Sukkot for TAA

(Delivered October 7, 2025)

Two weeks before Rosh Hashanah, I got an abnormal mammogram result. The day before Yom Kippur, I got the all clear. In the three weeks in between, I was living a double life. In my head, I was writing the happy ending and the tragic ending at the same time. On the one hand: reminding myself that abnormal test results are not uncommon; noting that for now at least, I felt fine; reassuring myself that nothing had happened yet. On the other hand: imagining myself telling my children the sobering news; picturing my family rallying around me; envisioning the community bringing me meals and holding my burdens with me, while I bravely faced my fate. I was living in the question mark opened up by that unsettling message in my doctor’s online portal, but I was also living my life: preparing Rosh Hashanah sermons, attending to the needs of the community, planning and working and eating and sometimes sleeping and reflecting and walking in the sunshine. The world kept turning, history kept churning. 

So it did. So it does.

And here we are at Sukkot. We are, still and always, living a double life, and the world keeps turning in its never-ending cycle. 

As so beautifully conceived by Rabbi Alan Lew in his book This is Real and you are Completely Unprepared, the cycle begins at Tisha b’Av, as the destruction of the ancient Temple is symbolically echoed in our own inner breaking—a breaking that teaches us to begin again, to strengthen our structures from the inside, through the spiritual work of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and the days that separate them. Through that process we are forged anew: we look carefully at what we’ve lost, where we’ve gone astray, whom we’ve hurt, the shards of what, when it remains unexamined, seems unbreakable. When we force ourselves to look, though, we notice the cracks. When we slow down over the difficult places, our stomachs howling with fasting, we learn where we need to rethink our approach. We allow regret to be our teacher. The breaking is as essential as the repair. Mishnah Rosh Hashanah teaches:

שׁוֹפָר שֶׁנִּסְדַּק וְדִבְּקוֹ פָּסוּל
A shofar that was cracked and glued back together, is unfit to use.

But we are not shofarot. We are constantly in the process of cracking and reassembling ourselves. Breaking and repair is the natural order of things.

And as soon as the repair is complete, the cracks begin to form again. This is the story of being human. The Book of Kohelet, which we turn to during Sukkot, reminds us over and over: 

הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים אָמַר קֹהֶלֶת הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים הַכֹּל הָבֶל׃
Vaporous mist, says Kohelet, vaporous mist. Everything is vapor.

The mist of impermanence hangs over the Book of Kohelet, the word הֲבֵל appearing 30 times in that short book. Likewise, the impermanence pervades Chag Sukkot, our flimsy huts as tentative as our souls. If we’re lucky, the holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have broken us open, so that we feel the wind in our very beings, as we feel it in our sukkot. If we did it right, our atoning shows us we’ve made mistakes and we’re still here. We’re worthy, we’re weak, we’re thoroughly human.

There was a video that went around the internet at this time last year, featuring the great Broadway performer Gavin Creel, who had died last fall at the cruel age of 48. In the video, Creel recited a passage he’d found on a scrap of paper in a secondhand art shop. It read: 

Everything is both
Wonderful and terrible
Boring and exciting
It’s OK that it’s both
Obvious and hidden
Simple and complicated
What a relief that everything can be both
Light and dark
Celebratory and melancholy 

This passage meant so much to Creel that he had the word BOTH tattooed on his wrist. The both-ness of life can be hard to keep in mind; holding it close lends a sense of meaning to the churn.

The overlap of Zman Simchateinu and October 7 could hardly make the point more starkly. During Sukkot, tradition commands us to be joyful before God for seven days, but these anniversaries—first day of Sukkot on October 7, the secular anniversary, plus the Hebrew anniversary which will always be Simchat Torah—these anniversaries press us to the bone. 

Yet as I so often say, our joy is our secret weapon. We Jews do not simply survive, we crawl our way back to thriving. There was a slogan that arose out of the Nova Music Festival—at which, on that hateful day, over 350 young revelers were murdered while dancing, and another 40 kidnapped into Gaza. The slogan said, We will dance again. Not just, “We will survive, we will limp through the rest of our lives, hollowed by trauma and rage.” We will dance. Zman Simchateinu, the time of our joy, is now. Our Jewish spirit is renewed by doing Jewish things with Jewish people. The world will keep turning, history will keep churning, and we will dance again. 

Chag sameach.

Yom Kippur for TAA

Delivered October 2, 2025

Imagine you wake up at the same time every day, make the same breakfast, drive the same route, do the same work, come home, same dinner, same bedtime, rinse and repeat. Then one morning a pipe bursts. Your kitchen floods. Everything is a mess, and your routine is hopelessly disrupted. You call plumbers; you have to eat out; you can’t do your kids’ drop-off; your plans crumble. The chaos jolts you out of your rhythms, and you start to notice things differently. You see what you take for granted; you ask for help; you reconsider priorities.

Similarly, Yom Kippur bursts our life’s patterns. So much of what we do by habit during the rest of the year is altered today—from speaking Baruch Shem Kvod Malchuto aloud, to fasting, to fixating on our own mortality. On this day, God orchestrates a “flood” in our internal life, forcing us to attend to what really matters.

The liturgy today takes us to dark places, describing in excruciating detail the many ways that we could have, and probably did, go off the rails over the past year. We stand for long intervals of time, beating our chests, naming every imaginable human frailty. And then we do it again, and again, and again. We grapple with the imagery of God weighing our lives in the balance over the past 10 days, and deciding before havdalah, whether we will live or whether we will die. And if we die, in what manner. 

And then there’s the Torah reading that picks up after the sudden, shocking deaths of Aaron‘s sons, Nadav and Avihu, and asks Aaron to go on as normal, to resume his priestly duties with precision and dispassion. 

Not to mention the haftarah, with its disdain for the Israelites’ insincere attempts at atonement. 

The eye of the needle we are hoping to thread with our teshuvah is very thin indeed. 

Back in July, I attended the funeral of my teacher Judith Kates’ beloved husband Bill. Now Bill was the kind of person about whom everybody felt like they were his best friend. He managed to find time and authentic attention for each person: not just skimming the surface, but allowing a depth of connection to blossom with each encounter. It didn’t take a burst pipe to get him to pay attention to what matters. 

One of his friends, speaking at the funeral, said something which is still with me months later: the unbearable was always part of the conversation. The friend meant this as the highest compliment. He was talking about how Bill had the capacity to face what most of us avoid. The unbearable was always part of the conversation.

Yom Kippur, more than any other holiday, forces us to confront the unbearable. The restrictions of this long day give us no way to distract ourselves from hard truths: no food, no electronics, no idle chitchat. Our purpose today is clear, almost too clear. There is no escaping the unbearable on Yom Kippur.

The menu of unbearable things is unusually robust this year: for the US, for the world, and for the Jewish people as a whole. Without breaking a sweat, I’m sure any one of us could come up with a fistful of unbearables: war in Ukraine, soon to enter its fourth year; spiraling violence, including the attack on the Mormon church in Michigan this week that left five dead and the church badly damaged and the attack just this morning in Manchester England, whose details are not yet known; the dysfunctional American leadership that squanders the privilege of their position to engage in callous brinksmanship, playing Russian roulette with our lives; the indiscriminate crackdown on immigrants in the US and elsewhere; and of course, perhaps the most unbearable for many of us in this room: the catastrophic war in Gaza that has the Jewish community on the defensive both internally and on the global stage.

Judging by the tone of the Rosh Hashanah sermons from other rabbis that have been forwarded to me in the past ten days, it seems that many of us feel the urgency of the conflict in Israel and Gaza. I know our community is not uniform in its point of view about the crisis, nor should it be. And as I write this, just days before unplugging for the holiday, it’s impossible to predict whether the Trump-Netanyahu peace plan on the table will actually settle things down or serve as yet another spark to further ignite an already terrifying conflagration. I genuinely don’t know what will happen next and if it will be to the good. Nobody does. But taking to heart Bill Kates’s practice of allowing the unbearable to be part of the conversation, what feels important is that we allow ourselves to talk about it, even if we don’t have all the answers, even if it feels almost unbearable.

And as I am your no-longer-quite-so-new rabbi, you should know who I am and where I struggle. You should know what I find unbearable. We should be able to have this conversation, despite how much it hurts, despite it revealing some tensions. We should address it, knowing that we will be called upon to be there for each other in community even where we disagree. As I said last night, our task is to make a heart of many rooms. Let me show you around some of the rooms of my heart.

Like many rabbis, I find myself paralyzed at the crossroads of loving Israel and feeling deep misgivings about the direction of Israeli policy. I believe without question in Israel’s right to exist, just as I believe in Israel’s responsibility to be the embodiment of Jewish values. I say all this with a good deal of humility, knowing that I don’t live there and don’t face the rammings, bombings, and daily rocket attacks (which had been going on long before October 7). 

The devastation of Hamas’s barbaric attack, and the ongoing hostage situation, now 727 days in, is impossible to overstate. In those first horrific days and months, I was blind with rage and pain. No amount of warfare would have felt like too much. Yet as the war grinds on, I have come to feel that it is no longer serving a purpose. In fact, it seems more and more that the war in Gaza is making Jews less safe everywhere, and is doing nothing to bring home the remaining hostages. 

Meanwhile Gaza is in ruins and another generation of Palestinians is in the position of seeing Israelis and Jews as oppressors—and their advocates are forcefully making that case to the world at large. Whether or not this is objectively accurate is of no consequence when, aided and abetted by simple-minded but extremely effective propaganda and slogans, Israel’s detractors are growing ever more strident with their conviction that the very existence of the Jewish state is untenable.

These lines from the Haftarah: 

הֲכָזֶה יִהְיֶה צוֹם אֶבְחָרֵהוּ
Have I chosen a fast like this?

are impossible to hear without thinking of the starvation taking hold in Gaza. 

The words:

וְעַל חֵטְא שֶׁחָטָאנוּ לְפָנֶיךָ בְּאִמּוּץ הַלֵּב
And for the sin we have committed before you by hardening our hearts

are impossible to hear without thinking of how easy it is to turn away from the suffering of hostage families and Gazans alike.

The words: 

אֵין דָּבָר נֶעְלָם מִמֶּךָּ וְאֵין נִסְתָּר מִנֶּגֶד עֵינֶיךָ
There is nothing hidden from You, and there is nothing secret in Your eyes

are impossible to hear without wondering how all this will turn out, or even what’s true amidst the swirl of impassioned polemics. 

Having encountered each of these phrases and many more that trouble me over the course of this solemn day of soul searching, I wonder—and perhaps you do too—where to draw courage from as we navigate so much that is unbearable. 

One resource is teshuvah itself, the reason for the season, so to say. Breishit Rabbah, a collection of Midrashic literature from the fifth century, teaches in the name of Rabbi Abahu bar Ze’ira: ”Great is teshuvah, for it existed in the world before Creation.” What this says to me is that the work of teshuvah is foundational. It’s part of the makeup of this world; the work of teshuvah is eternal, woven into the fabric of all creation. Human beings are made to sin, to regret, to try to make it right. That we, as Jews, choose to make it a core practice in our lives and to surface it in particular at this season is reinforced by its origin story in our tradition.

Another resource takes us back to that funeral I attended over the summer. The unbearable was always part of the conversation. Part of what made Bill Kates so special was his ability to accompany the people he cared about into the realm of the unbearable. Indeed we can bear so much more when we bear it together in relationship and in community. The conversation is more than just talking together. It is the way we meet one another with care, bring out one another’s deepest concerns, hold one another’s needs with gentleness and curiosity. The conversation is a million invisible threads that weave us together in our vulnerability and our striving toward wholeness. 

As we confront the too many unbearables of the current moment, let us do so in conversation and in community. Let us allow the stark Yom Kippur liturgy, with its insistence on the first person plural—Ashamnu—WE have been guilty; al Chet shechatanu, for the sins which WE have committed—let’s allow that sense of “we” to do its work on us and forge us into a collective. Let us hold each other, regardless of our individual political orientations, in the crucible of teshuvah and hold ourselves accountable for discerning how we can most be of use in this tragic but redeemable world. 

Shanah tovah.

Kol Nidrei / Erev Yom Kippur for TAA

(Delivered October 1, 2025)

When I was little, my mom had a cute habit of pretending she couldn’t quite make me out. I’d get up in the morning and go find her, and she’d say, “Is that you?” Although I do have three siblings, we are different enough from each other and far enough apart in age that I’m pretty sure my mom knew it was actually me. But still, it was fun to play the game, and to get that delicious moment of recognition when she would act like she couldn’t believe her luck at running into me, as if we’d been apart for decades, not hours. 

Looking back on it as an adult, I can see in her question, “Is that you?” more depth of meaning than either of us probably imagined during those days of practiced silliness.

The world we live in today seems designed to prevent us—parents and children, friends, partners, and strangers alike—from truly seeing one another. So many aspects of our lives are mediated: by the screens that dominate our waking hours; by the modern definition of work, which presses us to keep up a punishing pace, with no room for reflection or connection; by a poisonous algorithm that daily divides us into sharp categories designed for maximum agitation and isolation. Day by day, I encounter people who are even considering cutting off ties with someone they went to high school with, or with a co-worker, or, God forbid, with a child or a parent, because their political beliefs are so far apart as to make it impossible to talk without opening up a painful, unbridgeable chasm between them. Throughout these recent years of recreational rage, controversy and contention, I pride myself on not having broken off any relationships, but even I have to admit to a whole lot of avoidance. The much-talked-about polarization of American discourse has led to too many slammed doors, literal and figurative. As Rabbi Tali Adler puts it, “We have started to see each other … not as neighbors but as people who think the wrong things.” 

As always, I look to our tradition for guidance, if not precedent. As folks who participated in Backyard Mishnah this summer may remember, I have a fondness and an emotional connection with the Sages of the Rabbinic period. Even as foreign as it feels to us in terms of daily life, the world of the ancient Rabbis had more than a little bit in common with our world today. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves facing prejudices and violence because of who they were. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves in a place of profound alienation from cultural norms that had once seemed unbreakable. Like us, the Rabbis found themselves navigating profound communal disagreements that could have broken them apart. But also they found themselves with a sense of purpose: having lost their Temple and their homeland, they sought to reimagine every aspect of the world from the vantage point of their exile, as they built a new Judaism from the broken shards of the old one.

Despite the fact that we live very different lives from theirs—not many of us are blacksmiths or ride to and from work on a donkey, much less spend all our days reading, reciting, and memorizing Torah—even so, perhaps some of the principles they derived speak to our current day.

One core teaching comes to us from chapter 7 of Tosefta Sotah, a compilation of Jewish law from the second century. In the chapter, the Rabbis are grappling with ambiguities of meaning in the Torah and looking for a way to resolve the contradictions. In a mysterious and perhaps slightly maddening example, they look at the appearance of these three similar but different citations from Parshat Yitro: דברים  הדברים & אלה הדברים—words, the words, and these are the words. To the Rabbis, these almost-repetitions are different enough to raise curiosity, and so they wondered together, why the difference? Is one expression more valid than another, and if so, why? Which is the right one, the authoritative one? 

The way they resolve the question is subtle, and opens a way to abide this and other disagreements: כָּל הַדְּבָרִים נִתְּנוּ מֵרֹעֶה אֶחָד—All these things / words were given by one Shepherd. That is to say, the Torah can refer to things in different ways because it’s all part of a greater whole. There doesn’t have to be one and only one way to understand something. And from that, the Rabbis offer a gorgeous image to harmonize the principle:

 אַף אַתָּה עָשָׂה לִבְּךָ חַדְרֵי חֲדָרִים—Only make yourself a heart of many rooms.

A spacious heart, with capacity for understanding multiple viewpoints, can hold the uncertainty of not knowing, can open the imagination to a deeper understanding of the role that perspective plays in our experience.

Luckily for us, the Rabbis didn’t insist on unanimity—or worse, on one opinion being right and the rest being thrown out. Instead, as even a cursory look at a page of Talmud will show, they kept everything, almost like hoarders of ideas. Text and commentary, argument and counterargument, secondary and tertiary conclusions and legal derivations are all present on the page, allowing us to access a conversation across time and space, a conversation we are invited to join. Had the Rabbis looked for a single answer, the beauty and richness of our tradition would have been watered down to nothing, and it’s quite possible that Judaism as we understand it would not have survived. 

Holding one another’s perspectives with reverence in a time of upheaval  required the Rabbis to overcome their impulse toward avoidance. Instead, they made a spiritual practice of getting closer, of listening with curiosity about what was underneath their disagreements. Masechet Brachot page 9b finds them considering the question of when to say the morning Shema. That is to say, when is the light sufficient to be defined as morning? A few possibilities are offered in the Mishnah’s argument: Perhaps morning is defined as the moment when a person can distinguish blue from white. Or perhaps, as Rabbi Eliezer says, it’s when one can distinguish blue from green. The Gemara carries the discussion forward, with different voices introducing different possibilities: Rabbi Meir suggests it’s when you can distinguish two similar animals, like a wolf and a dog. Rabbi Akiva narrows the difference, saying when you can distinguish a donkey from a wild donkey. Still others say that morning comes when you can recognize the face of a neighbor from four cubits (or six feet) away. Ultimately the halachic ruling is with this final position. 

The Rabbis’ concern here is not just to button down when to say their prayers; we wouldn’t be so interested in this text thousands of years later, if that were the case. Rather, they’re teaching us the value of truly seeing. They’re teaching us how to pay attention, how to treat the moment, and one another, with reverence. In a similar vein, the Torah teaches in Exodus chapter 10 verse 23 that during the plague of darkness (familiar to us from the Pesach Haggadah) neighbor lost sight of neighbor, such that everyone was immobilized during the time of darkness. The physical darkness became a kind of existential metaphor: it’s not just tripping over the furniture, it’s that everyone became unhinged without the reference point of other people.

In our own time, as it grows harder and harder to see one another clearly through the distorting lenses of social media, a poisonous political discourse, and disproportionate representation in the public square from the toxic fringes; our timeless tradition offers an antidote. Indeed, it’s at the moment of the morning Shema—the moment the passage in Brachot is referring to—when we gather the fringes of our tallitot to symbolize the reunion of our entire fractious people. We declare the unity of God with all those fringes in our left hands—closer to the heart!—with threads of hope binding us together. We have no illusion that all of those fringes will all point in the same direction, but we do know: the vastness of God is able to contain their variation.

The Rabbis of the Talmud modeled for us the capacity not only to tolerate different points of view, but to learn from them. They implore us to teach our mouths to say, “I might be wrong.” And, “Tell me more.” And, “What I’m hearing from you doesn’t align with how I’ve been thinking about this, can you help me understand how you got there?” 

I want to be clear that I’m not advocating for changing our minds with every conversation, or for moral relativism. In the words of Dylan Marron of the podcast Conversations with People who Hate Me, “Empathy is not endorsement.” What I am advocating for is meeting one another with the courage to listen for the sake of understanding: for protecting our own humanity by acknowledging the other’s humanity.

Our Rabbinic literature is itself a conversation that’s been preserved because of the Sages’ open, searching minds, and their dogged determination that what we shared as a people was worth saving, despite the violence done to us and the destruction we suffered. Our ancestors invite us, in turn, to imitate their dogged determination—to see and hear one another, the better to save what can be saved. The better to save what can be saved.

The Rabbis offer a cautionary tale as to what can be lost when we stop seeking one another out, when we let insult and stereotype close off the doors of our hearts. In Masechet Baba Metzia 84a we encounter Rabbi Yochanan and his protege and havruta (study partner) Reish Lakish. When they first meet, Reish Lakish is a career criminal. Rabbi Yochanan sees his intellectual potential and convinces him to leave the bandit life and become a Torah scholar. They enjoy years of passionate yet respectful disagreement in their learning together, until in one debate about weaponry, Rabbi Yochanan blurts out a reminder of Reish Lakish’s past as a criminal. This vicious insult causes Reish Lakish so much emotional pain that he falls ill. Even then, Rabbi Yochanan refuses to apologize for his hurtful comments. It’s only after Reish Lakish dies that Rabbi Yochanan realizes the consequences of his harsh words, and laments the heartbreaking loss of his beloved partner in respectful dispute. He tries to find a new havruta, but nobody is able to challenge him the way Reish Lakish had done. Filled with remorse for having broken what was most important to him by allowing for an element of contempt to bubble up in their productive disagreements, Rabbi Yohanan himself goes mad and dies.

The ancient Rabbis saw their world shattered; they knew the perils of conflict in which respect is not a touchstone. And so, in addition to reinventing Jewish practice, in addition to preserving and elevating the work of their learning—the Sages also sounded a warning as piercing as a shofar call. Even, or especially, in times of moral degradation, seeing the divine image in one another—and acting in the image of God—are non-negotiable.

As we read in Pirkei Avot,

בְמָקוֹם שֶׁאֵין אֲנָשִׁים, הִשְׁתַּדֵּל לִהְיוֹת אִישׁ
In a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.

Let this be our watchword as we navigate our ever more fragmented world: to strive to be human, to cherish the infinite variety within the human family, and even in the deepest conflicts, to remember that they, that you, that we, are all created in the divine image. 

Shanah tovah!

Vayelech for TAA

(Delivered September 27, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

In these weeks of intense preparation leading to and through the High Holidays, I frequently find myself riding on a roller coaster of overconfidence and anxiety. On the one hand, I say to myself, “Self, you’ve never missed a deadline, you’re not going to miss one now.” And then on the other hand, I say to myself, “This is really a lot of writing. What if I run out of ideas?”

Amidst this recurring loop, one phrase that’s been turning in my mind is a saying that was made famous in a 1995 movie about the American space program. The movie was called Apollo 13, and it chronicled a flight to the moon that almost went terribly wrong. In the film, the three astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission encounter technical problems that make it unclear whether they will be able to return to earth safely. After a feature film’s worth of tension, argumentation, suspense, and good old American ingenuity; the astronauts and their ground control crew miraculously overcome what could’ve been disastrous, and bring the rocket and its crew safely home. The movie had a tagline that became a catch phrase which entered the cultural lexicon: failure is not an option. When I’m reminding myself that I’ve never missed a deadline, the phrase, “Failure is not an option,” seems basically plausible.

But this week’s Torah portion teaches something quite different. Indeed, as we make our way through Deuteronomy chapter 31, which constitutes the entirety of Parshat Vayelech, we get the undeniable, unbearable impression that failure is inevitable—that failure is not optional. Indeed it’s God who says so. In preparing Moses for his looming death, God does not offer comfort, but rather says:

‏הִנְּךָ שֹׁכֵב עִם־אֲבֹתֶיךָ וְקָם הָעָם הַזֶּה וְזָנָה  אַחֲרֵי  אֱלֹהֵי נֵכַר־הָאָרֶץ
אֲשֶׁר הוּא בָא־שָׁמָּה בְּקִרְבּוֹ וַעֲזָבַנִי וְהֵפֵר אֶת־בְּרִיתִי אֲשֶׁר כָּרַתִּי אִתּוֹ
Look, you are going to die soon, and afterward this people will go astray with the alien gods in their midst, in the land they are about to enter.
They will forsake Me and break the covenant I made with them. 

Such a vote of confidence! 

Despite—or perhaps because of—the 40+ years of wandering, of rupture and repair, of relationship-building, God has grown quite pragmatic about the Israelites’ flaws. God seems convinced, and not without reason, that as soon as the Israelites are granted the land flowing with milk and honey, a land that they have been longing after for all this time, they will shortly find a way to mess it up. 

When Moses retells this part of the narrative towards the end of the parsha, he essentially says the same thing. Verse 27 reads: 

כִּי אָנֹכִי יָדַעְתִּי אֶת־מֶרְיְךָ וְאֶת־עָרְפְּךָ הַקָּשֶׁה
הֵן בְּעוֹדֶנִּי חַי עִמָּכֶם הַיּוֹם מַמְרִים הֱיִתֶם עִם־יי וְאַף כִּי־אַחֲרֵי מוֹתִי
I know all too well your rebelliousness and your stubbornness
while I’m still alive and with you! You rebel against God now!
How much worse will it be after my death!

In a classic expression of irony, God and Moses know what we also know but the Israelites don’t: that humans are fallible, that we constantly make mistakes, that failure is indeed inevitable.

The beauty of Torah, and of Judaism as a whole, is that it doesn’t leave us in this place of degradation. The Torah knows, as we do, that being human will always involve moral and behavioral crises, that we will always be tempted to turn away from what’s eternal, and follow after trivial, ephemeral matters. We are made in the image of God, but we are not God. Our human makeup is ultimately weak in some truly fundamental ways. They say you can’t fight Mother Nature. Perhaps, you also can’t fight human nature.

Even so, the Torah gives us tools to try. For managing the inescapable lapses that we are bound to have, the parsha offers two notable and seemingly contradictory strategies.

The first of these is courage. No less than three times in this short portion, courage is called for. In verse six Moses tells the Israelites חִזְקוּ וְאִמְצוּ—be strong and courageous. In the following verse, he says the same to Joshua, his successor, חֲזַק וֶאֱמָץ. Finally, in verse 23, God also tells Joshua חֲזַק וֶאֱמָץ. Ibn Ezra suggests that the Israelites can be courageous because they know that God accompanies them in battle, that this is earned courage, a faith rooted in experience. 

Likewise, off the battlefield, knowing that we have overcome past challenges can strengthen us for future ones. If we find ourselves, as the parsha predicts, falling into patterns of focusing on the wrong things, we can derive courage from the knowledge that we have surmounted similar transgressions and made our way forward. In this season when we bring our attention to the work of teshuvah, of repentance or return, this is useful to remember. Failure, while not optional, does not have to be irrevocable. 

The parsha’s other strategy for confronting failure takes an entirely different approach, a softer approach. God, knowing that the Israelites will succumb to their humanity in one way or another, offers a decidedly human way of coping: poetry and song. In anticipation of the times when the people will stray and God will turn away, God instructs Moses to redirect and re-inspire them through הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת—this poem or this song. 

This phrase should ring a bell, since it’s also in the daily prayers, in a different context. When we reenact standing at the shore of the Sea, reliving a moment of crisis and recovery; the words of Shirat Hayam, the song of the sea, accompany us and steady us. They remind us we have faced the impossible before.

I think it’s actually kind of magical and forward-thinking that the Torah offers creative expression as an antidote to moral failure. Thousands of years ago, our tradition already knew that sometimes when we make consequential mistakes, it’s a sign of a soul out of balance. Easing into timeless words of beauty and meaning can show us not only where to go next, but why. It can remind us that the teachings that guide us are already בְּפִנוּ—in our mouths.

In this season of teshuvah, as we grapple with our own failures, may we hold to the creativity and poetry of our ancient texts, and may they give us strength and courage to move forward and bring ourselves safely home.

Shabbat shalom & gmar chatimah tovah! 

Rosh Hashanah 5786 | 2025

(Delivered September 23, 2025)

Shanah tovah! 

It is so good to be together as a community; these times when we are all gathered are a dream come true for me. Let’s take a moment to feel the sweetness of it.

OK. I’m going to start with a little survey. Listen carefully. […] Blink once if you feel totally comfortable in High Holiday services and know what’s going on at every single moment. […] Blink twice if you feel like everybody around you just blinked once. […] I’m not 100% sure of the survey results because I was … blinking twice. 

This fall season wouldn’t be the same without the High Holidays. The best-known verse from the psalm for the season says:

אַחַת  שָׁאַלְתִּי מֵאֵת־יי אוֹתָהּ אֲבַקֵּשׁ
שִׁבְתִּי בְּבֵית־יי כּל־יְמֵי חַיַּי לַחֲזוֹת בְּנֹעַם־יי וּלְבַקֵּר בְּהֵיכָלוֹ
One thing I ask of Adonai, this is what I seek: to dwell in the house of God
all the days of my life, to gaze upon God’s beauty, and to visit God’s temple

And indeed as summer turns to fall, an invisible thread starts to tug at our hearts to bring us here, to our human approximation of God’s temple. Yet for all our longing to be here, for all that mysteriously pulls us in, these services can be as alienating as they are uplifting. For folks who are regular synagogue-goers, the services are different enough from the usual Shabbat service to be strange and destabilizing. And for folks whose primary engagement with prayer comes only at this time of year, the services can be long, confusing, and repetitive. If we have memories of childhood High Holiday services, they are definitionally different from this—different tunes, different people, a different rabbi. And if people don’t have those childhood associations—becase they came to this tradition with a partner or through their own journeys in life, or because they are still children—this all can feel very foreign. Objectively: catching up with old friends we haven’t seen all year by reflecting together on the fragility of life and the passage of time, and meditating on the nature of sin and the challenge of forgiveness, is kind of a weird combination.

Yet both culturally and religiously, something calls us back every year. The concept of תשובה—of return or repentance—is woven throughout the season and throughout the liturgy. 

The imagery of return is with us in the structure of the shofar service that the students just led with me. Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, a 17th-century European sage, noted that there is a pattern of departure and return in the order of the shofar calls: tekiyah, shevarim, t’ruah, and back to tekiyah, like a baseball player taking off from home plate, and then returning to the same place having accomplished something. In Horowitz’s framework, the first tekiyah represents us when we feel whole and sure of ourselves. Shevarim, the slightly elongated broken sound, shows us the cracks just beneath the surface, the places where we are not quite aligned, or have done things we regret. Going deeper still, the t’ruah, those sobbing, shattered calls, show us the parts of us that are truly broken. Horowitz teaches that by coming to terms with the aspects of ourselves represented by the t’ruah call, we can return to the wholeness of tekiyah, stronger for having reckoned with our own brokenness. 

Another way we reflect on departure and return at this time of year is through the words, חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶדֶם—renew our days, like before. It’s a funny phrase. We want something new, but we want it to be similar to the past. Even when we seek new experiences, we crave the security of being able to recognize them like familiar faces and connect them to our experience. The idea that something can be both new and old is central to our holiday cycle, as we shed the old year’s hard words and cruel deeds and, as I spoke about last night, renew our hopes for the coming year.

We come home to ourselves through these rituals and words, and through the very act of entering this space as a community.

And yet for all this spiritual uplift, there are moments for many of us when, for one reason or another, we don’t quite feel like we belong here, don’t quite feel like all this belongs to us. 

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, a Hasidic rabbi who lived in 18th-century Ukraine, was one of our wisest and most sensitive teachers. He told the following story:

One time, a certain man in a certain city dreamed that in the city of Vienna, under a bridge, there was a treasure. He went there and stood by the bridge and asked around as to how to dig there. A soldier came by and said to him, What are you doing standing here and thinking? And he thought that it would be good to tell the soldier his dream so maybe the other man could help him in exchange for a share of the treasure. So he told him.

The soldier answered saying: Oy, stupid Jew! Why do you pay attention to dreams? Couldn’t I dream a dream that there was a treasure underneath the oven in the house of a certain Jew who lives in your home town? Do you really think I’d travel there for a treasure?

The Jew was taken aback and went home to his house. He dug in the kitchen under the oven, and found the treasure. Afterward, he remarked: I had to travel to Vienna in order to know there was a treasure right near me, in my own house. 

My beloved friends, each one of us is on a journey throughout our lifetimes of going away and coming back and going away and coming back, of searching for a treasure somewhere else, and then finding that it was close by the whole time. Finding that treasure isn’t easy, and making sense of it isn’t either. I can imagine the man in our story digging underneath the oven to find the treasure and then needing to figure out how to put his kitchen back together. Teshuvah is not neat and tidy. 

My own story is full of those zigzags, from the first time I got sent to the principal’s office in religious school because, having started in 5th grade, I didn’t know what was going on and didn’t understand why I was there. The zigzags continued for decades: from refusing to schedule a Bat Mitzvah and dropping out of religious school, to putting off rabbinical school for some years because I thought it was too late for me to learn and I’d have to be alienated forever. 

But the beauty of our tradition of תשובה is that we have a whole entire framework for coming back. There will always be aspects of Jewish tradition that feel uncomfortable—I’ve got a couple myself—but תשובה invites us back and encourages us to find our way. The root letters of the word תשובה—shin vav bet—speak of return, but they are close cousins of another root word, yud shin bet meaning, to stay. Teshuvah is not only an invitation to come back, but to stay, to settle in and explore.

To be Jewish is to wrestle with God, and sometimes with ourselves. It’s there in the word ישראל—God-wrestler. Our tradition expects us: to interpret the text, to ask hard questions, to argue with God. Digging up the kitchen is bound to kick up some dust.

So for folks who are counting the pages till the end of the service, or squirming in your seats, or wondering just who is this God that keeps accounts with such coldness, what I want most to say to you is: you belong here. All this—

the long, confusing services, 
the ambiguous teachings, 
the endless details and variations,
the arguments and the counter-arguments,
the words with multiple meanings,
the melodies that float around in your head for days and weeks, 
the shofar and the honey cake, 
the grownups who pat your head and tell you how tall you’ve gotten, 
the children who make you think—sometimes too much,
the soft heart and the sharp points,
the community that loves you—

All of it. This is your treasure. 

Welcome home. Shanah tovah.

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5786 | 2025

(Delivered September 22, 2025)

Some years back, I went through a big six-word story phase. For a self-professed haiku enthusiast and general word freak, this was the obvious next step! The six-word story demands that the writer have a clear expressive goal and the courage to trim everything that doesn’t point toward the goal… and then trim some more. Some of my attempts include: 

Two sweet boys. One sweet life.

Read books, write words, eat popcorn.

Awkward young nerds can become rabbis.

There’s something about a short story.

But seriously, there is. Sometimes the discipline of having parameters like 5-7-5 for haiku or using only six words to make your point reveals some greater truth. So it is for me with this phrase from our machzor:  

תִּכְלֶה שָׁנָה וְקִלְלוֹתֶיהָ וְתָּחֵל שָׁנָה וּבִרְכוֹתֶיהָ
An old year with its curses ends; a new year with its blessings begins.
Or to attempt to put it in six words:
Cursed year ends; blessed year begins.

There are so many ways in which the year just ending feels accursed. We’re living in a time of mounting dread: here, in Israel, and around the world. Dark forces are gathering, hard realities closing in. From a regime that governs by chaos and intimidation, to an ever-fracturing public discourse in which the toxic fringes drown out reasonable voices, to a widening crisis in Israel, to a disturbing uptick in antisemitic words and deeds, to devastating climate events, to school shootings, to drug overdoses, to political violence… It’s demoralizing even to list all these, much less to live them. Day by day, it seems the world threatens to boil over, with rage, dehumanization, and cruelty.

Amidst all this, something drew each of us here tonight. We come back to our tradition day after day, week after week, year after year. We come into the synagogue looking for connection, for spiritual uplift, for community, for emotional catharsis. Threaded through each of these, and many others I could have named, is hope. Even in a world beset by so many problems, in a time when it’s all too tempting to despair about humanity, we—as a community and as a people—are called to find some semblance of hope.

As we begin this new year, I want us to be able to approach it with hope. 

I don’t mean to paint too rosy a picture. Hope isn’t some namby-pamby, fake cheer. It’s not the practice of telling ourselves lies, convincing ourselves that everything is going to be perfect in some future time. Rather, to paraphrase Rabbi Shai Held, hope allows us to muster the energy to remind ourselves that we are OK enough for now. 

Recently, I came across a passage from the book Hope Amidst Conflict by the political psychologist Oded Leshem of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the excerpt, Leshem writes of disentangling the connection between our desires and our expectations, in a move toward what he calls optimal hope. In extreme conditions, it’s wise to, as he puts it, “decrease our expectations but keep our hopes propelled by our desires.” In other words, optimal hope is balanced between realism and yearning. When we want something but are realistic and clear-eyed about how likely or unlikely it is to come to pass, we approach Leshem’s intricate calculus of desire and expectation. Putting optimal hope into practice would mean, for example, engaging in activism out of conviction and integrity, rather than out of an exaggerated notion of how much influence we have on the wider world. It would mean parenting with deep feeling, but without attachment to the fantasy that our children will turn out to be violin prodigies and math geniuses with the athletic skills of LeBron James and the patience of the Dalai Lama. Even though, theoretically, some of them might.

Despite or perhaps because of the pattern of catastrophe and recovery that permeates Jewish history, our ancient tradition places a huge emphasis on hope. We see it in the way Torah pushes ever forward in the face of daunting obstacles. Take Moses, who suffers grievously throughout his life. He is deprived of the chance to be a child in his own family, and after being reconnected to his people as an adult, loses numerous close relatives, including his nephews, Nadav and Avihu, and his siblings, Aaron and Miriam. And he is ultimately denied the chance to see his life’s work fulfilled by crossing over into the Promised Land. Yet even Moses finishes with hope for his people. As he prepares to send the Israelites ahead without him, he says in Deuteronomy 31:8:

וַיי הוּא  הַהֹלֵךְ לְפָנֶיךָ הוּא יִהְיֶה עִמָּךְ לֹא יַרְפְּךָ וְלֹא יַעַזְבֶךָּ לֹא תִירָא וְלֹא תֵחָת׃
God will go before you and will be with you.
God will not abandon or forsake you. Do not be afraid, and do not panic.

Even as Moses agonizingly steps back, his thoughts and good wishes are with his people, carrying them forward, without him.

There are hints of hope amidst despair tucked in throughout our sacred texts—in our daily prayers, and in words that get pride of place at this time of year in particular. For example, the final two verses of the psalm for the season, Psalm 27, point tentatively toward hope. Verse 13 reads:

לוּלֵא הֶאֱמַנְתִּי לִרְאוֹת בְּטוּב־יי בְּאֶרֶץ חַיִּים
If only I could believe in seeing God’s goodness in the land of the living…  

The verse trails off as doubt and skepticism loom. Then the next verse, the final one of the psalm, answers:

קַוֵּה אֶל־יי חֲזַק וְיַאֲמֵץ לִבֶּךָ וְקַוֵּה אֶל־יי
Hope toward God! Be strong and courageous of heart,
and hope toward God.                      

This final couplet finds the Psalmist in a crisis of faith, wondering if he can actually believe the things he’s been saying—and then pulling himself toward hope and wholeness. The doubt peeks through in the phrase קַוֵּה אֶל־יי—hope toward God; it’s not a direct hit, but rather a fumbling in the general vicinity of the Divine. As in Leshem’s concept of optimal hope, the Psalmist acknowledges his desire for closeness with God while admitting that it is not a guarantee. This is optimal hope. Grownup hope. 

The Akeidah, the story of the Binding of Isaac, which we’ll read on the second day of Rosh haShanah, offers a stunning hint at hope. In a moment of moral compromise and panic, when it seems even God has turned away, as Abraham is poised with the knife over his son’s neck, there appears, just in the nick of time, a ram in the thicket. The Mishnah teaches that this ram was there all along, since the earliest days of creation. At the moment when it could all go irreparably wrong, Abraham sees the ram, a new possibility, and he narrowly avoids making the mistake of a lifetime. Even when it seems that all is lost, the narrative somehow pulls us back from the brink. 

For my part, when the brink feels perilously close, I often look for guidance from the Piasceczner Rebbe, who served as Rabbi of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. The Piasceczner Rebbe endured unimaginable oppression over an extended period of time, and yet managed to scrape together some crumbs of hope to help his community manage the day-to-day existential threats they faced. He walked the tightrope between desire and expectation, even as the dangers grew more and more acute.

In his Rosh Hashanah sermon from 1940, he included a parable of a man so distraught he burst out in wailing and tears. The man called out so loudly that his father ran to him and tried to comfort him. But because he was so wrapped up in his own anguish, the man couldn’t recognize his father or accept the comfort being offered. Imagine the solace he could have experienced, had he been able to perceive his father reaching out to help. This wouldn’t have reduced the ultimate cause of his distress, but at least he would not have been holding it alone. The Piasceczner’s teaching is profound, for his time and perhaps for our own: as individuals, we have very little power to alter or even mitigate the distressing circumstances swirling around us. But allowing ourselves to accept care—both human and divine—softens the heartbreak that threatens to overwhelm. And coming to the side of those who are suffering gives us a sense of purpose. That the Piasceczner could find inspiration to serve, week after week, in perhaps the most hopeless time our people has known, should itself be a source of hope.

In fact it’s due to an incredible act of hope that we even have his writings. During the Holocaust, in the Warsaw Ghetto, a historian by the name of Emanuel Ringelblum collected the everyday artifacts of Jewish life, in the hopes (that word again!) of preserving what could be preserved. Among the things he collected were the Piasceczner Rebbe’s writings, which were packed up into milk cans and buried underground, to be dug up later, after the war’s end. The miracle is that in a time of unrelenting misery, when the worst of humanity was on gruesome display, there were people—the Piasceczner Rebbe, Ringelblum, and others whose names we will probably never know—who saw that even though so many individuals would not survive; Jewish theology, culture, and thought were worth saving. Could be saved. The unimaginable future would someday come. In the words of the Chinese poet Lin Yutang: Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

The Hebrew language invites us to reflect on just how fragile hope can be. The word for hope תקווה also means… cord or thread. Sometimes, hope is as robust as a strong cable, a lifeline; sometimes it’s as thin as a thread we can barely see. But threads can be spun together, becoming strengthened over time. Threads can weave in and out of fabrics to reinforce and beautify them. You tie a knot in a thread and have an anchor for your work. Sometimes a thread is all you need to keep the story going.

A thread, like a six-word story, can hold our place and pull us forward.

Cursed year ends; blessed year begins.

Threads of hope bind us together.

Shanah tovah.

Nitzavim for TAA

(Delivered September 20, 2025)

I still remember where I was when I learned. It was a silvery spring day, the first really warm day. Sunshine, buds, short sleeves. My siblings and their spouses and Bill and I went for a nice long walk in the Nichols Arboretum, Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of my favorite places on this planet or any other.

I don’t know why, but we decided on a little game of hide-and-seek. I hadn’t played for years. There’s not much opportunity to, as a self-serious music student with ambitions as high as my vocal range. But we were getting pretty silly that day—must have been the spring air—and a game of hide-and-seek seemed like just the thing.

We decided who was “It” and scattered amongst the trees to hide while they counted. I found my spot and settled in. Then came the lesson. Having not played in a long while, and having been a very rule-obedient child, I was shocked and thrilled when I saw one of my brothers-in-law sneak out of his hiding place, run behind the “It” person and switch trees, while I crouched seemingly for an eternity behind one single oak tree.

It had never occurred to me before that minute that I wasn’t glued to my hiding place like a sitting duck. It had never occurred to me that switching hiding places was a strategy. It had never occurred to me that hidden things could change.

The whole episode came to mind this week as I was studying Parshat Nitzavim. As we’ve just heard, the parsha mainly revisits laws and teachings given in the service of the covenant that frames and permeates the book of Deuteronomy. Again, we receive the sharp warnings about what will happen, should we get caught up in idolatry, and again, we receive the gentle promises that returning to the fold is always possible, that if only we restore ourselves and our children to the right path, God will take us back in love.

And in the midst of this push and pull of sin and repentance, comes the mysterious pasuk that finds the hidden and the visible in a subtle dance. Deuteronomy chapter 29, verse 28 reads: 

הַנִּסְתָּרֹת לַיי אֱלֹהֵינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ עַד־עוֹלָם לַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת־כָּל־דִּבְרֵי הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת
What is hidden is for Adonai our God, and what is revealed is for us and our children eternally,
to do all of this instruction

The commentators make the logical connection that the word נִּסְתָּרֹת—that which is hidden—refers to secret idolatry. The bigger lesson, though, is that there are things that are known only to God. 

One of my earliest teachers taught me this—although neither he nor I knew he was my teacher as it happened. In a moment of teenage discombobulation, I went to stay for a few days with our longtime family friends, Jerry and Roberta Goldman, to recover from a broken heart. One afternoon, sitting in the backyard, I poured out my uncertainties and sadness, and Jerry, a rabbi who is as sensitive as he is brilliant, gently said, “Life is like a tapestry we can only see the back of. We see the knots and the clusters of threads tangled together and, sometimes if we’re lucky, the barest hints of what the picture on the other side might be. Only God sees the whole thing, and somehow, from God’s side, it makes sense.”

When it was first offered, Jerry’s lesson was one of hope and perspective, a grownup’s thoughtful advice to an overwrought teenager. Only later have I begun to see it also as a teaching about humility. Each and every one of us, no matter how curious and knowledgeable we might be, is limited in what we can observe. Countless factors contribute to this, from temperament to environment to the thousand quirks of the moment. The plain truth is that we can only ever see a small part of the world around us, and everything we perceive is a product of our experiences, expectations, and biases. It’s easiest and most normal for us to see what we’ve always seen, what we plan to see.

This is all the more so in the current polarized media environment, as we’ve witnessed to a horrifying degree in recent weeks. The shocking murder of Conservative media personality Charlie Kirk is only the latest Rorschach Test that maps political and social orientations onto the very perception of reality. While folks to my left have been excoriating Kirk as one of the most vile people ever to walk the earth, folks to my right have been canonizing him. The government’s policies on immigration, free speech, and gender issues are similarly met with cheering in some quarters and loathing in others. Many believe we are edging toward fascism; many believe we’re finally cleaning things up. Families and communities are navigating real schisms based on the American political scene, based on the situation in Israel and Gaza, based on world views about gender, sexuality, and race, based on beliefs about the rights and freedoms and responsibilities we regard as sacrosanct. The point is that in a feverish environment like the current moment, in which we don’t talk to one another across difference, the things we might be able to agree about remain hidden. And what’s revealed is so skewed as to be cartoonish. 

Between the technology that dominates so much of our waking lives, and the algorithm that offers us refills on what we already have decided is truth, and simple social isolation, we, as a society, have lost the thread of what constitutes fact, much less nuance. Each of us comes to conclusions that make sense, based on the information we’ve been fed. But we are not ordering from the full menu, and we are not asking questions of one another across the table.

I often lament how disheartening it is to hear people say they just can’t talk to so-and-so because their politics are not aligned. The less we hear ideas and viewpoints that challenge us, the more convinced we become not only of our rightness but of the essential wrongness of anyone who thinks differently. The middle space where we talk things over and consider multiple angles hollows out, while the habit of dehumanization gets ever more ingrained in us. There’s an arrogance to the whole vicious cycle, a knee-jerk dismissal of anything from the so-called other side. And what I want to say to you is that yes, there may be things about the ideology on the other side that are disagreeable or even hateful, but much of what we’re tagging as hateful is being fed to us in a way designed to make us think that. The same is true for the person you most vividly differ with. 

For the most part, the places where we get information are curating content and viewpoints for maximum agitation, at once disparaging those who see things differently and flattering our assumptions. All this is a very effective way of keeping us scrolling so they can generate more ad revenue. Our very humanity is being bought and sold, while our capacity for holding multiple perspectives with curiosity erodes with every conversation we avoid.

But the hidden things, the nuances of who we are, away from political argument, are known to God alone. What’s revealed is very much at the human level, and we simply can’t see the whole thing. Yet that long-ago game of hide-and-seek holds a lesson too. Hidden things can change, and we always have the choice to look harder at what’s revealed and wonder, together and apart, What is it that God sees in all this? What else is it that God sees in all this? And how can I teach my children to return to a stable path, so God can take us back in love?

We can never know the fullness of this world, but we can respect the not knowing, hold our convictions with humility and others’ with curiosity, and, in the words of Leonard Cohen, bless the covenant of love between what is hidden and what is revealed.

Shabbat Shalom!

Shoftim for TAA

(Delivered August 30, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

This week’s Torah portion, Parshat Shoftim, closes with a bizarre and confusing passage concerning a ritual that came to be known as עֶגְלָה עֲרוּפָה—a broken-necked calf. As I mentioned before, this ritual was prescribed in cases in which there was an unsolved murder out in the open (the assumption being that if the murder was in town it was much less likely to be unsolved). In such a situation, elders and judges from the area would painstakingly measure the distance from the corpse to each of the nearby towns. Whichever town was closest would then take on the responsibility of attending to the ritual, in which a young calf that had never been worked would be taken to a flooded ravine that had never been plowed. Once there, the elders would break the calf’s neck and, as they washed their hands in the flowing waters, they would recite the formula:

יָדֵינוּ לֹא שָׁפְכוּ אֶת־הַדָּם הַזֶּה וְעֵינֵינוּ לֹא רָאוּ׃
Our hands did not shed this blood, and our eyes didn’t see.

They would go on to say: Adonai, absolve Your people Israel, whom You redeemed, and do not permit innocent blood among Your people Israel. (Deut. 21:7-8)

To me, this ritual feels barbaric, in the way that it answers senseless violence with more senseless violence, all wrapped up in a veneer of religious practice. My dismay is compounded all the more so when I look at how the Rabbis of the Talmud treat it. Perhaps it’s just the Sages doing what Sages do, but it’s hard to stomach their exacting discussion of various aspects of the case: If the person was decapitated did the head roll away from the body, and if so, is the distance measured from the head or from the body? Supposing the body is still twitching? If the corpse was found hanging from a tree—in other words, not lying in the field as specified in the original verse—does the practice apply? The Talmudic approach to the ritual is grisly but precise, sparing no effort in the pursuit of certainty. 

The possibilities are endless…and gruesome. It’s all too easy to imagine the Rabbis investing in the minutiae with cold hearts, having somehow left behind the reality of a person who went missing and was found dead, a person who at one time meant the world to someone.

And yet, our ancestors lived in a time of intense uncertainty. They didn’t have rapid communication systems or forensic investigators, much less DNA testing. When a dead body was discovered, it was cause for even more anxiety. An unwitnessed, unmourned murder represented a threat; a killer was out there. Performing עֶגְלָה עֲרוּפָה assigns responsibility where none can actually be ascertained, and in doing so protects a semblance of social order. Communal atonement and protection seem possible, even as the killer does remain out there.

All these centuries later, the attempted creation of black and white where only grey exists reads to me like a container for doubt, a strategy for managing the sense of danger and anxiety that bubbles to the surface with an unsolved crime. The era of Rabbinic Judaism was barely more than a century after the destruction of the Second Temple, and it seems to me that the exactitude the Rabbis brought to the matter served a psychological purpose. For a people who had lost everything—twice—the need to manage uncertainty must have been profound. Their precision was the best tool they had for facing the existential dread that accompanied them day by day. I imagine them telling themselves, “If we know what to do, we can hold on.” Ritual filled the void when uncertainty grew unbearable. The Sages of the Talmud reached into every corner where a question might lurk, no matter how revolting or far-fetched.

Yet questions and doubts, innocent blood and senseless violence, and devastating questions of social order are again the topic of the day, and whether or not a killer’s identity is known, the very act of murder remains a mystery in and of itself. This week, a twenty-three-year-old opened fire on Annunciation Catholic school, killing two children as they prayed at Mass, and injuring at least 18 others. This horrific burst of violence—one in a too-long stream of similar events—forces us yet again to confront the darkness that persists in human nature, millennia after the Torah tried to locate an answer where none could exist.

And yet … about some things there is no doubt, no mystery. There is no doubt that we live in a society where weapons of war are available to private consumers; where red flags such as hateful social media posts are ignored or explained away; where cruelty has become part of the currency for much communication, particularly online; and where mass shooting after mass shooting after mass shooting gets met with hand-wringing and “thoughts and prayers” and an attitude of voluntary inevitability. There is no mystery, other than how and why inertia feeds on itself as more and more innocent people are murdered simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ironically, Parshat Shoftim also contains the famous phrase

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף
Justice, justice shall you pursue

We are tragically far from that ideal; day by day, the pursuit of justice is entangled in the snares of polarization, a warped definition of liberty, a dogged commitment to the wrong rights, and sheer exhaustion on the part of those of us who might make a change. Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski, the two children who were murdered this week, are just the most recent casualties of this uniquely American repetition compulsion. While we all go through the well-practiced motions of outrage and defensiveness and red herrings and legislative entropy, more and more will die.

This is not a dvar Torah with an easy answer. As obvious as the circumstances are, there seems to be no solution to this modern-day plague that pokes with too much regularity at the holes in our society. As we agonize and wait and advocate for change, let us learn from our ancestors about managing unbearable confusion and pain. Let us invest in ritual and the divine comfort we heard in today’s haftarah and in the blessing of community. And may we never know such sorrow again.

Re’eh for TAA

Delivered August 23, 2025

Shabbat shalom!

I bet you didn’t know this, but I am a thief. I try not to talk about it too much, it’s a little bit embarrassing, but it’s the truth. Not the kind of thief who sneaks about in the night and breaks into fancy houses. Nor the kind of thief who goes into stores and pockets things off the shelves. Nor the kind of thief who cheats on income taxes or tries to get unearned advantages. 

Rather, I have a long criminal record of stealing from God.

Let me explain. From Masechet Brachot 35b:

אָמַר רַבִּי חֲנִינָא בַּר פָּפָּא: כָּל הַנֶּהֱנֶה מִן הָעוֹלָם הַזֶּה בְּלֹא בְּרָכָה 
כְּאִילּוּ גּוֹזֵל לְהַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא וּכְנֶסֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל
Rabbi Hanina bar Papa said: Everyone who enjoys something from this world and does not make a blessing, it is as if they have stolen from the Holy Blessed One and from the community of Israel.

Before I began my journey home to Judaism, I stole ruthlessly from God. So many meals unblessed, so many mornings without Birchot haShachar—the everyday blessings—so many rainbows and first bites of summer peach and transitions into starlit evenings unacknowledged and unblessed. So many opportunities for gratitude squandered.

Everyone who enjoys something from this world and does not make a blessing, it is as if they have stolen from the Holy Blessed One and from the community of Israel.

Elsewhere, the Tosefta takes up the topic of this particular kind of theft, citing the first pasuk of Psalm 24. This should be familiar to my Sunday morning people: 

לַיי הָאָרֶץ וּמְלוֹאָהּ תֵּבֵל וְיֹשְׁבֵי בָהּ׃
The earth and everything in it belong to God; the world and its inhabitants.

The tradition is reminding us in these passages that whatever we have—no matter how hard we think we may have worked for it—is not ours solely due to our virtue. We benefit, constantly and in myriad ways, from the labor of other people, particularly our ancestors; from the systems and structures that make things work; from sheer dumb luck; and especially from God. In fact, looking at Psalm 24, we might say that all those things—the people, the systems, the luck—are manifestations of God. 

By living all those years without blessing—Jewish without Jewish practice—I was in regular violation of this principle, a repeat offender, so to say. According to this standard, I suppose many of us are. It’s all too easy to go about our lives experiencing deep enjoyment, without pausing to bless the ultimate Source of that enjoyment. But our Torah is interested in teaching us perspective—in showing us that what feels like it’s ours isn’t fully ours, isn’t truly ours.

The earth and everything in it belong to God; the world and its inhabitants.

Parshat Re’eh opens with a stark choice. In the first pasuk, which we’ll study in more depth next year, Moses says: 

רְאֵה אָנֹכִי נֹתֵן לִפְנֵיכֶם הַיּוֹם בְּרָכָה וּקְלָלָה
See! I place before you today: blessing and curse.

Moses goes on to teach that the choice is ours. If we live a life aligned with God’s commandments, blessing will be ours. And, of course, the reverse.

The parsha goes on to review various topics: the laws of kashrut, the practice of shmita (loan forgiveness), the sacrifices, tithing, the manumission of slaves, the three Festival holidays of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. And the biggie: resisting idolatry. 

Woven throughout these teachings is the thread of blessing. Over and over in Parshat Re’eh, we encounter some variation of the phrase: יְבָרֶכְךָ יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ—Adonai your God will bless you. These words crop up as we’re reflecting about property and prosperity, and the impermanence of both. The teachings dwell at length on how to treat people who have fewer resources than we have: people who are enslaved, impoverished, or indebted. 

In context, these reminders of God’s blessing reveal more about the nature of blessing. For example, in the section on tithes, the practice is that the Levites, as well as widows, orphans, and non-citizens are to be welcomed to come and eat their fill 

לְמַעַן יְבָרֶכְךָ יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־מַעֲשֵׂה יָדְךָ אֲשֶׁר תַּעֲשֶׂה
So that Adonai your God will bless you
in all the works of your hands that you take on

Similarly in the passage about shmita, the Torah teaches that when contemplating offering a loan to a needy person, we shouldn’t hesitate if it’s toward the end of the shmita cycle and the repayment rate will be low. Rather:

נָתוֹן תִּתֵּן לוֹ וְלֹא־יֵרַע לְבָבְךָ בְּתִתְּךָ לוֹ 

כִּי בִּגְלַל  הַדָּבָר הַזֶּה יְבָרֶכְךָ יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־מַעֲשֶׂךָ וּבְכֹל מִשְׁלַח יָדֶךָ
Give enthusiastically with no regrets in your heart for the giving,
For because of this, Adonai your God will bless you in all your works
and in everything you set your hand to

In this week’s Torah study, we paused over the passage about lending to the poor without regard to whether we will recoup that outlay. The text warns not to harden our hearts or close our fists but instead to give readily, to open a hand to all who are in need. Our sages elaborate: Rashi urges us to prioritize the needy over others, and not to agonize over whether or not to give, even multiple times. Just give. Ibn Ezra extends the generosity, not just to material goods but to comforting words. He writes: 

לֹא תְאַמֵּץ אֶת־לְבָבְךָ לְדָבֶּר עַל לִבּוֹ דְבָרִים טוֹביִם
Do not harden your heart but speak to their heart in words of kindness

The gentle heart and open hand the parsha teaches about allow us, rather than stealing from God, to imitate God. Perhaps this is why there are so many customs around reciting these words from Psalm 145, better known as Ashrei 

פּוֹתֵחַ אֶת־יָדֶךָ וּמַשְׂבִּיעַ לְכָל־חַי רָצוֹן
You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing

The Shulchan Aroch teaches we must have clear focus when saying this pasuk, and if we later realize we weren’t fully concentrating, we should go back and do it again. The importance of open hands—ours or God’s—warrants this special attention. The parsha makes this connection: to be generous is a blessing, which in turn benefits the work of our hands. There is reciprocity in blessing. The hands that open are also ready to receive. By blessing others, we are blessed. And when we receive, it is our obligation to give the blessing right back to God, in the form of acknowledgement, gratitude, and service.

I said before that Parshat Re’eh reviews many topics, including resisting idolatry. I think this is actually related to whether or not we engage in the practice of offering blessings. To offer a blessing of thanks keeps us in relationship with the divine. And the converse is true. When I was living my old life of untethered enjoyment, this was a low-impact form of עבודה זרה, of idolatry. The thread of blessing that weaves its way through our parsha reminds us that there’s another, more wholesome way. In each moment there is something to bless. When we open our hands to catch what comes, we open ourselves to the divine. And when we imagine, experience, and appreciate the openness of God’s hands, there is nothing to do but bless.

Shabbat shalom!

Eikev for TAA

(Delivered August 16, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

I’d like to start with a quick survey. Raise your hand if you’ve ever made a mistake. Great. I’m not the only one.

Mistakes, as I often tell my children (and myself), are part of life. We all make them, for all kinds of reasons. And if you were to take the third triennial of Parshat Eikev as the entirety of the parsha, you would make the mistake of thinking the covenant with God was much simpler than it actually is. There is a broader context for the question that opens our reading, a whole framework that brings that question to life. 

We come into the conversation in the middle, so to speak, as the Torah raises the topic of what God wants from us in order to uphold our end of the covenant. The expectation from God is high: יראת השם—fear or reverence for God—plus loving and serving God and walking the paths of the divine. This is a relational way of thinking about something ephemeral. It’s quite a tall order, and maddeningly hard to measure in terms of success. Relationship-building is full of challenges, even with tangible, proximate humans. How much more difficult, then, to be in this kind of relationship with … an idea, an abstraction which is definitionally out of reach.

The missing context, which complicates the discussion, is that there has been a breach prior to this. Earlier in the parsha, Moses recounts the story of חטא העגל—the sin of the Golden Calf originally told in the Book of Exodus. While Moses is up on Mount Sinai getting the tablets inscribed with God’s teachings, the Israelites have a spectacular meltdown, panicking at the sheer difficulty of their newfound monotheism. They crave something—anything— to give them a sense of divine presence, and so they take all their gold and turn it into a statue of a calf to worship. Moses describes the aftermath of this episode in excruciating detail: God’s furious desire to punish the Israelites, Moses smashing the tablets, and then grinding the idol to dust. This is a terrible rupture, a grievous mistake.

It seems irreparable. Our worst mistakes often do.

I spoke with someone this week who shared their own story of a grievous mistake, something that came about in a time when their mental health was compromised, leaving them susceptible to unwise decisions. As they spoke, I thought: this is so human. This is a person of deep integrity and compassion who had fallen into a situation that caused harm. It could happen with any of us, and perhaps it even has.

To reflect on this person’s story in the same week as I was preparing Parshat Eikev was instructive. Because the Torah teaches us that while our mistakes—even the worst ones—are real, and consequential, they are not unforgivable. Our tradition doesn’t shy away from the harm that human behavior can cause, but neither does it insist that we remain in a state of degradation forever. Even the Israelites’ act of עבודה זרה—idolatry—a sin which is considered in the same category as murder and adultery, does not define the trajectory of our people for all time. 

The parsha goes on to describe a second set of tablets, a second chance to engage with our side of the covenant. God allows Moses to come back up to the top of Mount Sinai, offering a fresh start. Moses brings down the new tablets and places them in the Aron, the holiest place in the mishkan, so that the Israelites can keep this holy teaching with them as they go. But the repair doesn’t end with that. The Gemara states, on Menachot 99a:

רַב יוסֵף מְלַמֵד שֶהַלוּחוֹת וְשִבְרֵי לוּחוֹת מוֹנַחִין בַּאַרוֹן
Rav Yosef teaches that the tablets
and the shards of the tablets rest in the Aron.

Rav Yosef’s statement might seem counterintuitive. Surely carrying around our worst mistake can only be discouraging and burdensome. What could possibly be the benefit of having to live with the reminder of ourselves at our lowest and most vulnerable moment? 

I think Rav Yosef’s profound teaching is that retaining the vision of the worst thing we’ve ever done, keeping it close by, allows us to see how far we’ve come. Our mistakes are a record of our growth, like the rings of a tree. Erase the memory of all the bumps in the road, and what remains is a falsified, whitewashed history—a curated image that has nothing to do with reality. We are formed by our deeds—even the ones that cause us the most pain to think about. And if our worst errors give us a chance to learn, they are not a waste.

In fact the rabbis posit in a few different places in the literature that perhaps God is, in some way, glad of our mistakes: יישר כח ששתרת—it’s good that you broke them. It isn’t that God relished the sin of the Golden Calf—surely not! But that horrific episode gave the Israelites a sense of what was at stake, and gave them a chance to know God in a different way: as a presence that offered a new beginning. The two sets of tablets together are a symbol for moving past heartbreak and self-recrimination into a stronger commitment to what’s important. Breaking makes room for something new, for something to grow where perhaps stagnation had taken hold. 

As we move into the season of the Days of Awe, thoughts of repentance begin to crowd our minds. What are the deeds we feel ashamed of, and how can we move beyond them? As we take on the work of תשובה—of return—we reset our moral compasses to direct us away from all the wrong paths onto which we might have strayed. But as we examine our past failures, let’s carry them lightly alongside us and allow them to teach us—to bear our lapses with grace, to draw courage from the ways we’ve overcome our lesser selves, and to move forward, the stronger for having been broken.

Shabbat shalom!