dvar Torah

Vayeshev for TAA

(Delivered December 13, 2025)

The Torah is at it again with a nice bait and switch. At the opening of Parshat Vayeshev, Jacob settles in בארץ מגורי אביו in the land where his father had been a foreigner. With Jacob settling in, surely things will begin to fall into a groove, as he completes the journey begun by his grandfather. By birds-eye view, the progression seems smooth: God tells Abraham to begin the journey; Isaac becomes the placeholder in Canaan, there but not quite, still a stranger; and then Jacob settles there in the first word we read from the scroll this week. So we might expect that the Torah is setting us up for something like a cozy bedtime story. אלה תולדות יעקב This is the story of Jacob. 

What follows is no more smooth and serene than what came before: Jacob, the grieving husband, deals with his children in ways that are clumsy at best, turning brother against brother and studiously avoiding any kind of reckoning with the dynamics of conflict within the family, dynamics that pick up steam with each verse. Meanwhile, Josef, the favored son, wears his elevated status both literally and figuratively, and shows no regard for how it might be affecting his brothers. Inevitably the brothers, already known in the episode of Dinah’s rape to be capable of real violence, live up to (or down to) their reputation and gang up on Josef with seeming callousness. Sitting down to a meal after ditching their brother is not their finest hour. Furthermore their lack of consideration for what it would do to Jacob to lose Josef means they go right ahead and enact the ruse. There are so many moments when they could have made less harmful choices. Instead, they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. 

Studying the Parsha this week, I have been struck by how distasteful I’ve found all of the characters. Even Josef comes across as vain, spoiled, gossipy, and clueless. It’s very telling that, after his brothers respond so angrily after hearing about his first dream, he still goes ahead and shares the second one. He is, it seems, incapable of reading the room. 

And the way that Jacob’s other sons behave is equally disturbing. Indeed their vendetta is as much against their father as against their brother. Plucking Josef out of the way serves their immediate interests, but they can’t seem to see that causing their father grievous pain will not make him love them more. But within this family system, it’s impossible to talk about the dynamics in play, impossible to articulate the ways emotional distress is inflicted over and over and over. A culture of silence prevails. There are no words, only hurtful behaviors.

Interestingly, though, some of our sages are at great pains to preserve the reputations of the brothers. Ovadia Sforno, the sixteenth-century rabbi and physician who lived and worked in Bologna, neatly defines the problem before them in his comment on verse 18. The verse reads:

וַיִּרְאוּ אֹתוֹ מֵרָחֹק וּבְטֶרֶם יִקְרַב אֲלֵיהֶם וַיִּתְנַכְּלוּ אֹתוֹ לַהֲמִיתוֹ
They saw him from afar, and before he approached them,
they conspired to kill him. 

Sforno notes that in future parts of the Torah it’s drilled into us that the names of all twelve of Jacob’s sons are inscribed on the ephod and memorialized as the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Given that after all these episodes of genuine cruelty they become somewhat exalted figures meant to inspire us, Sforno searches for the humanity in their hateful actions.

He writes: We must try to understand the collective feelings of the brothers as being that they actually felt themselves threatened by Joseph’s aspirations, and they were convinced that when one feels threatened, one is entitled or even obliged to take measures to neutralize the source of the danger. Thus, by Sforno’s lights, Josef’s approach felt to his brothers like a threat, and therefore their impulse to conspire to kill him was valid within their world view.

Later, Sforno posits that when the brothers sit down to eat after throwing Josef in the pit—even though they are doing something fairly heartless toward Josef, their actions make sense in their own minds. Sforno writes: If the brothers sat down to eat immediately after throwing Joseph into the pit, this is clear evidence that in their minds they had certainly not committed any wrong. WE, who were not part of Jacob’s household, and who know that these brothers were unanimously elevated to become the founding fathers of the Jewish nation, must therefore accept the premise underlying their actions as being that they had truly felt themselves personally threatened by Joseph. 

Other commentators try to redeem the brothers’ pausing for a meal in different ways. In Breishit Rabbah 84:17 Rabbi Achvah bar Zeira reads it as metaphor and foreshadowing: that this seemingly cavalier deed is meant to allude to the fact that Josef would eventually (in the coming chapters) be in the position to feed the world precisely because he ends up in Egypt. And the Midrash Sechel Tov says that even as the brothers were dining, they still invited passersby to join them in their meal. 

These explanations are not intuitive to me, but I see why Sforno and the midrashists are working with the story in this way. Indeed, for me, their efforts resonate as I reflect on the current-day divisions within the Jewish community: it makes me think of the ways that Jews with strong opinions (which is, possibly, all of us!) are tending more and more to assume the worst of those with whom they profoundly disagree. It is easier and easier to say to ourselves or to like-minded people, “I can’t believe a Jew would say such a thing. I can’t believe a Jew would think such a thing. I can’t believe a Jew would vote that way!” Which leads to, “I can’t even talk to that person, we disagree too profoundly.”

Yet Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks wrote: “When words fail, violence begins.” Ultimately, our commentators who search for a reasonable explanation for Josef’s brothers’ worst acts are teaching us from centuries ago that we can never fully know another person’s mind, but that it’s worth trying to discover what we can. We can never fully grasp what makes people do what they do, but if we start with the assumption of their humanity, if we approach with gentle curiosity, we might begin to untangle the roots of enmity.

Those of us who have read ahead or remember the coming parshiot from previous years know that eventually Josef will forgive his brothers and move forward in peace with them. In one of the most beloved moments in the Torah, Josef and his brothers will fully show one another who they are, through acts of vulnerability, care and generosity. They will overcome the culture of silence in their family and embrace one another, despite what came before. Eventually they will all set aside their grievances and become a family again. Josef and his brothers will be able to do what Jacob and Esav could not: stay together after reconciliation. 

So the birds-eye view of the progression from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob finds its resolution through this sequence of difficult but ultimately humanizing events. This family learns to do differently.

This is the story of Jacob.

Vayishlach for TAA

(Delivered December 6, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

Earlier this week, on a night when sleep eluded me, despite soul-crushing fatigue, I started to ponder Jacob’s second inexplicable night-time encounter. This second encounter is quite unlike the starry-eyed, angel-filled aha moment from last week’s parsha, Vayetze—the God-wink that awoke Jacob to the divinity that he didn’t previously recognize was available to him. 

The words:

אָכֵן יֵשׁ ה’ בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי
Truly there is God in this place, and I didn’t even know it

are words of a young man just leaving his family to make his own way. Jacob’s moment of discovery in Parshat Vayetze is full of possibility, of angels moving freely between earth and heaven, between here and there. There is possibility everywhere in this touch of God; the radiance of it practically leaps out of the scroll.

But now, in Vayishlach? As Jacob churns over the prospect of reckoning with his twin brother Esav, a shiny, star-dusted God is not on the menu, no matter how much he wishes it were. Like many of us, he can no longer believe in a simple God. Indeed, if Parshat Vayishlach had a subtitle, it might be God for Grownups.

Jacob is not the young man first awakening to wide-eyed wonder. He is different now. He is in a different place in his life, rundown by the strains of work and family—an unfair and unscrupulous boss who also happens to be his father-in-law, four wives, many children, complicated relationships and competing interests. 

Jacob is weathered. 

As he girds himself to reconnect with the brother whose detached nature he took advantage of, at great emotional cost, he is filled with misgiving. By this time, he’s been cheated himself, by Lavan’s greed and trickery. He has been robbed of blessing himself, through his beloved Rachel’s prolonged difficulty in conceiving. Jacob has absorbed on the molecular level that life is full of heartbreaks and injustices. 

When he learns that Esav, his brother, is coming to meet him, with a retinue of four hundred men: 

וַיִּירָא יַעֲקֹב מְאֹד וַיֵּצֶר לוֹ
Jacob was very afraid, and in distress

In his state of foreboding over how his brother would receive him, and perhaps (as Rashi teaches) fearing that he might cause Esav further harm, Jacob goes into crisis mode. He divides his entourage into groups, imagining the worst: that perhaps Esav and his army of 400 will attack, and leave him with nothing. In a classic, “the heir and the spare” move, Jacob hedges his bets in the hopes that he can diminish risk, and perhaps stave off the disaster he deep down feels like he deserves. He sets his various groups in motion—some animals and servants being sent as a peace offering to his brother, closer family members spirited off across the river for safekeeping, eventually to be subdivided again with respect to where they fall in his hierarchy of love—all the while praying for God’s protection from the brother he presumes the worst of.

Eventually Jacob finds himself alone. And then not alone. A mysterious presence tugs at the strings of his disquiet all night long, as Jacob tosses and turns. The text is thrillingly unclear as to what is happening. Is there actually another person there, or is Jacob wrestling with his own conscience? Is it a ladderless angel? The Hebrew slips through our fingers, like so much dust. 

What remains is the theological lesson. The text goes on to say that the stranger renames Jacob as Yisrael: 

כִּי־שָׂרִיתָ עִם־אֱלֹהִים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁים וַתּוּכָל
For you have contended with God and with people and prevailed

This word שָׂרִיתָ contains multitudes: you have contended, you have wrestled, you have exerted your power. The sin and the resh bring us to top of the food chain (think שַׂר הַטַּבָּחִים, Pharaoh’s chief officer) or even to the realm of royalty. שָׂרָה, after all, means princess. So whatever the physical or psychological nature of Jacob’s dustup, the text seems to want us to categorize it in the sweep of divinity. Perhaps, then, all the better that its nature is unclear. The ambiguity is part of the message.

And afterward, Jacob names the spot Peniel—the face of God. Or is it Penuel—God turned away? Clearly Jacob’s crisis of faith makes an opening for both sensations. He has felt the presence of the divine, and he has felt it vanish. The ephemerality of it, the strenuousness of holding onto that sense of connection leaves him damaged, with a limp that makes the phrase ‘crippled with anxiety’ all too real.

I personally am grateful for this confusing, opaque, non-reassuring description of encountering God. I’m grateful to read of the hair’s breadth distance—literally a verse—between seeing the face of God and feeling God turn away. I’m grateful that all this turmoil and searching is depicted as happening in the dark of night. 

Isn’t that what it’s really like?

Faith takes work. It takes wrestling. It’s hardest in the dark.

To locate this spiky, destabilizing experience of God with Yaakov Avinu—Jacob our ancestor, someone whose name we invoke every time we open a siddur to pray—hammers home that message. When we are praying, we are invited to bring a Jacob-consciousness, a stance of searching and doubt. It’s a feature, not a bug. 

And, of course, Jacob’s new name, Yisrael, is the name by which we come to know ourselves. In this haunting passage, our tradition gives us the gift of reassurance that our own uncertainties are part of the process, that our struggles are inherent in our identity as Jews. The moments when we see the face of God, and the moments when God turns away are all with us in our prayers, as in our lives.

We are alone. And then not alone. 

Shabbat Shalom!

Vayetze for TAA

(Delivered November 29, 2025)

One of the many things the Jewish community will probably never agree about is how to answer the question, “Where is God?”

Ask someone who’s spiritual but not religious and they are likely to say God is everywhere. Ask an atheist or a cynic and they’ll say God is nowhere. A reading in the Reform siddur describes God as, “closer than the air we breathe, yet further than the furthermost star.” So where is that, exactly?

The opening of Parshat Vayetze invites us into this unanswerable question with its famous image of Jacob’s Ladder. On the run from his murderous twin brother, Jacob lies down out in the open, and dreams of angels ascending and descending a ladder that reaches all the way to the sky. This electrifying vision jolts him into a different realm of consciousness, and when he wakes up he says the famous words:

אָכֵן יֵשׁ ה’ בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא יָדָעְתִּי
Indeed there was divinity in this place, and I didn’t even know

It’s easy to credit Jacob’s realization to the vision of that ladder teeming with angels. It’s an incredibly powerful image, which has found its way into all manner of artistic representation. And as a concept, it has plenty of crossover appeal. A quick AI search on the phrase ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ yields this: ​​”Jacob’s Ladder” most commonly refers to a biblical dream about a ladder to heaven, a 1990 psychological horror film starring Tim Robbins, or a type of wildflower with ladder-like leaves. It can also refer to a specific type of toy, a staircase in the Peak District of England, or a symbol in Freemasonry. In other words, Jacob’s isn’t the only imagination captured by the angel-filled ladder.

Jacob is a character who doesn’t appear to have much of a spiritual life prior to this encounter. He has so far come across as cunning and manipulative, not as a person in touch with a spiritual core that would prompt him to reflect on morality. In Parshat Toldot, he’s described as an אִישׁ תָּם—a simple man, which calls to mind the comparison with the simple child in the Haggadah. We can easily picture Jacob, when confronted with a spiritual question, responding like that simple child and saying מַה זּאֹת—what’s this?

So God has to hit Jacob over the head, with a vivid, unforgettable impression. But if we slow down over the passage, we can put together some of the unsung pieces of holiness.

Take, for example, Jacob’s physical experience and surroundings. The same verse that tells us he is an אִישׁ תָּם also describes his happy place: יֹשֵׁב אֹהָלִים—dwelling in tents. Unlike his twin brother, he’s almost an indoorsman and stays close to home. But at the beginning of Vayetze, he finds himself sleeping outside on the hard ground, out in the open, with a rock for a pillow. Like many of us, he resists going outside but when he finally ventures out, he finds something both grounding and uplifting. (Kind of like a ladder, if you think about it.) Getting closer to the natural world allows Jacob—and us—easier access to the divine. Encountering the mystery of creation invites us to ask מַה זּאֹת—what is this?—and increases the chance that we might sense the presence of  the Creator.

There’s more to it still: in verse 11, the text specifies that when Jacob arrives at the place, he stops for the night because the sun has set. Rashi comments that the word order suggests something unusual about the sunset. Had things been as normal, the text would have said: וַיָּבֹא הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ וַיָּלֶן שָׁם—the sun was setting, so he lay down for the night. According to Rashi, the text reverses the order to say he lay down because the sun had set, implying that the sun set suddenly for Jacob, not at its usual time, forcing him to stay in that exact place overnight. In Rashi’s reading, Jacob was taken aback by the sunset. It stopped him in his tracks.

In a different comment on the same verse, Rashi also specifies the place where Jacob stops. Because it is designated with the word מָּקוֹם, Rashi connects it to these words of Parshat Lech L’cha וַיַּרְא אֶת הַמָּקוֹם מֵרָחֹק—and he saw the place from afar—meaning Mount Moriah, the location of the עַקֵידָה—the binding of Isaac. That Jacob would experience the divine in the location of his father’s trauma opens the possibility of a kind of tikkun, a redemption of the horror of the earlier experience. 

To our question of where is God, though, this connection offers yet another layer. In Jewish tradition, the word מָּקוֹם is sometimes used to refer to God. Substituting it in, we can read the verse in Lech L’cha וַיַּרְא אֶת הַמָּקוֹם מֵרָחֹק—as he [maybe Abraham, maybe Isaac] saw God from afar. And here in Vayetze, Jacob gets a closer encounter: וַיִּפְגַּע בַּמָּקוֹם—and he met God.

Jacob’s conflicting impulses show some of his theological confusion: when he makes his vow to God after receiving the vision, his goal is to return to his father’s house. Yet he names the place where he is Beit El—House of God. For Jacob, there is confusion as to where God is: at home with his complicated family, or out in the open, in this special place that, despite its association with some of what makes his family so complicated, becomes a מָּקוֹם, a stand-in for divinity itself. 

It’s a little bit of both, as I suspect is the case for many of us. Jacob definitely taps into something larger than himself in the solitude of nature, aided and abetted by an extravagant vision of the holiness that he could access if he knew how. Yet he remains rooted to his family and his past, with all its competition and missed connections and hurt feelings and drama. Home and away. Isaac’s house and Beit El. Both speak to something essential in Jacob.

Ultimately, I think the parsha wants us to pause and locate God in each moment. The word וְהִנֵּה—and here—shows up eleven times in Parshat Vayetze. And so it is with God. God is here. And here. And here and here.

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.

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!

Breishit for TAA

(Delivered October 17, 2025)

We begin again. The cycle of the year has had its way with us: we have celebrated; we have examined our deeds, confessed and atoned; we have made space for weeping and grieving; we have taken to the moonlight in our trembling sukkot; we have rejoiced with Hallel and danced with the Torah and even then made space for weeping and grieving.

We begin again.

The sense of new beginning is ripe in the air, as we absorb the astonishing news that after more than two years, the remaining living hostages who were taken on October 7 have returned to the embrace of their families. 

For much of that time, many of us were counting the days. Following the model of the extraordinary modern-day prophetess Rachel Goldberg, Hersh’s mother, we kept track and tried to keep the world accountable by publicly wearing the number of days somewhere on our garments. Many displayed a piece of masking tape on their shirts with that number; some used numbered beads on a safety pin. Some posted every day on social media how many days had passed; some programmed automated counters on their websites to show the same. However, we did it, the point was to keep the hostages ever at the front of our minds, and perhaps to spark questions and awareness for those who found it too easy to forget.

Psalm 90, the only psalm credited to Moses, teaches us:

לִמְנוֹת יָמֵינוּ כֵּן הוֹדַע וְנָבִא לְבַב חָכְמָה׃
Teach us well to number our days
that we may bring about a heart of wisdom.

Jewish tradition often turns to counting days: we count the days of the Omer as we transition from being a quavering flood of refugees—free, but just barely—into a people ready to receive the teaching that will define our lives and our history. Some women keep the practice of niddah, counting the days of our cycles, to know when it’s time to visit the mikveh. We use candles to count the days of Hanukkah as we commemorate our unlikely triumph over those who would destroy us.

Counting and counting and counting the days of the past two years, grounded us in the reality that we faced. We hoped and prayed it would help us in our search for wisdom of heart. Surely, if we kept the hostages in mind, surely if we kept reminding the world, this is happening to our people, we could bring about some kind of resolution. Surely we weren’t entirely powerless. Counting our days gave us at least the illusion that we were in it with them, that thousands of miles away, we were pulling for our hostages—and we did begin to think of them as our hostages—to be rescued, to come home. We were, of course, powerless to end the nightmare, but at least we counters kept Hersh and Kfir and Eden and Omer and Itai and Gali and Shiri and all the rest present with us. 

So it seems fitting that as we begin again, as we scroll the Torah back around to that first parsha, we start by counting.

God looks at the watery mess and says יהי אור there will be light. And separates light from darkness. There is evening, there is morning, one day. יוֹם אֶחָד. But it isn’t really counting until there’s a second. Having the context and the contrast is what gives form to our narrative.

And still, the Torah only really counts the first six days. There’s no וַיְהִי־עֶרֶב וַיְהִי־בֹקֶר—there is evening, and there is morning—for the seventh day. The seventh day isn’t really created so much as it’s implied. It just is. And once the pattern of six and one, six and one, six and one, is set in motion, the Torah stops counting. The implication is: the cycle will continue, life will become normal. We’ll get into a routine.

And so we begin again.

The Torah doesn’t actually tell us what happens after the first Shabbat, a day for God to rest. The eighth day is not specified, at least not directly. But there’s a hint and maybe a warning in the ellipsis. We do get the teaching of Parshat Shmini, that on the eighth day the sacrifices begin. Aaron and the Kohanim take up their work. And no sooner do they start—just one chapter in—than it all goes wrong. Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, come too close, bring too much fire, take the priestly process for granted and are consumed in the very fire that animated them. 

Another eighth day comes in Parshat Emor, where it says:

שׁוֹר אוֹ־כֶשֶׂב אוֹ־עֵז כִּי יִוָּלֵד וְהָיָה שִׁבְעַת יָמִים תַּחַת אִמּוֹ
וּמִיּוֹם הַשְּׁמִינִי וָהָלְאָה יֵרָצֶה לְקָרְבַּן אִשֶּׁה לַיי׃
A newborn ox or sheep or goat remains with its mother seven days;
on the eighth day and after, it can be accepted as a fire offering to God

Another eighth day, another child separated from parent.

Although the story of Creation makes nothing explicit, pausing after the first seven days, the Torah hints darkly by these examples that the eighth day and following can be dangerous, especially to children. Returning to routine is soothing in a way, but complacency is a minefield. The lull of the everyday opens us to take the routine for granted and find ourselves consumed in the very fire that animates us.

After the elation of the high holidays, after the excitement of the hostages coming home—and perhaps a raw glimmer of hope that this brutal war might end—comes the routine, comes the everyday, comes the real work. A ceasefire is not peace, and homecoming in and of itself is not healing. 

If we look at the events of the past week and say, Right, it’s finished now, more and more children will be consumed. After our heart rates return to normal and the flush of sheer relief settles, there are things we must reckon with if we want the fragile peace to be sustained, if we want to move beyond the hateful patterns that keep repeating themselves. 

It isn’t only that Hamas must never be allowed to hold any power, although that would be a very good start. Such catastrophic failures of leadership must never happen again. The hostages themselves will need care in order to reintegrate into society. And we must come to understand and accept—in our bones—that the Palestinians exist, that they have a plausible claim to the land, that, like the Jews, they are not going anywhere. Indeed, Parshat Breishit teaches us that each and every human being is created in the precious, complicated image of God.

Breishit begins by counting days; Psalm 90 elevates the counting of days to לְבַב חָכְמָה—linking heart and mind. Matters of great importance require great attention. Teach us well to number our days: to keep trying, to keep searching. Teach us well to bring heart and wisdom to the urgent work of making peace. 

We begin. 

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!

Vayelech for TAA

(Delivered September 27, 2025)

Shabbat shalom!

In these weeks of intense preparation leading to and through the High Holidays, I frequently find myself riding on a roller coaster of overconfidence and anxiety. On the one hand, I say to myself, “Self, you’ve never missed a deadline, you’re not going to miss one now.” And then on the other hand, I say to myself, “This is really a lot of writing. What if I run out of ideas?”

Amidst this recurring loop, one phrase that’s been turning in my mind is a saying that was made famous in a 1995 movie about the American space program. The movie was called Apollo 13, and it chronicled a flight to the moon that almost went terribly wrong. In the film, the three astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 mission encounter technical problems that make it unclear whether they will be able to return to earth safely. After a feature film’s worth of tension, argumentation, suspense, and good old American ingenuity; the astronauts and their ground control crew miraculously overcome what could’ve been disastrous, and bring the rocket and its crew safely home. The movie had a tagline that became a catch phrase which entered the cultural lexicon: failure is not an option. When I’m reminding myself that I’ve never missed a deadline, the phrase, “Failure is not an option,” seems basically plausible.

But this week’s Torah portion teaches something quite different. Indeed, as we make our way through Deuteronomy chapter 31, which constitutes the entirety of Parshat Vayelech, we get the undeniable, unbearable impression that failure is inevitable—that failure is not optional. Indeed it’s God who says so. In preparing Moses for his looming death, God does not offer comfort, but rather says:

‏הִנְּךָ שֹׁכֵב עִם־אֲבֹתֶיךָ וְקָם הָעָם הַזֶּה וְזָנָה  אַחֲרֵי  אֱלֹהֵי נֵכַר־הָאָרֶץ
אֲשֶׁר הוּא בָא־שָׁמָּה בְּקִרְבּוֹ וַעֲזָבַנִי וְהֵפֵר אֶת־בְּרִיתִי אֲשֶׁר כָּרַתִּי אִתּוֹ
Look, you are going to die soon, and afterward this people will go astray with the alien gods in their midst, in the land they are about to enter.
They will forsake Me and break the covenant I made with them. 

Such a vote of confidence! 

Despite—or perhaps because of—the 40+ years of wandering, of rupture and repair, of relationship-building, God has grown quite pragmatic about the Israelites’ flaws. God seems convinced, and not without reason, that as soon as the Israelites are granted the land flowing with milk and honey, a land that they have been longing after for all this time, they will shortly find a way to mess it up. 

When Moses retells this part of the narrative towards the end of the parsha, he essentially says the same thing. Verse 27 reads: 

כִּי אָנֹכִי יָדַעְתִּי אֶת־מֶרְיְךָ וְאֶת־עָרְפְּךָ הַקָּשֶׁה
הֵן בְּעוֹדֶנִּי חַי עִמָּכֶם הַיּוֹם מַמְרִים הֱיִתֶם עִם־יי וְאַף כִּי־אַחֲרֵי מוֹתִי
I know all too well your rebelliousness and your stubbornness
while I’m still alive and with you! You rebel against God now!
How much worse will it be after my death!

In a classic expression of irony, God and Moses know what we also know but the Israelites don’t: that humans are fallible, that we constantly make mistakes, that failure is indeed inevitable.

The beauty of Torah, and of Judaism as a whole, is that it doesn’t leave us in this place of degradation. The Torah knows, as we do, that being human will always involve moral and behavioral crises, that we will always be tempted to turn away from what’s eternal, and follow after trivial, ephemeral matters. We are made in the image of God, but we are not God. Our human makeup is ultimately weak in some truly fundamental ways. They say you can’t fight Mother Nature. Perhaps, you also can’t fight human nature.

Even so, the Torah gives us tools to try. For managing the inescapable lapses that we are bound to have, the parsha offers two notable and seemingly contradictory strategies.

The first of these is courage. No less than three times in this short portion, courage is called for. In verse six Moses tells the Israelites חִזְקוּ וְאִמְצוּ—be strong and courageous. In the following verse, he says the same to Joshua, his successor, חֲזַק וֶאֱמָץ. Finally, in verse 23, God also tells Joshua חֲזַק וֶאֱמָץ. Ibn Ezra suggests that the Israelites can be courageous because they know that God accompanies them in battle, that this is earned courage, a faith rooted in experience. 

Likewise, off the battlefield, knowing that we have overcome past challenges can strengthen us for future ones. If we find ourselves, as the parsha predicts, falling into patterns of focusing on the wrong things, we can derive courage from the knowledge that we have surmounted similar transgressions and made our way forward. In this season when we bring our attention to the work of teshuvah, of repentance or return, this is useful to remember. Failure, while not optional, does not have to be irrevocable. 

The parsha’s other strategy for confronting failure takes an entirely different approach, a softer approach. God, knowing that the Israelites will succumb to their humanity in one way or another, offers a decidedly human way of coping: poetry and song. In anticipation of the times when the people will stray and God will turn away, God instructs Moses to redirect and re-inspire them through הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת—this poem or this song. 

This phrase should ring a bell, since it’s also in the daily prayers, in a different context. When we reenact standing at the shore of the Sea, reliving a moment of crisis and recovery; the words of Shirat Hayam, the song of the sea, accompany us and steady us. They remind us we have faced the impossible before.

I think it’s actually kind of magical and forward-thinking that the Torah offers creative expression as an antidote to moral failure. Thousands of years ago, our tradition already knew that sometimes when we make consequential mistakes, it’s a sign of a soul out of balance. Easing into timeless words of beauty and meaning can show us not only where to go next, but why. It can remind us that the teachings that guide us are already בְּפִנוּ—in our mouths.

In this season of teshuvah, as we grapple with our own failures, may we hold to the creativity and poetry of our ancient texts, and may they give us strength and courage to move forward and bring ourselves safely home.

Shabbat shalom & gmar chatimah tovah!