Acharon shel Pesach for TAA

(Delivered April 19, 2025)

Shabbat Shalom & Chag Sameach!

Sometimes it seems like Pesach is one big game of “I Spy.” Or for the younger set, “Where’s Waldo?” The opportunity to step off the usual path to notice what’s different is inherent in Pesach—after all, much of what we do at seder is expressly so that children will take note of the strangeness and ask questions. Opening our eyes to our surroundings leads to a deep, rich experience, and allows us to reflect on the familiar with fresh perspective.

Our holiday Torah readings likewise take us out of the flow of time, inviting us to re-examine familiar passages that we’ve already seen in the course of our regular weekly parsha study. Somehow, they seem to catch the light differently in a different season.

For example, the words of שירת הים—the Song of the Sea, which daily daveners say every morning and which we chant here every Shabbat, are at risk of becoming so familiar that we don’t even notice them anymore. Hearing them chanted in the context of the story they come from invites us to consider them anew. And hearing them chanted in the context of that story and in the context of the holiday that celebrates that story adds another layer of richness.

Something that struck me this year is that שיר, the Hebrew root word for song, appears for the first time in the entire Torah at this passage. The creation of the world—and all of the miraculous, beautiful, sorrowful, connective things that follow—go unsung. There is plenty of beautiful text, but it’s only after the Israelites cross the sea that they, and the text, burst into song. Imagine it! The creation of the world merits no song. Noah’s emergence from the Ark merits no song. Avram becoming Avraham, Yitzhak escaping the knife, Yaakov meeting his love, Josef forgiving his brothers. All these are described in gorgeous poetry but the voice never lifts into song.

As Rabbi Lewis taught us a few months ago, the first word of the Torah בראשית can be anagrammed to say שיר תאב, thus reinterpreting the Torah’s first pasuk from the familiar, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,

With an appetite for song, God created the heavens and the earth. If indeed God desired song from the beginning, it’s all the more telling that it isn’t until the moment of crossing the sea that something breaks open and song pours forth.

The sound of liberation is musical.

And yet this glorious riot of song poses a theological and moral question. The basis of the freedom that we sing about so robustly is found a little further back, in Parshat Vaera. In chapter 9 verse 1, God tells Moses to say to Pharaoh:

שַׁלַּח אֶת־עַמִּי וְיַעַבְדֻנִי
Let My people go, that they may worship Me

Though we may be tempted to think that the text is saying the Israelites are Moses’s people, the completion of the sentence makes it clear that in fact we are God’s people, and that the gist of the liberation Moses and we seek is not necessarily a life of ease, but rather a life of theological purpose. Thus Shirat Hayam, the song of the sea, is the expression of a new kind of relationship with the divine.

Why, then, do we use this new-found gift of song to rejoice at the death of our enemies? Dayeinu that we would have escaped with our lives, but then we go on at length with detailed descriptions of Pharaoh and his men, just recently bereaved of their first born sons, now drowning in the very waters that parted for us. We gloat at the sight of Pharaoh’s highest officers meeting their watery doom. We refer to God as אִישׁ מִלְחָמָה—a warrior. Why does triumph so often curdle into an appetite for vengeance? And why, even as I feel mildly embarrassed at this war cry, do I also feel a kinship with it?

If it’s uncomfortable to witness this in our ancestors, it’s probably because we recognize all too well the human impulse that drives it. I, too, have moments of wishing the worst on people whose actions have caused pain to the Jewish community; I imagine the same is true of everyone in this room. I grew up holding the contradiction that I should try to see the best in everyone… except Hitler. Today, that small carve-out category includes the Hamas leadership as well. There are people—people who are fully devoted to destruction—who seem to be beyond the pale of sympathy; and yet if we delight in the downfall of those who would destroy us, what does that say about us? What does it say about God? Where are the boundaries of צֶלֶם אֶלֹהִים?

Obviously these questions resonate with a lot of what I’ve been feeling lately as I look out from my happy little bubble at the bigger world. As the soul-wracking war in Israel and Gaza grinds on; as summary deportation becomes normalized here at home purportedly in the name of protecting the Jewish community; as antisemitism continues to surge—it’s all too easy to see the work of dehumanization. And it isn’t just “major social issues” where we see it. Even in our everyday lives, it’s the mechanics of dehumanization that make us decide we can no longer talk to, say, a high school friend whose political orientation we disagree with, or a family member whose sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not aligned with our own. These divisions are painful and growing ever wider. And when the Israelites burst into full-throated song to celebrate the deaths of the Egyptians, despite their justifiable rage at their oppressors, there’s more than a whiff of dehumanization in the song.

There is a teaching from the Talmud that speaks to this question. On Brachot 10a, we find Beruria, a great Rabbinic scholar of the first and second centuries, in conversation with her husband, Rabbi Meir. He is troubled by a gang of criminals in their neighborhood and, out of exasperation, prays for their death. Beruria chides him, using an ingenious reading of a verse from Psalm 104, to teach that he should pray not for the death of the sinner, but for the death of the sin. Convinced, Rabbi Meir instead prays on behalf of the hoodlums, and they repent. Beruria’s wisdom in this instance lay in her capacity to separate the action from the person.

Elsewhere in Tractate Brachot, the rabbis discuss the proper time to say the morning Shema. Their purpose is to describe just how much light is needed in order to say it’s light enough to be morning. They offer a few possibilities: when you can see the difference between blue and green; or the difference between sky blue and white; or the difference between a dog and a wolf. Finally they land on a distinction that speaks straight to my soul:

מִשֶּׁיִּרְאֶה אֶת חֲבֵרוֹ רָחוֹק אַרְבַּע אַמּוֹת, וְיַכִּירֶנּוּ
When you can see a friend from a short distance away,
and recognize them.

Our capacity and willingness to see one another and recognize one another’s humanity is our best hope for singing a song that seeks only the death of sin, and that ultimately liberates us all.

Vayikra for TAA

(Delivered April 5, 2025)

I don’t mean to alarm you, but I make a lot of mistakes. Most of them, thank God, are small mistakes: a thoughtless comment or a silly oversight, running out of time to call someone who deserves my attention or tripping over the Hebrew in my davening. Some of my mistakes are bigger, though. And I’m sorry to say that some of my mistakes are yet to be made. I may even make one with this dvar Torah. Living up to a standard of perfection is both extremely difficult and impossible. Difficult because of the toll the attempt can take on us, and impossible because, much to the chagrin of perfectionists everywhere, a life without mistakes is an unattainable standard.

Our parsha this week gives us a way to think and talk about the inherent tension between the state of being human and impossible standards.

As you probably remember from previous years, Sefer Vayikra, also known as the Book of Leviticus, mainly focuses on the practice of ritual sacrifice: who should bring sacrificial offerings; how, when, and where the offerings should be made; and the whole taxonomy of what goes into each type of offering and why. The triennial portion of Vayikra that we chanted today deals with mistake-offerings. The parsha details what to do when one unintentionally—or even unknowingly—transgresses the commandments of the Torah.

Given that it is human to make mistakes, the Torah offers us a hierarchy. Ideally, a person who sins בִּשְׁגָגָה—by mistake—would approach the Mishkan to bring the Priest a large animal from the herd, such as a sheep or a goat. But the Torah expansively notes that not everyone can afford to give up an animal from the herd. Even though it’s called sacrifice, scripture understands that not all sacrifices are sustainable. Giving something up should be consequential but not devastating.

Thus, if the person’s means don’t allow for a large animal, they could instead bring two birds. And if even the two birds were beyond their capacity, our tradition offers an alternative to the alternative by allowing them to bring a grain offering. The Torah seems to be going out of its way to acknowledge that our resources for making it right when we have gone astray are not all equal. Some of us, at some times, are able to do everything just so. But the Torah, knowing human nature as it does, allows for this to be one among a range of possible outcomes. There are times when we can do it all and do it well; there are times when we barely tread water.

A similar principle is at play in a Mishnah I encountered this week having to do with Bedikat Chametz, the search for chametz. One traditional practice around Pesach is to search out and burn all remaining traces of chametz on the day before the seder—or two days before if the day before is Shabbat. The evening of the appointed day, we search all around using a candle, or nowadays a flashlight. The following morning we burn all we have gathered and declare that any bits of chametz that we failed to find and burn in the process of Bedikat Chametz become ownerless as the dust of the earth.

Mishnah Pesachim (1:3) says:

רַבִּי יְהוּדָה אוֹמֵר
בּוֹדְקִין אוֹר אַרְבָּעָה עָשָׂר
וּבְאַרְבָּעָה עָשָׂר שַׁחֲרִית
וּבִשְׁעַת הַבִּעוּר

Rabbi Yehudah says: one checks at night on the 14th [of Nisan] and at dawn on the 14th, and at the time of burning. The Mishnah continues: If you don’t search in the evening of the 14th, search in the daytime on the 14th. And if you don’t search on the 14th at all, search during the festival. And if you don’t search during the festival, search after the festival.

Now, on the one hand, the Zohar teaches that anyone who eats chametz during Pesach, it’s as if they worship idols. High stakes indeed! And yet, on the other hand, we have such leniency built into the practice of rooting out chametz that even if we fail to do it for the entirety of the chag, we can still do it afterwards. Even after it becomes irrelevant, we are permitted to try again. Likewise, our tradition offers Pesach Sheni, a second chance to make the Passover sacrifice if one happens to be traveling or ritually impure at the time of the actual chag and therefore unable to make the sacrifice.

And then there’s the familiar Mishnah from Pirkei Avot (2:16), which coincidentally I also studied this week, which says,

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְלַאכָה לִגְמוֹר וְלֹא אָתָה בֵּן חוֹרִין לִיבָּטֵל מִמֻנָה
It is not up to you to complete the work,
but neither are you free to ignore it.

When three different texts you encounter in the same week are all pointing in the same direction, it’s worthwhile to look in that direction to see what they might be pointing at.

The overall message appears to be—not that we shouldn’t always try our best in matters of importance—but that sometimes our best is going to be truly excellent, and sometimes it will barely be passable. Sometimes we’ll be able to give it the full unblemished sheep treatment, and sometimes we’ll simply have to accept—and know that God will accept—a simple grain offering, the finest flour we can find.

In a week in which we seem to find ourselves in the crosshairs of history, this is a worthwhile principle to keep at the forefront of our minds. We are living in a time of multiple unfolding crises: of a volatile political situation at home, ever-increasing antisemitism, a grinding war and widening chaos in Israel, and looming economic troubles. Many of us, across a range of political orientations, are wanting to take action, whether to march in the streets, or call our senators, or sign onto petitions and letters condemning what we see as injustice being perpetrated in our names. Each of us will find ourselves navigating an individual calculus of what feels most urgent, weighed against our own inner resources.

In times of turmoil, it is impossible for any one of us to meet all the needs we perceive. Those who feel called to action will speak out, take a stand, make good trouble. Those who feel reticent or confused will watch and learn, and double down on the individual pursuits that strengthen them. Our TAA community is capacious enough to support all manner of engagement, and to care for one another with kindness and integrity, regardless of how the unfolding muddle strikes us. As our sacred texts teach us, we will bring the offerings that we can manage, and accept that others will bring what they can manage.

In the parsha, the Hebrew word for offering, קָרְבָּן, carries in it the root letters ק ר ב, meaning to come near. The practice of bringing offerings is a way of drawing closer to the divine and to one another. In this time of high anxiety—even many generations after the sacrificial cult ended and the Temple went up in flames—we can focus on the core principles taught in our parsha and in the Rabbinic literature that develops the idea. These principles invite us to locate ourselves along the continuum that stretches between the ambitious unblemished offering from the herd and the humble offering of a simple handful of flour. Accepting the world as it is and working within the parameters of our own gifts, we set our sights on seeking the nearness of God and the nearness of one another.

Shabbat shalom!

Vayakhel for TAA

(Delivered March 21, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

There’s something I used to say to the children when they were growing up, a phrase that came up a lot when we were navigating the typical questions of life with small children: “My brother got more than me,” or “I want another cookie,” or “I was here first.” The thing I said, much more often than not, was, “There’s plenty for everyone if everyone shares.”

I wasn’t sure if it was true, even though I dearly wanted it to be. I said it so often, because I wanted the kids to hold it as a value, even if it wasn’t always real. I wanted for them to believe in the magic of people pulling together with generosity in order to make life better for one another. Not because that’s the way life always is, but because I wanted them to imagine it could be, and point their compass in that direction.

Had I been acquainted with it at the time, our parsha for this week, Vayakhel, might have been the inspiration for that bit of aspirational maternal wisdom / magical thinking. Vayakhel finds the Israelites busily collecting voluntary donations for the building and decoration of the Mishkan—the portable sanctuary that our ancestors created according to divine blueprint and brought with them throughout their travels in the wilderness of Sinai, on the way to the Promised Land. This process of building begins with a wish list and is scaffolded by instructions that reflect wholesomeness and deep purpose.

In Shmot 35:5, we find the words:

קְחוּ מֵאִתְּכֶם תְּרוּמָה ליי כֹּל נְדִיב לִבּוֹ יְבִיאֶהָ אֵת תְּרוּמַת יי
זָהָב וָכֶסֶף וּנְחֹשֶׁת
Take from among you offerings for God; all whose heart is willing,
bring these gifts of gold, silver and copper.

Notice the phrase כֹּל נְדִיב לִבּוֹ. We have כֹּל—all, with its implications of inclusiveness; נְדִיב denoting nobility and generosity, and לב, the heart. All with generosity of heart. Many of the higher qualities of humanity are packed into this phrase. Rashi notes the implication that the heart is the seat of generosity, thus this whole phrase is heart-centered. Siftei Chachamim extends this reading to comment that it is the heart that inspires. Sforno reads in the phrase כֹּל נְדִיב לִבּוֹ a warning that giving must not be compulsory. When what you’re building is something for divine purpose, the manner of giving is relevant, as this famous phrase indicates.

Now if you have been tracking the Torah readings, you know that this holy project of Mishkan-building is not the only collective effort toward making something that’s been in play in this section of the scroll. Last week’s readings from Ki Tissa found the Israelites gathering up their riches to create something together, but the intention and result there were entirely different. In Exodus 32:2, Aaron responds to the Israelites’ desperate demand for a god to worship by saying:

פָּרְקוּ נִזְמֵי הַזָּהָב אֲשֶׁר בְּאָזְנֵי נְשֵׁיכֶם בְּנֵיכֶם וּבְנֹתֵיכֶם וְהָבִיאוּ אֵלָי
Snatch the gold rings from the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.

The word choice here—פָּרְקוּ—meaning to tear away or to break, is starkly different from the heart-oriented language for the Mishkan. There is inherent violence in the creation of עגל הזהב—the Golden Calf. Even the way the gold is collected speaks of tension, if not outright force. Although our sages try to save face for Aaron—saying that he submitted to the Israelites’ wild demands in order to stall for time, hoping that Moses would come back before he was able to actually make the idol—Aaron’s word choice betrays implicit brutality. At some subconscious level, Aaron knows that succumbing to the temptation for idolatry—an imitation of divine connection as opposed to the real thing—can only be unwholesome, to say the least.

The contrasting mode of collection in these two shared building projects teaches us that how we give—how we share—is consequential. Tearing the jewelry off a family member’s ears is a far cry from giving what the heart is inspired to give. The ill-gotten gold of Ki Tissa could only result in discord and degradation. And indeed Rashi suggests that the women didn’t participate voluntarily; their earrings had to be torn from them because they would never have given them of their own will.

By contrast, this week’s parsha opens with Moses gathering כּל־עֲדַת בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל—the whole community of Israelites—to receive instruction for what comes next. With the remnants of the Golden Calf still smoldering, it’s the entire assemblage that comes together, to try to pick up the pieces of their shattered society. And as they begin to heal, they know that only by giving fully, freely, and from the heart can they recover what has been lost and reset their compasses to the basic principle that there’s plenty for everyone if everyone shares. And that in that sharing, there is space for the divine to enter.

Terumah for TAA

(Delivered March 1, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

As I mentioned last night, I am newly the mother of a twenty-one-year old. This milestone has got me reflecting back to those early days, weeks, and months of parenthood: the utter bliss of falling in love with each of my children in his turn, the abject sleeplessness, the chaos of a household with a new person in it. And of course the recordkeeping. Especially with Akiva, our first-born, Bill and I were pretty compulsive about noting: everything he ate, his convoluted sleep patterns, how often he needed a new diaper, not to mention the gifts and cards and the thank-you notes they required of us. And of course, as a first child, Akiva was extremely well-photographed! Everything he did—from eating to laughing to yawning to sleeping—was adorable enough that we thought it needed to be preserved forever… from multiple angles.

I tried to capture everything in the world’s most comprehensive baby book. Every time he sampled a new food. The first time he sat up on his own. His first steps. His first words. His favorite books and songs and funny things he said. Every single moment was precious to us, and we wanted to hold onto it all, even as we were sure we’d remember everything with exquisite precision. Truth was, in our memories, we would constantly be overwriting one cute unforgettable thing with the next one, with the result that the whole thing was fuzzy by lunchtime. The number of details we were suddenly tracking—or attempting to track—was staggering, and all this, while we were exhausted and disoriented to begin with.

You’ve heard me say it before: the Torah is always on time. And so it is this week, as we study Parshat Terumah, one of a fistful of parshiot known for their repetitive, not to say slightly boring, detail. Terumah spells out the what and the how of building the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary that the Israelites will keep with them through their years in the wilderness. This parsha is full of the kinds of details that can cause the reader’s eyes to glaze over, the kinds of details that drove the Hassidic masters to go full mystical metaphor, the kinds of details that can make rabbis and B Mitzvah students alike wish for an easier parsha.

It’s tempting to skip over all this detail—the what and the how—but as people who take Torah seriously, we have to ask ourselves, what is the purpose of all this detail? Why do we need to know what color threads were used for the curtains, and what the planks were made of, and how the hooks were joined to the planks, and so on? What’s the deeper teaching here?

In a way, this building project is the holiest thing the Israelites have done thus far. This is the moment where they move from receiving wisdom to actually doing something. God provides instruction in painstaking detail because nobody has ever done anything like this. God is asking the Israelites to take a leap of faith and imagination, to contribute from their own belongings toward something larger than themselves.

Here, God says. You don’t know what this will be, but I do. You’re going to have to trust Me to show you what’s next.

Receiving the mitzvot and the manna were both mind-alteringly new experiences, but both of those developments were passive. In Terumah we turn the corner from observance to action. Receiving the rules and regulations is one thing, but if we are to build a society of our own, it’s not just about the rules and regs. There is the doing, and Terumah begins to show us how.

It’s not lost on me that this, too, is reminiscent of starting life with a new baby. Before the baby comes, there is anticipation and learning, and maybe in some way you think you have a vague sense of it. But all that learning is theoretical until you’re up all night with this small, needy creature whom you love with more love than you imagined could exist and he won’t stop squalling. These are the moments when we need instruction, and I can imagine that the Israelites would have floundered and failed, had they not had the clarity of divine expectation and instruction, just as Bill and I needed to be able to call our parents and ask, what do we do now?

And part of the value of having all this detail in the parsha today as modern readers is in connecting us to our tradition. This endless detail, boring as it may seem, enables us to remember, at least in imagination, something deeply consequential to our people, something that now feels as remote to us as Mars. It helps us to think what it might have been like to be in the wilderness—in every imaginable way—and not know what to do next, and then to get the instruction—commandment really—that says, get going. The next part is up to you.

I think ultimately the lesson is, if you want a community you have to build it. And indeed, the one pasuk in Terumah that deeply transcends the what and the how comes from the first triennial, chapter 25, verse 8:

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם
Let them build Me a holy space, and I will settle among them.

With this pasuk, we learn the why of the Mishkan. We learn that God commands us to give freely of what we have in the service of something mysterious and unrevealed, commands us to assemble specific materials and do all of this detailed work, so that, once completed, this Mishkan—the word Mishkan rooted in the meaning “to settle or to dwell”—will be a space for God to enter. If we want a community—or a family, or a society—we have to be willing to build it ourselves. We have to bring what we have, surrender to the guidance offered to us, and gradually, make it our own. And when it’s our own, it’s much more than just ours, for the divine presence dwells in places we are willing to work on together.

Shabbat shalom!

Yitro for TAA

(Delivered February 15, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

In the past several months, many people in my world—family members, fellow students, activists I know, and also (a little bit) me—have been dealing with a prolonged sense of overwhelm. We live in a complicated, overstimulating world, moving at a kind of hyper-speed pace. We are overscheduled, under-rested, and subject to constant bombardment in an ever shortening news cycle. Chaos has become the governing esthetic. Information, much of which barely counts as informative, is growing noisier all the time. Over and over, we get simultaneously drawn in deep and sidetracked by the volume—in both senses of the word—of what comes at us. Catastrophes both natural and human-caused are swirling all around us, and technology has made disconnecting from both bad news and our daily obligations harder and harder.

All this played in my mind when I read the parsha this week, especially as I reflected on the Israelites’ response to their momentous first direct encounter with the divine. As Moses works to ready everybody, he assembles the elders of the community and gives them the message that God has instructed him to relay: that God is offering to take on the Israelites as a treasured people, a people that can become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, if only they can fulfill God’s mitzvot.

וַיַּעֲנוּ כל־הָעָם יַחְדָּו וַיֹּאמְרוּ כֹּל אֲשֶׁר־דִּבֶּר יי נַעֲשֶׂה
And all the people answered together,
saying, “We will do all that God says.”

The elders’ eager response is telling. When the experience is new and enticing, when there is the prospect of a reward—in the form of becoming God’s special treasure—the Israelites are all in. Full of the ambition and desire to please the Holy One, they answer, as Cassuto puts it:

בְּלֵב אֶחַד וּבְנֶפֶש אַחַת
With one heart and one soul

In this moment, divine favor seems clear and attainable, so the Israelites have an easy time rallying around their task. They readily accept the teachings of the Torah, sight unseen.

Then… things get weird. The moment of God’s revelation turns out to be intense, breathtaking, and, yes, overwhelming. With thunder, lightning, and smoke, the sheer sensations of God’s presence are shattering. Maybe there’s an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, or maybe it just feels that way. Whatever the logical explanation may be, the cumulative effect of all that divinity is sensory overload. As the magnitude of God’s presence comes into focus, the Israelites realize they are going to have to filter their experience. The נַעֲשֶׂה of the previous chapter is transformed, and they say to Moses:

דַּבֵּר־אַתָּה עִמָּנוּ וְנִשְׁמָעָה וְאַל־יְדַבֵּר עִמָּנוּ אֱלֹהִים פֶּן־נָמוּת׃
You speak to us and we’ll do it,
but don’t let God speak to us again, or we will die.

Overpowered by what they encounter at Mount Sinai, the Israelites pump the brakes. They still want to receive the teachings of the Torah, and they are still committed to fulfilling them, but they wisely come to understand it’s going to be much more challenging than they expected, and they’re going to need to funnel the experience so they can take it in.

This change of heart is so very human. Sometimes the prospect of something seems manageable but the reality of it is much harder than we thought it would be.

And if something as amazing as being in the presence of the divine causes us to back away, how much more must we need to back away from, say, a complicated media environment or relentless political incitements. This is, of course, not the same thing, but the model of the Israelites in the Torah can teach us something about ourselves, and about what it is to be human.

In a way, the Israelites’ desire to titrate their encounter with God is a sign of maturity, an admission that we humans can’t do everything all the time. As the Emek Davar puts it, they realize:

לֹא הרְבָּה אֶפְשָר לַהֶם לִהִיוֹת בְּהַכַנָה רָבָה כַּזוֹ
שֶהָיָה בְּשָעָת עַשֶרֶת הַדִּבְּרוֹת
It is not possible for them to be ready in the same way
as they were at the moment of the ten commandments.

All this religious revelation takes a lot out of them, and they come to see that if they are really going to fulfill their commitments they will need to take a more measured pace. It isn’t just fear of the thunder and lightning, as Chizkuni interprets, but rather that the gestalt of God’s presence and the obligations it imposes on the Israelites add a kind of gravity that defies defying.

Likewise, when the demands of life threaten to drown us—whether that’s being a new parent or holding steady in a complicated world—it’s worthwhile to remind ourselves that we don’t have to do everything all the time. We don’t have to have a perfectly clean house, or read every article, or respond to every provocation.

Indeed our Haftarah today offers a holy antidote to the rigidity and overambition of the Israelites’ initial response. In the opening few verses, Isaiah describes the angels in attendance to God. His description is familiar from the kedusha, the prayer of holiness we recite each morning:

וְקָרָא זֶה אֶל־זֶה וְאָמַר
קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ
יי צְבָאוֹת
מְלֹא כל־הָאָרֶץ כְּבוֹדוֹ׃
And they called, one to another saying: Holy, holy, holy
is the God of creation, the whole world is filled with God’s glory.

Whereas the Israelites at first, over-ambitiously muster themselves to speak יַחְדָּו—together as one, the angels call out to one another, and speak in dialogue, which we imitate when we pray it. This back-and-forth gives us a רֶמֶז—a hint—of how we might handle our moments of overload. By being in dialogue, sharing the load; by calling out to one another; and by drawing our attention to the holiness that is with us, to the glory that fills this beautiful world, we can rest in the moment, even as it overwhelms.

Shabbat shalom!

Bo for TAA

Delivered February 1, 2025

If I were to call you up in the middle of the night to ask what’s the main action in the first half of Sefer Shmot—the Book of Exodus—you would rightly say Yetziat Mitzrayim—the escape from Egypt. And if you still hadn’t hung up on me, and I got to ask a follow-up question about the reason for the exodus, you would probably say freedom.

Freedom is a word that we hear a lot these days. It’s a core concept in the framing of our democracy, and it comes up rhetorically in contexts ranging from electoral politics to tropical vacations to drug commercials. But the Torah’s understanding of freedom is rooted in ideas that seem to be absent from many modern conceptions of the word. In a moment when freedom has become a buzzword to represent so many different things, it’s worth going back to our primary source, to think about how the Torah defines freedom, and what, according to our tradition, it demands of us.

It’s become axiomatic these days to say that freedom isn’t free. This is usually meant as a slogan in support of military or law enforcement personnel. The people who bear the weight of fighting for or defending our nation and its laws know the price of freedom more than most of us ever will.

Yet there are many ways in which freedom isn’t free.

Take freedom of speech, for example, one of the main principles on which our society is built. There seem to be more and more people who regard freedom of speech as meaning that they can say whatever they want regardless of consequences. Nasty comments on the internet? Go for it! Lying about someone else’s private life? By all means! Antisemitic conspiracy theories? Be my guest!

These examples (and many more) remind us that, even in a society that values freedom, actions have consequences and so does speech. The rise of social media has taught us a hard lesson, and it keeps teaching us the same lesson. An anonymous rumor—whether or not it’s true—can have devastating consequences. Think back to the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi in 2010, shortly after two fellow students outed him as gay on twitter.

It isn’t always in situations regarding the shocking or the prurient that freedom gets twisted. In a more mundane sense, there are people who think that freedom means less government regulation and oversight. To an extent, I agree. Not everything needs to be dictated from Washington. And yet, part of the point of such oversight is to ensure that someone is taking responsibility for the good of society as a whole. A laissez-faire government that doesn’t bother to supervise the safety of its food supply or ensure quality control over vaccines could wind up with a population that gets sickened unnecessarily.

Freedom is complicated, in another way. As the ceasefire and hostage deal plays out, we are seeing all too clearly the ways in which freedom for one party can be costly for another. As thousands of Palestinian prisoners are released from Israeli prisons, in exchange for a fistful of our hostages, Am Yisrael faces an impossible bind. Knowing that some of those who were recently released had been imprisoned in the first place because of past terror attacks means that their freedom is purchased at the cost of increased anguish for the families of their victims. And knowing that the architect of the October 7 massacre is one of the prisoners exchanged for the freedom of Gilad Shalit back in 2011, we cannot help but have the sinking feeling that the next butcher is no longer in prison but rather is biding his time and envisioning future carnage.

Freedom sounds shiny and easy, but it has a gravity to it that we do well not to forget. Parshat Bo implies this, for in the passage that precedes the aliyot we chanted today, we read:

וְהָיָה כִּי־תָבֹאוּ אֶל־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר יִתֵּן יי לָכֶם כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבֵּר
וּשְׁמַרְתֶּם אֶת־הָעֲבֹדָה הַזֹּאת
And when you come into the land which God is giving you as promised,
you must observe this avodah, this obligation.

The careful reader will recognize that the word avodah harkens back to our prior history of enslavement. When we sing Avadim Hayinu at Pesach, we are saying we were slaves. Yet our pasuk from Parshat Bo says that when we finally arrive in the promised land we are bound by a different avodah. Indeed when God tells Moses what to say to the Pharaoh, one repeating phrase is: שַׁלַּח אֶת־עַמִּי וְיַעַבְדֻנִי—send My people out so that they may serve me. Same root letters for the avdut of slavery and for the avodah that we are enjoined to, upon our release.

This passage teaches that when the Israelites finally reach their goal, when they are finally am chofshi b’artzeinu a free people in our land, then the real work of freedom begins. That’s when the multi generational task of preserving the story starts. We are told, we must keep Pesach, not because it’s fun and the food is great, but because we have a responsibility to retell the story to our children, so that they can tell it to their children, who can tell it to their children to follow, and so on, forever. Perhaps counterintuitively, we don’t tuck away our difficult history, saying, that’s all over now, everything is fine. Being free doesn’t release us from hard memories. Rather we keep these memories—enshrine them even—to remind us of what we’ve overcome and what it cost us, but most of all, to remind us that when we thought that the worst was upon us and that things could not possibly change, they did.

Freedom, it turns out, is a big commitment: a privilege that requires us to be informed and responsible, and that demands our loyalty to higher ideals and principles. Freedom is not about being able to say or do whatever you want, but rather about being willing to acknowledge that ultimate power is not ours to have, and that when we receive the gift of more possibility, we owe it to ourselves and to our Creator to use that possibility in the service of something nobler, braver, and more consequential.

Shabbat shalom!

Vaera for TAA

I was still at home sick this week. A sympathetic congregant read this to the community in my absence. January 25, 2025.

I had almost forgotten. The mood swings. The chaos. The sheer exhaustion of it all. Every day a new outrage, sometimes several per day. Every interaction undergirded with distrust, every encounter threaded through with unspoken questions. What’s really going on? Is the situation what I think it is? Does this person see the humanity in the person they are talking to?

I am speaking, of course, of the ever-tightening vise of the ten plagues, as it plays out against the backdrop of an already unsettled people. What did you think I meant?

Our parsha gives us an almost shockingly relevant description of the moment—theirs and ours—with the words קֹּצֶר רוּחַ (kotzer ruach). This colorful phrase can be translated variously as shortness of breath, anguished spirit, diminished patience. It comes up in chapter 6 verse 9, as Moses comes to the Israelites to try to rally them. God has remembered the covenant with their ancestors and is poised to deliver them (us) from this misery.

וְלֹא שָׁמְעוּ אֶל־מֹשֶׁה מִקֹּצֶר רוּחַ וּמֵעֲבֹדָה קָשָׁה
And they did not hear Moses because of kotzer ruach and hard labor

Rashi takes kotzer ruach quite literally, as shortness of wind. After all, when we are experiencing unimaginable stress, it can start to feel like a labor even to breathe. Ibn Ezra leans into the impatience of it, noting that the years of servitude and worsening conditions have taken their toll on the Israelites. Exile and backbreaking work have made them desperately impatient for relief. Chizkuni poignantly says that the Pharaoh has even caused the Israelites to forget their dreams. The midrashic literature even suggests that the Israelites are so downtrodden, they get caught up in idolatry. Unable to endure the conditions they face, they numb themselves with the easy answers of false gods. In this state of emotional, physical, and spiritual exhaustion, the Israelites have nothing left for Moses. Even when he brings good news they are too empty to take it in.

If you have been too depleted to read the newspaper, or if you have been doomscrolling to the point of oblivion, or if you have been unable to sleep because of the huge number of upsetting things happening here, in Israel, and around the world; I would suggest that the diagnosis is probably kotzer ruach. The truth is, like the many viruses floating around including the one that has knocked me out, kotzer ruach is practically epidemic right now.

And when we are compromised in our own spirits, when taking a deep breath feels impossible, when the constant assault of unsettling news takes root in us, it’s hard to jolt ourselves out of the space of narrowness and distress. The rut becomes a pattern and the pattern takes on the air of inevitability.

Similarly, the interplay in Parshat Vaera between Moses and Aaron on the one side, and the Pharaoh on the other, feels like a pattern that has taken on the air of inevitability. As each of the Ten Catastrophes unfolds, it’s with a sense that both sides are playing their parts, locked in a cycle of what Phil has taught me to call the repetition compulsion. Moses and Aaron approach the king asking for the Israelites to be released. The Pharaoh responds ranging from maybe to no, sometimes teasing the Israelite brothers with the prospect of success, only to pull the rug out from underneath them. And in between, the Pharaoh’s heart occasionally softens almost enough to relent, only to harden and return to resoluteness. Even as things go more and more badly for Pharaoh and the Egyptians—and of course we know they are going to get unthinkably worse—the king tightens his grip on power against any and all opposition. There is a whiff of kotzer ruach even in the Pharaoh, and no wonder: As Rabbi Lewis taught us last week, there’s a little bit of both sides in each of us. When we are overly committed to our own point of view, or even overly committed to our own misery, this is a reflection of the Pharaoh in us.

So what’s the antidote to this soreness of spirit? I can’t claim that there is one answer for everyone, but an experience I had this week reminded me of what it often is for me. This week, my Hebrew College cohort and I eased our way into going back to school for the semester with a seminar which, among other things, exposed us to several guest speakers. (Speaking of exposure, I attended online so as not to share my lovely germs.) One set of guest speakers gave us each the chance to talk about how we’d chosen the rabbinate, and when it was my turn, I talked about the feeling that characterized my 20s and 30s: a longing to come home to my people. As I said this, I watched our guest speakers’ faces soften in recognition. This same longing was what had brought them together as a couple decades ago, and what had inspired them to get deeply involved in the Jewish community.

And the sense of purpose and belonging that ensued from that original choice—for them as for me—has been an ongoing source of broadness of spirit, the very opposite of kotzer ruach.

In these times of near-constant anxiety and distress over the state of the world, being tucked into our Jewish community offers respite from the feeling of being squeezed from so many sides. There’s no substitute.

Being stuck at home, sick for the past 10 days, the truth is that I’ve been able to do much of my job remotely: I’ve kept up with most of the messages and moved various projects along, even prepared “self-driving” Torah study plans so that the group could continue to learn in my absence. Staff and congregants have gone to extra trouble to make sure that I was well cared for and included in conversations that I needed to be included in. Still what’s been missing for me is being in the synagogue, near my community.

The work that we do here congregationally strengthens us through simple proximity and a commitment to shared values. In a world that seems to be in constant crisis, we can resist kotzer ruach by building community together and by caring for one another. We can make it a point to reach out to those for whom coming into the synagogue is not easy, due to health or mobility or geography. And we can make every effort simply to keep close.

We cannot change the big sweep of history, but we can ride the waves together and derive strength from that. Shabbat shalom!

Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon for TAA

(Delivered October 2, 2024)

Shanah Tovah! It is so good to be here with you, to be your rabbi, and to begin this new year together as a community.

A few years back, before I ever could have imagined moving to Gloucester, my family and I spent a week in North Carolina by the beach, visiting with relatives. As everybody in this room knows, ocean has a rhythm all its own and while I’m not the biggest fan of sand, the roll and swell of the ever-changing sea is a source of constant wonder and inspiration.

So during that week in North Carolina, the four of us—me, my husband Bill, and our two sons Akiva & Gideon—spent a day at the beach. We had a great time, jumping the waves, goofing around. The afternoon went by in a golden haze as we just played in the ocean. At a certain point we looked up, and we realized we had drifted a couple of house-widths down the beach. It wasn’t a huge distance—maybe a hundred fifty feet—but none of us had noticed our orientation shifting as it was happening.

This is the point of teshuvah. Most of us, most of the time, are not slipping that far off course. But we do drift, despite our best intentions, and the reflective nature of Rosh Hashanah invites us to notice and return home to ourselves.

So we come together here, to retune our instruments, remember who we were and who we can be, to reconnect with ourselves and each other. And so here we are, not a minute too soon, facing a moment rich with meaning and possibility, and also with sorrow and worry.

With war grinding on in Gaza and now boiling over on Israel’s northern border, and Lebanon taking center stage while Gaza remains unresolved; with the missile attack from Iran just two days ago; with a contentious election season unfolding; with hostages still in captivity—not to mention the several losses and illnesses this community has sustained in recent weeks and months—I doubt anyone in this room feels uncomplicatedly upbeat about the world right now. Our Machzor has a one-liner, a kind of floating zinger, that could not possibly be more apt:

תִּכְלֶה שָׁנָה וְקִלְלוֹתֶיהָ תָּחֵל שָׁנָה וּבִרְכוֹתֶיהָ

May the old year and its curses end,
and may the new year and its blessings begin.

I enter this space, and this new year, with deep ambivalence. It is wonderful—really, really, truly wonderful—to be your rabbi and to be embarking on this relationship together. And you have no idea how much I wish we were beginning this new stage of our relationship in a less complicated world, in a world that felt as shiny and optimistic as the words הַיּוֹם הֲרַת עוֹלָם—Today the world was born!—seem to promise. In a world in which that line from the Machzor about the old year and its curses didn’t feel so immediately recognizable.

Many in the Jewish community are experiencing this time with a sense of near-existential dread. Disaster is not upon us, but it feels more plausible than ever before in my lifetime. Even as reasonable people may—and do—disagree about how we got here or what “the solution” is—any way we look at it, there is more than enough reason to locate ourselves somewhere along the continuum between unsettled and despairing.

If you came to synagogue tonight hoping that your new rabbi would make sense of the events of the past year and either tell you what to think about the historical swirl unfolding around us or reinforce your already-strong opinion about the historical swirl, I’m afraid I have some disappointing news. I live in a state of near-perpetual uncertainty about המצב—the situation. I have a whole range of contradictory beliefs and opinions. I am devastated and furious at the murderous rampage of October 7th and the ongoing captivity of our hostages. I’m heartbroken at the loss of innocent life in Gaza. I’m ashamed of the settler violence that plagues the West Bank. I’m terrified at this week’s escalation with Lebanon and Iran. What I feel truly certain about is that the whole thing is awful, it’s complex, and it has a history that’s at least several centuries long. A simple answer has never felt further off.

We live in a world often governed by the false assumption that things are all one way: that there is, in any given situation, a good guy and a bad guy, a victim and an oppressor, and that it’s easy to recognize who is playing which part. But, most of the time, that’s not real life. So much depends on where you stand and which way you’re looking. And within this room, there are bound to be folks on the right and on the left and in between. Our tradition doesn’t have a central arbiter of opinions, thank God. Rather, we make it a spiritual practice to listen across difference, and to remain in community regardless. Looking at our sacred rabbinic texts, we see multiple viewpoints represented, disagreements preserved, minority opinions articulated and commented on. We don’t mind the messiness of multivocality, in fact we embrace it.

What I really want to say to you tonight is that our purpose as a community is not uniformity, but solidarity. Regardless of the ways in which we may differ, our task is to be there for one another, a source of support in times of joy and sorrow and change. The war in Israel and Gaza and now Lebanon is far away but it implicates us all, in the ways that some in the non-Jewish world are perceiving us, and perhaps even in the ways we are seeing ourselves. In some sense, the Jewish people as a whole is at war, and as such, we need one another more than ever. We can’t afford to be fractious. We need gathering places like TAA, where we can be unapologetically Jewish, where we are not tempted to downplay our identities or tuck our Magen David necklaces into our shirts to draw as little attention as possible. We need places where, in the words of Rabbi Menachem Creditor, we don’t have to live in translation.

We find in Bamidbar chapter 23, verse 9 a phrase that has become a kind of watchword for the experience of being a tiny minority that often feels misunderstood and unwelcome in the wider world.

הֶן־עָם לְבָדָד יִשְׁכֹּן וּבַגּוֹיִם לֹא יִתְחַשָּׁב

Indeed this is a people that dwells apart,
and is not counted among the nations.

This poignant phrase is spoken by Bil’am, who is hired to curse the Israelites but instead winds up blessing us. Something in this outsider’s perception rings true; from his vantage point high above the Israelite camp, he can perceive the individuality that is inherent in our people, as well as the isolation that often comes with that individuality. Bil’am’s words feel so real to me these days. In the months since October 7, and after the fresh wound of the murder of the six hostages, I have been pained by the “split-screen” effect of my social media. While my Jewish friends have been mourning and grieving—albeit in different keys according to their political leanings—my non-Jewish friends have been deeply engaged in living a normal life. Stories of cute kids and hilarious puppies, vacation photos, the occasional gripe about an obnoxious in-law. This is the experience of being a people that dwells apart, uncounted amongst the nations. At times like this, I regard the mainstream regular world with wariness and a sensibility that says we’re here but not totally.

So where can we feel truly at home? Where do we turn in times of alienation and distress? Synagogue is the easy and expected answer—what else would your rabbi say?— but there’s something to it. I think there’s a way to look at this question through the lens of teshuvah—of return. That is, there’s a way in which we have to labor to create that sense of home. Making a space for teshuvah—for finding our way home—is something we do for one another. Think of Shmot chapter 25, verse 8, where God says:

וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם

Let them make me a sanctuary, and I will dwell amidst them.

Both verses play on the root letters—shin chaf nun—to dwell. The Bamidbar verse teaches about how we Jews dwell apart from other peoples; the Shmot verse shows the other side of the coin, about how building something together can awaken the divine presence. In a very real way, when the going gets tough, the Jews get … together.

Situated in a passage describing God’s instructions for forming the Israelites’ gifts into the mishkan, the traveling structure that will hold the divine presence, the Shmot verse implicates each and every community member in the mission of drawing God’s holy presence into the world. What connects it to teshuvah is that the Hebrew in the second half of the verse is ambiguous. You could translate it as I will dwell amidst them or, I will dwell within them. The spiritual task of returning to our truest selves brings us home to God; the spiritual task of gathering in community brings us home to one another.

At our best, in community—in this community—these threads are intertwined, braided together like the challot we enjoy at our Shabbat and holiday tables. By investing in one another and the work of sustaining our community, we can bring more kedushah—more holiness—into a world that badly needs it. This is the teshuvah that is calling to me the loudest this year—addressing the ways in which we are feeling alienated and alone through jointly creating a home in which to share our lives together, accessing the divine through deepening our commitments to one another.

Praying Without

I have been estranged from prayer since the pandemic began, the more so as school wound down for the semester. As much as I love prayer in real life, I kinda hate it in zoom life. Thus far, my shul here has not offered Shabbat broadcasts. These days on Shabbat, I tune into my hometown shul so I can see my parents, or to my favorite shul in New York. In either case, it’s hard not to feel more like a spectator than a worshipper. I’ve said it many times before: Rabbi Harold Kushner’s teaching that Jews don’t pray for, Jews pray with matters to me a great deal. How can I worship when I feel so alone in it? What does it mean to pray without?

Yet it’s dawned on me recently that as an aspiring spiritual leader, I need to take more ownership of my prayer life and sit more deeply and patiently with the question. I can’t continue to rely on the community around me to carry me along in prayer; this time is a hard but good opportunity to learn to carry myself in prayer. I need not only to develop more facility with the prayers but to develop more ballast for accessing the Divine when I am not riding the wave of soulful communal prayer.

For right now, my focus is simply trying to get back some of the sense of connection I normally derive through prayer, learning to do it on my own. I resolved to spend some time every morning with the prayer book and let things unfold. This morning as I began, a grey cloud formed inside me.

I have cried more tears in these past weeks than I have in a very long time. The son of my college roommate, his only child and treasured beyond words, ended his life two weeks ago. He laid down in the woods he loved and went to sleep forever. There is no way to express the heartbreak.

Tachanun came early today.

Long before I got to the moment of personal supplication I was (again) in tears at the soul-crushing effects of this loss. My friend and his wife will never — can never — be the same.

Last Shabbat we ended the book of Leviticus. Had we been in the synagogue and able to read from the scrolls, we would have closed the Torah reading with the words, חזק חזק ונתחזק (chazak chazak v’nitchazek). “Be strong, be strong, and let us strengthen one another.” And this week we start reading the book of Numbers, which begins with a Gd-ordained census. Thinking about this tender young man who died, I feel in my core that the census is incomplete. Somebody is missing.

This is a loss that cannot be unlost, and my friend and his spouse are reeling, searching for a way to feel whole again as their center of gravity dissolves. I wish I had answers, some wisdom that could make this OK, but it cannot be OK. This sweet, brilliant, hilarious young man will not be counted in the census, but his life counts. He gave his parents twenty years of joy, he had friends and teachers and church-mates. He played the cello. Somebody is missing.

I spoke with his bereaved dad last week. It had been a long while — we’d been in touch only sporadically after college — and he was shocked and bemused that I’m studying to become a rabbi. He isn’t religious, and said he doesn’t understand what Gd could be, or where Gd could be in all this struggle and sadness. I said it’s OK to have those questions; for me Gd is whatever it is that makes you feel less alone in this world. And we cried all over again.

This prayer journey of mine: if I can just feel less alone, and develop the strength to help others feel less alone, that will be something. Be strong, be strong, and let us strengthen one another.

May we never know such sorrow again.