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.