Chayei Sarah for TAA

(Delivered November 15, 2025)

You probably remember. For months, I wore a number on my shirt, first with masking tape and sharpie, then with a safety pin and numeral-imprinted beads. Each morning as I was getting dressed, I made a ritual of changing the number. One more day. One more day. One more agonizing day.

We Jews, of course, have a painful history with having numbers on our clothing or on our bodies—and although the practice I kept over those many months was voluntary—it reflected and refracted that ancient, modern, eternal pain. I am talking, of course, about tracking the days since October 7, 2023 and the embodied symbolism of counting the days of captivity that the hostages of many nations taken that day had to endure.

On October 13, just over a month ago, the living hostages were released, and I stopped wearing my pin. In the excitement of celebrating the ceasefire and the homecomings, it felt like the right moment to start fresh, with nothing on my lapel.

This week’s Torah reading from Parshat Chayei Sarah has me reconsidering. As we just read, the parsha opens with Avraham’s transaction with Efron ben Tzochar to acquire the Cave at Machpelah. In a different world with a different Torah, this purchase could easily be one imaginary pasuk, maybe two:

וְקַנָּה אַבְרָהָם אֶת מַּעֲרָת הַמַּכְפֵּלָה מֵעֶפְרוֹן הַחִתִּי בַּאַרְבַּע מֵאֹת שֶׁקֶל־כָּסֶף
And Abraham bought the Cave of Machpelah from Efron the Hittite
for 400 silver shekels.

End of story.

But in the real world, in our real Torah, the transaction unfolds in lengthy and almost comical detail: there is so much happening in this event, so much more exposition than we might imagine to be necessary. Over almost the entirety of chapter 23, we have Avraham—still grieving the death of his wife Sarah—approach the Hittites and ask for a burial plot. They generously say: you are a person of a higher status than all of us; just take what you want. He replies, essentially, let me speak to someone in charge. Efron emerges from the crowd and offers the land as a gift, Avraham insists on paying, and they go back and forth and back and forth. Finally Efron names his price, Avraham pays it, no questions asked, and the land passes into Avraham’s possession.

Given that this all could have been a single pasuk, we have to ask why the Torah has elongated and emphasized this exchange. After all, our scripture is often rather sparse on the details of the interactions between people. There tends not to be a lot of dialogue, even in dramatically rich scenes. For example, we famously don’t know what Cain said to Abel in the field, nor how Abel responded. We only know the murderous outcome of their conversation. So often the marrow of a scene is left unspoken. Here, it’s quite the opposite.

It could be that the Torah is simply reflecting the prevailing social customs for land acquisition, but this seems to me a pale explanation. In general, the Torah is not all that interested in teaching about sociological detail; that gets left more to the Sages of the Rabbinic Period. The Torah’s pedagogy is typically in the realm of theology and morality and ritual innovation.

Obviously I think there’s more going on here, as the Torah study folks and I discussed in detail the other day. Many of our commentators point to the dialogue between Avraham and Efron as being proof positive of the Jewish claim to the land: In Breishit Rabbah 79:7, Rabbi Yudan bar Shimon describes this passage as one of three where אֵין אֻמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם יְכוֹלִין לְהוֹנוֹת אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל לוֹמַר גְּזוּלִים הֵן בְּיֶדְכֶם—the nations of the world cannot disparage Israel and say these places were stolen by your hands. Rather, this dialogue—witnessed by the entire local community of Hittites—demonstrates that Abraham claimed ownership of the Cave of Machpelah fair and square. He paid the asking price. The entire city saw the deal go down.

Perhaps also this scene represents the next step in the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Avraham. Avraham followed God’s commandment to make his way to the Holy Land, in the belief that he and his descendants would become a great nation. He’s been there a while, has already had many adventures and misadventures. Perhaps the text is telling us: now, with Sarah’s death, it’s time for him to put down roots and stay.

This explanation is more compelling to me, as far as it goes. But I think there’s more still. The other day, at the memorial gathering for Jean O’Gorman, Rabbi Geller reminded us of the beautiful oral history curated by our member Sarah Dunlap, with the help of Jean and a few others (including Marilyn’s mother Janet Schlein). In that familiar green book, we learn that in October of 1904, just a few months after the founding of what would become TAA, the chevra, as it was known then, purchased the land that would become Mount Jacob Cemetery. As is customary across the Jewish world, one of the first—if not the first—acts of a group of Jews settling in a place, is the establishment and consecration of a graveyard. One of our core values—precious because it cannot be repaid—is חֶסֶד שֶׁל אֱמֶת, caring for the dead. Once a person’s earthly time is done, they should be buried with dignity, with the community standing alongside loved ones left behind.

We learn this from Avraham.

When he hears of Sarah’s death, he comes from Beersheva to Hevron to attend to her, he weeps over her, and then he does whatever it takes to make sure that her body will be buried nearby, in a setting that offers her the kavod she deserves, and offers him and Isaac a place to locate their grief and loss. Avraham intuits—and our tradition reinforces—that the honor of the dead cannot be trifled with. Halachic sources are unanimous in their emphasis of this point: from the simple burial shroud devised so that rich and poor will look the same in death, to the practices of mourning that allow us space and time to recall the loved ones who have meant so much to us.

Our tradition knows that relationships do not end with death, and that we must treat the bodies of our loved ones—created בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים in the image of God—with a reverence that befits that status.

It is a savage understatement to say that those who were taken on October 7 have received nothing close to resembling the respect that an image of God merits. That some of them have not yet returned is a heartbreak and a violation of the divinity in each of us.

As of yesterday, there were still three murdered hostages whose remains were being held in Gaza, and as I reflected on this sobering reality in the shadow of Parshat Chayei Sarah, I understood that my embodied practice of acknowledging the days of captivity is not yet complete. Inspired by Abraham’s example, by his piety and devotion even to his estranged wife, let us continue to hold Sudthisak Rinthalak, Dror Or, and Ran Gvili in our hearts and minds. Until the very last hostage comes home.

Shabbat shalom.

Lech L’cha for TAA

(Delivered November 1, 2025)

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!

This joke is unfunny even in the best of times, but downright absurd when talk of hunger lingers at the edge of our conversations. Nonetheless, this inane joke pops into my mind whenever I am facing a sustained challenge. In such times, I find myself thinking, Once this is finished, life will get back to normal. I tell myself, I just need to get through this one thing, and then it will be smooth sailing. Everything else will fall into place.

That’s not exactly how life works.

I know this isn’t news to you. The truth is, it also isn’t news to me. And yet for some reason, it’s a lesson we have to keep learning and have to keep teaching one another. The Torah is full of moments that look like endings, but which are really continuations.

This has rung especially true to me this week as I’ve been thinking about Parshat Lech L’cha. With its famous beginning:

וַיֹּאמֶר ה’ אֶל־אַבְרָם לֶךְ־לְךָ מֵאַרְצְךָ וּמִמּוֹלַדְתְּךָ וּמִבֵּית אָבִיךָ
אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר אַרְאֶךָּ׃
God said to Avram: Get going! Leave your homeland, your birthplace and your father’s house
and go to the land which I will show you.

It sounds as though it’s a thunderbolt! Here Avram is, minding his own business, and God says go go go. But if we look a little more carefully, if we remind ourselves that the Torah wasn’t written incrementally, parsha by parsha, but rather that it is a continuous scroll, we see something different.

As a triennial congregation, it’s particularly easy for us to miss this because, like Bruce Wayne and Batman never being seen in the same place, the third triennial of Parshat Noach, and the first triennial of Parshat Lech L’cha are never heard in the same year.

But if we bring ourselves into a scroll mindset, we can see the story as more continuous, less dramatic in a way.

The final few verses of Noach say that Terach (Avram’s father) takes Avram and Lot as well as Sarai, Avram’s wife, and they depart from Ur Kasdim, Avram’s birthplace, to go towards Canaan. And then, they get as far as Charan and they settle. The last line of Noach says.

וַיִּהְיוּ יְמֵי־תֶרַח חָמֵשׁ שָׁנִים וּמָאתַיִם שָׁנָה וַיָּמָת תֶּרַח בְּחָרָן׃
And Terach lived 205 years and Terach died in Charan.

What comes next is וַיֹּאמֶר ה’ אֶל־אַבְרָם לֶךְ־לְךָ …

Without a week separating them, it becomes clear that God’s grand pronouncement of Lech L’cha is not so much a grand pronouncement at all, but rather… a noodge. God is saying to Avram keep going, don’t lose your momentum. You stopped in Charan to rest, your father has died, it seems like you’re at an ending place, but there’s no such thing.

It’s all there in the first letter of the new parsha: the magic vav—meaning and—which says: what looks like the end is so often the middle. Whatever has happened has happened, and now something else will happen.

And indeed, just a few verses later, Avram actually arrives in Canaan. That’s right, the journey that the division of parshiot makes us see as a big, dramatic, Long Term Project in fact is resolved within a fistful of verses. It isn’t anticlimactic, though, because no sooner have they arrived in the land of Canaan, and begun anticipating the eventual inheritance of that land by Avram’s descendants yet to come, when a famine takes hold in the land.

And despite his great wealth and position of privilege, Avram again picks up stakes along with his family and travels down to Egypt to wait out the famine. The matter-of-fact mention of famine in this week’s parsha hits hard. As the government shutdown grinds into its second month—with the attendant furloughs of at least half a million federal employees, and with the evaporation of SNAP benefits for many families—starvation seems anything but theoretical. As of today, over 1 million Massachusetts residents, including 277,000 school-aged children, will not receive their SNAP benefits for the duration of the government shutdown.

Given the many hot-button issues before the public nationally and globally— from antisemitism to the fragile ceasefire in Gaza, from unrest about swirling authoritarian trends to hurricane destruction in Jamaica and Cuba, from ICE immigration raids to war in Ukraine to the whitewashing of American history to an unfurling genocide in Sudan to a contentious mayoral race in New York—it’s easy to develop a sense of fatigue and overwhelm for all that is unfolding.

But there’s a distinction, that comes with a call to action: all of those big trends I just named are unlikely to be influenced by our actions. But here on Cape Ann, food pantries, which had already ramped up their operations in recent months, are bracing for an onslaught of need. As members of a small, diverse island community, we have no choice but to be attuned to our neighbors in need. And indeed, already there are local businesses such as the Common Crow Market that are implementing efforts to provide extra support to the Open Door Food Pantry. And here in our own TAA community, two individuals independently and unbeknownst to each other—Mara Capello and Noa Lewis—have spearheaded fund drives to support the food pantry’s important and holy work. It is not my way to talk about money on Shabbat, much less to fundraise. Let me just say that these efforts are ongoing, the need is anticipated to be acute, and we are a community of deeply caring individuals.

It’s curious to me, as I mentioned in introducing the second aliyah, that the parsha makes a point of Avram’s wealth. If he’s so wealthy, why does he even need to go down to Egypt to ride out the famine? It suggests to me that even people with an abundance of resources have limits and need to make changes when conditions worsen. Given that, how much more so for folks whose lives are already on the margins, folks who were already strapped enough to need government benefits?

Everybody deserves to eat.

God’s prediction for Avram at the beginning of the parsha is that when he keeps going, moves on to Canaan, he will be rewarded with blessing, the most precious of which will be children and grandchildren, a line of descent that leads to this very room. And God says, וֶהְיֵה בְּרָכָה—and you shall be a blessing. The Kedushat Levi, also known as the Berdichever Rebbe, plays holy anagrams with this phrase to comment on it, noting that וֶהְיֵה—vav hey yud hey—reorders the letters of the unpronounceable representation of the name of God. The Berdichever talks about how until Abraham, there was nobody to complete the circuit of blessing that God was offering.

מִשֶׁבַּא אַבְרָהָם וְהָיָה הִתְעוֹרְרוּת הָשֶׁפַע מִלְמַטַה
Since Avraham came, the flow [of blessing] was awakened from below

In other words, something in Avram / Avraham sparked humankind’s capacity to receive and give blessing in the earthly realm. To read the opening of this week’s parsha, spoken to Avram (later Avraham), implicates all of us as his descendents. Like Avraham, we are urged to receive God’s blessing and to be a blessing. Like Avraham, we are called to keep going, when the road ahead seems unpassable. And like Avraham, we are blessed and privileged to be in divine covenant, to listen for the voice of God and to use it as our guiding star.

Shabbat shalom!

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!

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.

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!

Sh’lach L’cha for TAA

Delivered June 21, 2025

Shabbat shalom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shabbat shalom.

Letter to TAA Community following the attack in Boulder

June 2, 2025

My dear Community:

A mere ten days ago, we mourned the loss of two young Israeli Embassy staffers, who were shot dead as they were leaving an event at the Capital Jewish Museum. Just yesterday, as Shavuot was setting in, I got word of another attack, this time in Boulder, Colorado, directed at a peaceful demonstration calling for the return of the remaining October 7 hostages to their families (or their mourners, as the case may be).

It’s clear we are living in serious times, for which there are no easy solutions. In such moments, the temptation to despair can be overwhelming. Indeed it can seem like the only sensible response.

And yet, our tradition teaches us that, even in the face of such horror, there is ever the possibility of hope, of redemption. The Piasceczner Rebbe, the Rabbi who served in the Warsaw Ghetto wrote: Even in a time when a person sees, God forbid, no logical opening for faith, they still believe that God will save them, and they draw strength through this faith and trust.

We have the Piasceczner Rebbe’s writings because someone thought to preserve them. This is an act of wild hope, of which we are the beneficiaries. We owe it to future generations to hold the same wild hope, for their sake.

On this Shavuot, as we celebrate the gift of Torah—defiantly joyful—let us give one another the gift of not giving up. Not on each other. Not on our tradition. Not on the possibility of a more peaceful way forward.

May we pull one another through to better times.

As always, I am here for you if you need to talk.

Yours in sorrow and hope,

Rav Naomi

(Acharei Mot) Kedoshim for TAA

(Delivered May 9, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

Yesterday I attended my last class of my last semester of rabbinical school. Hold your applause; I still have to write two papers before my course work is complete. But in the past week or so, I feel like I’ve moved into a different time zone: let’s call it the reflection time zone. It’s not quite nostalgia but something nostalgia-adjacent, as I look back on the moments and relationships that have filled my last six years with so much meaning.

My time at Hebrew College has offered lesson after lesson in careful listening and in bridge-building across profound difference. As a pluralistic Jewish institution, the College community is made up of people who are all passionate about Judaism but who express it in many different ways. Under one roof we have Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jews. We have farm Jews and poetry Jews and queer theory Jews and anthropology Jews. We have lovers of Israel, we have Israel-skeptics, and we have full-on anti-Zionists.

This diversity has been a strength but it’s not always been easy. After the attacks on October 7, and throughout the war in Gaza, it’s been tense and at times painful to realize the gulf that exists between and among many in my community. Our perspectives about the world are shockingly different! And yet, it’s also been inspiring to be part of a community so fiercely committed to remaining in relationship despite these sharp differences.

People are often incredulous when I mention the coexistence of political disagreements and deep love that characterizes my school community. The responses range from, “How do you manage to learn together when you see the world so differently?” to, “How can you possibly talk to those people?”

This week’s parsha points the way. Parshat Kedoshim, the second half of our double portion this week, contains one of the most famous verses in all of scripture—actually the famous part of the verse is just three words. But these three magic words carry great power: as we discussed in Torah study this morning, many rabbis—both ancient and modern—consider them to be the essential message of the Torah. These three words, from Leviticus 19:18 read:

וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ

And you shall love your neighbor as yourself

Sounds great, right? More good advice that’s deceptively hard to follow. In fact, the three little words by themselves are not much more than a dorm room platitude. It’s the words surrounding them that give them texture and meaning. The full passage reads:

לֹא־תִשְׂנָא אֶת־אָחִיךָ בִּלְבָבֶךָ
הוֹכֵחַ תּוֹכִיחַ אֶת־עֲמִיתֶךָ וְלֹא־תִשָּׂא עָלָיו חֵטְא׃
לֹא־תִקֹּם וְלֹא־תִטֹּר אֶת־בְּנֵי עַמֶּךָ וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ אֲנִי יי׃

Do not hate your neighbor in your heart; rather admonish them and do not bear sin on their account. Do not be vengeful or grudging toward your tribe. Love your neighbor as yourself. I am God.

Seen in its full context, this pasuk shows that to love our neighbor involves not just a tender feeling that magically arises. Rather, this holy love is earned, through self-awareness and principled disagreement. We’re taught not to allow hateful feelings to fester in our hearts, but to speak them out loud.

Commentators have a wide range of explanations of what it might mean to bear sin because of our kinsmen. Is the sin we avoid, as Rashi said, not to embarrass the person in public? Is it, as Ibn Ezra said, not to falsely accuse someone, such that you end up being the one who is punished? I rather think—using an admittedly twenty-first century lens—that the sin we bear is in the hate itself. If we are carrying animosity toward another person and keep it inside, it starts to poison our interactions, which in turn can lead to לשון הרע—disparaging speech—and much worse.

The Torah teaches us instead to have the courage to admonish the offending person, which, when we do it effectively and they are able to truly take us in, allows us to move forward in relationship without the cloud of resentment hanging over our heads. It is only then that we can love our neighbor as ourselves. Having the self-respect to speak up when something isn’t right is a prerequisite to the kind of interaction that the Torah is advocating. And part of giving that תוכחה— admonishment or rebuke—is in being able to hear what the other person might need to say. An effective תוכחה conversation is predicated on having the humility to know that you might ALSO have to change.

The great Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai wrote:
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

It’s easy to shake our fists at all that we think is wrong in this world. Holding our own certainty with a light grip, though, allows us to see the humanity of others and move toward it like a magnet.

This is what the Torah demands of us, and as the last two words of this passage, אֲנִי יי—I am God—imply, the whole process is a pathway to connection with the divine, a recipe for holiness. The presence of God is the umbrella under which we undertake the mitzvot, and God’s teaching for righteous living is the reason we do.

And this ultimately has been the approach that made the complicated environment at Hebrew College beneficial for all. Through respectful, open-hearted listening, predicated on integrity and trust, we built, each day anew, a community that could not just withstand difference but find holiness in it.

Shabbat shalom!