(Delivered May 24, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again. The Torah is right on time. On this singular day—the one and only day before my one and only ordination—our triennial reading concerns itself with the practice of dedication to the Temple. It could hardly be more fitting to talk about consecration and vows and the certainty underneath them. 

But by now, you know me well enough to know that I think certainty is, at best, overrated. I like the complication, the nuance, the eternal question, “What else does it mean?” And part of dedicating oneself to leadership lies in being willing to sit with unanswerable questions and painful truths. I will get to both of these in this drasha, which I’d like to dedicate to the memories of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgram, the two young people who were murdered in DC this week at an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. 

So, as I was studying this week, I happened upon a teaching from Rabbi David Silber, which inspired me to pause over this challenging and ambiguous verse from the final aliyah. Chapter 27, verse 29 reads:

כָּל־חֵרֶם אֲשֶׁר יָחֳרַם מִן־הָאָדָם לֹא יִפָּדֶה מוֹת יוּמָת׃
All who have been proscribed cannot be redeemed;
they must surely die.

Proscribed and redeemed are both rather slippery terms, making the verse a minefield—or maybe a treasure chest—of potential interpretations. Let’s look at the word חֵרֶם—which takes on a variety of meanings throughout Jewish literature and thought, depending on the setting and the interpreter. It can mean dedicated, set aside, utterly destroyed, banned, or proscribed. Also, curiously, it can mean a net, like for fishing.

Rashi reads חֵרֶם in this verse to mean a person who has been sentenced to death: such a person cannot be redeemed through payment. Rather, their fate is already sealed, they must surely die. But, reading metaphorically, I can easily imagine our pasuk—our verse—to say that anything that is dedicated to God can’t be redeemed. Once we’ve chosen to vow something for the greater good, in the service of God, we can’t bargain our way out of it. A commitment is a commitment.

Several centuries before Rashi, in the Rabbinic literature, חֵרֶם refers to the status of having been forced out of the community. The Talmud tells the heartbreaking story of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hurkanos, who was so convinced of his own rightness and so unwilling to admit when he was outvoted, that he was placed in חֵרֶם and expelled from the Beit Midrash. The intellectual life of his colleagues continued without him, while he languished in isolation and defeat. 

His exile was long and painful. Eventually, as Rabbi Eliezer grew weak with illness and his death approached, his former colleagues softened, and they came to pay tribute to this formidable scholar. As Rabbi Eliezer wept for all the teaching he never got to do, the visitors asked him to teach them all he could, in the time that remained. He taught and taught and taught, many fine points of Levitical law, but of course the end always comes. His last words were words of teaching, and just as he died, the חֵרֶם was lifted.

For the Sages of the Rabbinic age, חֵרֶם was a fate worse than death. A person placed in חֵרֶם belonged to a caste of unredeemables, people who are excluded from learning and from social interaction. They become non-persons, stripped of their humanity.

Yet another usage of חֵרֶם is what it means in wartime, in which context it refers to military siege. The Book of Joshua, for example, teaches about the Battle of Jericho as an instance of חֵרֶם. This was an all-out war, which could only end in utter destruction. 

Here’s the thing, though. The Ramban on our verse from the parsha points in a very different direction, citing Shmuel Alef, the First Book of Samuel, which tells of a time when Saul had ordered that his soldiers would not eat, in preparation for battle. The troops came upon a honeycomb, and Saul’s son, Jonathan, unaware of the orders, ate some of the honey that had overflowed the comb. While Saul intended to carry out the punishment for breaking the חֵרֶם, by putting his own son to death, the other soldiers spoke up for Jonathan. Saul tempered justice with mercy, and he relented. Ramban cites this as a complication to Rashi’s more straightforward reading of the verse. Reading with deeper nuance, Ramban is pointing out that even חֵרֶם can be reversible. Even the harshest decree can be subdued.

These two contrasting descriptions of the military use of חֵרֶם feel all too relevant to us in the current day. The echoes are too loud to ignore, and I can’t help but think how the war in Gaza—a war I initially supported with a heavy but committed heart—seems to have taken a dark turn in recent weeks. It pains me to say this, but many authorities believe the Israeli government’s blockade of humanitarian assistance appears to be leading to widespread starvation of innocent people in Gaza. It’s important to note that not everybody agrees on this, and the fog of war makes it hard for even the most well-meaning and well-informed people to discern the truth. Even so, I fear the pain of our losses has been so great that it has caused us to embroil ourselves in an unwinnable war. I am no military strategist and speak only from the reflections of my own conscience, but it sometimes feels to me that continuing on the road we are on carries the risk of humanitarian, military, societal, and moral catastrophe.

I want to say this clearly: you can be Zionist (as I am), you can be pro-Israel (as I am), you can reject the rhetoric about Israeli oppression and other mindless generalizations (as I do), and you can still think that starvation as a tactic of war is immoral. The fact that Hamas has been engaging in the same sort of tactics should give us pause. The Torah teaches us to apply our ethics even in wartime. 

There are moments—more and more all the time—when I question whether this war is still serving to make Israelis safer, or whether it is moving us toward bringing the hostages home. The level of aggression that made sense in October of 2023 does not, to me, make sense in May of 2025. Just as the Torah eased its stance on חֵרֶם, from the Book of Leviticus to the Book of Samuel, so too, must we at least be prepared, when faced with new information and new circumstances, to question our own certainty. 

Indeed, the two young Israeli diplomats who were gunned down in DC just a few days ago, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Lynn Milgram, were involved in the work of peace. The event at which the shooting took place was dedicated to cooperative, cross-cultural diplomacy in the service of solving humanitarian crises throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It adds heartbreak to heartbreak that we lost people who had been engaged in this holy work.

Remember that outlying definition of חֵרֶם—the mesh of a net? Sometimes we can’t catch everything; there are always loose threads and ambiguities—things we wish were more neatly tied together. Our task as Jews, as citizens, and as humans is to hold the pieces with open hands, to continually ask ourselves, “What else might it mean?” We live in complex times, and integrity demands this of us. The one thing I’m certain of is that certainty is temporary.  

During his period of חֵרֶם, Rabbi Eliezer’s attitude tempered over time. One of the sayings attributed to him in Pirkei Avot, which is inscribed on his memorial stone in Tiverias, is:

יְהִי כְבוֹד חֲבֵרְךָ חָבִיב עָלֶיךָ כְּשֶׁלָּךְ
Let the dignity of your friend be as dear to you as your own.

There is much hard work ahead, and no doubt devastating heartbreaks to come. I pray that we can continue striving to embrace the ethical standards that make us who we are as a people. Torah teaches us that circumstances alter cases, that few things are exactly all one way, and that sometimes the strongest thing to do is to soften a little.

Shabbat shalom! May the memories of Yaron and Sarah be a blessing and an inspiration.