Delivered June 21, 2025

Shabbat shalom. 

One morning this week, as I was in my kitchen making tea, I heard a sudden crash. 

I was alone in the house: Bill was at work; Gideon had just left for school. After saying some rather un-rabbinic words, I went looking for the source of the crash. In the entryway of my small house, I found that a light fixture had, for no apparent reason, shattered. There were pieces of glass on the floor, in the soil of the etrog plant, under the radiator. It was a good, solid mess. I was fine, but jangled. Since I was barefoot, I left the mess for after breakfast. Figured it would keep.

Over breakfast, I started to think, what the heck was that? I might not have said heck. But really: what makes something that’s been in place for decades—a thing that nobody has jostled or fiddled with in all that time, a thing that seems safe and secure, just part of the scenery—suddenly shatter? 

The sound of that crash lingered in my ears, as I allowed my mind to wander.

I thought of another seemingly normal morning. Peaceniks waking up on kibbutz to the sound of gunfire and shouts. Young people at the Nova Music Festival initially mistaking the booms for the beat of the music they’d come to revel in together. Folks getting ready for Simchat Torah services suddenly running for their lives. People all over Israel jolted out of their morning routines. And even now, nearly two years later, our hostages trapped underground and the Gazans trapped above ground, all finding themselves at the mercy of forces that seem to exist well beyond the capacity for mercy. Sudden crashes are their daily bread as they try to hold on until something better comes. 

One morning this week, as I was in my kitchen making tea, I heard a sudden crash. 

I thought of my friends and colleagues in Israel, of my close friend Rabbi Matthew Schultz, whom I graduated with just a couple of weeks ago. Now known as Rav Matti, he started his new job as rabbi of Kehilat Moriah in Haifa, just as the conflict with Iran started to boil over. He led his first Kabbalat Shabbat service for his community on zoom, because it was deemed unsafe to come to the synagogue. He sent me a message just after Shabbat last week: Naomi, it’s terrifying. We’re just holding our breath, not knowing what’s going to happen. 

One morning this week, as I was in my kitchen making tea, I heard a sudden crash. 

I thought of the immigrants—sojourners for generations—raising children and worshipping with their neighbors and paying their taxes. People who have been pursuing the proper steps to gain US citizenship. Suddenly arrested, their hands zip-tied together in front of their children, and detained as they make their way out of a naturalization hearing. 

One morning this week, as I was in my kitchen making tea, I heard a sudden crash. 

I thought of the brick through the window at the Butcherie, the kosher grocery my friends and I have shopped at for years. The brick—thankfully thrown while the store was empty—said, “Free Palestine” on it. This antisemitic attack is only the latest symptom in a flareup of Jew hatred that’s got our community on edge.

Some years ago, I had an acting teacher who used an unforgettable metaphor to articulate the structural arc of a scene: When you begin the scene, everything is going along normally. The rhythm and relationships—the resting heart rate of the piece—get laid down, like a groove for improvisation. The scene becomes a drama when something happens that changes the contours of the norm that’s just been established. This is what sets the plot in motion, what engages the audience and the actors in a relationship of meaning. My teacher called this moment of spark the proverbial brick through the window. 

That’s how our sixth aliyah is reading to me today. In prior aliyot, the scene is set: with commandments for offerings, detailed instruction for the day to day work of the Mishkan and the Priestly functions that drive it. What to do in response to communal and individual mistakes in these rituals. What to do in cases of overreach.

And then comes the story of the man gathering firewood on Shabbat who meets with a horrific communal punishment commanded directly from God. The passage is unsettling at best, and our commentators are at pains to soften its sharp edges. The Bechor Shor points out that while many of the מצוות are applicable only once the Israelites reach the promised land, the laws of Shabbat are universal. Perhaps, therefore, such a punishment was necessary, in order to stress the importance of keeping an exacting Shabbat observance. Rashi’s comment supports this reading, noting that according to scripture, the Israelites’ adherence to Shabbat מצוות was already slipping, as of the second Shabbat. In any case, the parable of the wood-gatherer is the crash, the brick through the window that says God means business. 

It may be hard to imagine, particularly in this time of too many bricks through windows, but a crash isn’t uniformly, permanently bad. Rabbi Benay Lappe, the founder of Svara, a Traditionally Radical Yeshiva, has a whole Crash Theory. She teaches that what looks like disaster can be a turning point. The classic example she cites is the period after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans. This was the worst calamity the Jews had faced to date, and Jewish life might have ended there. Yet some chose to see that catastrophe as an invitation to go back to the tradition, preserve what was most important in it, and adapt it to the new, unwelcome circumstances. Instead of folding, through the creativity and determination of a small cadre of learned scholars, Judaism was saved as the Rabbinic period sprang to life. Rebbe Yochanan ben Zakai got himself smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin to establish the academy at Yavneh, and the Sages were off and running to shape something new. 

Similarly, in today’s Torah reading, after the wood-gatherer meets his awful fate, scripture goes back to basics. Through articulating the teaching of the tzitzit, we return to the מצוות, reorient ourselves to what God demands of us. The Torah provides us with something tangible, fringes on our garments, glinted with bright blue, to draw us like a mantra back to our holy obligations. 

There are many ways in which our world today feels like it’s crashing: escalating war in the Middle East, political chaos in the US, a fearsome rise in antisemitism that, between Beverly in January and Brookline this past week, feels dangerously close to home. And all that is on top of our own individual private sorrows: the ailing relative, the mental health struggles, the recent loss. We recommit ourselves to tradition—even when it feels like our Shabbat candles and our Torah learning and our daily prayers for peace have no effect whatsoever. Doing so connects us with one another across time and space, and aligns us with a sense of something larger than ourselves. 

When considered in conjunction with the opening of the parsha—the story of the scouts and their crisis of faith—the teaching of the tzitzit reads like the answer to the question that Parshat Sh’lach L’cha poses. What do we do when our confidence is shaken, when the brick through the window destabilizes everything we think we understand about ourselves? Come back. Come home. 

Shabbat shalom.