death

Vaetchanan for TAA

(Delivered July 25, 2026)

A dear friend of mine is sitting shiva for his mother this week. Although we have plans to visit in person for Shacharit tomorrow morning, I didn’t want to take the chance that we might oversleep or have car troubles or whatnot. So I attended the zoom shiva yesterday. It was there that I heard my friend use a phrase I’ve been mulling over ever since. He talked about how part of the process of shiva is discerning his mother‘s forever story. After all, now that she’s gone, there are no new memories to make, no new conversations to have together. The file is closed. Her forever story takes shape as memories and moments get sculpted into the architecture of a life.

Part of the poignancy of forever stories is that in some sense, they’re not really forever. Any story is just a snapshot. Just as becoming parents helps us to recast our own parents in a different light; memories and impressions of the past will change as we do. And of course, we almost always have some kind of unfinished business. The file never really closes. Even when someone dies after having lived a long and fruitful life, even when we’ve had the opportunity to say goodbye and thank you, and I’m sorry, and I love you, the mystery of death—its very power—is that it always leaves us with question marks and words unsaid. Likewise, with other moments of transition, moments with significantly less finality, there is still and always the sense of things left undone.

Life’s rhythm comes in stops and starts and ellipses. Even forever stories shift as the light changes, as we grow and change and reconsider.

Our Torah teaches this, with the narrative of Moses’s life as Exhibit A. Throughout Sefer Dvarim—the Book of Deuteronomy—Moses is wrapped up in the drama of an aspect of his life that remains tantalizingly unfinished. In various ways over the course of the book, this theme recurs like a spiral as Moses works it out. And if we are sensitive readers, we can learn from his process.

This week’s reading, Parshat Vaetchanan, begins with a heartrending scene, as Moses pleads with God for the chance to bring his life‘s work all the way to fruition. 

וָאֶתְחַנַּן אֶל־ה’ בָּעֵת הַהִוא
And I implored God at that time

Interestingly, the opening word וָאֶתְחַנַּן takes the root letters for grace חנן (chet nun nun) and puts them in a relatively unusual conjugation for this root: the hitpael. (The Hebrew word for praying לְהִתְפַּלֵל also takes this form.) There isn’t a precise translation that makes sense in English for the hitpael with these two examples. But it can’t be an accident that they take the same form, a form which in more easily translatable cases, indicates the reflexive, or something one does to or for oneself—like, I told myself.

I think, for Moses, there is a sense that he feels his very self depends on God’s answer. 

He continues 

אַתָּה הַחִלּוֹתָ לְהַרְאוֹת אֶת־עַבְדְּךָ אֶת־גָּדְלְךָ
You have just begun to show your servant your greatness…

In other words, You started this thing with me, God. Why does it have to end? This is agonizingly human! We so often say Dayeinu but we don’t always mean it. It’s awfully hard to feel like what we have is enough.

Moses so dearly wants to see the end that sometimes I think he forgets the beginning or begins to devalue it. If someone had said to him, look at where you’ve come from! I think it would be hard for him to hear. But truly, let’s look at where he came from:  

Here is Moses: who dodged genocide as a baby and was rescued for greatness; who grew up in privilege; who was given an extravagant second chance after he made a youthful mistake; who overcame his own perceived limitations to seize an opportunity to do something of enormous consequence; and who became the leader of a people and a revered figure we still talk, think, study, and sing about today.

And yet, this isn’t enough for him. There is a reason our tefillah calls for us to say שַׂבְּעֵֽנוּ מִטּוּבֶךָ—let us be satisfied with Your goodness. It’s so easy to disregard the goodness in front of us, in search of that one more thing that we think will make it all lock into place.

And when Moses asks for that one more thing, saying, אֶעְבְּרָה־נָּא—please let me cross over—you can hear the pain in his voice. Between the alef and the ayin, it’s almost impossible to pronounce this phrase without a little catch in the throat.

The unfinished business of Moses’s world threatens to overcome him in this moment. And yet, as I said, in our times of transition we all tend to think of what is still unfinished, no matter how much wisdom and experience we’ve accrued, no matter how deep and rich our relationships are.

I’m feeling this acutely as the summer passes. In less than a month, my younger son will be starting college. There is nothing like preparing to send your youngest off to college to get you thinking about the passage of time. Looking back on these past two decades, what stays in my mind—more than the cliches of baby’s first steps or first words—are all the things I’ve tried to tuck into my childrens’ souls on the off beats. The summer days of Ima Day Camp, when we went looking at bugs or walking to the local deli for a root beer to share: those days were not about the bugs and the root beer floats per se (although the latter were delicious!) but rather about trying to teach the boys to notice the world around them, to attend to even the smallest creatures, to delight in simple treats that we could prepare together. All those years, we were accruing life experience and deepening our tender connections. And the day when I tossed them the house key so they could tumble home through the woods without me for a Brother Party was more about allowing them the right amount of freedom than it was about the key or the woods. 

And still it feels like so much is unfinished. How have we not yet watched The Shawshank Redemption together? When will I teach him how to whistle? Have I imparted enough of our Jewish values to enable both boys to lead lives of kindness and usefulness? No matter how much I’ve tried, I always wish for more time together. Like Moses’, my voice will surely crack as I say goodbye to him and leave him on campus that first time. 

Through the story of Moshe Rabeinu—Moses, our teacher—the Torah gives over this bittersweet lesson: that nobody, even the greatest and most revered person, gets everything they want. All of us, as we move from stage to stage, want to have more, do more, be more. Like Moses, we watch helplessly as the past shrinks too quickly into the distance. Like Moses, we long for one more chance. And like Moses, eventually, we accept what’s real, stir up our courage and our אֶמֻנָה—our faith—and lovingly toss the house key to the next generation. 

Shabbat shalom! 

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.