Shabbat Sermon: A Sermon for Shabbat Hagadol with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

Do you rememberthe 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 ofthe 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? Was 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.