# What Holds Us Together When the Siren Stops?

> We know how to be one people when we are attacked. Remarks on the sixth yahrzeit of Rabbi Sacks on what holds us together afterwards.

By David Raitan · 2026-10-29 · https://torahmeirah.com/en/essays/what-holds-us-together

*Opening remarks at an evening in memory of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, on his sixth yahrzeit, at Beit Knesset Ohel Ari.*

This week marks six years since the passing of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, zecher tzaddik livracha, on Shabbat Parashat Vayera (וַיֵּרָא). He was one of the great moral voices of our time, and for many of us in this room, he remains a teacher whose voice we still hear today.

We have gathered tonight to ask what Rabbi Sacks would say about the fractures of our time. How do we stay united in divided times?

We all remember those nights. The siren would wake us, and we would run. Doors would fly open, and down the stairs would come the neighbours who never quite became friends: the man from the third floor whose name we never fully learned, the family whose politics we could guess from their car, the student whose music kept the building awake on Friday nights. Children in our arms. Slippers on the wrong feet. For those ten minutes, there were no rivalries. No factions. Someone held the door. Someone held a stranger's child.

There is a verse in the Torah that describes that moment exactly. It appears in the book of Vayikra (וַיִּקְרָא), among the curses! A people so frightened that the sound of a falling leaf sends them running, and as they run, they stumble, each man over his brother.

Out of that verse, of all verses, the sages drew one of the most beautiful principles in Judaism. Why does each man stumble over his brother? Because, they said, our lives are bound together. What one of us does, the other carries. When one falls, his brother falls with him. And so, they taught, [כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל עֲרֵבִים זֶה בָּזֶה](https://www.sefaria.org/Sanhedrin.27b) (Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh): all Israel are responsible for one another.

Why build so beautiful a principle on so dark a verse? The sages had the whole Torah to choose from. They could have chosen "love your neighbour as yourself." Instead, they chose a curse, one of the few passages that speaks of Jews who are scattered, defeated and powerless. They wanted to say: even there, especially there, you belong to one another. They took a moment of panic and turned it into a covenant. They took a curse and made it a blessing.

On those stairs, we lived both halves of the verse: the fear that made us stumble, and the care that made us reach for one another.

Then the danger passed. The doors closed. And a week later, the same neighbours stood side by side in the lift, looking at their phones.

Jewish law has a precise definition of an enemy. It is not someone who has harmed you. It is someone who has chosen not to speak to you for three days. Silence is how enemies are made.

So the question tonight is not whether we can stand together when the siren sounds. We have proved, at a terrible price, that we can. The question is what holds us together when the siren stops.

Here is a simple question. Why are we called the children of Israel? Not the children of Abraham. Not the children of Isaac.

Abraham had two sons, and only one of them stayed; the other was sent away. Isaac had two sons, and they went their separate ways. Jacob, whom God renamed Israel, had twelve. They were difficult children. They were jealous of one another, they quarrelled, and some of them did terrible things. To some, even on his deathbed, he spoke hard words. And yet he did not send a single one away. All twelve remained his children, and all twelve became the tribes of Israel.

That is the family whose name we carry: a family that argues, sometimes bitterly, and still stays a family.

But being in the same family is not the same as caring for one another.

The first brothers in the Torah are Cain and Abel. The Torah tells us that Cain spoke to his brother, and then the sentence simply stops. The Torah leaves a silence in the middle of the story. We never learn what he said. The next thing we read is that Cain rose up and killed him. When the words stop, the violence begins.

Generations later, Jacob's sons came to hate their brother Joseph, and the Torah tells us exactly what went wrong: they could no longer speak to him in peace. First they stopped talking to him. They threw him into a pit. And then Judah said the most painful sentence in the story. Why kill him, he asks? Let us sell him instead. After all, he is our brother.

That is what happens to brothers who stop speaking. They can still call one another brother, and still sell one another. In the end, that silence brought all of them down to Egypt, as slaves. The first exile of the Jewish people did not begin with an enemy. It began with brothers who stopped speaking.

Yet it was in Egypt that we became a people. The Haggadah says so: there, of all places, we became a nation. Not in freedom. Not in our own land. But in slavery. Pharaoh did what Jacob's sons could not do. He made them one.

That kind of unity is real, and our tradition has a name for it: the covenant of fate. Fate is what happens to us, whether we choose it or not. The siren belongs to the covenant of fate, and so does the reservist who leaves his home and his politics at the door. We felt it in June 1967. We felt it again three years ago, after the seventh of October.

But fate can only take us so far. It can tell us what we stand against. It cannot tell us what we stand for. For that, we need a second covenant.

That second covenant came just seven weeks after Egypt, at the foot of Mount Sinai. The Torah describes the camp there in the singular, as if the whole nation were a single person. One person, say the sages, with one heart. And they add that it was the only time: every other camp in the wilderness was full of complaining and fighting. Only at Sinai were they one heart. And at Sinai, no Pharaoh was behind them and no enemy was in front of them. They were not forced into unity. They chose it.

That is the covenant of faith. Fate is what happens to us. Faith is what we choose to do together. In Egypt, we were united against something. At Sinai, we were united for something.

Since 1967, we have had exodus after exodus. We are still waiting for our Sinai. We know how to be one people when we are attacked. We are still learning how to be one people when we are not.

So how does a people travel from Egypt to Sinai? The answer lies in the two words the people spoke at the foot of the mountain, all of them together: [נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמָע](https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.24.7) (na'aseh v'nishma). We will do, and we will listen. These two words hold the key. And notice the order. Doing comes first.

נַעֲשֶׂה (na'aseh): we will do. Right after Sinai, the people built the Mishkan, and they built it entirely from gifts, from anyone whose heart moved them to give. One brought gold, another wool, another wood, another a skill. Every gift was different, and every gift counted. Around that Mishkan the twelve tribes camped, each under its own banner, each in its own colour, all facing the same centre. No one had to lower his banner. No one was asked to agree. Everyone was asked to give. And the people who had complained at every step of the journey stopped complaining while they built.

More than seventy years ago, researchers brought two groups of boys to a summer camp and set them against each other. Within days they were bitter rivals, raiding each other's cabins and burning the other group's flag. Then the researchers tried to make peace by bringing them together for meals, films and fireworks. It only made things worse. The meals ended with the boys throwing food at each other.

What finally worked was something else. The camp's water supply failed, and the two groups had to fix it together. A truck carrying food for both of them broke down, and one boy called out: let's get our tug-of-war rope. The same rope they had used to pull against each other, they now used to pull together. And at the end of the summer, the boys who had burned each other's flag asked to ride home on the same bus.

They did not necessarily agree. But they discovered what they could do together.

That is the wisdom of נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמָע (na'aseh v'nishma). We do not build because we are united. We are united because we build. And very often, it is building together that teaches us to listen.

נִשְׁמָע (nishma): we will listen. This Shabbat, on his yahrzeit, we read how God tells Abraham that He is about to destroy Sodom. Sodom stood for everything Abraham opposed. He does not abandon his convictions. And yet Abraham argues, for them. Fifty righteous people? Forty-five? Forty? Ten? The first great argument in Jewish history was not made for our side. It was made for theirs.

The test for us is not whether we can argue. That has never been our difficulty. The test is whether we can listen to the other side until we can explain their view so fairly that they would recognise it as their own. Listening does not mean agreeing. It means recognising that the person across from us is more than the position we disagree with. That person, too, was created בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹקִים (b'tzelem Elokim), in the image of God, with a dignity that does not depend on agreeing with us. If every voice we hear agrees with us, we are not in a conversation. We are in an echo chamber. And an echo chamber, like silence, is how enemies are made.

Friends, two days ago we voted. An election can tell us who will govern us. It cannot tell us who we are.

Who we are is decided in small places. In a word to the neighbour we have only ever met on the stairs, before three days of silence have passed. In a seat at the Shabbat table for someone who thinks differently, and the patience to hear them out. In something we build side by side: a shiur we learn together, a meal for a reservist's family, a building where neighbours look out for one another.

Many years ago, at a dinner in London, the host handed two of his guests a dishcloth and a sink full of plates. One was the King of Jordan, the other the Foreign Minister of Israel. One washed, the other dried, and a friendship was born.

Across a table, we face each other, and we argue. In a lift, we stand side by side, and we look at our phones. But side by side at a shared task, strangers become a people. We need both: face to face, so that we see each other; side by side, so that we look towards the same future.

And this is not only our question. Free societies everywhere know how to unite against an enemy, and are still learning how to unite for a common good. For three thousand years, our small people has given the world ideas it did not yet know it needed. If we can learn, in a week like this one, to listen to one another and to build together, we will have one more gift to give the world: the proof that a people can disagree deeply and still remain one.

Our prayer book already knows this. Early each morning, before the main prayers begin, we stand before God and say:

מָה אָנוּ, מֶה חַיֵּינוּ – What are we? What is our life?

מַה כֹּחֵנוּ, מַה גְּבוּרָתֵנוּ – What is our strength? What is our might?

It sounds almost like despair. Standing before God, everything we are proud of, our strength, our achievements, even our heroes, looks very small. And then one small word changes everything: אֲבָל, but.

אֲבָל אֲנַחְנוּ עַמְּךָ, בְּנֵי בְרִיתֶךָ – But we are Your people, the children of Your covenant.

That word does not say we are perfect. It says that, small and imperfect as we are, we still belong. And it is true of every one of us. It is true of me. It is true of you. And it is just as true of the neighbour I disagree with most. All of us are children of that covenant.

Friends, what holds us together when the siren stops?

Not fate, but faith. Not only Egypt, but Sinai. Not because we stumble over one another, but because we stand for one another. And one shared task at a time, we can turn a building full of strangers into a home, and help heal a fractured world.

[הִנֵּה מַה טּוֹב וּמַה נָּעִים שֶׁבֶת אַחִים גַּם יָחַד](https://www.sefaria.org/Psalms.133.1) – How good and how pleasant it is when brothers sit together.

## Sources

- [Sanhedrin 27b](https://www.sefaria.org/Sanhedrin.27b)
- [Exodus 24:7](https://www.sefaria.org/Exodus.24.7)
- [Psalms 133:1](https://www.sefaria.org/Psalms.133.1)