March 28, 2026
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Tzav
A Sermon for Shabbat Hagadol
March 28, 2026 – 10 Nisan, 5786
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Do you remember the classic Lay’s potato chip ad—you can’t eat just one? That line came back to me on our recent flight to San Francisco, because once I picked up a new novel, I simply could not put it down.
The book, Good People, by Patmeena Sabit, tells the story of Afghan immigrants who come to America after the Soviet‑Afghan war. At the center is one family: Rahmat and Maryam Sharaf and their four children, struggling in a cramped one‑bedroom apartment. Fellow immigrants tell Rahmat to accept low‑wage work—work at Walmart 40 hours a week 12 dollars an hour for the rest of your life—and hope the next generation does better. He refuses. After many failures, years of seven‑day weeks, and very little sleep, he builds a successful business, sells it, and reinvests, moving his family from poverty to a multimillion‑dollar home in Virginia.
But the heart of the story is their daughter, Zorah—beloved and gifted. At 18, she dies in a single‑car accident after her car slides into a canal. Was it an accident? What it a crime? We never know. What actually happened remains a mystery.
The novel is told only through brief observations from others—neighbors, friends, journalists. We hear about the family. We never hear from the family. And each observer reveals far more about themselves than about the Sharafs—and there is a lot of negative energy.
The religiously observant complain that the Sharafs weren’t observant enough.
Those nostalgic for Afghanistan complain that they were too American.
Some parents critique the Sharafs for being too lenient.
Some teenagers critique the Sharafs for being too strict.
Threaded through it all is something harsher: schadenfreude—a perverse pleasure in someone else’s pain. People carrying their own disappointments and losses look at this family and judge them. Many characters have hard lives—economic pressures, cultural dislocation, broken dreams. Their hardship makes them hard. Understandable. Human. But hard.
Our Torah points us in another direction. Over and over—36 times, our sages say—the Torah commands: Be kind to the stranger, because you were strangers in Egypt. Our hardest experience is not supposed to make us hard; it is supposed to make us soft toward others who hurt. We know what pain feels like. Have empathy for the pain of others.
We need this reminder now. The moment we are living in makes it easy to be hard, and hard to be soft: economic anxieties; rapid changes in technology and work; will AI do your job better than you; the war in Israel with fear, grief, and destruction; and a rising tide of antisemitism and anti-Israel animus close to home. Will all of that make us hard?
The question isn’t abstract. It isn’t theoretical. It is urgent. And it is the question of the Passover season: Will our hard times make us harder—or can they make us softer?
Let me share with you a picture of what softer emerging out of harder looks like. This past Wednesday night I was at the evening minyan in Gann. A woman who had just buried her husband of 65 years sat in the front row with her son and his partner, preparing to say Kaddish. Then a woman I didn’t recognize walked in and quietly moved a chair to sit right beside the new widow. Her name was Monica. She was the hospice worker who had accompanied this family. She is not Jewish. She doesn’t know Hebrew. She had never been to a Kaddish service. But she came. She sat next to the widow and held her hand as she offered her words of Kaddish. When the service was over, I invited the four of them to come to the ark for a special moment, a special prayer where they could talk about what they could do to keep this wonderful man’s legacy alive. The wife was weeping. Understandable. They had been married for 65 years. The son was weeping. Understandable. His father loved him unconditionally. The partner was weeping. Understandable. She loved him, and he had been so loving and supportive. All that made perfect sense. But the hospice worker was also weeping.
That made me stop and reflect. Monica was a health professional. She is a professional hospice worker. She is with the dying and their families every day. That is her work. That is her calling. And yet, her hard day job did not harden her heart. It softened her heart. She summoned real tears for the real loss she felt. Not out of professional obligation but out of personal connection. To a family in need, she showed up with genuine sympathy and love.
This week, sometime between now and the first seder, each of us will have a moment—a conversation, a headline, an interaction—when hardness beckons. It is so easy to be hard. It is so hard to be soft. In that moment, try asking just once: What would softness look like here?
If you need a picture of what soft looks like—see Monica, quietly moving her chair, taking her place beside a grieving widow, and letting her own tears fall. From ultimate hardness to ultimate softness. Can we do our version of that? Shabbat shalom.