(Delivered October 24, 2026)
Whenever I meet somebody new and they find out that I’m a rabbi and then they find out that I’ve only been a rabbi for a year or so, they always come to the same question. When did you realize you wanted to be a Rabbi?
And I hum and I haw and I mumble. It’s hard to explain. And then sometimes if I’m feeling very trusting, I launch into an overly long story that spares no detail.
But really, I should just say, I realized it when I noticed how often I was asking myself the question, “What does it mean to be a Jew?”
This is a question I have asked myself in various ways and in various contexts for a good long time. I asked it when I was an undergraduate and attempting to go to Hillel events, and feeling so alienated, and so unqualified to be there that I would often leave before I even went in. Or when I realized what was happening on the morning of September 11, and something made me want to go to a synagogue. Or when my kids were little and I was searching for ways to provide them with strong Jewish connections. Or when I was finding my way as an adult beginner and trying to understand how I could access the learning I wanted without knowing Hebrew and without having grown up in a thickly Jewish environment. Or when, after the vigil on Boston Common in response to the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, I didn’t want to leave the Common. I longed to be with my people, even in a moment of pain and fear. Perhaps especially in a moment of pain and fear.
All these moments and countless more, I was wondering, What does it mean to be a Jew? What are the inheritances and obligations it comes with? And how do I make myself worthy of them?
Our Torah reading this week, from Parshat Lech Lecha, suggests the question of what it means to be a Jew, through the lens of Avraham Avinu, Abraham our Ancestor—here still called Avram.
In Breishit chapter 14 verse 13, a pasuk that seems mainly about moving the plot along and setting up the episode of Sdom and Amora—Sodom and Gomorrah, there is a passing mention of a refugee, who comes to speak to Avram haIvri. Abram the Ivri.
The word is unprecedented in the Torah, and is left undefined. The context doesn’t offer any solid information. Just the sort of grey ambiguity that invites questions.
The Brown-Driver-Briggs Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, my trusty sacred companion through rabbinical school and to this day, teaches that the word Ivri can mean, “one from beyond,” or, “Hebrew.”
Many regard this pasuk as marking the beginning of the concept of Jewish identity. Avram is—already—one from beyond, a traveller from Ur Kasdim who heard a divine voice telling him, Go, go! And the divine voice he heard spoke Hebrew.
Digging deeper in my trusty dictionary, we see that the root letters that make up the word עִבְרִי—ayin bet resh—have a range of meanings, each of which adds texture to the question of what it is to be עִבְרִי.
This root can mean: to cross over, to transgress, to emigrate, to be alienated. All these apply easily—some perhaps too easily—to being a Jew. This early description of Avram as עִבְרִי offers us a sketch, then, of what it means to be a Jew. Not a fully painted picture, but a sketch, and this is probably on purpose.
The portrait that emerges—a squiggle here, a line there—is of fluidity, movement, boundary-crossing, difference. Rather than having a fixed identity, location, or stance, the עִבְרִי dwells in the grey, in the in-between. In Breishit Rabbah, a work of Midrashic literature written between 300 and 500 CE, while the Sages are discussing the meaning of עִבְרִי, Rabbi Yehuda says of Avram:
כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ מֵעֵבֶר אֶחָד וְהוּא מֵעֵבֶר אֶחָד
The whole entire world is on one side, and he is on the other side.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik pulls the thread, writing, “Avraham took the vision of the Creator, of a new world order and a new morality, and thus separated himself from the rest of the world ideologically.” In the dawning of monotheistic thought, Avram found himself alone in his perspective, hearing a singularity in God’s voice that nobody else could hear yet. Avram the עִבְרִי, was an explorer who became an iconoclast, and with his footsteps he made the path that we all travel.
Sforno suggests the iconoclast wasn’t alone. Rather, the reason the refugee came to find Avram the עִבְרִי to warn him of Lot’s kidnapping was not that he knew they were related, but rather:
יָדַע שֶׁהָיָה מַחֲזִיק בְּדֵעוֹת עֵבֶר כָּמוֹהוּ
He knew that he (Lot) held dissenting views like him (Avram)
Notice the same root עֵבֶר in the phrase I’ve translated as dissenting views—דֵעוֹת עֵבֶר driving at the importance of argumentation and intellectual searching. Sforno’s comment could mean that Lot shares Avram’s burgeoning monotheism. It could also mean he holds yet another view.
The picture that begins to emerge through these comments and riffs on the word עִבְרִי is one of curiosity, imagination, intellectual daring, willingness to engage with what seems off limits.
Definitionally, being an עִבְרִי invites us—or even demands of us—that we look at the grey, embrace the difficult, locate ourselves in the impermanent, and, like Avraham Avinu, keep moving on.
This dwelling in the complication is always on my mind. This week, alongside Israeli and US elections and various simmering-to-boiling situations around the globe, I’ve had my eyes on the controversy surrounding my friend Rabbi Nikki Golomb, who was hired and fired from Emory Hillel in the space of a month, possibly because of her fiance’s politics, possibly because of her own—depending on whose narrative you hold to be true. It could be about protecting the olive harvest from rampaging extremist settlers. It could be about questioning the validity of the Israeli government. It could be about full-out anti-Zionism. It’s actually hard to know without careful communication.
In any case, I have serious questions about the practice of trying to protect Jewish college students from hard conversations by curating the influences around them. Given the reality that many young Jews are wrestling with Zionism, and are surrounded on campus by people who approach the issue with their fists already up, might there be wisdom in opening the conversation (with all its complexity) rather than closing it? Having the people in charge tell students they’re not allowed to think what they think, or even to think what they think they think, does not feel like a good investment in כְּלַל יִשְׂרָאֵל—Jewish unity—at a moment when we desperately need it. What would it look like if people on all sides of the conflict made more of an effort to move toward the grey, to become true עִבְרִיִים, willing to interrogate the boundaries of their beliefs with courage and open hearts? What would it look like if we were able to question what we’ve always been taught and listen for the divine voice to guide us?
I am the first to say that some of the beliefs Nikki is suspected of holding are not a match with mine. And yet, I know her to be a person of deep integrity, one capable of deep and empathic listening. These confusing and inconvenient facts actually raise the stakes and illustrate my point. There is always the possibility that she has perceived something that I haven’t, and vice versa. It’s worth summoning the courage to cross over, if only to listen and learn. To me, this is the lesson of אַבְרָם הָעִבְרִי—that we must never be so committed to what we already think that we fail to listen to higher voices pointing us to larger principles. Holding complexity with courage and generosity, moving beyond the familiar—while still being willing to double back to swoop up a kinsman in trouble—this is what it means to be a Jew. May we face the many conflicts in our world with that courage and generosity, and with that commitment to one another, as we follow in the footsteps of Avraham Avinu wherever they may lead.
