blessings

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.

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!

Pesach for TAA

(Adapted from my Pesach column for the Jewish Journal and delivered on April 12, 2025)

Chag Sameach!

What a time we live in! By some accountings, Nissan is the first month, and so, in a way, we are at the beginning of the year, even as we’re in the middle. Beginning, middle, or end, the moment we find ourselves in feels tender and fraught. Living in a divided community, in a divided country, in a divided world, we can sense all too plainly the cracks in the foundation. 

Within the Jewish community as a whole, there are people of strong ethical and moral fiber who disagree passionately on fundamental issues regarding the Jewish future. Heartfelt convictions as to what the Israeli government should and should not do vary widely from person to person. And all across the country, we are seeing ever more political polarization, as we grapple with the profound implications of the new regime and its forceful moves to reshape our democracy and our society. The world, meanwhile, is gripped by multiple wars and conflicts—from Israel to Sudan to Ukraine—and by all manner of natural and human-caused disasters. Jews are scared. LGBTQ+ folks are scared. Immigrants are scared.

The literal sense of Mitzrayim—narrow places—and the metaphorical sense of what it was like to be enslaved in Mitzrayim—oppressive, confining—feel all too real as we pray for the release of our hostages still remaining in Gaza and as we watch with agonizing concern as the global trend toward authoritarian extremism heats up, for Jews and for humanity in general.  

The arrival of Pesach seems both implausible and desperately necessary. To contemplate the miracle of redemption in a time of political discord, angst, and rising antisemitism feels chutzpadik at the least, and perhaps even downright absurd. Who can speak of a parting sea when we ourselves are drowning in grief over relentless violence in the Holy Land? Who can sing of freedom when our people—after more than 500 unbearable days—are still in dusty tunnels while their captors gloat? Who can fathom staying up all night to recount miracle upon miracle when we are, individually and collectively, exhausted to the brink of collapse?

And yet when redemption feels decidedly unattainable, that is when we most need to come together and raise our voices, as we remind ourselves and one another that the impossible is actually possible. What better time to remember the signs and wonders with which God signaled that our moment had arrived? What better time to remember the splitting of the sea, an event that set all Israelites on an equal footing, such that, according to Midrash, the lowliest housemaid saw the same glimpses of the divine that Moses himself saw? What better time to remember the way an unassuming, debilitatingly shy person with a too-hot temper grew into the leader who was entrusted with the task of setting God’s people free? 

Everything about Pesach is suffused with possibility: that those who have been downtrodden can rise up, that freedom can come, that things can change. 

Our Pesach Torah reading describes the moment of change like this: 

וּמוֹשַׁב בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֲשֶׁר יָשְׁבוּ בְּמִצְרָיִם שְׁלֹשִׁים שָׁנָה וְאַרְבַּע מֵאוֹת שָׁנָה׃
וַיְהִי מִקֵּץ שְׁלֹשִׁים שָׁנָה וְאַרְבַּע מֵאוֹת שָׁנָה וַיְהִי בְּעֶצֶם הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה יָצְאוּ כּל־צִבְאוֹת יי מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם׃

“The Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt was 430 years. And at the end of the 430th year, on that very day,
all of God’s multitudes went out from the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 12:40-41) 

I was struck anew this year by a phrase בְּעֶצֶם הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה (on that very day) that appears not once but twice in the Pesach readings. (It also appears just a few psukim prior to the beginning of our Torah reading, and in the haftarah that we read today.) That cluster of words is so unassuming that we might skip right past it, but like Moses himself, it contains astonishing potential. This is a phrase that shows us that everything has its moment, that there comes a last day for every hardship. 

This profound teaching—that something new is ever possible—is a message of hope, from the Author of hope. It reminds us that the future is God’s time. While we can’t know when the sea will split and the suffering will be behind us, we do know that everything has an endpoint.

And while we wait, the seder invites us to remember: We’ve been in tight spots before. In every generation forces have risen against us. We are much stronger than we’re sometimes given credit for. Our commitment to one another strengthens us yet more.

And every year—even as we end the seder with the bread of misery on our lips—we say L’shanah haba’ah bi’Yerushalayim. Next year in Jerusalem. May it be so, in a world at peace. Chag sameach!

Midweek Musings from Gloucester Daily Times

(This weekly column rotates among local clergy members on Cape Ann. This week it was my turn. Read it on the GDT site here.)

Jewish tradition makes a big deal about gratitude. The first words (or at least, the first official words) that we say each morning are words of thanks. Modeh ani l’fanecha—I am grateful before you, eternal giver of life, who has mercifully returned my soul to me. Your trust in me is great. This blessing we recite daily reminds us that, as one of my congregants likes to say, every day we get to wake up is a good day. The gratitude continues throughout the day, with some Jews holding to the tradition of saying 100 blessings per day. Any moment can be a source of appreciation, elevated from its daily-ness through the conscious act of blessing.

Of course, we know that life is complicated. It’s true that every day we get to wake up is a good day, but many of us wake up to physical or psychic pain, or we wake up to difficult relationships or uncertain economic circumstances. Being grateful is easy when everything is going well, when the world outside our windows is lovely and makes sense. But sometimes the landscape is blurred by disappointment, insufficiency, and regret. 

It has been a difficult period for the Jewish community. Since October 7 of last year, we have been reeling from Hamas’s ruthless attack, and from the slow but quickening boil of antisemitism that has followed. This antisemitism has been at times merely rhetorical and at times shockingly violent. Even in wonderful, peaceful Gloucester, the echoes of world events are cause for concern, and for reawakened trauma. 

The warning attributed to George Santayana, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” turns in my mind as I rearrange the words. Perhaps the Jewish version might be: Those who cannot forget the past are doomed to relive it.

They say that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. For my people, that means an age-old pattern of making our way in a society, settling into a community, only to watch relationships curdle and our safety come into question. When the world gets unsettled, so do the Jews. We know all too well that things can be going along well, until suddenly we’re in first century Rome, or in fifth century Minorca, or in eleventh century Mainz, or thirteenth century England, or seventeenth century Vienna, or Kentucky in 1862, or Kishinev, or Weimar, or waking up to the sound of explosions and gunshots one October morning in southern Israel, after a night of dancing to trance music at the Nova Music Festival.

To be Jewish is to carry this history in your bones.

And yet to be Jewish is also to say a hundred blessings every day. Telling the lachrymose version of the Jewish story is one way, but turn the lens and you see things differently. This people, this culture I cherish, has survived for millennia. Another way to see Jewish history is as a tale of innovation and thriving, of faith and vitality, punctuated by occasional catastrophe. Our sorrows are ancient, but so is our resilience.

The great first-century sage known as Rabbi Akiva was no stranger to loss, uncertainty and heartbreak, having lived in the time of the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, which was itself a violent antisemitic attack. In Mishnah Brachot (6:8), Rabbi Akiva taught, “Even if a person’s entire meal is overboiled vegetables (shelek), they should make three blessings afterward, [i.e. the traditional Jewish grace after meals].”

When I first encountered this text, I was puzzled. I hadn’t given much thought to blessing things that were unappealing. And yet—upon reflection, I began to see Rabbi Akiva’s wisdom. You might not enjoy the soggy vegetables as you’re eating them, but afterward, your belly is full. Sometimes having enough is truly enough. Stirring up our gratitude in the complicated moments can help us notice what’s worth blessing.

When life is difficult and anxious-making—as it surely is for the Jewish community at this moment in history—leaning on our practice of blessing can help us to hold steady. Blessing what is before us—even blessing the difficult—is like a lifeboat in a stormy sea. It cannot change the weather, but it gives us something to hold onto. 

Lech L’cha for TAA

(Delivered November 9, 2024)

For most of human history, the size of the known world was small. People were rooted in place, often for generations, unless a violent rupture upset the established order. We were thickly woven together, for better and worse. Many generations lived under one roof or close by; we knew our neighbors well; we lived lives of interdependence. Communication was in-person and travel was primarily by foot, with an animal and maybe a cart. As such, we might have known what was happening in our own village or the next one over, but that was it—that was as big as the “big picture” got. In contrast to the way many of us live our lives today—taking vacations that bring us all around the globe, spending half the year in one state and half in another, or even schlepping back and forth from Gloucester to Newton on a weekly basis—for most of human history, our existence was mainly about staying put.

So in Parshat Lech Lecha, when God says to Avram—he was still Avram then—

לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ

Go—go!—from your land, the your birthplace, from your ancestral home,
to the land that I will show to you

this is truly momentous. What God is asking of Avram is to have the courage to leave everything that makes sense, everything that is familiar, because some unknown destiny awaits. To pick up and go, not because something is chasing you, but because something is calling you. This is the experience our Torah invites us to reflect on. Unlike Adam and Chava leaving the Garden of Eden, Avram is not going into exile. And unlike the Israelites leaving Egypt in Sefer Shmot—the Book of Exodus—he is not leaving because conditions have become intolerable. Rather, he is subject to what the biblical scholar Avivah Zornberg calls a divine imperative. God says it’s time to go, so he goes. 

And as I said last night, God sweetens this instruction with the promise of blessing: that God will make Avram’s descendants into a great nation, that God will bless Avram and magnify his name, and that Avram himself will become a blessing. This reassurance of blessing jolts Avram, his wife Sarai, and their nephew Lot, and they set out. The journey will take them places they were expecting to go, but also to places they weren’t expecting. When famine strikes in Eretz Canaan—the Land of Canaan—Avram gathers himself again and takes his family down to Egypt for the sake of survival. Over the course of many decades Avram amasses wealth and position, so when he and his ever-growing entourage return again to Canaan, he and Lot find that they have become too wealthy to share the land together. They agree to split up and as they contemplate who should stay where, who should take which parcel of land, the forward motion that has characterized the parsha gets a revealing sliver of an interruption.

In chapter 13 verse 10, Lot looks around the land and, seeing how well-watered and fertile it is, compares it to two things: Gan Adonai and Eretz Mitzraim—God’s Garden, and the Land of Egypt. With this comparison, the text pumps the brakes on all this relentless movement. With this comparison, our Torah acknowledges that with every step forward there is an equal and opposite impulse within us to look back. At moments of change, we paraphrase the divine messenger that speaks to Hagar in the portion we heard chanted today:

אֵי־מִזֶּה בָאת וְאָנָה תֵלֵכִי

Where are you coming from? Where are you going?

At moments of change, something primal inside us says, why can’t things be the same as before? We long to go back to a simpler time, and we idealize even the places we needed to leave. 

At moments of change especially, the words we chant every time we place the Torah scrolls back in the aron ring in our hearts, maybe even make our voices falter:

חַדֵּשׁ יָמֵינוּ כְּקֶֽדֶם

Renew our days, like before

When the inexorable unfolding of time and history catches us in its grip, we imagine that there was a time when the path was different. We imagine perhaps that the past held us more tenderly than it did. But it was a hunger for life that made Eve test the fruit, which ultimately led to banishment. And it was conflict in Egypt that led to Avram continuing on his journey, doubling back to a land that ultimately held his fate as religious innovator, the father of three traditions. 

This week, this historic week, the inexorable unfolding of time and history has us sharp in its grip. Political division; another antisemitic attack, this time in Amsterdam; a government shakeup in Israel—all these events and more conspire to tell us, there is change and journey ahead, and it’s going to be harder than we thought. Our unity will be tested in ways that we can’t imagine. Yet in the words of the great Leonard Cohen, whose yahrzeit was this week:

The birds, they sang at the break of day, Start again, I heard them say. 
Don’t dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be.

We cannot recapture what is gone; all that is granted us is to move forward. Like Avram our ancestor, we can lean on the divine presence for strength. Like him, we can think critically about the dominant culture that surrounds us and speak up for what feels most true. The blessings that were offered to Avram—perhaps they weren’t promises after all, but consequences. There’s faith and courage in Avram’s story, and that’s where the blessings come from. Those blessings still speak to us today.

וְאֶעֶשְׂךָ לְגוֹי גָּדוֹל

And I will make you a great nation 

וַאֲבָרֶכְךָ

And I will bless you 

וַאֲגַדְּלָה שְׁמֶךָ

And I will magnify your name. 

וֶהְיֵה בְּרָכָה

And you shall be a blessing.

And you shall be a blessing.

And you shall be a blessing.

Shabbat shalom.

Lech L’cha for TAA

(Delivered November 8, 2024)

As you might have heard, we recently had an election, the culmination of a campaign season that felt to many of us monumentally consequential, to the point of dread. Never before in my lifetime has the American populace felt so at odds, so willing to turn away from each other, so poised to dismiss the humanity of fully half the citizenry. It’s easy to feel that, although a winner has been declared; at some level, America—or at least the idea of America—has already lost.

The campaign was long, unimaginably long, as we waited and wondered and worried. No doubt there will be more waiting and wondering and worrying; there always is. Yet a tradition that has endured and thrived for millennia has something to teach about taking the long view, especially when the short view looks bleak to half the nation.

Each morning, as I get to the late innings of the weekday Amidah, this phrase often catches in my throat:

כִּי לִישׁוּעָתְךָ קִוִּינוּ כָּל הַיּוֹם

All day long we hope for Your deliverance

We have grown accustomed to waiting, it seems.

We cannot know how a new Trump presidency will play out—whether the predictions of chaos and fascism will turn out to be accurate or hyperbolic, but we can derive strength from the manner of waiting. Our parsha this week opens, famously:

וַיֹּאמֶר יי אֶל־אַבְרָם לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ 

אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ׃

And God said to Avram: Go—go!—from your land, from your birthplace, from your ancestral home, to the land which I will show you.

And then comes a shower of blessing: 

I will bless you
You shall be a blessing
I will bless those who bless you
All the families of the earth will be blessed through you.

God urges Avram to move forward into an unknown future. And then, the promise of blessing. Now, as the nation prepares to deal with the election results, we have no choice but to go into an unknown future. May there be blessing upon blessing upon blessing to follow, and may we find a way, each and every family, to be blessed through one another.

Parshat Va’etchanan: God will Provide

A phrase I heard frequently in my household growing up was, “God will provide.” My sweet father used to say it a lot. Still does, at age 90. He is not a very religious man, but he is gentle and optimistic, which is almost the same thing. His faith is not often articulated at all—much less in fancy words—but more times than I can count, when we asked him how something we had doubts about was going to work out, he would say, “God will provide.”

He was usually right.

Our Torah reading this week, Parshat Vaetchanan, begins with Moshe pleading with God for a bit of grace: the opportunity to enter the Land of Israel despite God’s determination that he wouldn’t be permitted to do so. The word vaetchanan is rooted in the letters chet-nun-nun, and depending on the conjugation, can mean either to be gracious or to seek grace. Rashi suggests that the word could also be interpreted as being from the root letters chet-nun-mem, (as in sinat chinam, baseless hatred) to mean something unearned—so in this case, according to Rashi’s reading, Moshe might be asking for an unearned gift.

The two meanings pair nicely, and the parsha supports both. In chapter 6, verse 10, we read Moshe’s prediction that the Israelites, upon entering the Land, will find waiting for them: cities they didn’t build, houses full of things they didn’t fill them with, cisterns and vineyards and olive groves…  וְאָכַלְתָּ וְשָׂבָעְתָּ and you will eat, and you will be satisfied. The promise of the Promised Land here is that the Israelites will have their needs fulfilled, without having to work for it. They will have a head start in life, seemingly offered unconditionally from God. This seems to me the very definition of grace, and very much unearned. 

So Moshe goes on to warn the Israelites not to get so caught up in their bounty that they imagine their success to be to their own credit. Usually the so-called self-made man has a whole lot of unacknowledged help. We all do.

Vaetchanan reminds us that there is still a covenant in place. As Moses steps back from his leadership role, he reiterates this foundational teaching: 

הִשָּׁמְרוּ לָכֶם פֶּן־תִּשְׁכְּחוּ אֶת־בְּרִית יי אֱלֹהֵיכֶם אֲשֶׁר כָּרַת עִמָּכֶם
Watch yourselves so you don’t forget the covenant
that Adonai your God sealed with you. (Deuteronomy 4:23)

That is, the unearned goodies are actually part of a spiritual ecosystem and we have a role to play. Our role comes from words so familiar that their meaning may have dissolved in our minds; these words, too, come in our parsha this week.

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכׇל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכׇל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכׇל־מְאֹדֶךָ
You shall love Adonai your God, with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your being. (Deuteronomy 6:5)

You could recite it all by memory, no doubt, but let’s linger over it for a moment and make a point of not taking it for granted. What is it to love God with all the fullness of our selves?

It’s complicated: we don’t even really know Who or What God is, so that makes love hard to define or fathom. And how can we be commanded to love; aren’t feelings out of our conscious control? The Israeli Torah scholar Nechama Leibowitz offers two possibilities for approaching the question of how to love God: she suggests it can mean either to love the world that God created with undistracted passion, or to sever our connections to the world in order to focus solely on God. 

I am typically wary of answers that come in black and white. After all, if we drop everything and focus only on God, we risk isolation and myopia. And if we are locked in undiscerning gratitude, we risk squandering chances to improve the world through acts of kindness and righteousness. I would rather look for a way to unbind the Leibowitz binary and find a flexible approach that allows for a little of both. 

Love, of course, is both a feeling and an action. In any deep and sustaining relationship there are times when the feeling comes to the fore, and times when the feeling might seem dormant but action carries us through. Think of it this way: When your toddler suddenly grasps a concept they have been reaching for, or mixes up their words to say something adorably wrong, or covers you with hugs and kisses, the feeling of love is the most obvious thing in the world. When your toddler dumps baby powder on the carpet five minutes before guests arrive, or falls into a lightning-storm of wild emotion because you served the Ovaltine in the wrong sippy-cup, or rips several pages out of your favorite book, the feeling of love might go quiet for a while, but the action of love will keep you steady. 

So it is with God. At different moments, we have different experiences of our love for God: sometimes all-consuming, sometimes making the long way round through deep appreciation of the world’s many blessings. Sometimes, it’s easy to feel God’s presence and love as an emotion suffuses us; sometimes not so much, and our covenantal responsibility is to love anyway, as commanded. 

Sometimes it is easy to see what God has provided; sometimes God provides us with a challenge or a question. Our task is to love through feeling—through noticing and attending to the world in all its complicated glory, and through action—in the form of mitzvot, the things we do simply because the Beloved asks.

A Meditation on Time & Space

I hear and say it all the time these days: the world is so different now, nothing is the same, it all feels so unreal, so surreal, so theoretical. Time and space are collapsing. 

Gertrude Stein’s phrase, “There is no there there,” was originally her description of her experience revisiting the site of her family home as an adult and finding it had been torn down. It has come to mean much more over the years: everything from a half-horse town to a person who seems more substantive than they are. At this point it feels universal, like it describes everything. 

These days, there is no there anywhere. 

I imagine this might feel like a whiff of what it was like after the Temple was destroyed. Our center of our communal and religious life is barely available to us; it is virtually unrecognizable. Torah scrolls across the world sit lonely in their Arks, fallow, unread, longed for. Shabbat is virtual or solitary. Community interaction is flattened and packed into boxes on the screen. Weddings are postponed or pared down to the bone. Families mourn in isolation. 

Rabbi Harold Kushner’s teaching, “Jews don’t pray for, Jews pray with,” is one I return to often; it is a touchstone of my religious life. I am deeply moved by the very experience of sitting in synagogue in a community at prayer. I love the sound of voices going in and out or raising up together in song. I love the swaying. I love wrapping myself — and on rare, blessed occasions, my children — in a tallit. I love the feeling of being in a group of people united in hope and longing. Even if we are all hoping or longing for different things, each navigating our own idiosyncrasies of desire and need, we do it together and that, to me, feels holy. The vertical and the lateral entwine, filling the expanse. 

In pandemic time, it feels unsettling to think of praying with. Just when I need it most, my prayer life has shriveled to almost nothing. When I pray with others on a screen, I unwittingly become a spectator. My longing is mine alone and has no place to go. When I pray alone, the isolation is unbearable.

My world is at once tiny and unfathomable. The predictable physical space is accompanied by an inner space of such uncertainty and churn that it is sometimes hard to remember who I am or why I am here.

The Hebrew word עולם (olam) carries meanings of both time and space. It means world, and it means forever. It is all over the sacred texts, in phrases that conjure a beginningless, endless expanse: 

וחסד יי מעולם ועד עולם
And Gd’s love is from forever to forever (Psalm 103)

אתה הוא עד שלא נברא העולם
It was you who existed before the world’s creation (liturgy)

I have always been fascinated by the time/space one-two punch in עולם: in my imagination, the ancient Hebrews perceived a relationship between time and space that we moderns have a harder time accessing. They knew, I tell myself, that the things that are eternal are beyond easy categories. The sense we nowadays have, of time and space being two different things, is a construct. A wise friend once said to me, “Time is a dream.”

All the more so now. The days run together; the weeks fly; the months disappear, bringing May before we remember even to change the calendar page to April. It’s rushing by and going impossibly slowly all at the same (yeah) time. It feels like endless expanse, and like we’re all running out of time.

The book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) teaches that the wise and the foolish, the kind and the wicked, the joyful and the morose all come in time to the same end. The entirety of human experience is laid out in a book-length menu; we will at some point end up dining on each item. There is no implication that good behavior carries a reward, nor that bad behavior will be punished. We are told that a person’s ability to enjoy the pleasures at hand is a gift from Gd. 

ביום טובה היה בטוב וביום רעה ראה
In good days, dwell in the good; and in bad days, reflect. (Kohelet 7:14)

In this time period that feels both stretched and contracted, both eternal and ephemeral, time seems to fill every corner of the expanse and yet seems impossibly, terrifyingly short.

The present moment is all we have; let us meet it with all the joy we can muster.

We are alive, and that is blessing enough.

Four Blessings for Tu BiShevat

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Trees give us air to breathe, helping to sustain life. So, too, may you have a long, happy, healthy life. May you have space to breathe and may you breathe life into others by your example.

 

 

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Trees have roots that go deep into the ground and connect not only with the earth but with other trees. So, too, may you always know the joy of family, close friends, and a community to keep you company throughout your life. May you always be surrounded by people who love you and keep you connected.

 

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Tree trunks hold steady through harsh conditions. So, too, may you be held steady through life’s inevitable bumps. 

 

 

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The leaves of trees know when to hold on and when to let go. Called by the voice of nature itself, they follow a rhythm of their own. So, too, may you hear the still, small voice within you, and may it inspire you to a life of goodness in harmony with the world around you.