Our Own Odyssey
Rosh HaShanah 5787
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
There is no truth to the rumor that a major motion picture was made about our congregation, a film about a group wandering in the wilderness for years before finally coming home. That film was called “The Odyssey,” and although they did not make it about Beit Simcha, the fact that we’ve had five different homes over eight years does make it seem as though the title could have been taken from our peregrinations, our search for our Promised Land. We haven’t wandered for forty years in the Sonoran Desert; but we have certainly spent eight years trying hard to come home. We hope that, at long last, we finally have, or will soon.
I expect many of you have seen “The Odyssey” by now, or at least experienced aspects of the media frenzy that surrounded it. Director and writer Christopher Nolan’s reinterpretation of the classic Greek epic poem, attributed to Homer, is powerful, and I recommend it to anyone with the patience for a three-hour Imax movie. “The Odyssey” struck the public fancy this summer in a way you might not expect a 2800-year-old classic of world literature to do so. Epic poetry is not a format favored by most people in our time of TikTok videos, Facebook shorts and Instagram Reels, and anything that takes more than 20 seconds to view is quickly skipped over today. Yet this retelling of the narrative of a soldier/sailor king trying to return home covers 10 years of voyaging—a true Odyssey, named for its protagonist, Odysseus—and the movie takes patience. Like a High Holy Days’ service, it is longer than the typical theatrical experience of 2026.
It’s a great story, filled with miraculous and insane side trips and distractions. Inspired by the much older Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey is the source for every wild wanderer’s tale of peregrination and return in western world literature, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Gulliver’s Travels to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to Huckelberry Finn to the Pirates of the Caribbean and even Star Wars. But what exactly does the Odyssey really say about the human condition?
To give some context, Homer, blind Greek poet cited as author of this great epic, lived at the same time as our prophet First Isaiah, during the Iron Age, around 750 BCE, roughly 2800 years ago. He was writing, or singing, or slamming poems about a much earlier time still, the last part of the Bronze Age which collapsed around 1200 BCE. One of the pleasant surprises of the Odyssey film is that the director included references to the Bronze Age collapse of civilizations. That historical disaster is relevant to the movie, but it also highly important in understanding the development of Judaism. And it has lessons for us today.
As those of you who have taken our Tanakh classes on the Books of Joshua, Judges, and Samuel already know, the Bronze Age reached an apex 3300 years ago when major powers flourished in Egypt, Turkey, Mesopotamia, Canaan, Greece, and on the islands of Crete and Cyprus. At the height of the Bronze Age there was a durable balance of power between these accomplished civilizations, and while conflicts took place, no one kingdom or country tried to destroy another, nor were they strong enough to do so. In the absence of devastating international wars, agriculture expanded and food surpluses became common. Where there is plenty of food there are supplies to trade and time to enjoy life. In an era of balanced power and regional specialization, commerce flourished, cities grew extensively, wealth increased for everyone, and each of the quite different cultures developed to a high level in its own way. Literacy and culture reached levels never before experienced on earth.
Highlighting the remarkable, cooperative, international world of the late Bronze Age, there is a famous ship from the late Bronze Age, the Uluburun Shipwreck, which sank off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey around 1305 BCE. This was a 20-ton merchant vessel transporting luxury goods from Africa, Asia and Europe that happened to sink, perhaps in a storm. It was discovered in 1982 and its contents recovered during thousands of underwater archeological dives from the 1980s to the 90s. Its cargo was amazing. On board the ship, incredibly well-preserved, they found beautiful pottery and oil lamps from Greece, Cyprus, Syria, Canaan and Egypt, swords and shields from the Greek and Italian mainland, jewelry from Canaan and Egypt, ebony wood and elephant and hippopotamus ivory and ostrich shells from Africa, tin from Uzbekistan, axes from Bulgaria, perfume and spice jars from Mesopotamia and even India. Its remarkable cargo testifies to the diversity and quality of the trade goods available in 1300 BCE—a long time before Amazon Prime, but just as diverse as what you might purchase today, if you have deep pockets.
All that was on just one merchant ship, which proves that the people of the Bronze Age were connected in a mostly peaceful, international network of trade, culture, the arts, and the free exchange of ideas. That era represented the high-water mark of human civilization to that point. It was during that zenith of the Bronze Age that the myths of the Iliad and Odyssey are set—although, interestingly, the Iliad is about a huge war at the height of this time of peace and plenty. Moral violations in the conduct of that war are blamed, in the film, for the coming collapse.
It is no surprise that the Israelites’ experience in Egypt, and our Exodus towards Israel, is also set at the end of the Bronze Age, in our classic Iron Age literary works, the Torah and the Tanakh. It was a memorable, positive time in the ancient world’s consciousness.
Now whether Helen of Troy had anything to do with it, at the very height of the Bronze Age—you could call it the Golden Age of the Bronze Age, but that is mixing metaphors, and metals—things changed suddenly, for the worse. First, there was a dramatic transformation in the climate of the whole region of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Temperatures heated up everywhere, and rain dried up. Droughts became common, agricultural lands grew infertile, and those wonderful food surpluses that supported the development of international trade were gone, replaced by famines, forcing peoples to migrate to survive and creating population pressures in previously self-sufficient regions. With drought and famine, people became malnourished, starvation and disease spread rapidly, and pandemics ravaged established centers of civilization, weakening them in every way, including militarily. In a time of increasing scarcity, authority weakened, societal cohesion broke down, and the balance of power between mutually supportive civilizations collapsed.
If that sounds a little bit familiar, well, it should. Our circumstances today are not the same as Odysseus’ time, but the age of uncertainty we are in, the dramatic changes we see in climate and society, the threats to governmental norms, the breakdown of international agreements and social cohesion and respect for authority and tradition—all of these sound distressingly familiar, as though they came from our news feeds.
3200 years ago the coup de grace, the final element that broke the Bronze Age, was a sudden influx of invaders from the west. In his book, 1177 BC—the Year that Civilization Collapsed, Eric Cline delineates the destruction caused by the invasion of the “Sea Peoples.” We don’t really know where these peoples came from, or why they came when they did. We do not know their ideology or their original religions. But we do know they were ethnically different from the Egyptians, Hittites, Mycenean Greeks, Minoans, Canaanites, Cypriots, Babylonians, and Assyrians. We know that the established civilizations were faced with an existential crisis when the invading Peoples attacked. Could their weakened societies prevent the invaders from conquering their nations and destroying their cities?
We know most about these Sea Peoples from one country that succeeded in repelling them, Egypt. In the “Battle of the Nile Delta” the New Kingdom Pharaoh’s army and navy defeated a large amphibious attack by Sea Peoples, preserving the integrity of Egypt. The murals that survive to tell the tale of that 12th century BCE battle are the first mention in history of the ancient Israelites’ arch-enemy the Philistines, pilegesh. Repulsed by Egypt, those same Philistines settled in a less-well defended area that today we call Gaza. They remained a thorn in the Israelites’ side for centuries.
Even in victory against the Sea Peoples, Egypt was seriously damaged. She survived afterwards as an independent kingdom but never achieved the same level of power again. By the time of Homer, Egypt was a paper tiger, soon conquered by Iron Age Empires like Babylonia and Persia.
While Egypt survived, most of the other great Bronze Age powers were totally destroyed. We have the desperate letters written by the last ruler of Ugarit as invaders attacked the great trading city on the coast of Canaan, begging allies to send aid. Help did not arrive; Ugarit was permanently destroyed and never rebuilt. There are burn layers and thousands of arrowheads all around from the ghostly capital of the once-grand Hittite empire from when it fell to the Sea People invaders, never to rise again. Mycenean Greece—Homer’s imagined Greece of the Iliad and Odyssey—disappeared in the onslaught, as did the Minoan naval empire on Crete, as did the rich civilization of Cyprus.
A couple of more distant national entities survived this disaster in reduced, weakened form: Babylon, far inland in today’s Iraq, and Assyria, to the north and east, managed to resist conquest by these mysterious invaders from the west but they too, were wounded. The international trade and exchange of ideas, the peace and prosperity, the literacy, artistic accomplishment and cultural richness of the Bronze Age was over, to be followed by a Dark Age of contraction, poverty and illiteracy.
This great civilizational implosion was the Bronze Age Collapse. It marked an end to what people came to look back on as a glorious earlier age, and it marked the beginning of a dark and dangerous period in human history, in which the quality of life was diminished. In the movie version of the Odyssey key characters reference the coming of “The Sea Peoples,” and kings and queens and heroes reflect on the possibility—even the likelihood—of the end of their own civilization. Key characters reference violations of Xenia, “Zeus’s Law”, a kind of foundational principle of their society, in which hospitality must be granted to every stranger, wanderer, or beggar because they might actually be a god in disguise. Because this “Zeus’s Law” had been disregarded, even deliberately violated, their own civilization is now threatened with destruction.
The same tradition made its way into our Talmud, where we are told we should treat every begging indigent as though he or she might be the Messiah. There is, however, an important difference. Zeus’ law was there to protect you from a god in disguise; you show hospitality to protect your own home from an angry camouflaged god. In the Talmud, the beggar is there so that you can seek redemption for yourself and the world. You must find the holiness in the lowest member of society. As the Messiah says in the Talmudic story, “Redemption will come today—if you listen to God’s voice.”
That’s not the way it works in the Odyssey. A feeling of impending potential doom hangs over the film version, as Odysseus enters and escapes from a series of epic dangers and traps. Odysseus, cleverest, wiliest and most complicated of all the Greek commanders who destroy Troy, designer of the Trojan Horse, goes through fantastic trials and temptations before he can return home for a bloody, climactic confrontation. The story begins with the horrifying sack of the city of Troy, with death and destruction. After ten years of war, and a victory filled with murder and rapine, Odysseus can go home. But will he make it back to his wife and son in time to save them? Will his trickster ways offend various gods to the extent that they destroy him? Will his own crew abandon him because he has offended the gods? Can he outwit the magical and destructive creatures, and the gods, who seek his annihilation?
Odysseus, in Homer’s original, is a schemer, a manipulator, cleverer than everyone he encounters, able in a pinch to outwit the gods who so unevenly rule his polytheistic world. And yet, clever as he is, he is beset by trial and tribulation throughout his journey.
On the way back to his home, he loses all his ships and his entire crew to bloody deaths. Will Odysseus, survivor extraordinaire, return whole or unbroken from this long, mad experience?
Since Homer, or whoever created the Odyssey, was writing in the exact same era when the Torah and Tanakh were written I wondered what the closest Jewish analogies to Odysseus wild journeying might be. It is, after all, a sea story about an ancient mariner. We also have famous sea stories. How do these compare?
In a few weeks we will read the Torah portion of Noah, a sea story even older than Odysseus’. Noah’s journey appears even more hopeless on the surface: while Odysseus is just trying to get home, Noah’s home is washed away by the greatest flood of all time. He has nowhere to land but the soggy foot of Mt. Ararat, and although he preserves his crew—his nuclear family and a zoo-full of land and sky animals—he has no control of his literally rudderless ark. Unlike Odysseus, Noah is far from being a wily, clever, or complicated man. He is, however, quite the carpenter and incredibly good at following bizarre divine orders, something the Greek hero never cottons to. Noah’s tale—a simple human being saving all the species on the planet from divine destruction—is compelling, a tale of environmental rescue. Noah also takes a lot less time than the Odyssey—forty days and nights of rain, less than two years from plan to execution to resolution—and, thank God, it’s much shorter. And it ends in hope, a rainbow promise, not with the threat of further civilizational destruction.
However, Noah, like Odysseus, in some ways fails to perform as a good human being, and certainly as a leader. He never questions God’s decision to kill everyone, evil and good alike, and he never acts to save any human beings that aren’t in his own family. Noah is merely “righteous in his own generation”, not for all time. He gets drunk at the end of the portion and shames his sons, and although he does save a breeding remnant of humanity—and all those non-human beasts—he cannot save humankind from its own destructive inclinations. The rainbow is pretty and promising, but after the floodwaters dry those rotten humans quickly build the disastrous Tower of Babel and again fall into the evil practices that led to Divine punishment in the first place. The covenant with Noah, and us, is that God won’t destroy humanity again, at least not by flood. Unlike the Odyssey, there is a moral message: evil acts, hamas in the Hebrew, hatred and violence, lead to destruction, potentially total annihilation. Under these circumstances, even the best human being of a generation can only do so much.
The other famous Jewish Biblical sea story we know from Yom Kippur afternoon, the troubling book of the prophet Jonah. Jonah is commanded to go to Nineveh and warn the Assyrians—most murderous empire of antiquity—that God is coming to punish them for their evil ways, but they can still repent and save themselves. Jonah flees his divine command, heads in the opposite direction out to sea as far from the inland Assyrian capital of Nineveh as he can get. Jonah, like Odysseus, runs into magical disaster on the rough waters of the Mediterranean, and recognizes it as the punishment of God for fleeing his call. He forces the non-Israelite sailors to throw him overboard and save themselves. A magical animal, a giant fish, swallows him and against all zoological logic he survives in the belly of the beast for three days. This is in line with the wild, magical, terrible adventures of Odysseus and his men, who at one point is abandoned by the crew of his ship. Inside the fish, miraculously still alive, Jonah prays and atones for his sin of abandoning his God-given mission, is vomited up, walks inland to Nineveh, and delivers the message.
This time, much to the prophet’s chagrin, the people listen to God’s message of reform and return, of Teshuvah, and save themselves and their city. At the end, Jonah is reminded that his job of prophet is a moral one: he should seek not to condemn others to destruction but instead show them the path to return to goodness and God.
There are other sea stories in the Torah, most famously the crossing of the Reed Sea in the time of the Exodus. But the tale of Yetzi’at Mitzrayim in the Torah takes great pains to remind us we crossed that sea on dry land. It’s not really a sea story at all, at least from the Israelite point of view, although the wandering in the desert, and the difficult adventures, certainly have similarities to the Odyssey.
There are other Jewish sea stories that are definitely historical. After Spain expelled all its Jews in 1492 and instituted the Spanish Inquisition in its overseas empire, a series of Jewish pirate captains took revenge on Spain and preyed on Spanish shipping, including Moses Cohen Henriques, a Sephardic pirate who in 1628 captured a Spanish silver fleet off Cuba. This was the largest treasure heist in pirate history, gold and silver valued at over $1 billion in modern currency. My personal favorite Jewish mariner was a man named Samuel Pallache, a successful Spanish-Moroccan privateer, diplomat, and merchant known as the “Pirate Rabbi.” Now, that’s a cool nickname, no? “The Pirate Rabbi,” who helped the Dutch take revenge on the Portuguese and Spaniards for brutally expelling and tormenting Jews. Later, in 19th century America, Uriah P. Levy became the first Jewish Commodore in the US Navy, famous for outlawing flogging and, after retirement, saving Thomas Jefferson’s home of Monticello from destruction, preserving it for the nation.
Even these more modern Jewish sea stories have a moral element, it seems.
The Odyssey views the world as a capricious playground of gods, demi-gods, monsters and witches, where human beings are simply pawns of demanding, impulsive deities responding unpredictably to whatever we are trying to accomplish. It’s all, well, an Odyssey of potential disasters, of changeable storms and cruel dangers we cannot avoid. We are all—from simple citizens to powerful rulers—at the whim of gods’-driven forces that make little sense to us as mere people. Crazy things can happen at any time and destroy all of our plans—and us.
By contrast, the Bible, and Judaism, sees the world as controlled not by humans, and not by rival deities, but by one God, a God of morality, who cares whether we choose to observe commandments, who wishes us to be good and ethical and urges us to make decisions that lead us to the right path of life. Our limited sea stories are not mere Odysseys: they are stories with morals, real people dealing with dramatic crises, responding in ways deserving of both criticism and praise.
In short, they are human tales, people operating in a world that seeks morality, in which God wants humans to be good, obeying ethical, structured mitzvot that will make the world better.
Perhaps the closest Biblical figure to Odysseus is not a sailor at all—it is King David, who, like Odysseus, goes through a series of remarkable experiences, spends time in the wilderness, is tricky, and the cleverest person of his era. David, like Odysseus, is a king and warrior, and he, too, has a rather loose relationship with personal ethics.
Now what could the Odyssey possibly mean for us, we who live in a non-oceanic desert more than three millennia after the events it is supposed to be narrating? Is our own society poised at the edge of some kind of Bronze Age collapse? Will future generations talk about the great AI Age Collapse? Are we doomed to being flooded by disasters, climate change, disastrous wars, collapsed economies, a disintegrating social and governmental fabric, all compounded by migratory invasions, and perhaps runaway super-intelligent computers to boot?
Perhaps. Some people always think the end is nigh, of course. There are plenty of conspiracy theorists and doomsayers about these days, online and on social media and on the air. For them the world is always about to end. And if we don’t work to right the wrongs of our society—and there are plenty of them—then perhaps the catastrophizers will eventually be proved right.
But it seems to me that there is a quite different message in all of this.
The Odyssey film has been criticized for including what are loosely called Judeo-Christian values in a Greek, pagan world. You know, crazy, religious ideas like hospitality to strangers, not murdering or raping civilians in war, respecting legitimate authority, openness and honesty with colleagues and friends, even honor. That moral sense made the movie less authentically pagan, and less true to the source material. But it also conveyed some ideals we need to be reminded of today.
In truth, the Jewish versions of this ancient epic, in their own way, always had those elements. The foundational Jewish ideals of respect for human life, of responding to complex, dangerous situations with the best actions we can manage, of maintaining our values and ethical ideals even when faced with hard and harrowing choices: that was always the Jewish message. None of our prototypical wanderers—on sea or on land—were perfect paragons. They—Noah, Jonah, King David, and Abraham and Moses, too—were always human, with strengths and flaws; you know, like us. Our own lives are indeed a journey, and sometimes an odyssey. We may wander the sea, or river, or desert, or the whole earth in search of home, and encounter surprising difficulties, even disasters.
But for us Jews, it is not the vagaries of the voyage that matters, nor the vicissitudes of the challenges we must overcome. It is the way we conduct ourselves, the actions we take to bring hope and healing, to bring the best of our efforts and to build a life, and a world, that reflect that morality. It is the way we choose to live our lives, the values we embody, the actions we take to improve our community, and our world.
That is most true of all at this holy time of year, when we have the opportunity to make ourselves, our community, and our lives better, when we can do Teshuvah, and return to the best person we can be. It is the crucial lesson of Rosh HaShanah: it is not the odyssey of the events in our lives that matters, but the quality of the way we choose to live that does.
May the choices you make over these High Holy Days, and throughout this 5787 year, make your own Odyssey, your own journey, a voyage of goodness, meaning and blessing. L’Shana Tova.