Everything Everywhere All at Once: Or Frankenstein in the Promised Land
Shabbat Parashat Shelach
June 21, 2025
The years of labour have been long and unrelenting. At last, Victor Frankenstein declares success. Playing God, he has bestowed life upon the lifeless. Yet his triumph is laced with dread.
“How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe,” he asks, “or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form?”
One might expect Mary Shelley to grant Dr. Frankenstein a moment of unadulterated pride or awe. Instead, she gives us a man trembling before the thing he has made. He feels pride – and horror.
Last week, I offered an unambiguously triumphalist sermon about Jewish resilience in Israel’s defensive strike on Iran, and the unshakable need for Jewish pride in the face of resurgent antisemitism. I stand by every word.
But today, the tone must change. Not because the moral necessity of this war is uncertain – it is not. But because war, any war, should stir not only certainty but sorrow; not only clarity but complexity. Moral rightness does not negate moral grief.
These past nine days, I have felt everything. Pride. Anxiety. Faith. Fear. Defiance. Despair. We are living, quite literally, in a world of Everything Everywhere All at Once. Our emotions, like our headlines, are colliding in real time. The chaos without echoes the chaos within.
When Moses first confronts Pharaoh, Israel does not walk free. Conditions worsen. The workload remains, but now the people must gather their own straw.
Moses cries out:
“Why did You bring harm upon this people? Why did You send me? Ever since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has dealt worse with this people; and still You have not delivered Your people.”
The Midrash adds even more anguished words to his protest:
“I know You are destined to rescue them – but You do not care for those buried under the building.”
Moses' near-blasphemous cry is arresting. And it is impossible to hear “those under the building” without thinking of Haifa. Of Be’er Sheva. Of Tehran.
Yes – Tehran too. No war, not even a just one, is free of collateral cost. And in every city, there are innocents. There are always children trapped beneath buildings. This too is the legacy of war.
The moral blame lies with the Iranian regime. The immediate cause, however, was Israeli missiles and warplanes. We must hold both truths.
And so I say plainly: I did not like the memes that circulated when Hezbollah’s pagers went off. I like even less the images making the rounds today.
Victory may serve the state. But it cannot redeem the dead. It may secure a border, but it cannot restore a life.
John Keats once wrote:
“In the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”
True delight, he suggests, cannot be fully felt without the presence of sorrow. I would go further: Our joy at Israel’s strength must be tempered – always – by mourning for the suffering that accompanies it. This is the melancholy of victory.
Our tradition reminds us of this balance. When the Israelites crossed the sea and the Egyptian soldiers drowned, the angels in heaven began to sing. But God rebuked them: “The works of My hands are drowning in the sea, and you would sing?”
These were enemies – cruel, violent, oppressive. But they were still God's creations. The angels are silenced. Because even justified triumph is not uncomplicated.
Freedom is good. Freedom is necessary. But death – any death – must complicate our joy – for relief and joy are overlapping, but separate emotions.
I pray for the fall of the Islamic regime in Iran. May it come soon, speedily, and with finality. And when it does, I will be thinking of Proverbs 24:17:
בִּנְפֹל אוֹיִבְךָ אַל־תִּשְׂמָח, וּבְכִשְׁלוֹ אַל־יָגֵל לִבֶּךָ
“Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles.”
May we meet the moment of their downfall with strength – and with wisdom.
And until then – what are we to do?
The mind wavers. The heart races. Enemy missiles are intercepted, and still, a hospital is struck. Nuclear capabilities are dismantled, and still, apartment buildings fall. We are constantly reeling between promise and pain.
John Milton writes in Paradise Lost:
“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
The news is good. And the news is bad. And we must decide what to make of it.
We long for clarity. We long for certainty. So did our ancestors.
When they neared the Land, they sent spies to scout it. Ten returned with only fear. They saw giants. They saw danger. They saw themselves as grasshoppers. And so they shrank.
But two – Joshua and Caleb – saw something more. Not naively, not blindly. They saw with eyes of faith. They too saw the giants. But they also saw the possibility of overcoming them.
The people, scared, yearned for Egypt. But they, like us, do not have the option of returning to a world that once was. We cannot go back to October 6. We cannot return to the world before this war.
We must go forward – through the wilderness of this moment, with all its hazards and heartbreak – toward the hope of a safer future.
The American poet Robert Frost once wrote: “The best way out is always through.”
We cannot escape the wilderness. We must walk through it – with conviction, with compassion, and with an unyielding belief that beyond it lies something better.
Wilderness is not just a place. It is a state of being. A trial of the soul.
Our task is not simply to endure, but to advance – with clarity of conscience, humility of spirit, and the daring to hold joy and grief in the same heart.
Parashat Shelach reminds us:
We have a choice.
To walk in fear – or to walk in faith.
To surrender to despair – or to rise to purpose.
The giants will always be there.
The wilderness will always challenge us.
But the land is טובה מאד מאד.
And so too are the people destined to inherit it.
Dr. Frankenstein fled from the work of his hands. Our charge is to stay – to stand before what we have shaped, and to shape it still, with integrity and care. To own our decisions and if not then to change them.
We do not flee from what this moment demands. We do not avert our eyes from the lives at stake, from the losses endured, or from the power we now wield.
The prophets dreamed of swords beaten into plowshares. But before there is peace, there must be courage. May we walk forward with the clarity of justice and the burden of compassion. May we become the kind of people who make peace not only possible – but inevitable.
