Beshallach for TAA

(Delivered January 31, 2026)

Maybe it’s the soul-deadening effects of constant blaring media, social and otherwise. Maybe it’s the political polarization. Maybe it’s the violent immigration enforcement and the overheated rhetoric around it, including the targeting of journalists. Maybe it’s the crackdown in Iran, or the attack on the Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn, or the devastating floods in southern Africa, or the endless war in Ukraine. Maybe it’s just the late January two snowstorms in and waiting for the third, and the nasty flu bugs going around. Whatever it is, it seems like just about everybody I’ve encountered this week is upset about something. The individual contours of our discontent will vary, but it seems that discontent is in the air.

In so many parts of our lives, we are caught between, as we ask ourselves how this will all play out, as we wonder what comes next. These are times that call for courage.

Parshat Beshallach gives us much to think about in this regard. We pick up the story with the Israelites, newly released from Egypt, but far from free. With each turn of the scroll, we find yet another crisis of faith. And yet with each turn of the scroll, we find another miracle.

The push and pull of this parsha—from the first breath of freedom to the winding path of the wilderness. And from the terror of being caught between the roiling waters and the Egyptian army made mad with rage and loss, to the astonishment and exultation of the water splitting open to take us in. And from that narrow escape, with water all around, to the crisis of no water to drink. From the question of what to eat, to the miracle of manna and from the sneak attack of Amalek, to Moses and the Israelites’ improbable victory. Throughout the parsha, we are constantly between the frying pan and the inferno. The narrative rolls and swells like the waves of the sea. It’s all about change and moving relentlessly through and being in between.

And the quintessential miracle—of crossing יָם סוּף the Sea of Reeds—this is the centerpiece of our parsha, when the in between-ness is embodied in the scroll as it is in the tale itself. The words spread out over the scroll with undulating waves, while in the story, walls of water surround the Israelites, echoing the narrowness of enslavement. And then, something different happens. 

What haunts me about this passage is the way the situation seems fully impossible… until it isn’t. It reminds me of laboring to give birth, when there comes a moment when you want to give up. It hurts, it’s hard, it feels like you’ve been laboring forever. You want so much to just quit. But you can’t because there’s a baby who needs to be born and you’re the only one who can make it happen. 

The theological and philosophical work of Parshat Beshallach is in interrogating that moment of between-ness: What is it we need and what is it we bring to the process of moving through? Like a baby waiting to be born, or like a people struggling to become free, we pass through narrowness. Even the Hebrew name of Egypt—מִצְרָיִם—speaks to this narrowness, the root letters pointing to confinement, restriction, limitation. 

In the moment of release, God separates water from water and the Israelites discover a path forward. 

וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל הָלְכוּ בַיַּבָּשָׁה בְּתוֹךְ הַיָּם
And the Israelites walked on the dry land within the water

The Hebrew subtly indicates that the path was there all along, waiting to emerge. And the rarely-encountered word יַּבָּשָׁה—dry land—brings us back to another instance of God separating water from water. All the way back in the story of creation, in Parshat Breishit, 

וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יִקָּווּ הַמַּיִם מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמַיִם אֶל־מָקוֹם אֶחָד
וְתֵרָאֶה הַיַּבָּשָׁה וַיְהִי־כֵן׃
And God said, let the waters beneath the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear. And truly it did.

Here too, the land was there all along. 

And then there’s how it all began: with תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ—variously translated as unformed and void, formless and empty, welter and waste, chaos and catastrophe. The birth of the world begins in this chaos and catastrophe and, through God’s ineffable movement, becomes substance and form, becomes a world that can support life and growth and progress. From what seemed impossible, comes something new.

It’s the same in Beshallach: the chaos and catastrophe of enslavement give way to something new, a way of being that binds the Israelites to God so strongly that we, their descendants, sing of this moment every week, some of us every day. In fact, our Sages, in Mishnah Brachot, instruct us to recall the flight from Egypt כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ—all the days of your life. This foundational story is a metaphor on how to live our lives. It’s not just a tale of miracles, but also a tale of the impossible becoming real. In both passages, the waters part to make space for life to flourish.

Both the Midrash and the Talmud teach the story of Nachshon ben Aminadav, a story so familiar and convincing that it feels like it comes from the Torah. In Tractate Sotah, according to Rabbi Yehudah, tribe after tribe, facing the waters of יָם סוּף, said, 

We’re not going in first. 

We’re not going in first. 

We’re definitely not going in first. 

Then Nachshon ben Aminadav gathered his courage and went first. Some say he jumped into the waves; some say he walked, step by step, until the water came up to his nostrils. And here again, at the moment of impossibility, when one more step would have meant drowning, the waters split just in time.

With Nachshon as our teacher, the lesson of Beshallach is that when the chaos and catastrophe seem at their worst, when obstacles crowd the way forward and all seems lost; that’s the moment when the tide turns. It has to. 

Vaera for TAA

(Delivered January 17, 2026)

Torah study folks have heard me say quite a bit since I came here: the Torah is always right on time. No matter what’s happening in the world, or in our individual and communal narratives, somehow the Torah hits a nerve, often several. And so, as we find ourselves this week in the sweep of one of our foundational stories, the echoes and resonances to our current world abound. At some moments these past few weeks, it has seemed to me like there are Pharaohs everywhere I look. Even when I look in the mirror.

Let me explain. 

The beginning of Sefer Shmot—The Book of Exodus—stacks the deck for confrontation. The Israelites in Egypt have become numerous, and where previously they had enjoyed the favor of Egyptian society by association with Josef; as we roll into Shmot, the shine has worn off. The current leadership has no idea that Egypt’s status was built on the backs of Josef’s foresight and charisma. The new leadership looks at all these foreigners and sees only a drain on society, a threat, people who are barely human.

The stage is set: when God urges Moses to go make it right, and Moses shows up, the Pharaoh is already on edge and the Israelites have had enough. In Parshat Shmot—last week’s Torah reading—God hardens the Pharaoh’s heart against the Israelites’ righteous cause of freedom. And just that little whisper from God is all it takes for the Pharaoh’s heart to form the habit of hardness. By the time we get to Vaera—this week’s Torah reading—the Pharaoh’s heart has learned its lesson all too well. 

The hardened heart is not a virtue but it has capacities that, in times of intense upheaval, can start to seem appealing. It’s strenuous labor to hold prejudice, hard work to nurse a spark of hatred into a flame. It’s also hard to go about daily life in the presence of such hatred. The tough heart can more easily face the world without being subsumed. 

And so, in this time, our time of mounting chaos and trauma—with political turmoil, violence, and antisemitism raging—I find myself simultaneously wishing for a harder heart and worried about becoming numb. I worry that finding ways to cope with the horror of corruption and violence, with the hardness of hearts all around, will turn me into a Pharaoh myself.

Our tradition does not look kindly on the toughened heart. We are not meant to look up to the Pharaoh, and certainly not meant to become like him, hardening our own hearts until we cannot bring ourselves to care about the suffering around us. Our haftarah this week from Ezekiel has the Pharaoh exclaiming more than once:

לִי יְאֹרִי וַאֲנִי עֲשִׂיתִנִי
My Nile is mine, and I made it

These are the words of a person who sees himself as a god, as our historical knowledge of ancient Egypt supports. There is a midrash that teaches that God tells Moses to go to the Pharaoh by the river at dawn, because that’s where and when he is most vulnerable. That’s where the Pharaoh relieves himself. He is so committed to reinforcing his elevated status that he cannot allow the populace to see him as having human bodily functions. His complete self-absorption leaves him unable to see, much less care about, the people in his midst. 

Our task as Jews and as humans is to take the opposite approach. Our tradition demands it; God commands it.

A friend from rabbinical school who now serves a congregation in the Twin Cities texted me a little the other night. He talked about how scared and frazzled and drained everyone he knows is. It’s hard even to take it in. Nothing in rabbinical school would have prepared him for the reality he is currently facing. But rather than cut himself off from the world around him, he described how he and his congregants are rallying around neighbors who are at risk. My friend now carries a whistle on his keychain so he can alert people about ICE. Three short blasts mean ICE is in the neighborhood. Longer blasts mean they are actively taking someone. My friend now delivers groceries to families who are afraid to leave their homes. His community has, virtually overnight, established a Justice Committee to mobilize and help where they can.

This is the opposite of the hardened heart. And rather than succumbing to the danger of קוֹצֶר רוּחַ—the crushed spirit which numbed the Israelites even to the possibility of change, my friend and his local colleagues are managing to face the world as it is and spark in one another a commitment to human flourishing. 

To walk a spiritual path is to cultivate flexibility, to allow our hearts to remain open even when it is painful. Because the alternative—of disengagement or numbness—leads to harm and destruction. Just as the Pharaoh’s hardened heart allows for him to hold onto the enslaved Israelites despite the blood and vermin and disease, so too our hearts must retain enough “give” to keep us here in the world, even when the reality seems too much to face.

It’s not that we should wallow in every heartache, nobody can function that way. But the practice of resilience requires a balance of hardness and softness. There is a teaching from Rebbe Menachem Mendl of Kotzk that speaks to this alchemy. In the first paragraph of the Shema, familiarly known as the v’ahavta, we are taught that the love of God should be at the core of our every action, so that we love God with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our strength. 

וְהָיוּ הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם עַל־לְבָבֶךָ
And these words which I command you today will be on your heart

The Kotzker Rebbe wonders: Why are these words ON your heart and not IN it? He goes on to answer: the way we begin is to is settle the words on our hearts, and then, when there is a moment of opening, the words will enter. A hardened heart cannot allow the divine in, but if we keep the words on our hearts and soften just a touch, the words will find their way. Opening leads to opening. The love of God derives itself from the love of God. 

This is similar to the two types of rain we encounter in the second paragraph of the Shema, the soft rain and the hard rain. The autumn rain—יוֹרֶה—is a gentler rain; its role is to soften the ground. On its own, it is not sufficient to make crops grow, but if we don’t have that soft rain, the soil cannot support life. The spring rain, on the other hand—מַלְקוֹש—actually comes in a volume sufficient to make the crops grow. If the ground is hard from not having יוֹרֶה, it cannot take in the מַלְקוֹש. The soft rain is the words landing on the heart. This prepares the way, but it’s the hard rain of taking those words in that enables growth. 

May we each find the strength to be soft, and find the softness that strengthens us and reawakens us to our deepest values.

The Borrowed Son

(Dvar Torah on Parshat Shmot from 2023/5783)

PROLOGUE

I was sitting in a women’s Torah study years ago with my then-toddler son on my lap when I first saw it. We were studying Parashat Shmot, Chapter 2 to be precise, and suddenly it was clear as crystal, even through my tears. I clutched my boy tighter and said, “Moshe’s mother gave him up twice.” I had been told, of course, that our children are always separating from us, that childbirth is only the first step toward the inevitability of giving them up. But that day it was unthinkable; I wept and wept, and tried to learn. That little boy is in college now, and the lesson never ends.

THE FIRST TIME

וְלֹא־יָכְלָה עוֹד הַצְּפִינוֹ וַתִּקַּח־לוֹ תֵּבַת גֹּמֶא וַתַּחְמְרָה בַחֵמָר וּבַזָּפֶת וַתָּשֶׂם בָּהּ אֶת־הַיֶּלֶד
וַתָּשֶׂם בַּסּוּף עַל־שְׂפַת הַיְאֹר׃

And she could no longer hide him, so she took an ark of papyrus, and sealed it with asphalt and tar, and she put him in it, the little boy, and she put it in the reeds by the mouth of the River Nile. (Exodus 2:3)

All around me, desperate mothers trying anything to keep their babies alive, to find some way to skirt the decree. We were living amongst the Egyptians and knew all too well we were being targeted, each and every baby boy to be drowned in the great river. This was the second decree, the one that deputized ordinary Egyptians to do what our righteous midwives Shifrah and Pu’ah would not. 

Even so, we tried everything we could think of, babies hidden in crawl spaces, families encamped in out-of-the-way caves, boys disguised as girls, given false names to throw Pharaoh’s willing executioners off the scent. Women gave birth to baby after baby, even as we watched them die in our arms or had them taken from us. Our will to outlive them kept us both numb and strong, the callouses on our souls enabling us to persist, even as our families were unraveling. 

The pressure came from all sides, starting subtly and getting imperceptibly worse. Pharaoh knew how to influence the public without saying a word. First he placed extra taxes on us, then the secret plot with the midwives. Then he enlisted the population at large to drown our children. Eventually the Egyptians did Pharaoh’s work on their own; his idea became their idea. Pharaoh’s cleverness was in disguising the violence, to allow for his own deniability. By the time we realized how ensnared we were, it was too late to save ourselves, too late to speak up.

Our crowded settlements made the desperate even more desperate. People say Pharaoh engineered the overcrowding. Along with the forced labor under impossible conditions, he made sure we were loaded into cramped, too-tight quarters, to increase our burdens and dull our minds.

I made the neighborhood think I’d lost the baby at birth. A baby boy was a blessing and a problem. A liability. Better they think he was gone than ask questions. Attempts at consolation: you still have your older son Aaron, and your Miriam. Maybe someday it will be different, and you can try again. Painful words, meant in kindness. Painful not for the usual reason—children are neither replaceable nor interchangeable—but because he was living on borrowed time, as were we all.

He was a perfect baby. When he was born, I looked at him, and I knew. I knew he was special. I knew he was in danger. I knew I would have to give him up. 

I waited as long as I could. Made friends with the darkness to hide him until he could no longer be hidden. Three months of heartbreaking sweetness, every moment knowing he would be taken from me, one way or another. And every moment loving him with my whole heart.

That day, I took the basket and covered it over and over with dark tar. It was my only hope; he had discovered his voice and I couldn’t shush him anymore. I followed the letter of the law and placed my cherished baby in the water, with Miriam following close behind, as close as she dared.

He was only three months old. He was already three months old. Such a beautiful baby, my secret baby. 

THE SECOND TIME

וַיִּגְדַּל הַיֶּלֶד וַתְּבִאֵהוּ לְבַת־פַּרְעֹה וַיְהִי־לָהּ לְבֵן וַתִּקְרָא שְׁמוֹ מֹשֶׁה וַתֹּאמֶר כִּי מִן־הַמַּיִם מְשִׁיתִהוּ׃

And the boy grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son instead. And she called him Moshe, for she said, “I drew him out from the water.” (Exodus 2:10)

My heroic Miriam borrowed some time for me, three years to be precise. She saw Pharaoh’s daughter see my son, and she saw an opportunity for me to be with him again. Miriam bravely offered to find the princess an Israelite nurse for the baby. For three glorious years, I raised my own son, half in secret. Of course everyone around me knew I was nursing a baby for Pharaoh’s daughter. What they didn’t know, what I never dared to say, was that the baby was my own. They thought I’d lost the baby, and I let them think so. 

Inside my home, though, we were whole again. The violence outside our four walls was getting worse—harsh words, brawling in the streets—but inside, we were together. We watched the little one grow, I held him close, nursed him as long as I could. All that shushing from before had made him shy to speak, but his lively brown eyes, observing everything, told us his substance.

Soon, too soon, he nursed less and less until he stopped completely. Our days of sweet entanglement were ending. His future would unspool without me. It was time to give him up again.

That day, I whispered in his ear, as I had done for each of the thousand days we were together, “You are an Israelite, and your Israelite family will always love you.”

And then I returned him, my borrowed son.

In those thousand precious days, he taught me.

All time is borrowed. All sons are borrowed.

Recent Writings

No dvar Torah this week because I did an interactive discussion. However, I’ve been writing!

Click here for my Chanukah column for the Jewish Journal.

Click here for my Midweek Musing column for the Gloucester Daily Times.

And here are my comments from Temple Ahavat Achim’s public Menorah Lighting:

It’s wonderful to be together tonight, despite the cold and despite the darkness of the world. As many of you know, Chanukah is also called the Festival of Lights, and it celebrates two things: the victory of the Maccabees against the Syrian king Antiochus and the forces of assimilation, in a society that would have them give up being Jewish in order to fit in. AND the literal and figurative light that came from a small amount of oil, barely enough for one night, that expanded to fulfill its purpose, miraculously burning for eight nights. This was long enough for the newly victorious Maccabees to reclaim, recover, and rededicate their sacred Temple, which Antiochus’s forces had desecrated.

Light shines brighter in community. If you hold one candle just in front of you, it’s for you. If you lift up a candle, it’s for the people near you. If everyone raises up a candle, it lights the way, expanding to fulfill its purpose.

In the time of the Chanukah story, the Maccabees fought alone. In victory, they recovered alone. Tonight, in the shadow of a heavy world, we celebrate their courage and perseverance together, as a community of Jews and allies, neighbors and friends. It has been gratifying to feel the support of the wider Gloucester community, all the more so in light of recent events. Several of my interfaith clergy colleagues have reached out to lend their hearts. And the number of people who signed up for this event AFTER the news from Sydney came out should give us all a sense of hope for the light that shines so brightly in the Gloucester community. 

Chag Urim Sameach! Happy Chanukah!

Vayeshev for TAA

(Delivered December 13, 2025)

The Torah is at it again with a nice bait and switch. At the opening of Parshat Vayeshev, Jacob settles in בארץ מגורי אביו in the land where his father had been a foreigner. With Jacob settling in, surely things will begin to fall into a groove, as he completes the journey begun by his grandfather. By birds-eye view, the progression seems smooth: God tells Abraham to begin the journey; Isaac becomes the placeholder in Canaan, there but not quite, still a stranger; and then Jacob settles there in the first word we read from the scroll this week. So we might expect that the Torah is setting us up for something like a cozy bedtime story. אלה תולדות יעקב This is the story of Jacob. 

What follows is no more smooth and serene than what came before: Jacob, the grieving husband, deals with his children in ways that are clumsy at best, turning brother against brother and studiously avoiding any kind of reckoning with the dynamics of conflict within the family, dynamics that pick up steam with each verse. Meanwhile, Josef, the favored son, wears his elevated status both literally and figuratively, and shows no regard for how it might be affecting his brothers. Inevitably the brothers, already known in the episode of Dinah’s rape to be capable of real violence, live up to (or down to) their reputation and gang up on Josef with seeming callousness. Sitting down to a meal after ditching their brother is not their finest hour. Furthermore their lack of consideration for what it would do to Jacob to lose Josef means they go right ahead and enact the ruse. There are so many moments when they could have made less harmful choices. Instead, they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. 

Studying the Parsha this week, I have been struck by how distasteful I’ve found all of the characters. Even Josef comes across as vain, spoiled, gossipy, and clueless. It’s very telling that, after his brothers respond so angrily after hearing about his first dream, he still goes ahead and shares the second one. He is, it seems, incapable of reading the room. 

And the way that Jacob’s other sons behave is equally disturbing. Indeed their vendetta is as much against their father as against their brother. Plucking Josef out of the way serves their immediate interests, but they can’t seem to see that causing their father grievous pain will not make him love them more. But within this family system, it’s impossible to talk about the dynamics in play, impossible to articulate the ways emotional distress is inflicted over and over and over. A culture of silence prevails. There are no words, only hurtful behaviors.

Interestingly, though, some of our sages are at great pains to preserve the reputations of the brothers. Ovadia Sforno, the sixteenth-century rabbi and physician who lived and worked in Bologna, neatly defines the problem before them in his comment on verse 18. The verse reads:

וַיִּרְאוּ אֹתוֹ מֵרָחֹק וּבְטֶרֶם יִקְרַב אֲלֵיהֶם וַיִּתְנַכְּלוּ אֹתוֹ לַהֲמִיתוֹ
They saw him from afar, and before he approached them,
they conspired to kill him. 

Sforno notes that in future parts of the Torah it’s drilled into us that the names of all twelve of Jacob’s sons are inscribed on the ephod and memorialized as the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Given that after all these episodes of genuine cruelty they become somewhat exalted figures meant to inspire us, Sforno searches for the humanity in their hateful actions.

He writes: We must try to understand the collective feelings of the brothers as being that they actually felt themselves threatened by Joseph’s aspirations, and they were convinced that when one feels threatened, one is entitled or even obliged to take measures to neutralize the source of the danger. Thus, by Sforno’s lights, Josef’s approach felt to his brothers like a threat, and therefore their impulse to conspire to kill him was valid within their world view.

Later, Sforno posits that when the brothers sit down to eat after throwing Josef in the pit—even though they are doing something fairly heartless toward Josef, their actions make sense in their own minds. Sforno writes: If the brothers sat down to eat immediately after throwing Joseph into the pit, this is clear evidence that in their minds they had certainly not committed any wrong. WE, who were not part of Jacob’s household, and who know that these brothers were unanimously elevated to become the founding fathers of the Jewish nation, must therefore accept the premise underlying their actions as being that they had truly felt themselves personally threatened by Joseph. 

Other commentators try to redeem the brothers’ pausing for a meal in different ways. In Breishit Rabbah 84:17 Rabbi Achvah bar Zeira reads it as metaphor and foreshadowing: that this seemingly cavalier deed is meant to allude to the fact that Josef would eventually (in the coming chapters) be in the position to feed the world precisely because he ends up in Egypt. And the Midrash Sechel Tov says that even as the brothers were dining, they still invited passersby to join them in their meal. 

These explanations are not intuitive to me, but I see why Sforno and the midrashists are working with the story in this way. Indeed, for me, their efforts resonate as I reflect on the current-day divisions within the Jewish community: it makes me think of the ways that Jews with strong opinions (which is, possibly, all of us!) are tending more and more to assume the worst of those with whom they profoundly disagree. It is easier and easier to say to ourselves or to like-minded people, “I can’t believe a Jew would say such a thing. I can’t believe a Jew would think such a thing. I can’t believe a Jew would vote that way!” Which leads to, “I can’t even talk to that person, we disagree too profoundly.”

Yet Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote: “When words fail, violence begins.” Ultimately, our commentators who search for a reasonable explanation for Josef’s brothers’ worst acts are teaching us from centuries ago that we can never fully know another person’s mind, but that it’s worth trying to discover what we can. We can never fully grasp what makes people do what they do, but if we start with the assumption of their humanity, if we approach with gentle curiosity, we might begin to untangle the roots of enmity.

Those of us who have read ahead or remember the coming parshiot from previous years know that eventually Josef will forgive his brothers and move forward in peace with them. In one of the most beloved moments in the Torah, Josef and his brothers will fully show one another who they are, through acts of vulnerability, care and generosity. They will overcome the culture of silence in their family and embrace one another, despite what came before. Eventually they will all set aside their grievances and become a family again. Josef and his brothers will be able to do what Jacob and Esav could not: stay together after reconciliation. 

So the birds-eye view of the progression from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob finds its resolution through this sequence of difficult but ultimately humanizing events. This family learns to do differently.

This is the story of Jacob.

Vayishlach for TAA

(Delivered December 6, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

Earlier this week, on a night when sleep eluded me, despite soul-crushing fatigue, I started to ponder Jacob’s second inexplicable night-time encounter. This second encounter is quite unlike the starry-eyed, angel-filled aha moment from last week’s parsha, Vayetze—the God-wink that awoke Jacob to the divinity that he didn’t previously recognize was available to him. 

The words:

אָכֵן יֵשׁ ה’ בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי
Truly there is God in this place, and I didn’t even know it

are words of a young man just leaving his family to make his own way. Jacob’s moment of discovery in Parshat Vayetze is full of possibility, of angels moving freely between earth and heaven, between here and there. There is possibility everywhere in this touch of God; the radiance of it practically leaps out of the scroll.

But now, in Vayishlach? As Jacob churns over the prospect of reckoning with his twin brother Esav, a shiny, star-dusted God is not on the menu, no matter how much he wishes it were. Like many of us, he can no longer believe in a simple God. Indeed, if Parshat Vayishlach had a subtitle, it might be God for Grownups.

Jacob is not the young man first awakening to wide-eyed wonder. He is different now. He is in a different place in his life, rundown by the strains of work and family—an unfair and unscrupulous boss who also happens to be his father-in-law, four wives, many children, complicated relationships and competing interests. 

Jacob is weathered. 

As he girds himself to reconnect with the brother whose detached nature he took advantage of, at great emotional cost, he is filled with misgiving. By this time, he’s been cheated himself, by Lavan’s greed and trickery. He has been robbed of blessing himself, through his beloved Rachel’s prolonged difficulty in conceiving. Jacob has absorbed on the molecular level that life is full of heartbreaks and injustices. 

When he learns that Esav, his brother, is coming to meet him, with a retinue of four hundred men: 

וַיִּירָא יַעֲקֹב מְאֹד וַיֵּצֶר לוֹ
Jacob was very afraid, and in distress

In his state of foreboding over how his brother would receive him, and perhaps (as Rashi teaches) fearing that he might cause Esav further harm, Jacob goes into crisis mode. He divides his entourage into groups, imagining the worst: that perhaps Esav and his army of 400 will attack, and leave him with nothing. In a classic, “the heir and the spare” move, Jacob hedges his bets in the hopes that he can diminish risk, and perhaps stave off the disaster he deep down feels like he deserves. He sets his various groups in motion—some animals and servants being sent as a peace offering to his brother, closer family members spirited off across the river for safekeeping, eventually to be subdivided again with respect to where they fall in his hierarchy of love—all the while praying for God’s protection from the brother he presumes the worst of.

Eventually Jacob finds himself alone. And then not alone. A mysterious presence tugs at the strings of his disquiet all night long, as Jacob tosses and turns. The text is thrillingly unclear as to what is happening. Is there actually another person there, or is Jacob wrestling with his own conscience? Is it a ladderless angel? The Hebrew slips through our fingers, like so much dust. 

What remains is the theological lesson. The text goes on to say that the stranger renames Jacob as Yisrael: 

כִּי־שָׂרִיתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁים וַתּוּכָל
For you have contended with God and with people and prevailed

This word שָׂרִיתָ contains multitudes: you have contended, you have wrestled, you have exerted your power. The sin and the resh bring us to top of the food chain (think שַׂר הַטַּבָּחִים, Pharaoh’s chief officer) or even to the realm of royalty. שָׂרָה, after all, means princess. So whatever the physical or psychological nature of Jacob’s dustup, the text seems to want us to categorize it in the sweep of divinity. Perhaps, then, all the better that its nature is unclear. The ambiguity is part of the message.

And afterward, Jacob names the spot Peniel—the face of God. Or is it Penuel—God turned away? Clearly Jacob’s crisis of faith makes an opening for both sensations. He has felt the presence of the divine, and he has felt it vanish. The ephemerality of it, the strenuousness of holding onto that sense of connection leaves him damaged, with a limp that makes the phrase ‘crippled with anxiety’ all too real.

I personally am grateful for this confusing, opaque, non-reassuring description of encountering God. I’m grateful to read of the hair’s breadth distance—literally a verse—between seeing the face of God and feeling God turn away. I’m grateful that all this turmoil and searching is depicted as happening in the dark of night. 

Isn’t that what it’s really like?

Faith takes work. It takes wrestling. It’s hardest in the dark.

To locate this spiky, destabilizing experience of God with Yaakov Avinu—Jacob our ancestor, someone whose name we invoke every time we open a siddur to pray—hammers home that message. When we are praying, we are invited to bring a Jacob-consciousness, a stance of searching and doubt. It’s a feature, not a bug. 

And, of course, Jacob’s new name, Yisrael, is the name by which we come to know ourselves. In this haunting passage, our tradition gives us the gift of reassurance that our own uncertainties are part of the process, that our struggles are inherent in our identity as Jews. The moments when we see the face of God, and the moments when God turns away are all with us in our prayers, as in our lives.

We are alone. And then not alone. 

Shabbat Shalom!

Vayetze for TAA

(Delivered November 29, 2025)

One of the many things the Jewish community will probably never agree about is how to answer the question, “Where is God?”

Ask someone who’s spiritual but not religious and they are likely to say God is everywhere. Ask an atheist or a cynic and they’ll say God is nowhere. A reading in the Reform siddur describes God as, “closer than the air we breathe, yet further than the furthermost star.” So where is that, exactly?

The opening of Parshat Vayetze invites us into this unanswerable question with its famous image of Jacob’s Ladder. On the run from his murderous twin brother, Jacob lies down out in the open, and dreams of angels ascending and descending a ladder that reaches all the way to the sky. This electrifying vision jolts him into a different realm of consciousness, and when he wakes up he says the famous words:

אָכֵן יֵשׁ ה’ בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי
Indeed there was divinity in this place, and I didn’t even know

It’s easy to credit Jacob’s realization to the vision of that ladder teeming with angels. It’s an incredibly powerful image, which has found its way into all manner of artistic representation. And as a concept, it has plenty of crossover appeal. A quick AI search on the phrase ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ yields this: ​​”Jacob’s Ladder” most commonly refers to a biblical dream about a ladder to heaven, a 1990 psychological horror film starring Tim Robbins, or a type of wildflower with ladder-like leaves. It can also refer to a specific type of toy, a staircase in the Peak District of England, or a symbol in Freemasonry. In other words, Jacob’s isn’t the only imagination captured by the angel-filled ladder.

Jacob is a character who doesn’t appear to have much of a spiritual life prior to this encounter. He has so far come across as cunning and manipulative, not as a person in touch with a spiritual core that would prompt him to reflect on morality. In Parshat Toldot, he’s described as an אִישׁ תָּם—a simple man, which calls to mind the comparison with the simple child in the Haggadah. We can easily picture Jacob, when confronted with a spiritual question, responding like that simple child and saying מַה זּאֹת—what’s this?

So God has to hit Jacob over the head, with a vivid, unforgettable impression. But if we slow down over the passage, we can put together some of the unsung pieces of holiness.

Take, for example, Jacob’s physical experience and surroundings. The same verse that tells us he is an אִישׁ תָּם also describes his happy place: יֹשֵׁב אֹהָלִים—dwelling in tents. Unlike his twin brother, he’s almost an indoorsman and stays close to home. But at the beginning of Vayetze, he finds himself sleeping outside on the hard ground, out in the open, with a rock for a pillow. Like many of us, he resists going outside but when he finally ventures out, he finds something both grounding and uplifting. (Kind of like a ladder, if you think about it.) Getting closer to the natural world allows Jacob—and us—easier access to the divine. Encountering the mystery of creation invites us to ask מַה זּאֹת—what is this?—and increases the chance that we might sense the presence of  the Creator.

There’s more to it still: in verse 11, the text specifies that when Jacob arrives at the place, he stops for the night because the sun has set. Rashi comments that the word order suggests something unusual about the sunset. Had things been as normal, the text would have said: וַיָּבֹא הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ וַיָּלֶן שָׁם—the sun was setting, so he lay down for the night. According to Rashi, the text reverses the order to say he lay down because the sun had set, implying that the sun set suddenly for Jacob, not at its usual time, forcing him to stay in that exact place overnight. In Rashi’s reading, Jacob was taken aback by the sunset. It stopped him in his tracks.

In a different comment on the same verse, Rashi also specifies the place where Jacob stops. Because it is designated with the word מָּקוֹם, Rashi connects it to these words of Parshat Lech L’cha וַיַּרְא אֶת הַמָּקוֹם מֵרָחֹק—and he saw the place from afar—meaning Mount Moriah, the location of the עַקֵידָה—the binding of Isaac. That Jacob would experience the divine in the location of his father’s trauma opens the possibility of a kind of tikkun, a redemption of the horror of the earlier experience. 

To our question of where is God, though, this connection offers yet another layer. In Jewish tradition, the word מָּקוֹם is sometimes used to refer to God. Substituting it in, we can read the verse in Lech L’cha וַיַּרְא אֶת הַמָּקוֹם מֵרָחֹק—as he [maybe Abraham, maybe Isaac] saw God from afar. And here in Vayetze, Jacob gets a closer encounter: וַיִּפְגַּע בַּמָּקוֹם—and he met God.

Jacob’s conflicting impulses show some of his theological confusion: when he makes his vow to God after receiving the vision, his goal is to return to his father’s house. Yet he names the place where he is Beit El—House of God. For Jacob, there is confusion as to where God is: at home with his complicated family, or out in the open, in this special place that, despite its association with some of what makes his family so complicated, becomes a מָּקוֹם, a stand-in for divinity itself. 

It’s a little bit of both, as I suspect is the case for many of us. Jacob definitely taps into something larger than himself in the solitude of nature, aided and abetted by an extravagant vision of the holiness that he could access if he knew how. Yet he remains rooted to his family and his past, with all its competition and missed connections and hurt feelings and drama. Home and away. Isaac’s house and Beit El. Both speak to something essential in Jacob.

Ultimately, I think the parsha wants us to pause and locate God in each moment. The word וְהִנֵּה—and here—shows up eleven times in Parshat Vayetze. And so it is with God. God is here. And here. And here and here.

Shabbat shalom! 

Chayei Sarah for TAA

(Delivered November 15, 2025)

You probably remember. For months, I wore a number on my shirt, first with masking tape and sharpie, then with a safety pin and numeral-imprinted beads. Each morning as I was getting dressed, I made a ritual of changing the number. One more day. One more day. One more agonizing day. 

We Jews, of course, have a painful history with having numbers on our clothing or on our bodies—and although the practice I kept over those many months was voluntary—it reflected and refracted that ancient, modern, eternal pain. I am talking, of course, about tracking the days since October 7, 2023 and the embodied symbolism of counting the days of captivity that the hostages of many nations taken that day had to endure. 

On October 13, just over a month ago, the living hostages were released, and I stopped wearing my pin. In the excitement of celebrating the ceasefire and the homecomings, it felt like the right moment to start fresh, with nothing on my lapel. 

This week’s Torah reading from Parshat Chayei Sarah has me reconsidering. As we just read, the parsha opens with Avraham’s transaction with Efron ben Tzochar to acquire the Cave at Machpelah. In a different world with a different Torah, this purchase could easily be one imaginary pasuk, maybe two: 

וְקַנָּה אַבְרָהָם אֶת מַּעֲרָת הַמַּכְפֵּלָה מֵעֶפְרוֹן הַחִתִּי בַּאַרְבַּע מֵאֹת שֶׁקֶל־כָּסֶף
And Abraham bought the Cave of Machpelah from Efron the Hittite
for 400 silver shekels.

End of story.

But in the real world, in our real Torah, the transaction unfolds in lengthy and almost comical detail: there is so much happening in this event, so much more exposition than we might imagine to be necessary. Over almost the entirety of chapter 23, we have Avraham—still grieving the death of his wife Sarah—approach the Hittites and ask for a burial plot. They generously say: you are a person of a higher status than all of us; just take what you want. He replies, essentially, let me speak to someone in charge. Efron emerges from the crowd and offers the land as a gift, Avraham insists on paying, and they go back and forth and back and forth. Finally Efron names his price, Avraham pays it, no questions asked, and the land passes into Avraham’s possession. 

Given that this all could have been a single pasuk, we have to ask why the Torah has elongated and emphasized this exchange. After all, our scripture is often rather sparse on the details of the interactions between people. There tends not to be a lot of dialogue, even in dramatically rich scenes. For example, we famously don’t know what Cain said to Abel in the field, nor how Abel responded. We only know the murderous outcome of their conversation. So often the marrow of a scene is left unspoken. Here, it’s quite the opposite. 

It could be that the Torah is simply reflecting the prevailing social customs for land acquisition, but this seems to me a pale explanation. In general, the Torah is not all that interested in teaching about sociological detail; that gets left more to the Sages of the Rabbinic Period. The Torah’s pedagogy is typically in the realm of theology and morality and ritual innovation.

Obviously I think there’s more going on here, as the Torah study folks and I discussed in detail the other day. Many of our commentators point to the dialogue between Avraham and Efron as being proof positive of the Jewish claim to the land: In Breishit Rabbah 79:7, Rabbi Yudan bar Shimon describes this passage as one of three where אֵין אֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם יְכוֹלִין לְהוֹנוֹת אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל לוֹמַר גְּזוּלִים הֵן בְּיֶדְכֶם—the nations of the world cannot disparage Israel and say these places were stolen by your hands. Rather, this dialogue—witnessed by the entire local community of Hittites—demonstrates that Abraham claimed ownership of the Cave of Machpelah fair and square. He paid the asking price. The entire city saw the deal go down.

Perhaps also this scene represents the next step in the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Avraham. Avraham followed God’s commandment to make his way to the Holy Land, in the belief that he and his descendants would become a great nation. He’s been there a while, has already had many adventures and misadventures. Perhaps the text is telling us: now, with Sarah’s death, it’s time for him to put down roots and stay.

This explanation is more compelling to me, as far as it goes. But I think there’s more still. The other day, at the memorial gathering for Jean O’Gorman, Rabbi Geller reminded us of the beautiful oral history curated by our member Sarah Dunlap, with the help of Jean and a few others (including Marilyn’s mother Janet Schlein). In that familiar green book, we learn that in October of 1904, just a few months after the founding of what would become TAA, the chevra, as it was known then, purchased the land that would become Mount Jacob Cemetery. As is customary across the Jewish world, one of the first—if not the first—acts of a group of Jews settling in a place, is the establishment and consecration of a graveyard. One of our core values—precious because it cannot be repaid—is חֶסֶד שֶׁל אֱמֶת, caring for the dead. Once a person’s earthly time is done, they should be buried with dignity, with the community standing alongside loved ones left behind.

We learn this from Avraham. 

When he hears of Sarah’s death, he comes from Beersheva to Hevron to attend to her, he weeps over her, and then he does whatever it takes to make sure that her body will be buried nearby, in a setting that offers her the kavod she deserves, and offers him and Isaac a place to locate their grief and loss. Avraham intuits—and our tradition reinforces—that the honor of the dead cannot be trifled with. Halachic sources are unanimous in their emphasis of this point: from the simple burial shroud devised so that rich and poor will look the same in death, to the practices of mourning that allow us space and time to recall the loved ones who have meant so much to us.

Our tradition knows that relationships do not end with death, and that we must treat the bodies of our loved ones—created בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים in the image of God—with a reverence that befits that status.

It is a savage understatement to say that those who were taken on October 7 have received nothing close to resembling the respect that an image of God merits. That some of them have not yet returned is a heartbreak and a violation of the divinity in each of us.

As of yesterday, there were still three murdered hostages whose remains were being held in Gaza, and as I reflected on this sobering reality in the shadow of Parshat Chayei Sarah, I understood that my embodied practice of acknowledging the days of captivity is not yet complete. Inspired by Abraham’s example, by his piety and devotion even to his estranged wife, let us continue to hold Sudthisak Rinthalak, Dror Or, and Ran Gvili in our hearts and minds. Until the very last hostage comes home. 

Shabbat shalom.

Lech L’cha for TAA

(Delivered November 1, 2025)

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! 

This joke is unfunny even in the best of times, but downright absurd when talk of hunger lingers at the edge of our conversations. Nonetheless, this inane joke pops into my mind whenever I am facing a sustained challenge. In such times, I find myself thinking, Once this is finished, life will get back to normal. I tell myself, I just need to get through this one thing, and then it will be smooth sailing. Everything else will fall into place.

That’s not exactly how life works.

I know this isn’t news to you. The truth is, it also isn’t news to me. And yet for some reason, it’s a lesson we have to keep learning and have to keep teaching one another. The Torah is full of moments that look like endings, but which are really continuations.

This has rung especially true to me this week as I’ve been thinking about Parshat Lech L’cha. With its famous beginning: 

וַיֹּאמֶר ה’ אֶל־אַבְרָם לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ
אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ׃
God said to Avram: Get going! Leave your homeland, your birthplace and your father’s house
and go to the land which I will show you.

It sounds as though it’s a thunderbolt! Here Avram is, minding his own business, and God says go go go. But if we look a little more carefully, if we remind ourselves that the Torah wasn’t written incrementally, parsha by parsha, but rather that it is a continuous scroll, we see something different. 

As a triennial congregation, it’s particularly easy for us to miss this because, like Bruce Wayne and Batman never being seen in the same place, the third triennial of Parshat Noach, and the first triennial of Parshat Lech L’cha are never heard in the same year. 

But if we bring ourselves into a scroll mindset, we can see the story as more continuous, less dramatic in a way.

The final few verses of Noach say that Terach (Avram’s father) takes Avram and Lot as well as Sarai, Avram’s wife, and they depart from Ur Kasdim, Avram’s birthplace, to go towards Canaan. And then, they get as far as Charan and they settle. The last line of Noach says.

וַיִּהְיוּ יְמֵי־תֶרַח חָמֵשׁ שָׁנִים וּמָאתַיִם שָׁנָה וַיָּמָת תֶּרַח בְּחָרָן׃
And Terach lived 205 years and Terach died in Charan.

What comes next is וַיֹּאמֶר ה’ אֶל־אַבְרָם לֶךְ־לְךָ …

Without a week separating them, it becomes clear that God’s grand pronouncement of Lech L’cha is not so much a grand pronouncement at all, but rather… a noodge. God is saying to Avram keep going, don’t lose your momentum. You stopped in Charan to rest, your father has died, it seems like you’re at an ending place, but there’s no such thing. 

It’s all there in the first letter of the new parsha: the magic vav—meaning and—which says: what looks like the end is so often the middle. Whatever has happened has happened, and now something else will happen.

And indeed, just a few verses later, Avram actually arrives in Canaan. That’s right, the journey that the division of parshiot makes us see as a big, dramatic, Long Term Project in fact is resolved within a fistful of verses. It isn’t anticlimactic, though, because no sooner have they arrived in the land of Canaan, and begun anticipating the eventual inheritance of that land by Avram’s descendants yet to come, when a famine takes hold in the land.

And despite his great wealth and position of privilege, Avram again picks up stakes along with his family and travels down to Egypt to wait out the famine. The matter-of-fact mention of famine in this week’s parsha hits hard. As the government shutdown grinds into its second month—with the attendant furloughs of at least half a million federal employees, and with the evaporation of SNAP benefits for many families—starvation seems anything but theoretical. As of today, over 1 million Massachusetts residents, including 277,000 school-aged children, will not receive their SNAP benefits for the duration of the government shutdown. 

Given the many hot-button issues before the public nationally and globally— from antisemitism to the fragile ceasefire in Gaza, from unrest about swirling authoritarian trends to hurricane destruction in Jamaica and Cuba, from ICE immigration raids to war in Ukraine to the whitewashing of American history to an unfurling genocide in Sudan to a contentious mayoral race in New York—it’s easy to develop a sense of fatigue and overwhelm for all that is unfolding. 

But there’s a distinction, that comes with a call to action: all of those big trends I just named are unlikely to be influenced by our actions. But here on Cape Ann, food pantries, which had already ramped up their operations in recent months, are bracing for an onslaught of need. As members of a small, diverse island community, we have no choice but to be attuned to our neighbors in need. And indeed, already there are local businesses such as the Common Crow Market that are implementing efforts to provide extra support to the Open Door Food Pantry. And here in our own TAA community, two individuals independently and unbeknownst to each other—Mara Capello and Noa Lewis—have spearheaded fund drives to support the food pantry’s important and holy work. It is not my way to talk about money on Shabbat, much less to fundraise. Let me just say that these efforts are ongoing, the need is anticipated to be acute, and we are a community of deeply caring individuals.

It’s curious to me, as I mentioned in introducing the second aliyah, that the parsha makes a point of Avram’s wealth. If he’s so wealthy, why does he even need to go down to Egypt to ride out the famine? It suggests to me that even people with an abundance of resources have limits and need to make changes when conditions worsen. Given that, how much more so for folks whose lives are already on the margins, folks who were already strapped enough to need government benefits? 

Everybody deserves to eat.

God’s prediction for Avram at the beginning of the parsha is that when he keeps going, moves on to Canaan, he will be rewarded with blessing, the most precious of which will be children and grandchildren, a line of descent that leads to this very room. And God says, וֶהְיֵה בְּרָכָה—and you shall be a blessing. The Kedushat Levi, also known as the Berdichever Rebbe, plays holy anagrams with this phrase to comment on it, noting that וֶהְיֵה—vav hey yud hey—reorders the letters of the unpronounceable representation of the name of God. The Berdichever talks about how until Abraham, there was nobody to complete the circuit of blessing that God was offering. 

מִשֶׁבַּא אַבְרָהָם וְהָיָה הִתְעוֹרְרוּת הָשֶׁפַע מִלְמַטַה
Since Avraham came, the flow [of blessing] was awakened from below

In other words, something in Avram / Avraham sparked humankind’s capacity to receive and give blessing in the earthly realm. To read the opening of this week’s parsha, spoken to Avram (later Avraham), implicates all of us as his descendents. Like Avraham, we are urged to receive God’s blessing and to be a blessing. Like Avraham, we are called to keep going, when the road ahead seems unpassable. And like Avraham, we are blessed and privileged to be in divine covenant, to listen for the voice of God and to use it as our guiding star.

Shabbat shalom!

Breishit for TAA

(Delivered October 17, 2025)

We begin again. The cycle of the year has had its way with us: we have celebrated; we have examined our deeds, confessed and atoned; we have made space for weeping and grieving; we have taken to the moonlight in our trembling sukkot; we have rejoiced with Hallel and danced with the Torah and even then made space for weeping and grieving.

We begin again.

The sense of new beginning is ripe in the air, as we absorb the astonishing news that after more than two years, the remaining living hostages who were taken on October 7 have returned to the embrace of their families. 

For much of that time, many of us were counting the days. Following the model of the extraordinary modern-day prophetess Rachel Goldberg, Hersh’s mother, we kept track and tried to keep the world accountable by publicly wearing the number of days somewhere on our garments. Many displayed a piece of masking tape on their shirts with that number; some used numbered beads on a safety pin. Some posted every day on social media how many days had passed; some programmed automated counters on their websites to show the same. However, we did it, the point was to keep the hostages ever at the front of our minds, and perhaps to spark questions and awareness for those who found it too easy to forget.

Psalm 90, the only psalm credited to Moses, teaches us:

לִמְנוֹת יָמֵינוּ כֵּן הוֹדַע וְנָבִא לְבַב חָכְמָה׃
Teach us well to number our days
that we may bring about a heart of wisdom.

Jewish tradition often turns to counting days: we count the days of the Omer as we transition from being a quavering flood of refugees—free, but just barely—into a people ready to receive the teaching that will define our lives and our history. Some women keep the practice of niddah, counting the days of our cycles, to know when it’s time to visit the mikveh. We use candles to count the days of Hanukkah as we commemorate our unlikely triumph over those who would destroy us.

Counting and counting and counting the days of the past two years, grounded us in the reality that we faced. We hoped and prayed it would help us in our search for wisdom of heart. Surely, if we kept the hostages in mind, surely if we kept reminding the world, this is happening to our people, we could bring about some kind of resolution. Surely we weren’t entirely powerless. Counting our days gave us at least the illusion that we were in it with them, that thousands of miles away, we were pulling for our hostages—and we did begin to think of them as our hostages—to be rescued, to come home. We were, of course, powerless to end the nightmare, but at least we counters kept Hersh and Kfir and Eden and Omer and Itai and Gali and Shiri and all the rest present with us. 

So it seems fitting that as we begin again, as we scroll the Torah back around to that first parsha, we start by counting.

God looks at the watery mess and says יהי אור there will be light. And separates light from darkness. There is evening, there is morning, one day. יוֹם אֶחָד. But it isn’t really counting until there’s a second. Having the context and the contrast is what gives form to our narrative.

And still, the Torah only really counts the first six days. There’s no וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר—there is evening, and there is morning—for the seventh day. The seventh day isn’t really created so much as it’s implied. It just is. And once the pattern of six and one, six and one, six and one, is set in motion, the Torah stops counting. The implication is: the cycle will continue, life will become normal. We’ll get into a routine.

And so we begin again.

The Torah doesn’t actually tell us what happens after the first Shabbat, a day for God to rest. The eighth day is not specified, at least not directly. But there’s a hint and maybe a warning in the ellipsis. We do get the teaching of Parshat Shmini, that on the eighth day the sacrifices begin. Aaron and the Kohanim take up their work. And no sooner do they start—just one chapter in—than it all goes wrong. Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, come too close, bring too much fire, take the priestly process for granted and are consumed in the very fire that animated them. 

Another eighth day comes in Parshat Emor, where it says:

שׁוֹר אוֹ־כֶשֶׂב אוֹ־עֵז כִּי יִוָּלֵד וְהָיָה שִׁבְעַת יָמִים תַּחַת אִמּוֹ
וּמִיּוֹם הַשְּׁמִינִי וָהָלְאָה יֵרָצֶה לְקָרְבַּן אִשֶּׁה לַיי׃
A newborn ox or sheep or goat remains with its mother seven days;
on the eighth day and after, it can be accepted as a fire offering to God

Another eighth day, another child separated from parent.

Although the story of Creation makes nothing explicit, pausing after the first seven days, the Torah hints darkly by these examples that the eighth day and following can be dangerous, especially to children. Returning to routine is soothing in a way, but complacency is a minefield. The lull of the everyday opens us to take the routine for granted and find ourselves consumed in the very fire that animates us.

After the elation of the high holidays, after the excitement of the hostages coming home—and perhaps a raw glimmer of hope that this brutal war might end—comes the routine, comes the everyday, comes the real work. A ceasefire is not peace, and homecoming in and of itself is not healing. 

If we look at the events of the past week and say, Right, it’s finished now, more and more children will be consumed. After our heart rates return to normal and the flush of sheer relief settles, there are things we must reckon with if we want the fragile peace to be sustained, if we want to move beyond the hateful patterns that keep repeating themselves. 

It isn’t only that Hamas must never be allowed to hold any power, although that would be a very good start. Such catastrophic failures of leadership must never happen again. The hostages themselves will need care in order to reintegrate into society. And we must come to understand and accept—in our bones—that the Palestinians exist, that they have a plausible claim to the land, that, like the Jews, they are not going anywhere. Indeed, Parshat Breishit teaches us that each and every human being is created in the precious, complicated image of God.

Breishit begins by counting days; Psalm 90 elevates the counting of days to לְבַב חָכְמָה—linking heart and mind. Matters of great importance require great attention. Teach us well to number our days: to keep trying, to keep searching. Teach us well to bring heart and wisdom to the urgent work of making peace. 

We begin.