This spring I took a long-planned, three-week trip to the mountains of northern Italy. Before I left, my friends all said the same thing:

“Don’t wear your kippah. Don’t even bring it.”

Late last night, talking to my daughter in New York City about my upcoming visit, she said, “And Mom? Please don’t wear your kippah.”

I didn’t in Italy, and I won’t in New York.

Because hateful, frightened people are everywhere. A woman wearing a kippah in public is bound to attract unwanted attention.

Although you should know that some of the most unkind things ever said to me about wearing a kippah have come from shopkeepers in Israel and from Orthodox men. They have been among my harshest critics.

But that doesn’t contradict anything I wrote in my op-ed in Tuesday’s newspaper.

I firmly believe that we Jews need to stand tall. We need to claim our right to exist in the same public space as everyone else.

Not because we are unafraid. Of course we are afraid.

Why do you think that tonight every synagogue will be protected by security guards? Why do you think we keep the doors locked?

We understand that there always have been, and always will be, people who hate Jews. Sometimes for reasons they can explain. Sometimes for no reason at all. Hatred has always found convenient targets.

There is no excuse for it.

I’m simply acknowledging what all of us already know: we are living in a difficult world.

Then again, being Jewish has always meant living in a difficult world.

Yesterday afternoon, a man was stabbed as he left the Jewish Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It is not a tiny synagogue hidden behind an unmarked door. It is a six-story building, proudly and visibly Jewish.

The writer Ben Rohr wrote last night:

“At the Jewish Center the doors will open again.

People will be frightened. Security will be alert. Parents will check on their children. Men will look over their shoulders as they approach.

And still they will come.

That is not because Jews are unafraid.

It is because we refuse to let fear decide the boundaries of Jewish life.”

He wrote those words before Tisha B’Av was even over, after a man leaving services was stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver. The victim later said he pulled the screwdriver out himself because he feared that if he fell forward, it would be driven in even farther.

He is expected to survive.

I want to repeat Ben Rohr’s words:

“We refuse to let fear decide the boundaries of Jewish life.”

That is something every one of us needs to remember.

Rohr also wrote:

“We will be told that hatred has no home in New York. But hatred plainly does have a home in New York. It lives here because human beings live here.”

For just a moment, let me be a little cynical.

Hatred has a home everywhere.

It has a home in New York. In Sarasota. In every country, every city, every neighborhood.

But so does hope.

The Jewish people have survived for thousands of years. We have outlasted civilizations that once seemed eternal: the Greeks, the Romans, the kings that expelled us from England, France, Spain, and elsewhere. We endured fascism. We endured Nazism.

We survived—and we flourished.

Not because our enemies disappeared. They never did.

But because we refused to become only victims.

Last week I asked in my sermon how the Jewish people can continue to flourish in a world that so often turns against us—where words, religion, ethics, conspiracy theories, even something as ordinary as a screwdriver can be weaponized against another human being.

One answer is this:

We remember.

And then we get up.

Yesterday was Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av.

It commemorates the destruction of both ancient Temples in Jerusalem. Over the centuries it also became the date associated with many other calamities in Jewish history.

Observant Jews spend the day fasting, reading Lamentations, and sitting on the floor.

But when the day is over…

we stand up.

We return to our lives.

We remember the past.

We honor those who came before us.

And we keep going.

The destruction of the Second Temple forced Judaism to reinvent itself. Without that catastrophe, Judaism as we know it today might never have existed.

Then, fifty days after Tisha B’Av, we arrive at Rosh Hashanah.

This year it falls on the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11.

Those seven weeks become a spiritual journey—from the deepest sorrow of the Jewish calendar toward renewal, hope, and the possibility of beginning again.

America has done something remarkable with September 11.

It remains a day of mourning. We read the names of those who died. We remember.

But we also turned it into a National Day of Service.

Not because the grief disappeared.

Because grief alone cannot build a future.

That is a profoundly Jewish idea.

We practice tikkun olam—repairing the world.

Not because we imagine we can fix everything that is broken.

But because every act of kindness, every moment of justice, every gesture of compassion pushes the world a little closer to what it ought to be.

We do it for ourselves.

For our children and grandchildren.

For strangers.

Even for people whose hearts have become hardened by anger and hatred.

We are a people who remember.

We are a people who refuse to let fear define us.

And above all, we are a people of hope.

Shabbat shalom.

This is the sermon I will deliver this evening, with God’s grace, at Temple Beth Israel in Sarasota.