Honestly, I should have gotten up and walked out at that point, but I was rooted to my seat. If there's one thing that preachers' kids like me have been taught since early childhood, it's that you never, ever leave during the rabbi's sermon. It's incredibly disrespectful, and what could a rabbi possibly say that would merit such disrespect?
I did eventually mumble to myself, "I can't listen to any more this," and stand up and walk out, but it took a bit longer than it should have.

From his gleeful, ebullient praise of Israel's attacks on Iran, the rabbi launched into a parable about the two goats described in the Torah who atone for the people's sins on the Day of Atonement.
The rabbi described how lots are cast on the goats. One of them is chosen "for God" and the other "for Azazel."

He went on, "Now, it might seem like being chosen 'for God' would be preferable, but _that_ goat was immediately slaughtered as a sacrifice, while the goat chosen 'for Azazel' was sent into the wilderness. Nobody in Jewish history knows where 'Azazel' is, but at least that goat survived. Sometimes being chosen for God is fatal!"
My friends, for those of you who don't realize, I am afraid I must explain to you the extraordinary, comprehensive ignorance of his statement.

The mishna which was written down nearly two thousand years ago but was passed from teacher to student orally for many generations before it was written down, explains quite clearly what happened to the goat chosen "for Azazel."

That goat did not "survive." It was "sent into the wilderness" only in the sense that it was escorted on a lead by a priest, far out of the city, until the priest reached a steep, rocky cliff. There, the goat was thrown off the cliff, such that it was torn limb from limb and died. Ref: sefaria.org/Mishnah_Yoma.6.4-6…

_Both_ goats, the one designated "for God" and the one designated "for Azazel", died as part of the Day of Atonement ritual. The only difference is that one of them died a quick, painless death, while the other one died a painful death being thrown off a cliff and torn limb from limb.
This is not obscure knowledge. It's in the freaking mishna, which is a foundational text that anyone calling themselves a rabbi should be embarrassed not to be intimately familiar with.

And just to be clear, the rabbi who made this 100% false claim about the goat "for Azazel" is older than I am, and I'm GenX. Even if by some stretch of the imagination he made it out of rabbinical school without reading the section of the mishna I'm discussing here, he's had several decades since then to rectify that omission.

Confession time: when he made this astoundingly ignorant statement about Jewish tradition and history is when I finally got up the courage to get up and walk out. Praising Israel for starting a war and reciting ridiculous Israeli propaganda about there being no civilian casualties are what should have sent me out, but it wasn't until he also either lied about, or displayed shocking ignorance of, Jewish history, that I finally found the courage to turn my back on him.

I've been told that the rest of his sermon after I left was even more bonkers.
The two goats story he told (and got wrong) was somehow linked back to Jews' obligation to support Israel, though it's not clear to me how (and I think it might also have been unclear to the people who actually heard the sermon).
He apparently also talked about what happened to Jews in Europe before and during the Holocaust, because of course any sermon that lionizes Israel has to be grounded in Holocaust victimhood.

The point of the goat story seemed to be that sometimes you have to choose "for God" even if it's "fatal." To demonstrate this, he told the story of a family who immigrated to Israel, after which the father went into the IDF and was killed. If they hadn't immigrated he wouldn't have been killed, but what they did was still the right thing to do, because it's better to be the goat for God, even if it kills you, than the goat for Azazel.
Don't try to make it make sense, you can't.

Anyway, I'm now 12 posts into this thread, and I'm only just now getting to my main point, if indeed I have one, which is this:
If you don't fucking want people to associate being Jewish with supporting Israel's actions, then don't fucking stand up on the pulpit of a synagogue as its spiritual leader on a Saturday morning and give a sermon in which you gleefully praise Israel for going to war and say Jews are obligated to support Israel even if they die for it.

And also this: if you want to understand why every survey of American Jews shows that young Jews are fleeing synagogues and other communal Jewish institutions in droves, the sermon I heard this morning is all you need to look at.
The kids are alright, and most of them have no patience for this bullshit.

And it's not just young Jews. I, for example, will never set foot into that synagogue again on any Shabbat when that rabbi is sitting on the pulpit.
Because I'll be damned if I will attend a service presided over by a "rabbi" who gleefully praises war without offering even a token acknowledgment that hey, war is bad, and we would really rather not have to fight wars, actually, and there are human beings on both sides of any war, and killing people is kind of bad, actually.

Oh, wait, I almost forgot to mention this… Right after talking about how great it was that Israel killed all these evil Iranians without a single innocent person being killed or injured (not), he did acknowledge that there was also some somberness in Israel. But it wasn't about having just started another war and killing people. Nope, it was because grocery store shelves were bare because people were panic-buying food, and a young Israeli bride had to postpone her wedding.
*sigh*

Also, just to be 100% clear: I am not passing judgment here about whether Israel is right to be concerned about Iran's nuclear program or its military ambitions. Iran is not an innocent wallflower here. The risk of Iran's nuclear and military machinations are substantive, and whether Israel's attack was therefore justified is a legitimate question.
My concern is with the jingoistic war-mongering and fealty to Israel displayed by this rabbi and other Jewish leaders.

Having said that, if you don't understand that the current political leadership of the state of Israel is every bit as jingoistic, war-hungry, power-hungry, and territorial-expansionist as the political leadership in Iran, if not more so, then you are deluding yourself.