(Delivered July 27, 2024)

Shabbat shalom!

I remember when the boychiks were little and they would occasionally complain to me: Ima, I’m bored. And my reply would always be [shrug] OK. I think there’s something about the impulse to seek what’s new and exciting, that can fool us into thinking that the steadiness of the ordinary is of a lesser value. Yet I’m here today to sing the praises of boredom, to make the pitch for what lies beneath the mundane. 

This year we got to read a passage that probably sounded familiar, since we hear it several times a year at Rosh Hodesh. And actually, it’s that very familiarity I want us to consider a little bit. The last two aliyot today contain, as we said before, detailed descriptions of certain of the korbanot, the animal offerings that were at the center of the Temple culture prior to the destruction. To the casual reader, those daily offerings—the temidin—can be repetitive. Even—dare I say it?—boring. It’s tempting to skate over these parts when they come up in our study of Torah, as if they’re interchangeable and there’s nothing to be found in them. Yet, as always, if we slow down over the text, we can find and ask and feel all kinds of things that might not have been obvious at first glance. 

So what does this seemingly repetitive, semi-boring passage have to teach us? 

As I slowed down over the korbanot in Pinchas this year, the first thing that spoke to me, and spoke quite loudly, was its position in the parsha. Our Sages have taught that smichut parshiot—the juxtaposition of two different parts of a text—is purposeful and meaningful. That is to say, there is substance to be derived from the liminal space between sections. Like notes and prayers tucked into the cracks between the building blocks of the kotel, the in-between parts of a structure are actually part of the structure.

Coming as it does immediately following the section concerning Moses’s succession plan, and Joshua’s becoming the new leader and spokesperson of the Israelite community, the passage describing the daily practices of the Temple seems to me to be offering a subtle but important teaching. The advice—millennia before Change Management was a field—is that when we are in the midst of a leadership transition or, more broadly, in the throes of any sort of major disruption, steady practices offer a way of grounding ourselves and absorbing the change. 

Although it’s perhaps slightly less consequential than what’s described in the Torah, I can imagine that having a new rabbi, even one you basically feel good about, also involves some sense of destabilization. These first weeks, we are learning each other’s tunes, getting acquainted with one another’s customs, and finding our way, I hope, into each other’s hearts. We do this, in part, through the temidin of congregational life: keeping steady with our Shabbat practices, studying Torah, volunteering, coming to Sunday service, keeping up with what’s still the same while integrating what’s new. Having these spiritual habits at the core of what we do, helps us grow closer and knit our worlds together. This is a comfort in a time when it may feel like things are coming apart. With our hostages still in captivity and war raging in the Holy Land, and with political tensions at a high pitch here at home, we need to be able to lean on the temidin of life, to invest in our sense of community and wholeness.

As you probably know, on Monday night we entered into the period of the Three Weeks leading up to Tishaa b’Av, when we will commemorate the very destruction I mentioned earlier. In the book This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared, Rabbi Alan Lew articulates the cycle from Tishaa b’Av through Simchat Torah as an extended metaphor of ruin and return. In Lew’s framework, the grief of Tishaa b’Av carries us into the reflective work that culminates in the High Holidays. If you imagine teshuvah as a Temple itself, we have entered its gates and are in the courtyard. We have a ways to go to get to the heart of it, but we are beginning to tune into the frequency, of our own inner work. 

In my exploration of Parshat Pinchas, I found a Hasidic teaching about the temidin that links them to the Three Weeks and the long march to Yom Kippur. It comes from Rabbi Binyamin ben Aharon of Zalocze, whose book Torei Zahav recasts the jewel of the korbanot in an entirely different setting. Rav Binyamin cites a teaching he received from another hasid, Itzik Drobyczer, who made a fascinating linguistic leap to turn the temidin into a moral lesson about anger and forgiveness. Remember the phrase כְּבָשִׂים בְּנֵי־שָׁנָה—yearling lambs? Rav Itzik takes כְּבַשִים and recasts the root letters [chaf vet sin] to get the word כְּבֻשִׁים—things that are suppressed. From this connection, he reimagines the korbanot not as burnt offerings but rather as suppressed resentments and vendettas that, instead of being כְּבֻשׁ—held in check—until Yom Kippur, are offered up to God on a daily basis, through the ritual of the korbanot. Rav Itzik teaches that a person should say every night, paraphrasing a line from Megillah 28a, “May God forgive anyone who has harmed me.” This, then, becomes the רֵיחַ נִיחֹחַ לַיי. The sweet scent that gives God so much pleasure is not a physical smell per se, but the joy of seeing humans do the work of peace. 

So. Two different takes on the temidin: perhaps they are guardrails on the road of life, holding us secure when the path curves. Or perhaps they are an invitation to a daily discharge of hard emotion, a chance to offer up to God what we cannot ourselves express or redress.

Unsurprisingly, I think it’s both. Unsurprisingly, I think the meta lesson is not to take anything for granted, even the seemingly boring passages in the Torah. 

Truth is, the very name, temidin, is a teaching, for tamid carries two ways of thinking about the passage of time. Tamid can mean daily, as in the things that happen every day. That’s what these offerings are, the habitual actions that make up the structure of life. The temidin of modern life might be: brushing our teeth, saying good morning and good night to the people we live with, — if we’re lucky, studying Torah. I’m sure you can think of many more. But remember I said tamid carries two ways of thinking about the passage of time. Here’s where it gets interesting: tamid also means constant and uninterrupted. Think of the words from the first blessing after the Barchu:

רוֹמְמֵי שַׁדַּי תָּמִיד מְסַפְּרִים כְּבוֹד־אֵל וּקְדֻשָּׁתוֹ

The uplifters of Shaddai constantly recount the glory of Adonai and God’s holiness 

Tamid points us to a dual mode of experience: both habitually renewing and constant. Now and always. Particle and wave.

The meta-lesson is that every day, the everyday, is magical, and comes from God. Even when things are barely holding together, even when change and disruption threaten to engulf us, there is tamid: the constancy and the commonplace, the poetic and the prosaic, held and offered by 

הַמְחַדֵּשׁ בְּטוּבוֹ בְּכָל־יוֹם תָּמִיד מַעֲשֵׂה בְרֵאשִׁית

The One who, in goodness, constantly renews the works of creation,each and every day.

(Delivered July 20, 2024)

Psssst! Have you heard the one about the talking donkey?

Parshat Balak invites us into a weird and wacky world, a place where a nervous king can hire an itinerant mystical sorcerer to lay a curse on an entire people; a place where that itinerant mystical sorcerer might or might not be a prophet; a place where divine messengers appear as roadblocks and donkeys talk. 

So far it sounds like Fantasy-World, almost Disney-fied, maybe even a little silly. A topsy-turvy, funhouse mirror kind of parsha that might lend itself to a cute and pithy lesson. When we think of it this way, it’s tempting to underestimate its theological and moral import, but as any follower of the Marx Brothers or Sarah Silverman can tell you, just because something is funny doesn’t mean it isn’t serious.

Underneath the trappings of magical realism—with the emphasis on the magical part—there are questions of prejudice, free will vs. divine intervention, and insight coming in its own sweet time from the most unlikely places. What speaks to me the most this year, though, amidst high feeling about Israel and Gaza with ever-fresh wounds, and a contentious and downright bizarre election season, is the way that the character of Bil’am occupies a liminal space between cultures, and how he navigates it in this parsha—haltingly and full of dread and confusion—toward an abiding statement of peace. 

For although Bil’am is not an Israelite, when he finds himself in places of moral confusion in this parsha—which is often—he relies on the Israelite God to help him make sense of his situation. At the very beginning of the parsha when King Balak’s messengers approach Bil’am to hire him to curse the Israelites, I think his gut instinct is that he shouldn’t go, but perhaps he’s flattered by the attention. In any case, he stalls for time, saying to them: 

לִינוּ פֹה הַלַּיְלָה וַהֲשִׁבֹתִי אֶתְכֶם דָּבָר כַּאֲשֶׁר יְדַבֵּר יי אֵלָי

Stay here tonight, and I will answer you with whatever Adonai says to me

It’s not only that Bil’am seeks divine counsel but that he seeks it seemingly across cultural boundaries. Indeed, Adonai answers him back, more than once. It seems that this outsider has not just access but also a deep loyalty to God, even going so far as to later use the phrase Adonai Elohai: Adonai my God. It raises the question not only of how and why Bil’am is so connected to the Israelite God but why Balak would think to engage someone “under the influence of Adonai,” so to say, to curse Adonai’s chosen people. Surely hiring someone who hated the Israelites would have made more sense. 

Yet Bil’am is, at least in this parsha, positively linked with the Israelite God, such that some even call him a prophet. But it’s complicated. Because he is tempted by the riches and recognition that Balak’s representative dignitaries try to entice him with, he agrees to go on this unholy errand. But he goes reluctantly, with the understanding that he can only utter the words that Adonai feeds him. 

It’s interesting to me that our tradition gives us a non-Jewish character with such a strong connection to the Jewish God. While it’s unfashionable to admire Bil’am—especially knowing that a few chapters on, he will get blamed for Israelite heresy and idolatry—I can’t help seeing him in this moment as something of a role model. Here is a person who becomes a kind of fellow-traveler, a person who is not himself “one of us” but who is nonetheless familiar with Israelite culture and theology, and whose conscience leads him, despite his best worst intentions, to reflect for himself and bless where he was expected to curse.

This capacity for reflection surfaces in the scene with the donkey as well. When God finally grants Bil’am’s donkey the power of speech, she scolds Bil’am: 

מֶה־עָשִׂיתִי לְךָ כִּי הִכִּיתַנִי זֶה שָׁלֹשׁ רְגָלִים

What have I done to you, that you thrash me these three times? 

And when he doubles down on berating her, she says essentially: you’ve known me all these years. Have I ever done anything like this? 

Bil’am, to his credit, says, No. Rather than continue to antagonize the animal, he pauses and allows himself to admit he was wrong. And at that moment, 

וַיְגַל יי אֶת־עֵינֵי בִלְעָם וַיַּרְא אֶת־מַלְאַךְ יי

God uncovered Bil’am’s eyes and he saw the divine messenger

Bil’am’s humility here—and the ensuing divine insight—are a powerful lesson for us about what can happen when we embrace the vulnerability of admitting the possibility that we could be wrong.

The relevance to today couldn’t be more plain. In a world where the sharper and more strident the opinion, the more attention it gets; there seems to be little reward for subtlety and nuance. That very dynamic, abetted by social forces like isolation, technology, and pandemic, has led us to a place of echo chambers and shouting into the abyss, of relationships in disrepair because we decide we can’t talk to people who think like that. The illusion of certainty is buttressed by a constant bombardment of cultural messages curated just for us, that allows us to think that people like us are paragons of virtue and correctness, while people like them are unredeemably misguided monsters, mere caricatures of humanity. 

The lure of certainty, the mirage of an airtight argument, makes us soft-headed and hard-hearted. We surrender the intellectual honesty of complex engagement, in favor of slogans and bumper stickers. And we give up on people whose orientation to the world leads them to different conclusions than our own, determining that they are too far gone, too brainwashed to be worth talking to.

But today I’d like to make the case for listening more carefully, reflecting more deeply, and earnestly seeking the truth, even when it means, like Bil’am, admitting we’re wrong, even when it means, like Bil’am, withholding judgment until we can discern what God wants of us. 

I’d like to suggest that we make it a point to resist the idolatry of easy answers and invest our energy instead in learning more, and in trusting in the good will of others. Admittedly, it’s not true of everybody, all the time, and unprovoked attacks are not an indication of good will. Still, most of us, most of the time are decent people, created in the divine image, who are at least worthy of a smile or a conversation. We won’t always agree—and we shouldn’t have to—but there is no harm in considered, respectful disagreement. 

Let’s take the best of Bil’am by teaching ourselves to listen for the highest moral authority even if it means reconsidering what we thought was incontrovertible; by pulling back from the impulse to senseless violence; and by imagining the possibility of looking at those we are supposed to hate and saying: 

מַה־טֹּבוּ 

How beautiful!

Shabbat shalom!

(Delivered July 13, 2024)

Shabbat shalom! 

There’s a phrase that people often use in times of sorrow or challenge. Perhaps you’ve heard it yourself, or even said it. “God never gives us more than we can handle.” 

I hate that phrase.

Because when I’m feeling grief-stricken or brokenhearted, when it seems like all is lost, the least helpful thing is the idea that God has this particular challenge in mind for me, and it’s all just some kind of sadistic vote of confidence in my capacity to handle hard things. Thanks a lot. The idea that God never gives us more than we can handle bothers me, because it suggests a theology in which God is both individually emotionally involved in people’s lives AND sometimes uses that emotional involvement in manipulative ways.

As I studied the parsha this week, I found myself coming back to that smarmy phrase quite a bit. Looking at the way this parsha plays out for Moses, I kept thinking, Poor guy. He really deserves a break.

Think of it: two weeks ago was the incident with the scouts, in which ten of the twelve folks he sent to scout the Promised Land came back discouraged and without faith, saying this is too hard, we can’t settle this land. 

Dayeinu—that would have been enough to cause Moses immense frustration. And then came Parshat Korach from last week, in which Moses and the Israelites had to deal with rebellions that cost many lives and created a huge amount of trauma. Even though it all turned out correctly, and the rebels were defeated, that good outcome carried a price. Watching the earth open up and swallow Korach’s gang must have made a strong and hard impression on all of the Israelites. But for Moses and Aaron especially, it must have reawakened the trauma of the deaths of Nadav and Avihu from Parshat Shemini. Plus there was a plague in last week’s parsha. 

Then this week, in the fifth aliyah of Chukat, when the Israelites have set out into the Wilderness of Tzin and settled at Kadesh, Miriam dies. Suddenly, the water supply is gone, and the Israelites are once again in a panic—this time not so much from their sense of entitlement or weariness for how hard it is to be moving toward a goal that they didn’t entirely choose and don’t understand and can’t picture, and which they won’t actually get to enjoy because of their behavior in Shelach L’cha. 

This panic is actually life or death. They are wandering in the wilderness—in the desert!—and there is no water. When they go to Moses to complain, it’s with good reason, but it still probably sounds to him like more ungrateful kvetching from this fractious people he’s been reluctantly called to lead.

So Moses is already pretty wound up when he goes to God to ask (again) what to do about the water problem. God gives fairly clear instructions: Take your staff and gather the community, you and Aaron, 

וְדִבַּרְתֶּם אֶל־הַסֶּלַע לְעֵינֵיהֶם וְנָתַן מֵימָיו וְהוֹצֵאתָ לָהֶם מַיִם מִן־הַסֶּלַע 

And speak to the rock in sight of the community, and it will yield its water, 
and you will bring out water for them from the rock.

And this is where Moses starts to lose it, where the adage that God never gives us more than we can handle is exposed as untenable. This—the loss of his sister, the community tensions he is constantly managing, the horrific memories of the loss of his two nephews—this actually is more than he can handle. And instead of following instruction and coaxing the rock to give water, he scolds the gathered Israelites, 

שִׁמְעוּ־נָא הַמֹּרִים הֲמִן־הַסֶּלַע הַזֶּה נוֹצִיא לָכֶם מָיִם׃

Listen, you rebels! Can we get water for you out of this rock?!

And then Moses lifts his hand and hits the rock with his staff. Twice. 

Whereas God had told him that words would draw out the rock’s water, Moses was past his breaking point and he both defied the practical instruction about what to do and demonstrated by his words that he didn’t even believe in God’s instructions.

Moses had absorbed all he could absorb, and he snapped. It’s painful to watch him decompensate, this person who has overcome his own limitations and hesitations to become a truly capable leader. And yet if we look at the circumstances, it adds up. It seems God really did give him more than he could handle. 

As someone pointed out in Torah Study on Thursday, this task of leading the Israelites into the Promised Land, a task that he didn’t even want in the first place, should have been mostly finished by now. But because of the incident with the scouts, this two-year gig turned into a forty-year one and it’s already determined he won’t get the reward. To me, it’s amazing he continued to lead given all this. Even before striking the rock, he already knew from Shelach L’cha that he was part of דוֹר הָמִדְבַּר—the Wilderness Generation, none of whom would enter the land, save Joshua and Caleb.

In the text, Miriam’s death and burial together get only half a verse; it’s almost cursory, kind of seems like an afterthought that it was included at all. Immediately after her death and burial is when the water crisis arises, leading the Rabbis of the Midrash to posit that Miriam had her own private, portable well, which the Israelites lost access to after her death. But this quick chain of events also means that Moses did not have any time or space to mourn his sister, to integrate the loss of her physical presence into his being. 

Miriam’s importance to Moses—and, not for nothing, to us—is hard to overstate. When their mother gave Moses up as a baby under the sharp Egyptian order to murder all male Jewish babies, it was Miriam who watched after him and bravely approached Pharaoh’s daughter to offer to find her a nursemaid for the baby she drew out of the Nile—a nursemaid who of course turned out to be his own mother. The point is, from the beginning, Miriam was looking out for Moses’s needs in ways that had far-reaching consequences. If Moses had not had those extra borrowed years with his own mother, in his own Israelite culture, he might not have known who he was…and without that identity formation, all that followed—his rage resulting in the death of the Egyptian taskmaster, his being chosen by God to lead the Israelites to freedom, and so on—might not have occurred. 

So Moses having to go into crisis mode right after this foundational loss? Well, it’s understandable why it was so hard for him and why the pressure built up the way it did. 

By contrast, when Aaron dies shortly thereafter, Moses has prior notice directly from God that loss is imminent. And when it does happen, he has both time to absorb the loss and company with whom to absorb it. In chapter 20, verse 29, we read: 

וַיִּבְכּוּ אֶת־אַהֲרֹן שְׁלֹשִׁים יוֹם כֹּל בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל

The entire House of Israel mourned Aaron for 30 days.

Later still, we get a glimpse of what Moses is really made of—again, just a half of a verse. In this passage, which we don’t read this year, the Israelites rear up again with complaints and God sends fiery snakes to punish them. In chapter 21, verse 7, the people come to Moses to ask him to intervene, and even after everything that has happened, 

וַיִּתְפַּלֵּל מֹשֶׁה בְּעַד הָעָם

And Moses prayed on behalf of the people. 

This person who has been through the wringer and who would’ve had every right to give up on the Israelites still somehow manages to find enough compassion for this unruly bunch, to lend his voice to their plight. Looking at Moses’s actions from a wider angle makes me think a little differently about the notion of God only giving us what we can handle. Although Moses lost his composure spectacularly in the incident with the rock, with time he managed to right himself and regain the dignity and sense of responsibility that we expect of him. It turns out, he did handle all of the troubles that came his way, and eventually composted them into even more profound leadership. May we all meet our hardest moments with such fortitude and overcome our most shameful ones with such dignity.

Shabbat shalom!

(Delivered July 6, 2024)

Shabbat shalom & Hodesh tov! 

In case you hadn’t noticed, this is my first Shabbat as the official settled rabbi of TAA. I am uncharacteristically resorting to understatement when I say I am very happy to be here.

Being as I’m stepping into a new and bigger role, I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership. Luckily for me, Parshat Korach is also engaged in that question. Unluckily for me, Parshat Korach is not what you’d call unproblematic when it comes to leadership lessons. With four separate rebellions brewing, all of them connected to the title character—whom the Bible scholar Jacob Milgrom calls the arch-conspirator—the picture is muddy at best. Instead of giving us easy answers, Parshat Korach is inviting us to reflect on the big questions around leadership: Who gets to be a leader? Where does power actually come from? How does the leader’s intrinsic motivation play out? What is the role of followers in creating or ratifying leadership? 

Under the triennial system, we don’t read the opening of the parsha this year, so you’ll just have to believe me when I tell you it’s a whopper, a passage that takes what we think we know about leadership—and about the Israelites, and about God, and about basic right and wrong—and looks at it as if through a distorted fish-eye lens. 

The setup is this: Korach, a great-great-grandson of Jacob our Forefather, along with a pretty strong sampling of supposedly reputable Israelite men from good families, confronts Moses in rebellion. Korach says to Moses and Aaron:

 רַב־לָכֶם כִּי כׇל־הָעֵדָה כֻּלָּם קְדֹשִׁים וּבְתוֹכָם יי וּמַדּוּעַ תִּתְנַשְּׂאוּ עַל־קְהַל יי׃

Too much is yours! For the whole congregation—all of them—are holy, and God is within them. Why do you lift yourselves up over God’s community?

On the surface, this is a good argument. Korach’s message reaches back to Parshat Yitro, and the instruction to become מַמְלֶכֶת כֹּהֲנִים וְגוֹי קָדוֹשׁ—a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. And in a happy coincidence considering the secular holiday we just celebrated this week, it also reaches forward to the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”

But as you know from the second aliyah, it doesn’t go well for Korach. Rather than being covered with accolades for his progressive thinking, Korach meets a terrible end as the ground opens up and swallows him and his fellow rebels entirely. 

Why does a person who is saying all the right things meet such a terrible fate? It’s hard to fathom. The Rabbis suggest that Korach was motivated by ego and resentment. Aggrieved that Moses and Aaron—as leader and high priest respectively—had more stature and power than he did, Korach saw himself as the rightful third in command on account of his father’s place in the family tree. Korach’s beautiful, plausible words, the Rabbis imply, were not entirely sincere. Rather they were like a campaign speech designed to make the speaker look better by making his rival look bad. It’s this unsavory motivation that sparks our sages in Pirkei Avot chapter 5 mishnah 17 to cite Korach as the archetype of מחלוקת שאינה לשם שמים—an argument that is not in the name of heaven. 

The nineteenth-century Russian commentator, the Malbim, makes a subtle distinction about the Avot mishnah, noting the way the parallel structure of the mishnah suggests that the מחלוקת—the argument—that gets characterized as not being in the name of heaven, is not between Korach and Moses, but rather between Korach and his cohort of discontents. In the Malbim’s view, silver-tongued Korach leverages the resentments of others in order to gain power. His beautiful words are a double-edged sword, flattering the listener who most needs to be flattered, while disguising his hunger for the spotlight. In this case, the followers make the leader as much as the leader makes the followers: there’s a symbiosis between Korach’s needs and the rebels’ needs. As my late grandmother might say, they deserve each other. So this is one way of looking at the question of why Korach, with his eloquent and humanistic-sounding mission statement, meets this horrible fate. 

We also know, again from Parshat Yitro, that Moses has been guided toward sharing leadership. What if Korach had taken the longer road to leadership, offering himself as an assistant to Moses, working his way up the chain of command? Perhaps he might have attained the position he so badly wanted, the old-fashioned way, by earning it. Had this been his path, perhaps he would have felt more invested in the community as a whole, secure of his place in it and willing to approach with humility rather than hubris.

As the guys and I were discussing the parsha the other night, my son, perhaps under the influence of his aliyah, in which the glory of God suddenly suffused the Tent of Meeting, had a different idea of why Korach was so harshly punished. Maybe the lesson is that the ultimate judgment is God’s, that our human capacities are finite and therefore our moral analysis is definitionally limited. What looks clear to us might look very different if seen from a wide enough perspective. Submitting to divine will rather than forcing our own keeps us grounded—in the non-Korach, above ground, kind of way.

So what are the lessons for us as we enter into this relationship of rabbi and congregation? First, leadership requires humility. Not the false kind of humility that performs smallness while angling for more influence and prestige, but rather the kind of humility that Laila taught us about at Shavuot. The humility of knowing when it’s your turn to speak and when it’s your turn to listen, of having the courage to step forward when your contribution is needed, and the generosity to support others when the moment calls for their contribution. 

Second, and intertwined with humility: leadership can be shared and cultivated. To my delight, we had a robust number of folks chanting from the Torah today. In the coming weeks and months, I hope we’ll have more and more people on the bimah, leading parts of services or sharing words of Torah. (Side note: If you’ve sat in the seats and thought, I could do that! or I have a thought about that! or I could learn how to do that! please let me know. I’m happy to work with you or to help you find resources to build the skills you want to develop.)

The third leadership lesson I am taking from Parshat Korach, inextricably linked with the previous two, is that leaders and followers have a role in forming one another. The Israelites (mostly) follow Moses, and through his experiences with them—good and bad—he learns to be a leader. Korach, meanwhile, also finds his people, playing on their worst impulses with words that give them a false sense of their own righteousness. In each case, for better and worse, leader and followers teach each other what they’re looking for. For me, at this juncture in particular, this means asking you to share your institutional knowledge with me so that I can learn to meet your needs. And it means, sometimes, I might take a chance and go my own way because I believe there will be benefit for our community down that path.

And all of it under the umbrella that Akiva pointed out to me: the idea of, and search for, the divine will in everything we do.

Our liturgy actually gives us a glimpse of this model of mutuality informed by divinity. Each morning we imitate the angels on high as we say: 

וְכֻלָּם מְקַבְּלִים עֲלֵיהֶם עֹל מַלְכוּת שָׁמַיִם זֶה מִזֶּה

And they all receive upon themselves the yoke of God’s rule, one from another

And then we continue:

וְנוֹתְנִים רְשׁוּת זֶה לָזֶה

And give permission, one to another

We take God’s will upon ourselves in relationship, and we grant each other the freedom to enact it. Many congregations insert an additional word, בְּאָהָבָה—with love—in that granting of permission. וְנוֹתְנִים בְּאָהָבָה רְשׁוּת זֶה לָזֶה. Our lives as a community are bound by these things: by caring, humble leadership; by loving companionship; and by listening earnestly for the divine voice amid the fireworks of everyday life. 

May we merit all these, and may we go forward from strength to strength, בְּאָהָבָה.

Shabbat shalom!

I don’t know where to stand or how to be
The days are constant internal arguments

This one with a stranger on the radio, 
the woman who described her family’s suffering 
since the aggression began

Which beginning, I wonder?

(I know what she meant. Her world crumbled on October 8.)

Which beginning indeed.

Who has the oldest, surest claim to a crumbled world?
Who has dibs on all this suffering, 
this endless supply of degradation alienation & displacement

Who wins the prize for Most Unwanted People?

בָּרְכֵנוּ אָבִינוּ כֻּלָּנוּ כְּאֶחָד בְּאוֹר פָּנֶיךָ
Bless us, God, all of us as one, with the light of Your presence

Give us the courage to move beyond claims
Give us the courage to claim one another