Emor | Rabbi Michael Siegel | May 2, 2026
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Hope is in Our DNA
Parshat Emor
May 2, 2026
Rabbi Michael S. Siegel
There is a passage in this week’s Haftarah, our prophetic reading, that stops me every time I encounter it.
The Prophet Ezekiel is in Babylon. The Temple lies in ashes. The priesthood has been dispersed. The Davidic monarchy is finished. Everything the Jewish people had built over centuries — the altar, the sacrificial order, the holy precincts of Jerusalem — is gone. And yet Ezekiel begins to prophesy — in staggering detail — about the Kohanim returning to their duties in a restored Temple. He describes the linen vestments they will wear. He describes when they may drink wine and when they may not. He describes which women they may marry, and which of the dead they may approach to offer burial.
Ezekiel is engaged in an act of prophetic dreaming, in the most specific, architectural, liturgical detail, about a world that no longer exists, and most likely will never be resurrected.
I hasten to remind you that Ezekiel was the same Prophet who was shown a vision of a valley of dry bones and asked by God:
בֶּן־אָדָ֕ם הֲתִֽחְיֶ֖ינָה הָעֲצָמ֣וֹת הָאֵ֑לֶּה
Son of Man, can these dry bones yet live.
Ezekiel then witnessed the dry bones come together, reattach and with it the people of Israel arise.
As you already know, against all odds the Temple was rebuilt and the Priesthood was restored. Maybe not exactly as Ezekiel had envisioned it but the dry bones of a people in exile returned to their land, strong, proud and determined. The dust and rubble of a destroyed Temple was swept aside in order to build that Makom Kadosh anew.
The question that I have never been able to find an adequate answer for is where does a person find the courage to dream like this in the first place? Where, in the wreckage of everything he has known, does Ezekiel find the raw material for hope?
I want to suggest this morning that the answer may be not only written in the words of our tradition — but in our biology.
Over the past few decades, researchers have made a remarkable discovery in the field of genetics. It goes by the name epigenetics — and it refers to changes in the way genes are expressed that are caused not by alterations in the DNA itself, but by experience. By what happens to us.
The original research focused on trauma. Studies of Holocaust survivors and their descendants showed that traumatic experience can leave a biological imprint — changing how stress-response genes function and how that is passed to their children. We carry our history in our bodies. I believe that Jews have always suspected this. Now science confirms it.
But here is what is less often discussed. What is true in one direction should also be true in the other direction too. Sustained hope — the expectation that a better day is coming, a people that orients itself toward a new and better day— also leaves its mark. Resilience, meaning-making, the refusal to allow hope to be extinguished: these are not merely spiritual postures. They alter us at the cellular level. They shape how we respond to stress. They change what we are capable of enduring. In other words, if trauma can be written into DNA, so can hope.
And if ever there were a people in whom hope has been written into the DNA — it is us. Ezekiel was emblematic of an ever-hopeful people. But he certainly was not alone!
Consider Theodor Herzl. The year is 1895. Herzl is a journalist in Vienna — assimilated, sophisticated, more Viennese than the Viennese. He has covered the Dreyfus Affair in Paris, watched a French officer stripped of his rank before a screaming mob chanting Mort aux Juifs — Death to the Jews — and something breaks open in him.
He returns to Vienna and writes Der Judenstaat — The Jewish State. In it, he describes, with breathtaking confidence and precision, the political structures, the immigration waves, the labor organizations, the flag — the entire architecture of a Jewish homeland that does not yet exist. He is living in what we now know was a ticking time bomb for the Jews of Europe. The storm clouds are gathering. The future he cannot see is Auschwitz.
And yet he writes with the clarity of a man who has already been to the place he is describing. Not unlike Ezekiel himself.
In September 1897 following the First Zionist Congress: “At Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, I would be answered by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years, certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.”
How do we explain that? Herzl was the most assimilated of Jews who had a scant knowledge of Jewish texts, knowledge or tradition.
I think Herzl was drawing on something deep in the Jewish bloodstream — the epigenetic inheritance of a people that has survived destruction before. A people that has stood at the ruins of Temples and dared to imagine their rebuilding. A people whose prayers face Jerusalem even in exile. A people that ends its holiest fast day with the words: L’Shana Ha’Ba’ah B’Yerushalayim: Next year in Jerusalem. It is not naivete. It is not denial. It is something encoded in us — the refusal to accept that this is the end.
There is a new book by Matt Friedman – Out of the Sky – that tells one of the most extraordinary stories of the Second World War. In 1944, as the Holocaust reached its terrible climax, a group of young men and women — most of them from the pre-State Yishuv in Palestine — volunteered to parachute behind Nazi lines into occupied Europe. They were trained by the British. They wore military uniforms. They carried wireless radios. Imagine, Jews dropping into Slovenia and Hungary at the very moment the deportations to Auschwitz were accelerating.
Their mission was not, in the main, a rescue mission. They knew the math. They knew that the machinery of murder was operating at industrial scale. Their mission was something more audacious: to make contact with the remnants of Jewish communities, to tell them that the Jewish people of Palestine had not forgotten them — and to carry a message of national hope into the heart of darkness. A Jewish state was coming. You will not have died for nothing. You are not the last generation of Jews! Your people will have a home. They were not offering false hope to people in mortal danger. Rather, the message was that even if they do not survive the Jewish people would and settle in their own land. It was a message of hope for our people.
Among those parachutists was a young woman named Chana Senesh — Hannah Szenes. She was captured. She was tortured. She refused to reveal her codes. She was executed by firing squad in Budapest on November 7, 1944, at the age of twenty-three.
But there is more to the story. Before Chana crossed over from Slovenia to Hungary, she wrote a poem and gave it to a fellow soldier. He is how Matti Friedman tells the story:
On the forest path in Yugoslavia, Dafni thinks Hannah’s desire to cross the border is reckless, but she doesn’t care. Before the two parachutists part for good, Hannah extends her hand and squeezes his. He feels the paper in her palm.
This seems like a scene from a play or a novel, the kind Hannah reads and once hoped to write. Anyone of literary sensibility would appreciate it. But it doesn’t work on Dafni. He’s a practical man, not susceptible to the theatrical gesture. He finds it frivolous, even infuriating. … What the hell is this paper? Send it to my kibbutz, she says. But when she walks off toward the border, and he stands there watching her go, he actually throws it away and leaves.
Afterward, when he calms down, he regrets his impulse and comes back. It takes him a while to find the paper, which is caught in the branches of a bush. When he unfolds it, he sees four Hebrew lines…
אַשְׁרֵי הַגַּפְרוּר שֶׁנִּשְׂרַף וְהִצִּית לֶהָבוֹת
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Chana Senesh was twenty-three years old when she was placed before a firing squad. Tortured for months Chana refused to divulge any details of her mission. She wrote that poem knowing that she would likely not survive the mission with the hope that her words would live on. Chana Senesh was writing about the blessing of giving your life for her people, for a State that had not even been born. She uses the match as a metaphor of a hope and prayer that her sacrifice will add to the flame of the Jewish future! In a short time, Jews in Europe were reciting that poem and in Israel Ashrei Hagafrur, Blessed is the Match had become an anthem for a nascent Jewish State.
Where does that faith, that spirit, that hope come from? It comes from the same place Ezekiel found his vision in Babylon. It comes from the same place Herzl found his confidence in a Vienna that was about to betray him. It comes from a hope so deep it has become biological — the epigenetic inheritance of a people that knows, in its bones, those dry bones, that the story is not over.
Each of them lived in a moment of terrible darkness. Each of them found, in that darkness, a hope that was not complacency — not the hope of those who look away — but the hope of those who look directly at reality, at a match being consumed, and refuse to believe that the Ner Tamid, the eternal light of the Jewish people would not continue.
I want to speak to you now personally. After forty-four years with this congregation — forty-four years that have been the privilege and joy of my professional life — I am approaching retirement. While I am proud of the State of the Synagogue, I am saddened by the State of the Jewish world that my generation is leaving to the next. And yet, I find myself standing here, experiencing something I can only describe in the language of this sermon. I feel hopeful. Not the hope of someone who does not see the darkness on so many levels. I see it clearly. But a hope that is older than this moment. A hope that feels, to me, well, biological.
Because here is what I also see: I see a Jewish people that is being forced, by circumstances, to become more serious about what it means to be Jewish. Less dependent on the approval of the surrounding culture. More rooted in our own texts, our own rhythms, our own community. That is not nothing — that is, in fact, how Jewish civilization has always renewed itself. From the inside out, from the particular to the universal, and never the other way around.
I see a generation of young Israelis — inheritors of the parachutists’ dream, children of the State that Herzl imagined and Chana Senesh died for — bearing an extraordinary burden with remarkable courage. Despite the many significant challenges ahead that must be confronted, I see a new generation of founders.
I see this community — your resilience, your commitment, the fact that you are here — I look at our Bat Mitzvah Emmy Carr and so many like her and I believe, with everything in me, that the work of building Jewish life in America is not finished. The builders of tomorrow are already here. The light is still burning!
None of this is guaranteed. Let me be clear about that. The Temple was not rebuilt by wishful thinking. Israel was not founded by people who waited for someone else to act. American Jewry was not built by those who kept their heads down and hoped for the best. Every chapter of Jewish renewal has required hard work, creative choices, the willingness to take risks, the courage to disagree with the consensus of the surrounding world.
There will be disappointments. There will be setbacks. There will be moments — there already are moments — when the hatred feels overwhelming and the path forward is unclear. The fighting in Israel will continue. The struggle against Jew Hatred will continue. The work of building a serious, committed, spiritually alive American Jewish community will be hard.
But we have been here before. Jewish history may not repeat itself but in the words of Mark Twain, It rhymes. In Babylon. In Spain. In the shtetlach of Eastern Europe. In the shadow of Nazism. And every time, there were people — Ezekiels, Herzls, Chana Senshes — who refused to accept that this was the end. Who looked at the ruins and imagined the rebuilt Temple. Who looked at the exile and imagined the return. Who looked into the face of mortal danger and wrote a poem about the blessedness of a match.
That capacity is not accidental. It is not irrational. It is not mere stubbornness, but what I would call a uniquely Jewish psychosis. It is who we are. It is written in us. And when someone tells you the future is hopeless — when the cynics and the despairing and the enemies of our people tell you that the Jewish story is over — I want you to answer them with the words of Theodore Herzl, that have driven this people forward for more than a century:
אִם תִּרְצוּ, אֵין זוֹ אַגָּדָה
Im tirzu, ein zo agadah.
If you will it, it is no dream.
The Temple was rebuilt. The priesthood returned. The Jewish people came home after two thousand years. American Jews built the strongest diaspora community in the history of our people. The choice is in our hands, like those who have come before us!
And if anyone ever asks you how you can possibly be hopeful in a world like this one, look them in the eye and tell them the truth:
It is in our DNA. Am Yisrael Chai!
