weapons like that out of circulation would save kids’ lives. I know you see it differently, and I’d like to understand why.”
The conviction hasn’t moved an inch in that rewrite. The person still believes exactly what they believed thirty seconds earlier. What changed is whether the person on the other end has a door to walk through, or a wall to walk into.
In the study, people took the suggested rewrite about two out of every three times it was offered. And the people receiving those messages came away feeling more heard and more respected by strangers who still disagreed with them about guns just as much as they had at the start. Nobody’s position moved. What moved was whether two people who see the world differently could stay in the same room. The sin of dibarnu dofi is not disagreement. The sin is in how we open our mouths when we disagree.
This November, I’ll share this bimah with two friends of mine, Imam Idris Abdul-Zahir and Pastor Kevin Brown, in a conversation moderated by CNN’s Dana Bash. We are genuinely friends, the three of us, not just playing the part for an event poster. Our relationship has been built over years, from camel rides together in Abu Dhabi to standing in solidarity at each other’s houses of worship after antisemitic and Islamophobic attacks.
The truth is that although we are friends, Pastor Kevin, Imam Idris, and I don’t agree on everything. Israel and Gaza included. I’ve spoken before about how the three of us haven’t always had the right words for what we were trying to say to each other, especially when it comes to Israel. I’ve fallen victim to dibarnu dofi/speaking harshly in sharing my passion for Israel. What I treasure, though, about our relationship is that we are not committing to agreement. We are committed to listening to each other. To learning from each other. We are committed to using our voices productively and thoughtfully and, most of all, staying at the table.
Recently, Pastor Kevin sent me a clip about Israel; it was an anti-Zionist Israeli academic talking about the dangers of Zionism as a response to the trauma of the Holocaust. Pastor Kevin agreed with much of the clip, and he knew right away it probably wouldn’t land the same way with me. He could have sent it as a gotcha, “See – even Israelis see the dangers of Zionism!” But he didn’t. Instead, he wrote, “Not asking to be provocative but for education. How does this land with you? What is offensive? What would you disagree with and find overly simplified or dangerous to Jewish existence?”
He didn’t ask me to agree with him. He led with curiosity, which is hard to do when you’re already sure you know what the other person is going to say. He asked where the message landed wrong, and he showed real concern for our Jewish community’s well-being.
Underneath that question was a choice he had already made. Our relationship mattered more to him than winning the argument. Being right about Israel and Gaza was never going to be worth more to Pastor Kevin than staying in relationship with me. And none of that required him to give up his own convictions.
Pastor Kevin taught me something about humility as well. He agreed with the message he had sent. And he still made room for my thoughts. That is what it looks like to hold a position and still believe you have something left to learn.
This November, just eight days after the election, when the temptation to gloat or to despair will be at its highest, and staying at the table with people who prayed and voted differently will be hardest and most necessary, we will come together with people with whom we disagree. It may be hard, but the alternative is much more frightening. The alternative is a siloed country, where authoritarianism, which seeks to divide us, gets to control the narrative.
You will vote this fall. However you vote, know that a table is already being built. In this congregation, in this city, across lines of faith and partisanship. And it is worth showing up to that table for the future of our democracy.
The world was spoken into being 5787 years ago. And our country was spoken into being 250 years ago. How that conversation continues is up to us. Dibarnu dofi. We have spoken harshly. Let this be a year of relationship over being right; a year of curiosity over judgment. Let this be the year we speak the truth we believe, honestly, without shying away from the hard conversations, without watering it down, and without backing down. Let it also be the year we choose our words with enough care that they open a door instead of building a wall.
Ken yhi ratzon/May this be God’s will.
Gmar chatimah tovah.
